The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain

This dual capitalist/state enterprise approach was intended to ensure ‘competition in design’, and would mean that the failure of one ship would not terminate the whole programme, but what it also did, according to the stress engineer for the R100, N.S. Norway, later to be better known as the writer Nevil Shute, was to ensure that the lessons learned in one experiment were not shared with the other: it was rivalry, not collaboration.

The airships were to be built to the same rough specifications, designed to carry a hundred passengers in comfort, plus ten tons of mail and cargo, and to be capable of flying non-stop for fifty-seven hours at an average speed of 63 mph. But while the R100 was intended as a commercial craft, built along largely conventional lines gleaned from the German Zeppelins, the R101 was to be absolutely cutting-edge, employing the latest technologies.

The plan had been that the R101 would make its first trip to India in the early spring of 1927, but delays, design problems, and costs escalated at Cardington. By the end of 1927 only part of the R101’s structure had been delivered, whereas the framework of the R100 was almost finished, despite the fact that at Howden, where Vickers controlled the purse strings, many more calculations were made on the drawing board before work was put in hand. The R100 made its first flight of 150 miles (which took five hours forty-seven minutes) on 16 December 1929, and seven months later, in the early hours of 29 July 1930, took off for Canada. Meanwhile, the R101 had made a couple of flights round Britain, in ‘very perfect flying conditions’, as its chief designer, Lieutenant-Colonel Richmond, put it, but had not been tested on an overseas route. And the Imperial Conference at which Lord Thomson planned to make his dramatic entrance was due to open on 1 October.

In the early hours of 2 August 1930 the R100 moored at Montreal, having been in the air for seventy-four hours. On 16 August it was back in England, where Thomson congratulated the crew on accomplishing ‘this first and successful step in the development of our new generation of British airships’. It never flew again.

Meanwhile, the other great hope of British aviation was being sliced in half in its hangar. The surgical intervention was being performed to lengthen the R101 from 732 feet to 777 feet by adding a further section so that an additional gas bag could be inserted, covered, in the days before plastic, with the stretched intestines of bullocks imported from the great Chicago meatpacking factories. This was being done to give the R101 more lift: as it was, it would only have been able to carry a load of thirty-five tons; the long journey to India required twenty-five tons of fuel, leaving only an impossible ten tons for passengers, crew, luggage and stores. Already everything that could be lightened had been, and what looked like solid oak pillars were in fact balsa wood covered with a paper veneer. But it had been decided that with only weeks to go before the epic flight, drastic action had to be taken.

By 25 September the operation had been completed and the two halves of the airship sewn together again, but bad weather prevented further tests, and it was not until the early hours of 1 October that the R101 was finally ‘walked out’ of its hangar, some two hundred men (including a number of the unemployed from nearby Bedford) pulling the vast dirigible out of its glove-tight housing with ropes and mooring it to the Eiffel-tower-like structure to which it was attached ready for flight. Already twenty men, the ‘gassing and mooring party’, had left for Karachi to prepare for the R101’s arrival in India. If Thomson was to meet his timetable, it was essential that the airship set off as soon as possible. It has been alleged that Thomson’s impatience overrode proper safety concerns for the R101, although the airship’s principal biographer strenuously disputes this. Indeed, on the day of its departure for the subcontinent, Thomson insisted to Wing Commander Colmore, Director of Airship Development at Cardington, ‘You must not allow your judgment to be swayed by my natural anxiety to get off quickly.’

There were other considerations: six weeks earlier, on August Bank Holiday, the twenty-six-year-old Amy Johnson, daughter of a fish-shop owner from Hull, had arrived at Croydon airport in pouring rain after a nineteen-day solo round trip to Australia, via India. She too had received a warm welcome from the Secretary of State for Air, who nevertheless must have reflected on the contrast between Miss Johnson’s pioneering achievement and the fact that although nearly £2.5 million had been spent on the airship development programme since 1924, and questions were being asked in Parliament about such expenditure at a time of intense economic depression, so far there did not seem a great deal to show for it.

