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00:00First of all, one part amaretto, one part blue curacao, two parts cranberry juice,
00:18two parts pineapple juice, one part southern comfort.
00:26Shake, don't stir, and this is the bathwater cocktail, created for and named after the
00:43so-called bath and bottle party, the most notorious cocktail party in British history.
00:54It happened in a heat wave at the height of the social season on the evening of Friday
01:03the 13th of July 1928.
01:08The hosts, Babe Plunkett Green, Elizabeth Ponsonby, Edward Gaythorne Hardy and Brian Howard.
01:15The venue, St George's Swimming Baths, Buckingham Palace Road, Belgravia.
01:24The Daily Express gossiped about the edgy negro jazz band and costumes of the most dazzling
01:34kinds and colours.
01:37Even the waiters wore bathing suits as they served the bathwater cocktail.
01:44This was the party that would come to symbolise an era.
01:48And if you've ever been to a nightclub, drunk a cocktail or taken drugs, then you too have been shaken
01:55and stirred by the frenzied spirit of these extraordinary years.
02:00In the 1920s, Imperial Britannia is sliding from view.
02:10And modern Britain is stumbling out, almost like an adolescent, asking endless questions,
02:17a bit contemptuous of the past, trying everything new.
02:21The young call themselves the post-war generation.
02:26No idea that another war was on the way.
02:29And in this age of questions, if there's one that underpins all the rest,
02:34it's simply this.
02:36How best shall we live?
02:51The End
03:06When news of the end of the Great War reached the streets of Britain,
03:19a massive, heaving party broke out.
03:27There were wild scenes for three days and nights with drunkenness and even copulation on the streets.
03:36And at the centre of it all was David Lloyd George, the man who won the war.
03:42He'd had his share of scandals, but now he was riding high, as he called the first general election since 1910.
03:54Pledging a land fit for heroes, a new Britain of peace and prosperity.
04:02Lloyd George won by a landslide, a crushing personal victory for a man who was dodgy and private,
04:10but in public brimmed with plausible promises and sound bites.
04:15Now, we're not yet quite in modern Britain, but almost everywhere you look,
04:25you can find little flashes, glimpses of the more cynical and pleasure-loving country that we live in today.
04:34A great new age of experiment had arrived in politics, writing, art, sex and drugs.
04:51Night clubs catered for a new urban scene, open to anybody with enough cash and a clean shirt front.
05:00When the bright young things had tired of their latest party, they could go along to a club and shimmy, heebie-jeebie,
05:11do the camel walk or the black bottom into the early hours.
05:17And the queen of the night was a remarkable woman, known in club land as Ma Merrick.
05:25A respectable woman, divorced by her husband, Kate Merrick said she went into business to pay for her daughter's education at Rodine.
05:37The first night club in Leicester Square in 1919.
05:49Soon, celebrities were rubbing shoulders with new money and old royalty, refugee Russians and gangsters on the make.
05:59The local gangsters targeted Merrick herself, one even beat her up for refusing him entry.
06:08And yet, her little empire of the night continued to expand.
06:14The Manhattan, the Little Club, the Silver Slipper and many more.
06:20In 1921, she opened the most notorious nightclub in Soho, the 43.
06:34If Kate Merrick was the face of the fun-loving twenties, then the round pink face of disapproval belonged to a man known without affection as Jicks.
06:52Sir William Johnson Hicks, who became Home Secretary in 1924.
06:56When asked what his job was, Jicks replied,
07:08It is I who am ruler of England.
07:12And now he developed an obsession with nightclubs.
07:17As Home Secretary, Jicks had 65 nightclubs raided and prosecuted for breaking their alcohol licence.
07:30And he boasted in the Commons of having 48 clubs closed down.
07:35But Ma Merrick's 43 club seemed strangely and reliably and infuriatingly immune.
07:47At long last, the reason became clear.
07:54A senior member of the Soho Vice Squad was taking bribes to protect her.
08:01Finally, Jicks got his hands on Mrs Merrick.
