Executive summary
Half-way through this hefty 600-page popular history, author Roy Hattersley gives a handy little summary of the era under discussion. Most historians agree that:
- ‘the Edwardian period’ stretches from the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914
- it was named and typified by its obese jolly king, a sociable hunting, shooting and cigar-smoking man known for his numerous affairs and mistresses, ‘Edward the Caresser’ as Henry James nicknamed him
- its dominant political figures were:
- Arthur Balfour (Conservative Prime Minister 1902 to 1905)
- Herbert Asquith (Liberal Prime Minister 1908 to 1916)
- young radical firebrand David Lloyd George (driving force behind the People’s Budget, the Parliament Act and the National Insurance Act which laid the foundations for the welfare state)
- Winston Churchill was on his way up
- while Joe Chamberlain, associated with jingoism, the Boer War and protectionism (‘imperial preference’), was on the way out
- it was a decade troubled by explosive social issues such as women’s suffrage, Irish independence, trade union rights and the arrival of the Labour Party as a political force, destined to supersede the Liberals after the war
- society was transformed by scientific and technological inventions, on the theoretical level the discover of atomic and subatomic particles and Einstein’s theory of relativity, on the technology level, the rise of the motor car, the telephone and wireless, and the first manned airplane flights
There you have it, in a snapshot.
Dating the Edwardian era
Strictly speaking the Edwardian period refers to the reign of King Edward VII, king from the day his mother, Queen Victoria, died (22 January 1901) to the day he passed away (6 May 1910) to be replaced by his son, King George V (reigned 6 May 1910 to 20 January 1936).
However, like pretty much all historians of the period Hattersley stretches the definition of ‘Edwardian’ forwards to include the four years leading up to the Great War (commenced August 1914). And also, because he feels obliged to explain the origins and course of the Boer War (11 October 1899 to 31 May 1902), which was still ongoing when Edward came to the throne and which requires a description of the Jameson Raid (December 1895), Hattersley at various points goes back before his theoretical starting date to explain the deeper origins of this or that issue.
In other words, the dating is quite fluid, not only when it comes to politics but to social history as well, Hattersley reaching, in his chapter on poverty, back to the many reports on the subject published during the 1890s (for example, Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London 1889 to 1903); or going back to early roots of the suffragette movement which can said to have started in the 1880s; or of the Labour movement, which can be dated all the way back to Henry Hyndman founding Britain’s first left-wing political party, the Democratic Federation, in 1881; or, regarding the Irish Question, having to dig back into the 1880s to describe the secession of the Liberal Unionists who disagreed with Gladstone’s ill-fated policy of Home Rule for Ireland. And so on.
Subverting a straw man
On the cover, on the back, in the blurb and repeatedly within the text, Hattersley and his publishers say this book tackles and refutes the notion that Edwardian England was one long summer of boaters, bathers and village pubs, attacking the notion that the period ‘is often seen as a golden sunlit afternoon, personified by its genial and self-indulgent king’, before the Armageddon of the First World War.
The trouble is that this is what absolutely every book about the Edwardian era claims to do, using the same straw man to assert its novelty and originality. In fact not just histories but anyone who’s read the introduction to novels by H.G. Wells or Arnold Bennett or E.M. Foster reads the same ‘golden summer’ straw man being knocked down in the same way as the author sets out to correct our misconceptions to tell us that the period 1901 to 1914 was in fact crammed with scientific, technological and consumer product innovations and packed with fraught social and political issues, some of which I’ve listed above. It’s the standard trope invoked by all historians of the period.
The book announces its tone of superior gossip with a gorgeous description of Queen Victoria’s funeral (Saturday, 2 February 1901) and then a gossipy portrait of King Edward, his biography, personality and the courtiers and advisers who surrounded him. Initially, I thought maybe the whole thing was going to be a gossipy survey of Edwardian people. It was only on reading further that I realised that each of the 20 chapters, despite their vague and sometimes misleading titles (I’ve added clearer indications of their subject matter in brackets), is devoted to a specific social and political issue and examines each one in some detail.
It’s a romp, it’s a guilty pleasure, it’s good popular history packed to the gills with fascinating factoids – but still, coming to this book from the works of professional historians like Richard Shannon or Eric Hobsbawm is like falling off a cliff in terms of intellectual substance, historical authority and serious analysis.
1. A Cloud Across The Sun (Victoria’s funeral)
Detailed description of the immense and impressive procession of the body of Queen Victoria through London en route to her final resting place in Windsor. The total number of soldiers involved in taking part in or policing the procession was larger than the British Expeditionary Force sent to France at the start of the Great War. Most people were stunned for nobody knew any other monarch than Victoria who had reigned for 63 years. Generations had been brought up to associate the very word ‘Victorian’ with Britain’s world leading position. Her death triggered much soul searching. Educated commentators were uneasily aware that Britain was slipping. America and Germany were overtaking her in terms of industrial output (p.67, 467) and Germany’s Navy Law of 1898 set it on a course to match or exceed the Royal Navy’s firepower (p.15). Imperial anxiety as the old era ended.