Despite the fact that the R101 had never flown in bad weather, and had not flown for even an hour at full speed in any conditions, a Certificate of Airworthiness was issued, and on 4 October 1930, the last day of British Summer Time, the R101 was ready to take off on a ‘demonstration flight’ of 2,235 nautical miles to Ismalia in Egypt, and then on to Karachi.

At 6.15 that evening the ministerial Daimler drew up on the Cardington airfield and the Secretary of State for Air got out. Earlier that day biscuits had been decanted from tins into paper bags to save weight; Lord Thomson’s luggage, which included cabin trunks, suitcases, two cases of champagne, a dress sword weighing three pounds and a Persian carpet weighing 129 pounds to be laid for the state dinners planned for Ismalia and Karachi, amounted to 1,207 pounds. The total weight of the passengers and all their luggage was supposed to be 2,508 pounds.

The mighty silver airship, the largest in the world, with fifty-four people aboard including six passengers, slipped its moorings at 6.36 p.m. in poor weather and steered for London, where it cruised at no more than eight hundred feet above the city, its lights blazing. The practices and uniforms aboard the R101 were, as befitted the name airship, naval, but those not required for watch duty or other chores headed for the spacious dining room, where six tables had been laid with white linen and gleaming silverware presented in a gesture of civic pride by the town of Bedford. After a good dinner (for the grandees, or bread and cheese and pickles washed down with cocoa for the crew) most of the passengers retreated to the comfortable wicker chairs in the metal-lined fireproof smoking lounge for a final cigar and a brandy. Given the highly explosive nature of the gas in the airbags, no smoking (or matches) was permitted anywhere else on board. They then trooped out onto the viewing balconies on either side of the lounge, where they caught a glimpse of the mouth of the river Somme, which had such terrible redolence for most of their generation, before retiring to their cabins for the night.

At 2.07 a.m. French time, approaching the Beauvais Ridge, already well known to aviators for its notorious gusting winds, the R101, which had been flying at around 1,200 feet at fifty knots, rolling and pitching through turbulent wind and rain which had not been anticipated, suddenly nosedived towards the ground. At 2.09 it crashed into dense woods near the hamlet of Allone. The crash ignited leaking hydrogen, and flames immediately engulfed the airship, lighting up the countryside around. Forty-six perished, including Lord Thomson and his valet; Sir Sefton Brancker, Director of Civil Aviation; the Director and assistant Directors of Airship Development; the R101’s captain, navigator, engineers, petty officers, charge hands and other members of the crew. Eight managed to scramble free, but of those two died of their injuries.

Virginia Woolf watched the funeral procession of the ‘heroes’ of the R101 on 11 October — but was not impressed.

The fifty coffins have just trundled by, lorries spread rather skimpily with Union Jacks — an unbecoming pall — & stuck about with red & yellow wreaths … the crowd smells; the sun makes it all too like birthday cake & crackers; & the coffins conceal too much. One bone, one charred hand wd. have done what no ceremony can do … why ‘heroes’? A shifty & unpleasant man, Lord Thomson by all accounts, goes for a joy ride with other notables, & has the misfortune to be burnt at Beauvais … we have every reason to say Good God how very painful — how very unlucky — but why all the shops in Oxford Street and Southampton Row shd. display black dresses only & run up black bars; why people should line the streets & parade through Westminster Hall, why every paper should be filled with nobility & lamentations & praise, why the Germans should muffle their wireless & the French ordain a day of mourning & the footballers stop for two minutes silence — beats me & Leonard …

The inquiry into the disaster, which reported in March 1931, while admiring the ‘skill, courage, and devotion’ of all those involved in the flight, decided that the immediate cause of the crash was a sudden loss of gas in one of the gasbags at the moment that the nose of the airship was being depressed by a very strong wind. This was probably due to the ‘ripping of the fore part of the envelope’ (the doped canvas outer covering), which had torn at precisely the place where it had been patched rather than replaced after an earlier mishap, so the wind got in and split open the already punctured front gasbag. In addition the watch had just changed, and the new men on duty had not yet had time to get the ‘feel’ of the ship. But the conclusion was less contingent:

It is clear that if those responsible had been entirely free to choose the time and the weather in which the R101 should start for the first flight ever undertaken by any airship to India, and if the only considerations governing their choice were considerations of meteorology and of preparation for the voyage, the R101 would not have started when she did … It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the R101 would not have started for India on the evening of October 4th if it had not been that reasons of public policy were considered as making it highly desirable for her to do so if she could … Airship travel is still in its experimental stage. It is for others to determine whether the experiment should be further pursued.

