A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars by Alwyn Turner

This review appears in the latest issue of Liberator – no. 434. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

A Shellshocked Nation: Britain Between the Wars

Alwyn Turner

Profile Books, 2026, £25

The most startling thing about Britain in the inter-war years is what didn’t happen. Across Europe, Communist and Fascist regimes took power, but neither force ever came close to it here. George V’s verdict on the General Strike was “That was a rotten way to run a revolution, I could have done it better myself,” but few on the left had revolutionary ambitions and the aims of the unsuccessful strike were modest. Meanwhile on the right, Alwyn Turner argues, Oswald Mosley and his New Party were in decline after 1934: 

After that early boom, the party never really amounted to anything. The momentum rapidly dissipated, and no candidates were fielded in the 1935 general election. It wasn’t entirely clear what the movement was supposed to do, save to provide a dramatic backdrop to Mosley’s speeches, and it failed at that: the thuggery and anti-Semitism ensured that no one paid attention to what its leader was saying.

Other factors Turner points to enhance this impression of stability. The murder rate, for instance, was lower than it had been in Victoria’s day and a tenth of what it was in the United States.

What is particularly enjoyable about Turner’s approach to history is the way he combines high politics with the concerns and the entertainments of the masses. This prevents us from viewing the period as one of unrelenting grimness – think of the absurd view of the Seventies as wholly taken up by strikes and power cuts that pertains on social media and in popular podcasts. 

Sometimes the two streams turn out to be related. The inter-war years saw the decline of music hall and the rise of the cinema and radio. 

Some politicians adapted to these changes better than others. When first invited to address the nation live on BBC radio, both Asquith and Ramsay MacDonald found it natural to opt for a relay of a platform speech at a public meeting; it was Stanley Baldwin, who sat down with a studio microphone and spoke in conversational tones, who was adjudged to be more effective.

Modern readers, familiar with the concept of posttraumatic stress, will not be surprised to learn there was a high male suicide rate after the first world war. And for all the fun Turner brings to light, I remember that my mother used to quote her own mother as saying: “We hadn’t got over the last war when the next one came along.”

Asquith: The Movie

This television play, screened in 1983 as part of the ITV series Number 10, deals with Asquith's battle with the House of Lords to secure the passage of the budget in 1910.

That measure has gone down in history as Lloyd George's budget, but Asquith himself had done much of the work on it while he was still chancellor.

One thing that must have confused viewers at the time is that Asquith is played by David Langton, who had become well known a few years before for playing a Tory MP, Richard Bellamy in the wildly popular series Upstairs, Downstairs. Think of it as a superior version of Downton Abbey.

As to young Puffin Asquith, I have a book signed by him.

Violent Bonham Carter: Someone's been talking out of turn

From The Female Illuminati

When I ask him what became of Violent Bonham Carter, Lord Bonkers is evasive. "Some say he is lying low after an unsuccessful attempt to steal the Crown Jewels: others that he is to be found in one of the pillars of the Chiswick flyover," is all the old boy will offer.

If Violent is still with us, he won't be happy that his name is being banded about so freely. Following my earlier examples of 'Violent Bonham Carter' appearing in print, here is a set from the internet.

ABE Books listing for Lantern Slides: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter 1904-1914 edited by Mark Bonham Carter and Mark Pottle

Finest Hour, 133 (Winter 2006-7). Churchill Remembered: CD Review by John Ramsden.

Recruitment of Liberals into the Conservative Party, c. 1906-1935 by Nicholas Martin Cott (PhD thesis, University of Newcastle, 2015)

The making of Orpington: British political culture and the strange revival of liberalism,

1958-64 by Y. Membery (PhD thesis, University of Maastricht, 2021)

"A gent to his fingertips" was also how people described Violent - particularly if he had just threatened them.

Alistair Carmichael marks 75th anniversary of Jo Grimond’s election

Alistair Carmichael is the latest guest on Iain Dale's All Talk podcast, talking about his own career and about the former Liberal Party leader Jo Grimond. 

The Liberals and then Liberal Democrats have held the Orkney and Shetlands seat ever since Grimond won it at the 1950 election.

