The Making of Modern Britain

Part One

LIVING IN THE FUTURE
1900–1914

Don’t worry, darlin’

No baby, don’t you fret

We’re livin’ in the future,

And none of this has happened yet

Bruce Springsteen,

‘Livin’ in the Future’, 2007

Edwardians: the Shock of the Familiar

They are very far, and strangely near. Almost nobody is still alive who remembers Edwardian Britain. To that extent, it has become proper history. Its rigid class distinctions, its imperial pride, its strange ideas – from theosophy to racial purity – are the vivid coral of a lost world. Few of us would feel at home there for any length of time. Every town had places where the children were literally shoeless and where people were withering (not growing fatter) from malnutrition. The smells of the town included human excrement and unwashed bodies, along with tobacco, beer, coal smoke and the rich reek of horse. Child prostitutes were readily available on busy streets. The largest single group of the employed were not factory workers but domestic servants. Every middle-class household had a maid, or maids, a cook, and often a gardener or groom. Class distinction was not an abstract thing, but present in most houses, standing quietly in the room.

Today we still read one another instantly by clothing. A Barbour jacket means one thing, a hoodie another. Everyone can spot a cheap suit bought for that first job. But in Edwardian Britain the distinctions of dress were sharper and harsher. A shopkeeper’s assistant without a tail-coat could not stroll along the seafront promenade on a Sunday. An aristocrat seen wearing a coloured tie with a morning coat was angrily rebuked by his monarch. Respectable women always wore hats and gloves when outdoors. Gaiters, top hats with ribbons, pantaloons, three-inch boiled collars all sent messages, meaning drayman, bishop, suffragist and ‘masher’. For the poor there was no state welfare, just charity relief or the threat of the dreaded workhouse. Union flags billowed above the buildings. Race destiny was accepted by nearly everyone. We have a state. They had an empire.

The streets were crowded, as they are now, and noisy. But the omnibuses were horse-drawn, the carts and hansom cabs likewise, and the noise was of hooves, neighing, whips and cursing. Bicycling was popular and there were a few cars, regarded with amusement or suspicion as they passed, driven by people dressed, in the words of one observer, like ‘a cross between an overgrown goat and a doormat’. The first fatal accident involving a pedestrian and a car is generally reckoned to have happened in the Lower Shoreham Road in Hove, Sussex. The car was doing a dangerous 8 m.p.h. Crime was, by today’s standards, remarkably low. Yet anyone could walk into one of numerous shops and buy a revolver. The fashionable Webley-Green could be had blued or in nickel plate, with an ivory or mother-of-pearl handle. Edwardian Britain was an armed country, even after the Pistols Act of 1903 thoughtfully banned sales of handguns to people under eighteen or ‘drunken or insane’. In the ‘Tottenham Outrage’ of 1909, police chasing a gang simply picked up four pistols from passers-by for the pursuit; other armed citizens joined in. Regional accents were much stronger, suspicion of foreigners much more intense. As George Orwell noted later, Chinamen were sinister and funny too; Africans simple-minded; Indians loyal, or alternatively treacherous. There was music everywhere, but it was live and not recorded, tinkling out of pubs or being lustily sung in the open air. Yet the air of the cities, at least, was rarely open. Thick palls hung over industrial Yorkshire, the Clyde and London. When the 1906 Liberal government won its landslide victory and the new cabinet ministers were summoned to see the King, they could not find their way back from Buckingham Palace in the fog and had to feel past rows of horses with their hands.

Yet in so many other ways, Edwardian Britain confronts us with the shock of the entirely familiar. If you walk through most British town centres and look only in front then, yes, the Edwardians and Victorians have gone. The old specialist shops with tradesmen’s bicycles outside and the freshly scrubbed steps have been replaced by large glass chain-store frontages and a glut of metal, parked or crawling cars. But raise your gaze by a few degrees and often you find they are still with us. There are the elaborate brickwork upper storeys, fake turrets, old chimneys, faded shop signs, dates, spires and elaborate windows, evidence that these buildings were originally erected by craftsmen before the First World War. When they first went up, on wooden scaffolding ringing to the sound of Irish voices, the people who moved in were, like us, fascinated by celebrity gossip which they devoured in cheap newspapers and the popular magazines. They ate fish and chips and drank quite a lot, even by our standards. Though sex outside marriage and illegitimate children were matters to be ashamed of, there was plenty of sexual tension in the air. The upper classes and working classes behaved in ways that horrified the middle, who followed awful murders, worried about the unruly young and argued about divorce, state pensions, socialism and unemployment much as we do. In the new luxury variety halls and huge theatres, working-class culture had seized the imagination of the middle classes too, with sentimental songs, magicians, dancers, entertainers, infuriatingly hummable tunes and bad jokes – very much as happened when television culture arrived sixty years later. They were also great club-formers, creating endless leagues and associations, including many of today’s football and other sporting clubs.

As now, the middle classes looked to science to make life easier, and to save the world from possible calamities ahead. In the first Illustrated London News of 1901, various eminent scientists were asked to give their predictions about the new century. Sir Norman Lockyer explains that studying sunspots will enable people to forecast the weather, tackling ‘famines in India, and droughts in Australia’ long in advance. Sir W. H. Preece, co-inventor of the wireless telegraph, thinks that ‘the people of 2000 will smile at our achievements as we smile at those of 1800’ but warns that wireless communications have no further to go and is dubious about whether man will really fly through the air. Sir John Wolfe Barry, the engineer of Tower Bridge, believes we will see wave power and hydro-electric power in the twentieth century; though he also predicts ‘moving platforms’ above and below the streets to ease congestion. Sir William Crookes suspects telephones will become popular, and is interested in ‘radium’ as a new source of energy – predictions which he rather spoils by suggesting that all London will be covered by a large glass lid to deal with the weather. Sir Henry Roscoe, president of the Chemical Society, believes the ‘annihilation of distance’ cannot be carried much further in the twentieth century: ‘The Atlantic voyage, for instance, which we can now accomplish in five days, is not likely to be reduced to one.’

If the scientists were hit and miss about the future, the political visionaries were mostly miss. There was a general assumption, which extended to self-proclaimed radicals and liberals, that the Empire would continue to be huge while government would be small. Income tax had shot up, because of the Boer War, to the unseemly figure of a shilling in the pound – that is, 5 per cent. The war had increased public spending as a percentage of national income to nearly 15 per cent. It would fall towards 10 per cent until the First World War sent it rocketing to levels closer to those of the 1970s. The reformed and quite efficient civil service stood at around 116,000 (500,000 now, despite computers) though it would double in size in the Edwardian period. The House of Lords was still the cockpit of aristocracy and the prime minister sat there, not in the Commons – though Lord Salisbury would be the last British leader to do that. The richest peers lived on a scale barely comprehensible even after the age of hedge-fund managers and internet moguls. They had hundreds of personal servants. One had a private army, another a large private orchestra which travelled abroad with him. At Chatsworth, 300 torchbearers stood on the main avenue to welcome royal visitors. In London, the great ducal town houses were more like the palaces of lesser continental monarchs. Yet the wealth of the industrialists and financiers had eaten deeply into the landed gentry, diluting the old aristocrats. Their handbook, Debrett’s Peerage, was vastly swollen by new baronets. In the Commons, the party of the left, the Liberals, was still dominated by aristocrats or by commoners who had done so well they sounded like aristocrats. There were barely any working-class MPs.

The greatest crisis at the start of the century was the South African War, in which a struggling British army was trying to exert imperial domination over small Dutch-speaking republics. At home it uncorked a fizz of patriotism, with city workers queuing to sign up as volunteers, noblemen financing their own detachments, and all kinds of adverts taking on a military theme. Drab khaki (the word comes from an Indian one for dust), which had replaced easy-to-hit scarlet as the British army’s field colour, was being worn by fashionable women. When the isolated town of Mafeking was eventually relieved, the scenes of rejoicing were so exuberant that ‘mafficking’ became a word meaning, roughly speaking, to go wild in public. When Winston Churchill escaped from Boer captivity, the papers had a field day and the music halls satirized the bumptious young man. Yet all this enthusiasm could not hide the fact that Britain fought ineffectively at first, and then only achieved her victory by brutal new strategies, which made other Europeans shiver with detestation.

Early on, the heavily laden and cumbersome British forces found themselves outsmarted and at times cut to ribbons by Boers who knew the land, understood the value of digging trenches, and could attack in fast-moving formations they called commandos. This was as shocking for the Empire as Viet Cong guerrilla successes would be for the United States later. Eventually, under Lord Kitchener, the entire area of fighting was divided up with barbed wire fences and blockhouses, and Boer farms were burned to the ground in order to deny these early guerrillas food and shelter. The Boer women and children were homeless and were transported to badly run camps, soon called concentration camps. There, in conditions of squalor, 26,000 Boers died, most of them children. France, America, Austria and Germany expressed their horror. A brave woman, Emily Hobhouse, the daughter of a Cornish vicar, travelled to South Africa to investigate conditions there and returned to tell the British public about the flies, malnutrition and typhoid, what she described as ‘wholesale cruelty’ and ‘murder to the children’. She enlisted political support and is only one of many radical and feisty women who set the tone of Edwardian Britain. This was a land still bestriding much of the world, but angrily self-questioning at home. And it was a well-informed nation too.

In newspapers and magazines of the day the quantity of foreign news – from the Empire, but also from the United States, continental Europe and Russia – is staggering. Not needing passports, emigrants were flooding out of British ports to Australia, Canada and South Africa. A cascade of talented Britons, fed up with class distinction, grimy towns and lack of opportunity, was flowing into America. In the other direction, refugees from Czarist pogroms or Latin poverty were coming into Britain, mainly to London but also to manufacturing cities and the great ports. There were large German colonies in Bradford and Manchester, Italian merchants and Polish-Jewish areas. For the lucky rich it was a great age of travel and adventure. The better off set out by motor yacht or train to spend months on the Côte d’Azur, at one of the German spas or in Venice. Sporting aristocrats were busy slaughtering antelope, bison and tigers further afield: a whole dedicated class of civil servants and administrators were running the greatest imperial possession, India. With Britain controlling a quarter of the world and the world’s peoples, the planet seemed open and pliant. Literate people, and most were, may well have been better informed than people today, in the age of the internet and twenty-four-hour news. They were probably more interested, because in other ways Abroad was menacing. The German threat was rising, but the danger of invasion by the French had been discussed just as fervently. America was regarded as a hugely wealthy and energetic but politically unimportant power.

Our world is visible, struggling to be born, in one of the most vivid, teeming, fast-changing, exhilarating periods in British history. London was the world’s largest city, a global capital which lured anarchists and revolutionaries on the run, millionaires from America and countless poor migrants from Poland, Ireland and Italy. The speed of technological change was at least as disorientating as it is now. It was not simply cars and motorcycles and soon the first aircraft, but also impossibly large and fast ships, ocean liners and new Dreadnought battleships, so expensive they changed how Britons were taxed, as well as the new telegraph systems, electric lights and, bobbing on a distant skyline, Germany’s magnificent Zeppelins. Yet the upper classes and their middle-class copy-cats were still insisting on the primary importance of a classical education. More people read ancient Greek and Latin than German or French, though thrusting and ambitious youngsters were opting for science and engineering as the new frontier.

