It is said that the following verses, circulated among friends, but inevitably ‘leaked’ to a wider audience, delayed their author’s knighthood ‘for twenty years’.1 Almost more fascinating, given the obvious truth of Max Beerbohm’s gentle satire, is the fact that he could temporarily suspend his sense of humour to the point of being prepared to accept a knighthood. His ‘Ballade Tragique in Double Refrain’ is set in ‘A room in Windsor Castle’ and is a dialogue between a Lady-in-Waiting and a Lord-in-Waiting.
SHE: Slow pass the hours, ah, passing slow;
My doom is worse than anything
Conceived by Edgar Allan Poe
The Queen is duller than the King.
HE: Lady, your mind is wandering,
You babble what you do not mean;
Remember to your heartening,
The King is duller than the Queen.
Bearded, neat, five foot six inches in height, a naval officer and a countryman, King George V was within a few weeks of his forty-fifth birthday when he acceded to the throne in 1910. He would remain on the throne for a quarter of a century, during which he and his household changed hardly at all, and the world changed utterly. His chief preoccupations were shooting, when the season allowed it, his stamp collection, and clothes and uniforms. His one sartorial eccentricity was to wear his trousers pressed sideways, with no crease at the front. Otherwise he dressed like an Edwardian country gentleman – for formal occasions, a tall silk hat and a frock-coat; for race meetings or the Chelsea Flower Show, a well-cut brown or grey suit and a curly bowler hat. For shooting he often wore a Homburg, as had his father. But no one could have been less like King Edward.
George V was the reverse of a sensualist. He was socially shy and awkward. Like Queen Victoria, and like both his sons Edward VIII and George VI, he had uncontrollable temper tantrums. ‘Stupid dog!’ he unconvincingly exclaimed when he himself had farted, kicking out at the animal which, being unfortunately made of china, smashed to smithereens.
‘Inquiries are being made as to whether Your Majesty is going to wear a tall hat at Epsom today,’ wrote an equerry. At the bottom of the page the king wrote, ‘Who are the damned fools? A tall hat is always worn at this meeting at Epsom.’2 When a journalist asked him if it was true that Princess Margaret of Connaught was engaged to the crown prince of Sweden he replied: ‘Young man, I regret to find that you are ignorant of the very alphabet of your calling. Members of royal houses are not engaged. They are betrothed. In similar manner we speak of the conjunction of elephants and the copulation of mice.’3 When a footman, bringing him early morning tea, tripped and dropped the tray he heard a voice from the bed say: ‘That’s right, smash up the whole bloody Palace.’
The court, with its unvarying rituals, was hedged about with a discretion which was obsessional. Anyone who ‘revealed’ to an outsider talk with the king or queen was banished. Sir Philip Hunloke, the king’s sailing master, confided to colleagues: ‘There is a blackbird on the lawn. But for God’s sake don’t quote me.’4
The king’s wife, known as Queen Mary, had been Princess Mary of Teck. King George, together with her intimate family, always called her May. Because of her ramrod-straight back and her habit of wearing a toque she appeared to tower over her husband, though they were in fact of identical height. She had a peripatetic childhood, divided between Kensington Palace, where her parents were sometimes allowed an apartment, and a variety of German dukedoms and principalities – Rumpenheim, Strelitz and Reinshal. Her mother was the grotesquely obese Princess Mary Adelaide, daughter of Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, and Augusta, Princess of Hesse, and wife of Prince Franz of Teck. Princess Mary Adelaide was so large that she required two chairs if sitting out a dance. Her ample clothes usually contained a packet or two of Abernethy biscuits, of which she was a devotee.
