Sing as We Go: Britain Between the Wars, Simon Heffer, Penguin books, 2023 .
Weighing in at 860 pages, Simon Heffer’s history of Britain from 1919 to 1939, Sing As You Go, is undoubtedly a tome but what you find is its surprising economy.
For here are 20 of the most tumultuous and transformative years in our islands’ history; two decades furthermore sandwiched by the two greatest conflagrations in world history. Against that backdrop a strike rate of 43-pages a year looks light.
Heffer begins with Britain’s emergence from the Great War, offering fascinating details about the genesis, for instance, of the Cenotaph – first built in a hurry in wood and plaster with an inscription written by Kipling, before being built in stone. “The Cenotaph nearly didn’t happen,” “David Lloyd George, who had in the 1918 election campaign been happy to call himself “the man who won the war”, had learned that such a symbol would be constructed in Paris … and would not be outdone.”
Against the backdrop of a grief-stricken and massively indebted country – national debt stood at £7.4 billion, versus £650 million in 1914, we have the transition to peace and the demobilisation of men and society, along with the birth of a Labour party, heralded by the introduction of universal manhood suffrage in 1918.
We have another war in Ireland and the struggle to find a political solution to meet divisions there culminating with the birth of the Irish Free State in 1922. At the same time the fleeting post-war boom turns south, taking with it the ambitious social welfare plans of Lloyd George’s Coalition government and bringing with it the spectre of mass unemployment and civil unrest – all just a few years after the Russian revolution’s dispatch of the Tsar. As it was remarked at the time: “It must be remembered that in the event of rioting, for the first time in history, the rioters will be better trained than the troops.”
