Book Review

Before the rumble of a distant drum

The Morbid Age: Britain between the wars

Kingsley Amis said that there were two types of hangover: the physical, characterised by headaches and nausea, and, infinitely worse, the metaphysical, which induced profound feelings of doom and gloom. Professor Overy does not invoke Amis, but his message is clear enough: from 1919 until the spring of 1940 Britain experienced a chronic metaphysical hangover from which it was only rescued by the therapeutic shock of Hitler's blitzkrieg.

What caused this hangover? Overy blames the Great War and its consequences. But you could argue that the first symptoms appeared after the Boer War in which, as H.G. Wells noted, "Our Empire was nearly beaten by a handful of farmers amid the jeering contempt of the whole world." No wonder Kipling thought we were no longer fit for purpose, a view shared by Baden-Powell, who started the Boy Scout movement in an effort to halt imperial decline. But neither Kipling nor Baden-Powell had any answer to the suffragettes, industrial unrest and Home Rule, to name just three of the reasons why the German General Staff thought Britain too unstable to go to war.

This faulty appreciation was their undoing. The British - and many Irish too - were prepared to sink their differences in defence of their way of life. It was the Second Reich, not the British Empire, which imploded. But victory came at an extortionate price. As Viscount Esher cautioned Sir Maurice Hankey in February 1919: "You must get your perspective right ... England and the Empire can never again be the England and Empire that you knew" - and a good thing too in the opinion of most intelligent persons under 30. Appalled by the slaughter, they were determined that there could be no return to the status quo. The civilisation we had fought for was "botched": a clean slate was needed.

Unfortunately, a clean slate was the last thing the "Bloody Old Men" in charge wanted. It smacked of Bolshevism, which they saw as a deadly plague. Unable to dislodge these frock-coated fogeys, the educated young - Overy's largest constituency - eschewed politics in favour of novelty, aesthetics, personal relationships and Freudianism, the last of which had come to assume the same importance for them as Darwin's theories had for a previous generation. They may have despaired of their elders, but not of the future. As yet, there was no rumble of a distant drum.

So, despite his impressive array of sources, Overy does not convince me that long faces prevailed in the Twenties. But once the slump hit home even an incurable optimist must have found it hard to keep smiling. In September 1931 Britain went off the Gold Standard, "the biggest shock", according to Alec Waugh, that his generation and their predecessors had ever known. The tighter countries had to draw in their belts, the more comfortable they felt in a political straitjacket. Some on the Left thought this was a garment Britain should adopt, always provided, of course, that it was cut according to a Soviet design. How else could you impose a planned economy, Marxism's solution to the crisis of capitalism?

But people could live with economic decline. They could not, they thought, survive another war. Baldwin - not one to exaggerate - had warned that "the bomber will always get through". His prediction was embellished by scientists, savants, novelists and film-makers. A belief arose that when the next war started there would be no formal declaration, just the sound of sirens closely followed by the crash of exploding bombs. Were we doomed? Pacifists thought not. For a brief period their star was in the ascendant. Thousands joined Canon Dick Sheppard's Peace Pledge Union, and millions took part in the Peace Ballot, a massive house-to-house survey in which people were canvassed about the defence of the realm. The vast majority put their faith in international disarmament and collective security, the League of Nations' nostrum.

But first Mussolini, then Hitler, called the League's bluff. And it was powerless to intervene in the Spanish Civil War, which crystallised opinion, particularly on the Left. Fascism had to be stopped; and if that meant fighting, so be it. Julian Bell had once been a militant pacifist. Now, he told E.M. Forster, "to be anti-war means to submit to Fascism". He was killed driving an ambulance in Spain. Of course most people still hoped for peace, hence the euphoria occasioned by Munich. But in the end, war came as a relief - though it took the fall of France to summon up the blood.

Richard Overy has assembled an immense amount of evidence in support of his thesis. He insists that it was not just the usual suspects - intellectuals and artists - who were hag-ridden, but, thanks to the popular press, "ordinary" people as well. I wonder. Papers like the Mail and the Express believed that what their readers - and their advertisers - wanted was a quiet life, untroubled by wars and rumours of wars. Moreover this was an epoch when mass entertainment came into its own. Summer schools may have flourished, but they couldn't compete with the cinema, sport and dance halls, none of which is mentioned here. So although his book is timely - we're said to be on the brink of a collective nervous breakdown ourselves - I think Overy exaggerates the impact of the malaise he investigates so thoroughly.

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