08:10Merrick was sentenced to 15 months hard labour, a physically and mentally shattering ordeal.
08:17But on her release, she went straight back to work.
08:24She was sent to Holloway Prison five times.
08:28But she stares boldly out of photographs with pride.
08:31And two of her impeccably educated daughters married into the peerage.
08:44But this kind of social mountaineering was only for a few.
08:49The vast majority of people lived and died as struggling underdogs.
08:53In the final days of November 1923 in Pollock Shores, just outside Glasgow, a former schoolmaster gave his only overcoat to a destitute immigrant from Barbados called Neil Johnson.
09:17Soon afterwards, the Good Samaritan collapsed from pneumonia.
09:24His name was John MacLean.
09:27A hero in Soviet Russia forgotten here.
09:31Lloyd George once called him the most dangerous man in Britain.
09:34MacLean's dreams of a better world were inspired by Marxist thinking and the Russian Revolution.
09:48And in Glasgow, these dreams seemed about to be fulfilled.
09:51In early 1919, the Red Clydesiders demanded a 40-hour working week and threatened to call a general strike.
10:08MacLean tried to persuade the Union leaders to postpone the strike for at least a month,
10:12so the much more politically powerful English coal miners could be rallied to the cause, but they wouldn't listen.
10:20On the 27th of January, 40,000 Glasgow workers came out on strike and by the next day, that number had almost doubled.
10:33The strike leaders sent a deputation to persuade the government to settle the dispute.
10:38Two days later, the Red Clydesiders gathered to hear the government's response.
10:4660,000 strikers poured into Glasgow's George Square.
10:55Suddenly, a tram car ground to a halt on the south side of the square.
10:59Almost immediately, the police drew their batons, charged on the crowd.
11:02The police then made a second charge up the east side of the square.
11:19But there, they were met by a wall of demonstrators throwing lemonade bottles they'd pulled off a passing lorry.
11:26Inside the city chambers, the meeting broke up.
11:34The sheriff of Lanarkshire rushed out of the building and tried to disperse the crowd by ridding the riot act.
11:44But before he could get to the end of it, the paper was pulled out of his hand.
11:48Running battles went on for the rest of the day.
11:54Strike leaders were arrested.
11:57A red flag was raised in the square.
12:01Down in London, panicky ministers were meeting to discuss what was already been called Bloody Friday.
12:08But they were reassured to be told that six tanks and 100 lorry loads of soldiers were being sent north by rail that very night.
12:22The next morning, Glasgow was occupied by English troops.
12:37Scottish regiments were confined to barracks in case they mutinied.
12:40During these years, the fear of communist revolution was so great, the cabinet later discussed the military defence of London and using RAF squadrons to bomb the workers.
12:53They needn't have worried.
12:54Just as John Maclean had feared, the strike failed to spread beyond industrial Scotland.
13:03And when it became clear that the government was prepared to fight and even to kill workers in order to win, the strikers began returning to work.
13:11John Maclean was bitter and close to broken.
13:28During the war, he'd been to prison five times for inciting rebellion, suffering hard labour, sleep deprivation and force feeding.
13:35In November 1923, Maclean, who had double pneumonia, finally collapsed.
13:44He was actually in the middle of making a speech.
13:47And he was carried off the open air platform and taken home to die.
13:56Maclean's dreams of political revolution died with him.
14:00But all over Britain, artistic and sexual revolutionaries were already dreaming new dreams.
14:06Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire, once the home of an unconventional aristocrat, Lady Otterlyn Murrell.
14:32Nearly six feet tall, with turquoise eyes and thick red-gold hair, she was known around the village as the Gypsy Queen.
14:45Murrell turned Garsington into the country seat of the Bloomsbury set.
14:52You never knew who you were going to run into here.
15:04Virginia Woolf was a regular visitor.
15:07At Garsington, she said, even the cabbages are scented.
15:11One morning, after swimming in the lake, the pacifist philosopher Bertrand Russell emerged stark naked to find himself confronted by the then Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, who was himself very busy chasing a beautiful young artist.
