Author: J.P. Hughes

The Inter-War Period in England has too often been overlooked as a bridge between two cataclysms, the Great War and the Second World War. Too often the decline of the British Empire is viewed predominantly from the lens of conflagrations with its externalities, specifically Germany.  There is also a consensus that Britain was to go to war with Germany out of an inescapable law of the civilisations, namely the Thucydides Trap. Britain, a declining great power, must come to terms with the rising power, Germany, with terms settled via warfare.

Although it would be wrong to downplay the pressures that an external threat can place on an incumbent power, there appears to be a prerequisite to the so-called Thucydides Trap. What precisely had occurred in Britain to consider it a “declining power”? Where did inflection points truly lie on this road to a combustion? Before 1914, we had 1910, the year of the Peers versus the People elections. Before 1939, even before Munich, there was 1936. What the year 1936 has in common with 1910 is that they are years in which the challenges of the time can be viewed as internal, intra-Empire, not a problem imposed upon its boundary. 

For earlier generations, an educated class in Britain would have known the year of 1936 as The Year of the Three Emperors, a viewpoint which had become a cliche in relation to Britain’s obsession to find Roman analogies to its own civilisation. However, for any member of the population under forty, what was once cliche has become clouded, eclipsed by the shadow of the post-war consensus that subsequently crossed its path. The phrase is styled after the year 69 AD, when Rome underwent a tumultuous period of unrest, rebellion, and, faction. The annus ended with the ultimate shift of power from the Julio-Claudian dynasty to the Flavian. Whereas Rome had four Emperors that year (it later had five- and six-Emperor years) Britain gave us just the three. 

An obvious attack on trying to frame 1936 as Britain’s Year of the Three Emperors is to point out the limits on the power of these Emperors (and Emperors they were, by way of the title each held in India). The figures of George V and George VI are hardly worthy in personal licentiousness to be placed within the bounds of a copy of Suetonius but Edward VIII may well have candidature. Edward also has the centrality necessary in the greatest crisis of that year, the abdication, to remind us that the Emperors were not just some faces to be placed on plates for decoration. As small as they may seem in the great framework of the Empire, the British Monarch still provided the gravitational orbits along which the whole structure manoeuvred. This was revealed nakedly to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in the months of November and December of that year.

The best vantage to penetrate the year without the baggage of our post-war mythos, but “wie es eigentlich gewesen”, is to delve into the diary pages of Henry ‘Chips’ Channon, masterly edited by Simon Heffer at the start of this decade. Channon is an interesting figure in his own right; an American endeared with a taste for old-world extravagance, he commits to wed himself into the British upper classes, literally, by marrying into the Guinness fortune and placing himself in a Belgravian townhouse. From there he hosts his soirées, creates gossip, and absorbs scandal in equal measure. He is a product of the 1920s, where he comes of age in an environment of youthful exuberance after the war. Carrying these tendencies well into his middle age, Channon finds himself firmly on the side of Edward VIII throughout 1936. 

The year opens with two ominous signs – the death of “Bard of Empire”, Rudyard Kipling, and the illness of the King, George V. January, it seems, is intent on sweeping out the old. Channon recounts how he had once met Kipling, a “small man” with “long hairs protruding from his ears”, over a glass of port. Channon admired him as a ‘man of Empire’, but little else. “Kipling had no, or little, message for the youth of this country”. Channon, for all his indulgences, is a lover of vigour. Although Edward is in his forties by 1936, he is still the best part of thirty years the junior of Kipling. By the end of the month George V had joined Kipling in passing from this world, and with them seemed to go a particular era of Englishman. London was in black. The Eddie Clique, with shades of Evelyn Waugh’s Bright Young Things, will now represent a different trajectory. People who were “chic, glamorous and romantic” and made all else look dowdy have come to the fore. For now.

Channon immediately picks up on the instability of the situation, stating of the funeral procession that “the boyish young King, so young and seemingly frail”, seemed to be walking solemnly on the eve of war. This “eve of war” feeling is there for reasons of which Hitler is only one of many factors. Channon, and those who want to see Edward succeed, are a contradictory mix. In his loathing of Bolshevism and love of the aristocratic lifestyle, Channon is nominally pro ancien regime. Yet they persistently brush up against the figures of the old guard, it can be seen in his disconnect with Kipling, his dislike of Winston Churchill, his dread of inertia. In this dread, we see echoes of Channon’s one-time mentor, Lord George Curzon, who by 1936 had been dead eleven years. Curzon, some forty years earlier when he was the “Coming Man”, wrote in constant fear of the ‘creeping paralysis’ of civilisation. Though with Channon’s crowd, we can see the self-confidence needed in overcoming inertia, when coupled with the carefree partying of the 1920s, there entered an air of flippancy which was hard to eradicate.

