Little Britain Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain

Swinbrook House, in Oxfordshire,

1932.

Two girls are glaring at each other across a room.

It's been divided straight down the middle,

fascist images on one side of the line,

communist propaganda on the other.

On the red side is a feisty 15 year old called Jessica Mitford.

On the fascist side, her 18-year-old sister, Unity Mitford.

After the fighting, the two Mitford sisters would snuggle up together

and discuss how they'd feel if one of them were ever ordered

to execute the other.

Unity would later tell her sister how she dreamed of meeting Hitler.

Jessica said that she was going to run away and become a communist.

And you know what?

Unity really did become a close, personal friend of Adolf Hitler,

endlessly sitting at his feet while the Fuhrer stroked her hair.

And Jessica really did elope with Winston Churchill's leftie nephew

to the Spanish Civil War, later becoming a communist herself.

The antics of the Mitfords transfixed Britain in the '30s,

and have done ever since.

They became the pin-up girls for the political madness of those years.

In the real world, 99% of the British were much duller.

Thank the Lord!

For me, more than anything else, the 1930s is symbolised by hats.

Podgy politicians in trilby hats, incompetent financiers in top hats,

hard-faced manufacturers in bowler hats,

and endless streams of the unemployed, their flat caps pulled down tight.

Britain's new Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald was, hat-wise,

a man for all seasons - top hat, homburg, bowler.

Bad sign.

And yet MacDonald was a remarkable man,

a long-haired youthful agitator who'd helped to found the Labour Party,

and who, in 1924, became its first Prime Minister, for just nine months.

In June 1929, he was elected again.

I can assure you that my idea is going to be

to give this country a status in the world

based upon the righteousness of its actions.

When the victorious Ramsay MacDonald arrived here

at London's King's Cross station,

he was greeted by 12,000 people cheering wildly.

As he got out of the train, they tried to lift him on their shoulders.

One of the journalists wrote that,

"In the slums of the manufacturing towns and the hovels of the countryside,

"Ramsay MacDonald has become a legendary being,

"the personification of all that thousands of downtrodden men and women

"hope and dream and desire."

But if we remember '30s Britain for one thing, it's for unemployment.

And soon after MacDonald took office,

his hopes for a better future were shattered.

The stock market crashed,

bringing the worst financial collapse the world had, up to that point, ever seen.

By December 1930, unemployment in Britain had reached 2.5 million.

In some areas, nearly everyone was out of work.

The areas worst affected were in the north of England, Scotland and Wales,

where millions of unemployed people eked out their lives on meagre benefits.

And this was unemployment which left families really hungry,

living in under-heated, almost bare houses,

and always with the cosh of the means test waiting for anyone

who showed the slightest sign of existing just a little above the breadline.

Neighbours would rat on neighbours,

and government inspectors quite literally looked inside people's cooking pots

to check that they weren't eating the better cuts of meat.

A young Lancashire man, Walter Greenwood,

was living just this kind of life in a slum called Hanky Park in Salford.

Walter Greenwood started work in a pawnbroker's when he was just 13.

He never earned more than £2 a week, barely enough to pay the rent.

When he was made redundant, he spent nine months

burning up inside with fury at the poverty of his home town.

And then, he began to write a novel.

He said he wanted "to show the tragedy of a lost generation

"who had been denied the natural hopes and desires of youth".

Morning, Dad, morning, Mum.

More like afternoon to me.

Oh, give over, Dad.

The best-selling novel was a morality tale following the Hardcastle family

as they are torn apart by unemployment.

God, just give me a job.

I don't care if it's only half pay.

Their daughter, Sally, played by Deborah Kerr in the 1941 film,

is eventually forced into prostitution.

So you'd go on the loose, would you,

and make respectable folks like me and your mother the talk of the neighbourhood?

It's sick I am of codging old clothes to try and make them look summat like.

And it's sick I am of working week after week and seeing nowt for it.

And it's sick I am of never having nowt but what's been in t'pawnshop

and crawling with dirt and vermin.

