14 January 2026

The interwar years were as bewildering as the present

Alwyn Turner’s new history reassures us that the past is not, as many imagine, any cosier or more patriotic than our contemporary world

By Andrew Marr

Photo by Ncj Archive/Mirrorpix Via Getty Images

Interwar Britain can seem a twilit landscape, a pinched, brownish duo-decade caught between the dark shadow of what had just passed, and the shadow of what was about to happen. Inevitable framing, but ridiculous framing: people lived full, varied, brightly coloured lives there and, as Alwyn “page”-Turner demonstrates in A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars, these people were very like us.

Consider that in 1922-24 the UK managed to get through four prime ministers; that there was constant criticism of the second-rate, wooden-tongued national leaders in No 10; and that the party system was breaking down, with attention-grabbing challenges from left and right, intensified by an unruly new media. As a rival magazine asked of Stanley Baldwin’s Tories in 1925: “Can a political party possibly survive when the most popular newspapers, which normally support it, are engaged, day and night, in ridiculing its leader?”

Answer: easily. But consider, next, the deteriorating performance of the industrial economy until rearmament in the 1930s; the high taxes caused by the war debt; the riots; the panics about public order. Think of the national jolt of pandemic – the “Spanish” flu that probably killed more people, in a smaller population, than did Covid. Think of how “tariff reform” split politics as Brexit did.

The other big, obvious, national jolt in this period is the Wall Street Crash and the Depression. These were on a scale we have not recently endured, but the thought of a Labour government in 1931 unsuited to dealing radically with huge economic problems is unsettling. The Labour chancellor Philip Snowden was accused of purblind Treasury thinking, rather as Rachel Reeves has been recently. Turner writes: “[Snowden] presented no challenge to prevailing orthodoxy at a time when it had clearly been found wanting. As Churchill put it: ‘The Treasury mind and the Snowden mind embraced each other with the fervour of two long-separated kindred lizards.’”

Labour was not then facing Zack Polanski or, indeed, much of a threat from the overhyped British communists of the day. But it is salutary to remember that the renegade Oswald Mosley, before he turned to racism and paramilitary posturing, had an economic manifesto during his brief spell in the party that many on today’s Labour left would applaud: “The reduction of unemployment… long-term economic planning, regional investment, industrial subsidies and public works, all backed by the nationalisation of the Bank of England and government control of the financial sector, and… high tariffs on imports.”

Lloyd George called it “an injudicious mixture of Karl Marx and Lord Rothermere”, but it impressed many of the brightest minds of the time, including – partly – John Maynard Keynes, as well as Nye Bevan and the young Ian Mikardo.

Meanwhile, if we are looking for contemporary parallels, then in this account the Labour leader George Lansbury, east London radical and passionate pacifist, comes across very like Jeremy Corbyn. Lansbury had a great moral earnestness and was a teetotal non-smoker who hated swearing, though he confessed, “The exasperations and frustrations of [the House of Commons] would drive an angel to profanity – and I’m no angel.”

If the political parallels are striking, the social ones are even more so. The arguments and confusion in the debate around trans rights today have a rough 1920s equivalent in the media outrage over androgynous haircuts and dress codes. There were headlines like “The Girl Men of Cambridge”, who were apparently “soft, effeminate, painted, be-rouged youths… Young fellows with immaculate Marcel-waved hair and heavily powdered faces, and close-cropped, bull-necked girls.”

The press itself was also at the centre of controversy in a way that is reminiscent of today’s social media. Baldwin’s speech against the press moguls Beaverbrook and Rothermere, in which he accused them of seeking “the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages” (a Kipling coinage), is well known. But I was taken aback by the full ferocity of Baldwin savaging the popular press as “engines of propaganda” using “direct falsehood, misrepresentation, half-truths, the alteration of a speaker’s meaning by putting sentences apart from the context, suppression, and editorial criticism of speeches which are not reported”. This is very like today’s politicians criticising X.

