There's something eerie in finding one's children, without prompting, have same books on their shelves. Except, in this case, I assume there was prompting from a university course.
21. Ronald Blythe: The Age of Illusion
That comes with the informative sub-title: England in the Twenties and Thirties, 1919-1940. The first chapter is A Great Day for Westminster Abbey. That Great Day was 11 November 1920, and the interment of the Unknown Warrior. The final chapter is The Destruction of Neville Chamberlain, and deals with the few dramatic days from 7 May 1940.
In between most of the chapters hang hats on various characters of the period:
- Home Secretary Joynson-Hicks and his use of the Defence of the Realm Act to crack down on London night-life;
- John Reith and the birth of the British Broadcasting Company (sic);
- T.E. Lawrence;
- Amy Johnson;
- Harold Davidson, the infamous, much-maligned, and much-mocked Rector of Stiffkey;
- Wallis Simpson and the Abdication (and let's not forget the canoodlings of Edward Windsor and his Baltimore floozy did more to create the modern republic of Ireland than any of the blood-sacrifices of 1916);
- George Lansbury's pacifism and the Labour Party. That involved a swift canter through Lansbury's strengths and weaknessses, notably his use of the minor Cabinet post as Commissioner of Works — in which he tore down the railings of royal parks and opened the Serpentine to mixed bathing.
Those are then divided by the passing 'crises' of the age:
- the attractions of arty-farty bourgeois Communism;
- the horrors of the Depression;
- Britain's distraction with sensational murders, while the Nazis seized power in Germany;
- Spain.
When the New York Times came to review the book it pointed out that (on publication in 1964) it was as remote from the events it describes which are already as much history as the Battle of Hastings or Magna Carta. That is perversely true in psychological distance: the interim involved several wars (one World, one Cold) and a couple of nuclear bombs. I feel that review's attempt at a punch-line is mistaken:
the large and variegated cast are assembled, put on their costumes and their makeup, speak their lines. But what of the play? What is the point of this so foolish, expensive, bloody and destructive spectacle? If point there be, it has eluded Mr. Blythe.
The use of the word spectacle is appropriate; but the lesson it tries to draw is not. Britain between the Wars was living a myth: the days of imperial grandeur had died none too far from Sarajevo, but the reality hadn't struck home. Despite the loss of Empire and Britain's diminished status, it still properly hasn't — and won't as long as Boris Johnson stirs the ashes. Dean Acheson's pungent remark was two years old when the NY Times came up with that review:
Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a rôle.
The Age of Illusion, indeed.
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