Here was a new generation, shouting the old cries, learning the old creeds, through a reverie of long days and nights; destined finally to go out into that dirty gray turmoil to follow love and pride; a new generation dedicated more than the last to the fear of poverty and the worship of success; grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken….
(F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise, 1920)

The uncertainties of 1919 were over—there seemed little doubt about what was going to happen—America was going on the greatest, gaudiest spree in history and there was going to be plenty to tell about it. The whole golden boom was in the air—its splendid generosities, its outrageous corruptions and the tortuous death struggle of the old America in prohibition.
(F. Scott Fitzgerald, Early Success, 1937)

This is a big old large-format hardback coffee table book from 50 years ago, packed with popular history and overflowing with entertaining trivia about the 1920s. Lots and lots of evocative black-and-white photos and 30 or so so full colour plates from an era long lost.

What makes it different from others of its ilk is that the author, Alan Jenkins, was a kid at the time – he was 6 to 15 during the 1920s – and so the book contains many personal anecdotes and memories, of sports, movies, songs, what people wore, all manner of things. The first sentence sets the scene with ‘I am thirteen…’ describing him among 1920s bric-a-brac. There’s a vivid description of him listening to a home-built radio which used his metal bedframe as an aerial. He remembers seeing the first production of ‘Journey’s End’ when aged 14, and starting to ask his father about the war. He remembers being taken on a school trip to the newly reopened Shakespeare Memorial Theatre to see ‘As You Like It’. These anecdotes could have been annoying but they’re sweet and bring many of these dusty old themes to life.

American Jenkins’ premise is that the 1920s was the decade in which the American way of life invaded Britain as never before – in music, fashion, hairstyles, cosmetics, songs, dances, movies, drinks (cocktails) and much more. This explains why his book freely mixes American and British culture, often in the same paragraph, as if they’re virtually the same thing – while ignoring anywhere else, no France or Germany or everywhere. OK, there’s the occasional mention of Paris but it is overwhelmingly a time capsule of Anglo-Americana.

Factoids

11 November 1920 – the cenotaph in Whitehall unveiled. The body of an unknown soldier was brought to England in a French destroyer, then transported to Westminster accompanied by five admirals, three field marshals, two generals and one air marshal followed by the Royal Family. The idea had been thought up by the Reverend David Railton, Vicar of Margate.

The 1924 Empire Exhibition at Wembley, then on the outskirts of London (the one described by Virginia Woolf), was the occasion of the first radio broadcast by King George V. Intellectual snobs set up the Won’t Go To Wembley (WGTW) association.

1926 General Strike. In Britain there were 5 million Trade Union members out of a total working population of 15 million. Newspapers ceased for nine days. Ad hoc ones were created and distributed by hand, notably Winston Churchill’s British Gazette. The general strike collapsed after nine days. The miners stayed out on strike till August. The last workers went back at Christmas. Given the extreme violence of similar events on the Continent (Weimar Germany, Fascist Italy), it was remarkably peaceful. No-one was killed. Hugh Gaitskell, an undergraduate at Oxford, distributed The British Worker.

When it was over there was a thanksgiving service at Windsor were King George V was overheard telling the Dean: ‘That was a rotten way to run a revolution. I could have done better myself’.

A portrait of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, ‘The man who kept his head’, was the Royal Academy’s picture of the year. (A role he was to repeat in his calm handling of the Abdication Crisis exactly ten years later, in 1936.) I can’t find this specific one online but then Baldwin had 78 portraits done.

Invention of the Hunger march, first one in 1920, biggest one in 1929 (the most famous one of all was to be the Jarrow March of October 1936).

The Charleston Invented at the Jungles Casino, in Charleston, South Carolina. A guy called Dan White perfected it. It came to wider attention when included in the New York musical show Runnin’ Wild. It was introduced to dance teachers in Soho in 1925.

Cocktails, America’s most pervasive contribution to European culture before Coca Cola. A distinctive symbol of the 1920s was the bartender in white jacket athletically shaking his cocktail shaker or pouring individual drinks. By 1929 there were about 120 cocktail recipes in circulation. The cocktail cabinet became a fashionable item of decoration along with the phonograph. (At one point Jenkins explains that cocktails proliferated in the States because fancy extras were needed to mask the horrible taste of Prohibition home-made booze.)

The Bright Young Things. Documented in romans a clef like Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, whose precursor was the now-forgotten ‘Crazy Pavements’ by Beverley Nichols. I looked for this and it seems like you can’t read it online nor buy it anywhere. The classic account of the young generation, which really defined the decade, was Michael Arlen’s 1924 novel The Green Hat. Endless parties with outrageous themes. Recorded by Cecil Beaton.

The Royal Family

The Prince of Wales was a celebrity. He volunteered to fight in the Great War. In 1919 he began extensive travels, the best ambassador the British Empire had. In 1920 he laid the foundation stone for Canberra in Australia. In 1921 he was in India. In 1924 he was in America, meeting and partying. His aide-de-camp was Lord Louis Mountbatten. The Prince was best man at the latter’s wedding in 1922. In that year he became the first royal to be heard on the radio. In 1925 off to Africa.

In 1929 staid old King George V was taken ill so went to stay in Bognor for the air. He recovered and in recognition awarded it the sobriquet Regis. What a ridiculous country.

The Queen (Mary) never made a public speech and was believed never to have used the telephone.

In 1923 the second son, Albert, with his stammer, was married to Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon after a long courtship. It was he, of course who, after the dapper young Prince was forced to abdicate in 1936, was to become king, as George VI. In 1926 the future Queen Elizabeth II was born to Albert and Elizabeth (who was to become the venerated Queen Mother).

Politics

Prime Ministers of Great Britain

• 1916 to 1922: David Lloyd George, the man who won the war but was never trusted
• 1923 to 1924: Stanley Baldwin was Conservative Prime Minister: ‘If in doubt, do nothing’
• 1924: first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald, a natural gentleman who got on with the aristocracy and accepted a Rolls Royce as a gift
• 1924 to 1929 Stanley Baldwin again

1924: The Zinoviev letter published by the Daily Mail four days before the election, a blatant forgery claiming to come from Grigory Zinoviev, the head of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow, addressed to the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), ordering it to engage in seditious activities. The Mail and other outlets blamed the incumbent Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald for normalising relations with the Soviet Union and in the election the first Labour government was crushed by a strong victory for the Conservative Party. The Mail lying as usual.