Queen Mary’s innumerable German relations were nearly all redundant royalties, with mixed nationality. Typical in that respect was her mother’s sister, the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, who was in some ways closer to May in girlhood than her own mother. The Grand Duchess’s life spanned five reigns, from George IV, whom she could remember at Windsor, to George V. She imparted her implacable Toryism to May. She always wore a primrose on the day of Disraeli’s death and loathed Gladstone. (‘How is it possible people can still be taken in by that wicked madman!’) By the time she died, in Strelitz in 1916, Britain and Germany had been at war for two years. The last word she uttered was ‘May’.5
Queen Mary brought to marriage with her cousin an acute consciousness of how vulnerable royalty was in a changing world – a belief shared with the old Grand Duchess of Strelitz that ‘people delight in a monde réversé’.6 It is difficult to exaggerate the extent to which the king and queen of England at a moment in history when many believe the British Empire was at the height of its power were insecure. They could always hear the rattle of tumbrils over cobblestones.
Their way of life was simple by comparison with George’s sybaritic father. When Edward VII died, George and his wife allowed old Queen Alexandra to continue to live in the big house at Sandringham. George V and Queen Mary much preferred York Cottage on the Sandringham estate. ‘It was,’ wrote the king’s official biographer, ‘and remains a glum little villa, encompassed by thickets of laurel and rhododendron … The rooms inside, with their fumed oak surrounds, their white overmantels framing oval mirrors, their Doulton tiles and stained glass fanlights, are indistinguishable from those of any Surbiton or Upper Norwood home.’ The king bought his furniture from Heal’s in Tottenham Court Road. From his unpretentious cottage, he managed the large Sandringham estates, while continuing his work as a constitutional monarch, and Emperor of India.
Sophisticates could sneer at the royal family, but there was a certain beauty in their modest ways. On 18 April 1912, for example, at St Mary Magdalene’s church, Sandringham, the future George VI – then the Duke of York, and always known in the family as Bertie – was confirmed by the Rt Reverend Bishop Boyd Carpenter. The hymns were (from Hymns Ancient and Modern) number 349 – ‘My God, Accept my Heart this Day’; number 280 – ‘Thine for Ever!’; and number 27 – ‘O Jesus I have Promised’. Two years later, while serving aboard HMS Collingwood, 1st Battle Squadron, and signing himself ‘your most sincere friend Albert’, the young Bertie wrote to the bishop: ‘It is just two years ago to-morrow that you confirmed me in the small church at Sandringham. I have always remembered that day as one on which I took a great step in life. I took the Holy Sacrament on Easter Day alone with my father and mother, my eldest brother and my sister. It was so very nice having a small service quite alone, only the family.’7
When Bertie’s gorgeous cousin, Victoria Louise, was confirmed as a Lutheran in Berlin in 1909, her father the Kaiser marked the occasion by making her Colonel-in-Chief of the Death’s Head Hussars. When she appeared for the first time in uniform, looking both powerful and erotic, her father proudly declared that she could ride at the head of the first regiment that invaded England.8
The dullness, or the modesty, of the English monarchy during the reign of George V was surely one of the ingredients not merely in its own survival but in the comparative political stability of Britain in the years 1910–1936, compared that is to say with the other nations of Europe. Lenin formed the central question of politics, but it is one which everyone asks who wishes to exercise power: Who? Whom? Who does what to whom? Who persuades, or frightens, or encourages the ever-growing masses to accept government, supervision, laws? Where does power lie? With control of money? With land-ownership? With ancient privilege or new brute force? The Whig, or Liberal aristocratic answers to these questions had always involved, since 1832, sleight of hand. The landed classes and the aristocracy wished to continue to exercise power and very broadly, during the nineteenth century, they continued to do so. Nearly all Queen Victoria’s prime ministers were landed aristocrats, and the three who were not – Peel, Gladstone and Disraeli – all aspired to belong to, and mix with, the landed classes. With the coming of a new plutocracy, wealth based on finance, on manufacturing, not on land ownership, the importance of the old aristocracy was diminished, and with it, perhaps, that of the Crown.
