1930s had he not quarrelled with Baldwin and the
Conservative majority when the Conservatives
were still in opposition over how to deal with the
problem of Indian nationalism. The Labour gov-
ernment supported by Baldwin wished to make
concessions; Churchill thundered against appeas-
ing Indian nationalism and resigned from the
Conservative shadow Cabinet. It was a tragic mis-
judgement not only as regards India but possibly in
its effect on world history. Churchill was politically
isolated in the 1930s and when he warned against
appeasing Hitler, most of the Conservatives did
not listen.
The later 1930s belonged to Chamberlain not
Churchill. Chamberlain tackled the economic
problem with the characteristic vigour he had
already displayed as minister of health in the
1920s. Nevertheless, government policies were
pretty cautious. They were less spectacular, but
arguably more effective, than Roosevelt’s in
America. Chamberlain sought to create condi-
tions that would allow British industry to revive.
Recovery was not, however, all a matter of gov-
ernment economic planning. Equally important
was the behaviour of the British people – those
in employment – who by their spending gradu-
ally helped to lift Britain out of the slump.
Already in September 1931 Britain had gone
off the gold standard and devalued its currency
by a quarter so as to make British exports more
competitive. It followed the US in adopting a
protective tariff to discourage competitive imports
from abroad; a limited degree of imperial prefer-
ence was agreed by the Imperial Economic
Conference at Ottawa of July/August 1932,
which lowered mutual tariffs in the Common-
wealth, stimulating empire trade. Currency con-
trol was introduced and not eased until 1979 (it
was abolished soon after). Cheap credit stimu-
lated the domestic economy, especially in the
house-building trade. Schemes of direct govern-
ment subsidies and marketing boards also greatly
aided the British farmer. The government sought
to rationalise and produce a more uniform system
of unemployment benefits. The intentions were
good, but the resulting family ‘means tests’,
which investigated whether a whole family had
sufficient for its needs even if one of its members
was out of work, came to symbolise the heartless
bureaucracy of what was intended as a sensible
policy. The echoes of the resulting bitterness
made themselves felt for decades.
Class distinction was more acceptable to the
man in the street in good times, or in the war when
common hardships and dangers were being shared
by the upper and lower classes in the trenches. In
the 1930s the increasing division between rich and
poor, employed and unemployed, left bitter mem-
ories of Conservative rule that not even Winston
Churchill’s personal popularity could overcome in- The Prince of Wales, by his well-publicised
concern for the misery of the unemployed, did
something to bridge the gap. The abdication crisis
of November and December 1936, which forced
Edward VIII to renounce the throne unless he
gave up his proposed marriage to the divorced Mrs
Simpson, was seen by some embittered working
men as a manoeuvre to get rid of a king who
sympathised with them.
Unemployment, nevertheless, in the mid-
1930s was slowly declining. It never reached the
proportions of German and American unemploy-
ment at their peak in 1932–3, and fell steadily
from 1933 to 1937 from just under 3 million to
1.7 million. Even with rearmament getting under
way thereafter, it did not fall below 1 million and
since it was heavily concentrated in the depressed
areas it actually varied from 26 per cent in
Northern Ireland and 24 per cent in Wales to 6
per cent in the Midlands. Such gestures as subsi-
dising the completion of the liner Queen Mary on
the Clyde and other limited public schemes could
not touch the hard-core unemployment problems
of these regions. This, rather than the fact that
total production in 1934 exceeded the level of
1929, was what made the deepest impact on the
public mind in the 1930s.
One serious consequence of the depression was
that the democracies became preoccupied with
problems at home. Chamberlain saw rearmament
as a waste of national resources. Gradually recovery
was proceeding. For those in work living standards
were rising rather than falling. War threatened the
better way of life governments were seeking to
achieve for their peoples. But it was the war effort