Balancing the account

Asa Briggs

British Society, 1914-1945 John Stevenson (Allen Lane £16.95)

Itth is is appropriate that the middle pages of

admirably lucid and comprehensive nevi History

in the Penguin Social Histo of Britain are devoted to unemployment, a subject about which the author has already written at length. This was, as he says, the ec°11nnlic and social issue which more than any other determined the image of the inter- War Period as the 'wasted years'. The Phrase 'the devil's decade', applied to the 1930s, still conjures up pictures, eY reinforced n oral history, of dole queues,

hunger I!

1.arches and miserable families caught up ) the inquisitions of the means test. Yet, as also shows, there was far more to tflin Stevensontrhe 1920s and 1930s than that, For one

g, the politics never quite fitted, even though there was no 'welfare state', a term hot then coined, to mitigate militancy. The mere continental politics became polarised, the more Britain seemed to be devoted to middle way'. The symbolic Jarrow 'arch of 1926 was organised with the sup-

rt of the local Conservative party as well as that of the local Labour party. There had been More militant political activity in the the etie Years before 1914 than in the years of

great depression.

e.ler inCourse, the economics did not quite fit , and that may have accounted for the reuliar pattern. For all ins, cn- ecraetion, distortion andthe dislocatationty o

of the

nosy, economic growth permitted a rise ti g Standards for most of the popula- _een throughout the period and for sizeable !prients of the population substantial, if ,,.°1,..ten unacknowledged, benefits. By the end ." the 1930s, the gross domestic product bwas More than half as great again as it had pin in 1913, and the index of industrial citcluetion stood 75 per cent higher in elm 0 than in 1910-13. As Stevenson con- t,ua_.ities, In spite of the problems of the anal sectors, the inter-war years were marked 0Y substantial economic growth, rePrese - the nting a significant improvement on rb Edwardian era and in comparison with °,,st other

European countries.'

trt an age of mass unemployment, the in- fluential advocates of the middle way were less concerned with economic achievements than with economic problems, although some of them — those involved in mass retailing, for instance — moved into politics because they believed that their own ex- perience was directly relevant to the discovery of economic solutions for the country as a whole. Their presence at the time counted, although their influence, like that of Keynes, was for the most part not immediate but prospective. Concerned as they were with waste, particularly human waste, they were assembling the relevant materials for a 'progressive consensus' which pointed towards a 'managed economy' — 'planned' would be too strong an adjective, though it was a favourite one at the time — and the expansion of state- provided social services. And although the consensus, liberal in flavour, was to affect all political parties — that was of its essence — there was a sense in which the 'middle way' was 'the road to 1945'. For this reason, Labour's Immediate Programme of 1937 is more interesting to the political historian for the light it throws on 1945 than for the light it throws on 1937.

The electoral impulse behind the 1945 Labour victory cannot simply be explained, however, in terms of long-term currents of intellectual opinion. It had its origins in the divided individual and family experiences of the 1930s, reassessed in the light of the common experiences of war. There could be no return to the 1930s. A major reason was unemployment. Yet it was not the only reason. During the Second World War, Mass Observation, typical product of the 1930s, found that the political change peo- ple most commonly desired to see after the war was a reduction in class distinctions. These had survived the First World War, 'm boycotting South African food' and they were reinforced in the society of the inter-war years.

It was in the light of the social legislation that followed from the Labour victory of 1945 that the social history of the inter-war years first began to be written, insular social history with the politics inevitably written in, equally inevitably myth-ridden politics, the politics of finality. It was not until austerity had given way to (relative) affluence and 'fair shares for all' had lost much of its appeal that revisionist social history took shape. Under the glare of the media, sociology boomed during the 1960s, and a broader kind of social history began to be fashionable, a history that was con- cerned with leisure as well as with work and with ways of life as well as with standards of living. At first, for all the attraction of theory and the emphasis on 'history from below', it was easy to leave the economics out. Since then, however, they have come back almost to the exclusion of everything else. As a,result, the play of market forces in shaping society now receives more atten- tion than the consequences of welfare legislation. Such revisionism is still far from complete. Nor, of course, will it ever pro- duce more than limited assent. There is more polarisation in interpretation now than there ever has been.

Just because of this, Stevenson's book is a model of balanced scholarship. It draws on a wide variety of sources and on an equally wide variety of interpretative analyses. Indeed, the note on further reading is an imperfect guide to the author's own reading or to his study of other kinds of evidence, like radio pro- grammes and films. The relevant statistics, demographic and social as well as economic, are well handled too. Nor was there any shortage of them. As Malcolm Muggeridge, who did not like them, put it, 'facts were wanted about everyone and everything — cross-sections of society, symptomatic opinions and observations, detailed investigations and statistics.'

The most memorable features of Steven- son's book, however, are the more unusual glimpses of the society. Thus, we are told that the 6th Duke of Portland listed only four houses as private residences during the 1920s, as compared with 'a dozen or more' before 1914, and that between 1918 and 1921 there was the largest and most rapid transfer of land since the dissolution of the monasteries and possibly since the Norman Conquest.

When the social history of 31 years is related to British social history as a whole, what will stand out is not necessarily what contemporaries themselves thought most significant. Indeed, from a distant vantage point it may be difficult to avoid telescop- ing the two very different world wars into one. Meanwhile, the main historical prob- lem for the practising social historian now is to determine to what extent the two wars together have really changed the course of British social history. It may well be that what has happened during the last 20 years has changed it more. The shape of our own century is still not set.