by Andrew Marr
It was not just legal difficulties. The first commercial air services were manned by brave pilots struggling to keep to routines despite cloud and fog and with limited instruments. At least one early near miss over London came close to knocking a hole in St Paul’s Cathedral. Nevertheless, several companies did their best to encourage this new business. Frederick Handley Page, whose bombers had already become a mainstay of the RAF, converted some of them to passenger planes. By October 1919 passengers for Paris and Brussels were arriving at his Cricklewood aerodrome, where they could buy for three shillings a lunch box of six sandwiches, fruit and chocolate, before clambering into an unheated plane, ten at a time. The aircraft were noisy and slow but, guided by Marconi radio telephony, relatively safe. Other early passenger services included those of Instone, a colliery and shipping company whose planes took off from Croydon trimmed with silver wings and a royal-blue fuselage and whose pilots (because of the firm’s nautical history) dressed in sailor-like uniforms, perhaps influencing pilots’ and stewards’ dress even today. Then there were the red-and-white painted planes of Daimler Hire, flying to Berlin and Amsterdam, and, down at Southampton, the seaplanes, Supermarine Sea Eagles, owned by the British Marine Air Navigation Company, which flew to the Channel Islands. It was clear that the British private firms would struggle against rivals from the continent who were being subsidized by their governments. But Churchill, as air minister, told the Commons in March 1920: ‘Civil aviation must fly by itself: the government cannot possibly hold it up in the air.’
Churchill turned out to be wrong. The new form of travel had captured the imagination of the country. It proved surprisingly safe: in the five years to 1924 the little airlines with their biplanes and converted military bombers managed to transport 34,600 passengers while killing only five of them. But it was not, and could not be, profitable. The cost of the aircraft and the primitive arrangements for passengers, never mind arguments about airspace, meant that every one of the companies was broke. By 1922 the government was beginning to accept the need for subsidies. The following year a new air minister was given cabinet rank and a year later came the agreed merger of all the small private companies into a single national air-passenger outfit – Imperial Airways, now subsidized by the taxpayer and given a virtual monopoly on overseas flights. As legal problems continued to dog continental routes, it lived up to its name and to the obsessions of twenties Britain: it turned towards the Empire, not to Europe. The early routes included Basra, Baghdad and Cairo. By 1929 Imperial was flying in hops to Karachi, reaching Delhi the following year. In 1931 its long-range airliners were landing in central Africa, and by 1932 Cape Town. In 1933 the Imperial Airways service to Singapore began and after that, in 1934, it was flying a regular passenger route to Australia. These could be trips of many days, with stopovers at hotels for the night. But they were already shrinking the world.
The government had ulterior motives. It was not only interested in linking the Empire more closely together, it also knew that defence in the future would require a strong aircraft industry. In the early years Imperial was not making anything like enough money to sustain a major building programme: many of its early airliners were literally hand built. Yet Imperial, alongside the RAF, did keep enough aircraft manufacturers going to ensure that, when war came again, Britain would be able to churn out fighters and bombers in large numbers. De Havilland, whose DH4 bomber had been one of the flying successes of the war, used a new plywood-based aircraft – the Comet – for the 1934 London to Melbourne race, beating American competition; the construction techniques later reappeared in the wartime fighter-bomber Mosquito. Handley Page built large all-metal biplanes for the Imperial Airways routes; they quite easily moved back to building bombers, most famously the Halifax, during the next war. As with many of the new industries, these firms tended to be clustered in the south of England. A. V. Roe was the main exception, with its Manchester factory, and Armstrong-Whitworth was in Coventry. Handley-Page, as we have seen, was in Cricklewood, De Havilland was at Hatfield, and Short Brothers, who built those fantastic flying boats, were in Bedford and Rochester. The long imperial routes meant an emphasis on large planes: the Armstrong Ensign looked relatively modern, with a sleek metallic finish, but the DH Frobishers and Dianas were lumbering beasts; and the famous Short-Mayo Composite was downright weird. It piggy-backed a seaplane onto a flying boat: with the eight engines of the two planes working together it would become airborne, then they would break apart and the seaplane, more heavily loaded than it could have managed if taking off alone, flew on by itself. The emphasis on flying boats and seaplanes may seem strange to modern eyes, but in the context of the thirties it made perfect sense. There were few proper airfields, but they could land on any decent-sized piece of water. Air already seemed the new highway and also the coming battleground.
