If some British observers believed absolutism to be all right for Italians and Russians, the electorate at large was beginning to tire of Lloyd George’s rule by one party of coalition. And if democracy was a long way off in India, it was felt to be time that they experimented with a limited version of it once again in Britain. ‘Lloyd George was the nearest thing England has known to a Napoleon, a supreme ruler maintaining himself by individual achievement.’1 If that is true, then the electorate in the early 1920s, such as it was, decided very firmly that it did not want an English Napoleon, just as it would decide in later years that it wanted neither an English Lenin nor an English Mussolini.
The very fact that twentieth-century English political history is blander than its German, Italian, Spanish or Russian equivalent is perhaps revealing. Only two political figures, post-Lloyd George, had the charismatic status which could, in differing circumstances, have led to a cult of personality: Oswald Mosley and Winston Churchill. One of these men ended up as a pariah, the other as a national hero. But from the resignation of Lloyd George until the appointment of Winston Churchill in 1940, the British prime ministers are a succession of nonentities. None of the ‘stars’ in any of the three parties, in so far as they had stars, rose to the heights of leadership. This tells us something if we are prepared to watch closely. It would be gross sentimentality to deny the preparedness, in India, in Ireland, and in Britain itself, of the governing class to look after its own interests by violent suppression of dissident groups, races, classes. Equally, however, the refugees over the period 1918–39 have a story to tell. True, some eccentric Britons emigrated to Russia or Germany during these years, but overwhelmingly, the traffic was the other way. Slowly and painfully, a democratic decency did evolve, and though the British population underwent sore economic hardship during these years, it also enjoyed far greater political stability and freedom than almost any other country in Europe. This was partly because its economy was, even at the worst of times, underwritten by US loans, or bolstered by Empire trade. It must also have been, though, that British political institutions, more flexible to change than their Continental equivalents, were able to preserve some of the strengths they had possessed in times past. There were a number of English revolutions and evolutions, but they did not involve, as they did in Russia, Germany, Spain, Italy, the wholesale dumping of the political classes, of the civil service, or of the Establishment.
During the Lloyd George-as-Napoleon era, the two major political parties, the Liberals and the Conservatives or Unionists, had been dormant, patients etherized upon a table. When they awoke, the Liberal party found itself divided into two. Asquith, still leader of the party, presided over only a few dozen members of Parliament. The Lloyd George Liberals were larger in number but in much greater political disarray. The Labour party, which before the war had been a fledgling, formed the new party of radical opposition to the new-found strength of the Conservatives. This is the story of the swift changes of party leadership and of governments between 1922 and 1924, which saw the resignation of Lloyd George and the formation of Bonar Law’s Conservative government of October 1922; the succession of Baldwin’s Conservative government of May 1923; the first Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald in January 1924; and Baldwin’s second Conservative government in November that year.
David Lloyd George had come to England as an idealistic young Welshman determined to poke fun at the Establishment and to achieve a measure of justice for Wales and for the disadvantaged. He was at heart a radical, and he had done more than many politicians to help the poor. By introducing the Old Age Pension Act of 1908, and a National Insurance Act in 1911 he began the principle, ever since enshrined in British law, that provision would be made for the sick and the old out of the public purse. As a wartime leader, he had brio, and the gift of the gab. He had taken over the government at a woeful stage of the war, and although the slaughter had continued for another two years, he had some claim to be – as he’d claimed during the 1918 election – The Man Who Won The War. His later antics, ranging from the botched Versailles Treaty to the bloodbath in Ireland, were not made any more dignified by his cynical sale of peerages. It was time for Britain to resume party politics, an imperfect and in some respects farcical ritual, but one which at least allowed for the possibility of the electorate giving the government the sack and replacing it with another. It was a Triumph of the Will that Lloyd George kept his coalition going for as long as he did.
The coalition itself was maintained entirely by the Conservatives, but timidity had kept them from asserting independent political power. Then, in the summer of 1922, a crisis blew up in Greece. Mustafa Kemal, known to history as Ataturk, Father of the Turks (1881–1938), continued to fight the war against the Greeks. It was to be his ticket to popularity at home, and to enable him to abolish the Sultanate and unite Turkey behind him as a modern secular autocrat. In 1921 he had established a provisional government in Ankara, thus ending over a thousand years in which Constantinople was regarded as the imperial capital of the eastern Mediterranean. The military panache which had made him the hero of the Dardanelles led to a spectacular campaign against the Greeks when they invaded Anatolia. He massacred them by the thousand, took Smyrna, and by the end of the summer had advanced to the Straits and taken Chanak.
