Having a Ball Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain

JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

First of all,

one part amaretto.

One part blue Curacao.

Two parts cranberry juice.

Two parts pineapple juice.

One part Southern Comfort.

Shake, don't stir.

And this is the Bathwater Cocktail, created for and named after

the so-called "Bath and Bottle Party",

the most notorious cocktail party in British history.

It happened in a heat wave

at the height of the social season

on the evening of Friday 13th July 1928.

The hosts, "Babe" Plunket Greene,

Elizabeth Ponsonby,

Edward Gathorne-Hardy

and Brian Howard.

The venue, St George's Swimming Baths, Buckingham Palace Road, Belgravia.

The Daily Express gossiped about the "edgy Negro jazz band"

and costumes of "the most dazzling kinds and colours".

Even the waiters wore bathing suits as they served the Bathwater Cocktail.

This was the party that would come to symbolise an era.

And if you've ever been to a nightclub, drunk a cocktail or taken drugs,

then you too have been shaken and stirred

by the frenzied spirit of these extraordinary years.

In the 1920s, imperial Britannia is sliding from view

and modern Britain is stumbling out,

almost like an adolescent, asking endless questions,

a bit contemptuous of the past, trying everything new.

The young called themselves the post-war generation.

They had no idea that another war was on the way.

And in this age of questions,

if there's one that underpins all the rest, it's simply this -

"How best shall we live?"

CHEERING

When news of the end of the Great War reached the streets of Britain,

a massive, heaving party broke out.

There were wild scenes for three days and nights,

with drunkenness and even copulation on the streets.

And at the centre of it all was David Lloyd George,

"the man who won the war".

He'd had his share of scandals, but now he was riding high,

as he called the first general election since 1910.

Pledging a land fit for heroes,

a new Britain of peace and prosperity,

Lloyd George won by a landslide -

a crushing personal victory for a man who was dodgy in private, but in public,

brimmed with plausible promises and sound bites.

Now, we're not yet quite in modern Britain,

but almost everywhere you look, you can find little flashes,

glimpses of the more cynical and pleasure-loving country

that we live in today.

SWING MUSIC PLAYS

A great new age of experiment had arrived

in politics,

writing, art,

sex and drugs.

Nightclubs catered for a new urban scene,

open to anybody with enough cash and a clean shirt front.

When the "bright young things" had tired of their latest party,

they could go along to a club

and "shimmy",

"heebie-jeebie",

do the Camel Walk or the Black Bottom into the early hours.

And the Queen of the Night was a remarkable woman

known in clubland as Ma Meyrick.

A respectable woman, divorced by her husband,

Kate Meyrick said she went into business

to pay for her daughters' education at Roedean.

Meyrick opened her first nightclub in Leicester Square in 1919.

Soon celebrities were rubbing shoulders

with new money and old royalty, refugee Russians and gangsters on the make.

The local gangsters targeted Meyrick herself -

one even beat her up for refusing him entry.

And yet her little empire of the night continued to expand -

the Manhattan, The Little Club, the Silver Slipper and many more.

In 1921, she opened the most notorious nightclub in Soho -

The 43.

If Kate Meyrick was the face of the fun-loving '20s,

then the round, pink face of disapproval

belonged to a man known, without affection, as Jix...

..Sir William Joynson-Hicks, who became Home Secretary in 1924.

When asked what his job was, Jix replied,

"It is I who am ruler of England."

And now he developed an obsession with nightclubs.

As Home Secretary, Jix had 65 nightclubs raided and prosecuted

for breaking their alcohol licence,

and he boasted in the Commons of having 48 clubs closed down.

But Ma Meyrick's 43 Club seemed strangely,

and reliably and infuriatingly, immune.

At long last, the reason became clear.

A senior member of the Soho Vice Squad was taking bribes to protect her.

Finally, Jix got his hands on Mrs Meyrick.

Meyrick was sentenced to 15 months' hard labour -

a physically and mentally shattering ordeal.

But on her release, she went straight back to work.

She was sent to Holloway Prison five times.

But she stares boldly out of photographs with pride.

And two of her impeccably educated daughters married into the peerage.

But this kind of social mountaineering was only for a few.

The vast majority of people lived and died as struggling underdogs.

In the final days of November 1923, in Pollokshaws, just outside Glasgow,

a former schoolmaster gave his only overcoat

to a destitute immigrant from Barbados called Neil Johnson.