15:29Garsington was an exquisite warm haven for novelist, poets, philosophers, politicians and artists.
15:39And also for the son of a Nottinghamshire coal miner called David Herbert Laws.
15:45D. H. Lawrence was one of the first major novelists to rise from the British working class.
15:55He dreamt of getting back to an earthy, liberated sexuality.
15:59And of a new frankness between modern men and women.
16:08They became mutually bedazzled, the peacocky lady and the cocky young writer.
16:15It was a very English story.
16:17They spent hours at a time together, walking in the countryside and talking.
16:21Here, one feels the real England, said Lawrence, this house of Ottolines.
16:29It is England.
16:32She said of him, his vitality and presence seems to make every moment of the day throb with its own intense life.
16:43Lawrence and the lady, there is a deep spiritual bond between us, he said, deep to the bottom.
17:02Lawrence saw Garsington as a refuge from a country brutalized by industry and war.
17:08Like many of Ottolines guests, he saw it as a kind of earthly perfection.
17:19But there was a serpent in paradise.
17:22Ottolines always suspected that she wasn't loved quite as much as she'd have liked.
17:27But she had no idea of the true venom lurking inside the people she lavished hospitality upon.
17:35And then, she read Lawrence's new book, Women in Love.
17:48We have devised an entertainment for you, in the style of the Russian ballet.
17:54Lawrence introduces a tall, rich eccentric, Lady Hermione Rodis.
18:08Her home was clearly Lady Ottolines' Garsington Manor, and she was unmistakably the real-life Hermione.
18:15The novel was later made into a film by Ken Russell.
18:24Lawrence describes Hermione as being impressive but macabre.
18:31Remarkable but repulsive.
18:33It's a merciless character assassination aimed directly at Ottolines and everything she stood for.
18:49Ottolines was stricken with grief and broke off all contact with Lawrence.
18:53That brief dream of a new kind of British culture, where the aristocracy joined hands with the most radical and thrusting artists, turned sour almost immediately.
19:11Lawrence's fiery belief in sexual liberation would influence Britain right into the 1960s and beyond.
19:27But the good times at Garsington came to an end in 1927, when Ottolines ran out of money and was forced to sell.
19:34In May 1928, Lawrence heard that Ottolines was ill with bone cancer.
19:46By then, he was dying himself from tuberculosis, and he tried to say sorry.
19:52In a letter to her, he said,
19:54You've influenced lots of lives, as you have influenced mine, through being fundamentally generous and through being Ottolines.
20:06There's only one Ottolines, and he called her a queen among the mass of women.
20:17But the miners' son and the lady never saw one another again.
20:21The high culture revolutionaries didn't really catch on at the time.
20:32Most people preferred modern crime fiction, silent films, and the most exciting new technology of the day.
20:40One evening in June 1920, a crowd was gathering outside the Marconi works in Chelmsford, Essex, waiting breathlessly for the Australian-born opera singer Dame Nellie Melba.
20:59Dame Nellie Melba was the most famous singer in the world.
21:09She was huge.
21:11Melba Toast, Peach Melba, both named after her.
21:16She arrived here in Essex for Britain's first ever radio event.
21:21When she got to the rather primitive studio, one of the engineers explained to her that her singing was going to be transmitted from a 450-foot-high tower just outside.
21:36Young man, she said, if you think I'm going to climb up there, you are greatly mistaken.
21:45At ten past seven, accompanied by a small grand piano, Dame Nellie directed her voice into the microphone.
21:57The 30-minute concert sung in English, French and Italian, began with Home Sweet Home, and ended with a single verse.
22:15of God Save the King.
22:28The world's first international broadcast performance was picked up by radio pioneers all the way from Chelmsford to Paris, Madrid, Berlin.
22:44even Newfoundland.
22:47The next day, the papers reported that the songs came over mellow and perfect, without scratch or jar.
22:56Radio One, late-night talk shows, Terry Wogan.
23:02This is where it all began.
