2
Wait and See 1908–16
WELFARE
Virtually anyone living in Great Britain had a much better chance of seeing their next birthday in 1980 than if they had lived in 1900. Up to the age of forty-five, the death rate for males in 1900 was six times higher than in 1980. Among females it was ten times higher – not because women had been more vulnerable than men in 1900 but because their pre-existing advantage over men was to open out in the course of the century. Death was, of course, related to age; in this sense old age came ten or twenty years sooner in those days.1 Only after the age of sixty-five did a woman in 1980 have less than a 99 per cent chance of surviving the next year, whereas in 1900 a woman had the same expectation from as early as her forty-fifth birthday.
The most dramatic changes in life expectancy, as is usual, were those affecting the very young rather than the very old. In England and Wales in 1980 there were 12 deaths per thousand babies under the age of twelve months, whereas in 1900 there had been 163 – the sort of level which we now associate with the Third World. Thus in a family of six children – still not uncommon among manual labourers – it was probable that one baby would die. Other children might easily fail to survive to adulthood. Young people from five to thirty-five years old faced a chance of death which was only approached well into middle age later in the century. Little wonder that Edwardian as well as Victorian novels contained harrowing deathbed scenes in which men and women, boys and girls, were snatched away from sorrowing relatives – an incidence of mortality among the young which reached its gruesome climax with the First World War.
The English Book of Common Prayer was speaking literally when it proclaimed that in the midst of life we are in death. Death was a fact of life with which Victorians had coped in various ways. For some it was a transcending religious experience, especially if a shared faith in salvation united the whole family around the deathbed. It may seem natural that Christianity, with its promise of an afterlife, should have brought comfort to many families prematurely ripped apart by the ravages of mortality; though it is equally understandable that Joseph Chamberlain, after being twice widowed, lost his Christian faith, as did David Lloyd George, unreconciled to the loss of his favourite daughter. For believers and unbelievers alike, the rituals of mourning, which could be very elaborate, were a practical way of coming to terms with bereavement. In a small way euphemisms softened the blow; it was said that the deceased ‘passed on’ or was ‘called away’ or even, as on the tombstone of General William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army, who died in 1912, ‘called to higher service’.
The people of Britain in 1900 were not only shorter-lived but shorter than us. The two facts are, of course, connected since height is a clear long-term indicator of standards of nutrition, which in turn influence life expectancy. At the end of the nineteenth century the average height of adult Englishmen was around 5 ft 7 in (1.7 m) and Scotsmen were probably an inch taller. It was exceptional for a man to grow to six feet, so much so that to be a ‘six-footer’ became a mark of distinction which persisted in the language long after the physical achievement of growing to 1.8 m had ceased to be remarkable. From about 1870 each cohort of children grew taller – and more quickly. Until the 1930s the rate of change was not striking, at perhaps an inch a century; but in the next half century the rate quadrupled until British heights reached their genetic plateau in the 1970s. Adult males now averaged 1.76 m, with the English slightly taller than the Scots. The gains were greatest for teenage boys since the tempo of growth was to speed up in the twentieth century, especially for working-class children. Differences in height and weight were related to social class in obvious ways. The boys at Eton and other public schools, drawn from the well-fed classes, were already as tall as nowadays by the end of the nineteenth century. Undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge were likewise more obviously distinguished from working-class youths by brawn than by brain in 1900. The stature of Lancashire cotton operatives, by contrast, was stunted by a combination of child labour and a diet which later generations would regard as meagre.
Poverty was hardly a new problem. In the early nineteenth century people spoke of ‘the condition of England’; by the end of the century of ‘the Social Question’. Horrifying overcrowding in the slums of London had been the shock issue of the 1880s; the epic investigations of Charles Booth and his team of helpers were steadily being published throughout the 1890s, in a series of fat volumes. In later generations such a project would have been conducted by academically qualified sociologists, with funding from research councils or foundations: not paid for by a Liverpool shipowner, who initially wanted to show that socialist propaganda was alarmist, and who invented his methodology as he went along. Booth literally mapped out the impressions formed by his team of investigators, street by street. What distinguished Seebohm Rowntree’s book Poverty: a Study of Town Life (1901) was that he got inside the problem, house by house.
Rowntree was another well-heeled amateur, a member of a well-known Quaker family of cocoa and chocolate manufacturers in York. Again his work bears his own peculiar stamp, with procedures which a later code would regard as gross intrusion into the privacy of the working-class households which he investigated. He used his connections to find out, from the family firm or other employers, what income each household in York received. Then he drew on current research in nutrition to establish how much food was necessary for subsistence, and found out how much it currently cost. Putting the two sets of information together was Rowntree’s coup. At a stroke he could tell how many households had an income simply inadequate to provide for subsistence (‘primary poverty’) and how many, though possessed of such an income, were reduced to the same condition by unwise spending (‘secondary poverty’).
In the long run, this concept of the ‘poverty line’ promised an elegant solution to the problem of primary poverty, through ensuring a subsistence income to every household. In the short run, Rowntree’s book had a considerable impact on a public inured to the idea that the horrors of the rookeries were a problem unique to London. On the contrary: in a respectable, provincial city like York, blessed with philanthropic Quaker employers, 10 per cent of the population was in acute need and up to 30 per cent in some degree of poverty. Whether the Rowntrees were to blame, or their workers, or the capitalist system, or Free Trade, was a matter on which Tories, temperance activists, socialists and Tariff Reformers naturally held different opinions, which they sought to support by bandying selective findings from Rowntree on their different platforms in subsequent years.
Rowntree himself, as might be expected with his Quaker background, was an earnest Liberal. His family subsidized a weekly paper, the Nation, recently founded as the Liberal rival to the long-established Spectator (which was currently the mouthpiece of the Unionist Free Trade views of its editor, John St Loe Strachey). The Cadbury family, also Quakers, likewise subsidized the Daily News, giving the Liberals the support of the ‘cocoa press’ in the popular as well as the highbrow market. Seebohm Rowntree was thoroughly at home with the Nation and the band of talented contributors recruited by its editor, H. W. Massingham: notably the economist J. A. Hobson and the social philosopher L. T. Hobhouse. ‘The two Hobs’, as their friend the social historian Barbara Hammond called them, were the leading intellectual spokesmen for a New Liberalism of social reform which was now to come into its own.
Both Hobson and Hobhouse had been influenced by the Fabian Society, which was where young collectivists learnt their trade in the 1890s. They were indebted to Sidney and Beatrice Webb for lessons in painstaking social inquiry; and were almost as impressed with Shaw’s brilliance as he was himself. Graham Wallas was the other leading Fabian: a student of political behaviour whose book Human Nature in Politics (1908) was to suggest that social psychology had a generally unacknowledged importance in shaping the democratic process. It was Wallas with whom Hobson and Hobhouse developed a deeper affinity; conversely Wallas was to break with the Fabianism of the Webbs and, above all, Shaw in 1904 (over Free Trade) and identify with the New Liberalism.
It was essentially the logic of Chamberlainite-cum-Shavian imperialism, supporting the big state at home and abroad, which precipitated the rupture between Fabianism and New Liberalism. Hobson’s famous book, Imperialism (1902), identified imperialism as an economic and political force which was the enemy of social reform, not its ideological ally against Gladstonianism. Imperialism was the means by which parasitic plutocratic interests distracted the attention of the people in pursuit of adventures – notably in South Africa, of course – which were profitable for the vested interests concerned but bad business for the nation as a whole. Only redistribute wealth at home, Hobson urged, and the purchasing power of the mass of the people would provide all the markets that a prosperous economy needed.
‘Under-consumption’ is the way this tradition of economic thinking is generally known, and at the time it was regarded as heretical by orthodox academic economists. But though Hobson was broadly under-consumptionist in his economic views, not all New Liberals were. The neoclassical analysis developed by Alfred Marshall, the doyen of professional economists in Britain, countenanced everything that the Liberal Party came to adopt under Asquith and Lloyd George. Not only had Marshall, professor of political economy at Cambridge, rallied academic economists against Tariff Reform: his successor, A. C. Pigou, established the term ‘welfare economics’ in arguing out principles of distributive justice which justified interventionist reforms. New Liberalism was not necessarily under-consumptionist in economics, any more than it was necessarily Idealist in philosophy.1 What united New Liberals was a more directly political sentiment.
The way Hobhouse put it was to say that the task of Liberalism in the nineteenth century had been the achievement of political democracy; in the twentieth century it would be social democracy. There were senses of ‘socialism’, therefore, which were acceptable to Liberals; and certainly labour, representing a special case of the maldistribution of wealth in the community, ought to be part of the Liberal coalition. In arguing that liberalism and social democracy were compatible, the notion that liberalism was essentially a doctrine of the free play of the market was discarded. Maybe Liberals had historically been identified with laissez-faire, in fighting the battles of their own day against an aristocratic state; but that was no reason for modern Liberals to fear the democratic state or pit themselves against its benign collectivist potential. When the New Liberals put a new foot forward, this was it. Equally, it was held illiberal to pursue otherwise desirable collectivist ends by statist, bureaucratic or undemocratic means – the New Liberals’ liberal foot. Little wonder that they kept shifting the weight of their arguments from one to the other.