The Failure of the Clever
Should not a new world, born in the pain of world war, look different? Though Britain boasted some fine painters and sculptors in these years, nobody could say it was a great age for art. Conservative painters at the Royal Academy, offering aristocratic-style portraits, hunting or nature scenes and quiet still lifes, dominated public taste. In music, for once, England had a sound of her own, with composers such as Ralph Vaughan Williams, Arnold Bax and William Walton. It was new, but hardly surprising compared with the music being written in France or Russia, or the jazz of America. For real radicalism we turn to literature. James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound – an Irishman and two American exiles – broke up and reassembled the very language of the English-speaking world. They would have a major influence on intellectuals and university students but almost none on the wider public. The next generation of poets, politically engaged by the threats of the thirties, turned back to simpler and more direct words. The real question is why literary modernism, bursting with genius and ambition before 1914, had so little impact on the thinking or attitudes of inter-war Britain. Where were the home-grown British modernists?
There was one man who had fought in the Great War, painted it and was regarded as a serious literary rival by Joyce, Pound and Eliot. The war, said Percy Wyndham Lewis, had been ‘a black solid mass, cutting off all that went before it’. His short-lived Edwardian movement, vorticism, had been a British response to French cubism and Italian futurism. His angry little magazine Blast, a kind of manifesto for his Rebel Art Group, had fizzed. His whippy, sneering drawing was equally fresh. Wyndham Lewis was not wholly British. He had been born on a yacht off Nova Scotia and his father was an American who had fought in the Civil War. But he had been brought up in England, ending up at Rugby School. Equally at home with a fountain pen or a paintbrush, he was not a modest man. He wrote satirical novels which caused much offence, including to his sometime hostess Ottoline Morrell, but he was a genuinely original artist. If you have in your head a drawn or painted image of Joyce, Eliot, Pound or the Sitwells, it is almost certainly one of his. Wyndham Lewis’s theory was that the ‘men of 1914’ – the original radicals – had tried to break away from romantic art and propaganda to a purer art, ‘the detachment of true literature’, but were defeated by the war: ‘We are the first men of a Future that has not materialized. We belong to a “great age” that has not “come off”.’
So serious art in Britain had been aborted? The great slaughter had turned the country back to the pretty-pretty and the reassuring? Up to a point. But there was another problem with modernism which Wyndham Lewis personifies: the overwhelming tenor of the movement was right-wing, aristocratic and anti-Semitic. T. S. Eliot’s anti-Semitism, which was not a minor affectation, has been much discussed in recent years, while Ezra Pound became a wholehearted admirer of Mussolini and broadcast for the fascists during the war. W. B. Yeats became disillusioned with democracy and wrote marching songs for the Irish semi-fascist Blueshirts organization. And why, given his undoubted talents, energy and wartime courage, is Wyndham Lewis himself not so well known these days? Why is there some hesitation about him
? Perhaps it is something to do with a book called simply Hitler and attractively decorated with swastikas in which Lewis lauds the rising Nazi movement and contrasts it with the decadence and minor bullying of Weimar Germany. The first work in English about Hitler, it seethes with dislike for the ‘perverts’ paradise’ of Weimar Berlin, a place of ‘night circuses, Negertanz [nigger-dance] palaces . . . flagellation bars, and the sad wells of super-masculine loneliness, shining dives for the sleek, stock-jobbing, sleuths relaxing’.107 It is not so far removed from Eliot’s visions of modern corruption. Hitler is full of wild misjudgements (‘Today Paul Gauguin is totally discredited as an artist . . . It is very unlikely that there will be any swing of the pendulum, either, in favour of such pictures’), but the most astonishing of all are that Hitler himself is ‘a Man of Peace’ who would in power ‘show increasing moderation and tolerance’, while his admittedly drastic proposals against Jews are ‘a preliminary snag’ and ‘a mere bagatelle’ which should not sway British people against the Nazis. To be fair to Wyndham Lewis, he later renounced Hitlerism, just before the Second World War (which he spent in America). But he was enough of a serious and early admirer to be applauded in the Nazi press and he made repeated private visits to the British fascist Oswald Mosley, whom he greatly admired.
