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- Rise of the dictators began slide towards world war -The
1930s saw a slide towards war as the decade was dominated by dictators
and global depression, as Peter Woodman discovers. <news_story.cfm?StoryId=158491&Picture=YES&Frame=News
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- Evacuees: London youngsters, with their luggage
and gas masks, wait patiently to board the train which will take them to
Devon and safety - but away from family - at the start of the Second
World War.
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- The 1929 Wall Street crash heralded not only the start
of a world depression, but led to a fatal polarisation of political thinking.
To some, communism was the only answer. Others saw fascism, with strong
central Government, as the best way out of the crisis.
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- Humiliated by Germany's treatment by the Allies after
the First World War, Hitler was determined to build up German power, both
at home and abroad.
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- The fascist way also had its British supporters. Sir
Oswald Mosley, a disillusioned Labour minister, broke with his party and
formed the British Union of Fascists.
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- In Russia, Joseph Stalin inflicted his own reign of terror,
killing millions (maybe as high as 100 MILLION -ed) and wiping out anyone
even remotely likely to become a political opponent.
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- Even the US suffered.
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- The benevolent dictator who came to America's rescue
was a polio-stricken upper-crust politician called Franklin D Roosevelt
who came to power in 1932.
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- He asked for extraordinary powers to deal with the crisis
and he got them, creating new jobs and, shrewdly, setting in motion a huge
US arms-building programme.
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- His New Deal was the model dictatorship at a time when
the recession was so bad in the North-East of England that a group from
Jarrow marched on London in 1936 to force the Government to do something
about the 68pc unemployment in the town.
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- But Tory Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin would not even
meet them.
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- The new King, Edward VIII, wanted to marry twice-divorced
American Wallis Simpson.
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- In the end the king gave up the throne for "the
woman I love" and it was his brother, the Duke of York, Bertie, (King
George VI) who held the country together through the crisis years that
followed. Queen Elizabeth and the two princesses played their parts.
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- The decade had begun with the start of a competition
that was to grow into the most eagerly followed of all sporting events
- the World Cup.
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- Uruguay were the first winners.
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- Another winner in the decade was British tennis ace Fred
Perry who took the Wimbledon singles title three times in a row from 1934-36.
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- An even greater sporting champion - Australian Don Bradman
- arrived in England in 1930 to smash batting records and break bowlers'
hearts. A fast black American athlete Jessie Owens broke five world records
in one afternoon in 1935. The following year, he shattered the myth of
Aryan supremacy by winning four gold medals in the Berlin Olympics.
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- The same year, a new board game called Monopoly came
out.
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- Adolf Hitler was not playing games, though.
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- He occupied the Rhineland and annexed Austria and part
of Czechoslovakia.
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- The Czech crisis led to the infamous 1938 Munich summit
meeting, when British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain thought he had
won assurances of peace from Hitler.
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- The sight of Chamberlain arriving back at Heston airfield
in west London clutching his piece of paper from Herr Hitler is one of
the most memorable of the century, let alone the decade.
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- Chamberlain assured a wary British people that he was
confident of "peace for our time".
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- But within months Hitler had taken over all of Czechoslovakia
and when Poland was blitzkrieged in September 1939, Britain declared
war on Germany.
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