Soon afterwards, the Good Samaritan collapsed from pneumonia.

His name was John Maclean -

a hero in Soviet Russia, forgotten here.

Lloyd George once called him "the most dangerous man in Britain".

Maclean's dreams of a better world were inspired by Marxist thinking

and the Russian Revolution.

And in Glasgow, these dreams seemed about to be fulfilled.

In early 1919, the Red Clydesiders demanded a 40-hour working week

and threatened to call a general strike.

Maclean tried to persuade the union leaders

to postpone the strike for at least a month,

so the much more politically powerful English coal miners

could be rallied to the cause,

but they wouldn't listen.

On 27th January, 40,000 Glasgow workers came out on strike,

and by the next day that number had almost doubled.

The strike leaders sent a deputation

to persuade the Government to settle the dispute.

Two days later, the Red Clydesiders

gathered to hear the Government's response.

60,000 strikers poured into Glasgow's George Square.

Suddenly, a tramcar ground to a halt on the south side of the square.

Almost immediately, the police drew their batons, charged on the crowd.

The police then made a second charge up the east side of the square.

But there they were met by a wall of demonstrators

throwing lemonade bottles they'd pulled off a passing lorry.

GLASS SMASHES

Inside the City Chambers, the meeting broke up.

The Sheriff of Lanarkshire rushed out of the building

and tried to disperse the crowd by reading the Riot Act.

But before he could get to the end of it, the paper was pulled out of his hand.

Running battles went on for the rest of the day.

Strike leaders were arrested.

A red flag was raised in the square.

Down in London, panicky ministers were meeting to discuss

what was already being called "Bloody Friday".

But they were reassured to be told that six tanks

and a hundred lorry loads of soldiers

were being sent north by rail that very night.

The next morning, Glasgow was occupied by English troops.

Scottish regiments were confined to barracks in case they mutinied.

During these years, the fear of communist revolution was so great,

the Cabinet later discussed the military defence of London

and using RAF squadrons to bomb the workers.

They needn't have worried.

Just as John Maclean had feared,

the strike failed to spread beyond industrial Scotland.

And when it became clear that the Government was prepared to fight

and even to kill workers in order to win,

the strikers began returning to work.

John Maclean was bitter and close to broken.

During the war, he'd been to prison five times for inciting rebellion,

suffering hard labour, sleep deprivation and force-feeding.

In November 1923, Maclean, who had double pneumonia, finally collapsed.

He was actually in the middle of making a speech

and he was carried off the open-air platform and taken home to die.

Maclean's dreams of political revolution died with him.

But all over Britain, artistic and sexual revolutionaries

were already dreaming new dreams.

MUSIC: "Kashmiri Song" by Amy Woodforde-Finden

Garsington Manor, in Oxfordshire,

once the home of an unconventional aristocrat, Lady Ottoline Morrell.

Nearly six feet tall, with turquoise eyes and thick, red-gold hair,

she was known around the village as the Gypsy Queen.

Morrell turned Garsington into the country seat of the Bloomsbury Set.

You never knew who you were going to run into here.

Virginia Woolf was a regular visitor.

"At Garsington," she said, "even the cabbages are scented."

One morning, after swimming in the lake,

the pacifist philosopher Bertrand Russell emerged, stark naked,

to find himself confronted by the then Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith,

who was himself very busy chasing a beautiful young artist.

Garsington was an exquisite, warm haven for novelists, poets, philosophers,

politicians and artists,

and also for the son of a Nottinghamshire coal miner

called David Herbert Lawrence.

DH Lawrence was one of the first major novelists

to rise from the British working class.

He dreamt of getting back to an earthy, liberated sexuality

and of a new frankness between modern men and women.

They became mutually bedazzled,

the peacocky lady and the cocky young writer.

It was a very English story.

They spent hours at a time together, walking in the countryside and talking.

"Here one feels the real England," said Lawrence.

"This house of Ottoline's, it is England."

She said of him, "His vitality and presence

"seems to make every moment of the day throb with its own intense life."

And Lawrence on the lady -

"There is a deep, spiritual bond between us," he said,

"deep to the bottom."

Lawrence saw Garsington as a refuge from a country

brutalised by industry and war.

Like many of Ottoline's guests, he saw it as a kind of earthly perfection.

But there was a serpent in paradise.

