to the older members of their family.
Much of their money was spent watching (mainly American) films. Most young people watched at least one film a week, some watched many more. And not only did they watch films, they learned from them. They copied fashions and hairstyles, accents and attitudes. Boys wore slouched fedoras, girls delivered Scarlett O’Hara-style putdowns. According to the diary of a girl from a working-class Manchester suburb, an average 1938 Monday evening was spent watching a George Formby film with a friend, discussing the film (as well as boys and clothes), and then returning home to listen to dance music and talk to her family – about films.
Plenty of teen money was spent in dance halls. George Wagner (a sapper who would be evacuated from La Panne in May 1940) was sixteen in 1936, when he became a regular dance hall attendee. Despite being a shy boy, dancing was his chief hobby. ‘It was a place where you met all the girls,’ George says, ‘that was the main thing.’
Wearing suit, tie and waistcoat, bought by his mother (he had only graduated to long trousers at fourteen), George would walk a few miles to the Palace Ballroom in Erdington with three of his closest friends. The dances were run by Harry Phillips, who would walk around the floor, partnering boys and girls. No alcohol was served, so any of George’s friends who wanted a drink would have to go to a local pub and lie about their age. A five-piece dance band played popular American music – George’s favourite song was ‘Deep Purple’ – as young men plucked up their courage to approach young women. George says:
You used to chat them up, see if you could take them home. I didn’t have a particular girlfriend, not in them days, I was too young. I would walk them home and probably have a little snog when you got up to the gate. But they were very looked after in them days. Sometimes parents would be watching out of the window in the lamplight. ‘Come on! You’re late!’
So what were the differences between young wage-earners of this period and those of previous generations? Their instincts had not changed, but their behaviour had. They were now keeping far more of their wages to spend on themselves, and they had their own interests and pursuits. Before the First World War, there were very few – if any – pursuits that appealed only to the young. The music halls and cheap theatres were equally popular with all ages. It is hard to overestimate the growing independence and importance of youth at this period – and without the depression, it is hard to imagine how such developments could have taken place.
But at the same time, we should be careful not to ascribe our own modern attitudes to 1930s teens. We may want to imagine that they were ‘just like us’, but the truth is more nuanced. At the same time as he was learning about girls, George was very much a boy of his own time. He and his friends loved nothing more than pitching a tent in a field, pinching a bit of coal from the railway to start a fire, and cooking whatever they found in the fields. George would find an acorn, poke a straw into it, fill it with cigarette ends, and use it as a pipe. ‘If my mother had known,’ he says, ‘I would have got a thick ear.’ Youth attitudes may have been changing, but most young people remained innocent by today’s standards.
And we should also remember that young people were not alone in experiencing new pleasures and entertainments. Entirely British in flavour, accessible to all ages, a popular culture was also developing. It took the form of cheap luxuries and diversions available to people who could not afford the essentials. This, according to Orwell, was the logical result of the depression, as the manufacturer’s need for a market coincided with the half-starved populace’s need for cheap distractions:
A luxury nowadays is almost always cheaper than a necessity. One pair of plain solid shoes costs as much as two ultra-smart pairs. For the price of one square meal you can get two pounds of cheap sweets. You can’t get much meat for threepence but you can get a lot of fish and chips … And above all, there is gambling, the cheapest of all luxuries. Even people on the verge of starvation can buy a few days’ hope by having a penny on a sweepstake.
These trends are still with us today – although many of the specific diversions have now disappeared. Two British dances, enjoyed by all ages, in the late 1930s, were the Lambeth Walk and the Chestnut Tree. One was a pastiche of cockney culture, the other was based on a nursery rhyme. Compared with the primal danger of Swing, that edgy American import, these dances were cosily British in their eccentricity.
In Blackpool, the country’s favourite seaside resort, the diversions were equally British. One involved a woman named Valerie Arkell-Smith. Masculine in appearance, Arkell-Smith had spent years passing herself off as a retired army colonel – and had married an unsuspecting woman in the process. Following Arkell-Smith’s release from prison for making a false statement on her marriage certificate, an impresario signed her up to feature in a Blackpool sideshow. Billed as a woman who had recently had a sex-change operation, Arkell-Smith lay in a single bed, while a young woman lay alongside her in another bed, the two beds separated by flashing Belisha beacons. The conceit was that the pair had recently married but Arkell-Smith had placed a £250 bet that, for twenty-one weeks, they would not touch one another. Spectators paid twopence to view the odd, sexless bedshow, shouting obscenities at the ‘couple’.
Another sideshow was stranger still. Harold Davidson had been the rector of the parish of Stiffkey in Norfolk. He had been defrocked after an ecclesiastical court found him guilty of immoral conduct with a variety of women. Outraged at the verdict, Davidson had first embarked on a hunger strike (in an attempt to prove that God would not allow him to starve) before sitting for months in a barrel on Blackpool Promenade, trying to raise enough money to launch an appeal. The following year, he abandoned the barrel, and chose to appear inside a lion’s den at Skegness Amusement Park. This would be the end of the ecclesiastical road for the ex-Vicar of Stiffkey; the lion turned on him, and ate him in front of a paying audience.
It is often repeated that the 1950s gave rise to American-inspired youth culture, as well as a popular culture of cheap luxuries – but the pre-war period was clearly there first. And just as the American and German economies recovered as the 1930s wore on, so the general standard of living in Britain improved considerably.
One measure of this was the growing vibrancy of particular areas – such as Soho in London’s West End. The traditional French and Italian cafés and restaurants were joined by Chinese, Spanish and Hungarian restaurants. Considering that in 1939, less than 3 per cent of Londoners had been born abroad (compared with 37 per cent today), Soho was a genuine hub of cosmopolitan activity. A Picture Post feature noted expanses of cheese, garlands of sausages, rows of straw-covered Chianti bottles, tins of anchovies, olives and fruits, dishes of sweets and coloured beans, and glittering espresso machines. ‘The shop windows of Soho,’ it observes, ‘are crammed, gay, glowing and vivid.’ Even more surprisingly, Denmark Street, on the other side of Charing Cross Road, housed a Japanese community, where the truly intrepid could eat Japanese food. This is not a picture one readily associates with the 1930s.
Similarly, at this time, recognisably modern jobs emerged. Bill Taylor could neither read nor write – yet he worked as a long-distance lorry driver. When his firm gave him a delivery note, he would study a map for the place name that most resembled the one on the note. Then he would draw a straight line between his start point and end point, and circle every large town on the way. When he arrived in each town, he would stop and ask the way to the next. ‘None of the guv’nors I worked for ever knew I couldn’t read,’ he says, although he admits that ‘it had been easier when I’d started on the horses because some of the horses knew where they were going.’
One perk of Bill’s job was the existence of ‘lorry girls’ who hung around the cafés. ‘You’d take them from one town to another,’ he says. ‘Sometimes they’d stop with you a whole week, sleep with you and keep you company.’ In return the driver bought the girls food and cigarettes. ‘When the wives found out,’ says Bill, ‘a lot of marriages broke up.’
Sam Tobin, meanwhile, was a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman in north London. On Monday mornings, before setting off on the road, he would join fellow salesmen in a motivational singsong:
All the dirt, all the grit,
Hoover gets it every bit,
For