2. The Spirit of the Age (Edward’s character)
Edward was 60 when he came to the throne and was (surprisingly) badly prepared for the job. Successive prime ministers (Gladstone, Disraeli) tried to suggest useful jobs and opinions where he could get a feel for the nation he was set to rule but either Victoria or the Prince himself vetoed them.
He had a state income of £100,000. The whole country knew about Edward’s louche reputation. He had been named in a number of scandalous court cases and was well known to enjoy gambling, the horses, yachting and the high life. He was addicted to baccarat. The serious and high-minded (the kind of people who leave written texts such as sermons, newspaper articles, writers’ diaries etc) deplored his character and worried about the moral falling off which his rule would bring. The Marlborough House set.
But the thing about the written records is they tend to preserve the opinions of the worthy, high-minded, literate and concerned and ignore or neglect the opinions of the vast mass of the population who left few if any records. And in this respect, I think a key thing to grasp about the English is that they welcomed Charles II with open arms, and that well-known womaniser, gambler, horse and yacht-racing addict has gone down as arguably the most popular British king ever. So, away from the hand-wringing editorials, there might have been a great portion of the fun-loving proletariat who admired a merry monarch. (Compare and contrast the ongoing popularity of Boris Johnson – inexplicable to liberals and worthy Tories – an adulterer, drinker and shambling liar, but still admired by many for being a bloke you could go down the pub and have a laugh with).
And indeed Hattersley goes on to say that Edward’s much higher profile than his reclusive mother – photos in the press and reports of him opening Parliament or at racing meetings or holidaying in the South of France – associated him with the new taste for leisure and relaxation. Edward epitomised a new age of leisure.
Edward was very fat due to overeating. His chest and waist measured 48 inches. Hattersley gives mind boggling details of a typical royal meal, which usually had at least 14 courses. His coronation had to be postponed to a sudden flaring up of appendicitis and the consequent operation and was eventually held on 9 August 1902.
Edward hated to be alone and was an insatiable socialiser. He was liable to descend on the grand country houses of the aristocracy with little warning, an event which entailed huge disruption. After a string of extra-marital liaisons in 1892 he met Alice Keppel, the daughter of an admiral, and she became his official mistress for the rest of his life.
He was a menace in foreign affairs, acting tactlessly with the touchy Kaiser, but was personally involved in the great diplomatic triumph of his reign, the Entente Cordiale with France, which he did a lot to cement by a personal visit to Paris during which he undertook a lot of engagements with great enthusiasm and was eventually cheered by the French crowds.
Edward revived the state opening of Parliament in all its meretricious pomp and hollow ceremonial, which had been allowed to lapse by his reclusive mother, and which continues to this day, televised to the simpering tones of royal commentators.
3. The Powers Behind the Throne (Edward’s advisers)
When Edward came to the throne Britain was an imperial oligarchy, ruled by groups of aristocratic or mercantile families. Hattersley gives an entertaining tour of the political class, starting with the lingering influence of the Liberal ‘Grand Old Man’ Gladstone who had died in 1898, and the Conservative Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister when Edward acceded, who resigned a year later in July 1902, to be succeeded by his nephew, Arthur Balfour.
The Edwardian Prime Ministers
- Lord Salisbury (Conservative) 1895 to 1902
- Arthur James Balfour (Conservative) 1902 to 1905
- Henry Campbell-Bannerman (Liberal) 1905 to 1908
- Herbert Henry Asquith (Liberal) 1908 to 1916
(See section on ‘Politicians’, below.) This fusty world of faineant plutocrats was to be shaken up by the two firebrands, Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George.
The chapter morphs into a consideration of Edward’s closest personal advisers, being: Arthur Hardinge, Francis Knollys, Reginald Brett, military adviser Admiral Fisher.
4. The Condition of England
Named after the bestselling analysis of British society published in 1909 by Liberal politician and cabinet minister Charles Masterman.
Masterman copied the method of Matthew Arnold’s Victorian tract, ‘Culture and Anarchy’, by assigning the classes and groups of people in Edwardian England new generic names:
- the Conquerors (the old aristocracy)
- the Suburbans (the middle middle-class)
- the Multitude (the masses)
In the event Hattersley doesn’t dwell on Masterman’s analysis but uses it as a jumping off point for statistics about Britain’s economic decline, her stalling industrial growth, the shrinking of productive agriculture, the reliance on the informal economics of empire. He then goes on to summarise a bevy of reports and surveys which came out during the decade giving hard evidence of the dire poverty of about half the population, especially agricultural workers (‘Social surveys proliferated in Edwardian Britain’, p.74).
Lots of detail about the pay and wages of workers in different sectors, in different parts of the country with special attention to women.
5. Unfinished Business (the Boer War)
Hattersley’s account of the Boer War, with as much or more about its impact on domestic politics i.e. its fractious impact on an already split Liberal Party (because some Liberals were imperialists and some were anti-imperial Radicals). Milner’s miscalculation in thinking the Boers could be intimidated into submitting to Britain. The reasonableness of Paul Kruger’s position in not wanting his small culturally homogeneous country swamped by outsiders who, if given the vote, would support Britain’s policies. The chaotic conduct of the war. The concentration camp policy: in the 13 months between January 1901 and February 1902, to Britain’s eternal shame, 20,000 internees died, mostly women and children. Lloyd George was a rare voice fiercely denouncing the war, while the imperialist Liberals set up something called the Liberal Imperial Council.