With memories of the Allied disaster in the Dardanelles still green, Lloyd George would have liked to resist Kemal’s advance. Churchill and Birkenhead, his two allies in the coalition cabinet, forgot their earlier hostility to the Greeks and rallied to the cry of war, but they had misread the mood of the Empire and of their world allies. New Zealand, with prodigious heroism considering the numbers they had lost in Gallipoli, pledged support, but France and Italy were anxious to form alliances with Kemal, and most of the British Dominions were furious at not having been consulted about the policy. Australia and Canada were not going to provide Churchill and Lloyd George with more cannon fodder to be mown down by the Turks. Lloyd George decided to put the matter to the electorate. Still the timid Conservatives held back from breaking the coalition. Then there was a by-election in Newport and a candidate stood as a Conservative anti-Lloyd George candidate: that is, he broke away from the coalition, the mainstream Conservative line. He won the seat.
The leader of the Conservatives in the Commons was Austen Chamberlain (1863–1937), son of Joseph. ‘He always played the game and always lost it,’ as Churchill observed. In 1922, his losing tactic was to commit himself wholeheartedly to coalition with Lloyd George. He summoned a meeting of the Tory MPs at the Carlton Club on 19 October 1922 and they voted overwhelmingly to go it alone and break the coalition. Chamberlain could hardly do other than resign as leader of the Conservatives. They elected as their leader the mortally sick Bonar Law.
In French history, particular dates acquire a mythic status, so that streets can be named after them – Place du Dix-huit Juin, Rue du Quatre Septembre and so forth. The British have on the whole a less calendric approach to their historical mythologies. An exception is in the Conservative party, where their junta of back-bench members is known as the 1922 Committee in honour of the moment when they sacked one nonentity whom no one remembers, Austen Chamberlain, in favour of another, Bonar Law. The significance of Law, who was in any event dying of cancer, was that he was Beaverbrook’s candidate – Beaverbrook’s glove-puppet, as has been said. Now that he owned the Daily Express, and now that Northcliffe was dead, Beaverbrook’s megalomaniac political fantasies need know no bounds. He could see most of Law’s weaknesses, though he could not foresee quite how soon it would be before Law died. But Law would, for Beaverbrook’s purposes, do. He was an easily malleable figure, who would do what he was told when Beaverbrook summoned him to one of his residences, either the intimate Tudor house the Vineyard, Fulham, where the drawing-room had space for four people at most, or Cherkley in Surrey on larger country weekends.2
Always with an eye, not merely to the present wielder of power, but to the man in the wings, Beaverbrook left an unforgettable image of Bonar Law’s hour of triumph in the Carlton Club: ‘Bonar Law came down the stairs of the Club alone. He was the man of the hour, the victor today, the premier tomorrow. His slight figure, with the deepest eyes and the lined features, held everyone’s gaze. No one among the onlookers paid much attention to the stocky little man, five feet nine inches in height* with the florid, almost bucolic features, the face still unmarked by care, the gait yet unhindered by twinges of gout, who was following his leader.’3 Not one of those present gave a thought to the possibility that in the guise of this unremarkable figure, this ‘typical Englishman’, destiny was stalking forward. Stanley Baldwin took, that morning, an obscure place on the stairway. But just the same he was a man of the future.4
Bonar Law duly formed his government. Among the coalition Conservatives the only one who consented to serve in the new administration was Lord Curzon. He certainly had not seen the significance of the bucolic figure of Baldwin.
Law’s cabinet was overwhelmingly aristocratic. This was because the big Conservative guns of Lloyd George’s coalition were still realigning themselves politically. F. E. Smith (Lord Birkenhead) was not ready to return and Churchill was still technically a Liberal. Law therefore assembled the most aristocratic cabinet there had been for a generation, with the Duke of Devonshire as colonial secretary, the Marquess of Salisbury as lord president, the Earl of Derby as secretary of state for War. Curzon continued as Foreign Secretary. The previous year, 1921, his earldom had been upgraded to a marquessate.
His tragicomic career was about to reach its most painful moment. He must have believed, as he looked around the cabinet table early in 1923, that in many respects the old aristocratic order remained in England, shaken but not fundamentally changed since prewar days. And
* Beaverbrook’s height was also five foot nine inches in his socks, see A. J. P. Taylor, Beaverbrook, here.
there were some respects in which this was true. The old order had been given a terrible pounding by the war. Twenty-nine thousand small country estates throughout Britain would come on the market in the decade 1920–30, and one reason for this was that the occupants had lost their sons; the village war-memorials throughout the British Isles, and the memorial plaques in the public schools, the London clubs and the Oxford and Cambridge colleges show the devastation visited upon the old aristocracy and squirearchy. Yet the class which had taken over the government of Britain in 1689 was remarkably resilient, partly because, unlike its Continental equivalents, it saw nothing wrong with injecting cash and talent from outside its ranks. Curzon himself exemplified this. His first wife was Mary Leiter, the daughter of a Chicago millionaire. When he was left devastated by her loss, he remarried, and to another American. Grace Duggan was a doll-like pretty woman in her thirties when Curzon began to woo her. She was the widow of an immensely wealthy Argentinian–Irish financier. When Curzon was denied the ultimate political prize of becoming the Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour remarked that ‘even if he has lost the hope of Glory, he still has the means of Grace’.5 It is a bore to explain jokes, but only a very small number of people now read the Book of Common Prayer, which in 1924 was still very familiar to a majority of the British, or at least to the English. In the General Thanksgiving in that book, Almighty God is thanked ‘above all for thine inestimable love in the redemption of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory’.
