ABSTRACT
The years between the two great wars, especially the ‘Thirties’, have a particular place in popular memory. Labour politician Hugh Dalton labelled them the ‘The Thoughtless Thirties and the Workless Thirties’.2 The common images of the decade are of hunger marches, dole queues, idleness, poverty, slums, ill health and the rise of fascism. Revisionist historians challenge this recollection. John Stevenson and Chris Cook claim the decade was not a period of absolute misery and depression.3 Unemployment and hardship, they point out, were unevenly spread, concentrated mainly in the old industrial areas of the North, Scotland and Wales, where the jobless rates were particularly high. For those in work the 1930s were not ‘wasted years’ but years of prosperity. Some people were ‘enjoying a richer life than any previously known in the history of the world: longer holidays, shorter hours, higher real wages’.4 Stevenson and Cook argue that British society was not as divided by social conflict as the popular recollection would have us believe. They suggest that Britain was relatively stable and comparatively unified, arguing that a consensus of values existed between the wars. The role of the newspapers is seen by many scholars as providing a ‘feel
good factor’ in the face of rising tensions at home and abroad. Brian Whitaker5
refers to pressures from advertisers and business to remain cheerful, citing as one example the Daily Express front-page headline of 30 September 1938, which screamed ‘There Will Be No War This Year Nor Next Year’. The decline of the space devoted to public affairs stories in the 1930s is seen as another example of the desire to escape from the realities of politics and current affairs to a more comfortable world of gossip, entertainment and human interest stories.6 The British press is criticised for deliberately downplaying
the threat of war.7 The editor of The Times, Geoffrey Dawson, wrote in 1937 that he did his ‘utmost, night after night, to keep out of the paper anything that might hurt their (the German Government) susceptibilities’.8 The newspapers are accused of painting a rosy picture of unemployment and its attendant problems, and like the newsreels concentrating more on ‘successes, at sport, in economic terms and in both domestic and international politics’.9
Peddling optimism is partly attributed to the competition that pervaded Fleet Street between 1922 and 1939. The ‘circulation wars’ were an outcome of the changes wrought by Northcliffe and mass circulation papers, with popular journalism extending its influence throughout Fleet Street, through the skills of brilliant technical editors such as Arthur Christiansen at the Express and Guy Bartholomew at the Mirror, who eschewed politics for entertainment. Newspapers for the first time faced competition from other forms of mass
media, particularly cinema, which in the 1930s had established itself as the ‘essential social habit of the age’.10 The competition from other media led newspapers to place more emphasis on their visual appeal. The visual reorientation of the press gathered pace as audiences became more accustomed to increasingly sophisticated forms of visual representation on screen and on the page.11 There was a transformation in newspaper typography, with a significant reform of layout and presentation. The wireless and cinema newsreel posed a threat to newspapers’ monopoly of news provision. Newspaper proprietors struggled with the newly formed British Broadcasting Company (BBC) to prevent it setting up a radio news service. The BBC’s news coverage, it is argued, helped to keep newspapers honest.12 Stephen Tallents, the BBC’s Public Relations Director, believed the radio made it more difficult for ‘a newspaper with a private axe to grind’ to ‘invent or suppress news’.13
Broadcasters’ focus on impartiality also had the effect of making the press more careful in its gathering and reporting of the facts; newspapers between the wars began to place more emphasis on the distinction between fact and comment. The immediacy of radio forced them to re-evaluate their news coverage, further extending what was defined as news.14