23:04Christmas 1918. Lincoln Prison. An Irish prisoner is serving at mass.
23:25Choosing his moment, he takes the priest's key from the vestry and makes an impression in candle wax.
23:44One February night, the prisoner used his copied key and walked free from the building.
23:53And then he escaped through a hole in the fence which had been cut for him by an accomplice from the outside.
23:59The prisoner was Eamonn de Valera, the sharp-faced leader of Sinn Féin, soon to be Ireland's first president.
24:08And his accomplice with the wire cutters was Michael Collins, a republican hero known as the big fella.
24:15That night, they were working together.
24:20Soon, they would be mortal enemies as a bloody civil war turned Green Ireland red.
24:29In January 1919, Sinn Féin declared Ireland's independence and formed its own parliament, the Doyle.
24:43This was an assault on the Empire as well as the United Kingdom.
24:46Michael Collins set up an elite team of IRA assassins known as the Twelve Apostles.
24:59They efficiently targeted British troops and collaborators.
25:07The British responded with an MI5-trained team of British agents known as the Cairo Gang.
25:16In November 1919, Collins set out to destroy them.
25:26At eight, one Sunday morning, the Twelve Apostles burst into eight houses and shot 14 British agents dead.
25:35One was killed in his pyjamas, trying to escape through the back garden.
25:39Some were shot in bed, some in front of their wives.
25:46Now the violence spread in all directions.
25:52Sinn Féin and the Doyle were outlawed and British forces stormed through Ireland.
26:05After 18 months of terror, Eamon de Valera and Lloyd George agreed to a truce.
26:10Talks began in October 1921.
26:15The Valera stayed at home and ordered Collins to join the Irish delegation in London.
26:22If he came back with less than Sinn Féin's full demands, Collins knew he'd be the scapegoat.
26:28As the negotiations began, he said to a fellow Republican, you might say the trap is sprung.
26:37The talks moved towards a compromise, with Ireland self-governing but still inside the British Empire,
26:49and with the six predominantly Protestant northern counties free to choose to remain within the United Kingdom.
26:55After nearly two months, the Irish delegation was still agonising over the deal.
27:04With a theatrical flourish, Lloyd George arrived brandishing two envelopes.
27:10One contained the agreement, the other the refusal to come to terms.
27:16If I send this letter, he said, it's war and war within three days.
27:24Will you give peace or war to your country?
27:28We must have your answer by 10pm tonight.
27:31One by one, the Irish representatives signed the agreement.
27:42Michael Collins believed he was giving Ireland something it had wanted for 700 years.
27:49But that night, in his lodgings, he wrote,
27:53Early this morning, I signed my death warrant.
27:56Back in Dublin, the treaty was narrowly voted through in the Doyle,
28:06but Eamon de Valera denounced it as a betrayal and resigned.
28:11Collins and de Valera were now enemies in a cruel civil war dividing Republican families and friends.
28:18In August 1922, Michael Collins, now chief of the Irish National Army, went on a tour of his home county, Cork.
28:42Collins stopped at this pub to ask a local for directions.
28:46Little realising that the man was an anti-treaty rebel whose gun was leaning against a wall just inside the bar.
29:02That evening, Collins came back along the same road.
29:06A rebel ambush was waiting. They'd been here for hours and some of them had given up and gone back to the pub.
29:15But not all. At eight o'clock, the convoy came round the corner.
29:18Shots rang out the car's stop. Collins jumped out and returned fire from behind his car.
29:31When he saw some rebels running up the hill, he stood out into the open and standing about here, Michael Collins was killed with a single shot to the head.
29:42Hello, CQ. Hello. Hello, Ash. Hello, Ash. Hello, Ash. There may be some jamming.
29:56There may be some oscillation. Woo! Sorry. Sorry. Well, sorry, CQ. Closing down a moment.
30:00Most of Ireland had left the United Kingdom, but the British were already beginning to identify themselves less by territory than by culture.
30:13Regular radio broadcasting began in 1922.
30:23Programmes were planned and scripted here, at the Cocken Bell, in the Essex village of Rittle.
