14. Great Britain during the Great Depression
Great Britain had not recovered from the cost and the casualties of the First World War when the Great Depression struck it hard, forcing the Empire to abandon the gold standard by 1931 after investors began removing their deposits from British banks. The government attempted to balance the national budget as well as cut unemployment benefits to prevent economic collapse. The industrial north of the British Isles was the hardest hit; trade was severely curtailed as exports dwindled, and the trickle down of unemployment hit the shipping and transportation industries with a vengeance. In industrial Glasgow, more than 30% of the workforce was idled by 1933. Shipbuilding, long a major industry along Scotland’s Clydebank, and Liverpool’s Merseyside, declined by as much as 90% when the depression was at its height.
Southern England and the region of the country known as the Midlands was far less hard hit, with industries which built consumer goods such as refrigerators, radios, ranges (the English call them cookers), and automobiles actually achieving modest growth. Agriculture also flourished. As in the United States, a program was initiated by His Majesty’s government in which young men were enrolled and sent to work camps, from which they worked on infrastructure projects such as roads, small dams, and airfields, many of which became aerodromes supporting the RAF and later the USAAF in the following decade. Britain’s abandonment of the gold standard also allowed the government to borrow money more liberally in the decade following the depression, when it was forced to deal with the expenses of the Second World War.