6. A Preference for Empire (the tariff campaign)
‘Victory’ in the Boer War cost the British Exchequer some £222 million. This money had to be recouped. Of all UK politicians Joseph Chamberlain was most associated with the war, ‘Joe’s War’. Massively popular after the victory, he now launched a campaign for imperial protectionism i.e. to create a free trade zone between Britain and the white dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand, post-Boer War South Africa) and impose tariffs on imports from all other countries.
Hattersley gives his interpretation of the wild enthusiasm which greeted Joe’s campaign: it was widely seen as a cure for what an increasing number of people were realising was Britain’s industrial eclipse.
Manufacture was in decline. The Industrial Revolution had, in reality, ended more than half a century earlier. The consequences of failure to innovate and invest were just working their way through into the economy. Declining industries longed to be protected by a tariff. (p.109)
In 1903 Chamberlain made a big speech for ‘imperial preference’ which was seen as a proclamation that ‘the British Empire must stand together against the world’ (p.109). The government of the day was Conservative, led by Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, but it only had a majority because of its coalition with the Liberal Unionist defectors from the Liberal party. Now the core principle of old school liberalism was the free trade which had made Britain great in the mid-Victorian period.
In fact Hattersley neglects the detail and implications of protectionism to focus on giving an intricate and quite confusing account of the problems Balfour faced keeping his cabinet and his government together, which boiled down to the timing and way of announcing the resignation of various dissidents. Chamberlain resigned because protectionism wasn’t being implemented fast enough but Tory free traders also resigned in opposition to the policy and detestation of the former Liberal Chamberlain’s influence. Balfour dealt with the ongoing crisis with silky subtlety from 1902 to 1905 and then resigned government at the end of 1905. A general election was held in January 1906 and the Liberals stormed home in a landslide. The Liberals were, in fact, deeply divided over various issues, centrally the question of Irish Home Rule, but managed to unite around their anti-protectionism and ran a campaign highlighting the fact that tariffs would raise the cost of food.
Hattersley skimps on this, a key fact brought out in other accounts I’ve read. Instead he is obsessed with the minutiae of what Balfour promised the Duke of Devonshire who upset a trio of colleagues by not resigning alongside them, with details of meetings and dinners and promises and pledges among the Tory elite. No doubt that’s how politics actually works, but this aspect of Hattersley’s account is for politics addicts.
7. Uniting the Nation (social reforms)
Having painted in the background, this is the chapter in which Hattersley gets round to explaining the changes which he’s been claiming were so central to the Edwardian decade. At their core is one thing, a revolution in the political culture of the nation. Victoria’s entire reign was dominated by a laisser-faire philosophy of free trade and unfettered competition and the devil take the hindmost. Classical liberalism thought the state ought to be small and had just two duties, to uphold the law at home and protect from foreign enemies. When it came to the vast majority of the British population which were either poor or very poor or utterly destitute, the almost universal assumption was that their poverty was their own responsibility. Victorian moralists blamed the plight of the poor on their own indigence, immorality, laziness and so on. The only recourse for the poor and unemployed was the workhouse which, since the Poor Law of 1832, was purposely designed to be as inhumane as possible in order to act as a deterrent, and a spur to the indigent poor to try harder.
During the Edwardian decade this political philosophy underwent a swift and amazing revolution. A series of reports by charities and investigators during the 1890s revealed depths of poverty and squalor in all Britain’s cities but also in the countryside that had never been appreciated before. These findings were incorporated into a series of royal commissions which in turn led to a flurry of acts which fundamentally altered the attitude of the state to the poor from judgemental vengeance to support and responsibility.
- 1902 registration of midwives
- 1906 Education Act stipulating the supply of school meals
- a system of medical inspection of schools
- 1907 borstals were established for young offenders
- 1908 act made neglect a criminal offence for the first time
Why? The pop history answer is that the Boer War revealed the shocking health of the stunted wretches conscripted from Britain’s slums. Also, the influence of the growing number of Labour MPs, in the 1906 election Labour won 53 seats.
But what really comes over in this chapter is that we were copying Germany which was already decades ahead of us. This was especially true in the area of supporting the unemployed, creating a national insurance tax to pay the unemployed a minimum dole, and creating labour exchanges to help people back into work. Conservatives were persuaded of these lefty measures because they improved the efficiency of the economy as a whole. And far from being radical experiments, Britain copied the tried and tested methods which were already propelling Germany’s economy ahead of ours on every measure. To compete against its rivals, Britain needed a better educated, better fed workforce that wasn’t allowed to rot and lose its skills when laid off by capitalism’s regular slumps. Hence the unemployed workmen’s act and powers to set up labour exchanges (p.130).
It’s startling to learn that a young William Beveridge went to study Germany’s welfare provision in 1905 and was so impressed by what he saw that he brought back to Britain a version of the Bismarckian system which was to form the basis of the hugely influential report published during the war and which, famously, formed the basis of the Welfare State created by the Labour government under Clement Attlee (p.465).
