The Thirties: An Intimate History, by Juliet Gardiner – review

Nicholas Lezard on a history that is allowed to speak for itself
    • The Guardian,
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It would be hard to pick from this enormous book – 850 pages with index (and had sources for the quotes been given in endnotes, it would have been twice as long) – a single emblematic event or story. So let's have a chastening and relevant one instead. It is about how to deal with economic crisis.

  1. The Thirties: An Intimate History
  2. by Juliet Gardiner

"Roosevelt acted decisively: he excoriated the bankers, and dealt with the banking crisis by closing all banks for 10 days. This stemmed the panic, although it hardly reformed the system, but the British press was delighted. The right was prepared to see it not as an assault on capitalism, but rather as an attempt to curb irresponsibility and selfish money-making."

The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 separated investment banks from commercial banks; sadly, its lessons have not been learnt, or remembered, with results that we are enduring today. Moreover, it is particularly depressing to consider that anyone proposing a Roosevelt-style New Deal today would be dismissed as a lunatic. And as for the common sense of the right, the enthusiasm of the press – these make one weep for the state of things today.

So this was by no means entirely, as Auden described it, a "low, dishonest decade". It had its clever hopes, but they need not all have been dismissed. There was still terrible poverty and squalor – you did not want to live in a back-to-back in Leeds even then (health visitors unwise enough to accept cups of tea would find bugs dropping into them from the ceiling) – and a huge North-South divide in terms of life expectancy and infant mortality, but there were growing numbers of people prepared to do something about it. It was a nation becoming politicised, and not necessarily in bad ways. One gets the sense that there was a fork in the road, one way leading to something like Nazi Germany, and the other leading to something more muddled, but more benign and enlightened.

Gardiner tends to let her material speak for itself, but there is a telling aside when she notes that the synchronised displays of Mollie Bagot Stack's Women's League of Health and Beauty were "more Busby Berkeley than Nazi".

Not that all people who thought their hearts, or heads, were in the right place could be trusted. The Eugenics Society was instrumental in a Ministry of Health report that recommended sterilisation for a quarter of a million of the most "mentally defective" people in Britain; luckily, by the time the report came out, in 1934, the Nazis had started their own eugenics programme, and the idea had become broadly repugnant. If only, the Eugenics Society said, there could be provision for such a thing as "the regular consumption by mouth of a substance preventing fertilisation, taken at daily, or better at weekly or monthly intervals", which could be managed by "even the stupidest and therefore the most undesirable members of society". (We had to wait a bit for that.)

Gardiner's approach, as it has generally been for her other books, is to amass an enormous amount of anecdotal material from sources high and low and use it to illustrate the news of the time, largely without comment. When she does quote other historians, it is to good effect.

After a brief but satisfactory description of the "Bodyline" Ashes tour of 1932-33, she lets CLR James have the last word: ". . . it was not an accident, it was not a temporary aberration. It was the violence and ferocity of our age expressing itself in cricket."

But letting ordinary people, for the most part, tell their stories does give a very vivid and convincing picture. After immersing yourself in this book for a while, you begin to get the real flavour of the times, and this presumably is precisely what Gardiner wishes to achieve. Its length stops being intimidating and becomes a large, fascinating and well-populated expanse in which to roam. It is a little light on cultural exegesis (I still want to know why this was the golden age of the country house murder mystery, for instance), but that's probably just my problem.

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