30:32And all under the guidance of Captain Peter Eckersley, ex-RAF engineer, born entertainer and all-round show-off.
30:40Hello, CQ. Hello, CQ. Hello, CQ. This is 2M attack. Rittle testing. This is 2M attack. Rittle testing.
30:48Are the signals OK? No, they're not. Wave your hand if it's all OK. No waves. No waves. No waves.
30:57To start with, Peter Eckersley and his tiny team were only authorised to broadcast for half an hour a week, Tuesday nights.
31:05They'd pile down to this old army hut from the pub, and they'd put on records, they'd read out plays, made spoof weather announcements, they even had their own theme tune.
31:17The nearness of a microphone can do strange things to people, and as time went on, Eckersley's exhibitionist tendencies became more and more pronounced.
31:29On one occasion, he promised a night of grand opera.
31:45But there was no Dame Nelly that time. All the arias were sung by Peter Eckersley himself.
31:51But Captain Eckersley was about to have his wings clipped.
32:08On 14 November 1922, the British Broadcasting Company was established.
32:13John Reith, a tall, balding Scot with a long scar running down one cheek, was appointed general manager.
32:28To call John Reith odd would be a wild understatement.
32:33His father was a Scottish Presbyterian minister and he came from a family who all seemed to dislike each other intensely and were prone to violent rages.
32:46Reith himself was almost perpetually furious with somebody.
32:52He was one of history's great haters, and also one of its great Puritans.
32:57And this was the man who now had his hands on the BBC.
33:06Reith appointed Peter Eckersley as his chief engineer, and set to work shaping the future of British broadcasting.
33:18Everybody was struggling with two big questions.
33:21What was broadcasting for, and who should control it?
33:25Well, Peter Eckersley was absolutely clear.
33:30Every week he and his team would trundle this piano down from the Cock and Bell pub to his ex-army hut.
33:40Essentially because they wanted to entertain their listeners.
33:44Reith completely disagreed.
33:49For him, broadcasting was about information, education and high culture.
33:56So who was going to decide?
33:58Well, that at least was becoming clear.
34:01John Reith would decide.
34:04John Reith was in charge.
34:06And in 1929, Captain Eckersley got divorced, and John Reith sacked him.
34:15Ah, well, never mind.
34:26All across Britain, other young pioneers were on the up.
34:35In the summer of 1921, a teenager called Frank Taylor approached a bank manager in Blackpool for a loan of 400 pounds.
34:44It would help him transform the way this country looked.
34:52Frank needed 400 quid to build two houses.
34:56349, number 347, Central Drive, Blackpool.
35:01They've since been extended into a terrace.
35:03These are very ordinary houses.
35:07These are very special houses.
35:09Frank wanted them for his parents and his uncle Jack.
35:14Now, Frank was only 16 years old, but he got the plans approved himself.
35:21And as he said later, he was ready to do anything to get these houses built as quickly and as economically as possible.
35:29Taylor set about learning how to build a house with his own hands.
35:36Brick laying, hod carrying, carpentry, the lot.
35:43Before these houses were finished, before the roofs were even on,
35:47passers-by were stopping and asking to buy them.
35:52Well, he couldn't resist.
35:53He sold each of these houses for a thousand pounds.
35:56That was a hundred percent profit.
36:00And Frank asked himself,
36:03Building houses for the British.
36:07Perhaps there's money in this.
36:16After the war, Lloyd George had coined the catchphrase,
36:19homes for heroes.
36:20He had high hopes for a massive state housing boom.
36:25But money was short.
36:27And in fact, it was Frank's dream.
36:30Private, not public housing.
36:32That led the way.
36:34Producing 4 million new homes in 20 years.
36:38All exactly the same and every one of them different.
36:47Homes with hedges and rose bushes and sheds round the back for pottering in.
36:55Modest homes for peaceful heroes.
36:58Back at the start, Frank Taylor's building business had a problem.
37:10Frank's lawyer discovered that he was too young to own or sell land.
