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The music-hall reached its pinnacle at this time, with many new halls being built; the performers achieved great fame, but the life they sang about was the life of the audience - there was a great sense of shared experience, the feeling that they had all been through the bad times. In the burst of jingoism that came at the time of the first world war, the music halls were responsible for recruiting a large number of the young men who were to sacrifice their lives on the battlefields of France and Belgium. It was only as the war dragged on, and death came in wave after wave that the war songs of the music halls began to have a slightly plaintive quality. While the singers had been exhorting their young men to go over and do their glorious bit for England, now they were more likely to tell them to pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile. People only need to be told to smile, especially in such an insistent way, when there is precious little to smile about. Perhaps the decline of the halls which began in the twenties was due to the fact that they were seen to have become the tool of the establishment, the fact that people felt a sense of betrayal, and that the performers could no longer count on the bond of shared experience.
The war was the first in which civilians had to face directly the blows of the enemy. Early bombing raids were carried out by Zeppelins, which had a hard enough time actually finding the city, and many of their bombs dropped in the open countryside - casualties were light. However, Londoners were outraged at this new aspect of war, and called the Zeppelins the ‘baby killers’. Towards the end of the war London had to put up with more sustained and accurate bombing, and this was an early foretaste of what was to come in a couple of decades.
Public transport expanded a great deal in the first quarter of the century, with tramlines being laid and omnibus routes being established. After the Great War there was a great expansion, largely due to the laying of new railway lines, and ‘metroland’, beloved of John Betjeman, was born, being named after the Metropolitan Line whose trains entered the Hertfordshire countryside and brought the suburbs with them.
Following the agonies of the war, London now became infected with a new gaiety, as many of the Victorian social strictures were finally discarded. Perhaps the shortage of young men had something to do with it. The era of the ‘flapper’ had begun, and it was to be nearly half a century before the same kind of easy-going morality and sense of hedonistic enjoyment was to be seen again.
In the thirties the depression and the growing unease about what was happening in Germany had a sobering effect. Since 1666 the skyline of London had changed only gradually; there was a sense of permanence about these dignified buildings. The first world war had not had a major impact on London, but the second one changed the city completely. In 1941 the blitz took place, and bombs rained down nightly on London. The East End felt the brunt of it, but the whole of London suffered.