At the time, a pint of milk cost 3d and the average house cost just £619 as opposed to £290,000 today. In an era when most people smoked, a packet of twenty cigarettes cost less than a shilling. The big craze of the year was newspaper crosswords, as after the Sunday Express began to print them in 1924 the other papers soon caught on. ‘It would be a little unwise even for superior folks to affect any marked degree of scorn for the present crossword puzzle craze. After all, the vocabularies of most of us are rather uncomfortably limited,’ the Yorkshire Observer wrote.

The British public were also hooked on reading exciting thrillers and detective stories, with Daily Express writer Edgar Wallace the most popular author of the time. No fewer than eighteen Wallace novels appeared that year, and in the second half of 1926 his sales topped an incredible 750,000. Among his devotees were King George V and Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Wallace was a celebrity of the age and his views were sought on a wide range of issues. ‘Simply monstrous’ was how he described in the Daily Express the government’s introduction of a betting tax in November.

The year came to an end with the British Broadcasting Company becoming the British Broadcasting Corporation on 1 January 1927. The first broadcast was a Happy New Year Ball, beginning with the tune ‘The More We Are Together’. At the theatre, opening nights were strictly black-tie affairs, with ladies in evening gowns, and even in many middle-class homes, the family was expected to change for dinner into black tie and were waited upon.

However, not everyone lived such privileged lifestyles. There was also desperate social unrest and, twelve days after the royal princess was born, there was a general strike for the first time in British history. The strike, which bought the country to a standstill, was precipitated by the government’s withdrawal of subsidy to the coal industry and a dispute between the mine owners and the miners against a proposed reduction in their wages at a time when the whole country relied on coal.

Many people, including King George V, had some sympathies with the miners and how they had been treated by the owners, but for a while there seemed to be a serious threat to public order. People pulled together to do the essential tasks that the strikers had abandoned, such as unloading food ships at the docks, conducting and driving buses and so on. Meanwhile, society girls acted as waitresses to help feed the stand-in workforce.