Presidents of the USA

• 1913 to 1921: Woodrow Wilson (Democrat)
• 1921 to 1923: Warren G. Harding (Republican)
• 1923 to 1929: Calvin Coolidge (Republican) ‘piety with profit’
• 1929 to 1933: Herbert Hoover (Republican)

International affairs

The League of Nations was founded on 10 January 1920 by the Paris Peace Conference that ended the First World War.

The Great War was followed by a flurry of treaties designed to clear up the mess left by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire across eastern Europe and down into the Balkans, and of the Ottoman Empires with its vast territories across the Middle East and North Africa.

1919 – Treaty of Versailles, June 28: imposed harsh terms on Germany, including territorial losses, demilitarization and substantial reparations payments. It also included the War Guilt Clause, which forced Germany to accept responsibility for starting the war.

1919, September 10 – Treaty of Saint-Germain (Austria): dissolved the Austro-Hungarian Empire and created new nations like Austria, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

1919, November 27 – Treaty of Neuilly (Bulgaria): resulted in Bulgaria losing territory to Greece, Romania, and Yugoslavia.

1920, June 4 – Treaty of Trianon (Hungary): significantly reduced Hungary’s territory and population, transferring land to neighboring countries.

1920 August 20 – Treaty of Sèvres: aimed to partition the Ottoman Empire. However, it was later replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, which recognized the Republic of Turkey.

1919 to 1922: Greco-Turkish War

1923: Treaty of Lausanne, ended the conflict between Turkey and the Allies.

1925: The Locarno Pact, or Locarno Treaties, was a 1925 series of agreements between Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, and Great Britain that aimed to secure European borders and promote peace following World War I. Key terms included Germany accepting its western borders with France and Belgium, the permanent demilitarization of the Rhineland, and an agreement for peaceful dispute resolution. The pact also led to Germany’s entry into the League of Nations and was a significant step in improving Germany’s foreign relations at the time.

1928: Kellogg-Briand Pact – officially the General Treaty for Renunciation of War, signed by 62 nations, including Germany, France and the United States, to outlaw war as an instrument of national policy.

Germany

Tasked with paying ruinous debts. The hyper-inflation. 1923 Munich Beerhall Putsch. 1924 the French reoccupy the Ruhr.

• Weimar reviews

British Empire

The 1924 Empire Exhibition (described in an essay by Virginia Woolf, features in a story by P.G. Wodehouse, features in This Happy Breed by Noel Coward). Occasion of the first radio broadcast by King George V, to some 7 million radio owners. At the opening ceremony (23 April 1924) Edward Elgar conducted Land of Hope and Glory.

1926 Imperial Conference. At the Aldwych, India House and Australia House were built.

India’s educated classes revolted by the stupid Amritsar massacre, 1919. 1922 Mahatma Gandhi locked up for 6 years, but released in 1924. Start of the long slow mismanagement of Indian independence by the British.

The Dominions: Canada and South Africa refused to help the Brits when called on to help with the Chanak crisis.

God and religion

The Great War shook many people’s faith. Britain remained an Anglican country. Smart traditionalists still went to church on Sunday, but many didn’t.

The Scopes trial

The Scopes Trial, also known as the Monkey Trial. In May 1925 The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) advertised for a teacher to challenge the state of Tennessee’s Butler Act, which prohibited teaching any theory that denied the biblical account of creation. John T. Scopes, a 24-year-old high school substitute biology teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, agreed to be the test case. He was duly prosecuted and the case went to court. The prosecution secured fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential candidate and fundamentalist leader. The defence was led by Clarence Darrow, a famous agnostic defense attorney. The trial lasted from 10 to 21 July, held in a carnival-like atmosphere, the first trial in U.S. history to be broadcast live on national radio.

Darrow had the best of the argument but the issue was simple: had Scope broken the law by teaching a doctrine which denied the Bible account of creation? and the answer was a simple Yes. He was convicted and fined $100.

Elmer Gantry

‘Elmer Gantry’ is a novel by Sinclair Lewis that satirises American fundamentalist and evangelistic Christianity in the shape of a hypocritical tub-thumping revivalist preacher. It was the bestselling novel of 1927.

Spiritualism

Many people wanted to contact the dead men lost in the war. Spiritualism, seances and Ouija boards, satirised in E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia novels and Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wasted his energy and reputation after the war defending spiritualism.

Women

UK

1918 – the Representation of the People Act 1918 gave the vote to women over the age of 30 who met certain property qualifications.

1928 – Ten years later, women gained electoral equality with men when the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 gave women the right to vote on the same terms as men in the UK, lowering the voting age to 21 and eliminating property ownership requirements. This act, which received Royal Assent on July 2, 1928, established full electoral equality between men and women, added about 5 million women to the electorate, and resulted in women becoming a majority of the electorate.

Women now both smoked and applied make-up in public. See the surprise at seeing these surprising developments of a character returning to England in Mrs Dalloway.

Female firsts

Nancy Astor voted Britain’s first woman MP in 1919. She was a teetotaller, prohibitionist and Christian Scientist. Famous one-liners:

Heckler: You have enough brass to make a kettle.
Nancy: And you have enough water in your head to fill it.’

Farmer: How many toes does a pig have?
Nancy: Take off your shoes, man, and count for yourself.

Nancy’s husband owned a 46-bedroom stately home at Cliveden. Their coterie became known as the Cliveden Set.

• 1920 women awarded degrees for first time at Oxford (they weren’t at Cambridge until 1948!)
• 1921 women entered higher civil service for first time
• 1922: Ivy Williams, first woman called to the Bar. Helena Normenton one of the first 9 women barristers
• 1926: (American) Gertrude Earl swam the Channel
• Virginia Woolf’s two feminist books: A Room of One’s Own (1929) and Three Guineas (1938)

US

1920: the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution gave women the right to vote.

