Britain’s Decline and Fall

Sing As We Go: Britain Between the Wars, by Simon Heffer. Penguin Random House, London, 2023, 948 pp.

Sing As We Go (the title of a popular film by Gracie Fields, one of England’s most popular stars of the interwar period), is the fourth and final volume of Simon Heffer’s tetralogic history of England from the accession of Queen Victoria to the beginning of the Second World War. Like its predecessors, it is exhaustively researched, clearly written, and long—very long, 948 pages.

There have been a number of histories of 20th-century England, the two best being Charles Loch Mowat’s Britain Between the Wars, published in 1955, and A.J.P. Taylor’s volume in the highly regarded Oxford History of England series, England 1914–1945. Both set the standard for up-to-date scholarship and a lively literary style. So Heffer has quite a challenge before him. While he does an excellent job of updating our understanding of the period, at times one longs for the succinctness of Mowat or the paradoxical flair of Taylor.

Heffer’s basic thesis is that England emerged from the First World War to confront novel challenges. Despite her Empire, which peaked in size in 1919 as she took territory from Germany in Africa and the Pacific, and her glorious past, the nation suffered a physical and financial blow from which she would never really recover: Three quarters of a million of her best young men killed, her financial position as the world’s banking center passed to Wall Street, and her leading industries—ship building, coal mining, textiles—were overworked and exhausted. Heffer outlines how England first failed to recognize how dangerous the situation was and then how she ultimately sought to resurrect her pre-war position. 

Another byproduct of the war that would shape the nation for the future, Heffer’s argues, was the loss of deference on the part of the working and middle classes toward their betters. The emergence of the Labour Party as the real party of the left after the Liberals lost the confidence of the working classes is another major theme of the period. Heffer connects this development with the character of Lloyd George, Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922, whom he describes as “unprincipled,” “unscrupulous,” and “maladroit” while presiding over the destruction of Liberal party. He credits George, however, with finally resolving Ireland’s relationship to England in one of the book’s finest chapters, in which he also discusses the character of the Irish leader Eamon de Valera, whose “deviousness” he argues was a match for George’s. The resolution of the Irish issue did Lloyd George no good, he notes, as his concession to de Valera angered the Conservatives in his government on whose votes he depended. They saw the Irish deal as another example of his “fast dealing,” and took it as an excuse for ending their support for his premiership. 

The dominant political figures in the postwar period for Heffer were Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, who between them held the office of prime minister for 11 years. He has a low opinion of Baldwin, whom he describes as “entirely unideological,” as well as “incurious intellectually,” which perhaps explains his passivity and failure to react to the rise of Nazism. He was, however, a crafty politician. Churchill, no mean judge, said he was the best pure politician of his generation. Chamberlain once complained that you never knew what was in Baldwin’s mind because there was very little there in the first place. 

Heffer has a much higher opinion of Chamberlain, following the trend of rehabilitation he has received from scholars in recent years. He had, as Heffer writes, by far the most impressive record of getting things done of any Cabinet minister in the 1920s and 1930s. In housing, health, and financial matters he was a reformer, molded in the manner of his father, Joseph Chamberlain. 

After a brief burst of prosperity in the late 1920s, England entered what they called “the Slump,” the Depression years of the 1930s. Unemployment, a chronic problem even during the brief prosperity of the 1920s, reached 22 percent in 1931 and never dropped below 10 percent until the rearmament program of the late 1930s finally took hold. Heffer blames the government, especially Winston Churchill’s decision as chancellor of the Exchequer, to return England to the gold standard, thus overpricing English goods. Industries that had formed the backbone of the nation’s expansion in the Industrial Revolution were decrepit, and new ones in electricity and automobiles only began to take off as the Second World War approached. The General Strike of 1926 was a blow to what had been one of England’s backbone industries, coal mining; it never again recovered its dominance.

Heffer’s view of key individuals who played a major role during the interwar period follows traditional lines, although he is kinder than is customary to Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s first prime minister. MacDonald is regarded in left-wing circles as a traitor to the Labor party when he joined a Conservative-dominated National Government during the crisis of 1931, when the pound almost collapsed. Heffer argues that he “acted entirely sensibly.”

In cultural matters Heffer devotes considerable attention to the role that the creation of the BBC radio system played in unifying the nation, crediting its first director, the often-arrogant Sir John Reith, with refusing to allow it to become politicized—something PBS and NPR might give some thought to.

Heffer admires the singer and actress Gracie Fields as another unifying figure, especially for the working classes. She has 12 references in the index, while the contemporary Charlie Chaplin has just one. Taylor in his history of the period took a different view. Fields received a single reference, while Taylor describes Chaplin “as England’s gift to the world…as timeless as Shakespeare and as great.”

Heffer’s treatment of the appeasement crisis, which ended with the betrayal of Czechoslovakia at Munich in October 1938, follows traditional lines, portraying Chamberlain as vain and naïve. But he puts much of the blame on Sir Horace Wilson, Chamberlain’s key adviser, for misleading the prime minister. Heffer claims that Wilson convinced Chamberlain that the “best way to secure peace was to give Hitler as much as was feasible.”

Heffer’s study of Britain in the interwar years will become the standard interpretation of the era for a long time. If over long, it is nevertheless nothing if not thorough.