The great economic decline began immediately after the war ended, while many goods were still rationed and scarce, if not nonexistent. Many jobs were no longer needed due to the industrial drawdown, with an ambitious film journey covering the length and breadth of England and showing the industries in decline, particularly shipbuilding and its associated contributing manufacturers and suppliers, while at the same time employers were hiking required working hours and lowering pay. Particular emphasis was placed on the disparity between the elegant lives of the aristocracy, and the plight of the poor, which was a large part of the population. The beginnings of trade unions around this time helped the laborers somewhat, but the majority of the population was still at or below the poverty line.
Matters came to a head in May 1926, when the miners, long the most oppressed of the working classes, walked off the job. They were soon followed by the majority of the labor class, which brought the country nearly to a standstill. Reinforcing the hold that the aristocracy and the government had on the labor force, the Archbishop of the Church of England called the strike a sin “against the obedience owed to God,” and went on to say there was no moral justification for the walkout. In nine short days, the strike was broken, although the miners stayed on strike for another eight months before starvation drove them back to the pits. To emphasize its might, business forced the miners to accept even lower wages and longer hours in order to get their jobs back.
As books and movies have noted, India was the “Jewel in the Crown” of the British Empire, and a good part of the series covered this area of the world in greater detail, emphasizing how 100,000 British ruled over 300 million Indians. It showed the lifestyle of the aristocracy, including the tiger hunts, the parties, and how the officers and civilians in the occupying forces, as well as visiting dignitaries, were catered to in their every whim, including being carried in howdahs on the shoulders of human bearers.
A large portion of the series centered on the events leading up to, during, and following World War Two, which was when the Great Empire began to display its initial serious signs of crumbling. Indian activism had stepped up considerably since the turn of the 20th century, particularly after Mohandas Gandhi’s return to India in 1915. For the most part, the country rolled along pretty much as it had since the British assumed sovereignty, but with slow and steady growth in strength of the separatist movement.
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