Sex

‘Blondes for weekends, brunettes for keeps.’

‘Petting parties’ had been a thing in the States since around 1916, see the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The term ‘birth control’ had been coined by Mrs Margaret Sanger in 1914. In 1921 she organised the first American birth control conference.

1922: Marie Stopes hired the Queen’s Hall, London for her first meeting about contraception (her book ‘Married Love or Love in Marriage’ had been published in 1918).

By 1928, in the States one divorce for every six marriages.

Fashion

1920s fashion style was characterised by the ‘bob’ haircut and lightweight waistless dresses. The affect was androgynous, boyish as in the model Lee Miller or the fictional heroine Iris Storm.

Bosoms and busts came to be seen as common. Nice girls didn’t have bosoms.

Skirts became shorter. In 1919, women’s skirts were about six inches above ground level, but by 1927 the hems of skirts were up to knee-level. Theorists tried to explain the ever-changing hemline, the funniest theory tried to tie them to the vagaries of the stock market.

1924 the cloche hat appeared. 1925 the Eton crop and ‘shingled’ hair.

In his 1927 book The Glass of Fashion Cecil Beaton said that 1) the new look was a complete revolution in the concept of femininity, and 2) the flapper look had become as standardised as a prison uniform.

The bra came in, replacing corsets. It had been invented by Mary Phelps Jacob in 1914 but only became widespread during the ’20s.

During the war a Swiss had invented rayon which was widely marketed as artificial silk, giving a smooth look to stockings.

The rise to dominance of Coco Chanel in clothes design for modern liberated women; and Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein in cosmetics. Words like ‘facelift’ and ‘facial’ came in.

For men the Prince of Wales promoted Fair Isle jumpers, everyone stopped wearing top hats and switched to bowlers. Not wearing a hat at all indicated caddishness. Plus-fours came in, particularly for golf. A few daring souls wore polo neck sweaters. Suede shoes were for homosexuals.

It was very common to offer cigarettes from the pack – you had to have a cigarette case. If you had no speciality cigarettes you said, ‘Sorry, they’re only gaspers.’

Long underpants began to disappear but still feature in all those Laurel and Hardy comedies.

The very first zips were only introduced by the B.F. Goodrich Company on their rubber boots and didn’t catch on in the ’20s.

Oxford bags were absurdly wide baggy trousers. ‘Jumper’ was a new word, encompassing jersey and sweater.

Travel

The pound and dollar rode high, particularly compared with European currencies, which enabled British and especially Americans, to travel abroad. Jenkins tells us that a meal at a Paris cafe, including wine, cost 9d i.e 4p. A cocktail at a swanky bar cost 5p.

D.H. Lawrence set off round the world. Yanks like Fitzgerald and Hemingway came to Paris, then on to the South of France. Tens of thousands of their fellow countrymen and women were doing the same. The Lost Generation gathered in Paris bars. The Dome, the Deux Magots, the Rotonde, all became famous.

The French Riviera had for decades been a place the French visited in the winter; only the despised petit bourgeoisie went there in the summer. Before the war Antibes was a sleepy village. But after the war all that changed, very quickly. Gerald and Sara Murphy are usually blamed for discovering it then inviting their Paris American friends, and their hangers-on, and then the fashion photographers, and then the crowds. Sunbathing and swimming in the South of France (see Fiesta and Tender is the Night). Everyone was seen at the smart hotels and the casinos, newly built to cater for the sudden boom.

Skiing: in 1924 Nordic skiing was first featured at the first Winter Olympics in Chamonix, capturing global imagination and sparking tourism. See Hemingway’s stories: Cross Country Snow (1924) and An Alpine Idyll (1927).

Advertising

The 1920s was a pivotal era for advertising, marking the birth of modern consumer culture where advertising exploded through new media like radio and magazines, stimulating economic growth by creating demand for new goods like cars and appliances, and becoming deeply embedded in daily life by selling not just products but lifestyles. The 1920s was the decade when advertising matured from simple announcements in newspapers and on hoardings (which existed far back in the Victorian era) into a sophisticated industry that defined modern consumer culture, as it still does today.

New media, broader reach: Radio became a massive platform, alongside established newspapers, magazines (like the popular Saturday Evening Post), billboards and cinema ads, reaching vast audiences.

Booming economy: Advertising stimulated the post-WWI economic boom by encouraging purchases of new consumer goods, creating a cycle of demand, increased production and rising wages.

Rise of consumerism: Ads sold dreams, associating products with glamour, success, and modern living, transforming buying habits.

Targeting and psychology: Marketers began targeting specific demographics, particularly women as primary household purchasers, using emotional appeals and celebrity endorsements.

Product focus: Key items advertised included automobiles, radios, vacuum cleaners, washing machines, and processed foods, bringing new technologies into homes.

Cultural integration: Advertising became omnipresent, influencing fashion, fads (like Mahjong), and everyday aspirations.

Two distinct leaders in advertising investment were the car industry and the film industry. In America there were the first ads designed to create anxiety and self-consciousness about personal features like bad breath and BO, bad teeth, spots, poor complexion. Once you get started, the list of poor saps you can sucker out of their money is endless. Wolcott Gibbs wrote in the New Yorker:

Advertising is the new giant loudspeaker of Anerican free enterprise, the full-throated blaring horn telling millions what to eat, what to drink and what to wear.

Booze and clubs

In the UK Mrs Kate ‘Ma’ Metrick ran half a dozen nightclubs, including ‘the 43’, patronised by the Prince of Wales. The Embassy Club in Bond Street, Ciro’s. The KitKat Club.

In the US, Prohibition ran from 17 January 1920 to 5 December 1933, resulting in Speakeasies. Organised crime. Al Capone. Chicago gangsters. Not such a stupid policy until Ronald Reagan launched his War on Drugs in 1971. How has that panned out? According to Wikipedia:

In June 2011, the Global Commission on Drug Policy released a critical report, declaring: ‘The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world’. In 2023, the UN high commissioner for human rights stated that ‘decades of punitive, ‘war on drugs’ strategies had failed to prevent an increasing range and quantity of substances from being produced and consumed’. That year, the annual US federal drug war budget reached $39 billion, with cumulative spending since 1971 estimated at $1 trillion.

