HOWZAT

In terms of subject matter, too, these were unusual images. One of the earliest industrial images made in colour was a 1910 photograph by the Russian Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii, of a joining shop for the production of scabbards. But in Britain, there were no other known colour photographers making documentary images of industrial working life. Bill Brandt and Cecil Beaton had been shooting records of British social life, but only in black and white. And it wasn’t until the late Forties and Fifties that people such as Maurice Broomfield began to make colour documentary photographs of factories in Britain.

Looking at the image of the soap-manufacturing factory reproduced on page 47, for example, you can virtually smell the clean scent of lanolin and sense the cool, calm efficiency of these women as they cut and stack the blocks of soap. The softly rendered green and red colours, lit from above in the Bolton Tootal factory (page 38), stand out, too, as the two men arrange the wet hanks on rollers, bent intently over their task.

In Bogaerde’s pages, labour was made to look heroic and glamorous, and the nation was presented as calm, efficient and profitable, heralding Britain’s recovery from the First World War and the Depression. For although economic growth in the South and South-East was strong, and the standard of living there relatively high, the Depression had cast its pall over regions where new industries had thrived, and even over those who had remained in work. In 1938, Professor Richard Titmuss estimated that malnutrition had been responsible for the deaths of 150 people for every day of the previous ten years. There was, he wrote, “intense poverty, so considerable and so widespread, but at the same time so veiled and hidden by British stoicism and complacency, that public opinion has hitherto refused to recognise it”.

On February 13, 1936, The Times reported that half the population was “living on a diet insufficient or ill-designed to maintain health”. When the Duke of York (the future King George VI) visited the East End of London, he was assailed by cockneys shaking their fists and shouting, “Food! Give us food! We don’t want royal parasites!” But the “Devil’s Decade”, as the Thirties were known, also spawned, as we can see, the affluent society. In the South, the middle-class house and car culture was born, which stimulated manufacture of other goods – radios, cookers, vacuum cleaners, Anglepoise lamps, even sets of Monopoly. Bogaerde’s colour picture pages reflect that hope, aspiration and eventual prosperity.

Explore 200 years of The Times in our newly launched digital archive, timesonline.co.uk/archive

Editor's choice

• The 100 Best Films of the Decade
• 70 facts you didn't know about Marvel
• The 50 Biggest Movies Of 2010