Life Before the War

In northern Britain and parts of Wales and Scotland, your life might well be dominated 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 1930s you would probably be enjoying a far better life, as you benefited from the spread of electric power, new factories and products, a greater variety of food, a huge 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 between 1936 and 1939, as was shown by their increased consumption of food and clothes. The latter 1930s were years of ever more widespread leisure pursuits, among them near-universal cinema-going, newspaper reading and, for many millions, holiday-making. A well-paid working man or office worker might even be able to buy a car.

Even so, most working-class wages, especially for women, remained below those of the middle classes, and class differences were still clearly marked in housing, food, clothing, education, medical treatment, and purchasing power in general. Your views on religion, marriage, sex, and behaviour in general remained sharply defined and changed slowly, and only at the end of the decade could the beginnings 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 more into your daily life.

Using varied sources, including personal memories and daily life as pictured in newspapers and novels, Michael Alpert presents a broad picture of life for ordinary people in Britain nearly a century ago.