What the New Liberals required from a Liberal Government was a double agenda. Most of them had opposed the Boer War; they wanted an extrication from Chamberlainism. All of this made them partisans of Campbell-Bannerman, for they believed that liberalism was safe in his hands; they remained to be convinced that Asquith had lived down his Liberal Imperialist past. So much for the traditional idiom of Radicalism. But there was also an emerging political language which talked of ‘the left’ and of ‘welfare’. Of the new side of the New Liberals’ agenda there was little sign on the statute book before 1908. Whatever the Government’s other deficiencies, they were as nothing to its almost total failure to address the issue of social reform. As H. G. Wells was to put it in his The New Machiavelli (1911), it seemed tremendously clear what the Liberals were against – ‘The trouble was to find out what on earth they were for!’
A POPULAR CULTURE
In 1906 Shaw turned fifty and Wells forty; they were the dominant figures in the literary life of the Edwardian period. Their near contemporary Kipling already seemed the voice of an earlier era, that of the triumphant imperialism – which, it should be remembered, he had himself presciently chastised for its hubris since before the Boer War. His poem ‘Recessional’ (1897) marked Victoria’s diamond jubilee; and in the twentieth century his mood was indeed recessional, almost as if he had retired early, like one of his own Anglo-Indian subalterns, to tend his garden in Sussex. His established international fame was confirmed by the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907, whereas Shaw had to wait until 1925. Kipling at forty was a great Victorian whale washed up on the beach.
By contrast, Shaw and Wells made their names by teaching and preaching self-consciously post-Victorian attitudes. Keynes, another twenty years younger, later called them the ‘grand old schoolmasters’ of his generation: Shaw the divinity master and Wells, with his scientific bent, the ‘stinks’ master.
Shaw’s secularist morality invoked Darwin, Nietzsche, Samuel Butler and, above all, Ibsen, whose quintessence he aspired to transfer to the English stage. This ambition proved initially difficult to realize, and not just for artistic reasons. It long remained the law that the Lord Chamberlain had to grant a licence for all public performances on the stage, and Shaw’s agenda fell foul of this restriction. Indeed Mrs Warren’s Profession (1893), which suggested that there were more immoral earnings in the world than those that came from prostitution, had to wait thirty years for the Lord Chamberlain’s ban to be lifted, and many of Shaw’s plays were originally put on by the Stage Society in nominally private performances. In other provocative plays, like Widowers’ Houses (1892), which showed the squalid foundations on which a nice little investment in property might be built, Shaw succeeded in dramatizing the arguments even when he failed to make the characters much more than vehicles for his dialectical set-pieces. His Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898) offered texts, complete with full prefaces and stage directions, which could be read like novels – and without hindrance from any Lord Chamberlain.
By turning bourgeois morality inside out Shaw the socialist may have sought to expose the rottenness of capitalism. But the cold-eyed Fabian style, abjuring sentiment, meant that his offence was conducted most offensively against conventional Liberalism, with its propensity to strike moral attitudes. In Major Barbara (1905) every stripe of do-gooder is satirized: not only the internally inconsistent upper-crust Radical professions of Lady Britomart, and the ineffectual academic agonizings of Adolphus, but the well-meaning palliatives of the Salvation Army’s social work in the slums, carried on by Major Barbara herself. The real hero, by contrast, is the international arms dealer Undershaft, revealed not as the ‘merchant of death’ of Radical demonology but as the wholesale provider of a living wage to workers otherwise condemned to the ultimate sin: poverty. Little wonder that Shaw’s audiences squirmed in their seats, mocked for the same tender consciences which had brought them to attend these dramas of social concern.
Shaw, moreover, had a trick up his sleeve which ensured that they would come back for more: his genius not just with language but with ideas, seen in a dazzling gift for paradox which laced these plays with sardonic wit. Shocked, affronted, chastised – often unpersuaded – his audiences might be: but not bored. His ambivalent stance as an Irish exile, by extenuating the froth of words and the outrageous opinions, helped his accreditation as licensed jester. As ‘GBS’ he was as much a public figure as politicians like ‘C-B’ or ‘LG’, with fully as many newspaper profiles and biographies in his own (long) lifetime. The distinctive forked beard, the spare figure and the twinkling eye were easily recognizable. ‘GBS’ was a walking, talking caricature of the sandal-wearing Fabian lifestyle: the pure wool Jaeger knickerbocker-suit which he designed for himself as hygienic clothing; the vegetarianism which he upheld, not through soppiness over animals but through disgust over devouring dead bodies; the teetotalism which was not a moralistic reproach to the drinking classes but an almost Martian incomprehension about the alcohol habit.
Wells was more easily placed in the English social structure. Sprung from a lower-middle-class background of precarious gentility, he was shut out of the still exclusive ancient universities as surely as the eponymous hero of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895). Unlike Jude, Wells happily pursued his studies at the Normal School of Science, South Kensington, which had established a leading role in the training of science teachers. Wells celebrated the rise of a professional and managerial ethos, the triumph of an expertise that would later be called technocratic, seen most dramatically in the promise of science to unlock new potential in society. The fact that Britain lagged behind Germany and the USA in the priority given to scientific education was generally acknowledged in the early twentieth century. True, science now had a secure foothold in the universities, as illustrated by the sharp increase in the number of candidates for the Natural Sciences Tripos at Cambridge, albeit from a low base, or the burgeoning number of BSc degrees given by London and the newer civic universities. The perceived failure – which the foundation of Imperial College in 1908 was intended to remedy – was in coordinating academic specialization with the needs of industry (with new chemical technologies as an object lesson in German superiority). ‘There is a gap in our public mentality at the present time,’ Wells was to tell the British Science Guild in 1917, meaning that in Britain the ordinary man and the scientific specialist were hardly on speaking terms. He saw a mission in filling if not closing that gap.
Wells’s novels partook of his own complex persona. There are his early best-sellers in science fiction, opening a window from the known to the unknown in an almost surreal way, as in The Time Machine (1895) or The Invisible Man (1897). There is, in Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) and The History of Mr Polly (1910), a fine evocation of the thwarted aspirations of the unknown England of the shabby suburbs.
Wells developed too a genre which closely – sometimes mimetically – reflected the life of their successful Edwardian author. Typically, a striking young woman falls for a man twice her age; and scandal threatens to engulf them. She is a ‘new woman’, set on having her own career; he encourages her advanced views on social and political issues, with his own blend of idealism, experience and iconoclasm, which is plainly rather attractive to women – and evidently not unsympathetic to the author as an idealized self-portrait. The power of these novels to shock was fuelled by autobiographical references which inflamed some of Wells’s critics. Ann Veronica (1909), which reduced St Loe Strachey to apoplexy in the Spectator, had a reception which can only be explained in this way. The New Machiavelli (1911) contained a portrait of the Webbs – as Oscar and Altiora Bailey, with a passion for bureaucratic reform which would have replaced trees with green-painted sunshades – a portrait which was as unmistakable as it was unfriendly. Wells’s tactlessness, however, was pure artistic gain and helped him to make The New Machiavelli the equal of any political novel in the English language, animating the story with a real sense of the important issues at stake, rather than just using Westminster as a backdrop.
Writing made ‘GBS’ and ‘HG’ rich as well as famous. The Dickensian legacy of a large reading public for works of acknowledged literary quality was not exhausted. There were, of course, best-selling authors whose work is little read today. Silas Hocking had his public for novels imbued with high-minded religiosity; ‘Marie Corelli’ (Mary Mackay) had a distinctly lighter touch in her romantic fiction; and Elinor Glyn trespassed on the boundaries of public taste, especially with her erotically charged Three Weeks (1907).
‘Thrillers’ or ‘shockers’, plainly intended as entertainment, came from diverse hands. In The Riddle of the Sands (1903), Erskine Childers exploited the spy theme, allied with a passion for messing about in boats – all quintessentially English but for the fact that Childers himself later became an Irish Nationalist; a member of the Irish Republican Army, he was to be shot after a court martial in 1922. It was in the early part of the First World War that the Unionist politician, historian and publisher John Buchan found his vocation with books like The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915) and Greenmantle (1916), fantasies of espionage and political intrigue, pushing hard at the borders of plausibility. In 1920, on retiring from the Royal Engineers, Lt-Col. Cyril McNeile was to assume his own mantle as ‘Sapper’ and introduce Bull-Dog Drummond, an upper-class vigilante with a taste for violence that was both proto-fascist and photogenic, as a string of films testified. These were books without high literary pretensions. But they were joined on the best-seller lists of the first quarter of the century by an impressive number of novels which have survived the subsequent vicissitudes of critical taste.
Arnold Bennett was the spiritual successor of Trollope in his unabashed thirst for success and his utilitarian accounts of his annual production of words. Like Trollope, Bennett found that his reputation was to suffer as a result, especially when he became the prime butt of Virginia Woolf’s increasingly influential disdain in the twenties. Maybe by then he was past his best; but the years which saw the publication of Anna of the Five Towns (1902), The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) and Clayhanger (1910) were hardly barren of artistic achievement, despite their lucrative results. John Galsworthy was to endure similar condescension from coterie critics who dismissed his ‘Forsyte Saga’ and scorned his Order of Merit in 1929 and his Nobel Prize in 1932; yet the trilogy, The Man of Property (1906), In Chancery (1920) and To Let (1921), has continued to give later generations an insight into the social norms of Edwardian England. The comedies of manners by E. M. Forster were more finely drawn and had to wait for recognition – not only Maurice (posthumously published, 1971), with a homosexual theme that consigned its manuscript to a drawer for fifty years, but even Howards End (1910), with its culture-clash between the aesthetic values of the Schlegels and the ‘telegrams and anger’ of the worldly Wilcoxes. There was too a distinguished literary old guard: not only the immigrants Joseph Conrad (from Poland) and Henry James (from the USA) but, above all in popular acclaim, Thomas Hardy, who received the Order of Merit in 1910.
