The Nineteen Thirties: A Revisionist History

Abstract

John Stevenson and Chris Cook published in 1977 The Slump: Society and Politics during the Depression: a volume whose purpose was to assess what the first chapter headlined as 'Myth and Reality: Britain in the 1930s'. This is how the authors begin: Of all periods in recent British history, the thirties have had the worst press. Although the decade can now only be remembered by the middle-aged and the elderly, it retains the all-pervasive image of the 'wasted years' and the 'low dishonest decade'. Even for those who did not live through them, the 1930s are haunted by the spectres of mass unemployment, hunger marches, appeasement, and the rise of fascism at home and abroad. These sentences preface a text which provides a markedly uneven treatment of the decade, in that it omits much that is relevant to its theme; which is altogether lacking in intellectual rigour; and which, for two young historians of the 1970s, is notably old-fashioned in its approach and techniques. The book, moreover, is a cobbling together of a good deal of material already published, by both authors. The social history chapters for example, which offer the central revisionist thesis of the volume, are no more than an expansion of John Stevenson's chapter in Crisis and Controversy, Essays in Honour of A.J. P. Taylor (1976) edited by Alan Sked and Chris Cook. He uses the same quotations and the same sources; if new research has been undertaken, it is not evident. There would therefore be no point to a comment on this present volume were it not for its uncritical reception by some of its reviewers, to whom certain of its elementary points appeared to come as a blinding light of revelation; and also, because the book does raise some questions that need to be taken further.