Thanks to Caron Lindsay for flagging this up on Lib Dem Voice - follow that link to see a photograph of a very young Alistair. He is his usual engaging self in the podcast.

I never met Jo Grimond. The nearest I came to it was in the 1983 general election, when he did a public meeting for us in Kew. Being a good activist, I went canvassing instead - and there were no certificates and medals from Mark Pack in those days.

He gave his speech, I was told later, and then said, looking at the timetable he'd been given:

"It says 'Questions' here, but as I'm stone deaf these days, that's no use. I'll just come round the hall and meet you all."

And so he did, charming everybody.

But I did meet Laura Grimond, a significant figure in the party in her own right in her day, and also the wife of Jo, daughter of Violent Bonham Carter, the gender-fluid gangster even the Krays feared Violet Bonham Carter and granddaughter of Mr Asquith.

She came to Market Harborough a couple of times in the Eighties, and I've found a photo from those days in the British Newspaper Archive. It shows Laura Grimond, Phil Knowles (the current leader of Harborough District Council) and me. One day I'll share it with you.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: The prime minister was having an affair with Stanley

The question of the Bonhams Carter* and their hyphens is not a simple one. Helena Bonham Carter doesn't have one, but her grandfather Sir Maurice 'Bongie' Bonham-Carter, Asquith's principal private secretary, did. I knew a member of the family when I lived in Kew in the Eighties, and he had one too.

* Lord Bonkers assures me this is the correct plural - cf. courts martial.

Thursday

To Bloomsbury for the launch party of Precipice – Robert Harris’s novel about those terrible days before the outbreak of the Great War. 

He proves chiefly interested in Mr Asquith’s dalliance with Venetia Stanley, but this tale is not new to those of us who were around at the time. Indeed, when I first heard that the prime minister was having an affair with Stanley, I feared things were worse than they turned out to be. 

I prick up my ears when Harris tells me he has drawn heavily upon papers held by the Bonham-Carter family. If Violent got his hands on juicy gossip, you can be sure he turned that knowledge into hard cash. 

Some correspondents, incidentally, ask why Violent Bonham Carter had no hyphen when the rest of the clan do. The answer is that his was stolen from him one evening at Esmeralda's Barn by Ronnie Kray, and this lack of respect led to the gang warfare that so disfigured our capital in the Sixties.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• ‘The Defenestration of Ming Campbell’
• Pimped with underglow lights and belting out Hildegard of Bingen at full volume
• I catch Jennie rolling her eyes and feel a little ashamed

Robert Harris's Precipice, Asquith and Venetia Stanley

Billericay Dickie had a love affair with Nina in the back of his Cortina. Mr Asquith, it seems, had one with the socialite Venetia Stanley in the back of his prime-ministerial 1908 Napier.

Today's Observer has an article on Precipice, Robert Harris's forthcoming novel about the summer of 1914 and Britain's entry into the First World War.

Asquith wrote to Venetia Stanley three times a day, and those letters have been central to Harris's research for his new novel:

“I became fascinated by this aspect of Asquith’s story," said Harris. "We can account for so much of his time in the run-up to the first world war, but this enabled me to tell that story day by day through the 560 letters Venetia kept."

In his last days in No 10, having resigned and invited the Conservatives to form a coalition government after a fateful weekend in 1915 when he was unable to reach Stanley, Asquith is believed to have disposed of her letters. "He had a huge bonfire, but I could put together her replies, I realised, from what he had said and from the bits he quoted."

The claim that the physical element of the affair has been underestimated, Harris believes, is supported by the fittings of the PM’s car: "It was not how we might imagine now. It was totally sealed, like a bedroom on wheels, with blinds on the windows and only a push-button intercom to speak to the driver."

But sex is not the only missing component. Stanley and Asquith also discussed everything. "He enjoyed talking to her because she was clever and not trying to get a job or anything," said [Harris] ....  "So I feel that Venetia, like so many significant women behind the scenes, has been somewhat excised from history. If nothing else, I hope my novel will help give her the place she deserves."