George V was the fulcrum of Kitchener’s 1914 address to the English soldier, “Fear God. Honour the King”. As a monarch, his image would forever be tied to the Great War. With his death, then, could come the unravelling of that war’s settlement. Not all saw that as a bad thing. The League of Nations had proved impotent in the face of Mussolini’s aggression in Abyssinia late in 1935. The political scandal still radiating the halls of Whitehall in early 1936 remained the fallout of the Hoare-Laval pact, where the Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare had had to resign after arranging a peace settlement with Italy where the League of Nations was nowhere to be seen and Mussolini achieved dismemberment of Abyssinia. He was replaced by anti-appeaser Anthony Eden. In these cabinet manoeuvres, we see Britain in a truer internal tussle with regard to the direction of world affairs than two years later, where Munich comes into the frame more as a desperate last attempt to avoid the victory of Eden’s “Glamour Boys” and the Churchillians. It is in 1936 that we see the landscape of decision much more open to all sides, and much less sure.

         Divides would run across family lines. Sir Austen Chamberlain would decry the Hoare-Laval Pact, “Gentlemen do not behave in such a way” he would declare to the Conservative Foreign Affairs Committee. Neville Chamberlain would prove to be far more willing to cut deals with fascist leaders. Although outrage of the pact had been enough for Hoare to fall on his own sword, the situation was not one-directional. Evelyn Waugh had gone to Abyssinia as a war correspondent and returned to England in 1936 with anti-Abyssinian sentiments. Channon writes on the 12th of February, “They [Evelyn Waugh and Patrick Balfour] went to Abyssinia in the autumn, and were to stay for the duration of the hostilities. Now they are back, and both converted pro-Italians…Opinion in this country is veering somewhat to the anti-Abyssinan side”. India was far more important to the health of the Empire in 1936 than Italy or Abyssinia, and 1936 marks an important year in Indian affairs, which strangely seems to take a backseat in typical parlance re:1930s England. A new viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, was sent to India in April 1936 to see through the reforms outlined in the 1935 India Bill, whereby the provinces were to be governed by ministries responsible to the elected legislatures. Linlithgow, paired with a year of shifting Emperors, had in his hands the opportunity to pull a Curzonian stunt, a fated Durbar, where the Coronation of the new Emperor could showcase imperial majesty before his Indian subjects. Edward VIII fully intended to attend a Durbar in 1937 following his coronation in Westminster Abbey, and even after his abdication, Linlithgow would encourage George VI to take his place seamlessly, though this did not manifest, nominally because of George’s ill health. 1936 in India, then, marks the long failure of the India Bill to prevent outright Indian independence. Linlithgow, being no Curzon, allowed for the dreaded paralysis to take hold and handed initiative to the Indian National Congress Party, which would hold seven of eleven assemblies by the end of 1937. Channon again, for all his flippancy and fancies, has prescient marks for the Linlithgows. “She [Lady Linlithgow] has no sense of pomp…. There would never be anything like the famous Curzonisation in 1902”. Linlithgow would reign as Viceroy from 1936 until 1943, longer than any other incumbent. Yet his reign would be the true Kiplingesque Recessional.

         A portentous Year of the Three Emperors should not be viewed as a sign of Imperial slippage per se, but rather a moment of flux where the primary driver of decisions is internal to the Empire in question; pressurised, but not consumed, by affairs external to that Empire. Germany’s Year of the Three Emperors marks no presage of decline around the limb of the nation. Wilhelm II’s reign may have ended in destruction, but 1918 is a long distance from 1888. In the thirty years of his reign, the Kaiser saw Germany rise to a position of genuine challenger to the British Empire, a thought not seriously envisageable in 1888. The historically inclined may also, however, point to England’s Year of the Three Kings, 1483, which is shadowed by 1485, Bosworth and the end of Plantagenet England.