What were these people like? Still photographs of the Edwardians, like photographs of the Victorians, chemically paint just the wrong picture. For they are still. To ensure a likeness, sitters are caught in a rictus or trance, their faces frozen and serious. They seem impossibly stern, or sometimes merely vacant, whereas we know from the written record that this was a jokey, argumentative age. The jerky energy of early film is more useful. What about ‘the arts’? Are they a way into the reality of Edwardian life? This was a great age of story-telling. The Edwardians lived in the shadow of the great Victorian novelists – though both Meredith and Thomas Hardy survived into the twentieth century, the latter with his greatest period as a poet still ahead of him. But in the ripping yarn, the Edwardians were and are unsurpassed. This decade and a half saw Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and some of Sherlock Holmes’s greatest cases. It was when John Buchan published Prester John and was working on The Thirty-Nine Steps; when Joseph Conrad’s great sea adventures and his anarchist thriller The Secret Agent appeared, and the hilarious, acid-drenched stories of Saki; when H. G. Wells’s finest novels were written, after his invention of modern science fiction; when Kipling was at his most famous if not at his finest. These were the years of The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan and The Railway Children, which would spawn further wonderful decades of English children’s stories, so that a golden glow settled on our memory of Edwardian life that has never quite been tarnished by the facts. Today an academic priesthood divides these story-tellers into a hierarchy of seriousness, but it did not seem so then, when Henry James helped Kipling at his wedding, and Conrad dedicated books to Wells. Many of their stories appeared in the teeming magazines and journals of the age such as the Strand and the Illustrated London News. The country needed entertainment. There was no broadcasting. As a result, the Edwardians had richer internal lives than most of us today; their writers will appear throughout what follows.

A similar flash confidence ripples out of many Edwardian public buildings. Town councils, major companies and government officials picked a bewildering number of styles, from ornate Dutch gothic to Venice-in-brick, English-cottage-on-steroids to Loire-by-gaslight. But with steel frameworks they created large, stone- and brick-fronted structures of complexity, grace and sometimes humour, which are much more enjoyable than the peevish, meaner buildings which followed between the wars. Their style was less heavy than that of the encrusted Victorians, but showed an innocent enjoyment of decoration which the theorists and minimalists would later banish. Just as Sargent’s portraits show grand financiers or title-loaded aristocrats who smile back with wholly human self-mockery, so the best Edwardian buildings have the scale of an imperial age while somehow managing to avoid pomposity. One way of gauging quality in buildings is to ask how many of a certain age are later torn down and replaced. In general, we have elected to keep Edwardian buildings, including the first really popular generation of semi-detached houses, well made with ‘arts and crafts’ influences that flow back to the Victorians.

So, Edwardian Britannia touches modern Britain repeatedly. They were struggling with small wars abroad. They were convulsed by new technologies: the motor car, the aircraft, the motion-picture camera and the undersea telegraph cable, rather than biotechnology, digital platforms and the web. They were deeply engaged in the wider world yet sentimental about family and home, highly patriotic yet also sceptical about politicians, obsessed with crime stories and jostling each other in crowded city centres yet remarkably law abiding. They were divided by class and income and united by common prejudices and jokes which baffled outsiders. This was a roaring, unstable, fast-changing time but highly self-critical, too. Edwardian Britain was unfair and strange in many ways. But the Edwardians were evolving fast. The past is not a foreign country.

The Great Paperweight Is Lifted

Queen Victoria had died in bed, holding a crucifix. If there to ward off evil spirits, it was not powerful enough. She was being supported from behind by the Emperor of Germany, Wilhelm II, her dangerous grandson, his arm by her pillow. Immediately after she had gone, Kaiser Bill reflected: ‘She has been a very great woman. Just think of it; she remembers George III and now we are in the twentieth century.’¹ Cousin Willy, as the family called him, would do his bit to ensure that it became the bloodiest century in human history. Nor was his history accurate. Though Victoria was alive when George III died, and so provided a kind of human bridge to the age of Nelson and Samuel Johnson, she was just eight months old at the time. Still, the length of her reign had been extraordinary. It made her death, coming so soon after the start of the new century, and though hardly a surprise, one of those moments which sent a shudder of awe through most of the world.

In the year of her birth, 1819, Europe had still been adjusting to the aftermath of Waterloo, British cavalry massacred eleven protestors in Manchester, Keats was writing ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and Beethoven was beginning his great Missa Solemnis. In the midst of all this, the pregnancy of the wife of old King George’s fourth son, the fat, garlicky, sadistic and fifty-year-old Duke of Kent – ‘the greatest rascal left unhung’ in the summing-up of one contemporary – was of significance for only one reason. Though the British crown would pass to the atrocious Prince Regent, later George IV, there was then a problem: of fifty-six grandchildren, not one was legitimate. To ensure that his child would become Queen one day, the Duke and his heavily pregnant wife, who had been living in Germany, careered across France with borrowed money in a nine-coach convoy of doctors, dogs, songbirds, maids, footmen and cooks, so that the girl was born in London – ‘plump as a partridge’ – as she would remain. Her uncle, soon to become George IV, hated the very idea of her and when her father died of pneumonia in Sidmouth, Devon, the outlook for the baby and her German-speaking mother had been bleak. But he mellowed. Victoria remembered his grease-painted face and wig. The next king, the cheerful old William, tried quite hard to get her outlandish name changed for the day she ascended the throne.

Had he had his way, the name he wanted, she would have been Queen Elizabeth II. Instead, she became Queen Victoria at the age of twenty in 1837 and her name became familiar to everyone who speaks English. She was a politically active, opinionated and talented woman, who not only spoke German, French and some Italian, but later learned Hindustani too. She survived periodic outbreaks of republicanism, several assassination attempts and the death of her adored German husband, Albert, though this threw her into a decades-long gloom, earning her the dismissive moniker the Widow of Windsor. Earlier, she had been an earthy creature, who gobbled her food and had a loud laugh, particularly when her first prime minister, Lord Melbourne, was teasingly scandalizing her with his cynical stories. But slowly, as the wilder Britain of the 1840s gave way to the more ponderous, self-important imperium of the later nineteenth century, she too became a solemn, heavy-lidded presence. This is how she is remembered, a kind of fat, white queen bee, gorged on the royal jelly of imperial pride by buzzing flatterers such as Disraeli and surrounded by sleepy-eyed progeny.

Yet the nearly sixty-four years of her reign had seen Britain changed from a country ruled by a few mainly aristocratic families, still dominated by the values of landowners and protected by oak-sided sailing ships, to the centre of a global empire and an industrial urban nation in which workers had become voters. Waves of political reform in 1832, 1867 and 1884 had brought successive groups of men – property-owning, then ‘respectable middle class’, then working class – into the franchise. No women, yet, of course: the only woman in the land with any real political power was Victoria herself. She was well aware of the hideous conditions of industrial Britain. As a girl, she had travelled through the mining country of the Midlands, noting in 1832, the year of the first great Reform Act, that ‘men, women, children, country and houses are all black . . . The grass is quite blasted and black. Just now I saw an extraordinary building flaming with fire. The country continues black, engines flaming, coals in abundance, everywhere smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children.’ Blake, Engels or Orwell could hardly have put it better. But ‘democracy’ was seen as an enemy by the Palace and most of her titled ministers, a menacing, mysterious force that could not be wholly resisted but must somehow be tamed. When she became queen, politics was mainly conducted among a few families, behind closed doors, on handwritten notes and in self-consciously classical speeches in the Commons and Lords. When she died, political rows were being fought out among titled renegades, self-made men from the Midlands and uppity lawyers with a talent for rough talking, at raucous public meetings or through newspaper columns.

By then the vast gap between how Britain saw herself, and how she really was – the chasm in which twentieth-century life would be lived – was already clear to anyone with eyes to see. Vast fleets of ironclad battleships, the clatter of lancers and hussars, the giant public celebrations, jubilees and durbars, could not hide the massive embarrassment of the British army being humiliated by the sharp-shooting Dutch farmers of South Africa. In the Foreign Office by the light of gas lamps, aristocratic young men with beautiful Greek were worriedly studying German and Russian plans to drive south through the Muslim Middle East towards India itself. That great scattering of white settlers in Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand might have produced satisfactory washes of pink colouring on the map, but it was a thin scatter: in 1900 there were already fewer white people in the British Empire (54 million) than in Germany (56.3 million)² and far fewer than in the United States, which had a population of 75 million. The onetime workshop of the world was struggling too with high tariff walls overseas and old-fashioned industries. When Victoria died, Britain was importing huge quantities of German and American steel, and trying to plug the difference by digging and selling more of the coal on which these islands partially sat, hardly the sign of advanced industrial success. The shipyards were still ahead, but not always in technology. Four years before the Queen’s death her son Bertie, the Prince of Wales, had retired from his favourite sport of yacht racing at Cowes. His nephew the Kaiser had beaten Bertie’s Britannia with his new boat, and had taken to parading the latest ships of the German navy off the Isle of Wight at the same time. Bertie complained that ‘Willy is a bully’ and retired in a huff. In the same year the Blue Riband for Atlantic crossing times had been lost for the first time to the German liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, followed by the Deutschland in 1900. Everywhere one looked, from Gottfried Daimler’s new high-speed internal combustion engine to the new electric trams, British ingenuity was failing and falling back.

So there was a grey undercurrent of melancholy and uncertainty when the Queen, in her lead-lined coffin, with a photograph and lock of John Brown’s hair by her, was finally taken to Portsmouth. The Countess of Denbigh watched the Royal Naval fleet and the visiting German warships give salute after salute as the Royal Yacht Alberta passed. By 3 p.m. the blue sky was fading and ‘a wonderful golden pink appeared in the sky and the smoke rose slowly from the guns . . . like the purple hangings ordered by the King’. She observed ‘the white Alberta looking very small and frail next the towering battleships. We could see the motionless figures standing round the white pall which, with the crown and orb and sceptre, lay upon the coffin. Solemnly and slowly it glided over the calm blue water . . . giving one a strange choke, and a catch in one’s heart.’³ Days on, after a massive military commemoration in London which involved more men than set off in 1914 as the British Expeditionary Force to France, the Queen was finally taken to the Royal Chapel at Windsor – but because of faulty equipment (a broken trace), her horse-drawn final journey had to be completed by sailors hauling her home using the communication cord from a train, hurriedly removed for the purpose. This was hailed as a great sentimental British moment. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t Prussian, or American, efficiency.

L. F. Austin, editor of the Illustrated London News, thought that when the old century had ended ‘nobody was heart-stricken, for the world does not grieve over an imperceptible point of time. But at the end of the Victorian era, who is not conscious of a great blank?’ The very words to ‘God Save the King’ would, he thought, sound odd, ‘a phrase so strange upon our lips that it almost makes a stranger of him. Within the last few days, I have heard men murmuring “the king” as if they were groping in their memories for some ancient and unfamiliar charm.’⁴ Yet others were already impatient and keen for change. Beatrice Webb, co-founder with her husband Sidney of the Fabian Society, Britain’s successful socialist think-tank, wrote to a friend a few days later with bitter irony: ‘We are at last free of the funeral. It has been a true national “wake”, a real debauch of sentiment and loyalty – and a most impressive demonstration of the whole people in favour of the monarchical principle. The streets are still black with the multitudes in mourning, from the great ladies in their carriages to the flower girls, who are furnished with rags of crêpe. The King is hugely popular . . . as for the German Emperor, we all adore him!’