It was not: in December 1931 the R100 was broken up with axes and the pieces crushed by a steamroller so they could be sold for scrap. Workers from a Sheffield firm travelled to France and brought back the remains of the R101, some of which were made into pots and pans, while five tons were sold to the German Zeppelin Company. The sheds that had housed the R100 and the R101 were used to make and store barrage balloons during the Second World War. No more passenger-carrying airships were ever built in Britain. The loss of the German Hindenburg, dubbed the ‘Titanic of the sky’, which exploded in flames on landing in New Jersey in May 1937, drew what appears to have been a final line under civil airship development worldwide.

SIX ‘Can We Conquer Unemployment?’

I reminded myself firmly that I was no economist … My childlike literary mind always fastens upon concrete details. Thus, when the newspapers tell me there is yet another financial crisis and that gold is being rushed from one country to another and I see photographs of excited City men jostling and scrambling and of bank porters and sailors carrying boxes of bullion, I always feel that some idiotic game is going on and that it is as preposterous that the welfare of millions of real people should hang on the fortunes of this game as it would be if our happiness hung upon the results of the Stock Exchange golfing tournament … I thought … how this City, which is always referred to with tremendous respect, which is treated as if it were the very red beating heart of England, must have got its money from somewhere, but it could not have conjured gold out of Threadneedle Street and that a great deal of this money must have poured into it at one time — a good long time too — from that part of England which is much dearer to me than the City, namely, the industrial North. For generations the blackened North toiled and moiled so that England should be rich and the City of London be a great power in the world. But now this North is half derelict, and its people living on in queer and ugly places, are shabby, bewildered, unhappy. I was prejudiced, of course … perhaps because I like people who make things better than I like people who only deal in money … Perhaps I would not have dragged the City into this meditation at all if I had not always been told, every time the nation made an important move, went on the Gold Standard, or went off it, that the City had so ordered it. The City then, I thought, must accept the responsibility. Either it is bossing us about or it isn’t. If it is, then it must take the blame if there is any blame to be taken. And there seems to me to be a great deal of blame to be taken. What has the City done for its old ally, the industrial North? It seemed to have done what the black-moustached glossy gentleman in the old melodramas always did to the innocent village maiden.

J.B. Priestley, English Journey (1934)

It has increasingly been recognized in recent years that Keynes’ work cannot properly be appreciated if he is regarded narrowly as an ‘economist’ … the avocation of the economist required a combination of gifts: not only as mathematician and historian, but also as a statesman and philosopher.

Peter Clarke, ‘J.M. Keynes 1883–1946: The Best of Both Worlds’ (1994)

Shortly after six o’clock on the morning of Sunday, 5 October 1930, the bedside telephone of Ramsay MacDonald rang in his hotel room. ‘The R101 was wrecked and Thomson was not amongst the living!’ the Prime Minister wrote in his diary. ‘As though by the pressing of a button confusion & gloom & sorrow came upon the world — was the world. So, when I bade him goodbye on Friday & looked down at him descending the stairs at No. 10, that was to be the last glimpse of my friend, gallant, gay & loyal. No one was like him & there will be none … Why did I allow him to go? He was so dead certain there could be no mishap … This is indeed a great national calamity, & today, I distracted in the midst of it, can but grieve.’