         In 1936, though, slippage could be salvaged. Though live birth rates in England and Wales had more than halved between 1881-1931, the strain of being the first industrial nation was showing. Yet in response to the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, Britain had, belatedly, come to realise the vision of Joseph Chamberlain, and raised tariffs. His son Neville, who, unlike Churchill, shone as Chancellor of the Exchequer throughout the 1930s imposed an Import Duties Act in 1932 which had, by 1937, increased steel production comfortably beyond its 1929 level. The success of the tariffs in reviving British industry showcases that lines drawn by foreign affairs were not entrenched across other lines of imperial inquiry; Austen Chamberlain, an anti-fascist hawk, embraced his brother’s move toward protectionism, as did Leo Amery, an arch-anti-appeaser, who would be one of only four men not to applaud Chamberlain’s 1938 announcement that he would fly to Munich to seek an agreement. Among the three others would be Churchill and Eden. Churchill, who crossed the floor to join the Liberal party in 1904, nominally in the name of free trade, seemed in the 1930s to take a back seat on the tariff debate.

         Neville Chamberlain’s industrial drive did not stop with steel production, it was accompanied by a ramp-up in defence spending. The bomber development programme began in 1936 under the supervision of Lord Swinton, Secretary of State for Air 1935-38, with the erection of many shadow factories – war manufacturing facilities set up in the shadow of civilian plants. Chamberlain as exchequer would allow the funding. Churchill remained belligerent and intransigent throughout this period, failing to acknowledge the prudent moves which were being made in the name of defence. Although it has become fashionable to reverse-uno Churchill’s hero status and denounce him villain for the trajectory of the Empire, a far truer villain is the Prime Minister not in 1938 nor in 1940, but in 1936 – one Stanley Baldwin. Baldwin, the human embodiment of inertia, was a man so obsessed with following by-elections and the ‘national mood’ that he forgot he was in a position to lead the nation toward a different mood. He spends much of this time railing against Lloyd George’s war memoirs, published in six volumes between 1933 and 1937, terrified of phantom battles and missing real opportunities to improve the Empire. Baldwin symbolised the exact Conservative quagmire which would have been abhorred by the Curzonian mindset. His defenders would claim that, what he lacked in vitality, he made up for in tact. Yet when the great flux of human affairs is in motion, the Conservative who baulks at all avenues before him finalises nothing but his own fossil. Even in the heart of the abdication crisis, where Baldwin is mooted as having acted with integrity, he seems to take a backseat to the opinions of Archbishop Cosmo Lang and Alec Hardinge, the King’s private secretary. No wonder Baldwin feared Lloyd George and Churchill. Though both men of yesteryear, they had a virility and an oratorical capacity to swell the commons that deserted Baldwin.

         Throughout the summer of 1936, the Nazi opinion in Britain became more entrenched, on one side or the other. Duff Cooper, Secretary of State for War, addressed the Association France-Grande Bretagne in the presence of the British Ambassador and numerous British businessmen in France to explore trade opportunities. He attacked ‘the modern tendency to exalt war, to represent liberty as a false ideal, to glorify obedience.’ It was clear where he aimed the attack. Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland and the appointment of Ribbentrop to German Ambassador to the Court of the St. James that year had stoked divisions. The charm offensive of the Berlin Olympics in August would woo the likes of Channon, and alienate others. Channon’s main reason for supporting Hitler was his belief that the Führer was solely responsible for Germany avoiding a Communist revolution. “It is thanks to him that these games go on, that these fêtes take place…oh! England wake up.” Channon’s diary entries for August, where he is a guest of Göring during the games, make for fascinating reading into the pro-appeasement view of the world in 1936.