Curzon was indeed to be disappointed. When Bonar Law was told by his doctors, in May 1923, that he had incurable cancer of the oesophagus, he resigned at once. He died on 30 October, and was the first prime minister after Gladstone to be buried in Westminster Abbey. It was a singular honour for so totally undistinguished a figure, but it allowed Asquith to make his joke about the Unknown Prime Minister being buried near the tomb of the Unknown Warrior. To George Nathaniel Curzon, marquess, former viceroy of India, there could have been no doubt about the monarch’s choice for Bonar Law’s successor. Law had hinted to Lord Stamfordham, the King’s Private Secretary, that Curzon should succeed him, but when he heard of his impending death he stood aside from the political struggle and left matters in the hands of his own Parliamentary Private Secretary, a backroom fixer named John Colin (later Viscount) Davidson. He telephoned the king’s secretary before Law announced his resignation to warn him of what was coming, recommending that the King, if he wished to make consultations, should speak to Salisbury or Balfour. Both these grandees disliked Curzon, and their dislike had been intensified by his breaking ranks to serve in Law’s cabinet, rather than staying with the ‘coalition Conservatives’. Salisbury, when asked his view of Curzon, gave the devastating opinion that the Foreign Secretary’s ‘faults were improving’. Balfour had a long meeting with the king in which he stressed that it was no longer easy to have a Prime Minister in the House of Lords. Davidson drafted a memorandum which began with the fateful words: ‘Lord Curzon is regarded in the public eye as representing that section of privileged Conservatism which has its value but in this democratic age …’6
Poor George Nathaniel remained, aloof and unaware that any of this was going on, at Montacute, a great Elizabethan country house in Somerset whose lease he had taken while he waited, first for his father Lord Scarsdale to die, which he had done in 1916, and secondly to have the time and money to renovate his most beautiful house, Kedleston in Derbyshire, designed by Robert Adam. (He had also bought Bodiam Castle in Sussex and its estate in 1917.) Curzon’s favourite great house was Hatfield, the Elizabethan stronghold of the Cecils, a powerhouse of the greatest political dynasty in Conservative history. Montacute was a house which allowed Curzon to imagine himself a Cecil, especially when it had been done up by his mistress, the novelist Elinor Glyn. (She had spent much time and energy on the task and referred to George Nathaniel as ‘an ungrateful sneaking cad’ when he dumped her for Grace.)7 It was at Montacute that he awaited his sovereign’s call – Montacute, that Elizabethan pile where he could imagine himself as a worthy successor to the greatest Victorian Tory Prime Minister, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury. When one writes that Curzon awaited the call, he did not await anything so newfangled or so vulgar as a telephone. He regarded this as ‘a disastrous invention’. It was on Whit Monday, as the Foreign Secretary was cutting the lawn at Montacute in his shirt sleeves, that he saw what he had been awaiting for several days, the uniformed figure of the village policeman cycling up the drive bearing a telegram from His Majesty’s secretary. Curzon sent back his message that he would receive Lord Stamfordham the following afternoon at Carlton House Terrace.
On their way back to London, the Marquess and his American Marchioness sketched out their future together. They would not move into the poky Number 10 Downing Street, but would continue to reside at Carlton House Terrace. He would remain as Foreign Secretary as well as Prime Minister. What of ecclesiastical appointments? These too had their interest, and he spoke of them, as the train bore him towards the capital.
When they arrived at the front door Curzon was informed by his valet that Lord Stamfordham had been delayed. This was Curzon’s first inkling that all was not well. At half-past three, Stamfordham arrived, stammering and embarrassed. He tried to tell him that the king had considered the merits of another candidate. Curzon expostulated. He had made no secret of the fact that he considered Baldwin ‘a man of the utmost insignificance’.8 If Baldwin were chosen, it would be necessary, said the former viceroy, for Curzon to withdraw from public life. Stamfordham was too cowardly to tell the marquess that the pipe-smoking ironmaster from the West Midlands had kissed his sovereign’s hands and become the Prime Minister several hours earlier. It was a shattering blow to Curzon, and when he died, aged sixty-six, on 19 March 1925 it could be said that he died of a broken heart. Had he been less arrogant, perhaps Curzon might have stood a chance. But it is hard to doubt that it was not merely his aristocratic hauteur which was held against him; it was his cleverness. The Conservative party, with its horribly accurate political ‘nose’, could see that the country wanted ‘a man of the utmost insignificance’.
Baldwin, who had persuaded his colleagues to see him as a safe pair of hands, almost immediately plunged his party into a self-destructive quarrel about the old question of tariff reform. It had been the issue which sundered the party under Arthur Balfour’s premiership. Rather like British membership of the European Union in the post-1975 era, the matter of tariff reform called forth in Tory ranks all manner of deep doctrinal and atavistic divisions.
