ABSTRACT
One of Derek Aldcroft's (1962) earliest published papers, based on primary sources, concerned the inter-war years; the early attempts to operate a financially sound support for exporters through the new Export Credit Guarantee Department. His subsequent work on this period similarly emphasized the positive side of the performance of the British inter-war economy, rather than the dismal record of unemployment that principally occupied historiography at the time. The conventional view in the 1960s had become that the economy suffered from the slowness of policy-makers to absorb the fundamental truths of J. M. Keynes's economics. Montagu Norman and Winston Churchill were particular targets. Supposedly, the 1950s and 1960s were so prosperous because at last it had been appreciated that discretionary demand management could eliminate mass unemployment. For example:
The essential background to government fiscal policy in the 1920s was the persistence of an unemployment figure of about 1 million and the level of government expenditure was clearly inadequate to remove this. (Williams, 1971, p. 45)
It followed from the new, and now generally accepted [Keynesian] doctrine, that British budgetary policy in the interwar years was of a nature to aggravate the ill-effects of the trade cycle. (Pollard, 1962, p. 210)
Instead of demand and unemployment, Derek Aldcroft focused on economic growth and the supply side of the economy, supported by batteries of statistics. He both tuned in to the 'growthmanship' doctrines of the Labour government of 1964 and anticipated a more fundamental reaction, in economic theory as well as later in the interpretation of economic history. He pointed out that, since economic growth between the world wars was slightly stronger than in the later Victorian era, the 102period could hardly be labelled an economic disaster (for example, Aldcroft, 1970, p. 18).