The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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       TWO A Great Clearance

      … An utterly lost and daft

      System that gives a few at fancy prices Their fancy lives While ninety-nine in the hundred who never attend the banquet Must wash the grease of ages off the knives …

      Louis MacNeice, ‘Autumn Journal’ (1939)

      The post of Poet Laureate, official versifier, has had a chequered history. Originating with John Dryden in 1670, it has had its peaks — Wordsworth, Tennyson — and its troughs — possibly Colley Cibber, possibly Robert Southey (who only got the laurel wreath because Sir Walter Scott declined), certainly Alfred Austin (who was wheeled on because William Morris refused). When the scholarly, pantheistic Robert Bridges (who was only in post because Rudyard Kipling had said no) died on 21 April 1930, the honorary position as a member of the royal household (ranking between the Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod and the Marine Painter in the arcane hierarchy), carrying a nugatory stipend, was offered to John Masefield. He had his doubts: ‘I can write verse only in moments of deep feeling … this may perhaps be a disqualification,’ he wrote on 30 April to Ramsay MacDonald, who had offered to submit his name for royal approval — a mere formality, particularly since it was rumoured that Masefield was George V’s favourite poet. The Prime Minister must have had many more pressing matters on his mind, but he took time out to reply to the havering fifty-one-year-old poet, reassuring him that should the spirit move him, he could ‘write odes and such things’ on occasions of national import, but if it did not, he could keep quiet. Masefield accepted, but made it clear that as a writer committed to the cause of ‘the man with too weighty a burden, too heavy a load’, he would not define his task as being to acclaim ‘The princes and prelates with periwigged charioteers/Riding triumphantly laurelled to lap the fat of the years’. He would hold the post for thirty-seven years until his death in 1967, a longer tenure than any of his predecessors except Tennyson.

      John Masefield had long hymned the sea and the men who went down to the sea in ships (although he himself was an indifferent sailor who failed in his first choice of career in the Merchant Navy, and on one occasion had to be shipped home from Chile as a DBS — Distressed British Seaman). In 1934 the perfect opportunity to fuse his maritime yearnings with the gravitas of a national event presented itself. Masefield rose to the challenge with a seven-stanza poem entitled, rather unpromisingly, ‘Number 534’. ‘… Man in all the marvel of his thought/Smithied you into form of leap and curve,’ he wrote, ‘And took you so, and bent you to his vast/Intense great world of passionate design/Curve after changing curving, bracing and mast/To stand all tumult that can tumble brine.’ Far from being one of Masefield’s best-known ‘dirty British coaster[s] with a salt-caked smoke stack … With a cargo of Tyne coal/Road-rail, pig-lead/Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays’, ‘Number 534’ was the largest ocean-going liner ever built, the Queen Mary, and the occasion of his tribute was the ship’s launch, when in pouring rain on 26 September 1934 in front of a crowd of 200,000 mostly umbrella-holding spectators, the consort whose name the vessel carried, the wife of George V, dressed in powder blue, smashed a bottle of Australian wine over her bows, pressed a button, and the massive 81,000-ton Cunard liner, ‘long as a street and lofty as a tower’ and looking like a ‘great white cliff’, slipped into the Clyde.

      The Queen Mary represented many things. It was a gamble that despite a world depression this luxury liner, this super ship, would enable Britain to recapture its prestige on the seas, would win the coveted Blue Riband for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic, and would rekindle a glamorous and moneyed lifestyle that seemed lost. And yet, though its elaborate and luxurious interiors, its fabulous menus, its non-stop programme of entertainment seemed to hold out such a promise, the construction of the Queen Mary could be seen as an unfolding metaphor for the ambitious intentions, the rigid yet muddled thinking, the collective misery and dashed hopes of British industrial production in the early 1930s.

      British shipbuilding had suffered a similar fate to other heavy industries in the 1920s: a sharp decline from the First World War, when orders had flooded in for battleships, the big yards on the Clyde had expanded their capacity and their workforce to cope with military orders. When the war ended it seemed natural that the requirement for warships would be replaced by the need for a steady supply of merchant vessels, many of them to replace those lost at sea during hostilities. Indeed, foreseeing a boom in merchant orders John Brown & Co. had injected a huge capital sum of £316,000 into the facilities at their Clydebank yard, and shipbuilding companies merged and acquired control of the majority of Scotland’s steel industry. For the first two years after the war it looked as if this would pay off: between December 1918 and December 1920 Clydebank received orders for twelve merchant ships, including seven for the Royal Mail, two large passenger liners, the Franconia and the Alaunia for the Cunard line, СКАЧАТЬ