37:15To make things legal, he'd have to go into a partnership with an adult.
37:19And fast.
37:21What about Uncle Jack? said Frank.
37:26Jack Woodrow.
37:30And so, Taylor Woodrow was born.
37:33One of the property developers who together would build millions of homes.
37:38And help give Britain her distinctive look for the 20th century.
37:42The 20s produced the triumph of modern private housing.
37:54But they also gave us a modern political curse.
37:58Sleaze.
38:03One evening in September 1920, a socialist maverick called Victor Grayson walked into a bar in London.
38:10Sleaze.
38:13Sleaze.
38:15Sleaze.
38:17Grayson ordered a round.
38:19And then he got a message.
38:21And he said, don't let anyone drink my whiskey.
38:25Picked up his hat and his stick.
38:27And walked out into the Strand.
38:28His friends never saw him again.
38:45Victor Grayson's last political intervention was a speech against Lloyd George and a great cash-for-honours scandal.
38:55Sleaze.
38:58Unlike most politicians of the age, Lloyd George never had any money of his own.
39:03And once he became coalition prime minister, he didn't have a truly national party machine to raise funds either.
39:10And so, in order to keep himself in politics, he decided to sell honours, peerages, knighthoods, OBEs.
39:18Now, this was hardly unknown at Westminster, but what made Lloyd George different was the blatant nature of it.
39:27He went into business big and he went into business shamelessly.
39:32But the prime minister didn't want to get his own hands dirty.
39:39He needed a go-between.
39:41And he found one in a former spy, blackmailer and rogue, complete with monocle.
39:49His name was Maundy Gregory.
39:51Maundy Gregory would entice potential clients to his opulent offices, here at 38 Parliament Street.
40:03And they had a very useful back entrance.
40:06A kind of menu was quickly established.
40:10He wanted to be a baronet, but in today's money, £1.3 million.
40:16A knighthood, £330,000.
40:19Many people assumed that he was somehow a senior part of the government himself.
40:28In fact, these offices were a kind of clearing house for lethal gossip, bribery and kickbacks.
40:40Victor Grayson was determined to blow the whistle on Lloyd George's cash for honours operation.
40:44Meanwhile, Special Branch had tipped Maundy Gregory off that Grayson was a dangerous communist revolutionary and asked him to keep an eye on him.
40:54When Victor Grayson realised that Gregory was spying on him, he was more than ever determined to expose him.
41:08And eventually, with enormous guts, he made a blistering speech in Liverpool in which he said,
41:17This sale of honours is a national scandal.
41:22It can be traced all the way down from number 10 Downing Street and to a monocled dandy with offices in Whitehall.
41:31I know this man.
41:34And one day, I will name him.
41:39Now events began to take on a sinister edge.
41:43In September 1920, Grayson was attacked and beaten up.
41:46Eight days later, he disappeared.
42:01That evening, Grayson was spotted by a painter called George Flemmel.
42:06Flemmel was painting a landscape close to a small island on the Thames, near Hampton Court.
42:11Two men caught his attention as they passed by, in a newfangled invention, an electric canoe.
42:24As it happened, Flemmel had painted Grayson's portrait and he recognised him immediately.
42:32He watched as they moored on the island and saw them go into this bungalow, Vanity Fair.
42:41Vanity Fair belonged to Maundy Gregory, the only person on the island with an electric canoe, Maundy Gregory.
42:57Grayson's friends feared that something terrible had happened.
43:01Either he'd been killed or he'd been encouraged to disappear.
43:05With Grayson out of the picture, Lloyd George's honours racket continued.
43:17One of the nominations for a peerage in his next honours list was a convicted South African fraudster called Joseph Robinson.
43:23The commons exploded and the king was livid.
43:32Gregory had to break it to Joseph Robinson that the deal was off.
43:40But Robinson was slightly deaf. Sitting in his suite in the Savoy Hotel, he first thought he was being asked for even more money and he pulled out his cheque book.
43:52When he finally grasped that he wasn't getting a peerage at all, he demanded his money back.