Law had fought the 1922 election with the pledge that he would not introduce tariffs without consulting the electorate, so Baldwin could claim he was duty-bound to call an election when he hitched the Conservative party to protectionism. It seemed a necessary measure at the time to fight rising unemployment. But Baldwin was before everything else a politician. He was watching his own party, and the Liberals, always edgy that they might outmanoeuvre him. This matter of Free Trade versus Tariff had divided the Tories since the beginning of the century. Lloyd George had gone to America, on a successful speaking-tour, and rumour reached Baldwin that ‘the Goat’ was about to announce the Liberal party’s conversion to protection. If he did so, where would that leave the Tories?
If he needed to keep an eye on the Liberals, Baldwin was even more nervous about his enemies within his own party. There were grumbles from the moment of his selection. Some would have preferred to replace him with F. E. Smith (Lord Birkenhead), and they probably would have done so if Smith’s private life had not been scandalous. He was clever – ‘the cleverest man in the kingdom’, Beaverbrook believed. He made a brilliant career at the Bar, and he was one of the best speakers in the House of Commons. His obsession with one of his friend’s schoolgirl daughters was really what appalled the stuffier of his parliamentary colleagues. He seduced Mona Dunn when she was still in her teens. She was a great beauty, painted by Orpen. She would dance on the tables till dawn in the Criterion Restaurant. When she died, aged twenty-six, of peritonitis, Birkenhead wrote her a sonnet which he asked Beaverbrook to publish in the Sunday Express, but the request was refused. Such abandon did not suit the mood of the Conservative party. Although politicians could rely on the Press in those days not to print stories of their emotional lives – else, how would Lloyd George, or Asquith, or Curzon, have survived? – the new mood was for a party which espoused middle-class respectabilities. Baldwin, with his family business as an ironmaster, his pipe, his homely values, and his somewhat lugubrious mustachioed health minister, Neville Chamberlain, Austen’s half-brother, made much more suitable images to present to the electorate at large. There was not yet television to reveal or distort the appearance and behaviour of politicians for the voters, but there was ‘image’, projected in part by the newspapers, in part by the number of public meetings which politicians underwent during electioneering campaigns.
The aristocrats had had their day when it came to providing leadership for the party, but Baldwin needed to keep the grandees happy – Lord Salisbury, Balfour and the rest. Apart from anything else, if he brought back the coalitionists who had sat in Lloyd George’s cabinet, it would inevitably mean sacking some of the aristocrats whom Law had appointed in their stead. He needed to please both elements, and an election was a good way of doing this. After only six months in office, he gambled that if he went to the country he would ‘dish the Goat’, i.e. Lloyd George, and silence opposition from his own ranks. Conservatives dislike being in opposition, and will put up any show of unity in the face of a General Election. So Baldwin gambled, and he lost. Being consistently wrong is not nearly so dangerous a quality for politicians as being right. People will forgive a politician for being wrong. Baldwin was wrong in most of his economic predictions, most of his political judgements, most of his foreign policy. He would remain in office for much of the most crucial period of twentieth-century history. But, in this first instance of his wrongness, he lost an election – though his party remained the largest in the Commons.
It was a big poll – 74 per cent of the electorate voted. The Conservatives and their allied candidates secured 258 seats. The Liberals were now united again, with Asquithians and Lloyd George Liberals fighting on a single platform. They won 158 seats. But the Labour party won 191 seats. The Liberals were therefore in the position of holding a balance of power. As the party in third place, they could not expect office themselves, but they could, if they chose, support the Conservatives. Instead, they made an historic decision. They were caught up in a momentous political change. Anxious not to have a socialist Prime Minister, the king called Baldwin and asked him to form a government. Politically astute, Baldwin suggested he instead should invite Ramsay MacDonald to do so, thereby at one stroke bringing the Labour Party into the safety of the Establishment, and destroying the Liberals. They were never to hold office again – even though it was from their ranks that the biggest political innovations of the twentieth century in Britain would come: the advocacy of the economic theories of the Liberal John Maynard Keynes, and the report by the Liberal Sir William Beveridge which led, in the 1940s, to the establishment of a Welfare State.
The Liberal party has always been, historically, the Labour party’s midwife, and so it was in its first electoral triumph. On 22 January 1924 the king called upon James Ramsay MacDonald to form a government.
The 1918 Representation of the People Act not only added women over thirty to the electorate, but also the poorer one-third of adult males who had remained unenfranchised by the 1884 Reform Act. This was what caused a surge in the Labour vote. The working classes made up the huge majority of the British population: 78.29 per cent of the population in 1921, and only very slightly less ten years later. This represented 30.2 million people in 1921, and nearly 32 million in 1931. From the moment they left school at fourteen, most British people were destined for a lifetime of hard and usually monotonous work in factories, mines, docks, distributive trades, agriculture, or as domestic servants. Yet if work was boring, and life-shortening, unemployment was worse, and the phenomenon of unemployment was a spectre which now haunted Europe and was to change entirely its political complexion. Unemployment in the close of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is a risk that most people may run. In the 1920s it was almost entirely a working-class phenomenon.
