A special edition of the blog this week, as we have reached 100 posts! Here’s a look behind the scenes.

Basics

A new blog post appears every Wednesday, at 9.30am UK time.

On average, blog posts are about 1,050 words long. This means that there are now over 100,000 words written on this blog!

There are currently five different categories of posts: Fiction; Film; Newspapers; People; and Everything Else. Some posts are in more than one category if they cross over.

Film is by far the biggest category, betraying both my background in that subject and my commitment from the start of the blog to regularly highlight underappreciated British interwar films. Fiction is so far the smallest category, but it’s catching up rapidly.

There are also tags at the bottom of each post, which allow for more fine-grained categorisation. The most commonly used tags are Women; Journalism; and Police. Do use the tags to easily find more blogs about a particular topic.

Most popular posts

In the past two years(ish) of running this blog, one post has received way more attention than any others. The most popular post by a long way is Friday Night is Amami Night – this was one of the first blogs to appear and it remains consistently popular with readers.

Other evergreen posts are:

Car ownership and regulation in interwar London
W. Lusty & Sons Ltd – Furniture Makers; and
The Prince of Wales and the interwar craze for Fair Isle jumpers

Hidden gems

With a new post coming out every week, naturally some get more attention than others. Here are some posts that you may have missed:

Woman: Her Health and Beauty (1919): a deep dive through an early interwar exercise book for women. I try my best to include items and texts from the early interwar period (pre-1925) to give a rounded view of the period.

Mr Smith Wakes Up (1937): a short film addressing racism and colonial attitudes in interwar Britain. It’s definitely reflective of the period and not perfect by a long shot, but it’s also an all-too rare example of Black Britons being given a voice on screen in the 1930s.

1927: More Women Die Young: A good example of the mad populist newspaper articles that were absolutely everywhere during the 1920s and 1930s (and still are today, of course). The Daily Mail argued that being single as a woman would drastically shorten your lifespan.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Downhill (1927): One of the earlier films of one of the best-known film directors of the 20th century. Welsh heartthrob Ivor Novello stars as a young man whose life is ruined after taking responsibility for an unwanted pregnancy that he did not cause.

The Love Test (1935): One of my all-time favourite interwar films. Set in a chemical lab, it showcases (competent!) female scientists.

Readership

Predictably, the vast majority of the blog’s readers are based in the UK. This is followed by some distance by readers from the US, the Netherlands, Canada and China. However, I’m very pleased to say there are also readers in Vanuatu, Peru, Slovakia, Uruguay, Trinidad & Tobago, Pakistan, American Samoa, Taiwan, Denmark and many, many more. In fact, there have so far been readers of over 60 countries and territories!

I’m delighted that the blog has such a far reach, which is increasing week by week. I hope that it contributes in some way to make 1920s and 1930s British history more accessible to anyone with an interest in the topic.