The science-fiction writer H. G. Wells felt frank relief. He thought the old Queen had been like ‘a great paperweight’ and, now that she was removed, he expected all kinds of new ideas to blow around. So they would – though, as we shall see, they were not always good ones. Henry James, the expatriate American novelist and exquisite snob, thought ‘Bertie’, the new king, ‘a vulgarian’ and believed Victoria had died after being sickened and humiliated by the Boer War: ‘I mourn the safe, motherly old middle-class queen who held the nation warm under the folds of her big, hideous Scotch-plaid shawl.’ He admitted to feeling her death deeply and predicted that ‘the wild waters are upon us now’.⁵ Young Winston Churchill heard the news in snowy Winnipeg, where he was raising cash on a lecture tour. His father had clashed with Bertie in the past and Churchill showed no trace of sentiment in a letter to his mother: ‘I am curious to know about the King. Will it entirely revolutionize his way of life? Will he sell his horses and scatter his Jews [a reference to Bertie’s financial friends] or will Reuben Sassoon be enshrined among the crown jewels and other regalia? . . . Will the Keppel [Bertie’s mistress] be appointed 1st Lady of the Bedchamber?’⁶ And the vulgarian himself? Judging by the speed with which he destroyed many treasured statues of Brown, cleared out her photographs and papers, sold her beloved house, Osborne, and tramped around his new palaces in a trail of cigar smoke, he was not in a sentimental mood. Bertie had been a Victorian, he felt, for quite long enough.

The Chocolate Warrior

Saturday 7 July 1900 was a warm, sticky day in the narrow back streets of York. By first light, there were already plenty of people out and about. One of them was a quiet, soberly dressed man discreetly holding a notebook, standing in the shadows, watching the door of a small, dirty pub, one of fourteen nearby. Shortly after 6 a.m., people were already rattling the door of the pub, though it was slow to open this morning. Everyone who entered, and everyone who left, was noted down in the little book. In all, 550 people went in, including 113 children. After twelve hours of standing, the watcher scribbled down: ‘Between 5 and 6 p.m., a woman was ejected. A row immediately ensued, the woman using language unfit for human ears. As usual, a crowd of children were keenly enjoying the scene, which lasted for about three quarters of an hour.’ Just over a week later, on Sunday 15 July, the investigator was back. Even on the Sabbath, in an area with its share of Irish Catholics, all the small shops were open, doing a brisk business, particularly the fried-fish shops. Most of the women standing gossiping in the streets were in ‘déshabillé’, which in this context probably means open shirts, without hats. ‘Children simply swarm . . . In the evening there were several wordy battles between women neighbours, the language being very bad . . . Between seven and eight, three men endeavoured to hold a gospel meeting, but retired after singing a hymn and giving a short address; the people apparently took no notice, but continued their conversations.’ And the note-taker slipped sadly away.

What was happening in York as the old Queen lay ill would play its part in explaining why her son and grandson never faced the kind of revolutionary upheaval that ousted their cousins Czar Nicholas and Kaiser Bill. A large, mustachioed man in his late twenties had become outraged at the conditions of the poor. Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, of mixed Danish and Yorkshire descent, was no kind of rebel. He came from a powerful, energetic strain of English life, utterly alien to London politics, grown rich on cocoa and sweets. Though clever, he did not go to one of the public schools which had sprouted up all over the country. He did not go to Oxford or Cambridge, either, though his father could easily have afforded it. The Rowntrees were Quakers. So Benjamin went to a local school in York, and then to Owens College in Manchester, set up specifically to educate people who didn’t want to make that little curtsey to the Church of England needed in a country whose spiritual life was dominated by frilly bishops, vicars and the Book of Common Prayer. Rowntree’s father, Jacob, had also written about the poor, and been witheringly critical of ‘British civilization’ while he built his cocoa and crystallized-fruit empire. It was a time of investigations into the conditions of the poorer Britons, with government Blue Books, the work of social investigator Charles Booth in London, and socialists such as the Webbs. But Rowntree, working quietly up in York, was the man who would really shock Westminster.

The way he did it was to concentrate not on one of the infamous areas of a great industrial city, which everyone knew about, but on a relatively normal, middle-sized English town known best for its great minster and quaint medieval streets. His work was astonishingly meticulous and careful. He and his investigators went from house to house from the autumn of 1899, finally reaching 11,560 families in 388 streets. The notebook jottings still provide one of the most remarkable and vivid portraits of life as it was being lived at the heyday of the British Empire by a vast swathe of native-born Britons. First, there were brief notes, house by house, going from shoemakers to labourers, widows to factory workers: ‘Five children (three by first wife). Husband not quite steady, wife delicate-looking. Respectable: one boy sent to truant school . . . Father has lost an eye. House not very dirty . . . Disreputable old woman. Hawks when able. House very dirty, probably used as a house of ill-fame . . . Four boys, three girls (young). Very poor, little work. House dirty, very little furniture . . . Nine young children. Had parish relief stopped for illegitimate child. Children dirty and unruly. Query: how do they live?’

As the investigators homed in on housing conditions, again street by street, the descriptions become more detailed, and horrifying. In one street, for instance, they report of a pair of houses: ‘There is only one water-tap for the whole block. There are no sinks, slops being emptied down the street grating. There are two closets [toilets] in the yard but only one is fit to use, and it is shared by fifteen families.’ As the investigators dig deeper through the streets of York, their nausea and anger become more clearly visible through the dry notes. A lady inspector, probably a tough-sounding woman called May Kendall, who refused a salary and seems forgotten by history, makes her way across a brick floor, slimy with filth: ‘Dirty flock bedding in living room placed on a box and two chairs. Smell of room from dirt and bad air unbearable.’ Nearby, she finds no fewer than sixteen families sharing one tap: ‘the grating under this water tap is used for the disposal of human excreta and was partially blocked with it when inspected . . . When inspected the table and floor were covered with crumbs, potato parings, scraps of meat on newspaper, dirty pots, etc.’

There would be a spate of similar surveys of villages and towns across England. What made Rowntree’s work different was that he dug into the causes of poverty. The way wealthy Britain had dealt with it so far was to mix voluntary and religious help with a great deal of moralizing. The slums were disgusting, yes, but they were rare (Rowntree showed they were everywhere) and they were the fault of thriftless, drunken or immoral people. As The Times put it, responding to the furore caused by Rowntree’s book, which was finally published in the year of Victoria’s death: ‘their wages would suffice to keep them strong and healthy, but they are thriftless; they drink and bet, or they are ignorant and careless in housekeeping’.⁷ Rowntree was no stranger to moralizing – he was, after all, a teetotal Quaker – but he set out to clinically destroy the argument that poverty was the fault of the poor. He found two-thirds of people who literally did not have enough to live on ‘were women deserted by men, or widowed, or people no longer able to work through illness or old age’. Others were people in work whose families were too big to feed properly. As he pointed out, he was writing at a time when the trade cycle was up, and business was good, yet for workmen at the bottom of the heap, their position ‘is one of peculiar hopelessness. Their unfitness means low wages, low wages means insufficient food, insufficient food means unfitness for labour, so that the vicious circle is complete.’ Again and again he finds women who tell him they hide the desperate lack of food from their husbands in order to keep them strong enough to carry on working. Hunger happened in private, among the women and children: ‘Jim ollers takes ’is dinner to work, and I give it ’im as usual; ’e never knows we go without, and I never tells ’im.’

But what is enough food? Rowntree talked to experts in nutrition, and studied the diet handed out in the York workhouse to destitute people there. He then cut that back to produce the basic needed for ‘bare physical efficiency’ – and found that in York the wages paid for unskilled labour were not enough to provide food, clothing and shelter to sustain a family of moderate size at merely physical efficiency. Rowntree’s book, called simply Poverty: A Study of Town Life, is generally written without apparent anger, but at times he simply lets rip:

And let us clearly understand what ‘merely physical efficiency’ means. A family living upon the scale allowed for . . . must never spend a penny on railway fare or omnibus. They must never go into the country unless they walk. [Rowntree himself was a great lover of nature.] They must never purchase a halfpenny newspaper or spend a penny to buy a ticket for a popular concert. They must write no letters to absent children, for they cannot afford to pay the postage . . . The children must have no pocket money for dolls, marbles or sweets. The father must smoke no tobacco, and must drink no beer. The mother must never buy any pretty clothes . . . Should a child fall ill, it must be attended by the Parish doctor; should it die, it must be buried by the Parish. Finally, the wage earner must never be absent from his work for a single day.

Break any of these conditions, and the family would not have enough food to keep them going. Rowntree worked out that any labourer with three children or more, ‘must pass through a time, probably lasting for about ten years when . . . he and his family will be underfed’. He also demonstrated, with exhaustive tables and diagrams, that almost a third of the population of York were by his definition sunk in such poverty.

Yet there were moments of jollity. Rowntree and his investigators left a vivid picture of the poor making their own entertainment in the year 1901 which deserves its place as a contrast to the unbearable bleakness of the rest of his report. He found a lot of singing:

The rooms are, as a rule, brilliantly lit, and often gaudily, if cheaply, decorated. In winter they are always kept temptingly warm. The company is almost entirely composed of young persons, youths and girls, sitting round the room and at small tables. Often there are a considerable number of soldiers present. Everyone is drinking, but not heavily, and most of the men are smoking. At intervals, one of the company is called on for a song, and if there is a chorus, everyone who can will join in it. Many of the songs are characterized by maudlin sentimentality; others again are unreservedly vulgar. Throughout the whole assembly there is an air of jollity and an absence of irksome restraint that must prove very attractive after a day’s confinement in factory or shop. In a round of public houses which the writer made one Sunday evening in May 1901, the fact of their social attractiveness struck him very forcibly.

And Rowntree pads back for his cocoa with the brave thought that it all pointed to the need ‘for the establishment on temperance lines of something equally attractive’.

Rowntree’s book arrived like a bomb in British politics. It showed that at the heart of the Empire, with all its pomp, wealth and self-satisfaction, around a third of people were so poor they often did not have enough to eat, and many were sunk in utter poverty as bad as that of the Czar’s empire against which the communists raged. It did this clinically and statistically, in a way that was impossible to refute. Its influence, with repeated reprintings, would last until the First World War and it would later be seen as one of the seminal works of sociology, undoubtedly one of the most important books of the Edwardian age. David Lloyd George, another nonconformist shaker-upper idolized by Rowntree, would wave it at meeting after meeting. Rowntree himself, though a rather more nervous speaker, lectured across Britain, from Glasgow to Bristol, spreading the message. When he reached Birmingham and patiently explained his figures, the local screw manufacturer Arthur Chamberlain, brother of the great politician Joe, got slowly to his feet and announced that, try as he might, he could not find a hole in Rowntree’s argument. Therefore, first thing the following morning, he would find out how many people in his engineering companies were getting less than 22 shillings a week, and put it right. He did just that. (There was then a strike by workers paid more than 22s, who wanted their differential maintained; but it was still an extraordinary tribute to the book.)

In the cloisters of Balliol College, Oxford, the master told a young student called William Beveridge that once he had learned all the university could teach him, he must ‘go and discover why, with so much wealth in Britain, there continues to be so much poverty’.