43:57The chief whip asked Gregory if he knew what had become of it.
44:02Of course I know what's become of it, hissed Gregory. I've spent it.
44:06One mystery still remains. There were occasional claimed sightings of Victor Grayson right up until the 1950s in Spain.
44:21In North London, even in New Zealand.
44:24But he was never seen for certain ever again.
44:28For all intents and purposes, Victor Grayson vanished into thin air.
44:36The rather mucky Welsh wizard was still heading a conservative dominated coalition, but he was reaching the end of his long political road.
44:51In October 1922, the Tory backbenchers met at the Carlton Club to consider turning on their own party leadership and chucking out the Welsh cuckoo.
45:06Speaking against Lloyd George were two conservative leaders in waiting, Andrew Boner Law, who was ill, and Stanley Baldwin, who did the talking.
45:20Stanley Baldwin's speech was plain but devastating. Yes, Lloyd George was a dynamic force. But, he said, a dynamic force is a terrible thing.
45:34This one had smashed liberals and could smash the Conservatives too.
45:41They voted by 185 to 88 to cut loose and stand as an independent party.
45:48And the Conservatives have never forgotten at this moment. Even to this day, their backbenchers call themselves the 1922 committee. Their badge of independence from power drunk Westminster grandees.
46:05Britain would be spared another dynamic force for many years to come.
46:15This was an age of political pygmies. Over the next two years, Britain had four Prime Ministers.
46:24Boner Law, Stanley Baldwin, and Britain's first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald. He only lasted ten months.
46:34Oh yes, and then Stanley Baldwin again.
46:43But there was one big beast prowling around.
46:46After 20 years with the Liberals, Winston Churchill returned to Parliament as the Conservative MP for Epping.
46:55He was hoping Baldwin would offer him a modest government job.
47:04In fact, the Prime Minister asked him to be Chancellor of the Exchequer and Churchill was dumbfounded.
47:12I should like to have answered, will the bloody duck swim?
47:15But he had a sense of occasion and in fact said to Baldwin, I shall be delighted to serve you in this splendid office.
47:28But Churchill was not a splendid Chancellor. He had one great decision in front of him and he got it wrong.
47:36In March 1925, he summoned four economists to dine at the Treasury to thrash out the burning economic issue of the day, the gold standard.
47:53The gold standard simply meant fixing the price of national currencies to a certain amount of gold, providing a clear, transparent system which had underpinned the huge boom in world trade in the golden years before the war.
48:11Globalisation with Britain at the centre.
48:14During the war, the British economy had been bled dry. The city of London had lost its prime position to New York.
48:29The radical young economist John Maynard Keynes thought that going back to gold would devastate Britain's already weakened industry.
48:38By instinct, Churchill was also against, but the Treasury experts said that going back to the clear, transparent system of the pre-war world would make the city great again.
48:57But if a system is clear and transparent, it's also a ruthless exposer of weakness.
49:05All very glorious to put on an old suit of armour, unless you're too weak to walk in it.
49:16Churchill brooded as they argued it out over the table, but by the end of the meal, he'd been won over.
49:24Britain was going to have to go back onto the gold standard.
49:29But there was no mood of celebration over this dinner.
49:32As one of them put it, it will be hell.
49:38And hell it was.
49:40The return to the gold standard made British exports more expensive, including coal.
49:47And with more than a million miners, the coal industry was the country's largest employer.
49:52To stay in business, the mine owners announced a cut in wages and an even longer working day.
50:04An industrial dispute was soon coming to the boil.
50:09The mine owners stood firm.
50:10Then at one minute to midnight on Monday the 3rd of May 1926, the TUC pulled a general strike.
50:25Quietly, the government had been planning for this moment.
50:28And they now sent telegrams all across the country with a single code word.
50:35Action.
50:36All army and navy leave was immediately cancelled.
50:51Two battleships dropped anchor in the Mersey.
50:55Two infantry battalions marched through Liverpool.
51:02Bring it on.
