New book features old photographs showing 'the Britain our grandparents knew'
A new book shows how much life has changed since 1930-39 and includes ‘a broad swathe of Yorkshire life’. Ruby Kitchen reports.
A new book provides vivid reminders of 1930s Britain, including Yorkshire, captured by skilled press photographers.
This is a decade represented by the glory days of seaside holidays to Scarborough or Whitby, of an ‘old England’ of quaint villages and towns and a ‘new England’ of new trades and homes.
Britain in the 1930s features more than 900 photographs from the archives of Daily Mail publisher’s Associated Newspapers.
The book is written by Maureen Hill and Steven Brindle, with publisher Greg Hill of Atlantic Publishing.
Historian Mr Brindle said the book shows a world on the cusp of being lost to living memory.
“Lots of people have family photographs, say of their grandparents on their honeymoon,” he said. “This book gives us the context of the world they were in. This is the Britain our parents and grandparents knew.”
The late 1920s and 1930s was a tumultuous time in British history, edging away from the echoes of the Wall Street Crash and before the arrival of the Second World War.
It was, in JB Priestley’s words, a world characterised by three kinds of society in Britain.
An ‘old England’, of picturesque villages and parish churches and quaint market towns. Then ‘industrial England’, with mill towns and the textile trade and rows of terraced houses, blackened by soot. Finally, said Mr Brindle citing the Bradford-born author and playwright, there was a ‘new England’. It brought electrification, with a boom in new trades such as advertising or the new worlds of radio and cinema. It brought semis and bungalows.
“The 30s are remembered as having harsh high unemployment,” he said. “Of being on the dole, and means tested benefits. It was also an age where working class people were able to live more comfortable lives.”
The book now explores a land of these striking contrasts. There are pictures of the busy fish markets and the docks in Hull, road safety signs in Sheffield, and crowds greeting the Sheffield Wednesday team after an FA Cup win.
The pictures capture life in industrial cities such as Leeds. They show trams running, with very few cars and no road markings.
There are market days in Ripon and Beverley, views from Robin Hood’s Bay, punting on the River Nidd and honeymoons in Scarborough.
There are also the fashions of the 1930s when people owned fewer clothes and had to carefully consider their outfits.
“People might remember their grandparents telling them about buying a live goose, or looking forward to a week at the seaside because it was their only holiday,” said Mr Brindle. “There’s lots of aspects. There is a broad swathe of Yorkshire life.”
Britain in the 1930s is published by Atlantic Publishing, hardback £50. It features contributions from photographers including James Dixon-Scott, Anthony Frank Kersting, Will F. Taylor, and Leo Herbert Felton, and from the archive of Getty Images.