Queen Mary, born in 1867, grew up with the complaints of her German relations echoing in her childish ears that the newly formed Prussian Empire had deprived them all – grand dukes, kings and princes – of power. ‘Alas!’ her grandmother the Duchess of Cambridge would exclaim. ‘All the dearest countries that my heart loved best have been stolen (I can’t give it another name) … Hanover, which is the cradle of our English family, Hesse is mine and Nassau was my dearest own mother’s; so you may judge of my feelings at the moment; that is the moment of Germany becoming one nation.’9 In new Germany, moreover, there was an absolute division between the broadly Liberal and leftist Reichstag, Parliament, and the Junkers, the supporters of royal autocracy. It had required the political skill of Bismarck to hold together the warring factions of the newly created country, Germany. In Russia, the stubborn way in which Tsar Nicholas II, George V’s cousin, held on to autocracy had led to the revolution of 1905, since when, as the hours ticked past, it remained to be seen whether Nicholas would learn how to become a constitutional monarch. As the examples of Germany and Russia show, it is by no means the case that countries who throw off the supposedly outdated trappings of monarchy and aristocracy move seamlessly into eras of political contentment.
George V’s reign began with a constitutional crisis in which deep questions were being asked about how Britain was governed. The House of Lords had precipitated the crisis by rejecting Lloyd George’s 1909 budget. Asquith, the prime minister, called an election, and a Parliament Bill was introduced which effectively removed the Lords’ right to veto Commons measures either if the matters discussed were ‘Money Bills’, or if a bill had been passed three times by the lower house. Before this bill could become law, Edward VII died, and one of George V’s first tasks was to summon Tories and Liberals together to agree the way forward. The Constitutional Conference10 broke up with nothing resolved, but the Parliament Act passed eventually into law.
On the other hand, Lord Curzon could tell the electors of Oldham, a largely working-class northern constituency, that the House of Lords represented ‘the permanent sentiment and temper of the English people’; 170 members of the House of Lords had previously served in the Commons, 200 in the army or the navy, 70 had seen service in South Africa. If there were no working men in the Lords – though he would not be averse to seeing them there – there were no great generals or excolonial governors in the Commons. Two hundred and twenty-five Liberal and 181 Conservative peers had been created since 1831. Ernest Renan had said that all civilizations had been the work of aristocracies. Curzon also pointed out that the movement to reform working conditions in the factories and to improve labour conditions had originated in the Lords. He argued that an unfettered second chamber would be dangerous.11
Curzon’s Oldham speech is mentioned only to be dismissed by Roy Jenkins in his book on the constitutional crisis, Mr Balfour’s Poodle,12 written in 1954. But half a century would pass, after Jenkins published his book, before the legislative rights of hereditary peers were removed. Throughout the period of the present book, the first half of the twentieth century, Britain was at least partially governed by an aristocracy, and the Commons continued to be, as they are today, representative of geographical areas rather than political interest groups solely: that is people elected members for their own area to represent every person in the constituency regardless of their political persuasion. Though they took the party ‘whip’, MPs were the Honourable Member for such and such a place, not, as in parliaments where seats are allotted to party factions, the Socialist or the Liberal or the Conservative stooge.
The constitutional crisis was averted. The Parliament Act was passed in 1911. It had rocked the boat, but the monarchy and the House of Lords remained in place. Power, however, had shifted. Liberal optimists hoped and supposed that, because the power of the peers had been curtailed, that of the Commons had been strengthened. This is not how things work. ‘As the English kingship became in the nineteenth century, so parliament’s will became in the twentieth, a solemn and empty pageantry. As then sceptre and crown, so now people’s rights are paraded for the multitude, and all the more punctiliously the less they really signify.’13 The Commons might have become stronger than the Lords, but both were weakened. Real power was elsewhere, in industry, commerce, the Press.