Some of the child and family laws were passed under the Conservatives before 1905, but the working men’s legislation was driven forward by Winston Churchill during his so-called New Liberal phase. Churchill drove forward prison reform, a bill improving conditions in coal mines, a bill limiting the number of hours people could work in shops,
8. Who Shall Rule?
The clash between the old ruling class and the new liberals came to a head in the great constitutional crisis triggered by Lloyd George’s 1909 budget which imposed new taxes on the rich in order to fund old age pensions and welfare policies and which the House of Lords, dominated by rich landowners, promptly rejected. The Liberal government led by Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, First Earl of Oxford, threatened to flood with Lords with Liberal peers while radical firebrand David Lloyd George toured the country giving rabble rousing speeches, backed up by Winston Churchill, still in his fierce new Liberal phase.
Hattersley gives a fairly detailed account of the political machinations, in the middle of which King Edward died (6 May 1910) and was replaced by his son, George V. The Liberals proceeded to win two general elections (in January and December 1910) (admittedly with Labour and Irish Nationalist support) which persuaded the new sovereign, very reluctantly, to accede to Asquith’s threat, which in turn led the Lords to back down and pass Lloyd George’s Budget and the National Insurance Bill.
Hattersley delivers one of those pithy summaries which I remember my history teachers at school used to extract and turn into an essay question, namely: Victoria handed over to her successor the poisoned chalice of the Boer War, and Edward VII handed over to his successor the Peers-versus-the-People crisis.
9. Ourselves Alone (Irish Home Rule)
After decades of frustration among Irish nationalists, the question of Irish Home Rule returned to the agenda in Westminster because, in the 1910 general election called by the Liberal Party to prove their mandate for Lloyd George’s inflammatory budget of 1909, Conservatives and Liberals both won about 270 seats and so the balance of power was held by the Irish Nationalists with their 82 MPs.
It took the sclerotic process of Whitehall to get it together, but the 1912 Home Rule Bill was the price the British Liberals paid the Irish Nationalists for their support in getting the Budget and the act to reform the House of Lords through (p.187).
Hattersley goes back to recap the background. After the fall of its charismatic leader Charles Stewart Parnell 1890, named in a divorce case as an adulterer, the struggle for Irish independence went into abeyance.
‘The era of constitutional possibilities for Irish nationality ended on the day that Charles Stewart Parnell died.’ (Arthur Griffith, quoted on page 182)
Hattersley namechecks the key players and the numerous organisations set up to campaign for home rule, including Michael Davitt and Arthur Griffith (founder of Sinn Fein and editor of The United Irishman), John MacBride and James Connolly, Roger Casement (revealer of the horrors of Belgium’s colony in the Congo and later gun-runner for the IRA), James Larkin (leader of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union), John Redmond (leader of the Nationalist Party in Parliament), Michael Collins, along with the upper class women, Maud Gonne and Constance Gore-Booth, memorialised by the great poet W.B. Yeats.
Ireland was wretchedly badly run by the British, with rural and urban poverty even worse than on the mainland. The nationalist cause was boosted by Britain’s appalling handling of the Boer War, in which another small people was bullied and butchered by an overweening empire.
I read a lot of this stuff as an undergraduate as background to Yeats’s poetry, and periodically over the following years. Rereading it all in detail, I was struck not by the Irish fight for independence which, in a sense, that is simple and logical, like any other colonial struggle against imperial masters. What always impresses me is the strength of the opposing force, the rise of Unionism in Ulster, led by the brilliant and charismatic lawyer, Sir Edward Carson, the hundreds of thousands of northern Protestants who signed petitions, the 100,000 men who joined the proto Ulster army, the mass smuggling in of guns and ammunition, and the acquiescence of senior officers in the British Army in what Churchill bluntly called treason i.e. actions against the express wish of the elected British government and the King (p.188 ff.).
Hattersley shows how the partition of Ireland between an Irish nationalist south and west and a different entity in the Protestant north was originally one of many solutions proposed in the 1910s but slowly became the most favoured, how it was defined in different ways by different factions among the Unionists but within a few years had gained traction as the least bad option.
10. Votes for Women!
Female England awoke during the Edwardian era. (p.81)
Like the Ireland chapter this one goes back a few decades to background events, for example when Millicent Fawcett founded the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in 1887. But the story comes to life when Hattersley gives us biographies of the leading campaigner Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel (nicknamed by some papers ‘the Queen of the Mob’).
I knew the suffragettes were violent hooligans who used terrorist techniques (for example, sending letter bombs to leading politicians, p.220) but Hattersley’s account brings out how wilfully violent and destructive they were. Not only throwing bricks and tiles at the Prime Minister and other cabinet members, smashing their windows, vandalising their cars or trying to burn their houses down, slashing paintings in galleries, setting fire to postboxes, rampaging along Oxford Street and Regent Street smashing every shop window with hammers (p.219), spitting at and slapping policemen (p.207), but, when it was discovered some were practicing shooting, it was feared there would be active assassination attempts a la JFK (p.216). They also damaged quite a few works of art.
