A narrowly political, in the sense of party and parliamentary, history of Edwardian Britain would see the year 1906, and the great Liberal landslide which it brought in, as the crucial moment of change. At the beginning of the reign until the Coronation, the prime minister was the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, High Tory of High Tories, one of the cleverest and most enigmatic men ever to have held the office. He was succeeded by his nephew, Arthur Balfour, tall, languid, cynical, curiously detached from the world over which he exercised such influence. (He once asked one of his female relations to explain to him what a trade union was.) Balfour’s cabinet was composed largely of landed aristocrats or their relations. Exceptions were the rich Birmingham tycoons Joseph Chamberlain, colonial secretary, who was an imperialist radical Liberal who had split with Gladstone over Ireland, and Austen Chamberlain, one of the few men (until the twenty-first century) destined to lead the Conservative party without being prime minister.
The 1906 election produced the greatest poll victory on record. The Liberals obtained 400 seats, a majority of 130 over all other parties combined.1 They established the precedent, followed by the Labour governments of Ramsay MacDonald, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair, of a supposedly radical party coming in to a fanfare of excitement from its more optimistic or leftist supporters, only to adopt a broadly conservative set of policies. Though historians of party might see 1906 as a watermark, the incoming government could look at the problems of Britain and the world and quickly learn a policy of indifference which Lord Salisbury would have envied.
What were the major problems? What of the unresolved question of Women’s Suffrage? You might have supposed that a Liberal party would have been pro-feminist, but it wasn’t particularly. Its natural ‘grass-roots’ support came from the petite bourgeoisie, which was just as anxious as any Tory to keep the little woman in her place. The Liberal government passed the Qualification of Women Act, 1907, which allowed women to sit as councillors, aldermen, mayors or chairmen on county or borough councils; in the GLC election of 1907 there were 600,000 women householders, of whom over 100,000 voted. But the hot potato of women’s suffrage, women’s rights to a parliamentary vote, let alone to stand for parliamentary election, was given no time in the Liberal Parliaments.
The 1906 landslide happened just a decade before the Easter Rising in Dublin. The outgoing Tory chief secretary for Ireland, George Wyndham, did more to help small Irish landowners – with his Irish Land Purchase Act of 1903, enabling peasant and yeoman farmers to have a stake in their land – than any subsequent Liberal. This was the case in spite of the fact that the home secretary in the first Liberal administration was Herbert J. Gladstone, son of the Grand Old Man himself, the passionate advocate of Irish Home Rule.
Matters of arguably greater moment faced the new foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, the new secretary for India, John Morley, and the new colonial secretary, Lord Elgin. They were admirable Victorian Liberals, and it should not be said that they did nothing. They tried to reduce the ridiculous arms race with Germany, by having a conference on limitation at The Hague, in their first year of government. Though Grey wanted to reduce the number of dreadnoughts, one was launched just before the Hague Conference. Morley was destined forlornly to resign his cabinet seat when war eventually came. He had been powerless, and most of the Liberal party entirely unwilling, to stop it.
In South Africa, however, their record is rather better. As soon as the election was over, the new cabinet vetoed the further recruitment of Chinese slaves. The new liberal prime minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, had announced, at a rally in the Albert Hall, that his government would ‘stop forthwith the recruitment and embarkation of coolies in China and their importation into South Africa’. The Liberal imperialist chancellor of the Exchequer, however, H. H. Asquith, reminded the prime minister that licences for the importation of 14,000 coolies, granted the previous November, had not yet been used. The cabinet immediately backed down and prohibited merely the future issuance of licences, rather than bringing the Chinese labour to an end forthwith. It was not legally in its power to do so, and so it was not until 1910 that the last Chinese labourers left the Rand compounds.2
For the Radical wing of the Liberal party, this was not enough. The new member of Parliament for South Salford, for example, in his maiden speech, demanded that the government begin deporting the Chinese labourers within three months, and at a set rate of, say, 5,000 per month. The man who made this suggestion was Hilaire Belloc, journalist, historian and poet, better known to posterity for his comic rhymes for children than for his parliamentary career. He was a colourful presence in the House, who very quickly came to tire of the compromises which the party system forced upon people. It was not enough for Belloc and his friends that the Liberals had made a step in the right direction. Like all Radicals he was impatient for the career politicians to act upon their promises, to do what they said they would do. It was not enough that Campbell-Bannerman’s government did, in a number of significant ways, undermine the high imperialism of the previous administration. For example, in South Africa, the Liberals replaced the Tory system of complete British hegemony with self-government for the Orange River Colony (homogeneously Boer) and by 1908 they had drafted a constitution for a politically united South Africa which allowed universal suffrage among the white populace. The black majority, one need hardly say at this date, were not given the vote. No one offered it to them. Only the High Tory imperialist John Buchan in his thriller Prester John saw the potency of a black Africa as a political ideal. When the Scottish hero overhears the black clergyman, Laputa, urging the blacks to throw off white oppression (‘a bastard civilization which has sapped your manhood’) Davie cannot fail to be impressed. ‘By rights, I suppose, my blood should have been boiling at this treason. I am ashamed to confess that it did nothing of the sort. My mind was mesmerized by this amazing man.’3
So quickly had the imperial idea, mooted as an experiment in the mid- to late nineteenth century, been fixed in the British mind! When Frederick Lugard colonized West Africa he had seen it as a temporary measure, a matter of two or three generations to teach the Africans civilization, before the Europeans went home again. Post Boer War, for an African to speak of self-government was ‘treason’.4