The rank smell of corruption began to rise from a dying body politic. One obvious symptom was that titles and peerages were, when not blatantly for sale, then available to those with the money. Curzon saw that the demand for ‘social preferment’ on the part of the upstart plutocracy was ‘insatiable’. One plutocrat offered the bishop of Peterborough £50,000 for his diocesan funds if he could obtain a baronetcy for the donor. Another offered to build a sea-wall at Cromer round Lord Suffield’s estate in exchange for a peerage.14 Mr Arthur du Cross, a Conservative MP, settled the debts of Lady Warwick – a talkative ex-mistress of Edward VII – and was rewarded with a baronetcy in 1916. William Waldorf Astor, the American millionaire, showed that if you had the dollars, no one would stand in the way of your joining the aristocracy. He bought huge houses in London and the country, he bought a newspaper, he was elected to Parliament. In 1911 he went to a fancy-dress ball dressed in peer’s robes. He gave $100,000 to the Boer War effort, $250,000 to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, $275,000 to hospitals. He achieved his barony in 1916. By the time Lloyd George was a triumphant warlord and prime minister, there was a recognized tariff: £10,000 for a knighthood, £30,000 for a baronetcy, and £50,000 upwards for a peerage. As Lloyd George’s election funds dwindled in 1921–2 creations reached higher and higher levels, with 26 peerages, 74 baronetcies and 214 knighthoods.15 So simple and so easily satisfied is snobbery as an appetite that within a very few years no one in England much notices whether a family is of old or new nobility. Romantic snobbery such as that of Proust’s Baron de Charlus, caring about whether a family can trace itself back to Charlemagne, is a rarity. Most satisfy themselves with the thrill of a ‘handle’ to their names.
For the hoary social curse
Grows hoarier and hoarier,
And it stinks a trifle worse
Than in the reign of Queen Victoria.16
So wrote Hilaire Belloc, who left the Commons after the first, not bothering to contest the second, election of 1910. Belloc and his friend Cecil Chesterton, brother of G.K., were the journalists who did the most to expose the Marconi scandal which was another manifestation of political corruption.
In March 1912 the Postmaster General, Herbert Samuel, provisionally accepted a tender from the English Marconi Company for the construction of a chain of wireless stations across the Empire. The managing director of the English Marconi Company was Godfrey Isaacs, who was the brother of the Attorney General, Sir Rufus Isaacs. Godfrey Isaacs decided to expand the American Marconi Company – of which he was also managing director – and he floated a new issue of shares on the British market on 18 April 1912. Two of his brothers bought a block of new shares – his brother Harry bought 56,000 – nine days before public flotation. Rufus bought 10,000 shares at £2 a share and sold 1,000 to Lloyd George – Chancellor of the Exchequer – and 1,000 to the Liberal chief whip, the Master of Elibank. On 18 April the new issue was floated. The price of the shares bounced to £4, and all three ministers sold their shares at a handsome profit.
Cecil Chesterton and Belloc exposed the scandal – what would today be illegal insider trading – in their small-circulation magazine The Eye Witness. Their case was spoilt by minor inaccuracy and by ill-concealed anti-Semitism. This stung Samuel and Godfrey Isaacs to sue a French newspaper, Le Matin, which had repeated the supposed libels. On 11 October Samuel moved in the Commons to appoint a select committee to investigate the Marconi story. Both Rufus Isaacs and Lloyd George made statements to the House which were economical with the truth, since when they disclaimed any dealing in shares of ‘the Marconi company’ they could claim to have been speaking only of the English company.17
Lord Robert Cecil was almost the only member of the select committee to ask properly searching questions. ‘The life of the nation,’ he said, ‘is bound up with our respect for our public men and their personal integrity. That must be preserved and unless it is, we are done for absolutely.’18 In the event, the committee divided along party lines and the Liberals closed ranks. They were far too worried by the state of Ireland, by the instability caused by industrial unrest and by the Suffragettes, to allow themselves to be brought down by a corruption scandal. No doubt by the standard of corruption in other lands and at other periods, the British political scene in 1912 was only minimally corrupt. But there was a definite feeling of putrescence in the atmosphere, and, that very dangerous political thing, a sense of Parliament being an all-male club which did not represent the political interests or aspirations of growing masses of the population.
As we have already observed, strikes in the South Wales mining industry had been broken up by troops. In July 1910 there had been a four-day rail strike in Newcastle. There were strikes over a similar period in the Lancashire cotton industry, and among boilermakers in the northeast. Iron workers in the vital shipping industry stayed out for fourteen weeks – crippling to the poor families of the workers, but desperately frightening to an established class which had convinced itself that it needed more and more ironclad battleships to maintain its supremacy over the seas, hence over the world. In June 1911 there were dock strikes in London, Liverpool and Manchester threatening to paralyse trade. These were followed in 1912 by more dock strikes, and by miners’ strikes.19
It was by no means a time of stability, or general happiness. There is almost no truth in the cliché that 1914 brought to an end a seemingly endless, sunlit afternoon with Britain prosperous, peaceful, innocent. The strikes and industrial unrest heralded unease of a proportion unseen since 1848.
