THE STORY OF BRITAIN’S £

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32524, 6 February 1971, Page 10

THE STORY OF BRITAIN’S £

The Pound in Your Pocket. 1870-1970. By Peter Wilsher. Cassell. 243 pp. With the British £l/240 penny finally disappearing this month (February, 1971), the editor of the London “Sunday Times” Business News has considered it an opportune time to appraise the history of the pound sterling. About to be decimalised, the pound is described as “a token of considerable potency and charisma which has acted continuously as a symbol and index of British power, sovereignty, wealth, for over 900 years.” Mr Wilsher’s aim has been to study all the aspects of life where money is the ruling factor—prices, wages, taxes, welfare, credit, saving, banking, economic thought and attitudes to wealth and poverty. He has blended these into an interesting series of photographic portraits of the £, showing in colour,, perspective and several dimensions, the face it showed to the world in nine of the more climacteric years of its recent evolution. After reviewing the period from 760 when 240 pennies were first struck from a pound of silver, Mr Wilsher singles out the year 1870, one hundred years ago, which saw Britain at the height of her unique political, financial and mercantile power. However, the-stan-dard of living of the mass of the population was only gradually beginning to rise. It was a country that was largely ignorant,, squalid and brutal,

Blue blood More Equel Then Others. By Lord Montagu of Beaulieu. Michael Joseph. 192 pp. Appendices, Notes, Index.

This is not, as might be inferred from its authorship, and from a foreword written by a man with the curious title “Sir lain Moncrieffe of that Ilk, Bart.” a second “Book of Snobs.” It is in fact a sober record of the fate of a one-time ruling class in five European countries as well as in England. Lord Montagu traces the history of the nobility of France, Spain, Austria, Italy and Russia, all of whom had in common a certain rigidity of outlook, in that the fortunes of lesser men were of no interest to them, and they gave only perfunctory attention to matters not pertaining to life at Court Indeed, the European monarchy encouraged this type of segregation as a means of safeguarding its own authority. As an example, aristocrats at the French court at Versailles were seldom permitted to escape from it (except to go to wars), though if they were banished to their estates they regarded such an order as a disgrace and a martyrdom. Over the centuries, when the all too numerous dukes, counts and marquesses of the European aristocracy (in which every member of a noble family automatically assumed titles), the much less numerous English aristocracy were never indifferent to the value of agriculture, the mainstay of the country’s economy. From this fact arose some sort of communal feeling among those who farmed and owned land. “In effect society in England moved down the scale from Duke to Labourer through infinitely small and subtle graduations which probably account for the English skill at assessing and adjusting to nuances of rank, and the national reputation for snobbery.” Lord Townshend ("Turnip” Townshend of 18th century fame) was one of the experimenters with a fourcourse rotation of crops while many other landowners took a keen interest in the developments of their estates. This sensible, down-to-earth philosophy helped the British aristocracy to survive when the grandiloquent nobility of the other five countries mentioned have only their pride of pedigree and carefully cultivated social exclusiveness to counter the indifference of an increasingly egalitarian world. Nevertheless, in England the “aristocratic principle” automatically assumed that the nobility were natural administrators, and though they sometimes misused their privilege to gain some personal advantage they were also responsible for the reforms which put an end to child-labour and other abuses. Also, as times changed they adapted to new conditions including the voluntary limitation of their own powers most notably in 1911 when the House of Lords, with very little dissent from its members yielded up its right to veto measures passed by the Commons. The popular vision of the House of Lords as a place for peaceful slumber could easily be refuted by anyone who chooses to read the debates of both Houses of Parliament As Lord Arran modestly remarked recently "I won’t say we’re much more intelligent than the Commons, but we’re certainly much less stupid.” The introduction of life peers has added substance to this assertion, including as it does so many eminent people in different spheres, but though the hereditary principle is not defended by the author, he claims that those hereditary peers who take the trouble to attend the House are not unaware of the lessons of history and take their duties seriously. In an appendix Lord Montagu gives the result of a public-opinion survey which goes to show that in an equafitarian age a large cross-section of the public still regard a lord as meriting a measure of respect. To say that because the English are supposed to “love a lord” they must be written off as rather naive snobs is the view of the inverted snob whose elaborate disdain for all forms of rank to which he can never aspire himself, is, on the whole rather ludicrous.

impoverished in everything except capital resources and the more unfettered forms of business enterprise. Next, Mr Wilsher concentrates on the year 1886 which saw a million unemployed but the value of the individual pound reaching its nineteenth century peak in the heart of the Victorian "Great Depression.” Despite the unemployment, there was a continuing improvement in the economic substructure of most people’s lives. By 1896 retail prices for many items had reached the lowest levels for two centuries and everyone was slightly better off than they had been ten years before. Then prices started to rise again and the author notes that by 1909 (the year of the first payment of Lloyd George’s old age pension) progress for the great 39 million mass of the working populace had slowed to a halt and even started to run backwards. Economically, Britain was basking on a Gold Standard air cushion and a worsening balance of payments situation and an ageing industrial structure went largely unheeded. World War I saw the relative eclipse of London as a finance centre, a worsening of the position of the old staple and exporting industries but the general condition of the working classes was still a good deal better that it had been in the “golden ages” of the past

Then in 1925, Winston Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer, announced that Britain intended to return to the Gold Standard at the full pre-war rate, a decision that signalled the opening of one of the most miserable and mismanaged decades in British history. Mr Wilsher moves on the monetary crisis of 1931 when sterling was again forced off the Gold Standard, and effectively devalued by about 30 per cent. From then on, he notes, the steady attrition of sterling set in to continue without noticeable tor the 1945—the pouna devalued by 30?5 per cent; 1957—another grave balance of payments crisis; and in 1967—a further devaluation of 14 per cent, concluding with 1970 and an international improvement in the £ but an inflationary wageprice spiral threatening the hard-won gains of the previous two years. The author deftly combines fascinating snippets of social history (pilots in frock coats at the controls of early airliners and golf club lunches at Is 6d) with helpful insights into the historical background of current international monetary problems. He has a refreshingly human approach to his researches and has included a lively series of illustrations from the past with pertinent comments. Bibliography and an index are included.