Lord Bonkers, no doubt, will be consulting his lawyers, but I shall leave you with Charles Masterman's account of those summer days before Britain declared war:

It was a company of tired men who for twelve hot summer nights, without rest or relaxation, had devoted their energies to avert this thing which had now come inevitably to pass. No one who has been through the experience of those twelve days will ever be quite the same again. 

It is difficult to find a right simile for that experience. It was like a company of observers watching a little cloud in the east, appearing out of a blue sky, seeing it grow, day by day, until all the brightness had vanished and the sun itself has become obscured. 

It was like the victim of the old mediaeval torture enclosed in a chamber in which the walls, moved by some unseen mechanism, steadily closed on him day by day, until at the end he was crushed to death. 

It was most like perhaps those persons who have walked on the solid ground and seen slight cracks and fissures appear, and these enlarge and run together and swell in size hour by hour until yawning apertures revealed the boiling up beneath them of the earth's central fires, destined to sweep away the forests and vineyards of its surfaces and all the kindly habitations of man.

And all this experience - the development of a situation heading straight to misery and ruin without precedent - was continued in the midst of a world where the happy, abundant life of the people flowed on unconcerned and all thoughts were turned towards the approaching holidays and the glories of triumphant summer days.

Mr Asquith can sleep soundly in Sutton Courtenay churchyard

Yesterday the Liberal Democrats held two council seats in Oxfordshire. 

Because of ill health, Richard Webber had been forced to resign both the seats he held. They were the Sutton Courtenay ward of Vale of White Horse District Council and the Sutton Courtenay and Marcham ward of Oxfordshire County Council.

And both seats were held for the party in the resultant by-elections yesterday by Peter Stevens.

Andrew Teale will tell you all about the surprisingly industrial geography of the seats, but the village of Sutton Courtenay itself is on the Thames.

And in its churchyard you will find the tomb of a Liberal prime minister: H.H. Asquith. He chose to be buried at Sutton Courtenay rather than in Westminster Abbey.

He's not the only famous person buried there: you will also find the grave of a celebrated 20th-century writer.

Hear Asquith promote the People's Budget of 1909

I don't think I've heard Asquith's voice before. This is him speaking on the People's Budget of 1909: presumably this recording was intended for distribution as a gramophone record.

It is remarkably clear, and we even catch what sounds like a "Will this do?" at the end.

Boris Johnson up before the headmaster

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Martin Hammond, who was Boris Johnson's housemaster at Eton, famously summed up his 17-year-old pupil:

"Boris really has adopted a disgracefully cavalier attitude to his classical studies. [He] sometimes seems affronted when criticised for what amounts to a gross failure of responsibility (and surprised at the same time that he was not appointed Captain of the school for the next half).

"I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation that binds everyone else."

On Sunday the historian and public school headmaster Anthony Seldon summoned him to his study.

Seldon was interviewed on Johnson by Tim Adams, who wrote:

Seldon is a man who has devoted his life to understanding and nurturing the kind of emotional intelligence and civic responsibility from which society can be woven. Johnson represents the wilful rupture of those beliefs. 

Talking about him, Seldon acknowledges the former prime minister’s charisma "lights up the room", but you sense too his almost personal feeling of betrayal at the squandering of those gifts, that headmasterly reaction that Johnson had let down his school, his family, his nation, but most of all, himself.

And here is Seldon's view in his own words:

“"The great prime ministers are all there at moments of great historical importance,but they have to respond to them well. Chamberlain didn’t; Churchill in 1940, did. Asquith didn’t; Lloyd George did in 1916.

"Johnson had Brexit, he had the pandemic, he had the invasion of Ukraine and incipient third world war. He could have been the prime minister he craved to be, but he wasn’t, because of his utter inability to learn."

Moving on from school, I'm currently reading Simon Kuper's Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Over the UK. 

My conclusion so far is that Oxford, with its emphasis on the ability to talk plausibly on a subject you know little about, fits its alumni to be contrarian journalists but not serious politicians.

When the Conservatives insisted on Churchill's demotion before they would join a wartime coalition

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Yesterday we were debating Theresa May's habit of scraping the mould of the top of a jar of jam and then using it.