Winston Churchill went straight out for a copy and was soon telling an audience in Blackpool about how it ‘fairly made my hair stand on end’. In one review he wrote about the York poor: ‘Although the British Empire is so large, they cannot find room to live in it; although it is so magnificent, they would have had a better chance of happiness if they had been born cannibal islanders of the Southern Seas . . . this festering life at home makes world-wide power a mockery.’ Writing to the chairman of the Midland Conservatives, Churchill returned to the theme. American labourers were better fed and more efficient than British ones: ‘this is surely a fact which our unbridled Imperialists, who have no thought but to pile up armaments, taxation and territory, should not lose sight of. For my own part, I see little glory in an empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers.’⁸

Rowntree had begun to show that the condition of the poor was not simply a matter of their moral failure. Dickens himself, followed by others, had turned Victorian sensibility round from a purely moralizing hardness to a dawning awareness of the real lives of the people of the gutter and the swamp. Yet most turned their eyes away and dreamed of finding some way of dealing with the poor that did not involve either the danger of revolution, or the character-rotting effects of more generous levels of welfare. These are the years when the Labour Party is beginning to appear as Liberal trade unionists come together, and when socialist ideas are filtering through parts of Britain via the activities of small bands of intellectuals and agitators. But most thinking people were not socialist and, before Lloyd George and Churchill broke through the crust of complacency, were against a welfare state. So what could be done? This takes us to a second character, working busily away as the old Queen expired.

Basset Hounds and Breeding

Francis Galton was one of the last survivors of the heroic period of Victorian science. He looked a little like a smaller version of Charles Darwin, which was appropriate, because he was Darwin’s half cousin. They shared in Erasmus Darwin as grandfather one of the great luminaries of generous, ambitious eighteenth-century science, and Galton’s family tree was festooned with genius and public service. He had been an explorer and statistician, a renowned mathematician whose discoveries ranged from the bizarre to the useful – it was Francis Galton, for example, who showed that fingerprints were unique and did not change during life, a discovery immediately put to good use by Scotland Yard. Though disagreeing with Darwin about some aspects of evolution, he was also fascinated by the subject, particularly as it applied to people. At the Science Galleries of South Kensington – a place which will recur in this book – Galton had been collecting the heights, weights, strength of squeeze and pull of English schoolchildren, trying to establish a human database. But his breakthrough moment came when he stumbled upon a book by the son of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, the sturdy squire Sir John Everett Millais. This was not a work of science or fiction, but rather more down to earth. It was the Basset Hound Club Rules and Studbook of 1874–96. Sir John kept himself amused by detailing the limited number of splodges and colours of each puppy from each pairing of basset hounds. Galton took from this what he believed to be a foolproof theory of heredity – how much of each parent, grandparent and so on, we each possess. The crucial discoveries of Mendel were not yet known in Britain, so this cannot be called in any real sense genetic science. Galton invented a new word, instead: eugenics.

In October 1901 Galton stood up and delivered the second Huxley Lecture (in honour of ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ and defender, who had recently died) to the Anthropological Institute. He called it ‘The Possible Improvement of the Human Breed under the Existing Conditions of Law and Sentiment’. An intellectual link between the basset hound studbook and the policies of Nazi Germany was about to be forged. Galton had created, he believed, a statistical bell curve of human qualities – the proportion of the population that was very bright, healthy, middling, and so on. This was done in detail and went far beyond easily observable differences such as height. He classified people by their ‘civic worth’. Galton then applied his theory to the vast statistical and highly opinionated survey of the London East End poor by Charles Booth. As with the Poor Law Guardians and much ordinary debate at the time, economics and morality were inextricably mingled. Thus ‘Class A’ consisted of ‘criminals, semi-criminals and loafers’ while Class B comprised ‘very poor persons who subsist on casual earnings, many of whom are inevitably poor from shiftlessness, idleness or drink’. The largest class, E, were ‘All those with regular standard earnings of 22 to 30 shillings a week. This class is the recognized field . . . for trades unions . . . essentially the mediocre class, standing as far below the highest in civic worth as it stands above the lowest class of criminals.’⁹ At the top, of course, were the rich and clever.

Galton tried to calculate the worth of children in each group, subtracting what it cost to bring them up and look after them ‘when helpless through old age’ from lifetime earnings. Thus: ‘The worth of an average baby born to the wife of an Essex labourer . . . was found to be about five pounds.’ By contrast, the worth of a child of the top class ‘would be reckoned in thousands of pounds . . . They found great industries, establish vast undertakings, increase the wealth of multitudes and amass large fortunes for themselves. Others, whether they be rich or poor, are the guides and lights of the nation, raising its tone, enlightening its difficulties and imposing its ideals.’ (People, in short, like Galton himself.) But where radical Liberals and socialists argued against the unfairness of these great divisions, Galton thought them natural. Society should stop the lower sort from breeding so enthusiastically, and encourage the elite to breed more. It would be ‘a great benefit to the country if all habitual criminals were resolutely segregated . . . and peremptorily denied opportunities for producing offspring’. The better sort, meanwhile, should be given grants, diplomas and encouragement to marry each other and produce children, as early as possible. Male fast-breeders would be chosen through exam results and inspection of their family trees. ‘The opportunities for selecting women in this way are unfortunately fewer . . . In the selection of women, when nothing is known of their athletic proficiency, it would be especially necessary to pass a high and careful medical examination.’ Galton wondered whether the aristocracy might help encourage high-value couples without much cash: ‘It might well become a point of honour . . . for noble families to gather fine specimens of humanity around them, as it is to procure and maintain fine breeds of cattle and so forth, which are costly, but repay in satisfaction.’¹⁰

It is tempting to dismiss all this as irrelevant ravings, forgotten in the yellowing pages of Nature magazine, where they sit between a discussion of agriculture in Tibet and a paper on ocean currents. Nothing could be more wrong. Galton was a scientific superstar of his day. Through the early years of the twentieth century, though elderly (and childless) he was energetically promoting eugenics, often through lectures to the newly formed Sociological Society, then carried and publicized widely through the newspapers. Demanding social pressure to stop unsuitable marriage was vital: eugenics had to be ‘introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion’ so that ‘humanity can be represented by the fittest races’. He chose Valentine’s Day 1905 to proclaim his optimism that laws restricting the freedom to marry would eventually come about: The Times lavishly recorded his words. Supporters came from left and right. George Bernard Shaw, at the height of his reputation as progressive dramatist and sage, proclaimed that nothing but a eugenic religion could save our civilization. It was important, he went on, ‘that we never hesitate to carry out the negative side of eugenics with considerable zest, both on the scaffold and on the battlefield’.¹¹

H. G. Wells had been persuaded by his agent J. B. Pinker to collect some essays about the future that he had published in British and American newspapers. In 1901, alongside Rowntree on poverty, Wells’s resulting Anticipations was one of the talking-point books of the year. It ran to eight reprints in the first twelve months and was one of the bestsellers for the powerful circulating libraries and booksellers Mudie’s and Smith’s. Beatrice and Sidney Webb both thought it their favourite book of the year and were so impressed that they went to visit Wells at his Kent home to help draw him into their circle. He was introduced to A. J. Balfour, about to become prime minister, and fêted by the director of the Natural History Museum. Churchill bought a copy and liked it. As one of Wells’s biographers put it, Anticipations ‘catapulted Wellsian thought into the drawing rooms, railway cars and clubrooms of the upper and middle classes’.¹² So what was in the book? Parts are surprisingly accurate about the future. He predicts that English will be the world language by 2000 and that servants will disappear through technology. But his other messages underline the gap between Edwardian thought and ours. ‘If the Jew has a certain incurable tendency to social parasitism and we make social parasitism impossible, we should abolish the Jew, and if he has not, there is no need to abolish the Jew.’ Wells accepted that ‘there is something very ugly about many Jewish faces but there are Gentile faces just as coarse and gross . . . Many Jews are intensely vulgar in dress and bearing, materialistic in thought and cunning and base in method, but no more than many Gentiles.’ And, he pointed out, Jews died earlier anyway. But there was no such shilly-shallying when it came to other races: ‘And the rest, those swarms of black and brown, and dirty white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institute, and I take it they will have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world is, they have to go . . . it is their portion to die out and disappear.’

It is only fair to add that Wells revised his views on race a few years later, but the eugenics remained unapologetic when it came to drunkards, gluttons and others with inherited diseases. In his follow-up book, Mankind in the Making, published in 1903, he said it was ‘absurd to breed our horses and sheep and improve the stock of our pigs and fowls, while we leave humanity to mate in the most heedless manner’. For people with hereditary diseases, or alcoholics, the state should use everything ‘short of torture’ to punish those who tried to breed. (Wells’s own exuberantly unfaithful sexual habits made the finger-wagging about people mating in a heedless manner particularly hypocritical.) The point is that he was then splashing along self-confidently in the mainstream of advanced political thinking. Lord Rosebery, the former Liberal prime minister, expressed his great interest in Galton’s eugenics. In 1907 the British Eugenics Education Society, with at least half its members professional women, was launched and became hugely influential. Middle-class conversations were reported to Galton: a badly behaved child, or delinquent youth? ‘Well, it wasn’t a eugenic marriage, you see.’ A few years later a Mrs Bolce named her daughter Eugenette, thereby boasting about her and her husband’s excellent breeding stock.

In July 1912, six months after Galton’s death, the First International Congress of Eugenics opened at the grand Hotel Cecil, overlooking the Thames. Its vice presidents included the Lord Chief Justice, the president of the College of Surgeons, the Lord Mayor of London, the vice chancellor of London University, the Bishops of Ripon and Birmingham, the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, the First Lord of the Admiralty . . . and Winston Churchill. Major Leonard Darwin, the great scientist’s last surviving child, gave a rousing opening speech calling for action against the genetically undesirable. The purpose of the congress was ‘to spread far and wide the great new creed with its glittering goal of race and class improvement through selective breeding’.¹³ Tragically, in this it was successful. Compulsory sterilization of different groups of people began in some American states and President Calvin Coolidge explained his 1924 Immigration Act: ‘Biological laws show . . . that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.’ Worse still, the message was well heard on the continent of Europe, in France and Scandinavia but above all in Germany, where papers on eugenics were soon being written and where, in 1905, an organization called the Race Hygiene Society was formed.

Joe’s Great Rebellion

One hint of greatness is when a person attracts phrase-makers. Two of the most overused phrases used about a politician today are that all political careers end in failure and that so-and-so ‘makes the political weather’. Both were first said about that party-smashing comet of late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century British politics, Joe Chamberlain. Enoch Powell, a later iconoclast, just as dangerously tempted to see ideas through to their logical conclusion, said of his fellow Midlands platform-strider: ‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.’ And according to Winston Churchill, Joe’s sometime admirer and enemy, he ‘was incomparably the most live, sparkling, insurgent, compulsive figure in British affairs . . . “Joe” was the one who made the weather. He was the man the masses knew.’ Today his surname is used as shorthand reference to his younger son, the man who tried to appease Hitler at Munich. This would have staggered an Edwardian: Joe could hardly have been more famous in his day. His cartoon image was everywhere, his name was sung in music-hall songs, his speeches attracted tens of thousands and the next day filled page after page of the newspapers. His views were followed in Berlin and Moscow; he was vilified in French cartoons and he was front-page news in New York. But it did all end in failure, smashing electoral defeat in 1906, and worse. On his seventieth birthday he was greeted by a vast celebration in his political citadel, Birmingham, an orgy of processions, speeches, meals and cheering crowds – something like the civic welcome a cup-winning football team might expect today, but more so. Two days later, back home at his London house, the hero failed to appear downstairs for a dinner appointment. He was stuck on the bathroom floor, hit by a stroke which condemned him to a pitiful afterlife, lolling voiceless on the Commons benches where once he had commanded.