The really popular art form at the turn of the century was music hall. Originally based in pubs, it offered ‘turns’ of all kinds; comedy and popular songs trod an emotional tightrope, with a cynical undertow of sharp social comment. When Albert Chevalier offered the apparently sentimental tribute to forty years of married life together, ‘My Old Dutch’ (rhyming slang: Dutch House/spouse), the turn was performed against a backdrop which showed the workhouse, to which aged paupers were consigned. The otherwise bland refrain – ‘We’ve been together now for forty years/An’ it don’t seem a day too much’ – was bitterly undercut by the implications of the separate entrances on each side for Men and Women.
Music hall had a beery camaraderie, with plenty of audience participation from a plebeian crowd of men and women alike, while the new palaces of variety reached upmarket to an audience of clerks and rakish toffs, slumming while they eyed the chorus girls. At the time of the Boer War the music hall was looked on as a source of jingoism; but it was essentially the amplifier of the visceral response of the crowd to targets of approbation or derision, either noisily given. Topical references were quickly taken up; catchphrases were propagated across the country via a hidden network of which the nerve centre was Crewe Junction on a Sunday afternoon, when itinerant artistes changed trains en route to the next week’s engagement. This was the hard school in which Charlie Chaplin came up, before one day abandoning Crewe for California, where he captured some of his old acts on celluloid. George Robey, ‘the prime minister of mirth’, continued to tread the boards with a technique which, as Lloyd George realized, showed the affinities of the stage and the platform. Music hall finally became respectable when one of its greatest stars, the stage Scotsman Harry Lauder, was knighted in 1919.
In the late nineteenth century religion and recreation had often gone together. In much of provincial Britain they still did, with a wide range of social activities based on church and chapel: girls’ friendly societies or lads’ clubs, choirs or amateur dramatic groups. Choral works had long been the forte of English music; north-country town halls resounded to performances of oratorios like Handel’s Messiah, another reflection of the religiosity with which popular culture was still impregnated. Among secular works, Gilbert and Sullivan’s Savoy operas formed a mainstay of the amateur repertoire. All of this was in an active tradition of participation and self-help, common to the artisan ethic as much as to that of middle-class self-improvement. Lt-Gen. Robert Baden-Powell started the Scout movement in 1909 and it flourished, not because of its mildly imperialist proselytism, but because it was a passport to accessible outdoor adventures, where smoke-tainted food and damp canvas provided a fine escape from mean streets.
Sports clubs in urban areas were often started under religious auspices, with subsequently famous soccer teams springing from origins which would have surprised their mid-twentieth-century fans. Most clubs, of course, remained amateur in every sense of the word, with players who would turn out for St Swithin’s on a Saturday even if they did not often turn up for worship on a Sunday. Such transfers of attention and allegiance, from the religious life of the churches to the secular activities they sponsored, may have had the effect of diluting denomi national rivalries. The rise of professional football in the big cities, however, could foster and fan divisions between teams affiliated with the (indigenous) Protestant and (Irish) Catholic communities: in Glasgow it was Rangers versus Celtic; on Merseyside, Everton versus Liverpool.
Association Football (soccer) had become the people’s game by the end of the nineteenth century, especially in industrial Scotland and Lancashire, where the professional League clubs offered a chance of vicarious participation to workers who finished at noon on a Saturday, in time for the big match. Professional footballers were working-class heroes in a double sense. Treated as gods by their fans, they were treated as proletarians by their employers, and kept till 1961 in a form of wage slavery through flat-rate contracts which denied them the financial fruits of their talent. Their star status was affirmed by their depiction on ‘cigarette cards’, distributed in each packet by rival brands. The rise of football was also fuelled by its association with working-class gambling, hardly less than horse-racing, though more legally once the weekly football pools had become established. A surrogate for a British national lottery, filling in a pools coupon on the kitchen table offered a relatively respectable way of having a flutter, whereas the furtive presence of bookmakers’ runners on street corners testified to the fact that working-class gambling long remained (ineffectually) criminalized.
In 1911 virtually every English town with a population of over 50,000 had a Football League club. The big teams represented the big money, with the composition of the League charting the economic history of the country. The northern conurbations were represented among the twelve founder members of the League in 1888: Birmingham by Aston Villa, Merseyside by Everton – both of them teams which were still to be in the Premier League over a century later. It was still true five years later, with two divisions instituted, that none of the twenty-eight League clubs was south of Birmingham; though professional football was now creeping south. The Woolwich Arsenal, in south-east London, with waning prosperity after the Boer War, abruptly lost its connection with its eponymous football team, which moved to its present Highbury ground in Islington; but Arsenal remained ‘the Gunners’ just as their north-London rivals, Tottenham Hotspur, were ‘the Spurs’. Likewise the name Sheffield Wednesday commemorated the midweek fixtures on early closing day, which gave shopworkers the afternoon off. These big-city clubs lived on even when they had moved on from their origins. But at the beginning of the twentieth century it was still possible for the small northern cotton town of Glossop, boasting the largest spinning mill in the world, to enjoy its hour of glory in the First Division. Towards the end of the century it was the more prosperous south which was prominent in the upper reaches of the Football League, with clubs like Wimbledon, Southampton, Ipswich, and Norwich in the Premier League, and with Luton, Swindon, Oxford, Peterborough, Brighton, Cambridge and Bournemouth appearing in the First or Second Divisions.
In Wales rugby football acquired a mass working-class following that it lacked in England or Scotland, where its status as the amateur code was designed to keep it socially exclusive. Indeed the issue of amateur status had prompted the formation of the Rugby League, as a professional code, mainly on the coalfields of Lancashire and Yorkshire. Rugby Union, by contrast, was played in most public schools and Old Boys’ teams, or ‘Former Pupils’ in Scotland, were one of its mainstays. In south Wales, however, ‘football’ meant the Rugby Union code, amateur status and all, with heroic teams of pitmen from the valleys carrying the national honour. No fewer than six times between 1900 and 1912, Wales won the ‘triple crown’ by conquering England, Ireland and Scotland in the international championship; and the achievement of the Welsh XV in beating the All Blacks, hitherto undefeated on their 1905 tour from New Zealand, was to become legendary.
Unlike either code of football, cricket was played and followed by all social classes in England (and parts of south Wales too, but only by small Anglo-Scots and Anglo-Irish contingents). At its highest level of proficiency, accredited as ‘first-class cricket’ since the county championship began in 1873, it had always been a spectator sport in which the upper classes had insisted on participating, like horse racing. The governing body of the sport remained until 1969 the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) – nominally private, socially exclusive – established for more than a century at the present Lord’s cricket ground in north London. Cricket solved the problem of professionalism by making a distinction in first-class cricket between Gentlemen, who were amateurs, and Players, employed by the county clubs. In a microcosm of the English class system, they took the field each day as members of the same team, though through separate gates at Lord’s, and were distinguished by the fact that Gentlemen alone had initials before their surnames on the scorecard. Lord Hawke (the seventh baron) was captain of the Yorkshire XI from 1883 to 1910, leading his side to the county championship eight times. He also took MCC teams abroad, in proselytizing missions which may have had little lasting impact on the sporting culture of the USA, Canada, or South America. But Australia, with its tiny population, very soon proved more than able to take on the old country in Test matches, with the winner of each series awarded the purely notional trophy of ‘the Ashes’ (of English cricket). Hawke had the satisfaction of seeing other countries which he had toured, like India, the West Indies and South Africa, acquire international Test status – in the end a more lasting legacy for Commonwealth unity than anything Chamberlain achieved.
In England the status of cricket as the national game was culturally secure. Village teams, playing on village greens, preferably with the shadows of ancient trees lengthening across the wicket, with the blacksmith as fast bowler, and the squire’s son as a stylish batsman, were mythologized in prose and verse. Literary figures like J. M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan, doted on the game and were joined in their dotage by many indulgent readers who found here a potent metaphor for all that was best in English life. To call something ‘not cricket’ was to make a moral judgement.
For some people, the joke goes, sport is not a matter of life and death: it is more serious than that. When it is referred to as a religion, the comment may be suggestive as well as ironic. The ability of sport to capture the popular imagination, to infuse a sense of common commitment in the outcome of an epic contest, to provide a strong narrative line – even when busy people can only eavesdrop on the story on the back page of a newspaper or snatch at the latest Test score – this is not just a trivial matter. In twentieth-century Britain organized mass sport may have filled some of the psychic space which was being vacated by organized mass Christianity.
FISCAL CRISIS
Asquith stepped effortlessly into the premiership in 1908 and looked the part immediately. His strength lay in an executive capacity to transact business, with a mastery of exposition on paper which recalled Gladstone, and an adroitness in managing personalities which enabled him to nudge discussion towards consensus. He would bide his time in apparent indolence until he spotted a favourable turn, on which he would seize incisively. The dictum which became notorious – ‘Wait and see’ – was originally uttered during the Irish crisis, with a hint of menace as much as procrastination behind it. His intellectual dominance over his cabinet meant that, until the War came, he exacted respect from even the most forceful and self-confident of his lieutenants – indisputably, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. By immediately promoting them to key positions, Asquith injected his cabinet with a dynamism which Campbell-Bannerman’s had lacked. Grey as Foreign Secretary and Haldane as Secretary of State for War remained closer to the prime minister, and together they determined defence and foreign policy; but the initiatives now came in domestic politics.