Eliot was a man of very different temper, whose cultured, pessimistic and intellectual form of modernism turned into a devotion to High Anglican Englishness. He would call himself a royalist in politics (quite something for an American; he also took British citizenship in 1927), was an Anglo-Catholic in religion and a classicist in literary taste. His 1922 The Wasteland is a brilliant technical achievement, a lament for a civilization engulfed by barbarism and commercialism, but it is also supercilious in tone, sexually cold and requires a lot of work to fully appreciate. His friend Ezra Pound would take obscure referential tactics to absurd levels later in his Cantos. Eliot, a genuinely great poet, was saved from the full impact of his political views by his conservative caution. Later he would help Jewish émigrés and support the state of Israel, but he is another example of the tendency of British modernism to define itself by disdaining the common reader. Virginia Woolf too found the working classes squalid, greedy and confusing. Consider her reaction to a perfectly ordinary restaurant at Richmond railway station where she ‘looked into the lowest pit of human nature; saw flesh still unmoulded to the shape of humanity – whether it is the act of eating & drinking that degrades, or whether people who lunch at restaurants are naturally degraded, one can certainly hardly face one’s own humanity again afterwards’. Modernism, by breaking down the traditional forms of art which had evolved over centuries, had its moments of exhilarating energy. But it then shuffled the hoarded fragments of elite culture, despaired at democracy and fell for the cult of the Great Man. That is why it failed; and this happened just as British society in other ways was becoming more democratic, more consumerist and a little more open.
The Lost Hero
British socialism between the wars had no gods, and precious few heroes. If only, people say, Labour had produced a great early speaker who could have dominated Parliament and electrified large crowds. If only there had been one truly brave and effective leader – how different the politics of the twenties might have been. Someone, perhaps, who had shown the colour of his principles by suffering for them, who had come from the bottom of the social heap, who understood international issues, and who could rouse crowds to the highest pitch of feeling. In fact, there was one such man. But he has been dismissed, written out of the story. He was the bastard son of a hard-working mother, who had clawed his way up to a junior white-collar job, never losing sight of his socialist principles. He had spoken out against the Great War when it was dangerous as well as politically inconvenient to do so. He had been abused, physically attacked, had lost many of his friends and been so viciously assaulted in by-elections that he nearly lost the will to keep fighting. Later, he remembered, ‘the haunting memory of the women – bloodthirsty, cursing their hate, issuing from the courts and alleys crowded with children – the sad flotsam and jetsam of wild emotion’. He was for years the most hated and feared radical politician in Britain, a semiofficial position later held by Nye Bevan and Tony Benn. Newspapers revealed his illegitimacy and suggested he should be taken to the Tower of London and shot. He was a founder of the Independent Labour Party (ILP), to which most of the ‘Red Clydesiders’ belonged, and a member of it for nearly forty years. When he stood for Woolwich, the London trams carried posters on the side asking blankly: ‘A Traitor for Parliament?’