Political ideologues would be tempted to assume that this represented a huge and potentially revolutionary movement of left or right. Nothing could have been further from the truth. The indifference of the British to religion is matched only by their indifference to politics; and in so far as they do have political interests, those have often defied expectation. It is the working classes in Britain who have consistently cheered on imperialism and warmongering, while the well-meaning middle classes tried to spoon-feed them with improvement.
Just as the national Church, formed from warring factions of Catholics and Puritans, had successfully managed to keep the religious temperature lukewarm for three hundred years, so the Labour Party, in many respects its secular equivalent, would manage to dissipate and dilute any tendencies within its ranks towards radical socialism. Zealots will always be scornful both of the Church of England and of the Labour Party. In fact both were institutions in which the British, and most specifically the English, learned the delicate art of living with contradictions and compromise, and became a mature political democracy. Whereas in other countries, social democrats, trade unionists, Marxists, state socialists who fell just short of Marxist, royalists, Christian socialists and advanced atheist secularists would have felt the need to form separate organizations of their own, in Britain they had somehow managed together to form the Labour Party. Like the Church in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, the Labour Party, as it girded itself to take electoral power at the beginning of the 1920s, was really a coalition of mutually antagonistic, and indeed contradictory, sects.
There was the old Independent Labour Party, or ILP, which was the largest affiliated socialist society. It believed in state socialism, the nationalization of banks and major industries. Then there were the Trade Unions, who were very often much more right-wing than the ILP. Arthur Henderson, for example, who was the Home Secretary in the new government, was a representative of the Friendly Society of Ironfounders, but had never entertained any socialist beliefs at all. He merely wanted fair working conditions for his members. Then there were the Fabian socialists of whom the high priest was the new President of the Board of Trade, Sidney Webb. Together with his tall, elegant wife Beatrice, this tiny bulbous-headed figure, whom his wife likened to a tadpole, had founded the London School of Economics and the New Statesman to promote their doctrine of socialist gradualism. By means of education and persuasion, it would be possible for socialist ideas to ‘permeate’, and without immediate confiscation of personal property, the state could achieve the same result gradually by a rising scale of appropriation of middle-class savings and assets.
The new government was not in power for long enough to attempt any political changes, and it knew, in any event, that if it did try to be socialist, the Liberal Party would unite with the Tories to put it out of office. It had merely, as it were, sniffed the air.
It certainly tells us something about what had happened to England, that in the summer of 1923 the Marquess of Curzon supposed he was about to become Prime Minister, and six months later that office was handed to the illegitimate son of a female farmworker and a ploughman, from Lossiemouth, Morayshire. Malcolm Muggeridge, in his book on The Thirties, observed that:
it is impossible for one man, however determined and cunning he may be, to impose his will on other men for long unless they recognize themselves in him … Thus it was not chance or his own ambition merely which carried Ramsay MacDonald to the Premiership. He had his part to play, and that was the role in which he had been cast. Grounded in resentment against his obscure birth and childhood poverty, nurtured in the Fabian Society, the ILP and other offshoots of the late Victorian urge to improve the conditions of the poor without seriously incommoding the rich, brought to fruition in four and a half years of bloody warfare followed by a fraudulent peace and hysterical reaction against the strain and agony of war, his moment surely came.9
It was easy for Malcolm Muggeridge, whose father was a Labour MP, and who himself moved from a position of communism to disillusionment, to mock James Ramsay MacDonald, just as it was for him to mock the Labour Party as ‘Marxists and nonconformist clergymen and pacifists and check-weighmen and Clydeside demagogues’. What these ‘mugwumps’ had in common, however, was the rather simple desire of wanting Britain to be a slightly more decent place, or in the case of some of the loftier radicals, such as Colonel Wedgwood, the desire to bring out England’s inherent decency. ‘Those who believe in human nature must above all seek to put an end to the present hideous exploitation of the working classes,’ wrote this kindly factory-owner and pottery-manufacturer from North Staffordshire.
The choice before us is obvious. There are just two roads. Those who will not believe that you can do away with exploitation – that is, those who do not want to do away with it – all those ‘in the interests of Society’ will regulate, inspect and convert the working man into a machine that shall like its servitude. And there are those who know that exploitation can be stopped, and that man can yet be free; they will take liberty and justice as their guides, and pin their faith to the perfectibility of human nature. Is our guide to be – Police or Freedom?10
Neither the Conservative Party nor Lords Beaverbrook or Rothermere much wanted to be around when this alarming alternative was seen as a realistic choice. Much to their relief, Ramsay MacDonald’s government did not last out the year 1924. It attempted to do something to provide poor people with decent housing. The short life and career of Basil Jellicoe (1899–1935), nephew of the admiral who commanded the fleet at the battle of Jutland, demonstrated the desperate need for housing. He served briefly in the navy at the end of the war, and, as an Oxford undergraduate, he almost immediately went to work among the desperate slums in Somers Town, just north of Euston Station in London. Twenty-two thousand people lived in the parish of Somers Town, all sharing rooms, in damp, unhygienic houses with no adequate washing or lavatory facilities. He was ordained a priest in the Church of England, and with a capital of £250 founded the St Pancras Housing Improvement Society.