Asquith chose Lloyd George as his Chancellor of the Exchequer, knowing full well that this did not mean a quiet life. Like himself, Lloyd George was a self-made lawyer; but a Welsh country attorney, as he liked to call himself, rather than an Oxbridge-educated barrister. His background in Welsh-speaking, Nonconformist Caernarvonshire gave Lloyd George’s Radicalism a fiery, populist flavour, especially when directed against English landlords; but this ‘cottage-bred man’ had been pampered in the finest cottage in the village of Llanystumdwy and was a tribune voicing historic wrongs, not a victim of personal deprivation. His was a small people rightly struggling to be free of English oppression – hardly less than the Boers, whose cause he had naturally championed. Through the pro-Boer network he had broadened his political base, forming long-lasting bonds with New Liberals, like C. P. Scott, the magisterial editor of the Manchester Guardian, the leading anti-war paper. Scott, the high-minded patron of Progressive politics, reconciling Liberals with Labour, was to make a life’s work out of ‘saving Lloyd George’s soul’.
Lloyd George stood out as the minister with green fingers, able to make the garden bloom through an intuitive flair, in ways that he hardly understood, let alone foresaw. Above his bed was the motto: ‘There is a path which no fowl knoweth and the eye of the vulture hath not seen’ (Job 28: 7). An apprenticeship as President of the Board of Trade confirmed his ministerial calibre, showing that he was not just a Radical platform orator. More than anyone else, he was responsible for giving the New Liberalism a real purchase in Edwardian politics; yet he had no more read his Rowntree or his Hobhouse in 1908 than he had actually read the Reports of the Royal Commission on the Poor Law in 1909, when he airily began citing them in his speeches. Talking to Rowntree or Hobhouse, or to others who had read them, gave Lloyd George more in half an hour than anything he got from book learning; and though his manifest deficiencies in mastering the contents of his ministerial red boxes were as exasperating to colleagues as his blatant negligence as a correspondent, his methods had the unanswerable virtue of success, sometimes under conditions which needed drastic remedies.
Under Asquith some significant steps had already been taken at the Treasury, probing the frontier of traditional Free Trade finance. The 1907 Budget granted remissions of income tax on earned incomes, thus throwing the burden more on to investment incomes. This was frustrating for Tariff Reformers; it countered their strategy of relying more on indirect taxation by instead moving towards a progressive scale of direct taxation. Asquith’s trump card, moreover, was old-age pensions.
The Victorian poor law held out the prospect of the workhouse as a deterrent influence on its clients, thus providing an incentive to self-reliance and independence. The principle was that, under ordinary conditions, the worker had the means of avoiding pauperism in old age by the exercise of foresight, industry and thrift. So by foreseeing that old age comes to all, by industriously earning a living, and by thriftily setting enough aside for the future, the individual could reap the rewards of the individualist virtues. This was a scheme of things which many Liberals found appealing; they were by no means minded to throw it over, capriciously, in favour of a doctrine of collectivist provision. It was the manifest practical breakdown of existing arrangements which put the case for pensions on its feet. As life expectancy increased, more people lived to an age which they had never foreseen reaching, became unable to support themselves through their own industry, and were liable to exhaust whatever thrifty provision they had made. Moreover, the idea that all working-class incomes allowed a surplus for adequate endowment of old age was itself unrealistic. Furthermore, the friendly societies, through which many respectable artisans had accumulated pension rights, were now caught between the actuarial assumptions about life expectancy which had set their contributions levels and their ever-increasing liabilities to aged beneficiaries who, according to the yellowing life tables, ought to have been dead years ago.
The economic provisions of the 1908 Old Age Pensions Act were meagre by later standards. A pension of five shillings a week – only a quarter of even a labourer’s wage – was to be paid, and only after the age of seventy. A means test tapered payments to recipients of an income of more than ten shillings a week; and married couples were paid at a lower joint rate, thus further limiting the cost to the Treasury. Also anyone on poor relief was initially ineligible for a pension. This was an unsatisfactory stipulation, since paupers were the one group of old people manifestly in greatest need, but a wish to discriminate between the deserving and undeserving poor died hard. Even with such restrictions, since the scheme was non-contributory, the estimated burden was £6 million a year (an underestimate by 50 per cent as it turned out). The political impact was enormous: the more so since Chamberlain had for years been half-promising pensions. The Liberals smugly claimed that they had not promised them, just implemented them – and had done so without abandoning Free Trade.
Lloyd George inherited old-age pensions, not least as a commitment which he had to finance. The estimates of cost turned out to be underestimates; and the Government’s backbenchers insisted on removing the pauper disqualification, which enhanced both the consistency and the expense of the scheme. Not only that: further measures of social legislation were now in the pipeline, with a Royal Commission on the Poor Law about to report. Worse still, especially for a Government elected on the old Liberal cry of Peace, Retrenchment and Reform, were the naval estimates.
Here were the twin causes of the Edwardian fiscal crisis. Visions of a Liberal Government financing social reform from the money it would save on defence spending were blasted out of the water with the advent of the Dreadnought: a state-of-the-art battleship rightly renowned for its mighty firepower, its mighty armour and, not least, its mighty expense. The first ship of this class had been launched in 1906, giving the Royal Navy a clear technological edge over Germany – temporarily. For, once the Germans decided to compete, as they did in 1908, with a programme of lookalikes, only Dreadnoughts counted in the great game for mastery of the North Sea. Germany might thus leapfrog into the lead over a whole generation of outclassed British ships of an older vintage. Or so the alarmist propaganda of the Navy League, amplified through the Tory press, readily suggested, in a campaign to step up the construction of Dreadnoughts. ‘We want eight,’ was the cry; six was the Admiralty bid; four the sticking point of the ‘economists’ in the cabinet, led by Lloyd George and Churchill. After protracted disputes in 1909, the cabinet agreed to a compromise brokered by Asquith: four Dreadnoughts immediately, four more later, if found to be necessary, as they duly were.
Grey’s foreign policy was not hostile towards Germany, and more than one attempt was made to defuse the naval rivalry. But since Great Britain was in an essentially defensive position, it was inexorably pitted against constant challenges from the rising power of the Wilhelmine Reich, its thrusting nationalist ambitions fuelled by its dynamic economy. In 1900 Germany produced 13 per cent of world manufacturing output compared with nearly 19 per cent in Britain; but by 1913 Germany was breasting 15 per cent while Britain’s share had fallen below 14 per cent. Though both economies manufactured over twice as much as that of France, the combined size of all three was now only slightly greater than that of the new giant, the USA, fast approaching one-third of world manufacturing output. Such statistics spell out, with the sophistication of hindsight, a relative decline of power which was perhaps inevitable, but which excited apprehension among Britons who had been brought up to think differently. Periodic anti-German panics did not drive the Liberal Government into a full alliance with France, let alone with Tsarist Russia, and overtures continued to be made to Germany until 1912. But the 1909 crisis was significant because Germany was seen as challenging the position of the Royal Navy, the guardian of the sea routes on which depended both the security of the Empire and the political economy of Free Trade.
So it was that the Liberal Government became committed to financing a naval race with Germany at the same moment as the bills were coming in for its new programme of social reform. Existing taxes could not meet such calls, as Tariff Reformers kept reiterating, whereas their own proposal to ‘broaden the basis of taxation’ stood ready. Lloyd George’s answer was forthcoming in the distinctly unsuccessful speech – he hardly seemed to understand some of his own proposals – with which he introduced the 1909 Budget.
The People’s Budget, as he called it, found the bulk of the new revenue it needed by a sharp rise in direct taxation, especially by increasing the progressive impact of income tax on higher incomes, notably through a supplementary ‘supertax’ on the very rich. Measures to hit back at the drink trade were brought in by the back door, and the ground was prepared for taxes on land by initiating a valuation of all real property in the United Kingdom. All this made for a large and unwieldy Finance bill, arguably ‘tacking’ social legislation which the Liberals were unable to get through the House of Lords on to the budget, which was conventionally Commons business alone. The guts of the budget were pure New Liberalism: redistributing income from rich to poor via progressive taxation and social reform in a way that would have profoundly shocked Gladstone. But Lloyd George’s political cunning was to attach Old Liberal sentiment to its fate, by taxing the drink trade, by making faces at the landed interest, and by parading the vestal purity of Free Trade. Liberal finance, moreover, though it hit those who were seriously rich, was not unfriendly to a taxpayer in the professional class on an earned income of up to £1,000 a year.
Since 1906 by-elections had run against the Government, in a way that we now discount as ‘mid-term blues’, but which led contemporaries (and some subsequent historians) to more sweeping judgements about political trends. A short recession meant that unemployment in 1908–9 was at double the level of 1906–7, which gave Tariff Reform just the opening it needed; and a series of Unionist by-election victories helped dispel the taint of the electoral verdict in 1906. Partly as a result of the recession, more emphasis was now put on protection of domestic industries through a general tariff on manufactured goods, rather than on Imperial Preference. These two planks in the platform, plus the old Balfourite favourite of retaliatory tariffs, were joined by a fourth plank – revenue – which was to become the clinching argument in finally converting the party to Tariff Reform. Faced with the People’s Budget, the Unionists needed to point to an alternative source of revenue. The Budget could hardly be challenged on the expenditure side, since more Dreadnoughts had been a Unionist demand in the first place, and a repudiation of pensions spelt electoral suicide. Tariff Reform, in this domesticated form, thus became the Conservative answer to ‘Lloyd George finance’.
