Our first meeting this term was a really lively interpretation of Britain’s interwar history by Dr Alwyn Turner. Using the dance craze around the Lambeth Walk, hit tune from the show Me and My Gal, Alwyn explored why Britain was different from so much of Europe where dictatorships ruled by the 1930s. This upbeat cheerful tune started a worldwide dance craze and was very different from many of the usual images of the 1930s.
He argued that losses of the First World War, the 1926 General Strike and Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists while significant were not comparable to events in Europe. The most important politician of the period was Stanley Baldwin not Mosely. Mosley’s BUF was a target of satire for writers like John Buchan, Richmal Compton, Evelyn Waugh and most of all PG Wodehouse.
Britain’s monarchy already had the spectacle and iconography that dictators would replicate in the 1930s.
Alwyn introduced us to possible groups and events in 1919 that might have threatened the stability of Britain. As well as the events in Ireland there was violent rioting in Cardiff, Liverpool and Glasgow. The NUX (the National Union of Ex-servicemen) were a popular group with a radical agenda and 300,000 members in the early 1920s. However, the British Legion founded by General Haig was one of the key voluntary organizations that took Britain along a more moderate path. Others included Working Men’s Clubs and the Women’s Institute. These voluntary democratic societies had hundreds of thousands of members and were one of three strands of British society that Alwyn argued helped to shape a very different culture in Britain than much of Europe. The other two were the BBC and the British Board of Film Censorship. Lord Reith’s BBC produced a non-sectarian Christian culture with wide appeal and a mission to educate as well as entertain. By 1939 there were 9 million wireless licenses issued in Britain. The BBFC in 1920 set itself criteria that included banning the depiction of ‘indecorous dancing’ and ‘free love’ but also ‘scenes to inflame racial hatred’ or ‘inferiority of the coloured races.’ Its President Lord Tyrell was proud that ‘not a single film in London [dealt] with any of the burning issues of the day.’ The British media and most politicians attitude to the dictatorships was one of satire and disbelief. Alwyn illustrated this with cartoons from the Daily Herald and a quote from the much-loved author of Lost Horizon, James Hilton. This partially explained why Britain clung for so long to the policy of appeasement.
The end of the Lambeth Walk lecture showed how in wartime Charles Ridley devised a satire on Nazi Germany using speeded up film of a Hitler and his followers in 1941 to the tune of the Lambeth Walk. Alwyn produced not only an excellent lecture but a brilliant use of film, radio and music to illustrate his PowerPoint.
Our audience were heartily entertained and a great Q&A followed. Our audience numbered over 75.