History doesn’t occasionally repeat itself, history is unending repetition.

Jazz

Jazz originated in the southern states of the USA. The legal brothels in New Orleans’ famous Storyville district were officially ordered closed by the city council on 12 November 1917. This was a result of pressure from the federal government as the nation entered World War I because the city’s red-light district was located less than five miles from a naval training station, and so was thought to risk the spread of venereal disease among military personnel, plus a desire to promote public morality during wartime. New Orleans’ loss was the nation’s gain as musicians from the city’s bordellos and bars headed off for other sympathetic cities, namely Chicago, where a large community of jazz musicians developed the Chicago sound.

Most jazz musicians were Black Americans and a number of them, such as Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five band (West End Blues) and Bessie Smith, The Empress of the Blues, became very famous. Other Black musicians included: Jo ‘King’ Oliver, James Johnson, Jelly Roll Morton, Coleman Hawkins, Fletcher Henderson, to name just a few.

White jazz musicians: Pee Wee Russell, Mezz Messrow, Eddie Condon, Muggsy Spanier, Bud Freeman, Bix Beiderbecke the eternal adolescent who died at 28. Joe Venuti on jazz violin.

Chicago made jazz more polished. New York became associated with big bands, notably at the Savoy nightclub. Up in middle class Harlem at the Cotton Club, Duke Ellington developed the jungle sound of his big band: Black & Tan Fantasy, The Mooche, Creole Love Call, Cotton Club Stomp.

The remarkable George Gershwin combined jazz syncopation and orchestration with a classical orchestra:

• 1924: first performance of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue
• 1928: An American in Paris

Paul Whiteman was the first to write down transcriptions of his big band and set the mould for big bands which was copied in Britain by Jack Hylton and Jack Payne.

In England in the 1930s, Jenkins recalls the great argument being between devotees of Black and of white jazz – Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington versus Red Nichols and Bix Beiderbecke. Hard to believe anyone could have favoured the whites over the music’s inventors.

Popular jazz, playing up the entertainment angle, led to enjoyable Fats Waller and embarrassing Cab Calloway e.g. Hi-di-hi, Minnie the Moocher.

F. Scott Fitzgerald crystallised it as the adjective for the decade with his 1922 short story collection ‘Tales of the Jazz Age’, capturing the era’s post-World War I energy, prosperity, and fast-changing morals.

That crashing snob Aldous Huxley dismissed jazz, saying ‘modern popular music is more barbarous than any folk art has been for hundreds of years’. What a plonker. Of Huxley, Jenkins says that in the 1930s he:

found it extremely irritating to be talked down to by this absurdly well-read pedant, parading his learning before me, making me feel inferior.

Hit songs

The 1920s saw a flood of popular classics in the new syncopated style of jazz, inaugurating the Great American Songbook, and its star composers Irving Berlin, George Gershwin and Cole Porter. The immense power of what Noel Coward famously described as the ‘potency of cheap music’, which has never gone away since.

1920

• ‘Ain’t We Got Fun music by Richard A. Whiting, lyrics by Raymond B. Egan and Gus Kahn. Jenkins calls this ‘the credo of the decade’.

1922

• Runnin’ Wild by Arthur Harrington Gibbs with lyrics by Joe Grey and Leo Wood
• Toot, Toot, Tootsie (Goo’ Bye!) music and lyrics by Gus Kahn, Ernie Erdman and Danny Russo
• Three O’Clock in the Morning by by Julián Robledo, while the lyrics were added later by Dorothy Terriss. Paul Whiteman’s instrumental recording in 1922 became one of the first 20 recordings in history to sell more than 1 million copies. F. Scott Fitzgerald references the song in chapter 6 of ‘The Great Gatsby’, where the song is playing at one of Gatsby’s parties and is used to reflect Daisy’s mood.
• Tea for Two music by Vincent Youmans, lyrics by Irving Caesar

1923

• Yes! We Have No Bananas by Frank Silver and Irving Cohn
• What’ll I Do by Irving Berlin

1924

• Fascinating Rhythm by George Gershwin in 1924 with lyrics by Ira Gershwin.
• Oh, Lady Be Good! by George and Ira Gershwin
• The Man I Love George Gershwin and lyrics by his brother Ira Gershwin
• Indian Love Call, from Rose-Marie, an operetta-style Broadway musical with music by Rudolf Friml and Herbert Stothart, and book and lyrics by Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II
• Me and My Shadow by Irving Berlin

1925

• Ol’ Man River from Show Boat, music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II
• Poor Little Rich Girl by Noel Coward
• Yes Sir, That’s My Baby music by Walter Donaldson, lyrics by Gus Kahn
• I Want to Be Happy music by Vincent Youmans and lyrics by Irving Caesar
• Remember by Irving Berlin
• I’m Sitting on Top of the World performed by Al Jolson, music by Ray Henderson and lyrics by Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young

1926

• Bye Bye Blackbird by Jerome H. Remick and written by composer Ray Henderson and lyricist Mort Dixon
• Someone to Watch Over Me, George and Ira Gershwin
• Baby Face by Harry Akst (music) and Benny Davis (lyrics)

1927

• I’ve danced with a man, who’s danced with a girl, who’s danced with the Prince of Wales by Herbert Farjeon and Harold Scott written at the height of the popularity of Edward, Prince of Wales, later King Edward VIII
• My Blue Heaven music by Walter Donaldson with lyrics by George A. Whiting
• ‘S Wonderful music by George Gershwin, with lyrics written by Ira Gershwin
• Funny Face

1928

• You’re the Cream in My Coffee by Ray Henderson (music) and Buddy G. DeSylva & Lew Brown (lyrics) for the 1928 Broadway musical Hold Everything!
• Button Up Your Overcoat music by Ray Henderson, lyrics by B.G. DeSylva and Lew Brown
• Let’s Do It, Let’s Fall in Love by Cole Porter
• Sonny Boy” performed by Al Jolson, written by Ray Henderson, Buddy DeSylva, and Lew Brown
• A Room with a View by Noel Coward from ‘This Year of Grace!’
• Dance Little Lady by Noel Coward

1929

• Happy Days Are Here Again, music by Milton Ager and lyrics by Jack Yellen
• Spread a Little Happiness by Vivian Ellis and writer Clifford Grey
• Louise written by Leo Robin and Richard A. Whiting for Maurice Chevalier
• What Is This Thing Called Love? by Cole Porter
• Tiptoe Through the Tulips by Al Dubin (lyrics) and Joe Burke (music)

Listening to the original 1920s version of these songs makes them sound very samey. It’s often only the smoother, more professional recordings of the 1930s and ’40s which bring out their individuality and distinctiveness.