I'm sick of the sight of Hanky Park, aye, and everybody in it.

You brazen slut! Keep your lying tongue off your mother, do you hear?

The gritty dialogue and realism were totally new to most of its readers.

One reviewer said it was "a terrible indictment of modern civilisation...

"capitalism is utterly condemned".

DOOR BANGS

BAGPIPES PLAY

MacDonald, that's the view to across the...

Yet Britain's first socialist Prime Minister

seemed to be living in another world.

The only thing we have found to do here thus far, Mr MacDonald,

is to walk over the moors and to get a little trout fishing.

Perhaps I can lure you into taking a little of that

sometime while you are here.

Yes.

MacDonald seemed hopelessly out of touch already with ordinary people,

and he had no obvious solution to what he called the "economic blizzard".

At the Labour Party Conference at Llandudno in 1930,

MacDonald suggested that the best solution for the unemployed

was to return to the land, "where they could till and grow, sow and harvest".

Well, it's an idea, I suppose.

But a rather more modern solution

was coming from another member of the Labour Party.

Enter, stage left, 1930's very own pantomime villain.

We live in a period in which politicians are not very popular.

And believe me, you have my sympathy.

Oswald Mosley started as a Tory war hero,

before discovering socialism and joining Labour.

In his spare time, he liked to move among the rich and beautiful,

trying it on with almost every female he met.

Mosley was a flashy, dashing cad.

But he confined his mistresses to the upper classes.

His personal motto - "Vote Labour, sleep Tory".

But when he finally settled down with the aristocratic heiress Cimmie Curzon,

he promised an end to this vigorous hobby.

He drew a line under it all and confessed to all his previous conquests.

Well, not quite all.

He conveniently forgot to mention his affairs

with both his wife's sister and her stepmother.

But Mosley took his politics seriously.

Influenced by Mussolini's social-Fascist experiment in Italy,

he came up with one idea after another to solve the problem of unemployment.

We have resources, of craftsmanship, of skill, second to none in the world.

But those resources must be mobilised

for a great effort of a united nation.

Mosley wrote up his plans for large-scale borrowing

and ambitious public works schemes. It was called the Mosley Memorandum.

But standing in his way was the Chancellor, Philip Snowden,

a cold little man who blocked every radical policy to create jobs.

"Wildcat finance",

Snowden called Mosley's plans.

MacDonald was a bit more sympathetic, but he flapped and dithered.

Every time Mosley produced a detailed proposal,

he was brutally slapped down until eventually he resigned.

"I didn't come into politics to change the Labour Party," he said later,

"but to change the country."

Thank you. Goodbye.

Very soon the streets of Britain are swamped with lines of marching men

in search of work, on hunger marches, or promoting a new Big Idea.

Among them are the most disciplined, impressive marchers of them all...

Yes, it's the Green Shirts.

The who? The what?

The green-clad shock troops of the people's fighting front,

as the Green Shirts came to be known,

believed in a fairer society, the joys of outdoor living,

but above all, the overthrow of the banking system.

The Green Shirts were founded by a charismatic former Scout leader

called John Hargrave, also known as White Fox.

Hargrave's movement had begun in the 1920s

as a non-political organisation called the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift.

They were dedicated to the joys of camping, handicrafts, world peace...

and silly dancing.

There was a lot of silly dancing in the '20s,

but the mood of the '30s was darker.

Hargrave was converted to a new economic theory called Social Credit,

which seemed a middle way between capitalism and communism.

Working or not, young, old, sick,

everybody would get directly their share of the national dividend.

Why? Because the credit of a community belongs to the community.

Very straightforward.

And as a country grew richer through technical advance,

everybody would have to work far less.

Result - a leisure society.

Now, what's wrong with that?

Alongside the camping, the Green Shirt Movement

now came up with new political slogans and propaganda.

Kibbo Kift dancing was out, marching was in.

The Green Shirts became more and more militant.

A young, unemployed man called Michael Murphy

threw a green brick into the windows of Number 11 Downing Street.