Ottoline always suspected that she wasn't loved

quite as much as she'd have liked.

But she had no idea of the true venom lurking inside the people

she lavished hospitality upon.

And then,

she read Lawrence's new book, Women In Love.

We have devised an entertainment for you,

in the style of the Russian ballet.

Lawrence introduces a tall, rich eccentric,

Lady Hermione Roddice.

Her home was clearly Lady Ottoline's Garsington Manor,

and she was unmistakably the real-life Hermione.

The novel was later made into a film by Ken Russell.

Lawrence describes Hermione as being "impressive but macabre,

"remarkable but repulsive".

It's a merciless character assassination aimed directly at Ottoline

and everything she stood for.

Ottoline was stricken with grief,

and broke off all contact with Lawrence.

That brief dream of a new kind of British culture,

where the aristocracy joined hands with the most radical and thrusting artists,

turned sour almost immediately.

Lawrence's fiery belief in sexual liberation

would influence Britain right into the 1960s and beyond.

But the good times at Garsington came to an end in 1927,

when Ottoline ran out of money, and was forced to sell.

In May 1928, Lawrence heard that Ottoline was ill with bone cancer.

By then he was dying himself from tuberculosis,

and he tried to say sorry.

In a letter to her he said,

"You've influenced lots of lives, as you have influenced mine,

"through being fundamentally generous and through being Ottoline.

"There's only one Ottoline."

And he called her "a queen, among the mass of women".

But the miner's son and the lady never saw one another again.

UPBEAT JAZZ MUSIC PLAYS

The high-culture revolutionaries didn't really catch on at the time.

Most people preferred modern crime fiction,

silent films and the most exciting new technology of the day.

One evening in June 1920,

a crowd was gathering outside the Marconi Works in Chelmsford, Essex,

waiting breathlessly

for the Australian-born opera singer Dame Nellie Melba.

Dame Nellie Melba was the most famous singer in the world.

She was huge.

Melba toast, peach melba, both named after her.

She arrived here in Essex for Britain's first ever radio event.

When she got to the rather primitive studio,

one of the engineers explained to her

that her singing was going to be transmitted

from a 450ft-high tower just outside.

"Young man," she said,

"If you think I'm going to climb up there, you are greatly mistaken."

At 7.10pm, accompanied by a small grand piano,

Dame Nellie directed her voice into the microphone.

STATIC HISS AND CRACKLING

# Mid pleasures and palaces

# Though we may roam... #

The 30-minute concert, sung in English, French and Italian,

began with Home, Sweet Home

and ended with a single verse of God Save The King.

# ..No place like home... #

The world's first international broadcast performance

was picked up by radio pioneers all the way from Chelmsford

to Paris, Madrid, Berlin, even Newfoundland.

The next day, the papers reported that the songs came over

"mellow and perfect, without scratch or jar".

Radio 1, late-night talk shows, Terry Wogan,

this is where it all began.

# ..Ne'er met elsewhere. #

Christmas, 1918.

Lincoln Prison.

An Irish prisoner is serving at Mass.

Choosing his moment, he takes the priest's key from the vestry

and makes an impression in candle wax.

One February night, the prisoner used his copied key,

and walked free from the building,

and then he escaped through a hole in the fence

which had been cut for him by an accomplice from the outside.

The prisoner was Eamon de Valera, the sharp-faced leader of Sinn Fein,

soon to be Ireland's first President,

and his accomplice with the wire-cutters was Michael Collins,

a republican hero, known as the Big Fella.

That night they were working together.

Soon, they would be mortal enemies,

as a bloody civil war turned green Ireland red.

CHEERING

In January 1919, Sinn Fein declared Ireland's independence

and formed its own parliament, the Dail.

This was an assault on the Empire, as well as the United Kingdom.

INAUDIBLE SPEECH

Michael Collins set up

an elite team of IRA assassins known as the Twelve Apostles.

They efficiently targeted British troops and collaborators.

The British responded with an MI5-trained team of British agents

known as the Cairo Gang.

In November 1919, Collins set out to destroy them.

At 8.00 one Sunday morning, the Twelve Apostles burst into eight houses

and shot 14 British agents dead.

One was killed in his pyjamas trying to escape through the back garden,

some were shot in bed, some in front of their wives.

SHOUTING

Now the violence spread in all directions.

