Indeed, presents. Hires you can't afford to get wrong. Like warehouse operations manager. Where are the fort-lifts? I sold them. They were too expensive. I got a great deal on these scooters though. You expect us to move a two-term pallet on a scooter? It'll be fun. Just think of the core strength you'll build. This is a job for sponsored jobs! This is what happens when you don't sponsor your job on Indeed. So the next time you need someone to get the job done right, get matched with quality candidates with an Indeed sponsored job. Visit Indeed.com slash next hire and sponsor your job today. Project Hail Mary is an extraordinary cinematic experience. You're a great scientist Dr. Grace. The world is calmed down on you. Starring Ryan Goslick. So I met an alien. Two worlds. One impossible mission. We're going to save the stars. Project Hail Mary. Amazing, amazing, amazing. Seed first, March 14th and 15th. In cinemas everywhere March 19th. The new LinkedIn hiring pro can't undo your last hire. The empty seat. Who was actually just that? An empty chair in your office? Because you couldn't find someone to fill it. So it just sat there costing you money with all its fancy ergonomic features. But LinkedIn hiring pro can make it easy to fill that seat with the right candidate. With nearly 60% of businesses finding someone to interview in the first week alone. Hire right the first time with LinkedIn hiring pro. Post your first job today and get £100 off at LinkedIn.com slash AI hire. Times and conditions apply. The 1920s and 1930s were golden decades for extremism. Across Europe dictators including Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini goo step their way into power. Yet in Britain it was a different story. Here in conversation with Spencer Misen for this episode of a history extra podcast. Our wind-turner explains why, with a little help from the football pools, the women's institute and the Lambeth Walk, parliamentary democracy, rain supreme. We're going to talk today about interwar Britain. More specifically why Britain didn't succumb to dictatorship and extremism in the 1920s and 30s. Now before looking at the situation in Britain in more detail, I wonder if we could set the scene for our listeners by looking first at what was going on across the continent. We all know about the situation in Germany and Italy. But what strides was authoritarianism making elsewhere in Europe? Perhaps in places we'd less expect it to? Well the original concerns in the 1920s was Italy first, but also there were problems in Spain. This is long before the Spanish Civil War. There was the rise of Attaturk in Turkey. There was a whole swath of countries right across continental Europe that seemed to be drifting into some form of dictatorship or authoritarian rule. And people concerned that democracy was a fragile flower that was possibly wilting. And then of course the 30s makes things worse with the rise of Hitler in a Germany that was already deeply destabilized. And beyond that there was Russia, which had really kicked the whole thing off. And was feared greatly as a source of inspiration for discontented people elsewhere. And this is a phenomenon that was kind of happening in places where quite strong democratic traditions as well, wasn't it? Indeed, yeah. I mean it seemed to be no respecter of what had previously been there. And even in the countries that didn't succumb to totalitarianism, there were still extremist politics being espoused in fairly substantial form. In places like Belgium, where there's a far right groups that were doing very well in elections in France, the Communist Party did very well in elections. It seemed as if there was no worth stopping this contagion. It was growing and it was going to continue to grow. How large did this loom in the imaginations of the authorities in Britain? I mean, how were it? Were they about this? The awareness was there. And particularly, I mean what was striking reading the newspapers of the time is how early Hitler was identified as a serious disruptive force, originally billed as the German Mussolini back in the early 1920s. But the beer hall putch was given a great deal of attention. And from their onwards, he was always present in people's minds. And the concept of the British Hitler was by the end of the 1920s becoming a familiar idea that possibly there might be somebody in Britain who would rise in the same way. Now, despite all this, in your feature you've written for History Extra magazine, I mean, you point out that Britain didn't narrowly escape the extremism that swept across Europe. It never came even vaguely close. And I've got to say, I was quite surprised at how badly the communists and for example the British Union of Fascists performed it the polls in Britain when you go back and look at the numbers. Given all that, why then do you think that someone like, say, Oswald Mosley, leader of the B.U.F. Loomed so large in our imaginations? I mean, you write that it was a kind of a peripheral figure at the time but today he's one of the best known politicians from the interwar period, isn't it? I mean, why do you think that is? We might call it dictatorship envy, not that we wanted a dictatorship, but we want to be involved in big stories that clearly this is the issue in Europe and Britain is sitting it out effectively. Oswald Mosley's, at his peak, he had 40,000 members of the British Union of Fascists and that was only for a couple of months. And by comparison with other parties, absolutely nothing, completely irrelevant. But he got a lot of attention at the time in a country where politics was not exactly diverse because the National Government was in power. The National Government had won such a massive majority in 1931 that was really not much opposition and mostly is a colourful figure. Everything else seems quite bland and managerial. And then you get this very strange and very active and very charismatic figure. He attracts a lot of press attention and he is attracted to a huge amount of historical attention which I think is probably slightly undeserved. I mean, you write that he looks unconvincing and is though he was playing a dictator in an amateur dramatic show, which is a great description of him. What did he look unconvincing in a way that to