Meanwhile, far beyond universities and Fleet Street, there was a middle-class life that tastes and smells familiar to us, enjoying new electric gadgets and delighting in new tastes. Turner lists the treats now manufactured in Britain: “Aero, Black Magic, Chocolate Homewheat Digestive, Chocolate Orange, Crunchie, Fruit and Nut, Kit-Kat, Maltesers, Mars bars, Quality Street, Rolos, Roses and Smarties.”

Yet Turner is excellent when quietly reminding us how different the 1920s and 1930s also were when he negotiates the big, well-known moments that now bear capital letters – the Hunger Marches, the Crash, and steady rise of Hitler, the General Strike and the Jazz Age.

About sex, away from the intelligentsia, it was a much more censorious and cautious age. (Any good popular history is also, however, about challenging our assumptions, so we learn too about the woman who worked her way through cinema audiences in south London, “a mild-mannered, middle-aged lady with a greasy black fringe” known as “Tossoff Kate” who offered her services to men while the films were showing. Dear me.) Yet by our standards, mass culture was sentimental and naive. British audiences were shocked when the “talkies” brought them actual American voices.

Although churchgoing was falling fast, this was still a Christian country in the way it no longer is: bishops were taken seriously when they pronounced, the stage was censored, and films made here were more often romantic and respectable than racy.

The relationship between audience and new media was also on the change. The cinemas were, by comparison with the singalong musical tradition, a passive experience; just as smartphones and doomscrolling are even more passive and solitary today. The BBC was on its way to national dominance, but its influence was then conservative, under the intimidating figure of John Reith, known to Churchill as “the Wuthering Height”.

Outside the cinemas and theatres, the shadow of the Great War hung everywhere, from the vast memorial tablets in schools and villages to the presence of disabled veterans in the street. Hundreds of thousands of men were missing: in 1921, women outnumbered males by 4.8 percentage points, with the greatest differential among those aged 30 to 35. In that group, one in six had lost his life. So, there were far more single women and large numbers of children who had grown up without knowing a father: their behaviour provided one of the many moral panics of the age.

Turner, whose book follows his equally good Little Englanders (2024) on the Edwardians, again builds his account on newspapers and popular magazines. This produces a bottom-up, sharp and often surprising read. If there is lack in A Shellshocked Nation, it’s the economic and class analysis of the society in which the colourful bandmasters, criminals and music artists operate. For instance, this is really the last period in which the aristocracy matters, buttressing a social hierarchy with the monarch at its peak and based around annual rituals such as one “season” for debutants and another for hunting. A domestic economy based on a huge servant class was everywhere dissolving, thanks to plug-in vacuum cleaners, fridges and washing machines.

Many of the grand houses by this period were dilapidated or missing the men who would otherwise have inherited them; but the huge 1940s tax increases that would transform upper class life were still ahead. We could have done, also, perhaps with a lively description of the City of London in its last bowler and top-hatted, smoky imperial “Forsyte” heyday.

But I am cavilling. These are hard and worrying times; it’s reassuring to be reminded that a lost world often imagined to be cosier and more patriotic, was so like ours.

Why is it that we instinctively feel earlier decades were conservative and quiet compared with our own? That is how people between the wars thought of the Edwardian age, which was both turbulent and menacing. That is how we tend to think of life in the 1950s or even, for younger people, the 1980s. And in each case, it is a profoundly false memory. Perhaps because what is “now” is by definition new and challenging, the past must seem conservative by comparison. But it’s never true. The more one digs into the reality of previous decades, the clearer it is that they felt as fast-changing as any day we experience now.

That is profoundly true of the interwar period. Britons then, like us, faced existential challenges they struggled to comprehend. They, like us, found work and leisure upended by technologies their parents hadn’t even imagined. They had different social structures, different industrial landscapes and different music, but by this account they were no more moral, no more confident or any harder working than we are today. So, chill: this is a wild read but at a deeper level, a weirdly reassuring one as well.

A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars
Alwyn Turner
Profile, 384pp, £25

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[Further reading: The housing market has already crashed]