On 13 June 1906 there was a riot in the Nile Delta village of Denshawui in which a British officer died. It had been precipitated by British officers shooting pigeons against the wishes of the inhabitants. Lord Cromer, the British consul general in Egypt, ordered a summary tribunal. There were floggings of great severity performed in front of the victims’ families, four villagers were condemned to death and twelve imprisoned. Radicals like Belloc protested that there was no chance of an inquiry since Cromer had conveniently destroyed the evidence.5 Belloc’s Sussex neighbour Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the foremost British defender of Egyptian rights, published a pamphlet condemning the atrocities. The case, with the fudging of the issue of Chinese labour in the Natal, ‘together ought to shut English mouths forever about Russia and the Congo’.6
The British had gone into Egypt to tidy up after a local war. Gladstone ordered the occupation of the country in 1882 to help put down a mutiny against the Turks. The British fleet was sent to Alexandria but had been unable to prevent a riot in which the consul was killed. So they sent troops to support the Turkish Khedive. Before another year was up, General Gordon was making his fateful visit to Khartoum, and in the aftermath of that war, Evelyn Baring, financial adviser to the viceroy’s council in India, arranged a loan of £9 million in aid to the ‘Egyptian’, in fact Turkish, government. Baring became Lord Cromer, the virtual ruler of Egypt from 1883 to 1907, and the British did not leave Egypt until they were forced to do so by Colonel Nasser in 1956 after the Suez fiasco. ‘In the twenty-five years from 1882 to 1907 England is said to have made nearly 120 promises to evacuate Egypt while at the same time pursuing policies which confirmed her hold over the country.’7
It was the Suez Canal, in which Disraeli had arranged that the British government should buy a majority shareholding, which had led Britain into this disastrous imperialist position in Egypt. And why was the canal so important? Because it was the quickest trade route to India, with whose fortunes in the narrow financial as well as the destinal sense Britain’s were so intimately entwined. The new Liberal secretary for India, John Morley – patient Gladstonian and biographer of the Grand Old Man – put into place reforms in the subcontinent which matched what Britain had done in South Africa. Curzon’s successor as viceroy, Lord Minto, saw his role less as a proconsul than a civil servant, and together with Morley he attempted to extend legislative and administrative powers to Indians. Not much headway was made, partly because these well-intentioned Liberal gradualists met opposition both from Indian nationalists and from Tory British diehards.
Behind all the public debate about the Empire, which the new government occasioned, there remained the economic issues which had haunted Balfour’s government, and which would continue to dominate British life until the Second World War. These were the related questions of how the Empire enriched the mother country, how the domestic economy of Britain was managed, where British wealth came from, and how sustainable it was politically, given the huge growth of an urban industrialized and at times discontented working class. None of these questions can be studied or answered in isolation. They interrelate.
The Victorian success story had been entitled Free Trade. The old Corn Laws, by which Tory landowners could guarantee an income by fixing the price of grain, had been swept away by the radicals of the 1840s. The prophets of Free Trade like Cobden and Bright believed not only that it would make Britain rich, but that it would make the world peaceful. They entirely failed to predict that as other nations raced to catch up with Britain in industrial expertise and production they would see one another as deadly rivals, and that among the commodities they would perfect and develop and sell would be armaments.
Moreover Free Trade could impoverish as well as enrich. The most conspicuous example of this perhaps was the Lancashire cotton trade, Britain’s largest source of export. In the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, British cotton manufactures lost their European and American markets. The Europeans and the Americans developed means to produce and sell cotton goods of their own which were cheaper than the British products. So the British relied almost exclusively by 1900 on the markets of India, China and the Levant. It only needed the Indians to develop the means of industrial cotton-production, or actively to boycott British goods – both things were beginning to happen – for the working classes of Lancashire to face starvation, as they had done when cotton supplies gave up during the American Civil War.
This large single example will suffice as a paradigm for the whole debate which dominated Edwardian politics between those who clung to the Victorian belief in Free Trade and those who supported tariffs, artificially to shore up the British economy. This debate is related, economically and politically, to two other matters which would dominate the world in the decades following the First World War: namely currency and its fluctuations, and the question, never even considered in Britain until too late, of whether governments themselves could, or should, intervene to tackle employment problems. Carlyle could dismiss economics as the dismal science. In the century which followed Carlyle, economics were central.
It explains, for example, how a figure such as Joseph Chamberlain, the Radical mayor of Birmingham, through his advocacy of Empire and his belief in social harmony, should have undergone a total volte-face over the matter of Free Trade. It was Free Trade which made a great city such as Birmingham or Manchester, and which therefore made a successful entrepreneur such as Chamberlain. Equally, he discovered, Free Trade could unmake such places. In 1888 a dire new word entered the English language: unemployment.8 ‘Tariff Reform means work for all’ was Chamberlain’s boastful hope in 1903.9 The Empire became the means of saving ‘dying British industry’. The issue split the Conservative party: it was one of the reasons why they lost the 1906 election, and why Churchill, a keen Free Trader, left the Tories and joined the Liberal party.
The disparities between rich and poor in Edwardian Britain were by our standards grotesque. You would have to go to South America to find modern parallels. Vast population growth during the Victorian heyday was the essential ingredient in the story: it explained the prodigious wealth of the new plutocracy, and the abject poverty of those who, in an overcrowded market and in overcrowded cities, were pushed out of the possibilities either of work or decent housing. Add to that the fact that much of the rapid building in the mid- to late nineteenth century was of unsatisfactory quality and you have, above the level of the destitute, a large group of badly housed, unhealthy people.
