The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner
with push bars, and that seating capacity was limited, among other safety stipulations.
There was no counselling offered to the traumatised survivors. They were advised to forget about the terrible experience, and in an effort to help this healing process Paisley Town Council offered injured children and bereaved parents a week at the seaside. Small parties left Paisley a fortnight after the tragedy for West Kilbride and Dunoon. The relief fund was closed: it had raised £5,300.
It was a welcome sum. Paisley was a poor town. Although men such as the thread manufacturers Peter and James Coats, who were both worth more than £2 million (around £100 million in today’s prices) when they died in 1913, had made their fortunes in Paisley, by 1929 the town was the victim of the industrial depression that swept the West of Scotland, the Valleys of Wales, and the manufacturing North and other pockets of England. Unemployment was high and rising, and wages were low for those in work in Paisley.
Yet even before the Glen cinema disaster brought the town unwanted publicity, Paisley’s name was known throughout the English-speaking world. It was synonymous with soft woollen shawls bearing distinctive teardrop or tadpole patterns (probably representing the growing shoot of the date palm), usually in muted, smudged colours that had been greatly prized since the East India Company had first brought such shawls, woven of goatsdown, from Kashmir in the eighteenth century. Desirable these might have been, but they were fabulously expensive, so around 1780 weavers in Norwich and Edinburgh began to produce shawls ‘in imitation of the Indian’, using a new technique that reduced the cost of production by three-quarters. Paisley had a workforce of skilled weavers, but its silk industry had been hit badly by the Napoleonic Continental blockade. It seized on this new fashion accessory, and by the 1840s was effectively a one-industry town, with a monopoly of such shawl production, with the so-called ‘big corks’ of Paisley buying the yarn and the designs and distributing them to cottage-industry handloom weavers. Shawl-making brought new prosperity to the town — though not to the weavers, who were now outworkers rather than creative artisans, and gradually, with the introduction of the Jacquard loom, factory hands. But since by definition fashion items are just that, there were slumps and booms throughout the nineteenth century, and by the twentieth coats and jackets had replaced shawls as outer wear. The weavers of Paisley persevered and adapted to making any new products that might sell, but by 1930 only vestiges remained of the weaving industry that had made the town’s name go around the world. In mid-nineteenth-century Scotland the textile industry had employed over 20 per cent of the population; by 1931 the figure was less than 7 per cent, and those who could find work found it in thread manufacture, starching and dyeing.
Those who couldn’t would take a train to nearby Glasgow, with a population in 1931 of over a million and still claiming to be the ‘second city of the Empire’. But Glasgow had also been hard hit, with a large proportion of its resources tied up in what would become irredeemably depressed heavy industries: shipbuilding on the Clyde, where one-fifth of the world’s tonnage of ships had been launched by the start of the First World War, coalmining in Lanarkshire, and jute and linen manufacture on Tayside. By 1930, while 16.1 per cent of the population of the United Kingdom was unemployed, in Scotland the figure was 18.5 per cent, and by 1933 it had soared to 26.1 per cent compared to the overall UK figure of 19.9 per cent. And for those in work, wages were low: less than 92 per cent of those earned in England. By 1931–32 that had fallen further, to 87 per cent. The thirties were always going to be a difficult decade for Paisley: now it had tragedy layered over hardship.
We have magneto trouble. How, then, can we start up again?
John Maynard Keynes, December 1930
‘It is difficult to see the wood for the trees,’ mused Gerald Barry, then editor of Lord Beaverbrook’s Saturday Review, though soon to resign on a question of principle and start the Week-End Review, and something of a connoisseur of English eccentricities and oddities, in a BBC broadcast on the final day of the 1920s. He rounded off his talk in much the same vein. ‘We cannot put the jigsaw puzzle of the present together, because we are sitting on the pieces.’ In between he surveyed the year that had passed, commenting on the progress of the R100 and the R101 airships, and on the ‘thirst for speed … one of the significant tendencies of our time’, which had been partially slaked by Sir Henry Segrave’s ‘remarkable motor-car record at Daytona Beach of 231 m.p.h.’, and on the extraordinary weather, which ‘began with extreme and prolonged cold which those of us with burst water pipes will not forget in a hurry … followed by a superb summer and a drought which caused many towns and villages great anxiety and stopped many of us watering our gardens and washing our cars’, and ending with ‘disastrous floods and record gales’. The number of motorists had continued to increase, and with them the number of accidents, as had what Barry called the ‘continued uglification of the countryside’. On the credit side Stonehenge, Friday Street, Runnymede and many more ‘notable spots’ had been saved, and in Barry’s mind the fierce controversies over Sir Gilbert Scott’s design for a new power station at Battersea, the erection of pylons across the South Downs as part of the new electrical grid system and proposals for the new Charing Cross Bridge were evidence that ‘in 1929 we have become more conscious of the need of beauty and orderliness in our midst’.
Barry’s notion of sitting on a jigsaw, knowing that there were crucial pieces to be fitted together, but unable to see how they could coalesce, nonplussed by the odd shapes and irregularities of the pieces, the intransigent way one could not be locked with what seemed to be its natural partner to make a satisfying whole, could be a metaphor that would carry all the way from the turn of the decade when he conjured up the image, through the 1930s. It would be a decade of despair and frustration for many, of confusion and stasis, and sometimes, in what seemed a purblind refusal to recognise the true nature of economic and social problems, of government inaction and public despair. Yet paradoxically, this decline would co-exist alongside rising wages and falling prices, a steady increase in living standards, a housing boom and unprecedented growth in domestic consumption. While abroad the thirties would be a decade of escalating tension and the rise of fascism — again met with uncertainty, irresolution, self-deception, misread signals, anxious hopes and missed opportunities — they were also years of experimentation, of hope, of resolution, of a confident belief that modernity had provided the tools with which to fashion a better future, above all a planned future, that mobilised politics, economics, science and the arts to build a brave new world (Aldous Huxley’s novel — albeit a dystopia — was written in 1931 and published the following year). But while, of course, no one could be certain of the picture that would emerge from the disparate pieces at the start of 1930, there was the feeling that the coming decade would be significant. That the thirties would be very different from the twenties. As indeed they would.
The Lady, a magazine for women who lived a leisurely life in society, thought that 1930 ‘somehow assumes an added importance because it is a round number’. The magazine’s columnist was ‘curious’ that given this ‘added importance … most girls do not choose New Year’s Day for their wedding instead of hastening to the altar in December. It seems such a very appropriate day for the beginning of a new life — or, at any rate a new enterprise.’ One society girl did buck the trend in 1930 — though not entirely of her own volition: the wedding of Miss Zelia Hambro, daughter of Sir Percival Hambro of the merchant banking family, had to be rushed as the groom, Lieutenant Patrick Humphreys of the Royal Navy, was about to sail for China at short notice. For the wedding in Holy Trinity church, Sloane Street, Chelsea, the bride chose ‘a really lovely dress, far too good for any festivities on the China station’, and her mother, who was ‘rather keen on politics and belongs to the Ladies Imperial Club’ no doubt enlivened proceedings on the day by being ‘one of the few women in London who smokes cigars — real ones, and not the little affairs provided for women who prefer something stronger’.
There was, however, a more serious investment in marking the end of the 1920s, ten years stained by the memory of the Great War, in which 5.7 million British men had joined the armed forces, of whom three-quarters of a million had been killed and more