A History of England

The phoney war’s over. The shooting war has begun. And it isn’t going at all well. France is in collapse, its generals quickly turning defeatist and its politicians unable to shake them out of their inertia. Churchill tried hard, flying across to talk them into keeping up the fight, but without success. In the end, they surrendered to the Germans, being forced to sign an armistice in the same rail...

This episode includes several extracts from recordings of speeches by Churchill, so that we can enjoy listening to his actual voice – on the other hand, I apologise for the background noise on the recordings, but they sound inauthentic if I try to remove it. We also meet a number of people who will continue to have a significant role later: a man who deserves to be better-known, the brilliant theo...

Britain, along with France, might well have declared war against Germany in September 1939. But that didn’t lead to much fighting for the next eight months. There was some action at sea, during which the British Royal Navy put an end to German surface raiders, though it had still to face the worst threat to its maritime trade, which came not from ships on the surface, but from submarines. On land,...

Between 1938 and 1939, Churchill went from pariah and opponent of the Prime Minister, to the man of the moment many were calling on to re-enter government. That reflected the gradual realisation that Churchill had been right in warning of the need to resist Hitler and of approaching war, while Chamberlain had been wrong to think he could preserve peace by appeasing the dictators. By the end, Chamb...

The Munich Agreement had bought peace. But at a price. The highest had, of course, been paid by Czechoslovakia which lost much of its territory. But there was also a cost in the increasing distrust of the Soviet Union, another of the protecting powers of the Czechs, which had simply been left out of the Munich negotiations, towards the Western Powers. In Britain, though, Chamberlain enjoyed a burs...

With the Austrian annexation complete, Hitler could now start eying up his next target, Czechoslovakia again. Although Italy had proved absolutely no help to Britain in trying to stop Hitler’s move against Austria, Chamberlain had given his word to put in place an agreement which would accept the Italian occupation of Abyssinia in return for some Italian commitments in the Mediterranean, over the...

We start this week with Hitler announcing that there would be no more surprises, though we immediately question whether his word could always be wholly trusted. We go on to look at the way Hitler was building a regime which didn’t just want war, above all against what he saw as a Jewish-Bolshevik menace, but actually needed it as the only way to obtain basic products for the German population, and...

We’re still looking at 1936, a year packed with so many events that it’s taken two episodes to review the main ones. This week, on the domestic, British front: - The year of three kings, as one died, another abdicated for love, and the third took the throne - The Battle of Cable Street where 100,000-300,000 or more counter demonstrators turned out to stop the British Union of Fascists marching thr...

This episode is our first look at the exciting year of 1936. It was a time when some British politicians tried to appease one dictator, Mussolini, by taking no action to stop invading Abyssinia, in order to have his support against a far worse one, Hitler. As it happens, the effect was only to let Mussolini get away with occupying Abyssinia, leaving the League of Nations even more discredited, and...

Britain and France reckoned they’d secured the support of Italy, in the Stresa Front, for their efforts to contain Hitler. Britain was the first to undermine that pleasant understanding, by signing a naval agreement with Nazi Germany on its own. Even so, the British government did what it could to keep Mussolini’s Italy in the Front, a position shared by Winston Churchill. He was already ringing a...

In the mid-1930s, there was still widespread hope across Britain that a major war could be avoided. That could be achieved, many believed, by international negotiation towards disarmament, and by collaboration to enforce the decisions reached. A body existed to achieve just that: the League of Nations. It called a major conference, chaired by Arthur Henderson, former British Foreign Secretary, for...

We start this episode with the unveiling of the statue of Edward Carson at Stormont Castle in Northern Ireland. It rather makes the point that a man who helped organise an armed force against British law, and even to call on British soldiers to mutiny rather than fire on rebels – no doubt because to him and his friend they were the right kind of rebels – could get away with such behaviour if he ha...

It was a terrible time for Labour, down to just 52 MPs and having to choose a new leadership from a narrow pool from which most of the brightest lights, in the view of many but above all their own, were excluded. The Tories were on top of the world, with a clear majority. MacDonald still led the the National government, but in complete dependence on the Conservatives for his survival in office. A...