The squalid conditions in the district just north of Euston Station were noticed by Jellicoe, but he could have been speaking of Birmingham, Bristol, Bradford, Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow or any of the slums in the big Victorian cities, when he said that Somers Town houses were:
the Devil’s holiday, a kind of perpetual festival of All Sinners. It has been produced by selfishness, stupidity and sin, and only Love Incarnate can put it right. The slums produce something much more terrible than mere discomfort and discontent. They produce a kind of horrible excommunication; a fiendish plan on the part of the Powers of Evil to keep people from the happiness for which God made them, and from seeing the beauties of His world …11
In 1924 Basil Jellicoe, Percy Maryon-Wilson, Edith Neville and Miss I. N. Hill of the Charity Organization Society got together round Jellicoe’s dining-table resolved to do something. It was not until a year later, July 1925, that the St Pancras Housing Improvement Society was inaugurated. They bought eight slum houses with money raised by subscription and began work reconditioning them. The next year, quite by surprise, sixty-nine houses and an open space of 16,000 square feet became available. They needed a substantial sum for the deposit and £25,000 for the remainder to be paid in five months. Maryon-Wilson managed, by engineering the public support of the Minister of Health, Neville Chamberlain, and such figures as John Galsworthy and Lord Cecil, to raise the money. The old houses in Sidney Street were finally dynamited in 1930, and two months later Admiral Jellicoe laid the first brick of the new blocks of flats.
Twenty-first-century aesthetes might flinch to read of these eighteenth-century houses being blown up and replaced with the tenement buildings which, seventy-five years later, wear a joyless air. Such purists would miss the heady atmosphere in which Jellicoe and his friends said farewell to the verminous Victorian legacy of urban poverty. They had a Solemn Burning in Sidney Street. ‘We had previously built a large bonfire, ten feet high and on the top of this pyre had placed large models of a bug, a flea, a rat and a louse, all stuffed with fireworks, and these were solemnly burnt.’
People still remember Basil Jellicoe in North London. He was recently the subject of a spirited musical by Rob Inglis enacted at the Shaw Theatre, in his old parochial stamping-ground. His name survives in grateful families. A teacher I know in her thirties, of Irish Catholic stock, remembers her grandmother’s fond memories of Father Jellicoe as the man who stood up for the poor. This woman’s grandmother was struck in those intolerant days by how freely the Church of England parson Jellicoe gave himself for the Irish Catholics as well as for the Church of England people. The huge family of over a dozen children into which she had been born was rescued by Jellicoe from the foulest of slums and given a place to live which it was possible to clean, and where children could lead a healthy life.
Inspired partly by the example of Jellicoe, other areas of the country followed. In Leeds it was another Anglican priest, Charles Jenkinson, who led the campaign for better housing – though a very different sort of Anglican from Jellicoe’s Anglo-Catholicism. Jenkinson was a member of the Modern Churchman’s Union.12
Jellicoe died aged thirty-six. Archbishop Temple said: ‘There are some with whom it seems to be a necessary quality that they should die young – Mozart among musicians; Keats and Shelley among poets; and among the saints, with many another, Basil Jellicoe.’13
Beyond its own modest housing schemes, the first Labour government made no attempt to make Britain socialist. It was hounded out of office by a press scare, designed to make everyone fear that Ramsay MacDonald was the mustachioed Caledonian mask of Leninism.
During the summer, Arthur Ponsonby, son of the royal courtier Fritz Ponsonby, and a Labour MP, was the chief negotiator on behalf of the British government with the Soviet Union, when it was proposed that Britain would give diplomatic recognition of the USSR and offer loans. Russia was in a bad way, in the aftermath of a civil war, with its agricultural system in chaos. From a humanitarian point of view, there was obviously a case for British loans. MacDonald and his party had welcomed the Kerensky government in March 1917 but had never given succour or encouragement to Bolshevism, nor indeed to any political acts of violence. But the two treaties drawn up, one for the settlement of diplomatic differences between Britain and the Soviet Union, and the other for loans, excited fierce opposition. ‘No Money for Murderers’ was the slogan behind which Lloyd George, the Conservatives and the press united to attack the Labour administration.
Then the Foreign Office got hold of a letter, dated 15 September, purporting to have been sent by one G. Zinoviev, president of the Communist International in Moscow, to the British Communist party, urging British Communists to do all they could to ratify the treaties. The letter reached Conservative Central Office, and the Daily Mail, which published it. MacDonald himself did not see a copy of the letter until 16 October, but by then the damage was done.14 The public had been fed the idea that the Labour party was the deceptively benign face of International Communism. There was yet another election, and this time it was a triumph for the Conservatives. Stoked up by Lord Rothermere’s Daily Mail and by Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative Party, the electorate sent 419 Conservative members to Westminster, out of 615. Labour had 151 seats. The Liberals were reduced to 40 seats, and huddled behind Lloyd George’s leadership. It was a mere eighteen years since their landslide victory, and only two years since Lloyd George, the Man Who Won The War, had been leading what looked like the natural party of government.