Sinn Fein and the Dail were outlawed

and British forces stormed through Ireland.

After 18 months of terror,

Eamon de Valera and Lloyd George agreed to a truce.

Talks began in October 1921.

De Valera stayed at home

and ordered Collins to join the Irish delegation in London.

If he came back with less than Sinn Fein's full demands,

Collins knew he'd be the scapegoat.

As the negotiations began, he said to a fellow republican,

"You might say the trap is sprung."

The talks moved towards a compromise,

with Ireland self-governing, but still inside the British Empire,

and with the six predominantly Protestant northern counties free to choose

to remain within the United Kingdom.

After nearly two months,

the Irish delegation was still agonising over the deal.

With a theatrical flourish, Lloyd George arrived, brandishing two envelopes.

One contained the agreement, the other, the refusal to come to terms.

"If I send this letter," he said,

"it's war, and war within three days.

"Will you give peace or war to your country?

"We must have your answer by 10pm tonight."

One by one, the Irish representatives signed the agreement.

Michael Collins believed

he was giving Ireland something it had wanted for 700 years,

but that night, in his lodgings, he wrote,

"Early this morning, I signed my death warrant."

Back in Dublin, the treaty was narrowly voted through in the Dail.

But Eamon de Valera denounced it as a betrayal and resigned.

Collins and de Valera were now enemies

in a cruel civil war dividing republican families and friends.

SHOUTING AND GUNFIRE

MACHINE-GUN FIRE

In August 1922, Michael Collins, now Chief of the Irish National Army,

went on a tour of his home county, Cork.

Collins stopped at this pub to ask a local for directions,

little realising that the man was an anti-treaty rebel

whose gun was leaning against a wall just inside the bar.

That evening, Collins came back along the same road.

A rebel ambush was waiting. They'd been here for hours,

and some of them had given up and gone back to the pub, but not all.

At eight o'clock, the convoy came round the corner.

GUNFIRE

Shots rang out. The cars stopped.

Collins jumped out, and returned fire from behind his car.

When he saw some rebels running up the hill,

he stood out into the open,

and standing about here,

Michael Collins was killed with a single shot to the head.

GUNSHOT

Hello, CQ. Hello. Hello, Ash.

Hello, Ash. There may be some jamming.

Pa-pa-pa-pa-pa! There may be some oscillation. Whee-ew! Sorry?

Sorry, CQ. Closing down a moment.

Most of Ireland had left the United Kingdom,

but the British were already beginning to identify themselves

less by territory than by culture.

Regular radio broadcasting began in 1922.

Programmes were planned and scripted here at the Cock and Bell

in the Essex village of Writtle.

And all under the guidance of Captain Peter Eckersley,

ex-RAF engineer, born entertainer and all-round show-off.

Hello, CQ. Hello, CQ. This is Two-Emma-Toc of Wrrrittle testing.

This is Two-Emma-Toc of Wrrrittle testing.

Are the signals OK? No, they're not.

Wave your hand if it's all OK.

No waves?

No waves at all.

TUNING WHINE

To start with, Peter Eckersley and his tiny team were only authorised

to broadcast for half an hour a week, Tuesday nights.

They'd pile down to this old Army hut from the pub and they'd put on records,

they'd read out plays,

made spoof weather announcements - they even had their own theme tune.

The nearness of a microphone can do strange things to people,

and as time went on,

Eckersley's exhibitionist tendencies became more and more pronounced.

TUNING WHINE

On one occasion, he promised a night of grand opera.

But there was no Dame Nellie that time.

All the arias were sung by Peter Eckersley himself.

SINGING AND WAILING

But Captain Eckersley was about to have his wings clipped.

On 14th November 1922,

the British Broadcasting Company was established.

John Reith, a tall, balding Scot with a long scar running down one cheek,

was appointed General Manager.

To call John Reith odd would be a wild understatement.

His father was a Scottish Presbyterian minister

and he came from a family who all seemed to dislike each other intensely

and were prone to violent rages.

Reith himself was almost perpetually furious with somebody.

He was one of history's great haters,

and also one of its great puritans.

And this was the man who now had his hands on the BBC.

Reith appointed Peter Eckersley as his Chief Engineer,

and set to work shaping the future of British broadcasting.

Everybody was struggling with two big questions -

what was broadcasting for,

and who should control it.

Well, Peter Eckersley was absolutely clear.