a lot of people at least Hitler and Mussolini did not? Some of it is to do with the character himself that mostly is a very upper class figure, a redistry baronette. He is originally elected as a Conservative MP, which seems entirely righty, then defects from the party becomes an independent, becomes a Labour Cabinet Minister. All of which is perfectly mainstream and to move from that into adopting the rhetoric and the gestures and the clothing of a fascist leader is too big a jump. It just doesn't sit with him. He looks perfectly right in the early newsreels where he is wearing three-piece tweed suit and looking like a proper gentleman with his hands in his lapel, when he is making a speech and all of that. That fits him, but it doesn't fit him with this new thing that is clearly not part of British political culture and not part of his world at all. Whereas Hitler and Mussolini come from nowhere, they are not established figures within the mainstream who then go. They are coming in and it is much easier, I guess. But beyond that, I think there is also the issue that the British don't really do demonstrative politicians. In the same way, we don't really do demonstrative anything much. Understatement is to be valued and fascism does not deal with understatement. If there was a moment when the forces of the far left and the far right were at their strongest, when it looked like they might actually shake up Britain's political establishment, when was that? I think the real threat was in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. 1919 was a very disruptive year, not because of the fascists who did not yet exist. But the economy was going into recession. There was a short boom after the war. And then by the end of 1919, going into 1920, massive economic problems. The economist described 1920 as one of the worst years for depression since the Industrial Revolution. Huge unemployment, many of the unemployed were ex-servicemen. Many of them it was feared had weapons because demobilization is a very messy process always. And there was this genuine fear that inspired by the Russian Revolution, inspired by the Irish War of Independence, that might actually be arising in mainland Britain. And I think that was the point in those early years, there were riots and there were strikes. And that was when possibly things might have gone wrong. As you've written in the article, obviously Britain didn't succumb to dictatorship in this period. You identify a number of reasons why that might have been the case. I wonder if we could look at a few of those in a bit of detail. I mean, one of them was in the words of George Orwell, as you say, cheap luxuries. In the road to Wig and Peer, the great novelist argued that everything from the football pools to fishing ships kept the working class queer. Would you say he was on to something now? I think what he's getting at, to some extent, is accurate. That although we talk about hungry thirties and for obvious reasons, as a great deal of attention is paid to those areas of very high unemployment and hunger marches and all of that, actually for most people, the 1930s were not that bad. The standard of living was improving. The gap between the rich and the poor was declining. There was a huge program of house building. People were living in better quality accommodation. There were more consumer, durable, and available cheaply. Britain was not hit as bad by the depression as many other countries. And that's not necessarily to our credit because some of that is because the economy had effectively flatlined for much of the 1920s anyway. So we didn't have so far to fall. But compared to America, let alone Germany, the depression was not as destructive as it might have been. And without wishing to minimize the suffering that was clearly there in much of the north and the industrialising cities and towns, a lot of the country was doing okay. You also remarked that the insular period was the great era of voluntary associations. I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about that phenomenon, please. Why were they so incredibly popular? And why would these clubs act as a bulwark against extremism and dictatorship? There's two aspects to the voluntary organisations. There are the really big national and international ones. The Women's Institute, the British Legion. These very large organisations that had separate branches. The League of Nations Union was another one. They enjoyed peak membership. And I think some of that was to do with the fact that as now people were concerned that culture was becoming something that we consumed rather than participated in. We'd had, at the end of the 19th century, the invention of film of the Grammaphron record recorded sound. They don't allow for participation. The radio turns up in the 1920s. And it seemed as if everything was becoming rather passive. And as now there is a reaction against that where people wish to participate, wish to belong and wish to feel as if they are part of something bigger than themselves. And so you get the rise of community singing. The Daily Express starts putting on concerts at the Albert Hall where thousands of people come together, get issued with song sheets, and they all join in singing together. At the FA Cup Final, people are starting to abide with me. And that becomes part of the ritual of the football season. So I think there's that side of it where the culture seems to be becoming something that we can't enjoy being part of. And therefore we will find a place where we can. Alongside that, you also have the continuation and proliferation of just masses and masses of small clubs and societies, independent groups. That might be devoted to rose growing or to penum reform or to foreign films or to anything that is a specific little interest of your own. And what's distinctive about that I think is that these are all organized in very conventional ways. You tend to elect a committee. You have a treasurer. You read the minutes for the last meetings and you take minutes of this meeting. All of that panoply of a democratic process is part of everyday life and is part of your hobbies as well. And I think Britain is more distinctive with this than any other country. It becomes embedded and comes part of the warp