It was interesting to learn how many of them were lesbians or lived in unorthodox relationships (p.217). It is typical of Hattersley’s enjoyably gossipy approach to learn that the redoubtable Edwardian composer, Ethel Smyth (1858 to 1944), not only went to prison (2 months in Holloway) for smashing the Colonial Secretary’s windows, not only wrote the stirring suffragette anthem, ‘The March of the Women’, but fell passionately in love with (the married) Emmeline P, writing: ‘I knew that before long I would be her slave’ (p.217).
Did you know it was the Daily Mail which coined the word ‘suffragette’ as a term of mockery and abuse but which the activists then adopted with pride and we have used ever since? (p.209)
But the biggest thing that struck me was the reason many Liberal and Labour politicians opposed women’s suffrage wasn’t the principle of the thing, which most approved of – it was fear of its practical consequences.
It had taken decades of fraught negotiation for the existing male electorate to come into being and it still excluded some 5 million men from the vote (always forgotten in this context). Some Labour and Liberals were against women’s suffrage because they knew that the vote would probably, at least at first, only be extended to better-off women who would promptly vote Conservative.
In other words, giving middle-class women the vote (the most feasible strategy) risked destroying radical and progressive politics in Britain for a generation (p.218). It was a cogent and powerful argument, even if making it earned you a slap in the face from Christabel Pankhurst.
In 1912 and ’13 and ’14 bills were drafted to extend the franchise, to which greater or lesser measures of female suffrage were added, and which variously passed or failed in the Commons or in Committee stage but everyone accepted that suffrage was going to happen sooner or later. And then the Great War broke out, putting any further development on the women question – as with Irish independence – on hold but making some sort of solution inevitable once the fighting had finished.
In fact it was before the war ended (in November 1918) that, in January 1918, the Representation of the People Act was passed, giving the vote to men aged over 21, whether or not they owned property, and to women aged over 30 who occupied land or premises with a rateable value above £5, or whose husbands did, thus extending the local government franchise to include women aged over 21 on the same terms as men. As a result of the Act, the male electorate was extended by 5.2 million to 12.9 million and the female electorate went from 0 to 8.5 million, or 2 in 5 adult women.
(It was not until the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act 1928 that women gained full electoral equality with men, the act giving the vote to all women aged over 21, regardless of any property qualification, adding another five million women to the electorate.)
Since 1928 there have been 24 general elections, of which Labour have won 10. From the little research I’ve done, until recently women voters on the whole voted Conservative although that has changed recently (see article on gender divide in general election voting).
11. United We Stand (the trade unions)
The complicated history of trade unions in the Edwardian era. The Taff Vale train dispute case of 1901 recognised trade unions as legal entities but this was the opposite of a Good Thing for it meant that employers could now take trade unions to court if it could be proved that strikes or picketing had adversely affected their business. And not just claim compensation from union funds but sue individual union officials into the bargain (pp.222 to 224).
Hattersley explains that the Trade Union Congress and most unions had regarded politics as peripheral to their core activities of protecting members and campaigning for better pay and conditions, But the potentially crippling implications of the Taff Vale case made them all realise they needed representation in Parliament to defend their interests.
So this chapter traces the earliest history of the Independent Labour Party (founded 1893), the Labour Representation Committee (founded 1900) and its early luminaries, particularly the two key figures of Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald. This leads up to the foundation of the Labour Party proper in 1906, which broke through in that year’s January general election to win 29 seats on 4.8% of the vote (p.234).
Of course Hattersley’s lifelong involvement with the Labour Party, most notably as deputy leader under Neil Kinnock from 1983 to 1992, gives him unprecedented insight into Labour’s traditions and contemporary working. As such it is more than ordinarily interesting when he writes that the party – ‘then, as now, despised theory’, ‘more interested in practice than theory’ – has always been a very soft-left party with little or no theoretical underpinning (p.237).
In fact, the book is sprinkled with asides which sound like the wisdom of practical experience in the field, wry familiarity with the quirks and foibles of Parliamentary politics:
- [Balfour] took refuge in the expedient employed by uncertain prime ministers down the ages… (p.131)
- The TUC, always happy to accept half a loaf, was delighted… (p.152)
- It was a tactic the Tory party was to employ time and time again in an attempt to obstruct the work of elected governments. (p.158)
- General elections are rarely fought on issues of the parties’ choice… (p.167)
- Speakers’ judgements on such matters are rarely challenged with success… (p.220)
- Like so many private members bills it was then buried at the Committee stage and forgotten. (p.231)
- The new Labour members, euphoric as new members always are… (p.234)
- The Select Committee Inquiry endorsed the status quo as Select Committee Inquiries often do. (p.282)
- Select Committees of the House of Commons usually contain one or two Members whose enthusiasm outruns their discretion. (p.457)
Back to the Labour party, it was somehow symbolic that the party’s first leader and Moses, the illegitimate, poorly educated Scotsman, Keir Hardie, made powerful speeches about injustice but knew nothing about economics and had very few practical policies for bringing about the ideal world he depicted in his rousing speeches. Plus ça change…
The detailed series of legal cases which hampered then liberated the Edwardian trade unions, with the explanation of Liberal party support, the advent of the new Labour Party MPs, and the trend for the sometimes very small unions to amalgamate into huge mega-unions based on a specific trade (mining, railwaymen etc) all give a strong sense of a social movement emerging from legal, political and financial weakness, to staking its claim to become a major component of British domestic history for the rest of the century.
