Summary:
August is *silly season* for news organisations because many organisations wind down for the summer holidays, and Parliament shuts down for a couple of months. So the Cambridge Daily News invited its readers to suggest improvements to the town – in the most inappropriate way possible.
Cue the music <– Click.
Imagine a game show host saying this on Saturday night TV:
“It’s 1936 and evil dictators are all the rage! So we’re inviting you – yes, you! Our lucky viewers and readers to send in your suggestions on what you’d do to Cambridge if you were its dictator! We’ll be giving out cash prizes to the best suggestions!”
No – really.
From the Cambridge Daily News, August 1936, in the Cambridgeshire Collection
…which made this week in the Cambridgeshire Collection more than interesting…
“Oh that’s horrific”
This is the 1930s we’re talking about. The world struggling to emerge from the Great Depression, the country having been hit by austerity following falling tax revenues, Conservative peers, newspaper barons and Establishment cads flirting with the far right, while the Labour Party struggles to fight off communist infiltration….
…But that was the 1930s. It couldn’t happen again, could it?
Oh.
Ronald Searle in the Cambridge Daily News, 15 August 1936, in the Cambridgeshire Collection
I wonder what those two chaps and their chums would have made of He-Man of the 1982.
Not that those these chaps needed encouraging…
From the Cambridge Daily News, August 1936, in the Cambridgeshire Collection
“The writer above wasn’t being serious, was he?”
From the Cambridge Daily News, August 1936, in the Cambridgeshire Collection
So.,..you’re the dictator of Cambridge and you can build anything that you want in town and all you want to do is…turn off Hobson’s Conduit on a Saturday because people get splished? Did letter writers have no ambition back then?
In the meantime, The Guildhall gets it in the neck. Again.
Ronald Searle in the Cambridge Daily News, August 1936, in the Cambridgeshire Collection
This was also the year the steel skeleton of the new guildhall started taking shape. Locals still hated it. They also worried about what new cohorts of undergraduates and tourists arriving in Cambridge would think.
Interestingly, Cambridge outside of the colleges was not seen as a nice place architecture-wise.
Ronald Searle in the Cambridge Daily News, August 1936, in the Cambridgeshire Collection
Another group of people who got it in the neck from writers, were their wives – or women in general.
From the Cambridge Daily News, August 1936, in the Cambridgeshire Collection
Still, local cartoonist and future Cambridge hero Ronald Searle managed to lampoon the dictators in his cartoons…and those who went around pretending they were as such as well.
Town councillors always got it in the neck back then as they do now – the difference being that the councillors back then had a much higher profile because there were more, better attended local public meetings than there are today. Also, local party meetings were open to the public unlike today. Even Mr Searle felt sorry for them!
Ronald Searle in the Cambridge Daily News, August 1936, in the Cambridgeshire Collection
…note councillors, badly-behaved undergraduates from public school, Cambridge guildhall and noisy dustbin men…and wives, all are on the receiving end of his razor-sharp wit.
Some contributions contained issues that are still a problem today
Bus engines anyone?
I’ll try to feature some of the more positive ideas in a future post – as there are ones that either were followed through in the decades after the Second World War, as well as ones that we could do with today.
Lost Cambridge 