Every week, he and his team would trundle this piano

down from the Cock and Bell pub to his ex-Army hut,

essentially because they wanted to entertain their listeners.

Reith completely disagreed.

For him, broadcasting was about information,

education and high culture.

So who was going to decide?

Well, that at least was becoming clear.

John Reith would decide.

John Reith was in charge.

And in 1929, Captain Eckersley got divorced

and John Reith sacked him.

SINGING AND WAILING

Ah, well, never mind.

All across Britain, other young pioneers were on the up.

In the summer of 1921,

a teenager called Frank Taylor approached a bank manager in Blackpool

for a loan of £400.

It would help him transform the way this country looked.

Frank needed 400 quid to build two houses -

349 and number 347 Central Drive, Blackpool.

They've since been extended into a terrace.

These are very ordinary houses.

These are very special houses.

Frank wanted them for his parents and his Uncle Jack.

Now, Frank was only 16 years old, but he got the plans approved himself

and as he said later, he was ready to do anything

to get these houses built as quickly and as economically as possible.

Taylor set about learning how to build a house with his own hands -

bricklaying, hod-carrying, carpentry, the lot.

Before these houses were finished, before the roofs were even on,

passers-by were stopping and asking to buy them.

Well, he couldn't resist. He sold each of these houses for £1,000.

That was 100% profit.

And Frank asked himself,

"Building houses for the British?

"Perhaps there's money in this."

After the war, Lloyd George had coined the catchphrase "Homes for Heroes".

He had high hopes for a massive State housing boom,

but money was short.

In fact, it was Frank's dream - private, not public housing - that led the way,

producing four million new homes in 20 years...

..all exactly the same and every one of them different.

Homes with hedges and rose bushes

and sheds round the back for pottering in.

Modest homes for peaceful heroes.

Back at the start, Frank Taylor's building business had a problem.

Frank's lawyer discovered that he was too young to own or sell land.

To make things legal,

he'd have to go into a partnership with an adult - and fast.

"What about Uncle Jack?" said Frank.

"Jack Woodrow."

And so Taylor-Woodrow was born, one of the property developers

who together would build millions of homes

and help give Britain her distinctive look for the 20th century.

The '20s produced the triumph of modern private housing,

but they also gave us a modern political curse -

sleaze.

One evening in September 1920,

a socialist maverick called Victor Grayson walked into a bar in London.

Grayson ordered a round.

And then he got a message and he said, "Don't let anyone drink my whisky,"

picked up his hat and his stick, and walked out into the Strand.

His friends never saw him again.

Victor Grayson's last political intervention

was a speech against Lloyd George and a great cash-for-honours scandal.

Unlike most politicians of the age,

Lloyd George never had any money of his own.

And once he became coalition Prime Minister,

he didn't have a truly national party machine to raise funds, either.

And so, in order to keep himself in politics,

he decided to sell honours - peerages, knighthoods, OBEs.

Now, this was hardly unknown at Westminster,

but what made Lloyd George different was the blatant nature of it.

He went into business big,

and he went into business shamelessly.

But the Prime Minister didn't want to get his own hands dirty.

He needed a go-between.

And he found one in a former spy, blackmailer and rogue -

complete with monocle.

His name was Maundy Gregory.

Maundy Gregory would entice potential clients

to his opulent offices here at 38 Parliament Street.

And they had a very useful back entrance.

A kind of menu was quickly established.

You want to be a baronet?

Well, in today's money, £1.3 million.

A knighthood?

£330,000.

Many people assumed that he was somehow a senior part of the Government himself.

In fact, these offices were a kind of clearing house

for lethal gossip, bribery and kickbacks.

Victor Grayson was determined to blow the whistle

on Lloyd George's cash-for-honours operation.

Meanwhile, Special Branch had tipped Maundy Gregory off

that Grayson was "a dangerous communist revolutionary"

and asked him to keep an eye on him.

When Victor Grayson realised that Gregory was spying on him,

he was more than ever determined to expose him.

And eventually,

with enormous guts,

he made a blistering speech in Liverpool in which he said,

"This sale of honours is a national scandal.

"It can be traced all the way down from Number 10 Downing Street

"and to a monocled dandy with offices in Whitehall.

"I know this man and one day I will name him."

Now events began to take on a sinister edge.

In September 1920, Grayson was attacked and beaten up.

