3 Post-Empire Britain

Dr. Jameela Begum

English Society and Culture between the Wars (1919– 1939)

England emerged battered and bruised from World War I, the armistice signed between the allies and Germany on 11 November 1918 at the “eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month” brought a sense of relief. The nation was engulfed in grief at the enormous human cost of war that had left over 17 million dead and over 20 million wounded. War memorials cropped up even in some of the smallest towns of England. The inter war years was a period of sorrow and hopelessness. Europe tried hard to recover its ravaged economy but the economic depression(1929-30) triggered by the collapse of Wall Street posed a fresh challenge. The economic conditions that prevailed, coupled with the success of the pre-war Bolshevik  revolution in Russia helped spread the ideals of socialism across Europe and North America. People began to look at capitalism with more scepticism than at the time of Marx. “Traditional perceptions of home, village and town boundaries were broken; ideas of communication between people altered” (Clapson 20). Britain, like other European countries, experienced unimaginable social change. Traditional Victorian morals and bourgeois culture fell by the wayside even as the Avant Gardists tried to develop a new aesthetic that could adequately represent the confusion and chaos of modernity.

In the midst of all the uncertainty and instability, “The 1920s and 1930s saw the growth of mass entertainment” (Clapson20). The cinema replaced the old music halls, while pubs became popular centres of evening-time leisure activities. The sudden growth of cinema audiences necessitated an increase in places that screened these films, “culminating in the great ‘picture palaces’ of the 1920s which rivaled theatres and opera-houses for opulence and splendor” (Smith 17). Though the British and Germans did play a role in spreading the culture of cinema, it was the French followed by the Americans who began to dominate world cinema. The British government, however, responded with a cultural policy introducing “the Cinematographic Acts” in 1928 “to protect and promote the British film industry” (Clapson 20).

The radio grew simultaneously as a form of home entertainment. At 6 P.M on November 14th 1922, Arthur Burrows read a news bulletin that included a report of a “train robbery, an important political meeting, some sports results and a weather forecast.” With this broadcast, the British Broadcasting Company transformed itself into what we know as the BBC.

Grey Hound racing was “introduced in its modern form” (20) as a new sport in England in 1926. Dog racing along with other forms of gambling like football pools and Irish hospitals Sweepstakes( Lottery established in Irish free state in 1930 to raise finances for Irish hospitals), continued as alternative forms of entertainment despite government’s efforts to “restrict access to betting and gambling between the wars” (20).

British Political Economy between the Wars 

The General Strike of 1926 

The speculative boom created in 1919-20 of Post War British economy collapsed in 1921. Problems in staple industries persisted with high levels of unemployment and poor labour management. During the war, coal mining industry had come under government protection; after the war, the mine workers federation “pressed for the industry to be taken into public ownership and reorganized” (Sue 1). The “export price of coal slumped and the industry was in serious trouble. Government and mine owners “sought to restore profitability by imposing wage cuts”. The trade union movements before the war had “begun to make alliances across industrial sectors to form The Triple Alliance of miners, railway men and transport workers” (1). However, the alliance collapsed when things came to a crunch in 1921 and after 15th April, also known as Black Friday, “the miners were left to fight alone” (2). After eleven weeks of lockouts, the workers gave in and “accepted wage cuts”. By 1925, “the industry was in trouble” (2) and the government made matters worse by reverting to the prewar gold standard for currency valuation, making exports expensive. The “Samuel Commission of March 1926 did not (or could not) solve the industry’s problems”(2). On 30th April, “new notices of wage cuts, longer hours and an end  to national agreements” were posted. The trade unions called a “lockout” on 3rd May, this time the Triple Alliance stood firm and the “first line of transport workers and railway men came out with miners, involving just under two million workers”(2).

