ABSTRACT
However desperately people yearned to return to normality after the war, there was no possibility of ‘going back’ because the shadow of the war continued to hang over most parts of national life in the interwar years. The ‘old liberalism’ of prewar Britain, already tottering on the brink of senility in 1914, was trampled into the mud of Flanders Field. Patriotic idealism disappeared leaving a gap which would be filled by disillusionment and cynicism. Industrialism, spurred on by the war, entered a new stage of development and the products of assembly lines, numerous and ubiquitous as bacteria, began to spread across the land. The horse and the railway were increasingly challenged for supremacy in transport by the motor car, lorry, and omnibus, and the cinema and radio competed with the popular press for the attention of the people.