The fear of communism, rather than the charm of the Conservative party, was what lay behind the election result. Benign Colonel Wedgwood’s rhetorical question backfired. ‘Those who will not believe that you can do away with exploitation – that is, those who do not want to do away with it – all those “in the interests of Society” will regulate, inspect and convert the working man into a machine that shall like its servitude.’ That, precisely, is what the early years of Baldwin’s Second Government showed that the Conservative party wanted.
The word ‘unemployment’ had come into being during Gladstone’s last government15 to describe the mass effects of depression in capitalism. Since the 1880s at least, the capitalist world had suffered from cycles of unemployment, but in the post-world war era, it became much more acute. In 1921 there were 2 million British workers unemployed, the worst depression since the Industrial Revolution began. Then things picked up a little, but, in spite of an increase in the numbers in work, there were still 1 million unemployed. The export trades were continuing to produce goods for which there was no world market.16
It was at this stage of things that Baldwin returned for his second term in office and appointed as his Chancellor of the Exchequer a man who, for all his sterling qualities, was not noted for his skills as an economist: Winston Churchill.
The very last thing which should have happened at this stage of the economic cycle was for the British to so fix their currency that it became even more expensive for foreigners to buy British goods. John Maynard Keynes argued in a series of articles in the Nation that laissez-faire economics could not solve the unemployment crisis, and he also argued passionately for keeping Britain off the gold standard until the pound had found its level in the international currency markets.17 Yet the new Conservative Chancellor – new in the sense of being new to the job, and new as a Conservative, having crossed over from the Liberal benches – was determined to fix the pound at its old prewar parity with the dollar: £1 = $4.86. Following the Conservative election victory, the pound rose against the dollar, reaching $4.80 in early 1925. Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England, favoured Britain returning to the gold standard. Churchill was persuaded by the Treasury and by the Bank that it was worth while for Britain to go on to the gold standard at this rate, even if the short-term effects on the workforce were harsh. It was a ‘sacrifice’ worth making. Churchill was persuaded against his better judgement: he was half-persuaded by one of Keynes’s articles: ‘I would rather see Finance less proud and Industry more content,’ he wrote in a memo to the Treasury.18 But this mood did not last long.
With the inevitable dip in exports, Baldwin said in July 1925: ‘All the workers of this country have got to take reductions in wages to help put industry on its feet.’19
As in 1848, when the government took very great precautions to prepare against a Chartist Revolution, so in 1926 Baldwin’s Conservatives took highly effective steps to cripple the political power of the working class. The diplomatic settlement of the Ruhr occupation meant that there was now plentiful cheap coal available to be imported from Germany and Poland. It led to a reduction in the coal price, and the inevitable demand by mine-owners that the British coal miners should accept a cut in wages.
The miners were at the vanguard of the working-class struggle for fairly obvious and visible reasons. With their hard labour they had fuelled the industrial power and energy which had made Britain the supreme economic empire of the world. Until the arrival of oil-fuelled transport or industrial machinery, coal was visibly there, heaped in the factory yards, in the furnaces where Baldwin’s ironworks melted the ore, in the bottle-kilns which fired Colonel Wedgwood’s china: all over the industrial Midlands and North. Every railway station smelt of coal. It was smuts of coal which middle-class passengers wiped from their eyes if they leaned out of the express train window; it was slag heaps they saw, brooding like accursed mountains in a Dantean hellscape, as they steamed through the industrial heartlands. Coal, its dirt, energy and power, was the outward and visible sign of the contract which had been made since the Industrial Revolution began between the people who made and the people who owned the country’s wealth. Those who mined it led short lives. They returned to small houses to be washed in front of the fire in tin baths, their faces grimy, their lungs thick with pneumoconiosis. While the idea of the Labour movement was that all workers were partners, in real terms there was not a great connection between, say, textile workers based in Lancashire and those making nails in Birmingham, between a railway stoker in Barnstaple and a docker on the Clyde. But coal and its visible dirt united them all. The dispute which developed between Herbert Smith and the National Union of Mineworkers and the owners escalated. The owners made a mean-spirited offer, and then threatened lockout if the men refused the terms. The government, and especially the Home Secretary, the evangelical Christian William Joynson-Hicks, believed that a Communist revolution was imminent, even though the Communists were not especially influential in any of the unions drawn into the dispute, certainly not in the TUC, which tried to mediate.
If the railwaymen came out on strike in solidarity with the dockers they had the capacity to cause damage, but no longer totally to immobilize the country. The government drew up emergency plans, with anyone who could drive being enlisted as lorry-drivers to take food to the main cities. There was some further attempt at mediation between the workers and the mine-owners, but the truth is that the government wanted this strike. On 1 May the dockers were locked out, and on 3 May 1926 a General Strike was called.
