Adrian Lee is a solicitor-advocate in London, specialising in criminal defence, and was twice a Conservative parliamentary candidate.
Ninety years ago the United Kingdom went to the polls for the last time before the outbreak of the Second World War.
By the time they returned to the polling booths ten years later, society was radically changed by the experience of war.
The political issues of 1935 were no longer relevant, and the arguments and debates of that earlier campaign seemed as remote as the Near Eastern Crisis or even the divisions over the Corn Laws. Likewise, the dominant Party of 1935, the Conservatives, was resoundingly rejected in 1945 in favour of the Labour Party, a poor runner-up a decade earlier. Historian and broadcaster Robert Kee referred to the 1930s as “The World We Left Behind” after the declaration of war in September 1939.
Even the smallest of wars can have this effect.
After a string of victories in 1981 for the newly created Liberal-S.D.P. Alliance, Liberal Leader David Steel addressed the Llandudno Liberal Assembly that Autumn and concluded his speech with the now infamous sentence: “I have the good fortune to be the first Liberal Leader for over a half a century who is able to say to you at the end of our annual Assembly: go back to your constituencies and prepare for government.” In early 1982, the Alliance was still riding high but after the two-month long Falklands War, they never regained their supremacy and came a poor third at the 1983 General Election.
Over-confident Faragists should view with trepidation current Russian threats of conflict with N.A.T.O. countries.
Britain in 1935 was a very different place to the one which we currently inhabit. Cinema attendance dominated recreational activities for most. Particularly in the towns and cities, working and middle-classes alike attended at least once per week to see a full programme, including a feature film, a support feature (‘B Film’), a selection of topical newsreels and a cartoon.
There were over 4,300 cinemas in the country and new ones opened virtually every week. Gone were the days of local biograph, often appropriately nicknamed the ‘fleapit.’ The latest Art Deco constructions were frequently on a huge scale and sumptuously decorated. They richly deserved their description as Picture Palaces. Two of the greatest box office attractions of 1935 were Top Hat, staring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, and Alfred Hitchcock’s British Classic The Thirty-Nine Steps. Thankfully, most U.K. filmgoers did not get to see Germany’s top picture of 1935: Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.
Few people regularly dined out and when they did, the cuisine was almost exclusively English. There was only one coffee chain at the time: Kardomah Cafés. These genteel places, where ladies met for lunch, were immortalised a decade later by David Lean in his 1946 film Brief Encounter. Today, only the Swansea branch of the Kardomah, beloved of Dylan Thomas and friends in the 1930s, exists.
In 1935, Britain was at the height of the Dance Band years. Dance halls were packed on weekends and Dance Band Leaders like Roy Fox, Jack Hylton, Lew Stone and, arguably the biggest of them all, Henry Hall became household names. Hall, leader of the B.B.C. Dance Orchestra, broadcast every weekday at 5.15pm and millions tuned in.
With two million unemployed that year, the Great Depression still affected many areas. Northern England, industrial Scotland and South Wales experienced intense hardship. However, under the stewardship of Chancellor Neville Chamberlain, the economy grew and unemployment had fallen monthly since 1932. Chamberlain eschewed Roosevelt’s New Deal/Keynesian approach and stuck rigidly to cutting public expenditure. In doing so, he succeeded in getting Britain out of the economic doldrums by the second half of the decade.
Ironically, the American government’s approach resulted in the U.S.A. experiencing very little growth until 1941, the year they entered the War.
In 1935, the Labour Party was still reeling from the formation of the National Government and the expulsion of their Leader, Ramsay MacDonald and his 12 Parliamentary supporters in 1931.
The General Election of 1931 saw Labour, led by Arthur Henderson, reduced to just 52 M.P.s, whilst the Conservatives returned a stunning 470. Even Henderson lost his seat. In fact, the only senior Labour member to retain his seat was George Lansbury. Lansbury was 76 years old and had been one of Labour’s founders. However, despite his age and with the absence of credible alternatives, he became Party Leader in October 1932.