With the “Great Depression” in 1929, “unemployment rose from one million to over three million in 1932”(Clapson 21). Although many industrial regions were affected by high unemployment, the North-West of England, central Scotland and South Wales were the worst affected. These were designated as “distress areas” “targeted for assistance by the Special Areas Act of 1934” (21). Further, migration from these areas into wealthier regions “reflected the social geography of economic change” (21). Tortella suggests that politicians and statesmen tried desperately “to reconstruct the past,” but they repeatedly bumped against “a reality which they could not understand, but which acted as an invisible barrier to their efforts and defeated them” (Tortella 146).The only one who was able to comprehend the economic mess was John Maynard Keynes, who studied the situation and took pains to explain to politicians and people the fact that the economy had changed. The “traditional premises were no longer valid and that it was necessary to invent a new economic theory” (21). He put forth his thesis in the magnum opus of 20th century economic theory titled The General Theory of Employment,Interest and money in 1936.

Beginnings of Modernity in Art and Literature 

Charles Baudelaire, a pioneer of modernism, captured its essence thus in The Painter of Modern Life (1863): “Modernity is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent; it is one half of art, the other being the being the eternal and the immovable” (Baudelaire 17). From this quote and many similar statements made by artists and writers on modernity, it is amply clear that modernity is an obsession with time. Modernist writers and artists tried to represent the anxiety of fleeting time in almost the same terms of Carpe diem as done by the Cavalier poet Herrick in his poem “Gather Ye Rosebuds.” Levenson states that in the high modernist English novel of the first postwar decade, “time became such a dominant concern that it can be taken as a cultural signature…It became rather a fully thematised subject in its own right” (Levenson 197). He goes on to suggest that the “extra-literary historical world of novelty,” such as, “the experience of rapid modernization in technologies, social relations, religious beliefs, philosophic principles,” all entered “the literary universe, providing the subject-matter for the novel of time” (198). The technology of war had established “the terms of mass society” differently. Society was now merely “individual atoms absorbed within the surge and swarm of groups” (198). Modernity therefore, can be best understood only as a series of disjunctures and discontinuities with the past. It cannot be seen entirely as a twentieth century phenomenon; on the other hand, it should be taken as a heightened sense of “rupture and transition that had accompanied modernity since at least the beginning of the nineteenth century” (199).

Modern Fiction 

Novelists who played a leading role in establishing the Modernist literary canon of the 1920’s wereborn “within relatively few years of one another” (199) – Ford Madox Ford (b. 1873), Dorothy Richardson (b. 1873), E.M Forster (b. 1879), James Joyce (b. 1882), Wyndham Lewis (b. 1882), Virginia Woolf (b. 1882) and D.H Lawrence (b. 1885). Levenson suggests that in the case of these modernists “a collective consciousness of maturing as artists accompanies a memory of having been young together in the uncertain prewar period” (200).

Modern Poetry 

Walter Pater, Ezra Pound and T.S Eliot are leading Anglo-American modernists who tried to capture the sense of ennui, anonymity, monotony, and absurdity modern life in their poems in early 20th century. Neil Roberts suggests that modernist poets, to a large extent “have defined the terms in which the criticism of poetry has been conducted” (Roberts 2). He rightly points out that the century should be seen as one in “which poetry has been overwhelmingly self-conscious and self-reflexive” (2). Most of the modernist poets took their cue from French symbolist artists and poets, gathered together in movements, “wrote manifestos and largely created the cultural environment in which their work was received” (2). Roberts argues that the influence of poets like Pound and Eliot was “disproportionate to their number or to the sales of their books” (2). Hence he gives importance to other smaller groups of poets such as “Black Mountain and Language poets,” (2) who “formed conscious alliances and articulated shared principles” (2). The century saw poets divided between two groups; one of academics who taught in classrooms even as they wrote poetry and the other which was dedicated only to the art. Roberts suggests that throughout the twentieth century, poetry “had an immensely important and uncomfortable relationship with the academy” (2). William Carlos Williams, in fact, “condemned Eliot for handing poetry to the academics” (2). Nevertheless, one can suggest that modernist poets tried their best to represent what Thomas Carlyle’s essay “Signs of the Times” did as early as 1829.