Immigration into Britain has always caused unease to the indigenous population, and the disturbed situation of Russia in particular had driven large numbers of refugees from that land and its satellites, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania. Many were Jews. Some, as is reflected in such fiction as Conrad’s Secret Agent or G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, belonged to dissident political sects. The customs at Dover, according to one political report, stopped one Russian and found forty-seven automatic pistols and nearly 5,000 rounds of ammunition. In 1907 a Social Democratic congress was held at the Brotherhood Church in Whitechapel. Addressed by Lenin, the three hundred or so delegates included Trotsky, Voroshilov (a future Soviet field marshal), Maxim Litvinov (a future Soviet ambassador) and Maxim Gorky. Hindsight would surely vindicate the suspicions of police and Home Office that some fairly dangerous characters were there assembled, even if you did not add that one of the minor delegates at the congress, from Georgia, was Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, later known as Stalin. There was every reason for the authorities to be very wary indeed.
In 1909 two anarchists were involved with the murder of a policeman in Tottenham after an attempted ambush of the weekly wages arriving from the bank at Schurmann’s rubber factory.20 The two men fired over 400 rounds of ammunition and as well as two dead – a policeman and one of the criminals who shot himself – twenty-one were injured. ‘Who are these fiends in human shape, who do not hesitate to turn their weapons on little boys and harmless women?’ asked the Daily Mirror. ‘The answer is: they are foreign Anarchists, men who have been expelled from Russia for their crimes, whose political creed and religion is that human life is of no value at all.’
Of course, most refugees came not as aggressors, but in flight from dreadful state brutality in Tsarist Russia. But there was enough truth in the Daily Mirror’s words to make them frightening. Dostoevsky’s prophecy of social mayhem in The Devils, when just such an anarchist, nihilist cell, inspired by a charismatic, heartless leader, terrorizes a provincial Russian town, had been brought to the streets of London. Special Branch believed that the organizer of the Tottenham Outrages was a young Latvian named Jacob Fogel. His real name was Christian Jalmish, and he had helped a breakout of prisoners from Riga Central Prison in 1905 in which fifty-two armed fighters of the Latvian Social Democratic Workers Party escaped. They included one Peter Piatkov (‘Peter the Painter’), who, together with some of his Latvian friends, was interrupted by police in January 1911 trying to tunnel into a jeweller’s shop in Houndsditch, East London. There were rumours in the East End among the Russian and Latvian exiles that this shop in a very mean little slum-street was concealing the Tsarist Crown Jewels. The anarchists needed funds, and that was their motive for the burglary. When the police caught them in the act of burgling the shop, they opened fire and killed Sergeant Robert Bentley, as well as another officer, Sergeant Charles Tucker. When P.C. Choate wrestled one of the criminals – Gardstein – for his gun, he too was shot, many times, and eventually killed.21 The criminals then retreated up the tunnel to their adjoining quarters in 100 Sidney Street, Mile End Road, and the house was soon under police siege. Unable to reach the criminals with their revolvers, the police sent for reinforcements from the Scots Guards in the Tower.22
This required the authority of the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill. He gave it. In addition he ordered up the Horse Artillery from St John’s Wood Barracks, though they were not in the event required, and then, very characteristically, he hastened to the scene of the sieges, where bullets were flying in and out of the windows. The anarchists set fire to themselves in the house, and when it had been gutted by fire three corpses were found in the ruin, one of whom had been shot, the other two asphyxiated.