In the course of his career, Chamberlain had been a radical tyro, the greatest reforming civic leader in England, the man who split the Liberal Party in protest at Gladstone’s decision to grant Irish self-government, and an imperialist statesman whose leadership in the South African war had made him even more famous and divisive. But in this story, it is Chamberlain’s last and most dramatic campaign that matters. ‘Tariff reform’ meant building a wall of taxes around the British Empire and ending free trade. Like Third World campaigners today who call for ‘fair trade’ to help struggling farmers, the tariff reformers wanted less competition and brutal efficiency. It was an attempt to bind the Empire together in an increasingly dangerous world, to close off a struggling Britain from her European and American rivals. Had the tariff reformers, led by Chamberlain, succeeded, the story of modern Britain, and of the Western world in the early twentieth century, would have been very different.

In his early life Chamberlain had been nothing but useful. He grew up in London as the son of the owner of a shoemaking firm, and made useful shoes, before going to Birmingham and making the useful nuts and bolts that held together Victoria’s industrial empire – and in particular the screws. At one time his company was making two-thirds of all the screws manufactured in England. Like many Victorian entrepreneurs, he was able to retire early and devote himself to politics. In Birmingham he became a leading man in nonconformist and radical circles, a classic middle-class modernizer, arguing for votes for all, taking up the causes of compulsory and free secular education and campaigning against rural poverty. As he put it, ‘free church, free schools, free land, free labour’. This was also useful. But Chamberlain’s greatest early triumphs came after he was elected Liberal mayor of Birmingham in 1873. He dealt with lethally unhygienic water, incompetent and competing gas suppliers, a dangerous lack of proper sewerage, foul slums and more in a prolonged exhibition of energy, optimism and practical municipal politics that is still used today as the best example of what good local government can achieve. Joe’s Birmingham was soon sporting museums, libraries, cleared and rebuilt public spaces and noticeably healthier citizens.

Brilliantly equipped to fling himself into the wilder politics being created by the successive Reform Acts of the Victorian age, Chamberlain adored a crowd and marketed himself for a mass audience. His dandyish black velvet coat, soon adorned with an orchid, his scarlet necktie, and above all his monocle, became as well known as Churchill’s hat and cigar, Harold Wilson’s pipe or Margaret Thatcher’s handbag would be. He had a talent for the vivid phrase any advertising man would kill for. Once in the Commons, he set about creating a national organization to make the Liberals more effective, and under Gladstone produced useful legislation on such down-to-earth issues as electric lighting and bankruptcy reform. But Joe turned darker and dangerous, dreaming of a new politics that bound the most aggressive imperial tub-thumping with jobs and social reform at home. Patriotism plus cash in the hand has always been the two-card trick of the demagogue.

Wild men looking for a new politics took note. Among those watching him with awed admiration were Winston’s father Ran dolph, and the young Lloyd George – not to mention Joe’s unlikely friend Henry Hyndman, a leading early English Marxist and revolutionary. These were times of far more fluid and fast-changing political sympathies than the sepia pictures of impassive men in top hats suggest. In 1886 Joe broke with Gladstone and most Liberals over home rule for Ireland, setting up his rival Liberal Unionist organization. Going into alliance with the Tory leader Lord Salisbury (whom he had once denounced as a useless excrescence), he became a leading statesman in the days of the rush for African colonies, the confrontations with China and the growing rivalry with Germany. Joe’s populism left behind the beliefs of many traditional Liberals while distancing him from the plutocrats and aristocrats of old Tory England. He was routinely called a turncoat, which he was, and seemed to enjoy the blood-sport side of politics just a little too much, revelling in one famous Irish Commons debate when the arguments degenerated into fist fights, leaving torn clothing and broken teeth on the floor. His relish for the Boer War led to it being called ‘Joe’s War’, and his conduct of the 1900 ‘khaki election’, attacking Liberal opponents as traitors and whipping up a frenzy of imperial self-righteousness, led to that being called ‘Joe’s election’.

A sample of the tone can be tasted in Lloyd George’s expedition in December 1901 to speak against the Boer War in Birmingham, Chamberlain’s back yard. Having long lost his admiration for the radical imperialist, the Welshman was under ferocious, sometimes physical threat, as a leading ‘pro-Boer’. Chamberlain was asked to make sure that when Lloyd George arrived in the city he was at least given a fair hearing. He replied: ‘If Ll G wants his life, he had better keep away from Birmingham . . . If he doesn’t go, I will see that it is known he is afraid. If he does go, he will deserve all he gets.’ Lloyd George, never a coward, went and faced a seething mob. A pro-war crowd estimated at an astonishing 100,000 surrounded the town hall before smashing every window, overwhelming the police and using weapons to break into the building before Lloyd George had a chance to utter a full sentence. Fearing for his life, he donned a police uniform, put on a helmet and was smuggled to safety: forty people were injured and two killed. Chamberlain expressed disappointment that his foe had escaped when his spies sent him a telegram at his London club, telling him that the traitor had at least been prevented from speaking.¹⁴ At times it seemed as if Joe had little sense of where the clear boundaries of parliamentary and political behaviour lay, something shared with other rising stars of the new democracy.

By now he had put together in his mind a set of ideas about Britain’s problems and future solutions. Since the great battles over the Corn Laws in the 1840s, free trade had become synonymous with British power and Britain’s industrial revolution. The fundamental policy was to let in cheap food from America and Argentina to feed the cities, and leave the farmers to survive as best they could. The corn fields of Sussex had been out-shouted by the terraces of Oldham. But shrewd observers knew that once a tax on imported corn was announced in spring 1902 to help pay for the Boer War, the argument for a much larger wall around the British Empire was bound to return. Chamberlain had spent much of the past decade worriedly observing Germany, whose industry, prosperity and social welfare had been built up behind high tariff walls; the same was true of France and Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire; America’s tariffs were even higher, and her growth was even faster. So perhaps it was now time to accept that the world was one of rival trade blocks, and build a barrier round the British Empire too? Real wages were stagnating and British industry was growing too slowly. Chamberlain proposed that food should come in cheaply from South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia; anything else should be taxed severely. Meanwhile, British industry could again thrive, supplying the markets of the Empire, which had been effectively closed to outsiders. It was ‘Sinn Fein’ – Ourselves Alone – on a global scale.

There was one obvious problem. The cost of food was bound to rise. Chamberlain tried to deal with this by arguing that more prosperous British industries and the use of the tariff money for welfare to help the poor would counteract this. There were bigger political questions, too. If Britain went protectionist, and the tariff walls went ever higher, would not the whole world become poorer, and more mutually hostile? Was this not an admission of defeat, stark evidence that British industry, which had been so recently a wonder of the world, could no longer compete on equal terms? On the other hand, the domestic politics of protectionism were intriguing. Those who might benefit were not only the struggling industrialists but the cold-shouldered farmers and landowners – the bulwarks of old Liberalism and of old Toryism brought triumphantly together. Among those who would certainly cheer to support the Empire were the imperial beneficiaries, the military families and colonial administrators. The sharp-tongued Margot Asquith, wife of the Liberal leader, knew what was up. Tariff reform, she said, ‘caught on like wild fire, with the semi-clever, moderately educated, the Imperialists, Dukes, Journalists and Fighting Forces’.¹⁵ That was, for the time, quite a coalition.

Winston Churchill realized it too, during his final days on the same side of the Commons as Chamberlain. Speaking in the Budget debate of April 1902, he said people would soon ask why ‘should we not kill three birds with one stone – collect our revenue, support British industries, and consolidate the Empire’. He went on to wonder, ‘what will happen in this country if the fair trade issue [the euphemism for protection] is boldly raised by some responsible person of eminence and authority. We shall find ourselves once again on an old battlefield. Around will be the broken weapons, the grass-grown trenches and neglected graves . . . and party bitterness, such as this generation has not known. How is it going to split existing political organizations . . . ?’ His biographer son called Churchill’s speech ‘unbelievably prescient’, but young Winston was moving in well-informed circles. A week later, Churchill and his young-gun friends, who called themselves the Hooligans (after Hugh Cecil, one of their number), had Chamberlain to dinner. At the end of it he thanked them for a splendid meal and offered in return ‘a priceless secret. Tariffs! These are the politics of the future, and of the near future. Study them closely, and make yourselves masters of them, and you will not regret your hospitality to me!’¹⁶

By then, Joe was well on the way to destroying the Conservative government that had come in under Salisbury, but was now led by that great bison-like grandee’s nephew Arthur Balfour. A sprig of one of the oldest and grandest political dynasties, Balfour had seemed an effete creature to fellow MPs. When he was given his first political job by Salisbury, it was widely assumed to be an act of family patronage extreme by the standards even of late-Victorian England and it gave the English language the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’. Known as ‘Pretty Fanny’, Balfour was a member of the ‘Souls’ group of bright, self-consciously elitist young aristocrats who met, flirted and exchanged clevernesses. His philosophical writings were admired but the strain was a dying, elegiac one. Among his best-known sayings was ‘Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all’, while his best-known book was entitled Defence of Philosophic Doubt. In an age of vigorous social and scientific debate, he seemed languidly pessimistic to the point of fatalism. He took the long view: ‘The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude.’ This, while undeniably true, is not the stuff most prime ministers are made of.

Yet once getting into office, in charge of Ireland, Balfour had proved ruthless enough to get a second nickname, ‘Bloody Balfour’, and became one of the leading Conservative statesmen of the age, a natural successor to his uncle. As prime minister he was tested by a series of crises but was mostly merely struggling to keep together his coalition of Conservative and Liberal Unionists, as Chamberlain’s rampaging threatened to tear it apart. Chamberlain had already lost one important battle, against Balfour’s Education Act of 1902, disliked by nonconformists because, although it created a unified school system in England, it also made local ratepayers subsidize Anglican schools. Balfour, who had worried that Chamberlain might snatch the premiership away from him, was simply trying to keep his administration afloat. On tariffs, he had few strong views. He prevaricated, offered delays, including the promise of an imperial conference, and produced vaguely reassuring forms of words – behaving as John Major did while trying to hold his Conservative cabinet together when it was riven by Europe in the mid-1990s. He then trickily cajoled both his cabinet’s hard-line free traders and Chamberlain into resigning, and survived himself, undignified but placid, for longer than seemed possible.

Just as the row was hotting up, Churchill wrote to a constituent:

It would seem to me a fantastic policy to endeavour to shut the British Empire in a ringed fence. It is very large, and there are a good many things which can be produced in it, but the world is larger & produces some better things than can be found in the British Empire. Why should we deny ourselves the good and varied merchandise which the traffic of the world offers . . . Our planet is not a very big one compared with the other celestial bodies, and I see no particular reason why we should endeavour to make inside our planet a smaller planet called the British Empire, cut off by impassable space from everything else.

Churchill had but recently returned from making money in America, and had an American mother, but it was not self-interest that led him to worry in another letter, this time to a free-trade Tory in Chamberlain’s back yard, that a tariff wall would cut off Britain from the United States if it ever came to a European war: ‘I do not want a self-contained Empire.’¹⁷ For a man often caricatured as a simple-minded imperial jingo in his earlier career, it was a lucid and noble argument which would soon lead Churchill to desert not just Chamberlain – who was hurt by Winston’s defection – but the Conservative Party itself.

Five days before Churchill wrote his ‘smaller planet’ letter, Chamberlain had fired off the first shot in what would be one of the most gripping political duels of the young century. On 15 May 1903 in a speech at Birmingham Town Hall – its glass repaired from Lloyd George’s friendly visit – he swept aside all other issues, telling the Liberal chief whip, with magnificent contempt, ‘You can burn your leaflets. We are going to talk about something else.’ The country duly divided, with rival leagues, rival newspapers and rival arguments. Chamberlain, backed by most of the press, raised huge sums for posters, leaflets and full-time workers.