Today it is "Winston Churchill: Hero or villain?"

For what it is worth, I suspect May is right. We are too squeamish about food these days.

And Churchill? He was in many ways a flawed character, but I am glad he was there in 1940. Without him, it is unlikely that Nazism would have been destroyed.

Churchill, of course, was a Liberal for a while and at the forefront of the Asquith government's social reforms.

Those Conservatives who have been claiming a monopoly on him today should remember what happened in 1915, when Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty and Asquith wanted a coalition government to prosecute the war:

A new coalition was needed to bolster confidence. But the Conservatives were deeply hostile to Churchill and demanded his resignation. Backed into a corner, Asquith had no choice but to agree, and on the 15 November the resignation was confirmed. 

Demoted to the ceremonial position of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, the hurt and demoralised Winston resigned from the government altogether and left for the Western Front.

Talking of Conservatives who do not understand Churchill, here is Richard Evans' magisterial demolition of Boris Johnson's biography of the great man.

GUEST POST For Liberalism to succeed we must embrace all of its creed

Patrick Maxwell fears identity politics and the fight against Brexit are undermining Liberalism in the Liberal Democrats.

Liberalism is the most popular political ideal in the world. The notions of freedom and justice have had the power through the centuries to inspire and drive social, political and economic freedom.

Despite this, the creed espoused by the greatest civil rights activists and the big beasts of international suffrage seems in danger of succumbing to the identity politics mob and losing its original purpose and soul.

The dawn of identity politics has led to liberal values being widely distorted. Centrist politics remains in danger of becoming ignored in favour of a clear left-right divide ignoring any compromise and sensible pragmatism.

The 'culture wars' in the United States have driven many into their respective moral trenches, never to be reconciled from their echo-chambers. The 'no-platforming' evident in many universities in a quest to conform to the 'respect' agenda has driven many on the right to cry wolf about their new found state of victimhood.

Many a commentator has lamented the loss of freedom of speech, which has led to 'freedom fighters' and keyboard warriors to launch a more visceral attack on their 'social justice warrior' opponents. This war of attrition could have desperate ramifications for centrist and liberal values. Honest, pragmatic politics must respond.

Liberalism can only work when economic freedom and social and personal emancipation go hand in hand together. The task for progressive parties across Europe and America is to make the case for a Liberalism that allows for personal freedom but also the right to offend. This challenge includes standing up for all liberal principles, in positive and compassionate capitalism, cultural and social freedom and the right of equal opportunity.

John Locke, one the greatest Enlightenment philosophers and a founding father of the modern Liberal creed, was instrumental in the rising popularity of British freedom of religion, separation of Church and state, arguing the case for every man to have the right to life, liberty and property, the phrase also used by the Founding Fathers of America in their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness expression in the opening lines of The Constitution.

It was this early promotion of civil rights, free trade and democratic suffrage that founded the basis of the Welfare State in the early 20th century under Campbell-Bannerman, Lloyd-George and Asquith. The Liberal Democrat party today seems to have forgotten its original roots in the vain hope of stopping the biggest issue of the day in Brexit and distancing themselves from the mark the party made during the Coalition years.

For a party that had long been seen as a fringe protest movement, having members around the Cabinet table showed what progress the party had made. With Vince Cable as leader, a man who cites capitalism as only practical, not morally positive, the party is in danger of becoming that fringe wing that does not visibly promote the widespread benefits of modern free-trade policy out of a fear of being called a right-wing neo-liberal.

This position is not sustainable for the long-term future of the party and the obsession with Brexit and a second referendum, though honourable causes, won't do them any good come the next election.

Henry Campbell-Bannerman's two-and-a-half year stint as Prime Minister led to the beginning of the Welfare State and the Liberal reforms in the run to the great People's Budget of 1910. CB's pragmatism in ensuring 'peace, retrenchment and reform' secured widespread popularity, friendly foreign relations and better conditions and rights for workers, the man himself affirmed that he was 'keenly in sympathy' with members of the newly-formed Labour movement.