British Culture and Society (1939 – 45) 

Nationalism, Propaganda and rise of the Welfare State 

Clapson agrees with George Orwell who argues that the war would have “little effect on national identity” (Clapson 23) and would remain anchored round the same prewar issues of “class, regionalism and a host of stereotypes” (23). In the social realm however, it would “strengthen a demand for a ‘better life’” (23). George Orwell (real name Eric Blair) served the BBC briefly during the war from 1941- 43 as “a Talks Producer in the Eastern Service crucially influenced the creation of two celebrated books that he subsequently wrote under the pen-name of George Orwell.” He used his experience there to create the deliberately confusing language of news that he called “newspeak” in the novel Nineteen Eighty Four. Critics and biographers believe that the language of “newspeak” was modeled on “the BBC’s long tradition of bureaucratic jargon and rules about acceptable on-air language.” Clapson believes that Orwell and other broadcasters of the time were careful not to breach the censorship code implemented by the Ministry of information during the war.

In the first two years of war, the country seemed perched on “the edge of imminent defeat at the hands of Nazi Germany, and in 1940 a German invasion of Britain” appeared quite likely. The pessimistic Home Morale Emergency Committee of the Ministry of Information“prepared and circulated throughout the country a pamphlet entitled ‘If the Invader Comes’” (Foss 52). However, national confidence increased “after the end of the Blitz” but it hit a new low when “Japan invaded Singapore” (52) in 1941-42. The tide turned in England’s favour again in 1942 when news came of “Hitler’s forces being defeated at both El Alamein and Stalingrad” (52). In the same year, “theBeveridge Report was published” (52) where the author argued “for social progression which required a coherent government policy: ‘Social insurance fully developed  may provide income security; it is an attack upon Want’”(52). The report led to the establishment of a social security system and National Health Service after the end of the war.

Women during the War 

Claims made by feminists that the war was a liberating force for women who were earlier denied opportunities to work alongside men areindeed factual. The socio-economic conditions created by the war, became“an incentive in national recruitment campaigns to encourage women to join the Forces or volunteer for civilian war work” (Sheridan 32). War-time feminists,“anxious to see women’s potential as war workers being properly utilized and, importantly, properly credited” (32), developed an argument which supported such claims. Dorothy Sheridan suggests that for women today, war time images that “appeared in popular magazines like Picture Post,” (32) still hold a popular appeal. Photographs of “Land Girls driving tractors and women driving buses, ambulances and military trucks,” (32) evoke a powerful sentiment of femme power. Wartime representations showed women working alongside men; adding to the skilled labour force supporting the war effort. Such representations gave women the feeling that a different life was out there beyond the confines of the kitchen.

Dorothy Sheridan avers that such a view of war as a liberating influence cannot be fully substantiated since it is rather vague about “what the gains actually were,” and “whether the gains were made on an individual level by the women who were adults during the war or  whether they were made on behalf of all women and for subsequent generations” (32). A second view that runs contrary to the one mentioned above suggests that although women were temporarily able to “escape from strictly gender defined roles” (32), “they were forced back into the home as soon as the war ended” (32). Soon, the idealized picture of a woman as “an exclusive housewife and mother” (32) was reasserted and this shift was supported by a “wave of pro-natalist propaganda” that culminated in “theories of maternal deprivation” (32). Sheridan rightly points out that the first view fails to “define exactly how women benefited from the wartime experience” whereas, the second “fails to confront the question” how women, who had experienced the “liberating possibilities” of wartime “succumbed to the postwar reversal” (32)? Feminists studying the impact of war on women may have to walk the tight-rope to find a balance between these opposing views.

