Juliet Gardiner on 1930s Britain

The 1930s are hugely underrated as a decade, says the historian. She tells us about the social and design revolutions that made the thirties much more than just a prelude to war

Last year you published your book The Thirties: An Intimate History. What sparked your interest in this period?

I have always been interested in the 1930s. I just love thirties design – I even love thirties music and fashion – and obviously the politics are absolutely fascinating. It always seemed to me a very conflicted and interesting decade. I wrote a lot about the Home Front in World War II – three or four books and a television series – and I began to wonder if I was saying that things were different then, and how different were they in fact? I felt that I needed to go back and find out more about the foundations for a lot of people’s attitudes. At the time there was very little written on the 1930s. There were obviously books about certain aspects of it and there were books written contemporaneously, but I just wanted to get deeper. That’s why I called it an intimate history.

The book also calls it “Britain’s forgotten decade”. Why were the 1930s a forgotten decade?

Well, I think the thirties were a bit forgotten because of World War II. People only see the thirties as a prelude to the war, in the same way that they see the Edwardian period as a prelude to World War I, but in a very different way. People often look back on the Edwardian period as a golden age that was ruptured and dislocated by war but regard the 1930s as an inevitable plod towards Armageddon. I really didn’t feel that. I felt that was very much a hindsight view, and – this is reflected in my choice of five books – the thirties was also a period of high modernism, of experimentation and of optimism. Although that’s not to deny all the other aspects, like the Depression and the poverty. It just seemed to me it was an intellectually, socially interesting period. Nobody in the thirties, apart from politicians, really knew, or wanted to know, until 1938, that there was going to be war.

Writers in the 1930s gave contrasting pictures of life then. There’s George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier and his descriptions of the bleak living conditions among the working classes in the depression-hit industrial north. Then you have JB Priestley’s English Journey, where the focus is more on the growth of new suburbs and consumer affluence. Which one was more accurate?

Both were right. It literally depended on where you were. If you were an unskilled worker in heavy industries that were in freefall – industries like iron and steel, coal and textiles, which had really been in decline since before World War I – they tended to be situated in the north, the northeast, around the Clyde and the Mersey, and in the Welsh valleys. And we mustn’t forget that Cornwall and Somerset were also very poor counties at the time. On the other hand, if you lived in the south or the Midlands and you were skilled or even semi-skilled and had a job in one of the new industries such as the car industry, which was really burgeoning at the time, or synthetic textiles or pharmaceuticals or domestic goods manufacturing, then you were much more prosperous. So it really was a divided society geographically.

Were the seeds of the postwar social reforms sown in the 1930s?

One of the arguments in my book is that the blueprints for the welfare state were all obviously laid in the thirties and a lot of social experiments were tried out but were never rolled out because of World War II. That’s why I wanted to reclaim the thirties, because it’s often seen as a decade when nothing very much actually happened. My argument is that a lot of schemes ran into the sand at that time but they were there ready to be unrolled when the time was more propitious.

A Writer’s Diary

By Virginia Woolf

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Your first book is Virginia Woolf’s diary. What does she tell us about the interwar years?

I think she is the finest diarist of the 20th century. Nobody comes near her. She is so brilliant, but she’s snobbish and anti-semitic.

Even though she was married to Leonard Woolf, who was a Jew?

It’s not unusual. Casual anti-semitism was fairly pervasive at the time. Of course, Woolf had no sympathy with fascism or anything like that – she was a lifetime Labour supporter and a liberal and a tolerant person. I wouldn’t want to foreground her anti-semitism but it’s there, just as her snobbishness was there. She had a great deal of sympathy with the poor and the less privileged but just didn’t want to surround herself with them. But she writes beautifully in her dairies and letters, as well as her novels – I think she is an incomparable writer. She was absolutely at the heart of things. Yes, she moved in a very narrow circle of people, but they were people whose work we are still interested in. John Maynard Keynes was a great friend and there was the whole Bloomsbury set. She had advanced views on sexuality. She had this abiding intellectual curiosity so when she goes into a shop to buy something and the shop girl pronounces on the death of the king, the Prince of Wales or the abdication, Virginia Woolf has this acute ear and will pick it up. She doesn’t get down and dirty with these people but she listens to them. As I said, I just think she is absolutely incomparable.

I find her diaries very frank and honest – she says what comes into her mind. She just doesn’t care.

I agree. She’s completely unmediated. And that’s what I mean about casual anti-semitism. It wasn’t a worked-out position. She just makes remarks as they come to her. She’s very honest about people she knows. And then there are her spats with her servants, which she is entirely honest about, too. She is also very good on things like landscape, the country and country walks.

I just think that she is the most superb witness from World War I until her death during World War II. She expresses the dilemmas and has no simple answers. She’s never a propagandist. She always sees the other side. It’s like religion. She’s absolutely not religious but she still has the feeling, one that I think any intelligent person has, that there are things she cannot account for and she doesn’t know how to start to. So you get this highly intellectual woman who is beset by very proper intellectual doubts.

The way she talks about her depression in her diary and the letter she wrote to her husband before she killed herself are quite matter-of-fact. She writes in quite an unemotional way.

She does. Also, there’s the way she negotiates her sexuality. Woolf had these affairs or relationships with a number of people, including [the poet] Vita Sackville-West and the composer Ethel Smyth, yet Leonard was still her boon companion and she was deeply reliant on him. She’s without sentiment. That doesn’t mean she’s not emotional, it doesn’t mean she’s not intimate, it doesn’t mean she doesn’t have feelings. She’s just without saccharin and without sentiment.