Yet he was still labelled an old-style Gladstonian Liberal by many, despite his large reforming stance. His example as leader is one of pragmatism and compromise to achieve progress, and the modern party could take a lot from his example.

To make headway in the age of identity politics, the winner-takes-it-all type of politics that has enveloped many of the movements in Westminster, the Liberal Democrats must present a reforming, pragmatic, socially and economically progressive message to the electorate, which means including all the aspects of their core belief to ensure a positive and influential future for the party.

Patrick Maxwell blogs at Gerrymander.

Listen to Mr Asquith

Here is the Liberal prime minister Herbert Asquith making the case for Lloyd George's 'People's Budget' in 1909.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Confessions of a Cabinet Minister

I wonder how many of my younger readers will get the joke here? The worry is not that Lord Bonkers will get too old, but that I will get too old.

Tuesday

Down at Cowley Street or whatever it calls itself nowadays, I congratulate the bright young things of the use they are making of the electric interweb and wireless Twitter. As I tell them, the Liberal Party, Herbert Asquith in particular, adopted cinematography with enthusiasm in that technology’s early years.

Asquith starred in a rather fruity comedy named Confessions of a Cabinet Minister, which was followed (with diminishing returns, according to the critics) by Confessions of a Privy Councillor, Confessions of a Prime Minister and Confessions of a Statesman Forced from Office by that Bastard Lloyd George.

You can see where Helena Bonham Carter Gets It From.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary

• The Hinge and Bracket of English pace bowling

Charles Sydney Buxton (1884-1911)

I went to the antiques market in Market Harborough this morning. The best thing there was a table of ephemera. On it I found this little piece of Liberal Party history, which obviously dated from one of the 1910 general elections.

Charles Sydney Buxton, it turned out, fought Woodbridge at the January 1910 election. It had been gained from the Conservatives in the landslide of 1906 by Robert Everett (a veteran fighter for farmers' interests against the landlords).

Charles proved unable to hold it and the Woodbridge division remained Conservative until it was abolished after the 1945 election. The prominent Liberal journalist Roger Fulford managed a second place there as late as 1929.

Charles's father, grandfather and great grandfather were all Liberal MPs. His father served in the cabinet under both Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith.

His mother was Constance Mary Lubbock, which makes him a kinsman of Eric Avebury who died today.

Charles did not live to contest another election. He died from peritonitis in 1911 aged 27.

Not so long ago he would have been described as a forgotten figure. But thanks to the internet you can read all about his short life.

Go the University of Toronto website and you will find a PDF of a book about Charles commissioned by his father - Charles Sydney Buxton: A Memoir by H. Sanderson Furniss:

I had thought of calling this last chapter "The End," but on thinking it over I changed the title to "Plans for the Future"; for it was not the end. 

In the Sussex Memorial scheme, founded to bring education to the agricultural labourers in the Sussex villages ; in the Buxton Memorial Scholarship, which brings each year an agricultural labourer as a student to Ruskin College; in the annual scholarship, founded in his memory and provided by past and present students of the College; in Buxton Cottage on the Chiltern Hills, bought by the Workers' Educational Association and opened in his memory as a resting-place for those who are devoting their lives to working-class education; above all, in the hearts and lives of those who were inspired by his example, Charlie still lives.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Struck a glancing blow by Violet Asquith

Struck a glancing blow by Violet Asquith

I see this morning’s Daily Mail has got hold of rather a ticklish story:

At the end of a long, relatively uneventful Edwardian summer, the papers were suddenly full of dire news about the 21-year-old daughter of the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith. 

The headlines were shocking: ‘Premier’s daughter missing’, said one; ‘Miss Asquith’s peril’, warned another. She had been reported missing at Cruden Bay on the Scottish coast, where the family had been spending their holiday in September 1908 at a rented fortress with the ominous name of Slains Castle. 

After a dangerous search lasting half the night, Violet Asquith was finally discovered lying in wet grass on a rocky ledge above the sea - uninjured but apparently barely conscious.
A doctor was summoned and she quickly revived. But rumours continued to swirl: had she fallen by accident or had there been foul play? Some even whispered that she might have been intentionally trying to harm herself. 