The Postwar Scene: Winds of Cultural Change 

The postwar period is generally seen as a time of historical change; a period that ushered in hope and stability, and a time that saw “rising standards of living, rising rates of literacy (fuelled by the guarantee of secondary state education until fifteen)” (Hirschkop 455). Hirschkop quotes Malcolm Bradbury to suggest that it was a time when the provincials rose into “the ranks of the cultural and intellectual elite” (455). For many historians, the postwar period signifies a time when “capitalism finally hits its stride” (455). The wars had created an impression that capitalism, with its inherent contradiction of competitive accumulation and expansionism cannot secure steady progress for humanity. Moreover, soviet style socialism was always glaring the  western world in its eye, creating a heightened sense of insecurity. After the war however, it appeared as if the promise of “steady progress towards a more prosperous, more secure, and – from the mid-nineteenth century onwards – fairer society,” was now coming true.  Europe seemed to be on the threshold of a new phase in history, having faced “brutal inter capitalist wars…revolutions and murderous counter revolutions” (455) that had destroyed its self-image of a progressive civilization.

After 1945, Keynesian economic policies“used state expenditure to avoid dramatic economic crises” (455). The welfare state doled out “panoply of newbenefits” (455) and built public institutions, thereby “stealing socialism’s thunder” (455). Thus, England could successfully keep“the lid on class conflict” (455). Hirschkop avers that for anyone born too late to have any idea of war or revolution; the social world assumed “politics without periodic wars or revolutionary moments; an everyday life structured around domestic consumerism and the relative absence of absolute poverty; an emphasis on individual attainment heavily dependent on educational achievement; and communications that, as Raymond Williams once pointed out, made more drama available on screen each week than previous generations saw in a lifetime” (455-456).

“The democratization of progress,” made possible by the advent of mass media; especially the television and recorded music “that didn’t mind who tuned in” (456), created an illusory sense of class distinctions being erased. Some would even suggest that “the working class was undergoing ‘embourgeoisement’” (456). “‘classless’ forms of experience – embodied in new consumer objects, new kinds of mass culture, new kinds of places to live, as well as new types of occupation – seemed to be emerging” (456). The change influenced well known British Cultural Marxists Richard Hoggart and Stuart Williams so much that they “pointed to a ‘cultural classlessness’ on the horizon” (456). Education played a major role in bringing about this change, breaking the old stereotypes of class. A new middle class “of managers, new-style professionals, welfare-state employees” (456), entirely dependent on formal education, emerged to replace the older middle class occupations that were more skill oriented. Hirschkop argues that British society was never so inclined to attach “social power or prestige” (456) to education; even “the most powerful in British polity had seen no need to attend university” (456). The new middle class however, made education their social capital by tying it up with prestige and status.

The postwar period also threw up some significant cultural initiatives such as “the creation of the Arts Council, the 1951 Festival of Britain, the expansion and transformation of the BBC’s provision, and the inauguration of independent television” (456). The most significant though “most controversial” (456) among these however, was “the Education act of 1944 which guaranteed free education until fifteen” (456). The act also “brought the previously independent religious and grammar schools into the state system” (456).

Promoting Cultures, Building Identities: 1945 – 70 

Public funding for arts increased significantly between 1945 -70. “The Arts Council, the British Council, the British Film Institute and local authorities all invested increasingly in forms of creative production” (Shiach 528). Shiach argues that the process of investment “generated a series of complex questions about the relations between cultures and identities” (528). Artists were now obliged in some way to address “an increasingly recalcitrant set of relationships between nation, region and metropolis” (528). Shiach uses the argument of Tom Nairn to support his view that the “declining global economic standing of Britian” (529) after the war “created spaces of disadvantage and uneven development” (529). This necessitated a new understanding of the distinct “interests of different parts of Britain” (529). Regionalism, ethnicity and race became the new categories of identity that posed a challenge to the monolithic idea of nation. Scottish, Irish and Welsh identities were now yearning for cultural distinction.