12. Useful Members of the Community (education)
It was quite an eye-opener to learn that the central issue in trying to improve education in this country, from 1870s till the 1900s, was religion. To be precise, the majority of schools were run by the Church of England so when any government tried to set up a state-run, nationwide system of primary schools, it had to address two massive problems: 1) the Church of England’s powerful concerns that reforms would mean it losing its influence over the nation’s youth; and 2) the vehement opposition of non-conformists, who strongly objected to Anglican schools being subsidised by their local taxes.
Some non-conformists refused to pay their local taxes under the new system introduced in 1902 and were prepared to go to prison to defend the principle. In fact, the provisions for local authority funding of schools antagonised the large non-conformist community so much that this issue alone goes a long way to explaining why the Tories, who’d brought the Act in, were slaughtered in the 1906 election.
Everyone knew that Britain needed to bring its education system up to the standards of Germany (many British educationists had toured Germany and had realised the German system was way better than ours – just like their industries, businesses, health and welfare systems were streets ahead of ours, p.465). This chapter is a good example of the yawning gulf between political theory and practice; of the way a really simple aim and intention which most of the political class agreed on, could end up requiring endless, torturous negotiations, drafts and redrafts, defeats in the House of Commons and Lords, and so on, before a half-workable compromise finally gets passed.
Just working through the battle of vested interests and the hangover of historic structures and organisations in this one area, education, helps you understand why so many aspects of Britain’s social and economic structure are so compromised, messy, half-cocked and inefficient.
It was also the era when the Workers Education Association was founded (1908), the northern universities received their charters (Birmingham 1900, Manchester and Liverpool 1903, Leeds 1904, Sheffield 1905).
In a parallel stream, the wildly successful Boy Scout movement was founded by General Robert Baden-Powell, hero of the siege of Mafeking, the first camp being on Brownsea Island in 1907. One of the small group of men who founded a movement which they lived to see sweep the world.
13. Ideas Enter the Drawing Room (theatre)
Drawing room drama replaced by theatre of ideas, copying abroad (as usual), in this case Ibsen, and our own provocateur George Bernard Shaw (‘the most famous iconoclast and atheist of his age’, p.370). But first Hattersley conscientiously gives us the owners of London theatres, the price of tickets in London and the provinces, the lives of the great actor managers (Irving) and leading ladies (Ellen Terry, Mrs Patrick Campbell), the quality of middle-brown ‘respectable’ drawing room drama, the advent of musical comedy epitomised by the success of The Merry Widow.
And then the fight against the state censor of plays, the Lord Chamberlain, led by John Galsworthy who, according to Wikipedia:
became known for plays with a social message, reflecting, among other themes, the struggle of workers against exploitation, the use of solitary confinement in prisons, the repression of women, jingoism and the politics and morality of war.
With mention of the plays of Harley Granville-Barker, The Voysey Inheritance and Waste. Throw in the works of George Bernard Shaw and that’s quite a lot of plays about contemporary issues.
But the decade contained the seeds of change. The 1900s saw the first displays of moving pictures and by 1910 buildings had opened devoted to the showing of moving pictures, much more immediate and much cheaper than even the cheapest musical comedy and variety.
14. Literature Comes Home (Edwardian literature)
With the death of Aubrey Beardsley and the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde the Aesthetic Movement petered out. Hattersley quotes Yeats, pre-eminent poet of the Celtic Twilight and then Irish nationalist movement, remarking that around 1900 ‘Everyone got down off their stilts’. The trouble with overviews of the literature by historians or politicians is that they are not professional literary experts, and so they tend to make the obvious points in the obvious ways, writing the same opinions as a thousand other ‘histories of literature’. So: with the end of the Boer War Kipling moved to Britain, settled in Sussex and radically changed his subject matter from tales of the dry and dusty hills of India to stories about England, Puck of Pook’s Hill and the like. The Poet Laureate Alfred Austin and Sir Henry Newbolt supplied a continuation of Kiplingesque patriotic poems but without the subtlety.
If you’re looking for a common thread among the poets it is probably different flavours of patriotism, from Newbolt at the jingo end, through Robert Bridges, GK Chesterton, young Rupert Brooke, and then a flotilla of minor figures, each with one or two anthology poems – Walter de la Mare, John Masefield, poets who would be gathered together in the Georgian anthologies of 1912 and subsequent years.
Hattersley makes the dubiously journalistic claim that one ‘great’ novel was published each year:
1900 – The Way of All Flesh by Butler, Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
1901 – Kim by Rudyard Kipling
1902 – The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
1903 – The Ambassadors by Henry James
1904 – The Golden Bowl by Henry James, Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
1905 – Where Angels Fear to Tread by EM Foster, Kipps by H.G. Wells
1906 – The Man of Property by John Galsworthy
1907 – The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
1908 – The Old Wives Tale by Arnold Bennett, A Room with a View by E.M. Foster
1909 – Tono-Bungay and Ann Veronica by H.G. Wells
1910 – Howard’s End by EM Foster, The History of Mr Polly by H.G. Wells, Clayhanger by Arnold Bennett
The New Woman was a recurring theme in fiction and a flurry of woman writers, admittedly popular writers, such as Maria Corelli, Baroness Orczy, Ethel M Dell, Elinor Glyn, children’s writers Frances Hodgson Burnett, E. Nesbit and Beatrix Potter.