and weft of normal society that you have these democratic processes. It's not something that you do every five years when you go and cast a vote. It's what you do every Friday night when you go round to the British Legion because you're on the subcommittee for entertainment. It's just baked into normality. So was it baked into normality in a way that it was an in-save France, Belgium or Germany? Yes, I think it is. It's not simply the groups having shared interests coming together. It's the process whereby they do that. And that's been going on for so long in Britain. And I guess ultimately that's really why Britain is not attracted to extremist politics. It's the history, the continuity of centuries of institutions and of stable borders allows that stuff to grow. And so it's not simply that you haven't been invaded. It's that you've had the time of peace that you can develop those structures. And as I said, it's not simply the big institutions, which is obviously the important part of resisting extremism, it's the big national formal institutions. It's the everyday ones that I think matter as well. So you say in your feature is as you put it, the complete absence of politics in British cultural life. There's one really interesting example you mentioned in the realm of film, the cinema. Could you tell us a little bit more about that please about the role that say the British board of film sensors played in, sort of keep in film and politics separate? Yeah, the British board of film sensors are fascinating in situation. It is created by the film industry itself in order to avoid government interference, government censorship. And in order to produce the system of certifying films with a use certificate or an A certificate for adult, which is entirely intended to circumvent local councils making their own decisions. And so the BBC is created by the film industry to regulate itself. And it decides that in order to do this, it should have nothing controversial ever to say. And films have to be pre-submitted before they get released. The BBC stops pretty much anything that is to do with politics or religion or race. It will not allow you to criticise any foreign government. So even late on films like The Lady vanishes, Alfred Hitchcock's film from 1938-39, where it is very clear that the people who are trying to stop our heroes are German. They are not identified as German because that would go against the BBC's regulations and imply criticism of a foreign government. At a time when it was fairly clear that we probably should be criticising foreign governments. But the result of all of that, very heavy-handed censorship, is that it is completely apolitical. Other countries have censorship, but it tends to censor particular political views in Britain and just censor politics as a whole. And the reason it is out of bounds and consequently, British film and British cinema at the time is really quite a peaceful place. Russian films don't get certificates from the BBC because they are inherently communist obviously. And you get to a stage where there is nothing being discussed in movies. There is a complete silence about it. And it is a bit like those pubs that used to say no politics, no religion. There is no discussion, no talk. And I think the effect of that is to make everything seem much quieter and nicer somehow. I am not saying the same thing. We ought to go to 100. I want to worry about the level of censorship possibly, but it does have a dampening effect, I think. I was going to ask you about that though, because as you say, looking back from 100 years on, it could seem a little bit heavy-handed. And it was already pushed back to it at the time. Not really, no. There were people who wished to see films that they weren't allowed to see forum films, but because there was nothing being made in Britain, the people felt we are being excluded from because it wasn't made. That is part of the way that the BBC operates is you submit the script before making the movie. And so Walter Greenwood's classic novel Love on the Doll was a successful book. It transferred to the stage with some success. They submitted a script to the BBC and the BBC simply refused it. So it was never made. It was eventually made in a different version, much toned down in the 1940s. By which stage it was in historical peace, the moment had passed. When it really mattered, it wasn't there because it seemed too political. And that does have an effect, I think. It means she simply doesn't talk about this stuff. And that to me feels an important bit of it. And the BBC plays its part in this as well, because the BBC doesn't like controversy. Tell us a little bit more about the rise of the BBC in this period, then. How did the interwar commitment to keeping politics out of culture shaped the evolution of public service broadcast in Britain? Well, to start with, the BBC is not allowed to discuss politics. The government is quite clear that this is not its territory. And some of that is because of the campaigning of other vested interest groups, the newspapers in particular. I mean, to start with, the BBC is not allowed to broadcast news bulletins until 7 o'clock at night, because it would interfere with newspaper sales. Yeah, that's not imaginable, no? It is, yes, it's not until the general strike, which closed down newspaper production, that the BBC started doing bulletins before that. And of course, once that dam is broken, that's it. But there was a definite feeling that this was not what the BBC should be doing. As a monopoly broadcaster with only one national channel, one national radio station, it shouldn't be broadcasting anything that might disturb, upset, offend a large number of people. And so it's about compromises, about finding some kind of middle ground, common ground, that will be acceptable to pretty much everybody, because it has to be, the BBC is so big. By the end of the 1920s, there are 3 million radio licenses in the country. This is the precursor of the television license, that's a license for the radio. 