Cinema and Television in the 50’s 

In 1952, Britain’s most popular film fan magazine Picturegoer published a survey that inquired into the relation between television and cinema and predicted the growing popularity of the former compared to the latter. “Television’s growing status as a mass medium developed throughout these years, and although this certainly hastened the cinema’s ‘decline’, the cinema still remained a central part of cultural consciousness and experience for much of the 1950s” (Holmes 10). The Beveridge Committee in 1949 had recommended the “continuation of the BBC’s monopoly of broadcasting” (113) however; as the decade progressed there was growing pressure on government to introduce independent broadcasting service. The prosperity of the late 50’s saw “a rise in production and a corresponding demand for advertising outlets” (113). A new Television Act was implemented in 1954 and in 1955 “it was decided that commercial television was to be supervised by the Independent Television Authority (ITA)” (113).

The Resurgent 60’s 

The ITV (Independent Television) “introduced Britain’s longest-running and most successful soap opera, Coronation Street, in 1960” (Clapson 27). Clapson believes that the onset of television as mass medium incidentally occurred during a time of “greater permissiveness in British social and cultural life” (27). Although censorship of literature and arts was relaxed during the 50’s, it became even more so in the 60’s. For example, the ‘f’ word was “first used on television during this decade” (27). The 60’s decade was also accompanied by “great humanitarian strides in social policy”(27); “homosexuality was decriminalized, abortion became legally available, access to contraception was made easier, and divorce became more accessible and affordable” (27). Such far reaching social change certainly indicates the waning influence of Victorian values.

Rise of Pop (Popular) Culture 

The term popular culture has specific reference to a form of youth culture that developed around the 1960’s in post-war Europe. Andy Bennett suggests that there is ample evidence to show that there was “a cultural relationship between youth, music and attendant forms of visual style” (Bennett 8) in England, even before the war. However, “the appearance of music and style- driven youth cultures at a more widespread, and increasingly global, level began to occur only when youth became a distinct consumer group (8). Freed from earlier notions of a shared common culture, popular culture began to circulate as a distinctive marker of class in the socio- economic milieu of postwar industrial capitalism.

In January 1963, a London record reviewer Keith Fordyce in his weekly contribution to musical trade paper the New Musical Express, “commented on a new recording by a group that had first appeared on the charts” (Thompson 3). He was commenting on the promotional release of the Beatles solo “Please Please Me.” It was clear that American pop music was making its presence felt in London too. “A year later, on 9 February 1964, as millions watched the Beatles on CBS’s The Ed Sullivan Show, rock ’n’ roll ceased to be an exclusively American art form” (3). Nevertheless, British audiences preferred “homegrown versions to the American originals (5).The British pop music industry actively sought American disks for indigenous artists to imitate” (5).Further, given the fact that American music albums featured African -American performers prominently in the sixties, “the preference of white British audiences for performers who looked like themselves added a racist dimension to consumer patterns(5). Very soon there was huge “international demand for British pop music” (5), demand outstripped supply, and groups that earlier performed as dance hall entertainers “were hustled into the studio and promoted as the next great discovery” (5). Small studios thrived as they tried to satisfy “the adolescent hunger for new music”.

Postmodern Britain: From 1970 to the End of the Century 

The international decline of England began with the process of decolonization much earlier in the century. However, the formal independence of India and Pakistan; the decolonization of Africa beginning with Ghana signaled the end of the empire. Closer home, Northern Ireland remained a festering wound in the English body politic. The violent Irish conflict for constitutional status called ‘The Troubles’, began with a “civil rights march in Londonderry on 5th October 1968” and ended with “the Good Friday agreement on 10th April 1998.” Immigration into England from commonwealth countries that began by the middle of the century increased considerably. “By 1999 over 58 million people lived in Britain”.