The booming economy of the mid-nineteenth century needed an expanding population to match. Yet the rub was, when the economy contracted, that there would be a working population surplus to requirements in Malthusian terms. The situation would call for desperate remedies. If the ultimate Malthusian solution were not sought – a reduction of the population by war, massacre, plague, starvation, emigration – then some new, collective form of politics would have to be devised to contain an otherwise anarchic social situation. Yet how could such a solution not destroy the very wealth-creation which fuelled the economic boom in the first instance?
Had the population simply continued to swell, with no adequate means to increase the amount of food being imported into Britain, then a situation of Malthusian bleakness would have ensued. Indeed, Britain would have been starving. As it happened, however, food imports (while crippling British farmers) provided cheap grain, and meat, from America. And there was a further strange fact. At the moment when some improvement was brought to public health, and the death rate fell, so too did the birth rate. Death rates declined by 18.5 per cent between 1901 and 1913, while birth rates declined by 15.5 per cent.10
This did not stop the life of the urban poor being hard, nor did it prevent it from feeling overcrowded, wretched. Nor did the population actually decline, so the opportunities for wealth-creation remained prodigious.11 In the closing decades of the Victorian era, vast amounts of money could be made by those selling or making those commodities which the newly expanded population needed. The brewers of eighteenth-century London were among its richest men because no sane person would in those days have drunk the fetid water. So the Whitbreads and the Thrales became rich in a world of well over half a million thirsty Londoners. In the world of a hundred years later the brewer who could use modern technology to make the drink and railways and ships to transport it could be well over thousands of times richer, as was demonstrated by the Guinness fortune.
Many in the lifetime of Charles Dickens used soap. Some perhaps not. When William Hesketh Lever, however, bought a modest Warrington soap works in Cheshire (output 20 tons a week) in 1885 he rightly reckoned on a world where all respectable persons would like to buy soap. In his second year of ownership production had risen to 450 tons. By 1894 Lever Brothers became a public company valued at £1.5 million. With the fortune he made from Sunlight Soap, ‘Lifebuoy’ (made from surplus oil left over from Sunlight) and ‘Lux’ Flakes he built a model town, a paternalistic fantasy where he was king: Port Sunlight. By the time he died in 1925 he had factories in twenty-five countries, 85,000 employees and a capital of over £56 million.
The growth of Thomas Lipton, grocer of Stobcross Street, Glasgow, was no less simple and in a sense demographically inevitable. Lipton was said to feel unhappy if he did not open a shop every week. Having started out aged twenty-one on borrowed capital of £100 he was able to use his rapidly expanding chain of shops more or less to take over the Irish dairy, egg and ham market, and to corner the market in American pork. (His Chicago slaughterhouse alone killed and dressed 300–400 pigs a day.) ‘If you stick to business, business will stick to you,’ he liked to say. When Lipton’s became a public company in 1898 applications for £40 million of stock were received.
No one seems to care anything but about money today. Nothing is held of account except the bank accounts. Quality education, civic distinction, public virtue seem each year to be valued less and less. Riches unadorned seem each year to be valued more and more. We have in London an important section of the people who go about preaching the gospel of Mammon, advocating the 10% commandments, who raise each day the inspiring prayer, ‘Give cash in our time, O Lord’.12
Money was not merely important in Edwardian England, it was paramount. Lord Bryce, British ambassador to the United States from 1907 to 1912, believed that Britain was more money-obsessed than America, and in that sense less class-bound. In The American Commonwealth, he wrote:
It may seem a paradox to observe that a millionaire has a better and easier social career open to him in England than in America … In America, if his private character be bad, if he be mean or openly immoral, or personally vulgar, or dishonest, the best society may keep its doors closed against him. In England, great wealth, skilfully employed, will more readily force these doors open. For in England great wealth can practically buy rank from those who bestow it …
This was visibly the case, with honours and titles being on sale by all prime ministers from Gladstone onwards, and with a new monarch who needed money and liked the company of rich vulgarians more than that of impoverished old aristocrats. ‘My uncle has gone sailing with his grocer’ was the Kaiser’s amused comment at Cowes, when King Edward spent the day with his friend Sir Thomas Lipton.
Chiazza Money, a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, who became a Liberal MP in 1906, had in the previous year published a survey of Britain which would shock any reader of a remotely egalitarian frame of mind. In the financial year 1903–4, Money reckoned that the national income was £1,710m. Of this sum £830m was taken by 5 million people. The rest of the nation, some 38 million persons, lived on £880m.13
Money’s survey reveals a large prosperous middle class, and a prodigiously rich, mega-rich apogee at the top of Edwardian society. In this prosperous class Money reckoned 250,000 men supported about 1 million dependants.
Charles Booth, in his ground-breaking sociological researches into the lives of East Enders in London, Life and Labour of the People in London (1891–1903), reckoned that 30 per cent of those living in the capital did so in poverty. It was the capital city of the greatest Empire and the richest industrial power the world had ever seen. Well over a million Londoners lived beneath the poverty line and 37,610 (according to Booth) depended on a breadwinner whose income was less than 18 shillings a week. B. S. Rowntree and M. Kendall in their survey of 1913 reckoned that a family of two adults and three children could barely survive on £1.0s. 6d., and then only if they ate no butcher’s meat, no butter, no eggs and almost no tea.14
Although surveys of the wages of labourers and unskilled factory workers suggest that real income was on the increase, it did not necessarily feel like this. If industrial action is any indication of discontent and fear among the working classes then the very modest efforts of the Liberal government to improve the lot of the workers and their families did not prevent a prodigious growth in strikes. In 1907 the total trades union membership in Britain and Ireland was 2,513,000. After six years that had risen to 4,135,000. Whereas in 1907 there were a little over 2 million working days lost through strikes, by 1912 this had risen to a mind-boggling 40,890,000 working days.