It was now a choice, he said, between defending the Empire and sticking with the free-trade beliefs of ‘a small remnant of Little Englanders’. His language about Britain’s future without protection was apocalyptic, as in this typical speech, made at Greenock on 11 November: ‘Agriculture, as the greatest of all the trades and industries of this country, has been practically destroyed. Sugar has gone, silk has gone, iron is threatened, wool is threatened. The turn of cotton will come. How long are you going to stand it?’ These industries, he said, ‘are like sheep in a field. One by one they allow themselves to be led out to slaughter.’ In an initial dozen major events Chamberlain took his arguments from Glasgow to Newcastle and Tynemouth, then west to Liverpool, down to Cardiff and Newport, and back up to Leeds. His language shifted as the influence of the worried manufacturers grew – less of empire, more about saving those industries. A typical Tariff Reform League poster showed a cowed John Bull being pelted from above by American trains and trams, German cars, Austrian furniture and Belgian steel. In Limehouse in London he opened a new line of attack, on recent immigrants. Chamberlain the social revolutionary was gone. His Liberal Unionists were middle class and hostile to grand reforms, and he dropped, for instance, his enthusiasm for old-age pensions. Having joined forces with the right, he now became right.

Against him the Liberals, who had been divided by the Boer War, came together and went on to the attack. Lloyd George, who had been burned in effigy after the relief of Mafeking, and relishing the chance to punish his old enemy, was particularly virulent and witty. You had to go back fifty years to the time when the people’s bread was taxed, he told one audience, ‘and over three thousand years, to the time when a great Empire was governed by a man called Joseph . . . But there is this difference – the ancient Joseph in his dreams made provision for an abundance of corn for the people. This modern Joseph is dreaming about a scarcity of corn.’ (There is nothing like a biblical education to raise the quality of vituperation.) And again: Chamberlain fancied himself a little Bismarck, ‘the man of blood and iron’. Instead he was ‘the man of screws . . . that is all the iron in Mr Chamberlain’s Imperialism’.¹⁸ Yet it was not Lloyd George but the duller Liberal Henry Herbert Asquith who really scuppered Joe. For this stolid-seeming lawyer also criss-crossed the country, to Clydeside, Newcastle, Paisley and Worcester, patiently knocking down Chamberlain’s arguments with hard facts, challenging his grasp of history, essentially out-thinking him, as he had always supposed he would. Immediately after Chamberlain’s opening Birmingham blast, Asquith had taken the newspaper into his wife’s bedroom and exclaimed: ‘Wonderful news today; and it is only a question of time when we shall sweep the country.’¹⁹

For a while it seemed that Chamberlain was winning. His canvassers went from door to door, explaining the arguments and ticking off support. The young P. J. Wodehouse turned out pro-Chamberlain verses for the Daily Express featuring a parrot, parroting the cheap-food line of the Liberals. These were so successful they became a music-hall turn and parrot competitions were held. Another music-hall song went: ‘When wealth and mirth refill the earth / Let each man tell his neighbour / All this we owe to Chamberlain’. The whole country seemed to be caught up in what was, after all, an argument about economic theory. Yet this was an argument bigger than governments. Modern Britain became a country with a strong financial and City tradition, always trying to break down trading barriers and shaped by outside connections, not least with the United States. That Britain was the one that tariff reform would have killed at birth.

And in the end Asquith was proved right. Chamberlain was pulverized. It was partly that the business climate improved, so that the spectre of unemployment and mass bankruptcies that had helped him in the early days faded away by 1905. But it was also that he simply lost the argument. When the election was finally called in 1906 it produced a huge Liberal landslide. Even Balfour, the prime minister, lost his seat, though another was soon found for him. The Liberals would stay in office deep into the First World War and, so far as Edwardian Britain was concerned, the Conservatives became merely an embittered opposition. Chamberlain had smashed his second party. After his stroke, what Beatrice Webb called his ‘mechanically savage persistence’ would keep him going until 1914, when he finally died of a heart attack. A new age in politics was dawning, when the problems of the poor, and the Empire, would be dealt with in very different ways by the men who had beaten him: Asquith, Lloyd George – and Winston Churchill, who had now left the Tories on a long, strange journey of his own.

Death by Three Million Roses

Even The Times thought that three million roses might be overdoing it, but conceded that on the evening of 1 July 1912 the blooms, together with the wisteria, the flower-wreathed coloured lights and the gold Renaissance ornaments, produced an effect of ‘light and airy elegance’. The Palace theatre in London’s Shaftesbury Avenue had originally opened as a grand opera venue in 1891, with Arthur Sullivan’s Ivanhoe. But the London public’s thirst for opera was limited. It soon moved briskly down market, becoming a ‘theatre of varieties’ famous for its high-stepping showgirls. It was for variety theatre that the endless boxes of roses had been ordered, but that night the crowd was not dressed in the usual jackets and cheap glad-rags, but in formal evening dress. For this was the first ever Royal Command performance at a music hall. King George V and Queen Alexandra were among the guests to see the Palace Girls kick, Vesta Tilley do her male impersonation, Harry Lauder sing ‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’’, the great comedians of the day George Robey and Little Tich perform their famous sketches, the sensational juggler Cinquevalli, and many more. It was, in its way, a historic moment. For seventy years or so, a working-class tradition that had begun in the back rooms of pubs had been slowly forcing its way into the heart of the cities, into ever more lavish venues. Sneered at, campaigned against, brimming with broken marriages, alcoholics and fortunes lost as well as made, by Edwardian times music hall could not be ignored. From its hippodromes, palaces, empires, coliseums and palladiums, the songs poured out that you heard in the street, in the railway carriage and in the parlours. Now, even the other palace had come to pay homage.

Except that there was something wrong on that warm July night. Someone was missing. And though the newspapers wrote up the experiment as a great success, it is clear that it was not quite as sparkling as a really good music-hall night should be. The Times man thought some of the performers ‘a little overawed’ and therefore lacking ‘the sparkle of the oddity which endears them’ to their usual crowd. Another found it ‘a rather dull performance’. Was there a feeling, despite the presence of the King and Queen and the stellar list of performers – 150 took part in the ‘garden party’ finale – and the three million roses, that somehow the real action was taking place somewhere else? It surely was. Just a few hundred yards to the west, in fact, at the London Pavilion theatre (its shell is now the Trocadero) a very angry, very proud woman was on stage all by herself. The crowd were going wild. She sang and sang, one hit after another, and they would not let her stop. Marie Lloyd had been considered too rude, too ‘blue’ to appear at the Royal Command, despite being the most famous variety singer of them all. Snubbed, she had hired the rival Pavilion and, according to legend, put out her own posters announcing: ‘Every Performance Given by Marie Lloyd is a Command Performance by Order of the British Public’.

Music hall could not be tamed or aimed at the respectable middle classes – not without losing its soul and dying, which it soon would. It was a working-class entertainment, for the people by the people. Its humour was sentimental, patriotic and bawdy, its most celebrated circus acts eye-popping and its songs simple but infuriatingly difficult to dislodge from your ears. ‘Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer, Do’, ‘The Boy in the Gallery’, ‘I Belong to Glasgow’ are still being hummed across the English-speaking world today. Yet the songs, which survived in print and in some scratchy recordings, are only a small whiff of the spirit of music hall. Most of the great performers never recorded. Most were never filmed. A few were, but long after their heyday. We cannot really hear what the great comics said in their ‘patter’, partly because it was often thought too rude to write down. We can’t quite imagine the noise, smell and sound of the Victorian and Edwardian halls. They stank of sweat and dirty clothes. Most of the men in the stalls and galleries would have been smoking pipes or cigars; many customers would have been drinking heavily and eating during the performances. The gaslights were extremely dangerous and a remarkable number of the halls burned down.

Performers had seconds in which to grab people’s attention. Different towns had different traditions about what to do when an act failed. Shipbuilding cities like Glasgow or Newcastle used to specialize in throwing steel rivets. In the East End of London, trotter bones and vegetables were apparently more common. Heavy pewter mugs also made good missiles, which could cause a satisfyingly bloody wound on a struggling singer. Dead cats and dogs were not unknown. Some patrons removed their boots and threw those. In many of the rougher halls, the small orchestra performed below a wire mesh to keep them safe.

The music-hall age had started when Victoria was still a small girl, in rooms of taverns where professional entertainers and amateurs performed, known as ‘free and easies’. The money came from the drink sold, as much as the admission prices. They could be found in basements across London from the 1840s. The Star Inn at Bolton, which was in business by 1842, is often spoken of as the first music hall outside London; ten years later the town had ten free and easies. In Scotland, by mid-Victorian times, there were protests about the almost-naked women dancing, the coarse and blasphemous songs and the audience – many of whom were barefoot girls and boys under thirteen. The early purpose-built entertainment halls were wholly different from the respectable theatres of the day. They had tables laid out for eating and drinking, plus a chairman raised at one end by the stage, whose job was to both boost the next act – a juggler, a singer, a comic turn, a ventriloquist – and try to keep some kind of order. By the final years of Victoria’s reign the capital had more than 500 halls of different sizes and varieties, with names like Gatti Under-the-Arches, the Cosmotheka, the Old Mo and the Falstaff, and at least fifty grand, specially built music halls, with a further 200-plus round the rest of the country.

The technologies of the time – trains, newspapers and pianos – pushed music hall forward until the First World War. Now that the country was covered with an intricate web of railways, performers travelling in railway carriages bedecked with their own promotional placards could go almost anywhere, and the hit London songs could be heard within days in Exeter, Belfast or Dundee. Some of the most famous acts had come originally from Europe or Australia, while British singers were much in demand in the United States. Towns which had seen almost no outside entertainments coming to them regularly were introduced to people with the exotic accents of Scotland or cockney London, suitably toned down to aid understanding; for by late-Victorian times the rough diversity of regional English was just beginning to be softened. And these remote stars were turned into national celebrities, with their own foibles, catchphrases and tangled private lives, thanks to the explosion of the popular-newspaper market from the 1890s onwards. Finally, the arrival of cheap mass-manufactured pianos, mostly German, meant that a vastly increased number of families had a chance of learning and playing the new songs as they arrived. This in turn fed the music-hall star system. The singer would buy his or her own songs direct from the composers: if the songs went well, they could recoup a small fortune in sheet-music sales. Cheap pianos had the same kind of impact on music-hall Britain as electric guitars and transistor radios would have in the age of pop.