The Budget’s role in reviving the electoral fortunes of the Liberal Party seems unmistakable. It became the spine of a vertebrate policy of social reform, going beyond pensions into what Churchill called ‘the untrodden field in politics’. By this he meant unemployment; and as the new President of the Board of Trade, he had the field to himself. In so far as the problem was frictional unemployment, during the interval while a match was made between unfilled vacancies and the workers seeking them, he had an answer in ‘labour exchanges’, which were introduced in 1908. The idea had been worked out by one of Churchill’s advisers, William Beveridge, then beginning an influential career in social administration. This was hardly socialism: it was a means of making the free market in labour work more efficiently by means of a little interventionist lubrication. It provided, too, the passport to a further exercise in intervention which was now coming to fruition: unemployment insurance.
‘Unemployment’ spoke a language hardly more than twenty years old. The traditional term was ‘able-bodied pauper’, the client of the Poor Law, which was the administrative responsibility of the Local Government Board, which might be supposed, therefore, the seat of operations in a Government set on social reform. Not so under John Burns, the flamboyant Lib-Lab MP for Battersea, President of the Local Government Board since 1905. This striking appointment was ‘the most popular thing you have yet done’, Burns had confidently assured Campbell-Bannerman. Burns retained an emblematic membership of the class from which he had made his well-advertised rise – and showed all its social conservatism, not least in the artisan’s contempt for the undeserving poor.
If this was one reason why the Poor Law remained unreformed, another was that its potential reformers could not agree on their proposed reforms. The Royal Commission, which had been at work since 1905, found itself polarized between the two remarkable women who sat on it. Helen Bosanquet represented the individualist ethic of the Charity Organization Society, reinforced with the Hegelian social philosophy of her husband, Bernard Bosanquet; and she made the running in a majority report which wanted to retain the Poor Law as the authority dealing with destitution but to devolve many of its functions on to specialized agencies. With much of this the minority report in fact agreed; but Beatrice Webb had been determined to write it as a coherent statement of a case to break up the Poor Law. The unemployed would be required to register at labour exchanges, permitted to take out unemployment insurance, and guaranteed a minimum support from the state, on one crucial condition: that they submit to measures to reform and retrain them.
Faced with a choice between two reports, the Government chose neither. Instead of the Webbs’ package of voluntary unemployment insurance and conditional relief, Churchill opted for a scheme of compulsory insurance (in specified industries) but essentially unconditional entitlement to unemployment benefits. Registration at labour exchanges established a test of willingness to work and was thus the passport to benefits. This was to become Part Two of a vast National Insurance Act, passed in 1911, initially covering 2½ million workers in trades subject to cyclical unemployment. Part One was Lloyd George’s responsibility, covering sickness – though, appreciating that death insurance was always sold under the name life insurance, he adopted the term Health Insurance. ‘The Lloyd George’ (as it became known colloquially to its participants) covered all employed workers, about 12 million, but was less innovative than ‘the Winston Churchill’ (as, inequitably, it did not become known). Churchill’s scheme for unemployment-insurance benefit did not have German precedents upon which to build.
National Insurance protected the breadwinner by insuring him (almost always the male) against pauperization through unemployment or sickness. Medical help was subsidiary: basically it aimed to get the man back to work again, by giving him access to panels of approved doctors registered under the Act. The fact that the scheme was financed by weekly contributions from the insured worker and the employer, as well as a state subsidy, limited the Exchequer liability. If this was the financial rationale for choosing this approach, the political reasoning was equally revealing. First, it showed Lloyd George’s populist touch. He knew the revulsion with which people regarded the workhouse; he would have nothing to do with the machinery of the Poor Law in administering National Insurance, any more than in paying pensions, which came across the post-office counter. In this way the Liberals dealt with the Poor Law by ignoring it, coping with its traditional concerns through other means. Second, the point which the Webbs failed to grasp was that the unconditionality of insurance benefits, to which workers felt they had earned the right, was the means of winning assent for state intervention. Liberal collectivism thus made an appeal to Labour, bypassing socialist objections, which surely explains why the British welfare state was built on the foundation of National Insurance.
Without the People’s Budget, the Liberals’ welfare reforms would have had neither resources nor political clout. Social reform became big politics when it was meshed with partisan concerns in 1909–10, when the New Liberalism provided a language for addressing the predicament in which the Liberal Government found itself. The rejection of the Budget by the House of Lords in November 1909 led to a constitutional crisis, only settled, after two general elections, by the passing of the Parliament Act in 1911. This has sometimes obscured the fact that it was fundamentally a political conflict, resolved not by constitutional arguments but because the Liberals hit upon a winning political strategy.
The Unionist majority in the House of Lords blocked the Budget because they thought they could get away with it – and they almost did. The appearance of a number of ‘backwoodsmen’ to inflate the ordinary Tory majority – the Budget was lost by 375 to 75 – was a picturesque touch of the kind which fed Lloyd George’s rhetoric. He talked of being governed by ‘five hundred men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed’. But he had been nearer the mark when he had claimed that the House of Lords was not the watchdog of the constitution but ‘Mr Balfour’s poodle’. The Unionist leader knew that if the Budget could meet the Government’s revenue needs, the case for Tariff Reform would be much weakened; and the Lords carefully claimed that they were acting only so as to refer the matter to the people. No one doubted their legal right to vote against the Bill; likewise no one was surprised by Asquith’s response in calling a general election for January 1910.
This argument between a Liberal majority in the Commons and a Conservative majority in the Lords had been in rehearsal for at least twenty years. What gave it a cutting edge in 1910 was the electoral appeal of the underlying social and economic issues at stake. Social reform depended upon the People’s Budget; Tariff Reform relied upon defeating it. This was the core of the argument, especially in industrial and working-class seats. Lloyd George had already made his biggest splash in 1909, with his barnstorming taunts against the peers at Lime-house in east London becoming a synonym for demagogy (and upsetting the King into the bargain). Churchill spearheaded the campaign for the Budget, with a Lancashire campaign reminiscent of Gladstone’s in Midlothian, in which he impressed his view of the ‘fundamental issues’ – ‘They are great class and they are great economic and social issues.’ This was strong stuff from a duke’s grandson.
The progressive case was essentially the same whether it was made on Liberal or Labour platforms; and though there were more three-cornered contests than in 1906, the forty Labour MPs elected were overwhelmingly those with Liberal backing. The increase in numbers over 1906 was due to the belated affiliation of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain to the Labour Party in 1908, changing the label under which a dozen ‘Lib-Labs’ sat, in some cases without their acknowledging the difference. One incident, however, showed that the Lib-Labs were not going to fade away quietly. In 1909 a Liberal activist called Osborne obtained an injunction preventing his union, the Railway Servants, from using union dues to support Labour. The Osborne judgement was to cause a temporary financial crisis for Labour, which naturally pressed for remedial measures. The Government readily implemented a measure for the payment of £400 per annum to MPs in 1911. More reluctantly, it eventually brought in the Trade Union Act (1913), which directly dealt with the Osborne judgement by stipulating that any union could establish a political fund, which in practice was used simply to support Labour.
In the General Election of January 1910 the Unionist poll was 5 per cent higher than in 1906 in England, though only 2 per cent higher in Wales and Scotland. The Government’s majority at Westminster was cut as the Unionists gained more than a hundred seats, mainly in the south of England. In the north, however, as in Scotland, the progressive gains of 1906 were generally retained, not only in the historic Nonconformist areas of Yorkshire and the north-east but in Lancashire too; and much the same was true in the working-class districts of London, where the Liberals were now in their strongest position for a generation. The new House of Commons contained 275 Liberals and 273 Unionists, and the usual eighty-odd Irish Nationalists, who in theory could have voted the Government out. Leaving aside all 103 MPs from Ireland, the real electoral division in Great Britain was between 315 Progressives and 252 Unionists, giving the Government a majority of at least sixty. Since in Ireland the Nationalists likewise had a majority of sixty over the Ulster Unionists, this had the effect of doubling the Government’s working majority. The second general election of 1910, held in December, though it brought offsetting changes here and there, barely disturbed this parliamentary arithmetic. If few expected the new parliament to be as short as that elected in January 1910, no one predicted it would last eight years.
IRELAND
England and Wales together have roughly twice the land area of either Ireland or Scotland. In area, Great Britain is thus three times as big as Ireland. But the demographic shifts of the nineteenth century brought an increasing imbalance within the British Isles, which contributed to the instability of the Union with Ireland. The catastrophic Irish famine of the mid-1840s had precipitated changes which virtually halved its population by the time the island was partitioned after the First World War. Meanwhile the burgeoning population of Great Britain, which had been little more than twice that of Ireland in 1841, was nearly ten times as big by 1911. Under the Act of Union between Great Britain and Ireland, the Irish representation in the Westminster parliament was fixed at 103 seats – say 15 per cent of the House of Commons. In the early nineteenth century this meant that, relative to population, Ireland was under-represented by half. But by 1910, Ireland was over-represented by half.
