up, Trevor ran from the room.
Life was made harder still for the unemployed with the introduction of the Means Test, ensuring that the jobless would have regularly to justify themselves to a stranger, a government employee, who would stand in a family’s front room asking questions about a suspiciously new-looking overcoat. The unemployed man could afford neither secrets nor pride.
People sometimes tried to evade the Means Test; a young person living with parents might give a false address in an attempt to claim a separate allowance. On the other hand, assistance was sometimes mistakenly withdrawn. Orwell tells of a man seen feeding his neighbour’s chickens while the neighbour was away. It was reported that the man now had a job, and his money was withheld. And there was little official sympathy for those who slipped through the net. When a man travelling the country looking for work was caught stealing two loaves of bread, he told the bench that temptation was difficult to avoid. ‘That is what you say,’ said the magistrate. ‘I will teach you something different. You will go to prison for two months with hard labour.’
Arguably, though, it was the women who suffered most. The wife of an unemployed man still had to try to maintain a home. She often ate too little so that the children had enough, she dealt with the debt and rent collectors, and she had to manage her husband’s diminished sense of self-worth. And as Orwell noted, the average working-class man never did a stroke of housework – even when at home all day. Yet such women were not above being patronised; Sir F. G. Hopkins, president of the Royal Society, delivered a speech to fellow members in 1935, declaring that ‘what the English housewife in the poorer classes needs most is to be taught the art of simple but good cooking’.
With the dearth of any workable system of welfare, and the lack of understanding between society’s classes, it was to be expected that extreme political parties began to attract support. The British Union of Fascists, led by the opportunistic Oswald Mosley, consisted overwhelmingly of young working-class men under thirty. Its members marched through areas where they were sure to provoke local people. In October 1936, a huge mob, headed by Mosley, marched through the East End of London, where they were predictably confronted on Cable Street by a young mob of anti-fascists, enraged at the invasion. The ensuing fight led to the arrest of more anti-fascists than fascists, allowing Mosley to present his men as victims of aggression. The result was an increase in new members.
At the end of the march, Mosley spoke to his followers. ‘The government surrenders to Red violence and Jewish corruption,’ he said. But the fascists would never surrender. ‘Within us is the flame that shall light this country and later the world!’
Interviewed on BBC radio in 1989, Mosley’s widow, Diana (one of the eccentric, entitled Mitford sisters), claimed that her husband had not really been anti-semitic at all. Rather, by preventing him and his followers from marching, the Jews had provoked him. (In the same interview Diana remembered Hitler – ‘He was extremely interesting to talk to … he had so much to say …’)
Shortly before Cable Street, Diana’s father, Lord Redesdale, had given a speech to the House of Lords, protesting at ignorant British attitudes towards the Nazis. The most common mistake, he claimed, related to the Nazi treatment of Jews. The reality was that no Germans interfered with the Jews so long as they behaved themselves. And if the Germans felt that the Jews were a problem, Redesdale said, they should be allowed to deal with that problem as they thought best. Had the Nazis arrived in Britain, they would clearly have had ready-made support among the upper ranks, as well as the lower orders.
Another extreme – communism – was gaining support among young Britons. One of these, Winston Churchill’s nephew, Giles Romilly, wrote, ‘Youth has a clear choice. Either they must side with the parasites and exploiters … or with the working class to smash the capitalist system and lay the foundations of the classless society.’
In 1936 and 1937, thousands travelled to Spain to fight against Franco with the International Brigades. Once again, the vast majority were young working-class men – though not all. Penny Fiewel was a nurse working in Hertfordshire. A colleague asked her if she would volunteer for Spain: ‘I said I knew nothing about Spain – I didn’t know anything. She said I wanted educating, so she told me all about Spain, how the nuns were taking Franco’s side, and of course, it grabbed my heart – I was young and very emotional.’
Penny soon found herself in a field hospital on the front line, treating terrible injuries and teaching Spanish nurses to do the same. When bombs first fell near her operating theatre, it was invaded by civilians desperate for shelter. One man collided with her in the dark, and as she pushed him away, her fingers became sticky. When the lights were back on, she saw that half of the flesh on the man’s face had been blown away. Long before Hermann Goering launched the Luftwaffe’s raids against London in September 1940, Penny Fiewel was experiencing the brutality of area bombing. The Spanish Civil War – as illustrated by Pablo Picasso – was teaching the world to dread the bomber.
Months later, Penny was badly wounded during a raid. Waking up in a barn, naked except for bandages wound tightly around her chest and abdomen, she was in terrible pain. And as she lay recovering in hospital, the raids continued. ‘These were nightmare days,’ she says.
The war was ultimately won by Franco’s nationalists, with help from the Germans. This was a clear violation of a non-intervention agreement signed by Germany – and a warning of the dangers of trusting Hitler. But just as Britain’s leaders were tentative in their handling of the economy, so they were tentative in their handling of the Führer.
This was understandable. Britain had won the First World War – but her economy had been badly damaged. (As of 2017, astonishingly, the country still owed a large amount of First World War bond debt.) The greatest loss, however, was human. Much of Britain’s young male generation had been killed, wounded or traumatised, and the nation’s leaders were desperate to consign the war to history. They wanted to believe in a new peaceful world order based on the League of Nations – and were reluctant to focus too closely on events in Germany. Equally, they did not want to impose the high taxes that would be needed to rearm. Overall, therefore, it was easier for collective heads to remain in the sand where they could ignore the war cries of men such as Winston Churchill.
And although Britain’s politicians disapproved of Hitler’s methods, they did not initially identify him as an existential threat. As future United States President John F. Kennedy explained in his 1940 book, Why England Slept, ‘It is only fear, violent fear, for one’s own security … that results in a nation-wide demand for armaments.’ Such fear did not exist in Britain until it was almost too late.
Germany, by contrast, could hardly rearm quickly enough. And the two nations’ respective pre-war attitudes, one conservative and placatory, the other radical and ruthless, would come to a head in the events of May and June 1940.
But for all the difficulties Britain and her people faced in the years leading up to war, there was another – more positive – story emerging. Just as in America, and, in its own dark way, Germany, a distinct youth culture was forming. ‘Youth has broken out like a rash,’ stated a Picture Post leader in early 1939. Everybody, it claimed, was talking about ‘youth’, from journalists to politicians to church leaders: ‘What causes all this present chatter about “youth”? It is partly that we are in an age of transition, and older people are stamped by the institutions in which we have lost faith. We hope that youth will do better!’
Here is a striking similarity between our three nations. The depression and the apparent failure of the previous generation were allowing the young to forge a new identity. But in Britain, this new identity was being exercised by single wage-earners, aged fourteen to twenty-four, who had more expendable income than any other sector of society. The nation’s burgeoning youth culture would not have grown so quickly had it not offered such a boost to the economy.
A survey conducted in 1937 in a deprived area of Manchester concluded that working children from even the poorest families ‘would have holidays and outings and new clothes, while probably the parents, the mother certainly, stayed at home and wore old clothes’. We are witnessing the birth of the teenager – before the word was even