Winston Churchill, in the Christmas holiday of 1905, read Seebohm Rowntree’s study of urban poverty in York which, as he said, ‘has fairly made my hair stand on end … It is found that the poverty of the people extends to nearly one fifth of the population; nearly one fifth had something between one and a half and three fourths as much food to each as the paupers in the York Union. That I call a terrible and shocking thing, people who have only the workhouse or the prison as the only avenues to change from their present situation.’15
The very fact that Churchill himself was recklessly extravagant, and enjoyed the finest wines, the most expensive cigars and the patronage and company of the rich only increased his bewilderment when he allowed himself to be confronted by the cruel reality of other lives. Walking around the streets of Manchester with his friend Edward Marsh as they awaited the results of the 1906 poll, Churchill exclaimed: ‘Fancy living in one of these streets – never seeing anything beautiful – never eating anything savoury – never saying anything clever.’16 It is hardly communism. But it is an indication of why electors voted in the new Liberal government, which Churchill served – as assistant to David Lloyd George at the Board of Trade in 1906, becoming president of the Board of Trade under Asquith’s premiership in 1908, and home secretary in 1910.
Lloyd George’s brand of radicalism was very different from Churchill’s Whiggery. He was only forty-three when he became President of the Board of Trade. His initial political concerns had appeared to be local, a passionate advocacy of the rights of self-determination of the Welsh. It was during the Boer War, which he opposed, that David Lloyd George had come to people’s notice as an orator of genius and as a self-created thorn in the side of the English Establishment. He was neither left-wing nor right-wing by any recognizable standards. He was a solicitor by training, and he had the lawyer’s knack of taking each case as it came along, and arguing with more passion and wit, sometimes, than consistency. He was against the Boer War, for example, but he was not markedly anti-imperialist. He approved of the British running South Africa, he merely disliked the idea of them fighting, and wasting public money in so doing.
After Asquith had succeeded Campbell-Bannerman as prime minister in 1908, Lloyd George had the opportunity, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, to demonstrate his social and economic preferences. The budget gave him the chance to bring in a very few measures which would introduce some extremely modest social benefits, and to pay for four dreadnought battleships for which the MPs were clamouring. (Lloyd George ignored their mantra of We want eight and we won’t wait.) He founded a system of labour exchanges, which enabled the unemployed to look for work. (It cost £100,000.) He introduced a tax break for parents, giving them a £10 tax allowance for every child under sixteen. Asquith had already introduced Old Age Pensions in 1908, to start on 1 January 1909. By no stretch of the imagination could Lloyd George’s 1909 budget be regarded as socialist or revolutionary, but he was raising public spending by 11 per cent – £16 million had to be found. Some of it he could get from levies on petrol and a newly introduced scheme of motor licences. That would bring in £600,000. Death duties, a measure which cut at the very heart and notion of family stability and property ownership, were raised to yield £4.4 million a year. Income tax was raised from a shilling to 1s. 2d. in the pound. Duty on liquor was put up. But the real sticking point, the red rag offered to the landowning classes, was a tax on land value – unearned increment in the value of land would be taxed at 20 per cent.
We shall probably never know whether Lloyd George introduced this measure as a purely economic solution to his difficulties in raising the necessary shortfall for his budget, or whether he did so in order to bait the big landowners. Certainly he enjoyed doing this very much indeed, and he was brilliant at it.
The aristocrats rose to the bait, and the House of Lords responded in a way which put their very political life in jeopardy. They threatened to reject the budget, and in November 1909 they did so. Asquith moved and carried a motion in the Commons on 2 December 1909: ‘That the action of the House of Lords in refusing to pass into law the financial provisions made by this House for the service of the year is a breach of the Constitution and a usurpation of the rights of the Commons.’
In the January election, the Liberal vote slipped away: the figures were Liberals 275, Labour 40, Irish Nationalists 82 and Unionists, i.e. Conservatives, 273. It was assumed by Asquith’s supporters that he had told the king, if the Lords rejected the budget in the new Parliament, that the Liberals would create 500 peers of their own political persuasion. In fact, Edward VII, with some canniness, had not given any undertaking to do this. He had insisted that if the new peers were appointed, this would require a second General Election. As it happened, the matter was not to concern the king for much longer. King Edward died at Buckingham Palace on 6 May 1910, with the archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, on one side of the bed and Queen Alexandra on the other.
The constitutional crisis which had been precipitated by the Lloyd George budget was to be of interest to future historians. In terms of the status quo it left nothing changed. It was not surprising that a disillusioned Hillaire Belloc chose not to stand for re-election during the second election of 1910, which had been caused by the king’s death.
The accursed power which stands on Privilege
(And goes with Women, and Champagne, and Bridge)
Broke – and Democracy resumed her reign:
(Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne).17
Giving very minimal social welfare such as the Old Age Pension was considerably cheaper than keeping more and more urban indigents in workhouses where food and bedding, no matter how grudging, had to be provided. Lloyd George and his allies knew this, as did the many canny Liberal capitalists who supported him. This is not to decry these first steps towards using the tax system for the purposes of charity. But it is to doubt whether the measures considered were as revolutionary either as the Tory diehard peers dreaded in 1909, or as subsequent advocates of full-scale State Benefits might have wanted to suppose.
