Were the Interwar Years Truly a Slump?, Part I (book review)
These differences, Branson and Heineman charge, while caused by the dislocation produced by the Great War, were perpetuated and made worse during the Interwar period by members of the business and government establishment that were not keen on investing in what became euphemistically known as the "Depressed Areas." They--Branson and Heineman contemptuously write--"decided, almost to a man, that it was cheaper, pleasanter and more convenient to build new plant on the outskirts of London and Birmingham." [4] Between 1932 and 1937, out of an increase of 644 new factories in all of Great Britain, 532 were in Greater London alone [my emphasis]. [5] As a result, more than one million people between the ages of 15 and 45 migrated from the North and West to the Southeast between 1923 and 1938, leaving the more depressed regions with a higher proportion of older and relatively non-productive residents. [6] For this significant and somewhat catastrophic demographic shift, Branson and Heineman conclude, the government and business leaders must be blamed.
While no one can deny that there was a significant demographic shift between the wars, one in which the populations of Greater London and Birmingham grew at much higher rates than those of other regions, Sidney Pollard does not agree with much else of Branson's and Heineman's analysis. Despite the massive numbers of unemployed workers, Pollard argues that during the 1920s and 1930s life improved considerably for the vast majority of the working classes. Constructing two "typical" working-class budgets, one from 1904-1914 and the other from 1937-1938, Pollard notes that items that would have cost an average working-class family 100% of their total expenditures before the Great War, only cost 76% in 1937-38, meaning an average increase in real income over the two-to-three decade period of over 30%. [7]
Furthermore, unlike Branson and Heineman who very strongly suggest that the various Interwar governments did little to help the Depressed Areas and their unemployed workers, Pollard notes that several important pieces of social and domestic legislation was passed during the period, including the Addison [1919], Chamberlain [1923], Wheatley [1924], and Greenwood [1930] Acts which established the government's role in public housing for the first time. As a result, over one-third of the entire British housing stock in 1939 had been built in the previous two decades. [8] Unlike Branson and Heineman, Pollard argues that the government did play a large role in improving social and economic conditions.
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