The greatest architect of British music halls was a prolific Devon brewery manager’s son, Frank Matcham. He had a hand in no fewer than 150 theatres between 1879 and 1920, but of the forty-odd that have been listed as his major music halls, twenty-seven have been demolished, several have burned down and most of the rest altered beyond recognition.²⁰ Only a few of the grandest, such as London’s Coliseum and Hippodrome, the Shepherd’s Bush Empire and the Bristol Hippodrome, remain. We have some no doubt useful spur roads, bingo halls and office blocks instead. In Matcham halls, the classic tiers and stalls arrangements of conventional theatres were copied, and ever more fantastic decorations added. His grandest confection, the Coliseum, boasted the first lift in any theatre in the world, a revolving stage for horse-races and other spectacles, and a small railway to convey the King and his party directly to the royal box. Physicians and others who might receive urgent messages left their seat numbers at a cubicle and would be fished out by messengers. Inside the new halls, thanks to early electric lighting and ventilation, the old scenes of cat-throwing and eating were replaced by something more like a theatrical experience. Even so, during failed or unpopular numbers the noise of hecklers and jeering was often so loud that the performer couldn’t be heard. This could gather to ‘being given the bird’ – hissing so widespread that the act was instantly stopped. A typical evening might include as many as twenty individual acts, each pretty short – jugglers, blacked-up ‘nigger singers’, romantic ballads, comics mocking the new fad for motor cars, and conjurors. In the provinces there were customarily two performances a night, the first more genteel and the second, for obvious reasons, much rowdier. In London and a few other cities, performers would dash from theatre to theatre, covering quite a few in a single evening. On Friday nights many halls allowed amateurs to try their best, in much the same way as TV talent shows today. In some halls, in place of a verbally sadistic panel of celebrity judges, there really was a manager standing watching in the wings with a long hooked pole to pull failures off-stage by their necks.

The parallels with pop culture are intriguing, going beyond the impact of technology. The subjects of the music-hall songs – love and heartbreak – were not so different, though sentiment ruled, rather than personal rebellion. The structure of the songs, with simple lyrics and pounding chorus, was not so different either. Nor were the temptations. There were plenty of teenage stars tearing their way towards ruin through drink, promiscuity and even drugs. Despair was felt as keenly. Mark Sheridan, the man who had a huge hit with ‘I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside’ in 1909 but later saw his career on the slide, was so depressed by being booed at the Glasgow Coliseum that he went to the city’s Kelvingrove Park and shot himself. If modern celebrity culture depends on stunts, then again this was nothing new to the music-hall performers. Harry Houdini made a practice of getting himself locked in the local jail wherever he was booked to perform, and then escaping – including from the triple-locked condemned cell in Sheffield, even after the police had added a further seven-lever lock to the cell block. Singers would arrive with pipers or carriages and make grand civic entrances. The rewards could be spectacular, particularly for the singers who were prepared to go on tour to Australia, South Africa, Paris and New York. Though only in her twenties, Marie Lloyd kept a huge establishment of carriages, servants and hangers-on. Recklessly generous, she would shower lesser artists with cash, bought her parents a pub each in Soho and travelled everywhere in high style. Fred Barnes, a gay singer who got his first break at the London Pavilion, was soon earning a fortune, splashing out thousands of pounds a night in Monte Carlo, keeping four cars when they were very expensive toys, and a substantial staff of servants. Florrie Forde, the Australian singer whose hits included ‘Down at the Old Bull and Bush’ and ‘Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?’ – which in 1909 seems to have been as ubiquitous as a Beatles hit sixty years later – became a very wealthy woman. Several music-hall singers married into the aristocracy. Harry Lauder was knighted.

But for most music-hall performers, like most rock singers, life was an endless trail from provincial date to date, always on the road, sleeping in lousy rooms and dreaming of a real hit. The music-hall singer had no records and therefore no way of knowing what might be a hit, other than by the immediate reaction in the hall. The advantage was that, in the pre-recording age, a star only needed a handful of hit songs to continue his or her career for years. In between the live performances, nobody heard you. This also meant that established performers could continue for as long as their strength held out. The easiest way of gauging success was simply to see what the theatre manager would pay. Harry Lauder first realized he was a star when offered an American tour. Not wanting to go, he asked for a fee he thought ludicrous, and got it. Another way was to chart sheet-music sales. ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, written by a composer and a semi-professional singer who ran a fish stall, was a sheet-music hit when it came out in 1912 and two years later, towards the end of the first year of the war, was selling an astonishing 10,000 copies every day. But most music-hall stars simply listened. If the audience was joining in the chorus after a week or two, the song was a hit. If not, it would be dropped. Katie Lawrence, who sang ‘Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer Do’, said that having sung it for several weeks and found it was not catching on, she was about to drop it. Then, back in London after a provincial tour, she heard someone humming it at the station: ‘A few minutes later, I heard it again and found that it was all over London. I was completely surprised and, as you may imagine, I did not drop the song.’²¹ But the random nature of the business meant there was a voracious demand for ever more songs. Harry Dacre, who wrote ‘Daisy’, said that in his first two years as a songwriter he had penned 700, and sold 600 of them.

We must beware golden-ageism. Most music-hall songs, inevitably, were unmemorable. The 1960s novelist Colin MacInnes, a lover of music-hall tradition, concluded that they were not as strong as older folk songs, or the blues: ‘They’re too inhibited emotionally, too limited intellectually, too frankly commercial in their intentions. I think the highest one can claim for them is that they are a sort of bastard folk song of an industrial-commercial-imperial age.’²² Yet they were also, as he acknowledged, the voice of working-class Britain through more than half a century of fast change. Almost every simple assertion about them can be contradicted. They were jingoistic? Yes – the very word ‘jingo’ came from a music-hall song about the Russo-Turkish war. But the other point of view was heard as well. ‘We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do . . .’ was soon countered by another singer proclaiming: ‘I don’t want to fight, I’ll be slaughtered if I do, I’ll change my togs, I’ll sell my kit and pop my rifle too. I don’t like war. I ain’t a Briton true. And I’ll let the Russians have Constantinople.’ Were the songs sentimental? Many were, but others were hard-boiled cynical. Were they dirty? Well . . . that takes us back to the great Marie Lloyd.

Marie Lloyd was a star for thirty-odd years, even though she died at fifty-two. Born Matilda Wood in the East End of London to parents whose job was to make artificial flowers, she made her debut at fifteen under the name Bella Delmere. Her stage surname was taken from a popular newspaper of the time and her private life was catastrophic: three husbands, two of them violent bullies. She was loved for her famously sharp wit and cheek and the sense that she never left her class. On an ocean voyage, snubbed by the posh travellers, she refused to sing for the first-class deck, but only for the second and the people in steerage. In the 1907 theatre strike she was on the picket line supporting lesser-paid performers. What many people thought about first, though, when they heard her name, was that she was somehow improper. Genuinely filthy jokes were repeated as if from her mouth. Although she had a famously sharp wit, this seems hard to understand. If you read the lyrics to her best-known songs, such as ‘Oh Mr Porter, what shall I do? I wanted to go to Birmingham, but they’ve carried me on to Crewe’, they seem innocent enough, though there is plenty of innuendo of a gentle, winking nature and many of her songs were meltingly romantic. Clearly, though, Lloyd’s style, her corrupted-girl knowingness, could send audiences of the day into squirming paroxysms. Summoned by the London County Council licensing committee during a major inquiry into indecency in the music halls, she sang her way through three songs with a butter-wouldn’t-melt little-girl innocence which had them completely perplexed. They expressed their bemusement. Marie then chose another song, Lord Tennyson’s ‘Come into the Garden, Maud’, about as proper a poem as any middle-class parent could wish for. But she sang it in a way that made it seem instantly filthy, looked them in the eye and then – as with any audience – laughed at them as they blushed. That story probably tells as much about the nature of music hall as a dozen treatises.

Here was another secret of Edwardian public behaviour. Innuendo can be more subversive than outright smut, because to acknowledge that you understand the meaning is to show you understand the hidden world of pre-Freudian rhyming slang and body-part images. To blush is to admit. The LCC let Lloyd alone and their campaign focused instead on the Empire theatre in Leicester Square which, like many music halls, had a considerable number of prostitutes openly working the back of the large horseshoe ‘promenade’ at the back of the auditorium. The prospect of this being closed caused protests by theatre workers and London cabmen – who passed a motion ‘to prevent those persons who were taking such a great interest in the morals of Londoners ruining, not only public places of amusement, but the cab industry’. It provoked a great argument between libertarians and those they called ‘prudes’, particularly once a decision was made to place a large screen round the back of the theatre, effectively destroying the boozy, smoky, libidinous promenade. Among those who were outraged was the young Winston Churchill, then a Sandhurst cadet, who came to London to protest and produced his first ever letter to a newspaper, telling the Westminster Gazette that ‘in England we have too long obeyed the voice of the prude’. He was then, by his own account, at the head of a mob of several hundred people who stormed the screen, or barricade, and tore it down, boasting to his brother, ‘It was I who led the rioters’. He then made his first public speech, appealing to the crowd from the top of the debris: ‘You have seen us tear down these barricades tonight; see that you pull down those responsible for them at the coming election.’²³

Yet if the LCC was briefly confounded by this unlikely seeming alliance of young Churchill of the hussars and Marie Lloyd of the wiggles and winks, the steady smothering of the spirit of the old music hall continued – death by patronage and respectability as much as death by cinema. Though the ‘bioscope’, or early films, were offered to music-hall audiences from 1900 onwards, they were little regarded by the performers and certainly no match for the colour and noise of the live acts. As the writer J. B. Priestley, who saw these things first from the perspective of Bradford and the industrial north, put it: ‘What began in Coketown finally triumphed close to Piccadilly Circus’; but though the middle classes began to pour in, ‘Variety came from the industrial working class and never really moved a long way from it.’²⁴ Almost everywhere we look in Edwardian Britain, we find a surge of democracy sweeping round the old order. But wherever we look, we also see British society incorporating, and calming, the popular tide. That is true of the early Labour Party, to a lesser extent of trade unionism . . . and it is certainly true of music hall too. West End audiences meant self-censorship, not bawdy, and even short plays. Music hall would continue well into the 1920s, but become a sugary, sanitized mimicry of its earlier self. Those roses had fatal thorns.

Captains and Kings

One of the things that must strike anyone reading Edwardian political memoirs is just how important were the views of the monarch. The papers of Churchill, Asquith and many others are scattered with royal telegrams and accounts of difficult meetings with Edward VII and George V. Both men were natural reactionaries, tempered by more Liberal-leaning advisers and, in Edward’s case, by a pro-Liberal mistress. Though this is the beginning of the democratic age, the old web of royal marriages still spread across Europe, making diplomacy familial. Since both ‘Edwardian’ kings were not merely monarchs at home but enjoyed the fine title King-Emperor, they followed imperial affairs very closely. Edward VII was, as we have seen, highly suspicious of his cousin the Kaiser. He much preferred France to Germany. His wildly successful visit to Paris in 1903, which came when Britain was unpopular there, was followed by the momentous entente cordiale of the following year. It was the last ever significant diplomatic act by a British monarch and helped pull Britain into the Great War. Edward knew Paris very well, having sowed enough wild oats there as Prince of Wales to feed most of Europe. He was a great frequenter of Parisian brothels and knew many of the most famous whores, appearing in Belle Epoque naughtiness like a figure in a Toulouse-Lautrec poster, with top hat and bulging belly. This Falstaffian side of Edward also helped make him popular at home, where his many mistresses ranged from cockney girls to one Mrs Keppel.

Of the regiment of strong women that populated Edwardian life, Alice Keppel is worth remembering. Of all Edward’s mistresses, none was as important as she, none better known, none more politically significant. She was by Edwardian standards rather on the left, an opponent of Chamberlain and a moderate supporter of Lloyd George. She was present at the Liberal dinner when Edward was reconciled to the idea of the anti-war Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman becoming prime minister. When Edward died Queen Alexandra invited Mrs Keppel to his death-bed in 1910. Something of her fame can be surmised by the tale of her getting into a hansom cab and announcing, ‘King’s Cross’. The cabbie turned round. He was sorry to hear it, he said – but never mind, she’d win him round in due course. (Cabbies featured in many Edward stories. Another had his bawdier cockney mistress Rosa Lewis and the future King enjoying a wild time in a closed hackney coach. The Prince of Wales handed over a miserable payment, leading to the angry cabbie protesting until Rosa gave him two sovereigns. ‘I knowed you was a lady as soon as I seen you,’ said the cabbie, ‘but where did you pick ’im up?’)

