The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain - Juliet Gardiner

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nature of the gas in the airbags, no smoking (or matches) was permitted anywhere else on board. They then trooped out onto the viewing balconies on either side of the lounge, where they caught a glimpse of the mouth of the river Somme, which had such terrible redolence for most of their generation, before retiring to their cabins for the night.

      At 2.07 a.m. French time, approaching the Beauvais Ridge, already well known to aviators for its notorious gusting winds, the R101, which had been flying at around 1,200 feet at fifty knots, rolling and pitching through turbulent wind and rain which had not been anticipated, suddenly nosedived towards the ground. At 2.09 it crashed into dense woods near the hamlet of Allone. The crash ignited leaking hydrogen, and flames immediately engulfed the airship, lighting up the countryside around. Forty-six perished, including Lord Thomson and his valet; Sir Sefton Brancker, Director of Civil Aviation; the Director and assistant Directors of Airship Development; the R101’s captain, navigator, engineers, petty officers, charge hands and other members of the crew. Eight managed to scramble free, but of those two died of their injuries.

      Virginia Woolf watched the funeral procession of the ‘heroes’ of the R101 on 11 October — but was not impressed.

      The fifty coffins have just trundled by, lorries spread rather skimpily with Union Jacks — an unbecoming pall — & stuck about with red & yellow wreaths … the crowd smells; the sun makes it all too like birthday cake & crackers; & the coffins conceal too much. One bone, one charred hand wd. have done what no ceremony can do … why ‘heroes’? A shifty & unpleasant man, Lord Thomson by all accounts, goes for a joy ride with other notables, & has the misfortune to be burnt at Beauvais … we have every reason to say Good God how very painful — how very unlucky — but why all the shops in Oxford Street and Southampton Row shd. display black dresses only & run up black bars; why people should line the streets & parade through Westminster Hall, why every paper should be filled with nobility & lamentations & praise, why the Germans should muffle their wireless & the French ordain a day of mourning & the footballers stop for two minutes silence — beats me & Leonard …

      The inquiry into the disaster, which reported in March 1931, while admiring the ‘skill, courage, and devotion’ of all those involved in the flight, decided that the immediate cause of the crash was a sudden loss of gas in one of the gasbags at the moment that the nose of the airship was being depressed by a very strong wind. This was probably due to the ‘ripping of the fore part of the envelope’ (the doped canvas outer covering), which had torn at precisely the place where it had been patched rather than replaced after an earlier mishap, so the wind got in and split open the already punctured front gasbag. In addition the watch had just changed, and the new men on duty had not yet had time to get the ‘feel’ of the ship. But the conclusion was less contingent:

      It is clear that if those responsible had been entirely free to choose the time and the weather in which the R101 should start for the first flight ever undertaken by any airship to India, and if the only considerations governing their choice were considerations of meteorology and of preparation for the voyage, the R101 would not have started when she did … It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the R101 would not have started for India on the evening of October 4th if it had not been that reasons of public policy were considered as making it highly desirable for her to do so if she could … Airship travel is still in its experimental stage. It is for others to determine whether the experiment should be further pursued.

      It was not: in December 1931 the R100 was broken up with axes and the pieces crushed by a steamroller so they could be sold for scrap. Workers from a Sheffield firm travelled to France and brought back the remains of the R101, some of which were made into pots and pans, while five tons were sold to the German Zeppelin Company. The sheds that had housed the R100 and the R101 were used to make and store barrage balloons during the Second World War. No more passenger-carrying airships were ever built in Britain. The loss of the German Hindenburg, dubbed the ‘Titanic of the sky’, which exploded in flames on landing in New Jersey in May 1937, drew what appears to have been a final line under civil airship development worldwide.

       SIX ‘Can We Conquer Unemployment?’

      I reminded myself firmly that I was no economist … My childlike literary mind always fastens upon concrete details. Thus, when the newspapers tell me there is yet another financial crisis and that gold is being rushed from one country to another and I see photographs of excited City men jostling and scrambling and of bank porters and sailors carrying boxes of bullion, I always feel that some idiotic game is going on and that it is as preposterous that the welfare of millions of real people should hang on the fortunes of this game as it would be if our happiness hung upon the results of the Stock Exchange golfing tournament … I thought … how this City, which is always referred to with tremendous respect, which is treated as if it were the very red beating heart of England, must have got its money from somewhere, but it could not have conjured gold out of Threadneedle Street and that a great deal of this money must have poured into it at one time — a good long time too — from that part of England which is much dearer to me than the City, namely, the industrial North. For generations the blackened North toiled and moiled so that England should be rich and the City of London be a great power in the world. But now this North is half derelict, and its people living on in queer and ugly places, are shabby, bewildered, unhappy. I was prejudiced, of course … perhaps because I like people who make things better than I like people who only deal in money … Perhaps I would not have dragged the City into this meditation at all if I had not always been told, every time the nation made an important move, went on the Gold Standard, or went off it, that the City had so ordered it. The City then, I thought, must accept the responsibility. Either it is bossing us about or it isn’t. If it is, then it must take the blame if there is any blame to be taken. And there seems to me to be a great deal of blame to be taken. What has the City done for its old ally, the industrial North? It seemed to have done what the black-moustached glossy gentleman in the old melodramas always did to the innocent village maiden.

      J.B. Priestley, English Journey (1934)

      It has increasingly been recognized in recent years that Keynes’ work cannot properly be appreciated if he is regarded narrowly as an ‘economist’ … the avocation of the economist required a combination of gifts: not only as mathematician and historian, but also as a statesman and philosopher.

      Peter Clarke, ‘J.M. Keynes 1883–1946: The Best of Both Worlds’ (1994)

      Shortly after six o’clock on the morning of Sunday, 5 October 1930, the bedside telephone of Ramsay MacDonald rang in his hotel room. ‘The R101 was wrecked and Thomson was not amongst the living!’ the Prime Minister wrote in his diary. ‘As though by the pressing of a button confusion & gloom & sorrow came upon the world — was the world. So, when I bade him goodbye on Friday & looked down at him descending the stairs at No. 10, that was to be the last glimpse of my friend, gallant, gay & loyal. No one was like him & there will be none … Why did I allow him to go? He was so dead certain there could be no mishap … This is indeed a great national calamity, & today, I distracted in the midst of it, can but grieve.’

      Two days later MacDonald, who was in Llandudno for the Labour Party Conference, addressed the assembled delegates. Looking ‘drawn and haggard’ he paid tribute to the man who was probably his closest friend in politics before turning to a passionate defence of his government and its attempts to deal with the crushing problems of unemployment:

      We are not on trial, it is the system under which we live which is under trial. It has broken down, not only in this little island, it has broken down in Europe, in Asia, in America; it has broken down everywhere. It was bound to break down. And the cure, the new path, the new idea is organisation — organisation that will protect life not property … I appeal to you, my friends, today, with all that is going on outside — I appeal to you to go back to your Socialist faith. Do not mix that up with pettifogging patching, either of a Poor Law kind or a Relief Work kind. Construction, ideas, architecture, building line upon line, stone upon stone, storey upon storey … I think

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