Unionists claimed that the tail was now wagging the dog: that the Liberal Government was in thrall to the Irish Nationalist Party. Its leader, John Redmond, was called the ‘Dollar Dictator’, because of the subventions which the Nationalists received from their expatriate supporters in the USA. This was melodramatic stuff, fit for the hustings. The Unionists, however, had a serious point about representation and they used it to justify their obstruction of Liberal measures of electoral reform in Great Britain. Their further contention, that it was improper for a Liberal Government to enjoy the parliamentary support of the Irish MPs, was less tenable – especially on the Unionist argument that the United Kingdom was one and indivisible. What was the principle of the Union if not that Ireland was to be represented at Westminster by MPs with full voting rights? Moreover, not all Irish MPs were Home Rulers: and the bulldog of British Toryism was soon to be wagged by its own Ulster Unionist tail.
Home Rule had been a non-issue in 1906. Many Liberals secretly hoped that it it might remain in limbo and not return, like Gladstone’s ghost, to spoil their long-awaited electoral feast. But the compromise Irish Council bill of 1908 was a fiasco; like other measures proposed by the Campbell-Bannerman Government, it disconcerted its friends while failing to appease its enemies. It was an illusion, therefore, to suppose that anything short of Home Rule would suffice. To be sure, successive land-purchase schemes had already given a glimpse of twentieth-century Ireland as a nation of peasants, by creating a generation of well-fed petty proprietors whose complacency their fellow-countryman Shaw mercilessly satirized in John Bull’s Other Island (1904). The Irish Nationalist Party no longer displayed the raw political hunger for red meat which had gnawed at Parnell, now safely dead these twenty years. He was posthumously revered and commemorated with a hollow piety which James Joyce surely captured in his perfectly achieved short story, ‘Ivy Day in the Committee Room’, published in his collection Dubliners (1914).
The post-Parnellite Nationalist Party faced a problem not dissimilar from that of its mainland ally, the post-Gladstonian Liberal Party. There was talk at the time of a ‘crisis of liberalism’, as the Liberal Party, with its historic bourgeois image and Nonconformist identity, faced up to the problems of economic and social change in the twentieth century, with a potential challenge from a working-class party if its nerve should fail. The New Liberalism, as developed in practical politics under Asquith and Lloyd George, went a long way to confound such fears and to give evidence of the ‘illimitable character of Liberalism, based on the infinitude of the possibilities of human life’; so J. A. Hobson argued in a book on this theme. A later historian, George Dangerfield, was to go further and write of ‘the strange death of Liberal England’, a phrase which retains a hold almost like that of scripture: mythopeically enshrined in the minds of even those readers who doubt that the story is actually true. But perhaps Redmond’s party faced its own crisis of liberalism that portended the strange death of Nationalist Ireland, outflanked by a new wave of cultural politics which looked for salvation to Sinn Fein (‘ourselves alone’) rather than the British parliament.
The third Home Rule bill was conceived as a thoroughly parliamentary proceeding from first to last. It was intended to repay the Liberal Party’s historic debt to Ireland, now that there was no excuse for default. Home Rule had handicapped the Liberals in the 1910 elections, especially in December 1910 in the west of England, where losses of some seats held in January offset the modest gains the Progressives registered in industrial England. Almost all Liberal and Labour candidates had given pledges for Home Rule, usually in the small print at the bottom of their election addresses. It was the Unionists who, as usual, claimed that Home Rule was the headline issue; and they did so with more verisimilitude on this occasion because of developments in the political situation during 1910.
The January 1910 election sealed the fate of the Budget but not that of the House of Lords. Asquith had not obtained from the King an undertaking to use the royal prerogative, which would be necessary to enforce the supremacy of the House of Commons by threatening to create enough new peers to outvote the old ones. Otherwise the Lords could simply reject proposals for constitutional change, like any other bills which they disliked. This revelation of Asquith’s nakedness shook the confidence of his supporters; but he was able to retrieve the position nicely. First King Edward died in May 1910; and, amid the fulsome obsequies, efforts were made to negotiate an agreed constitutional settlement among all parties.
Home Rule was the stumbling block. The Government would not countenance any arrangement that precluded Home Rule, the Unionists any that facilitated it. Behind the scenes Lloyd George went further, seeking to leapfrog over the constitutional obstacle by making an overtly political deal, via a national government which would roll up social reform, Tariff Reform and Home Rule into one constructive package of measures. Again Home Rule was Balfour’s sticking point. Indeed the lengths to which he would go to defend the Union were seen in the December elections. With days to go before the first polls, he appalled loyal Chamberlainites by giving a pledge that a Unionist Government would be prepared to submit Tariff Reform to a referendum before implementing it, thus further emphasizing the Home Rule issue.
Asquith meanwhile had put irresistible pressure on the new King, George V, to back a Liberal Government by creating as many peers as were necessary to override the House of Lords. The Government’s election victory in December 1910 therefore determined the political outcome; the legislative steps followed inexorably. Asquith now had the right cards in his hand and took his tricks with the finesse of a man who enjoyed his bridge. The Parliament Bill of 1911 made noises about reforming the composition of the House of Lords but in fact just removed its veto on legislation. In future, money bills would need approval by the Commons alone, and any other bill rejected by the Lords would nonetheless become law once it had been passed by the Commons in three (normally annual) sessions.
Passing the Parliament Bill itself, of course, needed a Lords majority, which the Government did not possess, and most Tory peers professed their determination to die in the last ditch. But the ‘ditchers’ were cheated of their martyrdom. The bishops, under the leadership of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, were enlisted in the bill’s support – an early sign that in the twentieth century the Church of England was no longer simply ‘The Tory Party at prayer’. Crucially, enough Tory peers broke ranks (‘hedgers’) to avert the prospect of a mass creation of Liberal peers. That this was a serious possibility is shown by the survival in the Liberal chief whip’s papers of a list of several hundred names – such as Bertrand Russell, Robert Baden-Powell, Thomas Hardy, Gilbert Murray, J. M. Barrie – which would actually have increased the calibre of any second chamber.
The third Home Rule bill, introduced in 1912, could be expected to complete the procedure required under the Parliament Act by 1914. Unlike Gladstone’s original Home Rule bill, which had excluded the Irish from the Westminster Parliament (to Unionist outcry), and the second Home Rule bill, which had included them (to renewed Unionist outcry), the new bill offered the compromise that the Irish representation would be reduced at Westminster, just as the Unionists kept demanding.1 They were no better pleased, however. The proposal was essentially one for devolution, giving an Irish parliament significant domestic authority but reserving some powers to the Westminster parliament. Defence was one, fiscal policy another – a thorny issue since, left to themselves, most Irish Nationalists would have opted for protection. What most distinguished the Third Home Rule from its two predecessors was the real prospect that it would become law and be imposed on Ulster.
The nine counties in the north of Ireland that comprised the historic province of Ulster contained most of the Protestant population. Since there was also a strong Catholic presence, the province’s parliamentary representation was pretty equally divided between Nationalists and Unionists. For, despite a distinguished line of Nationalist Protestants – Parnell, for example – the conflict was basically between communities defined by religious labels. The notion that Home Rule meant Rome rule was an agreeable joke in the southern provinces of Ireland; for the Protestant Orangemen of Ulster it was a nightmare. Their hostility to Home Rule, in any of its previous incarnations, had never been in doubt; it was back in 1886 that Lord Randolph Churchill had talked of playing ‘the Orange card’ against Gladstone. The British Unionists were as determined as ever to support Ulster in 1912, if possible to scupper Home Rule altogether. But this time, from an early stage, there was a fallback position: an implicit concession of Home Rule for southern Ireland so long as Ulster was excluded.
If this meant sacrificing the Unionists’ traditional supporters among the Anglo-Irish landowners, like Lansdowne, their own leader in the Lords, at least the patricians could be bought off, as many had been already, through land purchase. But the plebeian Protestants of Belfast had nowhere to run, and no money to run with. Little wonder that more than 400,000 of them, harking back to the seventeenth century as usual, were to sign a ‘solemn covenant’ declaring that they would not submit to a Dublin parliament. Others had gone further: no fewer than 80,000 Orange Volunteers were drilling by April 1912 – and who should turn up to take the salute but the new leader of the British Unionist Party.
Andrew Bonar Law was an unexpected choice to succeed Balfour, who had resigned at the end of 1911, having exhausted the tolerance of the Tariff Reformers by losing three elections in a row. Their preferred candidate was Chamberlain – Austen since they could no longer have Joe. But another candidate, a much more traditional Tory who could play the squire, was found in Walter Long; and to avoid further conflict they both did the decent thing and withdrew in favour of Law. He was a leading Tariff Reformer, a businessman from Glasgow who had been born in Canada; but at least he was a Conservative, through and through, who made no pretence of magnanimity. Once invited to agree that Gladstone was a very great man, Law simply said: ‘He was a very great humbug.’ This was all in a different tenor from Balfour – Asquith sarcastically called it ‘the new style’ – which was, of course, the whole point of changing the leadership. What the Chamberlainites misjudged was that Law’s single-minded fervour for Tariff Reform would be outmatched by his single-minded fervour against Home Rule.