On it were two slogans - "Issue the National Dividend!"

and "Power to the Green Shirts!"

Social Credit had gone guerrilla, and the evolution of the Green Shirts

from the mildly batty but entirely gentle Kibbo Kift

to paramilitary street fighters

is about as good a parable of the age as you're likely to get.

By the summer of 1931, Government spending seemed out of control.

The Treasury demanded a £67 million reduction in payments to the unemployed,

which is the equivalent of £3.4 billion today.

Could a Labour Government slash spending?

And if not, would the Conservatives come in and do it instead?

Very reluctantly, Ramsay MacDonald recommended the cuts to his Cabinet.

REPORTER: What's going on behind these famous doors?

The whole country and the rest of the world is watching

to see how Great Britain is going to put its financial affairs in order.

But the Cabinet was split. Many refused to agree.

MacDonald's authority over his party had collapsed,

and he felt he had no alternative but to offer his resignation to the King.

But even before MacDonald had delivered his letter,

the King announced that he trusted there was no question of him leaving office.

MacDonald was the only man to lead the country through the crisis.

Instead, MacDonald should form a National Government,

including Conservatives and Liberals.

Now, MacDonald knew that if he did this he'd be scuppered - in his own words,

becoming "a ridiculous figure, unable to command support

"and bring odium not only upon his party but himself".

Yet, flattered by the King - at this moment of crisis,

that little bit of magic royal oil - MacDonald agreed.

For the national coalition to go ahead,

MacDonald brought down his own Labour Government and Parliament was dissolved.

On 28th September, he was expelled from the party he'd helped to create.

Among Labour people to this day,

Ramsay MacDonald is bitterly remembered as a traitor.

But in the general election that followed, MacDonald was rewarded

with one of the largest mandates ever won by a British Prime Minister.

But with Tories Neville Chamberlain as Chancellor

and Stanley Baldwin as the effective Deputy Leader,

MacDonald now found himself at the beck and call of the Conservatives.

CHEERING

SLURRING: Conservatives win. Hooray for Ramsay Baldwin!

One of Ramsay MacDonald's first challenges as the leader of the National Government

was to paper over the cracks in the British Empire.

REPORTER: Here he is at last, the mystery man of India, Mr Gandhi,

dressed in just his loincloth, even in the chilly climes of Europe.

He's carrying with him his pots and pans, which he declared at Customs.

On September 12th 1931, Gandhi came to Britain to discuss the future of India.

In the early '30s he'd begun a campaign

of non-violent protest against British rule.

The British Government reacted by arresting some 100,000 Indians,

including Gandhi himself.

The Empire was becoming a worldwide laughing stock.

Here in Britain, Winston Churchill was infuriated by Gandhi's cheek

and resigned in protest from the Government.

Churchill saw the irritating little man in a loincloth

as the beginning of the end for the British Empire.

And nothing he said has worn quite as badly as his description of Gandhi

as "a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, posing as a half-naked fakir".

He said he'd like to see Gandhi bound, laid in the dust outside Delhi,

and trampled upon by the Viceroy, riding an elephant.

But now, to Churchill's horror,

here he was having round-table talks with the British Government.

While the talks were going on, Gandhi toured the country,

visiting unemployed mill workers in Lancashire.

MAN: Oh, he looks a likely lad.

On November 5th, Gandhi was invited to tea with King George V at Buckingham Palace.

The King was most unhappy.

"I tell you what it is, Mr Gandhi," the King blurted out.

"I am not having any of your damned interference in my Empire."

Gandhi replied very calmly,

"I must not be drawn into a political discussion with Your Majesty

"while I am receiving Your Majesty's hospitality."

As he was leaving the palace, he was asked by journalists

if he really felt properly dressed for the occasion.

"It was fine," said Gandhi.

"The King was wearing enough for both of us."

Gandhi left Britain, as eventually his country would too.

Elsewhere, new empires were rising.

Meine deutschen Arbeiter, das deutsche Volk hat nur einen Wunsch...

In 1933, Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany.

He immediately began a massive expansion of the country's industrial production.

