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The most evident manifestation of this general crisis in Britain was that capitalism, which had made Britain a great industrial power, was on its last legs, incapable of creating prosperity as the Victorians conceived it would. The financial collapse of 1929 had deepened into a depression which, at its height, threw three million men out of work. Compared with the present credit crunch, with a few shops boarded up, the depression of the 1930s was visible to all. As a boy I saw the unemployed standing idly on the street corners of the great industrial towns. Their cloth caps were a uniform that divided them, as did their local accents, from the respectable citizens who wore hats.
In 1933 a lad from depressed Lancashire, Walter Greenwood, who had left school at 13, published a novel, Love on the Dole, which described the destruction of a working-class family by grim poverty. Many had seen it as a play. ‘It expressed in clear and simple terms truths about the modern age which no number of economic experts would match’. From Norman Montagu, the Governor of the Bank of England, down, economic experts could find no remedy for the depression. Montagu later confessed that their efforts were disastrous. By the late 1930s a recovery, kick-started by expenditure on armaments, allowed those who remained employed to flourish. My father, an elementary schoolmaster, could buy a second-hand car and take a Cook’s tour to Paris.
Nevertheless, the conviction persisted that the capitalist economic system stood in dire need of repair. Leftist-leaning intellectuals provided the necessary tools. Beatrice and Sidney Webb, in their Communism: A New Civilisation, praised Stalin, a political thug, as a democrat and the Soviet Union of the treason trials as a model to be imitated. At Cambridge, the Marxist Maurice Dobb wrote that ‘the signposts of economic and social evolution point endlessly from Capitalism to Socialism and Communism’. At Oxford G. D. H. Cole, no Marxist, preached that only a radically reformed democratic socialism could provide a decent humane society.
Only a minority of intellectuals were committed Marxists. But a wide swathe of intellectuals were committed to the then shaky science of eugenics. An increasing proportion of the population would carry genes that, as the respected biologist Julian Huxley argued, would ‘gradually drag us down’. Voluntary sterilisation was universally supported; compulsory sterilisation could not be publicly advanced, though Leonard Darwin, son of the great Darwin, considered it should be legalised. Worse still, in a private letter, he confessed that it might be necessary to kill a child with congenital blindness. ‘My wife and I certainly would’. This was the obscene nadir of an element of ‘progressive’ thought.
A more acceptable means of preserving the purity of the race was birth control. Marie Stopes, its energetic propagandist, set up her first birth control clinic in 1920. When her son married a genetically impaired girl with glasses she cut him out of her will. Birth control would liberate women from continuous child- bearing, allowing them to enjoy the pleasures of sexual intercourse. What if men could not come up to scratch in providing that pleasure? Doubts about this, far from liberating me, made me wary about sex for a considerable period.
If eugenics were the creed of a progressive elite, Sigmund Freud’s works familiarised intellectuals with his major discovery: the unconscious mind. As his translator and disciple Ernest Jones insisted: ‘My whole point is that every human being is guided in his actions by forces of which he is more or less unconscious.’ This undermined the old-fashioned belief that reason could be relied on to solve the problems of the modern world. Conventional psychologists, treating the conscious mind, insisted that psychoanalysts merely deepened the neuroses they professed to cure in interminable therapeutic sessions. One such consultant psychologist suggested that GPs should recommend holidays, rest in bed, mild sedation and indulge in encouraging chat.
As early as 1923 the Cambridge don G. Lowes Dickinson warned that ‘if civilisation does not end war, war will put an end to civilisation.’ Ten years later, fear of the prospect of a war had become a mass psychosis. Overy deals at length with the anti-war movement. Organisations like the Peace Pledge Union were as successful in attracting mass support as was the Free Trade movement in Victorian Britain. But they produced no Cobden or Bright capable of influencing government policy. As Germany was arming for war, absolute pacifists demanded total disarmament, while the League of Nations was at a low ebb as a peacekeeping power. For Overy the failure of the peace movement was the ‘greatest disappointment of the interwar years’.
Eminently readable, The Morbid Age is a masterpiece of historical imagination. Overy is familiar with the vast number of written sources. He ransacks the private correspondence of the time in order to expose the personality and prejudices of the writers. For anyone who wishes to understand inter- war Britain, this book is essential reading.
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