Law’s presence in Belfast was one visible sign; and in the course of 1912 he publicly declared, both in the House and outside, that ‘there are things stronger than Parliamentary majorities’. By committing the Unionist Party to supporting armed resistance to Home Rule, Law was not only making Ulster the sticking point: he was raising the spectre of civil war. Here was another constitutional crisis following at the heels of the last. Perhaps it is wrong to be surprised that the Conservative Party, the traditional upholder of law and order, should have taken this course. After all, until the passing of the Parliament Act, Tories had never needed to challenge the verdict of the ballot box in this way; they had been able to thwart their opponents through the House of Lords. Historians who complacently celebrate the smooth transition from aristocratic to democratic government in Britain perhaps overlook the Ulster crisis as the moment of truth for a politically emasculated governing class, resisting the implications of representative government.
One democratic resolution of this conflict, of course, would have been a referendum. There was a case for appealing to the people on a fundamental issue, especially one of a constitutional character. This proposal attracted Unionists who were confident that the majority which the Liberals had jobbed together between British Progressives, on the basis of economic and social issues, concealed the fact that Home Rule was as unpopular as ever. But the expedient of a referendum was not to be tried for another sixty years.
Since Home Rule remained inextricably mixed up with other party issues, therefore, it was a question of priorities on both sides. The Government sadly came to appreciate how much of the momentum of its emerging new policies was lost after 1911, when its obsolescent old policies – not only Irish Home Rule but, in minor key, Welsh Disestablishment – instead hogged the business. This was why Lloyd George launched his land campaign in 1913, with a think-tank headed by Seebohm Rowntree to dream up new ideas, such as state intervention in housing and a minimum wage, to reinforce old Radical cries. ‘God gave the land to the people,’ was the chorus of the Lloyd George land song, which would have been the Liberal theme in the general election envisaged for 1915. On the Unionist side, conversely, the change of ground, from social reform to Ulster, was a welcome boost, as the mid-term by-elections seemed to confirm; but the worry was that Tariff Reform would still blight the party’s appeal in a general election.
Whether he was clearing the decks for a civil war or just a general election, therefore, Law’s priorities became clear in the course of 1912. He knew that the pledge which Balfour had given in December 1910, to submit food taxes to a referendum, would kill Imperial Preference; and at the end of 1912 he initially endorsed Lansdowne’s announcement that the pledge had now lapsed. Law also knew, however, how strongly feelings ran in Lancashire; his experience in contesting a Manchester seat at the previous election had brought him to clutch at the pledge in the first place; and when the local magnate Lord Derby could no longer keep the Lancashire Tories in check, Law realized that the moment had come for a volte-face. Food taxes were written out of the programme; Imperial Preference was thereby ditched and only industrial protection retained. By the time Joseph Chamberlain died in 1914 Tariff Reform had become a ghost policy.
The Unionists now put all their chips on Ulster. The Home Rule bill was duly passed by the Commons in 1912 and 1913. There was, at this late stage, serious discussion of schemes to exempt Ulster, or at least those counties of Ulster which had a Protestant majority, at least temporarily if not permanently. The clear Protestant majority in Belfast and four of the northern counties did not, however, live in well-defined segregated areas, susceptible of neat partition, as subsequent history has fully demonstrated. It is not obvious, at the end of the twentieth century, that partition was ever a real solution; certainly it commanded insufficient support in 1914. As Law had foretold, there was a difference between passing a Home Rule Act and implementing it. The position of the Army was delicate, the more so since many officers had Irish connections. The so-called mutiny by a number of army officers at the Curragh in May 1914 showed the uncertainty of the Government’s grip at this juncture. A messy situation faced a messy outcome, one way or another.
What happened, of course, was that European War eclipsed any threat of civil war in the summer of 1914. The Government got its Home Rule Act on to the statute book at last; but with the provision that it would only come into operation a year after the conclusion of peace. Redmond was not happy with this, but he supported it because he supported the United Kingdom war effort; and really he had little alternative. The pugnacious instincts of the Ulster Volunteers were likewise now diverted to the western front. Once again, England’s danger was Ireland’s opportunity – this time an opportunity to be forgotten. Indeed it was only with the Easter Rising that Irish affairs burst back on to the front pages of British newspapers.
At Easter 1916 the headline news was that the Dublin Post Office had been seized by Sinn Feiners, in a largely symbolic move. Any threat of insurrection was quickly dispelled since the general feeling in Dublin, when not apathetic, was against Sinn Fein. What transformed the situation was the Government’s crass response. True, efforts were made to negotiate a compromise, with Lloyd George’s emollient skills coaxing Nationalists and Ulster Unionists to the brink of an agreement to implement Home Rule for twenty-six counties, excluding six in Ulster. But all of this was to break down. Above all, in the eyes of most ordinary Nationalists, the execution of the ringleaders of the Rising turned them into martyrs, and Redmond’s denunciation of it as a German plot turned him into a stooge. The scenario in which Asquith and Redmond would lead their nations to reconciliation through an Irish Home Rule Act was brought to a bloody end.
THE POLITICS OF WAR
There are potent literary evocations, ranging from Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) to L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953), of a blissful Edwardian garden party, a golden age of peace and prosperity, suddenly brought to an end in August 1914. For a small elite, whose double privilege it was to enjoy unfettered amenities before Armageddon and to provide the junior officer corps for the impending slaughter, it is surely understandable that subsequent reminiscence was to carry a heavy freight of nostalgia. Their experience, however, was not the whole story.
For most people in Britain life was hard in 1914. The burst in emigration was one testimony. To be sure, social reforms now alleviated some of the terrors of old age, sickness and unemployment – an incremental gain in welfare at a cost of 10 per cent of a Budget that touched £200 million in 1914. The purchasing power of wages, which had been rising as prices fell in the late nineteenth century, faltered in its advance once prices started to rise in the mid-1890s. Nobody supposes that average real wages fell; the older statistics show that they were exactly the same in 1914 as in 1895, and recalculations suggest that there may even have been some improvement. This tallies with other indications that nutrition and physical welfare were now steadily improving for the population in general.
The cost of living, however, rose by 20 per cent in twenty years, sometimes outstripping the annual rise in money wages (notably in 1905–7) with unsettling effects on wage bargaining. Indeed the sharp cost-of-living increases from 1910 to 1913 brought a rash of strikes on a scale not seen since the 1890s. In 1912 40 million days were lost through strikes, notably a national coal dispute which was eventually settled through Government intervention – a sign of the times. But this ‘labour unrest’, unlike the Ulster crisis, had subsided by 1914.
The pre-war years, while hardly seeing ‘the strange death of Liberal England’, were not trouble-free. It was the direction from which trouble came in the summer of 1914 that was unexpected. In H. G. Wells’s Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916), its hero stood representative of all those who were ‘mightily concerned about the conflict in Ireland, and almost deliberately negligent of the possibility of a war with Germany’. Sarajevo suddenly became a city to find on the map, with the assassination there of the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand igniting a powder trail across Europe that, by 1 August, faced Asquith’s cabinet with an unpalatable decision: whether to support France (and Russia) against the Central Powers (the Habsburg and German Empires).
Alliances had pulled the continental powers into conflict; Britain was not committed. True, there was an Entente with France, and military talks had taken place between the two general staffs; there was also an understanding between the fleets. These were only contingency plans. If they were not implemented, however, France would be vulnerable, creating an obligation of honour which weighed heavy on Grey as Foreign Secretary. Grey worked hard for peace in the last days but he had become bound to France more closely than he cared to admit; though those members of the cabinet who later accused him of misleading them – the Lord Chancellor, Loreburn, spoke of a Liberal Imperialist plot – must have been wilfully myopic not to see the implications of facts which they all knew.
The fact is that the drift of opinion in the cabinet was quite inadequately conveyed by the conventional divisions between ‘Liberal Imperialists’, in support of a strong foreign policy, and ‘Radicals’ against it. Lloyd George, though he continued trying to trim the naval estimates, had shown in the 1911 Agadir crisis – the Kaiser had sent a gunboat to Morocco – that he was quite ready to face up to German pretensions. It was Lloyd George’s Mansion House speech, agreed with Grey, which publicly declared the position of His Majesty’s Government. Churchill was no longer the ‘economist’ of 1908; he was now a free-spending First Lord of the Admiralty, determined that the mighty British fleet should retain its historic supremacy. The old pro-Boers whom Lloyd George consulted in August 1914 – C. P. Scott hopped on the train from Manchester – were unable to count on their man any more for the peace party. In the end only two cabinet ministers resigned when Britain declared war on Germany: the old Lib-Lab John Burns and the aged biographer of Gladstone, John Morley. Whatever other factors disposed towards British intervention, what brought almost all Liberals round to supporting the war was the German invasion of Belgium.
Serbia was belatedly seized upon as a small nation rightly struggling to be free – Lloyd George was to make a speech about how much the world owed to ‘the little 5-foot-5 nations’ – but it was Belgium which immediately fitted this familar paradigm. The point was that a war on behalf of Belgium was not seen as an assertion of realpolitik in the national interest, which Conservatives would have supported anyway, but a struggle of right and wrong in the Gladstonian tradition. Radicals, whose readiness to resist public obloquy their pro-Boer stand had testified, and who had long stood accused of being anti-British, were persuaded that this time it was, for once, their own country that was in the right. It was to be a Liberal professor of Greek at Oxford, Gilbert Murray, who wrote the classic defence of Grey’s foreign policy in 1915. It may have made an anti-war protestor like Bertrand Russell angry, and left the sceptical Shaw unmoved, but it tapped a rich vein of Liberal self-righteousness, which, stage by stage, helped to invest war-making and peace-making with high moral objectives. It is not at all odd, therefore, that the most impassioned call for patriotic sacrifice came from Lloyd George in his first public utterance of the war at the Queen’s Hall in London in September 1914.
