In one of the Chronicles of Narnia novels, mention is made of a once-wealthy fellow who was “made poor by the War.” I’m trying to understand how one’s country being at war could lead to a wealthy citizen becoming impoverished. I can only think of a couple of scenarios.
Could it be that his business depended on unmolested trade in the North Atlantic, where there was always the possibility of ships being sunk by German ships? Could it be that his wealth came from rents on his land, and those rents weren’t coming in because men of working age were fighting the war? Or am I missing other possibilities?
Also, did a significant number of wealthy Britons find themselves in penury once WWII ended?
Business interests almost anywhere in Britain or Europe, or places like Singapore, would have taken a beating. So many places reduced to rubble, with little or no income during the war years.
If he wealth involved buildings/real estate/physical structures they could have been bombed and destroyed. If you’re a store owner and your store is destroyed that’s a bit hit. If you own factories and the factories are destroyed that’s a big hit. If you’re a landlord and the buildings you own and rent are destroyed there goes your income and capital.
It might include: owning foreign investments that had to be compulsorily liquidated (most British investments in North and South America had to be sold at firesale prices before the Americans would consent to do lend-lease); owning stock in firms whose plant was worn out by constant working, without investment in replacement; seeing any profits made clawed back by the Excess Profits Tax; paying extra income tax that would be returned once you were 65 under the Postwar Credit Scheme …. Much of British industry was already in poor shape due to the Depression, lacking investment and tied to old-fashioned methods of doing things.
This doesn’t relate to GB and WWII. But an example of a wealthy person who impoverished herself in service to her country at war is Elizabeth Van Lew, a resident of Richmond, VA during the Civil War.
Van Lew ran a spy network for the North and reportedly sheltered escaping Union soldiers in her mansion, expending her fortune in the process.
After her death, the city of Richmond acquired her home (at a time when similar historic residences were being preserved), and demolished it in an act of petty vengeance.
Many in the business of making or selling luxury goods who could not transfer their expertise to a war economy would have been screwed. Rolls Royce could make aircraft and Savile Row could switch to military uniforms. But what about the guy in the jewelry business whose competitor beat him to an exclusive on military decorations or the guy who made/sold ladies’ hats for the Derby? Or just something equally frivolous like roller skates or polo mallets. Not every industry could make the conversion to government contractor.
Right. If you’re rich and try to maintain the standard of living that goes along with being rich, you’re going to have to pay a lot of money to the gardeners, housekeepers, cooks, maids, butlers, chauffeurs, and other staff, since they have the opportunity to work for more money in factories (or just can demand higher wages because so much of their competition is in the Army or Navy). Meanwhile your income from renting out farmland may be limited by contract or tradition - and if you sell the land to make due during the war, after the war, you won’t have the income, but the prices will still be high.
As Agatha Christie is reported to have said “I never thought I’d be rich enough to own an automobile, or so poor that I couldn’t afford servants”
For owners of large country houses/estates, their property might well be requisitioned for war purposes (military HQ/training facility, airfield, hospital, evacuated school) and (if returned) requiring substantial repair/making good - with supplies and manpower remaining in shortage or too expensive for years after the war.
My grandfather was a businessman who owned a factory making soft furnishing products at the start of WW2. Basically fabric furnishings, so buying textiles and a factory of workers driving sewing machines.
The war in Britain was one of heavy handed government regulation. You couldn’t purchase raw materials without government say so, and couldn’t really operate traditional businesses of many kinds. My mother tells of government officials arriving at the factory on more than one occasion, and demanding that it be shut down. My grandfather got through the war making parachutes. But at the end of the war, the country was impoverished, supply chains for materials were nonexistent and there was suddenly no military customer. With neither materials nor market, many businesses would go under.
The transition to post war economy probably drove as many under as the war itself. The manner in which overbearing government regulation persisted after the end of the war was extraordinarily damaging on many fronts.
As the Art of War says: In times of peace, prepare for war; In times of war, prepare for peace. The UK didn’t really manage that.
Fortunately, Hitler was insane and decided to invade the Soviet Union rather than finish off England. Had he done the right thing, he could have secured Europe and taken away England as a staging area for D-Day. He also could have blockaded the import of goods and, by doing so, destroyed their quality of life.
Britain was very impoverished in the early 1950s, when the Narnia books were written. As well as the war debts and loss of empire, the post-war Labour Government nationalised many industries and the National Health service, removing many sources of undeserved wealth for the middle and upper classes.
C. S. Lewis was somewhat of a reactionary on the quiet, but he kept it fairly well hidden except in works like That Hideous Strength, and a certain amount of racism and misogyny even in the Narnia books.
There were so many international markets & industries overturned, it’s hard to know where to start. Enormous fortunes were lost in almost any place you can think of: insurance, petroleum/energy, rubber, sugar, banking, shipping, metals, chemicals.
An investment in a French printing press or Italian vineyard. A partnership with a Polish fish cannery. A silk importer.
That’s kind of what I was thinking when I read the passage in the book. I mean, the guy could have owned pastry shops, or some other type of fancy/luxury non-essential product that would be crushed by nearly six years of rationing and centralized economic control.
Or even just owned a chain of service stations; I suspect that there was precious little gasoline being sold to civilians, and a commensurate drop in maintenance, consumables, etc…
One other factor was the Blitz. Some of the worst bombing in the City destroyed a tremendous amount of businesses and business records. One article I read suggested that the damage to the City contributed to Britain’s long-term economic decline.
Other posters have alluded to the physical losses in the war. I think it’s important to remember that most insurance policies don’t cover acts of war. So if a bomb destroys your factory, there’s no insurance to make you whole.
.