To many in 1909–10 it must have seemed as if the debates in Westminster about the budget, or about the relative power of the Commons versus the Lords, were a galanty show, a distraction from the really searching issues of the day – an unwieldy and perhaps untenable British Empire not facing up to the realities of, for instance, Indian aspirations to independence; a desperately unstable European situation, in which the national leaders and their diplomats appeared to be sleepwalking towards disaster; a tinderbox in Ireland, waiting to explode; a potentially revolutionary situation in British factories and slums, where hundreds of thousands of people felt themselves to be trapped by poverty, bad housing and uncongenial work, which was preferable to no work at all. And there was, in addition, the quiet revolution which had, in the country at large, though not in the political sphere, already taken place: the change in the position of women.
To say that women’s position had changed is not to say that late Victorian or Edwardian women were ‘liberated’ in the sense of the word which would be meaningful in the mid- to late twentieth century. Women, in houses without servants, still did all the domestic drudgery; and in houses with servants it was left to the females on the staff to sweep the stairs, lay the grates, empty the chamber pots and peel the potatoes. Except for a tiny handful of privileged (not necessarily rich, but privileged) young women who attended the newly formed university colleges in London, Cambridge and Oxford, women still lacked the educational opportunities given to males. But things had, during the mid- to late Victorian years, altered. Women now were educated. They had achieved some significant parliamentary victories and changes in the law. The Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, for example, had abolished a husband’s absolute control over his wife’s property. Women were now technically independent under the law. It was a huge advance, though many might not have felt its immediate benefit.
Thanks to the pioneering bravery of Elizabeth Garrett (Anderson) (1836–1917) – who qualified as a doctor in 1865 – and to Dr Sophia Jex-Blake, who founded the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874, it was now possible for women to aspire to the same professional careers as their brothers. When Christabel Pankhurst (1880–1958) applied to study law at Lincoln’s Inn, her father’s old Inn of Court, she was turned down because she was a woman, but she studied law at Manchester University. Very many women lower down the social scale had worked in mines and factories and mills and the Matchmakers’ Union (not a dating agency, but a trade union based around Bryant and May’s match factory in the East End of London) was founded by a woman (Annie Besant) for an almost entirely female membership. Their successful strike for slightly better pay and conditions in 1888 gave male workers the courage to start strikes of their own, and it was a key moment in British labour history.
The story of the political emancipation of British women, like the story of Ireland, is one which is still being written, and it poses important questions, beyond itself, about the nature of democratic change. In his smug history of this decade, The Edwardians, J. B. Priestley says that the ‘militant’ wing of the feminist movement, by their ‘extreme’ behaviour, actually delayed the arrival of Votes for Women. In a somewhat similar vein, it is suggested that if only the blacks, or the Irish, had been patient enough to trust their lords and masters, they would have been given their independence all in good time.
Others, whatever their view of trouble, by whomsoever it is made, will rather doubt this. For every male member of Parliament who was enlightened, there were dozens who were not. Take the example of Hilaire Belloc. Hardly a typical backbencher, you would say, and you would be right. But his mother, Bessie Parkes, had been a pioneering feminist radical, a friend of Barbara Bodichon, George Eliot and others. Yet he grew up with views which seemed to reflect none of this. He opposed female suffrage. Winston Churchill claimed, as a Liberal MP, to support female suffrage, and did once vote in its favour during a division in the House of Commons which was never going to bring the vote to pass. Using the militancy of suffrage activists, or ‘Suffragettes’, as his excuse for dragging his heels, he said: ‘I am not going to be henpecked on a question of such grave importance’ – a sentence which might have been echoed by many males who considered themselves enlightened so much as to consider the matter. As Home Secretary in 1910 he allowed the straitjacketing and force-feeding of suffragette political prisoners – though another Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, in his biography of Churchill says that he did not demonstrate ‘heavy-handedness’ in this respect.
The truth is, we cannot know how quickly the all-male Parliament and the male monarch would have decided to give women the vote in Britain had they not been ‘hen-pecked’. The historical evidence, which belongs later in this book, is that, as in the case of Ireland, and as in the slightly different case of India, political action became evident in the chamber of Parliament only after very disruptive action was taken on the ground by the ‘militants’.
As with the Chartist movement, there were two broad strands of female suffragists: the ‘moderates’ who hoped to achieve their ends merely by argument, and those who favoured demonstrations of force. The most distinguished advocate of the former path was Millicent Fawcett (1847–1929), who at eighteen had married the blind professor of economics at Cambridge. She took part in the foundation of Newnham College, and knew all the grandees of Victorian radical thought – above all John Stuart Mill. Like many women who supported the suffragette cause, Millicent Fawcett was naturally conservative in other areas of political life. For instance, when the South African War broke out in 1899, she made many patriotic speeches, much to the horror of some of her suffragette supporters, and she even went to South Africa in an attempt to play down the stories coming out about British concentration camps, and the maltreatment and starvation of Boer women and children. She was president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, whose sole aim was the obtaining of votes for women ‘on the same terms as it is or may be granted to men’.18
Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928) favoured the militant approach. Like Millicent Fawcett, she was married to a much older man, and when he died in 1898 she was left in very reduced circumstances in Manchester. She became the registrar of births and deaths at Rusholme in an attempt to make ends meet for herself and four young children (her eldest son having died). She tried to juggle this tedious job with her work for the cause, but by 1907 it was impossible, and she gave up work, and the hope of a pension. In 1903, with her fiery daughter Christabel, she founded the Women’s Social and Political Union. During an election meeting in October 1905, when Sir Edward Grey was speaking (a moderate Liberal supporter of female emancipation), Christabel asked Sir Edward what would be the new government’s policy on votes for women. She and Annie Kenney unfurled a large banner reading VOTES FOR WOMEN, upon which the two friends were expelled from the meeting. There were some highly satisfactory scuffles in the street outside and the Manchester newspapers devoted considerably more space to the women’s issue than they would have done had they accepted Sir Edward’s brush-off with demure silence.
