On August 4th, David Davies presented the Club’s first ‘Face to Face’ talk for 18 months, about ‘The Clouded Years (1919 -1939)’.
A good turnout of members were treated to a historical summary of the inter-war years in Great Britain, where not everything that happened was as troubled and negative as the usual impression of great poverty, high unemployment and slum housing.
GB was in fact surprisingly stable politically, resisting the threat of fascism. The value of pensions and the school leaving age both rose, and infant mortality fell, with GB having the highest per capita income of any European country. The National Grid, the BBC and the NHS were all created, and motor vehicles became affordable to many. Only towards the end of the period did the dark clouds of WWII threaten, with the rise to power of Hitler and Mussolini.