Eight days later,

he disappeared.

That evening, Grayson was spotted by a painter called George Flemwell.

Flemwell was painting a landscape close to a small island

on the Thames near Hampton Court.

Two men caught his attention as they passed by in a newfangled invention,

an electric canoe.

As it happened, Flemwell had painted Grayson's portrait

and he recognised him immediately.

He watched as they moored on the island

and saw them go into this bungalow, Vanity Fair.

Vanity Fair belonged to Maundy Gregory.

The only person on the island with an electric canoe?

Maundy Gregory.

Grayson's friends feared that something terrible had happened.

Either he'd been killed,

or he'd been encouraged to disappear.

With Grayson out of the picture,

Lloyd George's honours racket continued.

One of the nominations for a peerage in his next honours list

was a convicted South African fraudster called Joseph Robinson.

The Commons exploded

and the King was livid.

Gregory had to break it to Joseph Robinson that the deal was off.

But Robinson was slightly deaf.

Sitting in his suite in the Savoy Hotel,

he first thought he was being asked for even more money,

and he pulled out his chequebook.

When he finally grasped that he wasn't getting a peerage at all,

he demanded his money back.

The Chief Whip asked Gregory if he knew what had become of it.

"Of course I know what's become of it," hissed Gregory. "I've spent it."

One mystery still remains.

There were occasional claimed sightings of Victor Grayson

right up until the 1950s

in Spain, in north London, even in New Zealand.

But he was never seen for certain ever again.

To all intents and purposes, Victor Grayson vanished into thin air.

The rather mucky Welsh Wizard

was still heading a Conservative-dominated coalition,

but he was reaching the end of his long political road.

In October 1922, the Tory backbenchers

met at the Carlton Club to consider turning on their own party leadership

and chucking out the Welsh cuckoo.

Speaking against Lloyd George were two Conservative leaders-in-waiting -

Andrew Bonar Law, who was ill, and Stanley Baldwin,

who did the talking.

INAUDIBLE SPEECH

Stanley Baldwin's speech was plain but devastating.

Yes, Lloyd George was a dynamic force.

"But," he said, "a dynamic force is a terrible thing."

This one had smashed the Liberals and could smash the Conservatives too.

They voted by 185 to 88 to cut loose and stand as an independent party.

And the Conservatives have never forgotten this moment.

Even to this day, their backbenchers call themselves the 1922 Committee,

their badge of independence from power-drunk Westminster grandees.

Britain would be spared another "dynamic force" for many years to come.

This was an age of political pygmies.

Over the next two years, Britain had four prime ministers - Bonar Law,

Stanley Baldwin,

and Britain's first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald.

He only lasted ten months.

Oh, yes, and then Stanley Baldwin again.

But there was one big beast prowling around.

After 20 years with the Liberals, Winston Churchill returned to Parliament

as the Conservative MP for Epping.

He was hoping Baldwin would offer him a modest Government job.

In fact, the Prime Minister asked him to be Chancellor of the Exchequer,

and Churchill was dumbfounded.

"I should like to have answered, 'Will the bloody duck swim?'"

But he had a sense of occasion, and in fact said to Baldwin,

"I shall be delighted to serve you in this splendid office."

But Churchill was not a splendid Chancellor.

He had one great decision in front of him and he got it wrong.

In March 1925, he summoned four economists to dine at the Treasury

to thrash out the burning economic issue of the day - the gold standard.

The gold standard simply meant

fixing the price of national currencies to a certain amount of gold,

providing a clear, transparent system

which had underpinned the huge boom in world trade

in the golden years before the war.

Globalisation with Britain at the centre.

But during the war, the British economy had been bled dry,

and the City of London had lost its prime position to New York.

The radical young economist John Maynard Keynes

thought that going back to gold

would devastate Britain's already weakened industry.

By instinct, Churchill was also against.

But the Treasury experts said

that going back to the clear, transparent system of the pre-war world

would make the City great again.

But if a system is clear and transparent,

it is also a ruthless exposer of weakness.

All very glorious to put on an old suit of armour,

unless you're too weak to walk in it.

Churchill brooded as they argued it out over the table,

but by the end of the meal he'd been won over.

Britain was going to have to go back on to the gold standard.

But there was no mood

of celebration over this dinner - as one of them put it, "It will be hell."

And hell it was.

The return to the gold standard made British exports more expensive,

including coal.