Christabel and Annie Kenney made a splendid pair. Christabel had a marvellous speaking voice and beautiful skin. Annie, more abrasive and Yorkshire, had fair hair and blazing blue eyes. After their triumph of disruption at Sir Edward Grey’s meeting, Annie went to the Albert Hall and disrupted a rally by the new prime minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and by 1906 her rowdy attempt to force a meeting upon the then new home secretary, H. H. Asquith, landed her with two months in Holloway Prison – a place to which she would return. After the activity of these two spirited young women, women all over England flocked to the cause. As the heroines of the movement chained themselves to railings, broke shop windows, waved flags in the faces of pompous politicians, thousands of women, in quiet homes and provincial towns, joined Mrs Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union. When Emmeline Pankhurst herself was jailed in Holloway Prison in 1908, the women of Britain did not feel that they should accept what the males told them. Women had been given the vote in Australia in 1902. The obfuscations and delays of an all-male Parliament, and the resort where necessary to brutal suppression of the rebels, backfired badly.
The self-confidently male Liberals in their frock-coats and top hats were sending out dangerous parables to the world which could now read of such matters in the newspapers and see it in M. Pathé’s newsreels. Indian nationalists, would-be communists or anti-communist revolutionaries could watch and see how a Liberal government could treat its women when it felt ‘hen-pecked’. They could see that for all the rough handling by the police and the prison wardresses, this policy of government restraint, and everything passing through the due processes in the lobbies of Parliament, was not working. The Pankhursts and Annie Kenney sent out messages to the world which the Liberal government of Messrs Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith would much rather had not been heard.
But as the testimony of countless families in Britain shows, the government had completely lost touch with ‘ordinary’ or ‘decent’ opinion over this question. Look at the diaries of Emily Blathwayt, daughter of an Indian army colonel who had retired to Eagle House, Batheaston, and related to the nearby landowners at Dryham Park. The colonel was not a revolutionary; but he and his daughter’s house became a centre of suffragette fervour, as did the house of a neighbour, a Mrs Tollemache. These, and not the seedy backstreet revolutionaries of Conrad’s Secret Agent, were the sort who organized meetings all over the country, and took delegations of the Bristol WSPU to march on Holloway Prison when Mrs Pankhurst was arrested. When they shouted down a Liberal cabinet minister during a political meeting in Bristol, Emily Blathwayt wrote in her diary: ‘Our women are justified as they have no legal voice as men have.’19
For as long as women were excluded from Parliament, and from parliamentary elections, the essential redundancy of Parliament was demonstrated. This redundancy would continue, even after the short-term battle was won and women were allowed, together with men, to take part in the sham of ‘democracy’. It was the signal of their exclusion which was objectionable.
This makes all the more striking the position of those educated and privileged women who opposed Female Suffrage. In the liberal periodical the Nineteenth Century, the issue for June 1889, the popular novelist Mrs Humphry Ward had written an ‘anti-suffrage appeal’. Ward was a strange woman, father-, son- and uncle-obsessed, as well might be the granddaughter of Dr Arnold of Rugby, the niece of Matthew, daughter of Tom Arnold, and mother of a ne’er-do-well whose gambling habit mopped up most of the profits from such high-minded bestsellers as Helbeck of Bannisdale and Robert Elsmere, books which popularized for a mass market the religio-ethical torments of doubters who had read John Henry Newman and T. H. Green.
What is so striking is the presence among Mrs Ward’s co-signatories of the name of Beatrice Potter – not Beatrix Potter, the chronicler of clothed rabbits and hedgehogs in the Lake District, but Beatrice, daughter of the railway and timber millionaire Richard Potter, later to be famous by her married name, Beatrice Webb. As a young woman, she had been obsessively in love with Joseph Chamberlain, his brusque atheism and thrusting imperialism both alike wounding to her essentially mystical and religious temperament. Unhappiness drove her into the East End of London, where with such feminists as Octavia Hill she began her life’s work, the accumulation of information (she called it gradgrinding) about the lives of the working classes. The conditions of women and children working in the sweatshops, and the mass misery of slum-dwellers, fashioned her political vision. As one of several researchers for Charles Booth, she worked on The Life and Labour of the People in London, and her study of the Co-operative Movement led her slowly but inexorably towards socialism.
It was in 1892 that Beatrice Potter married Sidney Webb, the political and economic thinker who was the driving force behind the foundation of the Fabian Society. Together with his friend George Bernard Shaw, Webb believed in state socialism brought about not by revolution but by gradualism (hence Fabian – after Fabius Maximus Cunctator (the Delayer) (d. 203 BC), the Roman general who wore down Hannibal and the Carthagiman invaders of Italy by a policy of slow caution and delay). Not for the Webbs the armed struggle on the barricade, but rather the hours spent in committee getting their supporters elected to the London County Council and the various wards of other cities, to bring about ‘municipal socialism’. In 1898, in two rented rooms of the Adelphi, the Webbs founded the London School of Economics, and just as after a long communion with the God of Israel, Moses descended from the mountain top with the Law inscribed on tablets of stone, so, after twenty years of earnest discussion with their fellow Fabians, the Webbs, in 1913, founded the weekly organ of leftist opinion in Britain, The New Statesman.