Classical music

After the war there was a reaction against heavy expressionism towards a light and brittle neo-classicism.

• Stravinksy: Symphonies of Wind Instruments – unlike anything else.

Britain

• William Walton: String quartet, piano quartet, Portsmouth Point overture (1925), Belshazzar’s Feast (1931)
• Constance Lambert: Pomona, Music for Orchestra, Rio Grande
• Ralph Vaughan Williams: Third Symphony 1922, my favourite classical piece of the decade
• Frederick Delius: incidental music for Hassan (1923), Three Preludes for piano (1923)

France

• Darius Milhaud: Socrate, Creation of the World
• Francois Poulenc: Les Biches
• Maurice Ravel

Germany

• Hindemith: Chamber music 1 (1922)
• Krenek: Johnny Spielt Auf (1926)
• Weill: Threepenny opera (1928)

USA

• Charles Ives
• Aaron Copland
• Samuel Barber

Movies

Silent movies and the publicity machine which grew up around them, made Hollywood stars international, an effect which kept on growing through the 1920s. Lillian Gish, Clara Bow the It Girl. Incidentally, the IT in question was invented by popular and saucy novelist Elinor Glyn, who intended something more like charisma than what later came to be called sex appeal. She defined it as:

‘a characteristic that draws all others with magnetic force. With ‘IT’ you win all men if you are a woman–and all women if you are a man. ‘IT’ can be a quality of the mind as well as a physical attraction.’

The rise and rise of Hollywood was accompanied by new professions, like the press agent, public relations managers and the Hollywood correspondent, all still with us, still promoting vast quantities of product.

Male movie stars

Silent comedy was defined and bestridden by Charlie Chaplin, run a close second by Fatty Arbuckle and then Harold Lloyd who became the most popular silent comedy start of the later 1920s.

1924 – The Thief of Baghdad made the most of Douglas Fairbanks’s muscular athleticism.

Rudolph Valentino, an Italian, was very popular and his role in The Sheikh (1921) made him a sex symbol. When he died suddenly in 1926, his fans were grief-stricken. Novelist Beverley Nichols, watching film after film in which Valentino threw women around as if they were sacks of potatoes, kidnapping and ravishing them to the wild excitement of his female fans, speculated that ‘newly liberated’ wanted ‘he-men’ to overpower them; then you can have sex (as you want to) but without feeling any guilt (because it’s all the man’s fault).

John Gilbert. Ronald Colman.

In 1927 ‘talking pictures’ or ‘talkies’ began with Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer.

As soon as sound arrived, so did boosterish adverts for it. ‘All singing, all dancing’ is an idiom meaning ‘full of vitality’. It originated with advertisements for the 1929 musical film ‘The Broadway Melody’ which proclaimed the film to be ‘All talking! All singing! All dancing!’

Female movie stars

The most famous actresses of the time were Mary Pickford (‘the world’s sweetheart’) and Clara Bow, who was marketed as the ‘It Girl’. Bow was probably the biggest embodiment of ‘The Flapper’. Tallulah Bankhead, daughter of Senator Bankhead. Gloria Swanson. Myrna Loy.

The perceived immorality of movies led to the creation of the Hays Code, named after Will H. Hays, the president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), which was in force from 1934 to 1968.

Cartoons

Felix the Cat appeared in 1923, Mickey Mouse in 1928.

British stage actors

Gertrude Lawrence, Edith Evans, Anna Neagle. Laurence Olivier’s stage debut 1928.

Celebrities

All famous actors were celebrities but celebrity expanded to include all notable or glamorous people, put into that position by the press (and their press agents). This included the bright young things and eminent society people promoted in Tatler and Vogue e.g. Lady Diana Cooper. Zelda Fitzgerald.

Isidora Duncan. Nancy Cunard. Marion Davies. Josephine Baker ‘the Black Venus’.

Grand Society ladies

Hostesses and lion hunters like The Marchioness of Londonderry, Lady Lavery, the Duchess of Buccleuch, Lady Louis Mountbatten, Lady Ribblesdale formerly Mrs JJ Astor.

Fashionable weddings took place at St Margaret’s, Westminster. See:

• Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World @ the National Portrait Gallery

Sets

The Cliveden Set

The Cliveden set were an upper-class group of politically influential people active in the 1920s and ’30s. They were in the circle of Nancy Astor, Viscountess Astor, the first female Member of Parliament to take up her seat. The name comes from Cliveden, a stately home in Buckinghamshire that was Astor’s country residence. The ‘Cliveden Set’ tag was coined by Claud Cockburn in his journalism for the communist newspaper The Week. He popularised that this influential upper-class group was pro-Germany and supported the 1930s policy of appeasement towards Nazi Germany. In recent decades this has been comprehensively disproved.

• The Cliveden set Wikipedia article

The Bloomsbury Group

The Bloomsbury Group was a group of associated British writers, intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the early 20th century. Among the people involved in the group were Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E.M. Forster, Vanessa Bell, and Lytton Strachey. Their works and outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics, as well as modern attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality.

Although popularly thought of as a formal group, it was a loose collective of friends and relatives closely associated with the University of Cambridge for the men and King’s College London for the women, who at one point lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury, London. According to Ian Ousby, ‘although its members denied being a group in any formal sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts’, as well as their pacifism, and their experimental, non-conformist attitude to relationships and sex.