Churchill had gone down to witness the scene at first hand partly because he was excited by the whiff of grapeshot and partly because he was momentarily penitent at having attacked what he conceived as a mean-spirited Tory immigration law, the Aliens Bill of 1904. The king’s Private Secretary was not slow to inform Churchill of His Majesty’s hopes ‘that these outrages by foreigners will lead you to consider whether the Aliens Act could not be amended so as to prevent London from being infested with men and women whose presence would not be tolerated in any other country’. Churchill felt there was a case for tightening the laws against aliens. One of his staunchest allies, however, the backbench radical Josiah Wedgwood, whose namesake and forebear had struck the anti-slavery medallion AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER? in their Staffordshire pottery, wrote memorably to Churchill: ‘It is fatally easy to justify them [i.e. draconian anti-terrorist laws] but they lower the character of a whole nation. You know as well as I do that human life does not matter a rap in comparison with the death of ideas and the betrayal of English traditions. Rebelling against civilisation and society will go on anyhow and this is only a new form of the disease of ‘48; so let us have English rule not Bourbon.’ In spite of these wise words Churchill drafted the outlines of the Aliens Act of 1911 which attempted to combat terrorism by forbidding aliens to carry firearms.23
As in the case of twenty-first-century paranoia against terrorism, some of the fears were justified – desperadoes with guns really were killing policemen – and some of the fears were expressions of unease about something else. Those who are confident in the idea of their own country, who truly believe in it and its values, do not believe that they can be brought down by a few fanatics with guns. Churchill at Sidney Street must have wondered as Conrad wondered when he wrote The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes whether the values or institutions of the West really were that strong. Christianity, for Churchill’s generation, was a thing of the past. He certainly did not believe in it.24 As the Parliament Act made clear, you could remove power from the Lords at a stroke. (Churchill favoured at this date the total abolition of the House of Lords.25) Even before the collapse of the Prussian, Austrian and Russian monarchies at the end of the First World War, there were signs of change in the air. Portugal became a republic in 1910, and between 1901 and 1914 at least three monarchs and a number of Russian grand dukes were assassinated. Churchill had enough historical sense to know that it took very little to unseat a monarchy. And what would be left? Dear old Jos Wedgwood’s ‘ideas and English traditions’. What if these did not amount to very much against the more articulate forces of Marxism, or against nationalist expansionism, or anarchism, or Prussian militarism, or America?
There was a palpable sense in the early years of George V’s reign that, prosperous and powerful as Britain was, all was not as it had been. The image of shipwreck came to mind, and in April 1912 there occurred one of those catastrophic events which possess, almost as soon as they happen, the qualities of a defining myth – what in the early twenty-first century could be seen as a 9/11 moment. It was an essential part of this myth, of the wreck of a luxury liner, that it was on its way to the United States of America.
A myth is a story by which people define themselves. No less than the peoples of pre-literate or semi-literate ages, the peoples of the Western world in the twentieth century projected myths about themselves in order to place themselves in the universe, to make sense of their predicament. The sinking of the RMS Titanic on its maiden voyage almost instantaneously took on a mythic dimension.26 For example, one of the things which ‘everyone’ knows about the Titanic is that it was known as ‘the unsinkable ship’. In his seminal book about the disaster, A Night to Remember, made into a film by the J. Arthur Rank Organisation in 1958, with Kenneth More, Walter Lord stated: ‘The Titanic was unsinkable. Everybody said so.’27 But when did everyone say so? Not before the voyage, as you might expect: but after it. It is true that in 1911 the small-circulation trade publication The Shipbuilder, describing the watertight doors that divided the bulkheads in the liner, stated that the capacity of the captain to close the doors by flicking an electric switch made ‘the vessel practically unsinkable’.28 Such language was not, however, used in any of the promotional literature to advertise the maiden voyage, nor by any of what we could call the journalistic hype beforehand. When Harland and Wolff, the Belfast shipbuilders, were commissioned to build the luxury liner for the Liverpool-based White Star Company it was recognized that to make the operation lucrative they would need to make weekly transatlantic crossings. This would require three ships of identical speed and capacity to provide a reliable ‘ferry’ service, one at each end and one on stand-by. The first two to be built were the Olympic and the Titanic, with the Gigantic ordered.