They are the godparents of the Labour party – and yet Beatrice had signed Mrs Humphry Ward’s petition. Her comments about it in her autobiography, My Apprenticeships are almost more baffling than the signature itself:
In the spring of 1889, I took what afterwards seemed to me a false step in joining with others in signing the then notorious manifesto, drafted by Mrs Humphry Ward and some other distinguished ladies, against the political enfranchisement of women, thereby arousing the hostility of ardent women brain-workers, and, in the eyes of the general public, undermining my reputation as an impartial investigator of women’s questions.
There are many very strange things about this sentence. First, she does not tell us why she signed the petition in the first place. Then, there is the curious use of the word ‘brain-workers’: as the woman who drafted the constitution of the Labour party, she made the notorious distinction, displeasing to later socialists, between those who worked with their hands and those who did so with their brains, implying – what she no doubt believed – that such a distinction existed, and that whatever passed through the ‘brains’ of the toilers need not be considered too carefully by the intellectuals of the party. Then again, there is the curious egotism of the idea of herself, in 1889 aged thirty and almost unknown, having a public reputation which either could or could not be damaged. She goes on in My Apprenticeship to say that Millicent Fawcett protested against Mrs Ward’s anti-suffragist manifesto, and that the magazine editors then asked her, Beatrice, to pen the riposte to Mrs Fawcett. It was then ‘I realised my mistake. Though I delayed my public recantation for nearly twenty years, I immediately and resolutely withdrew from that particular controversy.’20
Odder and odder. No explanation is given for her silence, until the period of the struggles, both of Fawcett-inspired moderates and Pankhurstian railing-chainers, for women’s votes shamed her into writing a formal recantation of her previous position. (‘I shall be thought, by some, to be a pompous prig,’ she told her diary.) Perhaps she feared that the very unpopularity of feminism would put off likely male converts to ‘municipal socialism’? The early Chartists had wanted the vote for women but had been dissuaded in the 1840s from making it part of their public platform for similar reasons. Perhaps it happened to be low down on Beatrice Webb’s political agenda, though if so, this is strange. The painstaking cataloguing work she did for Charles Booth – the number of rooms occupied in tenement buildings, the number of persons per room, the sanitary arrangements of over a million dwellings, the working hours of women (and children) – all suggested a world where not merely the poor but the females especially of the species were downtrodden in part because they were not considered, by the system, to exist on the same level as the male. Yet, she was right to see it as a peripheral issue. Unless or until the egalitarian party she was helping to create had actual political power – and in spite of two Labour governments in 1924 and 1929, that would not happen until 1945 – it did not much matter who was elected to the House of Commons.
Behind Beatrice Webb’s signature, though, there surely also lurked that attitude so commonly displayed by power-obsessed females, a dislike of her own sex. Witness the exclusion of women from positions of power by Golda Meir, or Margaret Thatcher.
When H. G. Wells (1866–1946) felt drawn towards the Fabians, Mrs Webb felt some misgivings. This was partly because she disapproved of his sexual morals, but chiefly because she feared he might have ideas of his own which did not conform to the carefully formulated diktats of the two-person Webb Politburo. ‘It is more for “copy” than for reform that he has stepped out of his study,’ she remarked sniffily of the popular novelist. ‘When he has got his “copy” he will step back again.’21 She found his Cockney accent and his general commonness hard to cope with, noting: ‘It is a case of “Kipps” in matters more important than table manners.’22 (Kipps was one of Wells’s many autobiographical novels about a perky, intellectually curious, emotionally chaotic young man.)
In July 1906 Mrs Webb was especially disconcerted by Wells’s fondness for the United States. ‘Two months rushing about from New York to Washington, Philadelphia to Chicago, has convinced him that America is much nearer the promised land of economic equality than we in England are: that ideas are understood by a great number of people and that all else is unimportant.’23 She seems, however, more concerned that Wells, by his conversion to American democracy, will try to foist these ideas on the Fabian Society. ‘He seems confident that Sidney [Webb] and GBS will also have to retire if they do not fall in with his schemes,’ she writes with the irony of one confident of her unshakeable position, ‘and is constantly apologizing to us in advance for this sad necessity.’24 After one of their quarrels with him Beatrice told her diary: ‘Sidney had long had a settled aversion to H. G. Wells.’25 They object to his being ‘a sensualist’, ‘blown out with self-conceit’. ‘He began to look on Webb and Shaw as back numbers.’ This was bad enough, but one suspects that one of the things about Wells which the Webbs found hardest to stomach was his expressed belief in ‘votes, votes, votes’.
‘The Webbs were elitists,’ the editors of her diaries write, ‘with a conventional belief in the superiority of the civilized races and especially the educated classes which emerges in many thoughtless asides.’26 The charge that the Webb scheme for reform of the Poor Law was ‘undemocratic as well as bureaucratically complex and expensive was to be made repeatedly’.27
Novelists or poets, particularly of a leftist disposition, who fancy themselves as political pundits are so thick on the ground in the history of the twentieth century that the reader may wonder why we pause to consider Wells. It is because, although very little he wrote after the age of forty is worth reading (and he lived to be eighty), he was a genuine artist, and his response to his times is often memorable, instructive, reflective of something bigger than Wells and his own life, even when he is not on top form. It is a mistake to think that artists respond to the world intuitively, in contrast to scientists, economists, political theorists or statisticians who somehow ‘gradgrind’ into existence a more accurate world of ‘fact’. On the contrary, all human impressions of a general character are intuitions, programmed by the character and circumstances of that very imperfect instrument the human consciousness. One reviewer of my book The Victorians complained that it was too ‘literary’, implying that a vision of the world compiled from Hansard or Bradshaw’s Railway Timetable or Smiley’s Lives of the Engineers might have given a truer impression of what was happening in Britain than the poetry of Tennyson, the novels of Dickens, the reflections of Carlyle and Ruskin.