In Italy, Benito Mussolini, or Il Duce, was planning the invasion of Abyssinia.

MUSIC: "Rule, Britannia!" by Thomas Arne

In Britain, we had a different sense of national destiny.

Let's look the other way, vote for dull politicians and keep our fingers crossed.

And after all, there were other distractions.

# I've tasted their waffles and corn on the cob

# But give me some hotpot... #

Oi! Are you dreamin'? Come on!

None bigger, none louder,

than Britain's very own superstar of the talkies, Gracie Fields.

This was a great age of film, and Gracie was, by far,

the most popular entertainer in Britain.

Even her director, Basil Dean, seemed puzzled by her success -

what he called her "almost freakish drawing-power".

"Gracie's personality literally bounces off the screen," he wrote.

Queen Mary wondered how it was possible that she sang so beautifully,

while at the same time making "those rough noises".

# I'm walking in the shade Sticking out my chest

# Hoping for the best Looking on the bright side of life... #

Our Gracie was born Gracie Stansfield

in 1898 above a chip shop in Rochdale, Lancashire.

She escaped the cotton mills with a career in music hall,

and by the time she was 25, she was a household name.

In 1934, she appeared in the box office hit Sing As We Go,

the story of a mouthy mill worker called Gracie Platt.

Well, Grace, this lot's knocked the song and dance out of you.

Oh, no, it hasn't, long face.

Come on, lads and lasses, let's leave the mill in good style.

Sing as we go!

# Sing as we go and let the world go by

# Singing a song we march along the highway

# A song and a smile make it right worthwhile

# So sing...as we go along. #

When she hears she's going to lose her job in the Depression,

Gracie takes it on the chin.

"If we can't spin, we can still sing," she insists as she warbles her way

out of the factory gates and off into an uncertain future.

She gets on her bike and ends up here in Blackpool...

..where she tries various jobs. She's a waitress...

Hold on, you haven't said, "How do you do?" to me yet.

..a spiritualist...

Your astral form is very visible to me. It's bright red.

I feel the radiation coming through to me at once.

..and a vendor of Krunchy-Wunchy Toffee here on the seafront.

Threepence or sixpence a packet, Krunchy-Wunchy Toffee.

CHEERING

After a series of adventures,

Gracie returns triumphantly to the reopened factory.

# Sing as we go along

# Sing as we go and watch the world go by... #

Fairytale or not, this is probably the worst film I have ever seen.

But in the 1930s, Britain lapped it up.

One critic at the time wrote,

"In the cinema there is too much sex appeal.

"But the performance of Gracie Fields brings a breath of fresh air.

"This helps keep the right spirit of England together -

"clean living and a total absence of anything unnatural."

Except, of course, the unnatural appeal of Gracie Fields herself.

In history, not everything can be explained.

BOOING

Boo!

The worldwide fascist movement has made a new advance in Germany.

They have reached power

after polling over 17 million votes in a general election.

And we believe that Britain will be the next country to give fascism a chance.

In 1932, Oswald Mosley was ready for his next costume change.

He launched the British Union of Fascists.

CHEERING

Fundraising for his new party, Mosley approached the businessman Israel Sieff

who'd later run Marks & Spencer's.

Sieff obligingly organised a dinner for a dozen business leaders.

In what must be one of the most cack-handed attempts

at political fundraising in British history,

Mosley told Israel Sieff and the assembled gathering that,

"A political party must capitalise on emotion and have a hate plank.

"And today," he said, "the best hate plank is the Jews."

Realising that this might be just a little tactless, Mosley hastily added,

"Of course, this doesn't apply to Jews like you, Israel."

Sieff said nothing,

but rang his bell to alert the butler that Mosley would be leaving.

"But I haven't finished my brandy yet," spluttered Moseley.

"Charles, Sir Oswald is leaving."

And Mosley struggled.

While fascists overseas were holding vast military rallies

and making plans to invade other countries,

the British Blackshirts spent quite a lot of time frolicking at the seaside.