The Olympic and the Titanic were the biggest ships ever built. The White Star publicists put out brochures of one of the liners up-ended so that potential voyagers could see it outsoaring in height Cologne Cathedral, St Peter’s in Rome, the Great Pyramid of Giza and even the New Woolworth Building, NYC.29 At over 46,000 tons gross they were considerably larger than the existing record-holders, the liners Lusitania and Mauretania, which weighed in at a little less than 32,000 tons. The Olympic was launched on 20 October 1910, the Titanic on 31 May 1911. The two ships were identical in construction, with exactly similar hulls, construction and propulsion, and the advertising was for both ships – ‘OLYMPIC and TITANIC’. Only an obsessive expert could spot differences between the first-class promenades on A-deck in the two ships. Indeed, in the sale catalogue for Titanic memorabilia at Christie’s in 1992 the cover uses an illustration of the Olympic. The ships were built by the same yard, owned by the same company and captained on their maiden voyages by the same man, Captain Edward John Smith. Of the two, however, only the Titanic is remembered as the ‘unsinkable’ ship. The Olympic which did not in fact sink, and which stayed afloat until 1937, winning the sobriquet Old Reliable’, until it was scrapped in Scotland, was never described as ‘unsinkable’.
It was the collision of the Titanic with an iceberg during the night of 14–15 April 1912 which introduced the word unsinkable into the popular vocabulary and began the process of myth-making. On the morning of Monday 15 April, the vice-president of the White Star Line in New York, Philip A. S. Franklin, announced: ‘We place absolute confidence in the Titanic. We believe the boat is unsinkable.’ By then, the ship had sunk: 1,490 passengers were dead and the 711 survivors were bobbing about despondently in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. ‘Manager of the Line Insisted Titanic was Unsinkable Even After She Had Gone Down’ declared a sub-headline in the New York Times. ‘Mr Franklin called her unsinkable’ – the qualifier ‘practically’ has been lost – ‘and last night when he knew at last that the pride of his line was beneath the ocean he could not seem to comprehend that the steamer had sunk. “I thought her unsinkable”, he declared, “and I based by [sic] opinion on the best expert advice. I do not understand it.”‘30
The gigantic floating palace, hubristic in its self-image, cruising at speed towards disaster, was an obvious emblem of Europe on the edge of self-destruction. For Marxists, the shipwreck seemed a repulsive opportunity on behalf of the capitalist press to lament the death of the rich.
‘Among the dead were millionaires,’ wrote ‘Virtus’ in the Italian language Communist paper La Fiaccola (The Torch, Buffalo, NY), ‘and our readers have been able to read in other papers long articles and sensational stories about the 200 rich people who with 1,400 poor, met their deaths, as if the heroism and the grief of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd classes unfolded in the same circumstances!’ La Fiaccola shone its torch-rays on the fact that the 700 crew died like martyrs and went on to lament the deaths of 500,000 in American factories each year, deaths which went largely unreported.31 The Denver Post was more biblical, more elemental, and saw the sea claiming rich and poor, famous and obscure figures alike. John Jacob Astor, worth two hundred million dollars: he ‘would give all he possesses for the place of that woman and child in the lifeboat’.32 Many33 saw it as a Judgement, though quite what the Judgement signified was a trifle vague. ‘The sixteen hundred who went down were typical of mankind …’ opined the Christian Century. ‘Manhood triumphed when the Titanic sank.’34 George Bernard Shaw stirred up controversy by refusing to believe in the heroic tales of the Night to Remember. He pointed out that whereas pious newspapers claimed that the band played ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ as the ship sank, it had actually played popular Ragtime tunes to allay panic. Further, vital information about the disaster was withheld from passengers, especially those travelling 3rd class, and their supposedly unruly behaviour had been exaggerated so as to highlight the heroic and gentlemanlike behaviour of the richer passengers and the officers.35
To many, GBS’s compulsion to debunk was in the lowest degree distasteful. Had not Benjamin Guggenheim, the American multi-millionaire, gone back to his cabin to change into evening dress and said to an amazed steward: ‘If we have to die we will die like gentlemen’?