And with more than a million miners,

the coal industry was the country's largest employer.

To stay in business, the mine owners announced a cut in wages

and an even longer working day.

An industrial dispute was soon coming to the boil.

The mine owners stood firm.

Then, at one minute to midnight on Monday 3rd May 1926,

the TUC called a general strike.

Quietly, the Government had been planning for this moment,

and they now sent telegrams all across the country

with the single code word, "Action".

All Army and Navy leave was immediately cancelled.

Two battleships dropped anchor in the Mersey.

Two infantry battalions marched through Liverpool.

Bring it on!

If the revolution was coming,

the authorities were determined to show they were ready for it.

On the first morning of the strike, Britain came to a virtual standstill.

UPBEAT JAZZ MUSIC

But the Government already had a small army

of strike-breaking volunteers at its disposal.

City gents shovelled coal at the gasworks.

The Ranelagh Polo Club patrolled central London

as special constables on their ponies.

Titled ladies and debutantes turned up to organise food supplies.

One posh drama student wrote to her mother

about the gentleman volunteers on the London Tube.

"It's perfectly mad to hear a beautiful Oxford voice crying,

"'Uxbridge and Harrow train,' rather than, 'Uxbridge 'n' 'Arro.'

"It's perfectly jolly,

"and such an improvement on the ordinary, humdrum state of things."

But it was the railways that attracted the real toffs.

The Honourable Mrs Beaumont led stable duty at Paddington.

Lord Monkswell was a signalman at Marylebone.

And the Honourable Lionel Guest successfully drove a train

all the way from Liverpool Street to Yarmouth.

TRAIN HOOTS

After a few days,

many of the strike-breaking volunteers developed a healthy respect

for the working classes they had often never come across before.

One of them said,

"I found much of my sympathy was more with the men

"than with the employers or the Government.

"I had never realised the appalling poverty which existed."

By the fifth day of the strike, London was running short of flour and bread.

At 4am, the Government sent a convoy of lorries and armoured cars

to take food from the docks by force.

Restless crowds of strikers looked on, but didn't interfere.

This was the psychological turning point.

At noon on the ninth day of the strike,

Arthur Pugh, the leader of the TUC, contacted Baldwin

to tell him that the strike was to be "terminated forthwith".

Baldwin wasn't quite sure he'd heard properly.

"Forthwith," replied Pugh.

"That means immediately."

And Baldwin said, "I thank God for your decision."

The strike was over and, for some, the good times still rolled on.

In June of 1928, a crudely printed party invitation began arriving

at some of the best addresses in Mayfair and Belgravia.

This was to be the most outrageous party of the season,

and it was being held at the local swimming baths.

On the guest list was a young Oxford graduate called Tom Driberg,

later a communist, MI5 spy and Chairman of the Labour Party.

He'd just started writing for the Daily Express gossip column,

The Talk Of London.

Writing anonymously as the Dragoman, Tom Driberg reported

"visions of great rubber horses and flowers floating about on the water".

Everything was illuminated by coloured spotlights

and many of the guests had brought two or three costumes to change into

as the night wore on.

Driberg kept rushing out to the nearest public telephone to file his copy.

This was a hoot, but also a scoop.

DANCE MUSIC

The guests included the brightest of the bright young things -

Mayfair debutantes, the children of lords and Government ministers

and a slender It girl with a weakness for hard drugs

called Brenda Dean Paul.

Brenda Dean Paul remembered seeing unshockable old dowagers

glued to the only available seats

in the dimly lit cubicles by the side of the pool.

She said they seemed "quite contented,

"like plump hens, their lorgnettes fixed on the dripping parade".

The Bath and Bottle Party would turn out to be

the beginning of the end for Britain's roaring '20s.

For an economic storm was brewing across the Atlantic,

and from the dealing rooms on Wall Street,

the chilly winds would soon be blowing all the way to Belgravia.

For the bright young things,

the end of the Bath and Bottle Party was a premonition.

Modern times were giving way to hard times,

and soon the off-colour cocktails and the crushed rose petals

and the glittering pool were only a memory.

The good times were drifting away on a thousand bobbing champagne corks.

And as the sunlight filtered through the skylights,

Britain's fast set were weaving and wobbling their weary way home.

In the next programme -

Black Shirts, green shirts and Gracie Fields,

Butlins and Mrs Simpson.