Life Before the War

In northern Britain and parts of Wales and Scotland, your life might well bedominated throughout the 1930s by unemployment, low wages, poor nutrition,ill health, and slum housing.But if you lived in the Midlands, London or the South-East, by the latter 1930syou would probably be enjoying a far better life, as you benefited from thespread of electric power, new factories and products, a greater variety of food, ahuge private and public house-building programme and expansion of all sorts,much of it created by the sums spent on rearmament. For people living in prosperous areas, real wages rose substantially between1936 and 1939, as was shown by their increased consumption of food andclothes. The latter 1930s were years of ever more widespread leisure pursuits,among them near-universal cinema-going, newspaper reading and, for manymillions, holiday-making. A well-paid working man or office worker mighteven be able to buy a car. Even so, most working-class wages, especially for women, remained belowthose of themiddle classes, and class differences were still clearly marked inhousing, food, clothing, education, medical treatment, and purchasing poweringeneral.Your views on religion, marriage, sex, and behaviour in general remainedsharply defined and changed slowly, and only at the end of the decade could thebeginnings of change be seen. At the same time the Second World War, which began on 3 September 1939,was the climax of a long period of increasing anxiety, during which the press,the wireless and the cinema newsreel brought foreign affairs more and moreinto your daily life. Using varied sources, including personal memories and daily life as pictured innewspapers and novels, Michael Alpert presents a broad picture of life for ordinarypeople in Britain nearly a century ago.