Like me, Jenkins never liked them. Their smugness, their self-absorption, their snobbish superiority. Their mediocrity. Jenkins writes:

They seem to me to be Edwardians still revolting against the Victorians instead of true Twenties-rebels reacting against everything. (p.169)

It’s notable that Katherine Mansfield, a very great writer, disliked them for their snobbery and cliqueishness.

• Bloomsbury group Wikipedia article

The Algonquin Round Table

The Algonquin Round Table was a group of New York City writers, critics, actors, and wits. Gathering initially as part of a practical joke, members of ‘The Vicious Circle’ as they dubbed themselves, met for lunch each day at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 until roughly 1929. At these luncheons they engaged in wisecracks, wordplay and witticisms that, through the newspaper columns of Round Table members, were disseminated across the country. They developed Crazy Humour which flourished in the movies of the Marx Brothers in the 1930s.

• The Algonquin Round Table Wikipedia article

Art deco

Short for the French Arts décoratifs (‘Decorative Arts’) – a style of visual arts, architecture, and product design that first appeared in Paris in the 1910s just before World War I and flourished internationally during the 1920s to early 1930s, through styling and design of the exterior and interior of anything from large structures to small objects, including clothing, fashion, and jewelry. Art Deco influenced the design of almost everything from skyscrapers to cinemas, bridges, ocean liners, trains, cars, trucks, buses, furniture, and everyday objects, including radios and vacuum cleaners.

The name Art Deco came into use after the 1925 Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes (International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts) held in Paris. It has its origin in the bold geometric forms of the Vienna Secession and Cubism. From the outset, Art Deco was influenced by the bright colors of Fauvism and the Ballets Russes, and the exoticised styles of art from China, Japan, India, Persia, ancient Egypt, and the Maya. In its time, Art Deco was tagged with other names such as style moderne, Moderne, modernistic, or style contemporain, and it was not recognized as a distinct and homogeneous style.

Jenkins mentions products characteristic of Art Deco including sculpture, vases, ashtrays, cocktail shakers, furniture and decorations.

Architecture

As in every modern period, the decade saw a mix of different architectural styles. Google AI tells me that:

1920s architecture was a dynamic mix of opulent Art Deco, sleek Modernism (Bauhaus / International Style), and nostalgic Period Revivals like Gothic and French styles.

Drilling down:

Art Deco: The quintessential style of the decade, symbolizing glamour, progress, and luxury.
Features: Geometric patterns (zigzags, chevrons), stylized forms, sleek lines, rich materials (chrome, stainless steel, lacquer), and ornamentation inspired by ancient Egypt, exotic cultures, and the machine age (speed, flight).
Examples: Chrysler Building (NYC), Carbide & Carbon Building (Chicago).

Modernism (Bauhaus/International Style): A radical move towards functional, minimalist design, stripped of all Edwardian bourgeois decoration.
Features: Flat roofs, smooth walls, simple geometric forms, large windows, and functional layouts, influenced by German Bauhaus ideals.
Examples: Le Corbusier’s work, Lovell House (Neutra).

Period Revivals: A nostalgic look back at European styles, often mixed with modern elements.
Features: Neo-Gothic (ornate, arched windows, buttresses), Beaux-Arts (classical French/Italian), and Storybook/Tudor styles.
Examples: Tribune Tower (Chicago).

Prairie School (Midwest): A distinctly American style focusing on horizontal lines, integration with landscape, and open plans, evolving from Frank Lloyd Wright’s work.

In architecture Art Deco introduced new materials such as chrome plating, stainless steel, and plastic. In New York, the Empire State Building, Chrysler Building, and other buildings from the 1920s and 1930s are monuments to the style. The largest concentration of Art Deco architecture in the world is in Miami Beach, Florida.

The Florida land boom

The great Florida boom of the 1920s, with real estate mapped out and sold for increasingly ridiculous sums, while huckstering architects concocted every more fantastical buildings. During the decade some 2 million people emigrated to Florida, turning Miami from a town with 30,000 into a city of 300,000.

Addison Cairns Mizner (1872 to 1933) was an American architect whose Mediterranean Revival and Spanish Colonial Revival style interpretations changed the character of southern Florida, where the style is continued by architects and land developers. During the 1920s Mizner was perhaps the best-known living American architect. He transformed Palm Beach, Florida, where most of his houses are located.

• Florida land boom of the 1920s

Medicine

1921: insulin was discovered by Sir Frederick G Banting, Charles H Best and JJR Macleod at the University of Toronto.

1928: Scottish scientist Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered penicillin, the world’s first antibiotic, by noticing mould (Penicillium) killing bacteria in a contaminated petri dish at St. Mary’s Hospital in London.

Freud

Freud’s reputation spread and became associated with the idea that free love or sex unrepressed and relieved you, removed your ‘complexes’.

• Freud reviews

Also Adler, the man who invented the inferiority complex which, as Jenkins puts it, was a relatively easy concept to (mis)understand. This explains why it (the inferiority complex) turns up regularly in the crime novels of Agatha Christie and others as a ready-made excuse for the murderer’s behaviour.

Games and fads

• 1921 – Couê – ‘every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better’
• 1922 – Mah Jongg
• 1924 – the first crosswords book
• 1927 – the rules of contract bridge drafted in New York
• 1929 – British rules of contract bridge issued by the Portland Club

Contract bridge was the new version and rival of the traditional auction bridge. E.F. Benson gives an amusing explanation of the different in his 1935 novel Lucia’s Progress:

For the last year Contract had waged a deadly war with Auction, but the latter, like the Tishbites in King David’s campaigns, had been exterminated, since Contract gave so much more scope for violent differences of opinion about honour-tricks and declarations and doublings and strong twos and takings-out, which all added spleen and savagery to the game.
(Lucia’s Progress, Chapter 1)

Cars

Car ownership in the UK shot from 186,601 in 1920 to 579,901 in 1925.