In organised camps they could learn about party principles, practise boxing,

relax in the sun or take a bracing dip.

Fascism-on-Sea.

As ever, Mosley was busy flirting, but not with women this time.

Nope - newspaper tycoons instead.

Lord Rothermere was a particular enthusiast,

and soon his newspaper, the Daily Mail,

was encouraging its readers to join the Blackshirts.

It ran pound-a-week prizes for the best letter on Why I Like The Blackshirts.

It ran beauty contests for Blackshirt women,

and in January 1934 it abandoned all pretence of neutrality

and ran the foamingly pro-Mosley headline, "Hurrah for the Blackshirts!"

Only a small splash for the Blackshirts...

..while at Westminster, politics as usual chugged on.

Ramsay MacDonald retired and Stanley Baldwin took over.

A placid-looking fellow, he didn't make waves, either.

Baldwin was always a strangely anonymous figure.

Once he was travelling on the train

and noticed that a fellow passenger was staring at him.

After a while, the man leaned forward and tapped him on the knee.

"You're Baldwin," he said.

"Harrow, '84."

And Baldwin nodded in agreement and his former school fellow seemed satisfied.

Then a few moments later he leaned forward and tapped the Prime Minister again.

"So," he said, "tell me,

"what are you doing now?"

Baldwin might have been bland, but he did make a lot of promises.

One was to take thousands off the dole queues by building houses across Britain.

On the Continent, the '30s building boom

had produced white, boxy, sharp-edged houses with flat roofs

inspired by modernist architects with an eye on the future.

We had a few here, but most Britons were having none of that.

Instead we got mock-Tudor and mock-Elizabethan homes

that gave the impression of unshakeable stability.

Homes for commuters spread out along the Metropolitan Railway and far beyond.

They called it Metroland.

European modernism seemed simply unable to answer some deep instinct in the British.

Something to do with our love of privacy on a small, crowded island.

Our sense that the past, for all its faults, was perhaps a kinder country.

Metroland expresses British conservatism,

our small dreams,

so easy to sneer at in an age of big, bad ideas.

At dawn on March 7th 1936, in contravention of the Treaty of Versailles,

Adolf Hitler ordered 19 German infantry battalions to march into the Rhineland.

The reaction in Britain was muted.

One diplomat said it was "no more than the Germans walking into their own backyard".

Winston Churchill disagreed.

CHURCHILL: There is a nation which has abandoned all its liberties

in order to augment its collective strength.

There is a nation in the grip of a group of ruthless men

preaching a gospel of intolerance and racial pride,

unrestrained by law, by parliament or by public opinion.

Alarmed British officials were feeding Churchill secret information

about Britain's woeful lack of military preparations.

He understood the Nazis and he was worried.

On this, Churchill was right and he was relentless.

But he was mostly dismissed, not least by the Prime Minister.

Stanley Baldwin once said that he dreamt of making a speech to the House of Commons

that would go something like this.

"When Winston was born, lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle with gifts -

"imagination, eloquence, industry, ability.

"And then came a fairy who said,

"'No one person has the right to so many gifts,'

"and picked him up and gave him such a shake and a twist

"that with all these gifts, he was denied wisdom and judgment.

"And that is why, while in this House

"we delight to listen to his eloquence, we do not take his advice."

CHEERING

Instead, Britain was getting to know its own, home-grown, little Hitler.

This nation again and again in the great hours of its fate

has swept aside convention, has swept aside the little men of talk and of delay

and have decided to follow men of moment.

In October 1936, Oswald Mosley remarried.

His new bride, Diana, was part of one of Britain's most notorious families.

Yes, it's those Mitfords again.

Diana Mitford was the older sister of Jessica and Unity.

Like Unity, Diana was fascinated by Hitler.

So when it came to the wedding, what better place than Goebbels' private house,

with special guest Adolf Hitler?

Hitler gave the happy couple

a signed photograph of himself in a silver monogrammed frame,

complete with German eagle, presented in a leather case lined with red velvet.

Very nice.