Two days later MacDonald, who was in Llandudno for the Labour Party Conference, addressed the assembled delegates. Looking ‘drawn and haggard’ he paid tribute to the man who was probably his closest friend in politics before turning to a passionate defence of his government and its attempts to deal with the crushing problems of unemployment:

We are not on trial, it is the system under which we live which is under trial. It has broken down, not only in this little island, it has broken down in Europe, in Asia, in America; it has broken down everywhere. It was bound to break down. And the cure, the new path, the new idea is organisation — organisation that will protect life not property … I appeal to you, my friends, today, with all that is going on outside — I appeal to you to go back to your Socialist faith. Do not mix that up with pettifogging patching, either of a Poor Law kind or a Relief Work kind. Construction, ideas, architecture, building line upon line, stone upon stone, storey upon storey … I think [it] will be your happiness, as it is mine, to go on convinced that the great foundations are being well laid … and that by skilled craftsmen, confident in each other’s goodwill and sincerity, the temple will rise and rise until at last it is complete, and the genius of humanity will find within it an appropriate resting place.

With tumultuous applause ringing in his ears, MacDonald hurried back to London, anxious to get to Victoria station in time to greet the flag-draped coffins of the victims of the R101 disaster as they arrived back from France, leaving others at the Welsh seaside resort to puzzle over how these stirring sentiments (or ‘MacDonaldite slush and floral phrases. Meaning nothing definite’) could be translated to the matter at hand: unemployment, which had stood at 1.1 million when Labour came to power in May 1929, had risen by the time of MacDonald’s speech in October 1930 to more than double that. How could the task of realising the ‘temple’ of socialism accord with alleviating the immediate sufferings of the present crisis of the capitalist one? Or, put more epigrammatically, how could a new Jerusalem be built during the ‘economic blizzard’, as MacDonald characterised it, that engulfed Britain (and much of the rest of the world) in 1930?

The Labour Party had been founded to give the working classes a voice in Parliament, and it was committed to a parliamentary democratic route to achieving its aims. Now in its second term in office, but still without an outright majority, Labour might — at the outside — have five years in which to effect the transformation from capitalism to socialism, as was outlined in its first detailed programme, Labour and the New Social Order, adopted by the party in 1918. As Sidney Webb, the programme’s main author, had put it, ‘The Labour Party refuses absolutely to believe that the British people will permanently tolerate any reconstruction or perpetuation of the dis-organisation, waste and inefficiency involved in the abandonment of British industry to a jostling around of separate private employers … What the Labour Party looks to is a genuinely scientific re-organisation of the nation’s industry no longer deflected by individual profiteering on the basis of Common Ownership of the Means of Production.’ But the radical changes this transformation required would be quite impossible to achieve within a single Parliament: Labour would need at least one further term in office to complete the process. That would mean tailoring policies to win electoral support, while at the same time advancing from a society where explicit government intervention was exercised with a light touch, towards a socialist state with a great deal of public control. It was to be the unfulfilled task of the 1930s for the Labour Party to articulate a practical strategy for accomplishing this goal by democratic means.

Moreover, Ramsay MacDonald, his Ministers and the majority of the Labour Party were committed to this gradualist approach, believing that socialism would be achieved not as a result of the collapse of capitalism, but rather on the back of its success, since it was this that would generate the money needed for wide-ranging community social services and redistributive taxation.

‘The election of 1929 seemed to us at the time a wonderful, almost miraculous victory,’ wrote the twenty-three-year-old Hugh Gaitskell, at the time a lecturer in political economy at University College, London. ‘We had done so much better than I (perhaps because most of my speaking had been in Marylebone!) had thought possible. We paid little, no doubt far too little, attention to the absence of a clear majority. It was enough for us that Labour was in power again, and for the first time held the largest number of seats. Our hopes for peace could be high, we would clear the slums — and, above all, tackle the unemployment.’ In fact 1929 was a disastrous time for Labour to come to power, especially with a hung Parliament. As the government struggled to drain the pool of structural unemployment that had been filling up throughout the 1920s, it was knocked sideways by the flood of cyclical unemployment caused by the worldwide Depression. No country was able to cope satisfactorily with the ‘economic blizzard’ and find an answer to the rising unemployment that resulted. In fact Britain was less hard hit than many other countries, particularly Germany and the United States. Nevertheless, the fate of the Labour government would be in thrall to an unprecedented degree to the performance of the economy. At a time when capitalism, if not in the throes of its final crisis, was certainly being severely tested, socialists were in no doubt that the government should take charge of the management of the economy, and that under a socialist state poverty and unemployment would fade away. But that was a long-term aim (and one without a blueprint for how it would be achieved), and while MacDonald and his colleagues spoke of themselves as socialists they were also members of the labour movement, committed to the defence of working-class living standards, which were under attack as a result of the economic crisis.