The Prime Minister moved swiftly to quiet any speculation by offering an innocent tale about his daughter stumbling in the dark. But no one could explain why Violet had remained missing for so many hours. It took several days of determined stonewalling before the Press stopped asking questions. 

What happened that night has long remained a mystery - but buried in the Asquith family papers, now at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, I have discovered an astonishing revelation: the story of Violet Asquith’s brush with death is inextricably linked with her doomed love for a rising young star in her father’s Liberal cabinet - Winston Churchill.

Well, I suppose it was bound to come out sooner or later. As one who was also staying at Cruden Bay that summer, I can confirm that Violet Asquith did indeed carry a torch for Churchill and threw herself off the cliff when he made it clear that he preferred his darling Clementine.

What the Mail does not record, however, is the reason that Violet Asquith survived her plunge. It happened that I was walking along the beach composing a speech on Chinese Labour at just the time that she went over the edge. The Asquith were always sporty, healthy girls, and if she had scored a bull’s eye on my crumpet her father might well have had to find a candidate to fight a by-election in Rutland South-West. As it turned out, she caught me a glancing blow. This broke her fall sufficiently to save her from serious harm, but I still get a pain in my shoulder in wet weather.

Previously in Lord Bonkers' Diary...

• Call Nick Clegg
• The Life of Pie

Struck a glancing blow by Violet Asquith

Over on Liberator's blog, Lord Bonkers casts new light on events at Cruden Bay in the summer of 1908.

Isobel Logan, suffragette

Nora Logan was one of a group of wealthy antivivisectionists who grew old together in a mansion flat overlooking Regents Park Zoo. Nora and her eldest sister, Isobel, were militant suffragettes, and both were imprisoned for refusing to pay a fine for smashing windows writes Nina Boyd. And it seems that Isobel was a more significant suffragette than Nora among the daughters of my hero J.W. Logan.

Isobel Logan appears in the Who's Who of Radical Leicester:

Isobel became dissatisfied by the lack of action by the Women’s Liberal Association on the question of women’s rights. She resigned, saying it that ‘the question of women's suffrage is so important and its continued denial so great an injustice to women, that it is impossible for me to belong to an association that does not put the question before others.’ 

She cut quite a dash when she attended suffrage meetings in a motor car, however soon after joining the WSPU in 1909 she took employment as a bookbinder. In June 1909, she was among 27 women who were arrested following a deputation to Parliament when windows were smashed in Whitehall and Downing Street. Rather than pay a fine, she opted to go prison.

And you can read a contemporary account of her arrest in the New York Times.

Charles Masterman in a British Pathe film

Note first the Suffragette outside the gates of Parliament - you can see her in the photo above too. Then Mr Asquith arrives at the House by taxi - note that he pays for it out of his own pocket.

Then the scene changes and we see Lloyd George, Sir Rufus Isaacs and this blog's old friend Charles Masterman. Masterman is the younger man in the dark overcoat and stands on the right of the group of three.

Something does not quite add up here. The clip comes from 1913, yet Masterman was not asked to join the cabinet until February the following year.

As we saw a couple of weeks ago, this promotion obliged Masterman to resign his seat and fight a by-election. He was unable to win it and later lost a second by-election in Ipswich.

A little piece of Liberal history for £5

In a Stamford bookshop today (though not the one that stuffs owls) I bought a copy of a one-volume edition of The Autobiography of Margot Asquith edited by Mark Bonham Carter. He was the son of Margot's stepdaughter Violet.

The book is inscribed:

For my own darling Ilona with all the love in the world from the author's son

Puff

April 1967

Which means that Puff must be the film director Anthony "Puffin" Asquith, who died the following year.

Those Asquiths and Bonham Carters in full

To mark the centenary of Herbert Asquith’s accession as British prime minister, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography has set up a page on him and his descendants.

But there is no mention of a character to whom Lord Bonkers often refers: Violent Bonham Carter, the East End gangster.

And his lordship also insists that the correct plural is Bonhams Carter - along the lines of courts martial, I suppose.

Thanks to Lib Dem Voice.