This episode looks at the impact in Britain of continuing trouble in India. There Gandhi had launched his salt march, walking to the sea to make salt, in breach of the British monopoly and the heavy tax on salt inflicted by the colonial authorities. That had led to his being gaoled. In Britain, the report of the Simon Commission recommended limited reform in India, but not the granting of Dominion...

The ‘flapper election’ took place on 30 May 1929. The reference was top ‘flappers’, fashionable and slightly shocking young women of the 1920s, who could vote in it because, at last, universal suffrage had been introduced for all adults of 21 or over irrespective of sex or property. The Tories, who’d made some moves, perhaps rather more modest than many might have hoped, towards alleviating proper...

We pick up the story just after the defeat of the 1926 British General Strike. It was a bad time for the unions, with strikes accounting for only just over a fifth as many working days lost in the whole of the next ten years as they had in the single year of 1926. Meanwhile, the Labour Party seemed to be cosying up to some strange people, specifically Lord Londonderry, Tory and coal mine owner, wh...

It's time for A History of England to take a short break, until 15 September. So this episode is a brief review of where we’ve got to, after the defeat of the General Strike. That defeat showed the poor in Britain, and workers in particular, that there was little hope of improvement in their conditions through union action alone. Instead political action would be needed, by a government dispos...

It’s the general strike! This time the unions couldn’t push Stanley Baldwin’s government into making concessions to the miners. That was because while, in his own words, in the previous year Baldwin had not been ready, this time he was. When the miners came out and the TUC with them, they found the government ready to call up volunteers as strike breakers or special constables to support the polic...

The Labour government was kicked out of office at the 1924 General Election, in a campaign marked by the Conservative-leaning Daily Mail engaging in some fake news. It published a forged letter claiming to be from the Soviet leader, Zinoviev, suggesting that re-electing Labour would prepare the ground for a Communist takeover. As it happens, Labour’s popular vote went up by a million. But Tory vot...

In contrast to the last episode, where we saw how dire the state of the British economy was and how close to violent confrontation society was coming, this episode is the one where we find Britain reaching the peak of its imperial grandeur. It seems that power abroad doesn’t necessarily deliver either peace or prosperity at home. Meanwhile, at home, political instability continued. There were two...

The promise of building Britain into a ‘land fit for heroes’ never came close to being kept. Instead inflation undermined wages, unemployment rose, and living conditions, with widespread slum housing, remained dire. When the government handed coal mining, an industry employing over a million men, back to the private sector after having taken direct control during the war, the drive for profitabili...

Before moving on from the times when Lloyd George held power, we take a look in this episode at one of the major moments of his time as an international statesman: the Paris Peace Conference and, above all, the specific agreement that emerged from it concerning Germany, the Treaty of Versailles. The episode draws heavily on the views of Maynard Keynes on the Treaty and its likely effects, in parti...

The Chanak crisis of 1922 brought Britain to the brink of war with Turkey. Saner heads, in particular those of both the British general on the spot and the Turkish leader, Mustafa Kemal, soon to be Turkish president as Kemal Atatürk, defused the crisis and averted war. But Lloyd George’s handling of the crisis, in which he took a distinctly hawkish stance, added further to the growing dissatisfact...

In 1921 and 1922, the sharks were beginning to circle around Lloyd George. While he thought that getting a Peace Treaty for Ireland was a major success, many felt dissatisfied with a compromise that gave no one entirely what they wanted, and therefore had a sense of being betrayed. That sense deepened as violence continued to surge in Ireland, even leading to the murder by anti-Treaty forces of on...

Would Britain go to war in Ireland? Was military action its only available response to the republican party, Sinn Fein, and its determination to govern an independent nation from its own parliament, the Dáil? And, indeed, was it in Britain’s power to go for that option? At first, that certainly seemed to be the way things were heading. Attacks by IRA units against the police or army led to increas...