         By May a reader sees Channon beginning to realise a reckoning will come for King Edward with regard to Mrs. Simpson. “The King is her slave; he will go nowhere where Mrs Simpson is not invited”, though Chanon admits readily that she is “charm itself”. It will be a few months, though, before things could turn into a genuine crisis for the King. The rumours started swirling in late November that Edward’s obstreperousness was hurtling toward a showdown. It is only over divorcée Mrs. Simpson that Baldwin, finally, shows some confidence that he and the ‘mood of the nation’ are one, though whether this was true was never fully tested. A “King and people versus parliament” election never comes close to materialising. Baldwin, threatening to resign if the King did not ditch his lover, was hoping for abdication. He saw in Edward the air of instability which he so loathed. Rumours abounded that the king was sexually unsound, even homosexual. Only Mrs Simpson had the tools to unlock his sensitivities in the bedroom, so the rumour went, using wicked tricks learned from the Orient. For Hardinge, the fears went beyond the love affair, stating Edward was ‘entirely ignorant of the powers of a constitutional sovereign and of the lines on which a King’s business should be carried on.’ ‘Who is King here? Baldwin or I?’ Edward had said to close relatives in the heat of the tense discussions. Baldwin, in his instinct for passivity, was craving the milder Duke of York, future George VI. Churchill postulated the formation of a ‘King’s Party’ and an election. It never got off the ground. Edward ultimately wanted the crown and Mrs Simpson both, but too hastily chose the life of least resistance. To have blinked first in a battle with Baldwin is hardly indicative of a monarch who could carve out an Anglo-German alliance on personal terms with Hitler, let alone brave the myriad of tough choices that would be necessary for such an active monarchy in the coming years. The risk of a Republic ran as high as any other if the country were to go to the polls on any specific issue regarding kingship. What would be the constitutional situation if the king were to lose? It was murky water. Far more likely is that a Baldwin resignation would have changed little in the long run for the Conservative party, though may have saved Edward. Chamberlain and his cabinet may have momentarily resigned with him, but he would be well placed to lead the party once the initial storm had calmed. Baldwin would resign in any case in 1937, after the coronation of George VI, safe in the mind he had cemented a passive lineage for the crown, with an eye to George’s two doting daughters as being a safe course. There had been rumours Baldwin was to resign in the summer of 1936 in any case, with the crisis but a distant glint, due to an ongoing illness. A 1936 exit of Baldwin then, like that of his childhood friend Kipling, could have changed the shape of England. We know King Edward’s tenure was strained and unlikely to be smooth with or without Baldwin though, of that Hardinge was correct. The myth around Edward grows thanks to his warming toward Germany, and that the King had survived an assassination attempt in July 1936 under mysterious circumstances by a paid informant of the security services, George McMahon. McMahon claimed to have been instructed to do so by the Italian embassy and had botched the attempt purposefully. The conspiracy that his removal went far beyond Baldwin, Lang, and Hardinge naturally arises, though the timings of the events of 1936 leave this conspiracy with as many gaps as the official narrative. If King Edward was more like his grandfather, Edward VII, than his father, would it have proved fatal to keep him on the throne? It would be difficult, particularly in the event of a Labour government, but Baldwin Conservatism denies us this actuality. We are left to speculate.

With the formal abdication in December it was clear that, despite all of Edward’s faults, something more profound had occurred than a want to marry a divorcée. Bidding goodbye to his duties as King and Emperor, Britain entered 1937 with energetic men such as Eden moving away from the old Imperial structure. The very lure of orbit around the monarch had been dented by events. A man such as Eden, in a position as Viceroy, could have placed those energies into an Indian reform that did not drift to complete independence. Instead of the long years of Linlithgow a new Curzonian spark may have been added to the British rule in India. Yet what is a Viceroy to an Emperor who could be humbled by a Baldwin? 1936 also saw the release of a film adaptation of  H.G. Wells’ The Shape of Things to Come. The plot, eerily prescient in parts, revolves around a war sparked in 1940 between Germany and Poland over Danzig. Global war and bombing raids soon engulf civilisation back into a dark age as things escalate. Out of the rubble comes a new international breed of man – engineers and mechanical men who outlaw war and dictate affairs from a monoplane hovering above the earth, styling themselves as the Wings Over the World. These men of science would replace the aggressive misapplied will of the previous power brokers. The Wings Over the World alone had the vision to usher in a new age of progress and peace. Eden was eventually offered the Viceroyship in 1943 as Linlithgow departed, yet only two years later flirted with the idea of becoming Secretary General of the newly formed United Nations. By 1943 the viceroyship was Wells’ old world rubble. The UN was the Wings Over the World. Although he was to take neither position, the juxtaposition of the offers is stark. The natural career trajectory of men like Eden had changed utterly.

There is a poignant moment in the Channon diaries from November 30th, 1936 which lends a poetic gravitas to the whole year. Returning to a parliament wrought with tension over the abdication, he finds the sky lit up to the south. The Crystal Palace, that great testament to Prince Albert and the Vicrotian twins will for progress and Empire, is on fire.

“When I returned to the House I found the dark sky ablaze with light and it looked like a Venetian sunset. It was the Crystal Palace that was burning; it was none of the largest fires ever known in London; for hours the glass melted and now there is only a tower left, as a reminder of the Victorian age.”

         Here is the perfect vista for Britain’s Year of the Three Emperors. A year worth remembering.