Law - 1938: modern Britain: social change and visions of the future

1938: Modern Britain

1938: Modern Britain

Social change and visions of the future

MICHAEL JOHN LAW

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

Contents

Figures

Tables

Maps

Writing a book seems, when you are doing it, to be a very solitary task. In truth, many people have helped me with 1938: Modern Britain .

I would like to thank the editorial staff from Bloomsbury Academic, who provided encouragement at the beginning of this project and consistent, professional support thereafter. I am grateful for the good advice provided by Mark Clapson and Peter Catterall and would like to thank Martin Doherty and the University of Westminster for providing funding for the illustrations for the book. Geoff Levett and Phil Hatfield have had to bear the brunt of putting up with me talking about this book for the best part of two years.

My family have always been supportive of my work, whether it is as an academic or in my previous business life, and without them it would be hard to imagine I could have had any success as a writer. Particular thanks to Pippa, who read the drafts of this book and steered me away from some overwritten sentences and clumsy grammar.

MJL

The history of 1938 is well known. It was an interesting year, too interesting in some ways as the competing claims of appeasement and the preparations for war filled the newspapers. In the headlines were Chamberlains meetings with Hitler, Kristallnacht , the Spanish Civil War, and at home, Air Raid Precautions and planning for the evacuation of children from London in the event of a war. Each of these news items brought home the foreboding possibility of another world war. However, among all these profound world events, something else far less obvious at the time was happening, a modern world in rapid development, a process that was to be halted by the Second World War and the years of austerity that followed it.

The starting point for this book was an idea that there was something hidden and odd about 1938 that most studies of the period have ignored and that warranted further investigation. My initial prompt was coming across Modern Wonder , a set of lively weekly magazines from 1937 and 1938, in a Brighton junk shop. As promised in the title, the magazines brightly coloured covers and exciting features delivered a vision of the future of science and technology. Their enthusiastic articles described a world yet unaffected by wartime fears.

This find provoked two pieces of informal research. First was to use Googles Ngram viewer, which searches digitized books and magazines to calculate the relative frequency of a words use over time. British sources showed a peak in use of the word modern in the late 1930s and early 1940s, reflecting a long upward trend over many decades. Second was a search on eBay, the internet marketplace, for material featuring both of the terms modern and 1938. This returned many interesting items for sale, including books, magazines, cigarette cards and postcards from an Empire exhibition in Glasgow. Contrary to what I had expected, instead of material on the latest navy destroyer or fighter planes, the search mostly produced representations of civilian technologies. There were pictures of giant American telescopes and magazine features on the secrets of electric trains. Perhaps some national cognitive dissonance was in play, Britain not wanting to believe war was coming.

A more systematic investigation of British newsreels, newspapers and magazines revealed many different major projects in progress in 1938. Not connected to the war, they showed a modern society in development. Construction projects for schools, hospitals, airports and office blocks were in full swing. Publishers launched new magazines, exhibitions were held to boost imperial pride or to sell televisions to expectant, wealthy customers and increased working-class mobility prompted new types of leisure.

This modernity was apparent to some at the time. Cicely Hamilton, novelist, travel writer, commentator and former suffragette, wrote about the changes she had seen in the previous fifteen years. Hamilton and Orwells examples are reflected in the choice of case studies for this book.

As the title of this chapter proposes, this book is a partial history of modern Britain in 1938. I use the term partial observation in 1978. Since then, there have been many new studies of the 1930s that have taken a more thematic and less temporal view of the decade. However, there is still some truth in her idea; the historiography of the end of this decade continues to be dominated by the profound world events of 1938 and 1939.