H. G. Wells had the humiliating kind of early life that Dickens might have written about. His hopeless father, an unsuccessful shopkeeper in Bromley, Kent, specializing in cricket goods – bats, balls, pads, etc. – was no role model. At the earliest juncture, the mother returned to her favoured avocation, that of a housekeeper at Uppark, the Fetherstonhaugh seat where in her girlhood 120 years earlier Emma Hart – one day to be Nelson’s mistress – had danced on the table. Bertie – H.G. – was sent to be a draper’s assistant, but escaped through cleverness, and studied science under T. H. Huxley, Darwin’s representative on Earth, at the Normal School. ‘I had come,’ he wrote later, ‘from beginnings of an elementary sort to the fountainhead of knowledge.’
Wells shared most of the late Victorian illusions about science – believing that it had disproved religion, and so forth – but his intuitive response was much more double-edged than that of some Victorian apologist like Huxley. In his scientific fantasies and romances – the first, and the best, things he published – Wells could see not only that science was the religion of his own, and the coming, age, but that it was a greedy Moloch of a god which would need to be fed children to remain satisfied. It is hard, reading The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), to realize it was written years before Nazi doctors experimented with just such cross-species unions between human and bestial.
In his scientific fables, Wells was able to see that the optimism of Victorian progressives was thoroughly misplaced. The Time Machine, in the story of the title, takes the traveller so far into the future that he has left the comforts of a cosy Victorian dinner party in Richmond and ended in an impersonal Darwinian horror. The Eloi are not, as the traveller at first supposes, cultivated persons like ourselves. They are being farmed as cattle to feed the machine-minders, the Morlocks, children of darkness and earth who live underground, only emerging to feed on human flesh. The cannibalistic theme is repeated in The War of the Worlds, in which the Martians invade and ‘all those damned little clerks … The bar-loafers and mashers and singers’ are to be turned into food for the voracious Martians, barbecued by heat-rays. In The First Men in the Moon the human race has in effect come to an end, since those who survive are the Selenites, a little like the Morlocks, subterranean and completely amoral. Wells’s stories, dashed off at tremendous speed when he was a young man, place into grisly perspective his worthier, more optimistic political and historical writings. They are in the best sense catastrophic. He could feel, know almost, the destructive effects which science was going to have in the new century.
In a book which already enjoys something of classic status, The Intellectuals and the Masses by John Carey, the Merton Professor of English at Oxford notes with some horror the response by those he terms ‘intellectuals’ to the population explosion at the close of the Edwardian period. He quotes, and evidently enjoys quoting, a letter written by D. H. Lawrence from Croydon in 1908 after a woman, Daisy Lord, had been sentenced to death for the murder of her illegitimate child, a sentence which was later commuted to life imprisonment. (Women’s suffragists campaigned unsuccessfully for her complete release.)
‘Concerning Daisy Lord, I am entirely in accord with you’, he wrote to Blanche Jennings, one of those young women with whom he enjoyed platonic and intense conversations. ‘If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the “Hallelujah Chorus”!’28
‘What else would softly bubble out in order to make the lethal chamber lethal, Lawrence even here does not specify, but maybe his later interest in poison gas gives a clue to the direction of his imaginings,’ writes Professor Carey. He finds many comparable sentiments in the works of H. G. Wells, concentrating especially upon Wells’s notorious Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon Human Life and Thought, which was published in 1901. In that chilling book, Wells had prophesied: ‘for a multitude of contemptible and silly creatures, fear-driven and helpless and useless, unhappy or hatefully happy in the midst of squalid dishonour, feeble, ugly, inefficient, born of unrestrained lusts, and increasing and multiplying through sheer incontinence and stupidity, the men of the New Republic will have little pity and less benevolence’. Carey goes on to say that for Wells, genocide is the only answer to the problems of world overpopulation, especially in Africa and Asia, where the ‘swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people’ will ‘have to go’.29
You can’t fail to be shocked by these passages, but there are two shocking things about them. The first, naturally, is that those who were intelligent enough to write books which we have all admired and enjoyed should have such very ‘unenlightened’ views. This, one suspects, is Professor Carey’s chief area of concern in his hilarious book. Had Wells and D. H. Lawrence and the other writers excoriated by Professor Carey lived in Dean Swift’s time, we should merely be able to enjoy the luxury of condemning their poor taste. The doubly shocking thing about such ideas is that we know that within a few short decades of these science-fiction fantasies being expounded the human race was actually to encounter real Dr Moreaus, real genocidal tyrants. One of the scientists who worked on the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Leo Szilard, said that the idea of nuclear chain reaction first came to him when reading Wells’s The World Set Free (1914), in which atom bombs falling on world cities during the 1950s kill millions of people. These things were not possible when Wells wrote about them. We know that the twentieth century would see them happen. And the horrors were so often perpetrated by just such small-town suburban types, nonentities, as H. G. Wells made the subject of his comedies such as Kipps and Mr Britling Sees It Through. It was not some Napoleonic tyrant who authorized the bombing of Hiroshima but a small-town lawyer, President Harry S. Truman, whose face could easily have been used to adorn the jacket of an H. G. Wells suburban comedy.