The Labour movement, too, despite much pre-war rhetoric about the international solidarity of the working class, generally supported the Government’s decision to go to the aid of Belgium. This is not surprising since the Gladstonian tradition was part of the progressive ideology that encompassed Liberals and Labour, so that they split over the war on much the same lines. Ramsay MacDonald, who, very much the progressive in outlook, had debated whether to accept a cabinet post only a few months previously, now resigned as Labour leader in the Commons and was to work with Liberal critics of Grey’s foreign policy in setting up the Union of Democratic Control, aimed at securing peace in future through international cooperation. The trade unionist Arthur Henderson took over from MacDonald, becoming uniquely powerful in shaping his party’s destiny during the war years. Labour support for the war was obviously more readily forthcoming under a Liberal than a Conservative Government.
The prime minister kept so far as possible to the methods that had served him well in peacetime. His only immediate concession was to find a new Secretary of State for War – he had held the post himself since the fiasco at the Curragh – in the august person of Lord Kitchener. This was the stern visage, all brass hat and mustachios, which was to stare out from the recruiting posters: pointing the finger at potential volunteers. Since the cabinet was clearly an unsuitable body to determine strategy, this meant that Kitchener’s control of the war effort went virtually unchallenged. A War Council was set up, which took over the secretariat that had served the Committee of Imperial Defence, as established by Balfour back in 1902; indeed not only did the War Council inherit Colonel Maurice Hankey from the CID as its secretary, it also took on Balfour as a member – the only Unionist directly enlisted in the war effort.
The slogan, ‘Business As Usual’, was coined by Churchill, but exemplified by Asquith. Asquith’s conception of the war was traditional. For a couple of centuries Britain’s role in continental wars had been to leave most of the fighting to the mass armies of her allies while acting as paymaster; the preservation of her economic and financial resources was thus crucial. This was a highly rational model, which, through two World Wars, greatly profited the USA as ‘the arsenal of democracy’. But how far was such a strategy any longer available to the United Kingdom?
Unusually, Kitchener predicted the likelihood of a war that could last for years, with a need for millions of men. His ‘new armies’ were thrust into the breach, since the sector of the western front assigned to Britain, though perhaps commensurate with the relative French and British populations, was clearly beyond the capacity of the puny British Expeditionary Force of trained soldiers, even when reinforced by the Territorial Army of part-time reservists that Haldane had created. Volunteers came flooding in, at a rate which took the authorities aback. The problem was training and supplying them, not finding them. They were reinforced too by troops from the Empire. Australia and New Zealand sent troops altogether out of proportion to their population; Canada came in to the war despite internal divisions in Quebec; and so, more remarkably, did the Boer-led Government of South Africa, where General Smuts emerged as a key figure.
The appalling losses on the western front – they were still higher on the eastern front – soon provided a chilling rebuff to many of the easy assumptions of August 1914. The prospect of a quick breakthrough on either side was poor.
In this context the War Council came up with a plan to switch the attack to another theatre and to bring the Royal Navy into play. The defensive role of the Navy was to protect British shipping routes and in this it was generally successful, at least against surface attack. The only full-scale naval engagement was to be the inconclusive encounter at Jutland in May 1916; and the Kaiser’s claims of a famous victory by his High Seas Fleet were belied by the fact that it never again put to sea. But if the British were able to secure their essential defensive objective, the Royal Navy found more difficulty in securing an offensive advantage. This is where the ill-fated plan for naval action to take the Darda nelles, at the mouth of the Black Sea, went badly wrong, committing Imperial forces to a futile battle at Gallipoli. British and Australian troops bore the brunt of the carnage. Churchill’s dream of finding an alternative strategy thus became ensnared by compromise, muddle and indecision, which was hardly his sole responsibility – but more his than that of the men who perished at Gallipoli. Politically Churchill was saddled with it, and he lost the Admiralty in May 1915.
It was not the Admiralty crisis alone which prompted the reconstruction of the Government; allegations in the press that the British Army in France faced a shell shortage forced Asquith’s hand. As in previous crises, he showed that he was still the master and that Lloyd George was still his principal adjutant. Together they disposed of the offices in a new administration, including the Unionists. This was hardly an equal coalition; Law was only given the Colonial Office and Liberals continued to hold all the top jobs, including the Treasury, which went to Reginald McKenna. Lloyd George’s move to the new Ministry of Munitions was the big change. He threw himself into the task of improvising a better supply structure by doing deals with the armaments industry and vastly extending state intervention through munitions factories under his own control. He became the apostle of state intervention, finding allies where he could.
The new Minister of Munitions went so far as to say: ‘We are fighting Germany, Austria and drink; and, as far as I can see, the greatest of these deadly foes is drink.’ The real drink problem at the time was not beer but spirits. The peak year had been 1900, when 25 million gallons of proof spirits were consumed in England and Wales (well over a gallon for each adult) and over 8 million gallons in Scotland (well over three gallons per head). Despite a slightly rising population, these totals had dropped by 1913 to under 17 million and under 6 million gallons respectively. It was the War that gave a temporary boost, as war workers spilled their earnings. Lloyd George’s temperance supporters, thwarted by the Lords before the War, saw their chance in 1915. Not only was beer watered in strength but the hours of licensed premises were regulated. In London, for example, pubs were henceforth open only from 12 noon to 2.30 p.m. and from 6.30 to 9.30 p.m. The immediate objective was achieved; in Great Britain consumption of spirits in 1918 was only 40 per cent of its pre-war level, and little more than a quarter of the levels of 1900. The effects, moreover, were long-term. Despite a temporary post-war boost, these levels of consumption were to remain normal until the 1960s; and the distinctive British licensing hours, with compulsory afternoon closing, were set for the next seventy years.
The coalition had been formed partly to blunt press criticism of the Government. In getting rid of Haldane, the architect of an efficient army, in face of grotesque allegations that he was pro-German, Asquith sacrificed not only an old friend but also an old friendship. The press attacks continued regardless, but on a more selective basis. Lloyd George was the one Liberal who was exempt: a mark of the fact that his position was now much more sympathetic to Unionists who generally favoured belligerent measures. It was in the summer of 1915 that the prime minister lost Lloyd George’s confidence. ‘Wait and see was an excellent precept for peace,’ he now said privately. ‘But in war it is leading us straight to destruction.’
The great divisive issue was conscription. Many Unionists had favoured it anyway, as a means of state-building which marched alongside a policy of national economy and tariffs. The needs of the new armies converted many more, who wondered aloud why the flower of British manhood should perish while men at home failed to do their patriotic duty. In fact there was no absolute shortage of volunteer recruits. The real case for conscription was a matter of logistics – to implement manpower priorities which would prevent essential civilian workers from joining up and keep them on the job in factories and mines. This was not, however, the emotional level on which the issue was approached in the winter of 1915–16. Instead Asquith exhausted every tactic of dissimulation to appease Tory demands while simultaneously appeasing Liberal consciences. He encouraged Lord Derby, ‘the King of Lancashire’, to come up with a scheme that ostensibly preserved the voluntary principle, by getting men to attest their willingness to serve, while assuring the married men that none who attested would be taken until the single men had gone, and then telling single men who had not attested that they were ‘deemed’ to have attested. The Derby scheme was laughable or despicable, according to taste. Conscription was finally introduced in Great Britain (not Ireland) at the beginning of 1916. It was Asquith’s final essay in consensus.
In 1914 the parties had called an electoral truce; they agreed to give an unopposed return to the party in possession at by-elections. But politics did not stop just because some peacetime quarrels were shelved. Labour issues, for example, were as crucial as ever, once a war of production gave a wholly new leverage to the trade unions.
The key issue was whether the unions would permit the ‘dilution’ of their position by allowing less skilled workers to do some of the jobs without the traditional union ticket. These working practices, called ‘protective’ by the unions and ‘restrictive’ by the employers, maintained a ‘closed shop’ under union control. This was the problem which Lloyd George addressed in the Treasury Agreements, early in 1915, securing concessions from the trade unions on ‘dilution’ but strictly on the understanding that the restrictive practices would be restored at the end of the war. This was a considerable victory for the trade unions, whose leaders patriotically responded to the nation’s needs – but on their own terms.
In all these ways the conduct of the war became the stuff of politics. It was on this protean issue, not on pre-existing rivalries or ideological divergence, that the working alliance between Asquith and Lloyd George came unstuck. By the end of 1916 Lloyd George was ready to make a bid for control of the war effort – not initially for the premiership, but stating terms for the establishment of a small war committee, excluding Asquith, which would have made a mockery of his position. The crisis of December 1916 found Asquith less steady on his feet – allegations about his drinking now dogged ‘Old Squiffy’ – and one sign of the toll of a long premiership was that he overestimated his own following. When he backtracked on a compromise with Lloyd George, Asquith found himself displaced. Their partnership had been the axis of the Government for the past eight years and the mainspring of Liberal success; their vendetta over the next six years was to push the Liberal Party to the edge of the grave.