Unfortunately, Lansbury was very much on the Left of the Party. Whilst it is true that he had started his career as a Radical Liberal, he went onto join Henry Hyndman’s Marxist Social Democratic Federation in 1892, which was an early affiliate of the Labour Party. A staunch opponent of Britain’s participation in World War One, Lansbury praised the Russian Bolsheviks when they came to power in 1917. Three years later he personally met Lenin.
George Lansbury’s strongest held political conviction was pacifism.
As unemployment ceased to be the burning issue by the Summer of 1933, Lansbury launched his “Peace and Disarmament” strategy. Henceforth Labour would campaign on opposing rearmament, abolishing all national navies and air forces, prohibiting the manufacture and sale of armaments for private profit (echoing Sir Edward Grey’s belief that “Great armaments lead inevitably to war.”), international control of civil aviation and the creation of an international air police force.
Most Labour members put their faith in the League of Nations and economic sanctions to keep the peace. However, Stafford Cripps disagreed, believing that the League of Nations was itself a tool of “capitalism and imperialism”. Amazingly, in the light of the slaughter of the Great War, this potty manifesto met with a significant degree of support, most notably in Labour’s victory in the East Fulham by-election of October 1933.
Ever the political opportunist, Conservative Leader Stanley Baldwin started to distance himself from the cause of rearmament and assured voters of his devotion to the League of Nations. Unfortunately for Lansbury, he had one implacable enemy within the Labour movement’s ranks: T.U.C. leader Ernest Bevin. At Labour’s 1935 Conference, the intensely patriotic Bevin decided that Lansbury must go.
In a debate on a resolution from Labour’s N.E.C., Bevin took to the rostrum to denounce Lansbury’s for “hawking your conscience around from body to body.” The N.E.C. resolution was defeated by the T.U.C.’s block vote and Lansbury resigned. Clement Attlee was chosen as “temporary leader to take them into the election.” Baldwin, who had taken over from MacDonald as Prime Minister in June, called the General Election on the 23rd October for the 14th November.
David Lloyd George was back in the Liberal Party, but with Herbert Samuel as the official Leader. Since January, Lloyd George had campaigned for adopting a New Deal along American lines. Unfortunately, this strategy turned out to be a damp squib, especially as the Conservatives could point to economic recovery. On defence issues, the Liberals broadly supported Labour’s pacifism.
With Lansbury gone, Attlee turned to economic issues and campaigned for nationalising banking, coal, transport, electricity, iron and steel, the cotton industry and land. This did not turn out to be a vote winner and it has been pointed out that Labour offered little by way of welfare. Try as Labour did to step aside from the issue of disarmament, defence kept coming back. This was largely facilitated by the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, which was launched by Mussolini in early October.
Baldwin became a polished performer on the hustings, which was most clearly demonstrated on his radio broadcasts and in cinema newsreels. He addressed large rallies in Wolverhampton, Liverpool, Leeds and Newcastle. In contrast, the inexperienced Attlee appeared dull and rigid. It was believed that whilst Lloyd George was by far the best platform orator, his speeches were witty but had become contentless.
On the 1st of November, municipal elections took place, and the results clearly indicated a Conservative victory in the General Election. Thereafter, the wind seemed to go out of the sails of the opposition parties. The result was 387 seats for the Conservatives and 33 for their National Liberal allies. Ramsay MacDonald’s National Labour fell to just 8 M.P.s, but Attlee’s official Labour Party increased to 154. Finally, Samuel’s and Lloyd George’s Liberal Party were reduced to 21 seats, and some of these were uncontested by one of the two main parties.
The 1935 election ensured that rearmament could eventually proceed under the Conservatives.
A Labour victory, whilst they maintained a pacifist mindset, would have sabotaged this and arguably would have led to Britain becoming a vassal state of the increasingly powerful Third Reich. The Second World War administered a strong dose of reality to the Labour leadership, so much so that Attlee and Bevin successfully embarked upon secretly developing Britain’s first atomic weapons after 1945.