What emerges from Hattersley’s brisk review is a sense of an emerging, educated, intelligent middle class, of the rise and rise of the New Woman, of the lives of working people described with a new seriousness, in Wells and Bennett up to a point, but with sensitivity and insight of genius in the novels of DH Lawrence who emerged just at the end of the period (Sons and Lovers, 1913).
15. The End of Innocence (sport)
With increased leisure time, caused in part by government legislation limiting working hours, went the growth of sport: football, cricket, tennis, athletics, rugby league and union, were all put on a more professional basis, paid, and new stadiums and halls built to accommodate growing crowds. Sport became business. London hosted the 1908 Olympic games. The conflict between gentlemen and players, based on snobbery and a wish to keep the classes distinct i.e. gentlemen unsullied by commerce. The first celebrity sportsmen such as Bob Crompton of Blackburn Rovers and W.G. Grace. The aim of gentlemen, in sport as in every other aspect of life, was to demonstrate ‘effortless superiority’. Contemporary commentary is littered with words like ‘chivalry’ and ‘honour’, words associated with the medieval ruling class. The MCC and other sporting bodies, like the House of Lords, could be relied on to resist the encroachment of commercialisation i.e. working class players being paid, for as long as possible.
Meanwhile in other nations, such as America, sportsmen specialised in one game and practiced intensively, sometimes with the support of a ‘coach’ (p.323). Or the advent of American jockeys who used a new posture, ‘the forward seat’, to win (p.331). In sport, as in industry and commerce Britain’s addiction to amateurism, hobbled by class war, condemned it to long-term mediocrity.
Horse racing has always relied on gambling. In 1906 the government tried to regulate it. In 1908 the sport established a new definition of ‘thoroughbred’, mainly with a view to excluding the threat from American-bred winners.
Surprisingly, given the general chauvinism, women progressed in two sports, gold and tennis, although these remained robustly middle class (as they are to this day). Popular men’s sports, on the other hand, steadily became more working class, football and rugby union being two examples, and boxing, the longest establishment popular sport.
Hunting, of course, remained the preserve of the aristocratic elite, surrounded by all manner of preposterous traditions, like chivalry ultimately dating back to the Norman conquest and subjugation of Saxon serfs. As a Saxon serf I have all my life cordially despised the aristocrats who subtly or not so subtly have asserted their superiority over me, John Buchan’s Lord Leithen, Siegfried Sassoon in his memoirs. No surprise that the resistance to Asquith and Lloyd George’s People’s Budget in the House of Lords was led by fox-hunting aristocrats like Willoughby de Broke (with his floridly Norman name). They were, and are, the class enemy.
So many of these social aspects remind me of what H.G. Wells in Tono-Bungay calls the Bladesover system, the way English society was structured around the grand houses of the landed aristocracy in the 17th and 18th centuries, with a constellation of professions (lawyers, doctors, bankers and brokers) servicing them, and had provided the social, cultural, mental and even geographic structure of Britain up till his own time, the only change being the stepping of new businessmen or financiers into various places as the actual aristocracy became defunct, but everyone working to keeping these archaic structures of thought and ceremonial in place. ‘The new middle class hunters wanted to conform…’ (p.337)
I was forced to play lots of sports at school: I disliked cricket because of the boredom and snobbery, really disliked rugby because of the sadistic pleasure big boys took in stomping everyone else, quite liked hockey because there was little physical contact and some skill, really liked rowing especially sculling because you could disappear down the river on your own; and in breaks played football on the tarmac playground, often with small tennis-sized balls.
16. Gerontius Awakes (art, architecture, music)
Another portmanteau chapter, which is interesting enough but feels like a dutiful ticking of obvious boxes. In 1901 commenced the redesign of the Mall from the statue of Victoria (1901) to Admiralty Arch (1911).
John Singer Sargent was friends with Monet but eschewed foreign experimentalism and made himself the Reynolds (i.e. the highly paid portrait painter of the rich) of his day. Hattersley quotes the avant-garde art critic Roger Fry describing Sargent as: ‘as gentle as a man as he was striking and undistinguished as an illustrator and non-existent as an artist’ (p.358), one of the few moments which ruffles the stolid flow of Hattersley’s dutiful nods to all the obvious greats.
The great composer of the day was Edward Elgar, condemned for ever to be remembered for his Pomp and Circumstance marches, written 1901 to 1907. ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ took music from one of the marches and incorporated words by A. C. Benson in 1902. Notes on Delius, Holst (lots of folk songs, St Paul’s suite 1912), Percy Grainger and the young Vaughan Williams (The Lark Ascending 1914). A little later, in 1916, Hubert Parry would set Jerusalem to music. Celebrations of Englishness comparable to the very English settings of Foster, Wells, Saki, Kipling in Pook’s Hill mode and all those Georgian poets.
