1938 Newspaper Supplement

"Forty Wonderful Years" is something of a rose-tinted view taken by this newspaper supplement from 1938, one of my collection of old newspapers.

Much of the content relates to the monarchy which had only just recovered from one of it’s least wonderful moments, namely the abdication of the uncrowned King Edward VIII.

In referring to a "Pictorial Record of Our Times" the supplement skips many of the horrors of World War 1, ignores completely the terrible Flu pandemic of 1918, the depression years and (in 1938) glosses over the already serious threat posed by Germany under Hitler. Forty Wonderful Years? Perhaps not quite!

The 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic claimed somewhere between 50 and 100 million lives (about 5% of the world’s population at the time) which compares with 15 million estimated deaths spread over the four years of WW1.

Posted by davids pix on 2019-05-22 15:30:19

Tagged: , Forty , Wonderful , Years , Newspaper , Supplement , 1938 , Royal , family , Queen , Victoria