As an orator, though no film exists of his great days, he was clearly spellbinding. He was an important political theorist, too. While many socialists were falling for the spell of the Bolsheviks and their idea of a revolutionary vanguard, this was the man who saw very early that Bolshevism had to lead to tyranny: the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ would become mere dictatorship. He did more than anyone to keep Labour radicals, mainly in the ILP, out of the clutches of Moscow’s Third International. He told them that, under Lenin, Russia would develop a bureaucracy of repression ‘so the revolution changes from being a movement of ideas to becoming a series of bloody events; repression finally develops into a complete policy of extermination’. This was said before the rise of Stalin. It was long before Orwell. It was genuine prophecy. And he was a genuine socialist, whose attacks on capitalism’s use of ‘the whip of starvation’ made him a hero to party members during his years in the wilderness. Finally back in Parliament, he was abruptly thrown into national leadership by Baldwin’s strange decision to hold a general election in the winter of 1923 so that he could repudiate free trade. Some idea of his popularity then comes from reports of his campaigning in Wales, where he was hailed as ‘the Messiah’ and had his car dragged by supporters through the streets with a brass band in front of it. A Labour newspaper reported on his last rally, held by moonlight, that ‘the crowd bore down on the car like an avalanche. What mattered it that the windows were smashed? – the eager men whose arms went through could not help themselves in the impetuous rush of the hundreds . . . It took the car nearly two hours to travel a mile. That speaks for itself . . . rarely, if ever, in English political history has such a scene been witnessed.’108
So who was this far-sighted and popular radical hero? He was Ramsay MacDonald, who, in 1924, became the first Labour prime minister of Britain. MacDonald, from the small Scottish east-coast town of Lossiemouth, is remembered today as Labour’s traitor, because he split the party and accepted office in the National Government of 1931. One biographer argues that no British political leader in the century has been so reviled.109 He became the ultimate symbol of lickspittle turncoat politics, fawning on duchesses and selling out the workers. For a while he so embarrassed Labour that he was airbrushed out of the party’s history. Yet MacDonald was a strikingly brave, patriotic and radical politician who was seen in his day as the great hope of the left. He is hardly the first person to have crossed the political divide during a time of crisis – Churchill and Lloyd George both did the same, and the latter also smashed his party while doing so. Yet because the National Government has been so unhappily remembered, the men who brought us mass unemployment and appeasement, and was followed by the country-changing 1945 Labour government (by which time MacDonald was long dead), his reputation has been trashed. His personal courage has been forgotten – he lost both wife and son very quickly, and worked himself almost to death. Surrounded by waspish and snooty intellectuals, his achievement in setting out what a non-revolutionary socialist party might achieve has been ignored. He was long-winded, self-pitying and arrogant. But again, that puts him in busy political company.
MacDonald’s great failure was that he was unable to chart a democratic socialist course in Britain between the wars. Along with Philip Snowden – the weavers’ son from the Pennines, who also helped found the ILP and whose anti-war stance was similar to MacDonald’s – he was in his economics a traditional Lib
eral, even a Victorian. This meant that he believed in free trade, balanced budgets and government economy, all paid lip service to by today’s politicians but an inadequate response to the mass unemployment and slump of the inter-war years. It meant limiting socialist reforms to good times; but these were bad times. In 1924 the alternative, Keynes’s advocacy of high spending to kick-start growth, was only beginning to be debated among intellectuals. More generally, MacDonald’s insistence that Labour must be respectable was a reasonable response to what was still an essentially conservative country, so recently and violently hostile to socialists. His first government lasted only ten months, always dependent on the other parties to let it continue in office. Despite some useful housing reforms, it achieved little before being beaten in the 1924 election, partly thanks to the ‘Red scare’ of the forged Zinoviev letter purporting to be secret instructions from the Russian communists to their British comrades, and published in the Daily Mail the day before the election. Between the iron certainties of the revolutionary states abroad, and those of traditional liberals at home, there was almost no ground at all. And if anyone doubted that, the General Strike of 1926 rammed the message home.
A Very British Revolt