With Diana at his side and increasingly under Hitler's spell,

Mosley now turned his party in a more violent and anti-Semitic direction.

REPORTER: 5,000 fascists rally to their mobilisation

for the much-advertised march through the East End.

And Sir Oswald Mosley, Blackshirt leader, arrives to inspect his followers.

On October 4th, Mosley organised a fascist march

through the predominantly Jewish areas of London's East End -

a deliberate act of intimidation.

But Britain's anti-fascists were ready and waiting.

REPORTER: Thousands of East Enders prepare to resist the invasion.

6,000 police are already concentrated in the area.

Others are rushed to reinforce them.

By around 2pm, some 50,000 Jews, communists, trade unionists,

Labour Party members and dockers

had arrived here at Gardiners Corner in Aldgate to halt the march, chanting,

"They shall not pass. They shall not pass,"

and, "One, two, three, four, five, we want Mosley, dead or alive."

Hundreds of policemen were soon holding the line

between the Blackshirts and the anti-fascists.

Word filtered out that the Chief of Police

had directed Mosley to march along Cable Street.

Demonstrators barricaded the street.

The police feared a riot.

At 3.40, the police ordered Mosley and his men to abandon their march.

They then turned on the demonstrators.

All around, there were running battles.

Horses' hooves went flying as children threw marbles onto the streets.

HORSE WHINNIES

Women emptied the unappealing contents of chamber pots onto policemen's heads.

More than 100 people were injured in the battle.

83 of the protesters were arrested.

It became known as the Battle of Cable Street.

The overwhelming public reaction

was one of disgust and - very important, this - mockery.

The interesting thing is how quickly Mosley became a national figure of fun.

The peaked cap, the shiny boots, all that shouting, just didn't work.

When we ask why Britain never fell for a totalitarian leader,

it's about our suspicion of all politicians,

our national inability to go the whole hog, and that sense of humour.

Cable Street was most unusual.

Generally, when people saw lines of marching men in silly uniforms,

they simply sniggered.

TRUMPET FANFARE

It hath pleased Almighty God

that the high and mighty Prince Edward Albert Christian George...

On Wednesday 22nd January 1936, King Edward VIII watched the proclamation

of his own accession to the throne from a window at St James's Palace.

..is now become King.

At his side was a 40-year-old American called Wallis Simpson.

God save the King.

Their drama would be played out

at a toy castle outside London called Fort Belvedere.

The new King was a super celebrity,

in many ways a perfect symbol of modernisation.

Informal, handsome, beautifully dressed,

this man was Hollywood-on-Thames at a time when frankly this country

didn't have a lot in the way of home-grown glamour.

But by the time he came to the throne, Edward had already been having an affair

for two years with the once-divorced and married Mrs Simpson.

His father, George V, had predicted trouble.

"When I'm dead," he once said, "that boy will ruin himself in 12 months."

Edward knew that his affair with a married woman would be a scandal.

But the British media kept their deferential distance.

The Americans had no such qualms,

and paparazzi followed the King and his mistress wherever they went.

REPORTER: Edward says she makes him happy.

Bright hours by the blue Mediterranean.

Exclusive Movietone pictures.

There have been rumours that he might elope with her

and abandon crown and throne for her.

In October 1936, the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, arrived at Number Ten

to discuss world events including the Spanish Civil War

and the mounting threat from Nazi Germany.

Baldwin's first question to Eden

was whether he'd had a lot of telegrams about the King.

Eden replied that he hadn't.

Baldwin said he'd had, "a great many, some from the most extraordinary people.

"I foresee I shall have a lot of trouble over this.

" I hope that you won't trouble me too much with foreign affairs just now."

By now, Wallis Simpson was filing for divorce from her second husband,

opening the way for her to marry Edward and become Queen.

Baldwin panicked and made an appointment to visit the King

at his Fort Belvedere retreat.

To calm his nerves, Baldwin first asked for a drink

and then he came straight to point.

"You may think me Victorian, sir.

"You may think my values are out of date.

"But I believe that I know how to interpret the mind of my own people.