Motorbike ownership doubled from 287,739 to 571,552. Many bikes were equipped with pillion seats known as ‘flapper brackets’.

The first petrol station in Britain opened in Aldermaston in 1920.

1920 Brooklands Racing track reopened.

1925 the first hand-operated traffic lights started working at the corner of Bond Street and Piccadilly. 1927 – Wolverhampton was the first British town to have automatic traffic lights.

In the UK the official speed limit throughout the 1920s was 20mph but nobody obeyed it. Similarly, there was no driving test.

Sir Herbert Austin had been knighted for producing guns and aircraft during the war. He established a carworks at Longbridge near Birmingham. 1922 – produced the first people’s car, the Austen Seven selling at £165.

William Morris built his carworks at Cowley, outside Oxford. In 1928 he launched his people’s car, the Morris Minor, retailing at £125.

By 1928 in the States the Big Three motor manufacturers were in place – Ford, Chrysler, General Motors.

In 1929 the world speed record of 231 mph was set on Daytona Beach, Florida.

Ships

Ocean liners once again competed in luxury. ‘Going Cunard is a state of grace’ ran the advertising slogan. The Aquitania, Mauretania, Berengaria.

• Ocean Liners: Speed and Style @ the Victoria and Albert Museum (March 2018)

Trains

It took four days and three nights to cross the States by train.

In Europe it was the era of the Blue Train in France and the Simplon Orient Express both, of course, featuring in Agatha Christie whodunnits (the Mystery of the Blue Train, Murder on the Orient Express).

In Britain The Flying Scotsman came into service in 1923.

Flying

1924 – Imperial Airways was established. Most bits of the Empire could be reached in a series of short hops. Since 1919 there had been regular scheduled flights to Paris, flying at 200 feet, £20 return. (This, also, features in a Christie novel, Death in the Clouds.)

May 20–21, 1927 Charles Lindbergh made the first nonstop flight from New York to Paris in the Spirit of St Louis, a single-propeller plane, a distance of 3,600 miles (5,800 km), flying alone for 33.5 hours. He was 21, an all-American boy. Although not the first transatlantic flight, it was the longest at the time by nearly 2,000 miles (3,200 km), the first solo transatlantic flight, and set a new flight distance world record.

1929 – Dr Hugo Eckener’s Graf Zeppelin flew from New York to Friedrichshaven in 55.5 hours.

Sports

Madison Square Garden was rebuilt in 1925 in order to hold sporting events, such as boxing, ice hockey and basketball.

Tennis was the sport of the decade. ‘Anyone for tennis?’ as in Noel Coward’s play Easy Virtue. Leading players included William Tatem Tilden and Helen Wills.

Golf was the other popular game, as recorded in numerous novels (The Murder on the Links). Bobby Jones from Georgia was a leading amateur champion.

Football: in 1928 the offside rule was brought in.

Baseball: recovering from the the famous scandal of 1919 when 8 members of the White Sox took bribes to throw the series, as featured in The Great Gatsby. 1923 building of the Yankee Stadium. Babe Ruth whose peak year was 1927.

Boxing: Jack Dempsey, heavyweight boxing champion of the world from 1919 to 1926, when he was beaten by Gene Tunney.

Cricket: Jack Hobbs scored record number of centuries. England won the Ashes in 1926 and 1929. The latter test series heralded the arrival of Don Bradman.

Horse-racing: the Derby, the Grand National.

Other popular sports: polo; car racing at Brooklands; dirt track racing; ice rinks; greyhound racing.

Sponsorship: Coca-Cola was the first company to sponsor the Olympic Games, in 1928.

Radio

1920 station KDKA went on the air to describe the 1920 presidential election. 1921 8 more stations. 1922 564. In 1922 $60 million of radio sets sold in US, in 1929 $842 million.

First song about radio in 1922, and in 1923 an entire revue titled ‘London Calling!’ written by Noel Coward.

American radio stations were commercial and there were thousands of them. Little Britain had the British Broadcasting Company, first broadcast on 14 November 1922. In 1923 Britain had 500,000 receiving licences. 1924, over 1 million, by 1927 wireless was in 2.5 million homes.

The first broadcast concert in Britain came from a garden fete in Hampstead in July 1922 when, The Times wrote, the programme consisted of ‘unconsidered trifles of the lightest type’.

In 1927 the BBC changed from the British Broadcasting Company to the British Broadcasting Corporation and adopted the motto ‘Nation shall speak peace unto nation’. Right from the start it was criticised on all sides, for its vulgarity or pomposity, for the upper class voices of the announcers or the ghastly chav accents of some of the entertainers. Jenkins amusingly calls the British public ‘music hating’. It’s certainly a philistine country and he quotes some typically philistine jokes.

Interviewer to Sir Thomas Beecham: Have you ever conducted any Stockhausen?
Beecham: No, but I trod in some once.

John Reith was Scottish, the son of a Presbyterian minister. Jenkins wonders whether his unbending mission to educate and inform stemmed from the fact that he, Reith, never went to university.

Early broadcasters included: Stainless Stephen, John Henry, A.J. Alan, Leslie Lambert, Christopher Stone (very classical-focused disc jockey), Tommy Handley, the Black duo Layton and Johnstone, Wish Wynne, Reginald Foort and other cinema organists.

So far from killing live music, it was the BBC which stepped in to save Sir Henry Wood’s promenade concerts which were on their last legs.

In the States, in 1926 the Radio Corporation of America with General Electric and Westinghouse formed the National Broadcasting Company. In 1927 United Independent Broadcasters and Columbia Phonograph begat the Columbia Broadcasting System.

Notable plays

1921 – The Circle by Somerset Maugham

1922 – East of Suez by Maugham

1923 – Outward Bound by Sutton Vane; Our Betters by Maugham; Saint Joan by Shaw

1924 – The Vortex by Noel Coward

1925 – Easy Virtue, Fallen Angels, Hay Fever by Coward

1926 – The Constant Wife by Maugham

1927 – The Fanatics by Miles Malleson

1928 – The Front Page by by Ben Hecht

1929 – The Sacred Flame by Maugham; Private Lives by Coward; Journey’s End; The Apple Cart by Shaw

Jenkins suggests the unmentionable theme of homosexuality hovered over many of these plays, although that might be a trick of perspective because we now know the two most successful playwrights of the decade (Maugham and Coward) were gay.