Arthur Conan Doyle36 wrote to the Daily News to denounce Shaw’s iconoclasm, furious at the implication that rich or pushing men found their way into the lifeboats, and that heroism was not displayed by the officers and their class. The conservative Doyle and the iconoclastically socialist Shaw took opposing views of the reporting of the Titanic disaster because they took radically different views of the nature of society. For one man, who was destined to become a spiritualist and who in later life was tricked into believing that some children had managed to photograph fairies, the disaster was heroic, the gentlemen behaved like gents, the officers like officers, while the poor piously praised their God. For Shaw the incident exemplified the unfairness of the social divide and the collaborative need shared by popular newspapers and their readership to invent consoling versions of intolerable truths.
At the Royal Opera House Covent Garden at a Titanic Disaster Fund Matinee, Thomas Hardy, the old Victorian agonistic pessimist, took the stage on 14 May 1912, the very day of Shaw’s Daily News article, to read his interpretation of events, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’. Hardy’s poem saw it as a fatalistic moment. Now the ship, ‘and the Pride of Life that planned her’, lay at the bottom of the ocean. Even as the ship was being built, however:
In stature grace, and hue,
In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.
Till the Spinner of the Years
Said ‘Now!’ And each one hears,
And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.37
Here is the true prophetic note, from the poet.
Alongside the arms race between the Great Powers, and the desire for the British and the Germans to have more and bigger battleships than one another, European and American companies vied with one another for larger, faster and speedier ocean liners. The British led the field with 17 vessels of 12,000 tons and upwards in June 1910 as against 14 Germans, but the German boats – the George Washington, Kaiser Auguste Viktoria, Cleveland, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse and others – were magnificent, luxurious boats.38 You could say that the rivalry was one of the things which caused the disaster on the Titanic. Shaw scornfully wrote: ‘the one thing positively known was that Captain Smith had lost his ship by deliberately and knowingly steaming into an ice field at the highest speed he had coal for’.39 You could certainly see the Titanic as the very embodiment of the enterprise and ambition which created it. The entrepreneurial ambition of a Liverpool shipping company called on the combined skill of Scottish engineering – Harland – and Jewish finance – Wolff – to make a floating emblem of the Edwardian class structure. Everyone knew, didn’t they – surely they did – that the British Empire was one on which the sun would never set? It was an unsinkable vessel … wasn’t it? At its summit were gentlemen and officers who, even though they kept company with extravagant millionaires and vulgarian financiers, would behave like heroes – wouldn’t they? When disaster struck? Wouldn’t they? And if the unthinkable happened the disaster would not be accompanied, would it, by the airs of Ragtime and Dixie, but by the dignified melancholy of the old hymn, ‘Nearer My God to Thee’?
Generations of American children have sung the song round campfires:
O they sailed from England and were almost to the shore,
When the rich refused to associate with the poor,
So they put them down below, where they were the first to go.
It was sad when that great ship went down.
It was sad, it was sad,
It was sad when that great ship went down.
Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives –
It was sad when that great ship went down.40
For those attentive enough to recognize it, Europe, and certainly Britain, had reached a crisis in its destiny. Something was about to change, or had changed, for ever. D. H. Lawrence’s greatest novel, The Rainbow, which he was writing as the world sleep-walked into the most destructive war in its history, is full of this sense of loss, of elegy. So are Lawrence’s letters which must rank among the greatest ever written in English. To his friend Lady Cynthia Asquith he wrote from an Oxfordshire manor house where he was staying in November 1915:
When I drive across this country, with the autumn falling and rustling to pieces, I am so sad, for my country, for this great wave of civilisation, 200 years, which is now collapsing, that it is hard to live. So much beauty and pathos of old things passing away and no new things coming: this house of the Ottolines* – It is England – my God, it breaks my soul – this England, these shafted windows, the elm-trees, the blue distance – the past, the great past, crumbling down, breaking down, not under the force of the coming buds, but under the weight of many exhausted, lovely yellow leaves, that drift over the lawn and over the pond, like the soldiers, passing away, into winter and the darkness of winter – no, I can’t bear it. For the winter stretches ahead, where all vision is lost and all memory dies out.41
* Ottoline and Philip Morrell lived at Garsington Manor, Oxfordshire.