"And although it is true that standards are lower since the war,

"that only leads people to expect higher standards from their King."

A few days later, the King received a letter

from his personal private secretary.

It warned him that his affair was doing untold damage.

The Government was threatening to resign.

Mrs Simpson, he concluded, MUST leave the country.

Two days later, on 11th December 1936, Edward spoke to his people.

EDWARD VIII: I have found it impossible to carry

the heavy burden of responsibility

and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do

without the help and support of the woman I love.

Britain erupted with an outpouring of support for the King,

but hostility towards Wallis Simpson.

In playgrounds across the country children chanted,

"Mrs Simpson stole our King!"

But I think she did this country an enormous favour,

for Edward was pro-German and just a little too close to the Nazis.

He even visited Hitler shortly after he abdicated.

By removing this vain, petulant and politically naive man from the throne,

Wallis Simpson also took away a real source of domestic danger.

Far from being a national blow,

the abdication was a great stroke of national luck.

As Britain recovered from abdication fever,

a little revolution was taking place at the seaside, and no, not a fascist one.

Its leader?

Billy Butlin.

Billy Butlin was a tough little character,

a natural showman who carried a cut-throat razor in his top pocket.

He told friends he had three aims in life - power, money and women.

He started off with a humble hoopla stall, but his big break came

when he bought the European licence for the new, all-American...

..Dodgem car.

The vision of a holiday camp came to Billy Butlin when he noticed

hordes of miserable holidaymakers wandering the streets in the rain,

desperately looking for something to do.

Not everything changes.

He found a location here in Skegness, and began to design the camp himself

with vast dining rooms, theatres and swimming pools.

Guests would stay in individual, hutch-like, mock-Tudor chalets.

Billy's first guest was Freda Monk from Nottingham.

Unable to contain her excitement, Freda had turned up a day early.

One of the managers found her wandering around the still unfinished camp.

Clutching her suitcase and looking lost, she was quickly bundled into her chalet.

Then it began to snow.

Freda spent her first night shivering with cold.

She was spotted the next morning having breakfast wearing her overcoat.

But Freda Monk didn't care about the weather.

She was just delighted to have a week away from ordinary life.

In 1938, the Government passed a new law

giving a week's paid holiday to all industrial workers in Britain.

Hello, dear. Well, this year, we've got holidays with pay.

Ooh!

# Who's been polishing the sun

# Brightening the sky today?

# They must have known just how I like it

# Cos everything's coming my way... #

Butlin came up with the catchy slogan, "Holidays with pay, holidays with play.

"A week's holiday for a week's wage."

The morning-to-bedtime activities

provided by the relentlessly jolly Redcoats

seemed to be exactly what grey Britain needed.

Billy Butlin offered colour and fun and, for the time, surprisingly good food.

So when the news arrived about the Italians invading Abyssinia,

or the Nuremberg rallies,

here there was a constant diet of distraction,

from light opera to ballroom dancing

to the notorious knobbly-knees and glamorous-grannies contests.

You didn't get that in the Hitler Youth.

On 12th March 1938, Hitler's troops marched into Austria.

In Britain we had a new Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.

He announced that, "Nothing could have arrested this action by Germany

"unless we and others had been prepared to use force to prevent it."

And they weren't.

Appeasement, not confrontation, was the British way.

The word "appeasement" is now loaded with shame and embarrassment.

But it once had a gentler meaning - simply to bring peace, or calm down.

And as a strategy for dealing with Hitler, never forget that it was hugely popular

with millions of Britons who supported it at every stage.

Appeasement was pursued by politicians and diplomats with skill,

determination and even nerve, like a chess game.

Only one problem - Hitler wasn't playing chess.

REPORTER: The guns boom from the mountains behind Gottesberg,

as a million German men turn field and forest into a practice battleground.

Once Austria was folded into the Reich,

Hitler turned his attention to part of Czechoslovakia,

the Sudetenland, on Germany's eastern border.

Chamberlain did nothing.

By all accounts, Chamberlain was not an appealing man.