51:04If the revolution was coming, the authorities were determined to show they were ready for it.
51:12They were ready for it.
51:30On the first morning of the strike, Britain came to a virtual standstill.
51:42But the government already had a small army of strike-breaking volunteers at its disposal.
51:55City gents shoveled coal at the gasworks.
52:02The Ranela Polo Club patrolled central Londoners special constables on their ponies.
52:08Titled ladies and debutantes turned up to organise food supplies.
52:16One posh drama student wrote to her mother about the gentlemen volunteers on the London tube.
52:24It's perfectly mad to hear a beautiful Oxford voice crying,
52:29Uxbridge and Harrow train, rather than Uxbridge and Arra.
52:33It's perfectly jolly and such an improvement on the ordinary hum-drum state of things.
52:45But it was the railways that attracted the real toffs.
52:50The Honourable Mrs Beaumont led stable duty at Paddington.
52:54Lord Monkswell was a signalman at Marylebone.
53:00And the Honourable Lionel Guest successfully drove a train all the way from Liverpool Street to Yarmouth.
53:07After a few days, many of the strike-breaking volunteers developed a train of war.
53:25a healthy respect for the working classes they had often never come across before.
53:43One of them said,
53:44I found much of my sympathy was more with the men than with the employers or the government.
53:53I had never realised the appalling poverty which existed.
53:59By the fifth day of the strike, London was running short of flour and bread.
54:10At 4am, the government sent a convoy of lorries and armoured cars to take food from the docks by force.
54:20Restless crowds of strikers looked on, but didn't interfere.
54:24This was the psychological turning point.
54:34At noon, on the ninth day of the strike, Arthur Pugh, the leader of the TUC, contacted Baldwin to tell him that the strike was to be terminated forthwith.
54:46Baldwin wasn't quite sure he'd heard properly.
54:48Forthwith, replied Pugh, that means immediately.
54:54Baldwin said, I thank God for your decision.
54:59The strike was over, and for some, the good times still rolled on.
55:12In June 1928, a crudely printed party invitation began arriving at some of the best addresses in Mayfair and Belgravia.
55:24This was to be the most outrageous party of the season, and it was being held at the local swimming baths.
55:30On the guest list was a young Oxford graduate called Tom Dryberg, later a communist, MI5 spy and chairman of the Labour Party.
55:46He'd just started writing for the Daily Express gossip column, The Talk of London.
55:55Writing anonymously as the Dragoman, Tom Dryberg reported visions of great rubber horses and flowers floating about on the water.
56:05Everything was illuminated by coloured spotlights, and many of the guests had brought two or three costumes to change into as the night wore on.
56:16Dryberg kept rushing out to the nearest public telephone to file his copy.
56:20This was a hoot, but also a scoop.
56:30The guests included the brightest of the bright young things, Mayfair debutants, the children of lords and government ministers,
56:37and a slender it-girl with a weakness for hard drugs called Brenda Dean Paul.
56:50Brenda Dean Paul remembered seeing unshockable old dowagers glued to the only available seats in the dimly lit cubicles by the side of the pool.
57:00She said, they seemed quite contented, like plump hens their lorgnettes fixed on the dripping parade.
57:21The bath and bottle party would turn out to be the beginning of the end for Britain's roaring twenties.
57:26For an economic storm was brewing across the Atlantic, and from the dealing rooms on Wall Street, the chilly winds would soon be blowing all the way to Belgravia.
57:46For the bright young things, the end of the bath and bottle party was a premonition.
57:51Modern times were giving way to hard times, and soon the off-colour cocktails and the crushed rose petals and the glittering pool were only a memory.
58:04The good times were drifting away on a thousand bobbing champagne corks.
58:09And as the sunlight filtered through the skylights, Britain's fast set were weaving and wobbling their weary way home.
58:20And the without-rain
58:22and the light tym hmm was a while.
58:23The end of the day
58:28in the day
58:29in the day
58:35The rest of the day
58:37in the day
58:39in the day
58:40in the day
58:41in the day