The middle classes responded with a whooping excitement to the challenge. Public-school-educated young men who had always dreamed of doing so drove trains. Those who for recreation rode to hounds now volunteered as mounted police. Millions of strikers were out, and in all major towns there were huge crowds, but they were on the whole peaceful. Four thousand at the end of a week were prosecuted for violence, but this was 4,000 out of crowds of millions. Much violence, on both sides, went unreported.20 Churchill was in his element. He forgot that the job of Chancellor was merely to look after the nation’s economy, and moved immediately into dictatorial mode. ‘He thinks he is Napoleon,’ J. C. Davidson complained to Baldwin. When the first convoy brought food into central London from the docks by volunteer drivers, Churchill wanted it to be escorted by tanks with machine guns tactically placed en route. He tried to commandeer the BBC, but Reith resisted. When the compositors at the Daily Mail went on strike rather than print an inflammatory and inaccurate article, and most of the other printers followed suit, Churchill decided to produce his own government propaganda sheet. The British Gazette was produced from the offices and printing plant of the Morning Post. He commandeered newsprint, paper and machines. By the last day of the strike, he had got the circulation up to 2.2 million.
His biographer Roy Jenkins calls this ‘a formidable achievement’, without mentioning that his own father, a Welsh miner who became a Labour MP, went to prison for his advocacy of the miners’ cause.21 Two months after the strike, when the House of Commons was debating it all, Churchill turned to a Labour member and said: ‘I have no wish to make threats which would disturb the House and cause bad blood, but this I must say. Make your minds perfectly clear that if ever you let loose upon us again a General Strike, we will let loose upon you.’ He paused. ‘Another British Gazette.’ There was laughter of course from both sides of the House. Churchill could not help being funny and charming, but his actual policy, and that of the government, was very far from charming or funny. He would certainly have been prepared to use machine guns and tanks on men who only eight years before were being asked to die for their country and who were rightly described by Lloyd George as heroes.
The General Strike lasted nine days. The miners held out for six months until starvation drove them back to accept worse conditions than before, lower wages and longer hours. Coal mines remained, until the Second World War, the largest employers of labour.22 The behaviour of the owners was not forgotten, however, and this was one of the chief reasons why the coal-mining industry was nationalized as soon as there was a powerful and effective Labour government in 1945.
The King wrote in his diary: ‘Our old country can well be proud of itself, as during the last nine days there has been a strike in which four million people have been affected, not a shot has been fired and no one killed. It shows what a wonderful people we are.’23 But who needs to fire a gun if you have hunger and fear to drive people back to work?
The union leaders certainly did not want Britain to become communist. But for eight years since the end of the war, the working classes had waited for some of the promises of politicians to be fulfilled. Where was the Land Fit for Heroes to Live In which Lloyd George had promised? How did they live, in their back-to-back houses, and their tenements? How did they wash? How did they go to the lavatory? What happened to them when they were ill? What sort of schooling was offered to their children? Of course these were not the issues in the General Strike, but they were the circumstances which explained how and why so many people went out. It was a yelp of pain and anger, not an organized political programme. The Conservatives could capitalize on all the fears which the strike had aroused, by bringing in the Trade Unions Act of 1927. It greatly expanded the class of ‘illegal strikes’. It banned all strikes ‘designed or calculated to coerce the Government either directly or by inflicting hardship on the community’. Workers who refused to accept changes in their working conditions were now deemed in the eyes of the law to be on strike. Peaceful picketing was banned. Civil servants were forbidden from joining a trade union. The comparative benignity of the Employers and Workmen Act of 1875 was swept away. Trade unions were limited in the extent to which they could fund political parties, so that the government was able, while limiting the power of the union, to ruin, financially, the Labour party, since trade unions were the principal sources of Labour party funding. Labour could now collect money only from trade union members who had specifically ‘contracted in’ to pay for party funding; this at a time when wages were being reduced and unemployment always threatened. Labour party membership fell from 3,388,000 in 1926 to a little over 1 million in 1927.24
There was now on the statute book a system of iron control over the disgruntled workforce, and the painstaking trade union movement, which had built up its rights and its power base over the previous century, was now firmly knocked into submission. In so doing, the Conservatives undoubtedly strengthened the Labour party in the long term, since many more individuals, as opposed to union people, joined the party over the coming decade, and for every one who joined there were ten who were sympathetic fellow travellers, and potential Labour voters when the next election came.
The General Strike had been an ugly episode. It did not show what a wonderful people the British were. It showed how selfish their middle classes were, and how strong was their monied power. On 28 October 1926, Hilaire Belloc wrote to his friend Katharine Asquith: ‘We are in a state of permanent and sullen civil war, modified by general patriotism and terror of the police and the troopers. The rich are seeing to it that these divisions shall grow more acute. God has blinded them. I have not met one single gentleman or lady on the side of the poor in this crisis. That’s ominous!’25