Campbell-Bannerman would become the Great Caresser’s great reassurer. Frequently going for spa treatments at the German resort of Marienbad, where he met Edward both as Prince of Wales and King, the politician worried about ‘the extraordinary number of tainted ladies’ around the royal person. If Edward VII had been concerned about having to put up with a government of damned Liberals and radicals then owlish, mustachioed ‘C-B’ was the very man to calm him down. His most famous moment of radicalism had happened during the Boer War, which he vehemently opposed, when he attacked British ‘methods of barbarism’. Yet within a few years this was forgotten by all except the military commanders against whom the comment was aimed and Campbell-Bannerman seemed the ultimate safe pair of hands. He memorably said of his health regime, perhaps alluding to his political philosophy too: ‘Personally I am an immense believer in bed, in constantly keeping horizontal: the heart and everything else goes slower, and the whole system is refreshed.’ Not refreshed enough, however, for in 1908 he became ill, resigned and died three weeks later in Downing Street – the only prime minister to do so.

Asquith’s succession meant a steelier, tougher figure at the top, and a much harder time ahead for the monarch. Known to admiring cartoonists as ‘the Last of the Romans’ and later, to colleagues alarmed by his convivial habits, as ‘old Squiffy’, his deep learning awed other MPs just as much as his private life intrigued them. He had been happily married to Helen, a quiet, gentle woman who had produced five children; but in the same year he met Margot Tennant at a Commons dinner party, Helen caught typhoid and died on holiday in Scotland. Asquith was by then a rising political star and successful barrister, but Margot was slow to yield. It seemed a very strange match. Asquith had come from an austere middle-class Bible-reading family in Yorkshire and had propelled himself upwards through his academic brilliance and a formidable appetite for hard work. He was of the non-flashy, impassive, middle-class breed of Victorian Liberals, winning great plaudits as home secretary under Gladstone. Stocky, earnest and conventionally dressed, he was the opposite of the aristocrats with whom Margot had mingled. Yet she had always been a fervent Liberal, interested in politics, and had always admired high intelligence – which the Asquiths possessed in spades. Their marriage, which intrigued Westminster, did not prove as happy as either hoped.

Margot Asquith seems to have been a tremendously frightening woman. One of eight surviving children of a rich brewer, she had been brought up in a tempestuous, clever household living in a modern baronial mansion in the Scottish borders. Her great tragedy had been the death of her adored elder sister in childbirth. One of the ‘Souls’, those arch clever-clever aristos, among the statesmen she knew were Gladstone, Salisbury, Balfour and Rosebery. Her passion was hunting. In 1906 she reflected: ‘I ride better than most people . . . I have broken both collar-bones, my nose, my ribs and my kneecap; dislocated my jaw, fractured my skull, and had five concussions of the brain; but – though my horses are to be sold next week – I have not lost my nerve.’²⁵ Her tongue was even more dangerous than her horse riding. She had some odd beliefs. Among them was that a full set of teeth was an invariable sign of insanity which would lead to early death – in later years her butler and footmen were encouraged to have all their teeth extracted. As one of the great hostesses, she was a friend of the King and part of the network of high society that kept Liberalism and the Palace in touch.

But by the time of Asquith’s arrival as prime minister, relations between Edward and his Liberal ministers were fast deteriorating. As we shall see, it was the great crisis over the Lords and the People’s Budget that really brought this to a head, but royal sniping over issues from taxes to the Czar to Ireland required careful attention, both before and after the accession of George V in 1910. Not all ministers reacted well. Churchill was always cheeky and particularly infuriated King George by some of his comments in the gossipy daily reports from Parliament that it was his duty to send to the Palace. In one, in February 1911, Churchill wrote that ‘tramps and wastrels’ should be sent to labour colonies to work, adding, ‘It must not however be forgotten that there are idlers and wastrels at both ends of the social scale.’ King George was so angry he instructed his secretary to write to 10 Downing Street: ‘The King thinks that Mr Churchill’s views, as contained in the enclosed, are very socialistic . . . HM considers it quite superfluous for Churchill in a letter of the description he was writing to him, to bring in about “idlers and wastrels at both ends of the social ladder”.’ Churchill wrote to the King apparently apologizing, but with perfect insolence suggesting that, if the King did not like his chatty style, he might try reading the parliamentary debates in the newspapers, and effectively resigning. The King’s secretary replied that ‘he regrets that your feelings should have been hurt’ and added: ‘The King directs me to add that your letters are always instructive and interesting and he would be sorry if he were to receive no further ones.’ Eventually the little dispute was smoothed over. But the Liberal politician’s disinclination to be browbeaten by the King is significant. It would not have happened that way in Berlin or St Petersburg; which may be why those monarchies went, and that of fat, wicked Edward and his son, the stamp-collecting, apologetic George, kept chugging forwards.

Daisy in the Time of Nightmares

A good-looking fifteen-year-old boy was in the garden one morning in October 1900, digging in his old jacket and knickerbockers. The big balconied house is gone now, burned down, but the gardens remain, in the south-east London suburb of Eltham. Then, there was a moat and rambling flowers, huge cedars full of owls and old brick walls, dating back to an ancient Tudor house where, by legend, the severed head of Thomas More had been buried by his daughter. It was a place of magic and darkness. At around eleven that morning, a doctor and an anaesthetist arrived at the gate. The boy’s mother, still asleep, was woken up. She made him bathe and get into some clean clothes for the simple operation to come – a removal of his adenoids because of the heavy colds he had had. Two hours later, the boy’s father emerged white-faced. After the doctors had given the boy chloroform, done their work and left, the boy, whose name was Fabian, had died. There were two grieving women present. One was known as Mouse. The other was Fabian’s mother, Edith, who in her despair tried to warm up and revive the child with hot water bottles. Later, talking of the thirteen-year-old girl who was also part of the family, she raged at her husband: ‘Why couldn’t it have been Rosamund?’ Terribly, Rosamund overheard the words. And her world started to fall in as well. For she began to realize she was not the daughter of Edith at all. She was Mouse’s daughter. The patriarch of the family, a monocled, mustachioed man named Hubert, was living with his wife and his mistress together. And Edith, his wife, had taken in both the children of his mistress and brought them up as her own.

Edith was already famous, as she still is today, as E. Nesbit, the great children’s author who gave the world The Treasure Seekers, The Wouldbegoods, Five Children and It, The Railway Children and many other wonderful stories. Some say she invented the modern children’s novel. When Fabian died, she was forty-two, a striking woman much addicted to long silk dresses and silver bangles. As the child’s name suggests, she was a fervent socialist, one of the founder members of the Fabian Society. Known to her family as Daisy, she had grown up in a rambling, insecure family. Her father had died before she knew him and her mother had taken the children from place to place, through France and Germany as well as England, and from school to school. Daisy emerged as a wilful, sharp, impetuous girl who was soon earning small amounts of cash supplying poems and sentimental stories to the booming magazine market of Fleet Street. She fell for a dashing businessman and sometime writer called Hubert Bland. He had promised to marry someone else, but failed to tell Daisy. When she was seven months pregnant he married her instead, and she decided to make friends with her rival. It would be the start of a pattern. The contradictions of hippie living, mixing politics and sex, high theory and low practice, were known well before the 1960s.

Hubert and Daisy began married life with little money. His brush-making firm, in the hard climate of the 1880s, went bust. She was soon producing children and also helping to keep them afloat through her writing – until slowly he too became a successful journalist. She was unconventional from the start, hacking off her long Victorian hair into a tomboyish crop, refusing to wear the tight corsets and flounces of fashion and smoking cigarettes and cigars in public. It was the first flowering of socialist thought, and Daisy would spend days in the British Museum reading room, working at her stories. Among the friends she made were Annie Besant, who was living with the notorious atheist Charles Bradlaugh. They had gone round the country lecturing on birth control and she had lost custody of her children because of it. Besant would lead the famous strike of the London match girls and was a driving force among Fabian socialists before defecting to the limp mystical creed of Theosophy. Another of Daisy’s new friends was Eleanor Marx, daughter of Karl. She had nursed him, helped finish Das Kapital and then thrown herself into socialist politics. She lived with Edward Aveling, another socialist, in what the Victorians would call ‘sin’. Aveling married an actress without telling Eleanor and then proposed a joint suicide pact, leaving her with the prussic acid. Eleanor killed herself while he quietly left, very much alive. Which was a sin.

This is a suburb of English life full of idealistic but badly behaved men and strong but tormented women. Hubert was an insatiable sexual predator and Daisy responded to his multiple infidelities by taking many lovers of her own, including George Bernard Shaw and a string of devoted younger men. When Shaw was approached by Edith Nesbit’s first biographer, his secretary replied for him: ‘Mr Bernard Shaw desires me to say that as Edith was an audaciously unconventional lady and Hubert an exceedingly unfaithful husband, he does not see how a presentable biography is possible as yet; and he has nothing to contribute to a mere whitewashing operation.’ Hubert may have been behaving in a traditional male fashion, like so many other Victorian and Edwardian males from Edward VII to Lloyd George, but Edith, or Daisy, was struggling to find what life as a freer, more independent woman might mean. How should women conduct themselves in this in-between world of traditionalist and voracious men and a glimmering new idea of freer relations outside the confines of unhappy marriage? It was a real dilemma. At the top end of the social scale, adulteries were so frequent they were taken for granted by the hostesses organizing country-house weekends. Among working-class families, as Rowntree, Booth and others had shown, huge numbers of children were born out of wedlock, often to mothers unsure of the father’s identity. The middle classes, pressed by both sides, hung on all the more doggedly to notions of respectability, casting adulterers and unmarried mothers into social darkness.

One way of approaching the dilemma was to ask whether divorce should be allowed without disgrace, thus at least freeing some men and women from relationships they had come to loathe. In 1890 the second Earl Russell had married a woman called Mabel Scott but the marriage had not worked and she returned to live with her mother. Ten years on he went to Nevada, the only place he could get a divorce, and then remarried. This was illegal in Britain, and in 1901 he was tried and imprisoned for bigamy. Out of this and his moving defence of his position came the Divorce Law Reform Association of 1903 and a Royal Commission in 1909. The commission even included some women, despite the protests of the King, who complained that this was ‘not a subject upon which women’s opinions can be conveniently expressed’. Arnold Bennett’s novel Whom God Hath Joined in 1915 dealt directly with the misery of unhappy marriage and the dangers of the divorce court: ‘It was the most ordinary thing on earth! Two people had cared for each other and had ceased to care for each other, and a third person had come between them. Why not, since they had ceased to care?’ The novel reaches its climax in the gloomy Divorce Court on the Strand: ‘And gradually the secret imperious attraction of the Divorce Court [to bystanders] grew clearer to the disgusted and frightened Laurence . . . Here it was frankly admitted that a man was always “after” some woman and that the woman is also running away while looking behind her, until she stumbles and is caught . . . All the hidden shames were exposed to view, a feast for avid eyes. The animal in every individual could lick its chops and thrill with pleasure.’

Part One

LIVING IN THE FUTURE 1900–1914

LIVING IN THE FUTURE
1900–1914