Peter Pugh - Headline Britons 1921-1925

E very publishing season sees the launch of books on famous characters of the twentieth century and many high achievers have more than one book about them. For example, the number of books on Winston Churchill is in the twenties or thirties and recently there was another book on Clement Attlee.

This new series Icon is launching will cover the last 100 years of British history in five-year splits the first two are 192125 and 192630 and, as well as giving the background, both social and economic, of those years, will concentrate on the interesting and often misunderstood characters that featured in them.

One of the main characters in this first book, 19211925, is Marie Stopes, the first person to set up birth control clinics (by coincidence I met her only son when interviewing his wife, who happens to be the daughter of the Dambusters bouncing bomb inventor, Barnes Wallis, about whom I was writing a book). Then there is the famous fraudster, Horatio Bottomley, and the founder of the Boy Scout movement, Baden-Powell. Another character is David Lloyd George, the Welshman who was the prime minister when we won the First World War and remained in charge until he was forced to resign in 1922, largely because he connived in the granting of knighthoods and other honours to people who paid for them. Another two characters who made a contribution to the early 1920s were the socialite Lady Diana Cooper and the philosopher Bertrand Russell. We will also look at John, later Lord, Reith, the first and very autocratic boss of the BBC.

M oney and its value is always a problem when writing about a period that stretches over a number of years. Furthermore, establishing a yardstick for measuring the change in the value of money is not easy either. Do we take the external value of the or what it will buy in the average (whatever that may be) weekly shopping basket? Do we relate it to the average manual wage? As we know, while prices in general might rise, and have done so in this country every year since the Second World War, the prices of certain products might fall. However, we have to make some judgements. We can only generalise, and I think the best yardstick is probably the average working wage.

Taking this as the yardstick, here is a measure of the sterling relative to the in 2017.

Apart from wartime, prices were stable for 250 years, but prices began to rise in the run-up to the First World War.

16651900 multiply by 120

19001914 multiply by 110

191839 multiply by 60

194550 multiply by 35

195060 multiply by 30

196070 multiply by 25

197074 multiply by 20

197577 multiply by 15

197880 multiply by 8

198087 multiply by 5

198791 multiply by 2.5

199197 multiply by 2

19972010 multiply by 1.5

Since 2010, the rate of inflation, by the standards of most of the twentieth century, has been very low, averaging, until very recently, less than the 19972010 Labour governments originally stated aim of 2.5 per cent (since reduced to 2 per cent). You dont need me to tell you that some things such as telephone charges and many items made in the Far East, notably China, can go down in price while others, such as houses, have moved up very sharply from 1997 to 2017.

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