The conundrum of whether, in times of crisis, capitalism should be repaired (if made more equitable) or replaced would haunt the left in various degrees throughout the thirties, and contribute to its sense of impotence. ‘The capitalist system is ossified, restrictionist and unjust; but it is expanding and stable,’ wrote the economist and political theorist Evan Durbin in a book published in 1940 that explored the socialist dilemmas of the 1930s. ‘The society based upon the capitalist economy is unequal and restless; but it is democratic, middle class and conservative. What then ought to be done?’ However, the immediate problem was that more and more people were being thrown out of work. How could their distress be alleviated without ‘propping up’ the inefficiencies of the capitalist system any longer than necessary?

Not that there was any lack of ideas about how this should be done. The trouble was that most were contradictory, and several cut across party lines, which is not surprising, since there was no agreed analysis of the causes of the slump among politicians of any of the major parties — although all three had made reducing unemployment the main plank of their election appeal. It was hard to find a solution when what was causing the problem was so perplexing.

The Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, was an exemplar of ‘orthodox economics’ — ‘a High Priest’, thought Winston Churchill: ‘The Treasury mind and the Snowden mind embraced each other with the fervour of two long-separated lizards,’ he wrote. Snowden was adamant that Britain’s recovery would only take place as part of a stable international economy based on the Gold Standard. Thus there was an absolute imperative to maintain international confidence by keeping the economy balanced and avoiding a budget deficit at all costs.

This meant that Snowden was implacably opposed to those who saw the solution in expanding the economy through lower interest rates and a programme of public works projects. The Chancellor had made his views clear during the first Labour government in July 1924, and had not budged since: ‘It is no part of my job as Chancellor of the Exchequer to put before the House of Commons proposals for the expenditure of public money. The function of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, as I understand it, is to resist all demands for expenditure made by his colleagues and, when he can no longer resist, to limit the concession to the barest point of acceptance.’ For Snowden, public works projects had to be strictly evaluated like any other form of investment. Unemployment was a long-term problem that would only be solved if production costs could be brought down — particularly in the export industries. Public works might redistribute unemployment; they would not end it. This was largely the view of the Conservatives too, as well as the City.

As for MacDonald, he had few firm convictions as to what was causing the slump, little confidence in his understanding of the economy (which Labour ‘shall have to put under a gyroscope’, he once wrote) and few ideas about how Britain was going to get out of it. But, as he made clear in his speech to Conference, he recognised that, along with peace, unemployment was the central issue the Labour government had to tackle — and would be judged by. He started the process as soon as Labour took power. ‘Since our return to Whitehall,’ wrote Secretary to the Cabinet Thomas Jones (always known as ‘TJ’), ‘the pace has been furious. The slogan is not “Socialism in our time” but “Socialism before Xmas”. Big bills are being drafted on Unemployment, Roads, Factories, Pension, Coal …’

The ex-railway union leader J.H. (Jimmy) Thomas had been MacDonald’s first choice as Foreign Secretary, but since Arthur Henderson ‘would not return to H.O. [Home Office] but put in plea for F.O.’, instead agreed to accept the post of Lord Privy Seal with responsibility for coordinating government unemployment policies. In the debate on the King’s Speech he reported on his progress less than a month after taking office. Already he had tramped the country talking to industrialists about the supposed panacea of ‘rationalisation’ to cut costs and improve competitiveness, having discussions with railway managers, business leaders and civil servants, and conducting ‘long and delicate negotiations’ with the obdurate Governor of the Bank of England, Montagu Norman. He eventually succeeded in interesting the City in ‘placing industry on a broad and sound basis and ready to support any plans that in its opinion lead to this end’, and by March 1930 what might now be called a Public Private Initiative, the Bankers’ Industrial Development Company, had been set up to finance rationalised industry, with £6 million coming from the Bank of England and over forty merchant banks, clearing banks and other financial institutions.