But Jenkins makes the point that the typical form of the 1920s was the musical revue and dedicates a chapter to listing and describing them and their star performers, including Fred and Adele Astaire.

Coward and Fitzgerald

Jenkins makes the interesting point that Noel Coward in Britain was what F. Scott Fitzgerald was in the States, the leading ‘participant-observer’, filling newspaper headlines and the new gossip columns as much for their exploits, clothes and interviews as for their works. He jokes that you could hardly open a Society magazine without reading, either in the gossip column or under a photo of a part, ‘… and Mr Noel Coward.’

Literature

Like architecture, a mix of all kinds of styles. The new thing was post-war disillusion and a boom in satire, as in the over-intellectual novels and essays of Aldous Huxley. D.H. Lawrence emerged as the prophet of the natural life. H.G. Wells trundled on peddling visions of a new society. F.Scott Fitzgerald arrived in a blare of publicity defining the Jazz Age. Off to one side were the challenging stream-of-consciousness works of Virginia Woolf and, even more recondite, the huge experimental novel Ulysses by James Joyce. Back among the bestsellers the 1920s saw the start of the Golden Age of crime writing with the advent of Agatha Christie, followed by Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham. At the bottom of the scale the blunt adventure stories of Bulldog Drummond.

1920 – Women in Love, Limbo, H.G. Wells’s Outline of History, Bulldog Drummond; This Side of Paradise, Flappers and Philosophers, The Age of Innocence,

1921 – Crome Yellow, Mortal Coils, The Trembling of a Leaf: Little Stories of the South Sea Islands

1922 – The Waste Land, Ulysses, Jacob’s Room, Aaron’s Rod, England, My England and Other Stories, The Young Idea; The Beautiful and Damned, Tales of the Jazz Age, Babbitt; Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus; Swann’s Way; Huntingtower

1923 – Antic Hay, The Fox, The Captain’s Doll, The Ladybird, Kangaroo, The Inimitable Jeeves, Men Like Gods

1924 – The Green Hat; Passage To India; Little Mexican and other stories; Within a Budding Grove; Beau Geste; The Three Hostages

1925 – Mrs Dalloway, St Mawr and Other Stories, Those Barren Leaves, The Painted Veil, Carry On Jeeves, Easy Virtue, Hay Fever; The Trial; An American Tragedy, The Great Gatsby, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; Manhattan Transfer; The Guermantes Way; John Macnab

1926 – The Plumed Serpent, Two or Three Graces, The Casuarina Tree: Six Stories, The Constant Wife, Debits and Credits; Nigger Heaven by Carl Van Vechten, All the Sad Young Men, The Torrents of Spring, The Sun Also Rises; The Decline of the West (in English); Religion and the Rise of Capitalism; The Dancing Floor, The World of William Clissold, Jesting Pilate

1927 – To the Lighthouse, Proper Studies; Cities of the Plain,

1928 – Undertones of War, Orlando: A Biography, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Point Counter Point, Ashenden: Or the British Agent, The Woman who Rode Away and Other Stories, Decline and Fall, The Open Conspiracy: Blueprints for a World Revolution, All the Conspirators, Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island

1929 – The Good Companions; Private Lives, A Room of One’s Own, Goodbye To All That; Death of a Hero, A Farewell to Arms, All Quiet on the Western Front; The Sound and the Fury; The Captive; The Courts of the Morning

Detective stories

Some 5,000 detective novels were published in the 1920s by around 1,000 authors.

• H.C. Neile aka Sapper, with his Bulldog Drummond novels
• Edgar Wallace: author of 150 crime and adventure stories
• William le Queux
• E. Philips Oppenheim

Even Winnie the Pooh inventor A.A. Milne got in on the fashion with his The Red House.

In 1929 priest and story writer Father Ronald Knox published his ten commandments of detective fiction. (Mind bogglingly, back in 1926 Father Knox was allowed to broadcast a play on the BBC which claimed to be a live account of revolution breaking out in England, including eye witness descriptions of people being roasted in Trafalgar Square.

Agatha Christie

• The Mysterious Affair at Styles 1921
• The Secret Adversary 1922
• The Murder on the Links 1923
• The Secret of Chimneys 1925
• The Murder of Roger Ackroyd 1926
• The Big Four 1927
• The Mystery of the Blue Train 1928
• The Seven Dials Mystery 1929

Dorothy L. Sayers

• Whose Body? 1923
• Clouds of Witness 1926
• Unnatural Death 1927

Margery Allingham

• The Crime at Black Dudley 1929

Ellery Queen

• The Roman Hat Mystery, 1929

Hard-boiled America

Hammett’s novel signalled the advent of a new tone, much harsher, more violent, less secure.

• Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (1929)

Magazines

Posh

• Vanity Fair
• The New Yorker, began weekly publishing in 1925
• Saturday Evening Post
• The Smart Set, edited by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan
• American Mercury, founded 1924 by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan – the Bible of the lost generation, against religion, democracy, the bilge of idealism and the gaping primates

Literary

• transition edited by Eugene Jolas
• The Little Review edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap
• Transatlantic Review edited by Ford Madox Ford
• The Criterion, edited by T.S. Eliot
• London Mercury edited by Sir John Squire

UK

• The Spectator
• New Statesman
• Life and Letters
• The Adelphi
• Strand magazine, published P.G. Wodehouse
• Tatler
• Bystander

Kids comics

• Magnet
• Gem
• 1922 Richmal Crompton began her Just William series

Gossip columns

The modern gossip column was invented in the 1920s by Walter Winchell, who launched the first syndicated gossip column, ‘On Broadway’, in 1929. While precursor society columns existed much earlier, Winchell is credited with creating the format as it’s known today, mixing celebrity, political, and social news with a distinctive, often fearless style.

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Credit

‘The Twenties’ by Alan Jenkins was published by William Heinemann in 1974.