Britain became a more “ethnically diverse country than ever before in its history”. Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi restaurants added spice to “much maligned British cuisine” (31), just as “Pizzas and Italian meals, American fast-food outlets, and Greek and Spanish restaurants became increasingly common”. Multiculturalism became the order of the day, though it was not easy for the native majority to accept some cultural practices of minority immigrant groups. Among the Christian population however, “church attendances had declined”(31) over the postwar years; “secularization had eroded much of the influence of the Church of England and other Christian churches”.

Supermarkets “grew massively”(32); giants like “Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda and Safeway (later Morrisons), dominated shopping and consumerism”.

Employment opportunities for women increased considerably, though inequalities “continued within the workplace” (32). “The equal pay legislation of 1971” (32), went a long way in improving pay parity.

Leisure became “more abundant” (32), affordable, and people began to spend more on it than before. Cinema made a “comeback from the mid-1980’s” (32). The first multiplex cinema “opened in 1985” (32) and grew in “the centres and around the outskirts of towns and cities” (32). By 1990’s every British home owned a television set and the PC became a new need of the times.

Sexual relationships became much freer with rising number of gay and lesbian relations; families grew smaller, and it was no longer stigmatic “to have children outside of marriage, or to live as an unmarried couple” (33). Clapson suggests that the “Divorce Act of 1969 had also contributed to the growth in the number of smaller households” (33). Towards the end of the century, the last “lingering traces of Victorian censoriousness were wiped away by the introduction of liberalised opening hours of pubs and bars, and by the introduction in 1994 of the National Lottery” (33). In the sphere of culture, at least, England had turned the American way by adopting consumerism as a way of life. The state now actively sought to “promote and profit from” (33) what it once “tried to prohibit”.

Reference

• Baudelaire, Charles. The Painter of Modern Life. Trans. P.E Charvey, London: Penguin, 1972. Print.
• Bennett, Andy. Cultures of Popular Music. Buckingham-Philadelphia: Open UP, 2001. Print.
• Bruley, Sue. The Women and Men of 1926: The General Strike and Miner’s Lockout in South Wales.Cardiff: Univ of Wales Press, 2010, pp 1 -17. Print
• Clapson, Mark. The Routledge Companion to Britain in the Twentieth Century. New York: Routledge, 2009. Print.
• Foss, Brian. “Message and Medium: Government Patronage, National Identity and National Culture in Britain, 1939-45,” Oxford Art Journal, Vol. 14, No. 2 (1991), pp. 52-72. Published by: Oxford University Press. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1360524 Accessed: 10-05-2016 08:40 UTC.
• Hirschkop, Ken. “Culture, Class and Education.” Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls Ed The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century English Literature. Cambridge, UK: CUP, 2004. pp.455 – 474, 2004. Print.
• Holmes, Su. “Introduction,” British TV and Film in 1950’s: ‘Coming to a TV near you.’ UK: Intellect Books, 2005. Print.
• Levenson, Michael. “The time-mind of the Twenties,” Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls Ed The Cambridge History of Twentieth Century English Literature. Cambridge, UK: CUP, 2004. pp. 197-218, 2004. Print.
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• Roberts, Neil. “Introduction,” Neil Roberts Ed A Companion to Twentieth Century Poetry. Malden USA: Blackwell Pub, 2001. Print.
• Sheridan, Dorothy. “Ambivalent Memories: Women and the 1939-45 War in Britain.” Oral History, Vol. 18, No. 1, Popular Memory (Spring,1990), pp. 32-40.Published by: Oral History Society. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40179138 Accessed: 10-05-2016 08:48 UTC
• Smith-Nowell, Geoffrey. “Inroduction,” The Oxford History of World Cinema. New York: OUP, http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.474.5157&rep=rep1&type=pdf
• Thompson, Gordon. Please Please Me: Sixties British Pop Inside Out. Oxford: OUP, 2008. Print.
• Tortella, Gabriel. The Origins of the Twenty –First Century. New York: Routledge, 2010. Print.