He was cold and he was sarcastic.

But he wasn't stupid.

He'd had a finger in almost every international crisis

since the early 1930s.

He thought that only his wisdom had kept Britain out of the Spanish Civil War.

Only he could soothe Mussolini.

When he became Prime Minister at last, he said,

"I only have to raise a finger and the whole face of Europe is changed."

Chamberlain's problem wasn't ignorance.

It was colossal and tragic vanity.

REPORTER: A gasp of amazement and satisfaction runs around the world.

The Prime Minister decides to fly

to a personal meeting with the German Chancellor.

The world has realised that war would be a folly and a crime.

When Chamberlain arrived in Munich, he was greeted by saluting Nazis.

He responded by waving his homburg hat.

Then it was off to Hitler's Alpine retreat, Berchtesgaden,

and the mission of his life.

This was history's first modern summit, and it was give and take -

British give and German take.

Chamberlain accepted entirely that three million Czechs

wanted to leave their country and join the Reich,

and promised to do his bit to bully the Czech government into agreeing.

And in return he got what?

A short delay and the German promise not to actually invade Czechoslovakia,

unless, of course, they were provoked by "terrorist incidents" on the border.

Round one to Hitler.

Britain was selling Czechoslovakia down the river,

but when Chamberlain returned home, this diplomatic disgrace

was greeted with huge enthusiasm.

Anything to avoid war.

REPORTER: The tumult and the clamour are for the man who has brought to politics

the commonsense point of view of the man in the street.

On his sane judgment we base our hopes of peace and happiness.

CHEERING

Hip, hip, hooray! Hip, hip, hooray!

Two weeks later, Chamberlain was off again.

At a summit on the Rhine,

Hitler gave notice that German troops were now ready to invade the Sudetenland.

Chamberlain protested, but Hitler had decided he was a ninny.

But in Britain, the mood was now rapidly changing.

Preparations for war were under way.

Churchill's instincts had been right all along,

and at last people were starting to listen.

One senior official at the Foreign Office wrote in his diary that he knew

Britain was in no condition to fight, "But I'd rather be beat than dishonoured.

"How can we look any foreigner in the face after this?"

Then Hitler blinked.

Instead of invading Czechoslovakia, he called yet another summit.

Chamberlain called it

"the last, desperate snatch at the last tuft on the very verge of the precipice".

The summit didn't achieve much.

Chamberlain persuaded Hitler to sign a waffle-filled piece of paper.

REPORTER: And the Prime Minister comes home,

home to a welcome that he will never forget.

On his return, Chamberlain was met by a large crowd waiting in the rain.

He waved his precious piece of paper and read it out.

"We regard the agreement signed last night and the Anglo-German naval agreement

"as symbolic of the desire of our two peoples

"never to go to war with one another again."

CHEERING

Back at Downing Street, there was another cheering crowd.

Chamberlain leaned out of a window

and announced that he had brought back peace with honour.

It was, he said, "peace for our time".

On 1st September 1939, German forces invaded Poland.

Chamberlain gave Hitler an ultimatum - withdraw or face the consequence.

REPORTER: The fateful hour of 11 has struck

and Britain's final warning to Hitler having been ignored,

a state of war once more exists between Great Britain and Germany.

With the declaration of war, there was a steady crescendo

of demands for Winston Churchill's return to government.

Chamberlain bowed to the inevitable

and invited Churchill to join his War Cabinet as First Lord of the Admiralty.

We tried again and again to prevent this war.

And for the sake of peace we've put up with a lot of things happening

which ought not to have happened.

But now we are at war, and we are going to make war,

and persevere in making war until the other side have had enough of it.

Churchill hadn't set foot in the Admiralty since 1915.

But when he went in and opened a cupboard, he found one of his own old maps

charting Royal Naval positions from the Great War still hanging there.

Later that day, the Admiralty sent the fleet a signal.

It consisted of just three words.

"Winston is back."

In the next programme, Churchill to the rescue...

Spitfire magic...

tanks, yanks...

and Dad's Army.