3 million radio licenses by the end of the 1920s, by the end of the 1930s is 9 million. That's virtually every home in the country is getting the BBC. It is the dominant cultural force by a very long margin, even bigger than the cinema. And in that context, it doesn't want to upset people. It will broadcast dramas that have political themes, but even there, it gets a bit nervous, depending on the mood of the nation at the time. And so there's a pacifist play that is banned in 1937, because by that stage, a piecement is on the way out, we're into rearmament, it's no longer appropriate. Five years earlier, it would have been okay. So there is some political material, but there's no real room on the BBC for a communist or a fascist, because they're outside the mainstream, and the BBC is very committed to the mainstream. It's biases towards parliamentary democracy. Okay, how much credit can King George the Fifth take for all this? Because iconography, portraiture, images, very sort of important to the rise of authoritarian regimes across Europe in Germany and Italy, there are images of Hitler and Mussolini everywhere and their respective nations. In Britain, however, coins curred the portrait, not of a politician, but of the King. How important is that fact to this story? I think it is massively important to the large extent, it's because we don't think about it. It is so much part of the national fabric already that you don't even consider that this is happening. But it is the stuff that any other country is what a dictator wishes to do. If you walk down the street in Moscow, you will see a picture of Stalin in a shop window. All of that, that wish to be the visible embodiment of the state. That's already been taken. All of that territory is taken over by the monarchy, which has limited political power. It has a huge amount of cultural power, because it's been there forever. As far as anybody is concerned, this is just a fact of life. It's not something that's been decided. And so the scope for a dictator is massively reduced. You can't have that territory. It's already taken by the King. It's always interesting to compare the present day with the events of a century ago. What's prevailing view of politicians back in the 1920s and 30s? I mean, judging by the numbers, I guess you could say there was a significant amount of political participation in the movement and engagement amongst the wider population. Well, there's still a novelty element, of course. The 1918 representation of the people was acted, given the vote to all men, the working class, when they were allowed to vote. Most women were now allowed to vote, and by 1928, that had become all women. We had universal franchise. There's still a novelty for much of the country that you're allowed to participate in this. I think the parallel with then and now is the struggle of an electoral system of first pass the post, which is intended for two major parties, trying to deal with multiple parties. And so you've got the decline of the liberals, the rise of the Labour Party, and even that is not the whole story, because at one point in the 1931 election, there are three Liberal parties, there are two Labour parties. There is, as well as the independent Labour Party and Scottish National parties emerging, this massive party is jumbling around. And you can see the same kind of instability there that we've enjoyed, or endured recently. Four prime ministers in the space of three years in 1922 to 24, three years of elections. There is this churn as the system tries to adjust. Ultimately it does so, and it settles down into Conservative Labour as the two dominant forces having started with the Conservative Liberal. So I maybe want you to take some comfort from this, that even a period of great instability, the system will ultimately adjust and maybe things settle down. Of course it did take a World War, but nonetheless. Oh, and towards the end of the feature, you observe that if there is a single cultural symbol of Britain's instinctive distrusted dictator, it was perhaps the Lambeth Walk. So tell us a little bit about this song, it's evolution, and how it found itself on the front line of a clash of values is you're up-lurched towards another conflict. The Lambeth Walk is a song that comes from the show Me and My Girl, which had started in London on stage. Unsuccessfully, it was doing very poorly and it looked as if it might have to come off. And in one of those nice quirks of cultural fate, there was a band leader was scheduling to make a broadcast on the BBC on the radio, and had to cancel with very short notice. And so to replace the programme, the BBC broadcast an extract from a live performance of Me and My Girl, including the Lambeth Walk. It was a big hit, box office went wild, and the show was established, and that song in particular. It's a really simple, nice little song, catchy melody. It comes with a dance, this is the great period of dance bands and dancers generally, the 1920s and 30s. But the Lambeth Walk is different to the others. Things like the Chas and the Black Bottom, all of these dancers that have come from Me and My Girl, terribly athletic, they require a huge amount of energy to perform them. The Lambeth Walk, you just have to strut along a bit and sway your shoulders and occasionally jerk your thumb in the air. Everybody can do it and everybody does. It becomes right across society. It's classless, it's ageless, it is so simple to do, it is so catchy. It is the big hit of 1938. The Times talks about it as this is going to be the tipperary of the next wall. It is covered by musicians around the world, and in Germany it is barred in many places. A large part of that is, as it's seen from Britain, is that the Germans don't understand the implicit democracy that is involved in this song. Particularly the middle-aged section where it talks about, do as you're damn well-pleasy. Life is nice and easy. This idea of do as you're done well-pleasy is seen as being the antithesis of extremist politics. And that lead to the Labour Party says in Germany they can't do the Lambeth Walk, they can only do the goose step. And that seems to be the cultural opposition between the two. That was our wind-turner speaking to Spencer Misen. Our wind-turner is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Chichester and an author of numerous books on 20th century Britain. His latest, which tells the story of the UK in the 1920s and 1930s, is a shell-shot nation written between the wars.