Architecture characterised by the Edwardian Baroque. Edwin Lutyens, Giles Gilbert Scott and, in Scotland, Charles Rennie Mackintosh. The influence of Alfred Waterhouse on commissions of large public buildings. The Ritz Hotel. The RAC club in Pall Mall. Royal London House, Finsbury Square. Westminster Cathedral (John F. Bentley).
The garden suburb movement, Ebenezer Howard. Letchworth. Hampstead. the prophets thought it would appeal to all classes but like all high-minded movements it attracted the professional middle classes.
The Camden Town school of art, correlative of Zola’s naturalism. Yuk.
In 1910 Grafton art gallery hosted an exhibition of recent French painting (Gauguin, Matisse) which caused a scandal. The critic Roger Fry could only think to label them all post-impressionists, an unsatisfactory label which has stuck (p.356). It highlighted the philistinism of the ruling class and the sensationalising vulgar sensationalising of the press, led by the Times.
The first Futurist manifesto 1909, the second one 1910. Committed to replicating the machine energy of the age.
17. Would You Believe It? (philosophy and religion)
Summary of G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica which had such a dynamite impact on the Bloomsbury Group. Hattersley summarises it as claiming that morality is relative, changes according to time and place. This was perceived by the Bloomsburies as a huge liberation from Christian morality which insists that moral values are universal and (incidentally), strict and repressive. Moore gave them a theory which underpinned their already existing practice of passionate friendships and cliques. And non-traditional sexual relations i.e. gays and lesbians and other genders in between. Hattersley tags on a brisk explanation of Bertrand Russell’s work on sets and categories, explaining that both Moore and Russell were anti-Christian. From the heights of academia came an attack on the ideology Oxbridge was invented to guard. Backtracking a bit to The Golden Bough, the pioneering work of anthropology which theorised that all human societies progress from pagan polytheism through monotheism and finally achieve the objective rational thought of science.
The life and extraordinary discoveries of New Zealander Ernest Rutherford i.e. discovering that the atom is not the smallest unit of matter but is itself made up of component parts.
Second half of the chapter is about the Christian churches: the part erection of the Catholic Westminster Cathedral; the divisions in the Church of England between High Church at one end and Modernists seeking to reconcile the creed with all the discoveries of science, at the other; the Methodists and other nonconformists. No mention of Jews, Muslims etc…
18. Hardihood, Endurance and Courage
There were four Polar expeditions during the Edwardian decade. Hattersley describes in detail all four of them: Scott’s first 1902-3, Shackleton’s in 1907-8, Scott’s second in 1910-12, Shackleton’s second 1914.
Scott’s diary and the example of Oates are routinely trotted out as examples of British pluck, but reading any account impresses you more with the bad decisions, bad planning, lack of resources and shambolic amateurishness of the attempt. When you read that some of Scott’s companions questioned the quality of the horses and provisions before they even set sail but decided to defer to their captain and social superiority’s judgement (p.406), you hear the genuine voice of deference to idiots which led Britain to near disaster in the Boer War and to catastrophe in the First World War.
Plus the amazing adventures in Central Asia of Marc Aurel Stein, archaeologist of Buddhism (pages 396 to 397), and Colonel Sir Francis Younghusband’s expedition up from British India to Tibet (394 and 5).
19. Halfpenny Dreadful (newspapers)
Riveting chapter about the explosion of newspapers, magazines and journals at the end of the nineteenth century, and the creation of a particular type of populist paper at the turn of the century, focusing on the career of Alfred Harmsworth, later made 1st Viscount Northcliffe (1865 to 1922), creator of the Daily Mail (in 1896) and the Daily Mirror. His career is set against George Newnes’s creation of Tit-Bits magazine in 1881. Newnes mentored and trained a generation of journalists in what came to be called The New Journalism. Harmsworth was one, another was Cyril Arthur Pearson, who founded the Daily Express in 1900.
Hattersley says there were two types of New Journalism, one which aimed to report politics and the news but in a much more accessible format than the solid wall of prose of The Times; and the other sort which didn’t care about serious news at all and was packed with trivia and celebrities.
How with the outbreak of the Boer War, Harmsworth deliberately made the Daily Mail the newspaper of empire, the jingo paper, taking an attitude of unremitting criticism of the (Conservative) government for its comprehensive mismanagement of the war, thus letting our boys down.
Between 1866 when the Companies Act eased the rules of limited liability and 1914 4,000 newspaper companies were formed in London and the provinces. Between 1900 and 1914 ten evening newspapers tried their luck in London.
I didn’t know the Daily Mirror was set up in 1903 to target women readers, had an all-women staff and a woman editor. It only lasted a year. In the end the chapter is all about Harmsworth and ends with his mounting campaign to warn the government about the dire military and naval threat from Germany. Interestingly, he became obsessed with German interest in the very new technology of flying, which he thought the British Army was ignoring.
20. The Shape of Things To Come (new technologies)
Britain pioneered the canal and the steam railway but was badly behind by the time the two next transport innovations came long, electric trams and motor cars. The Americans and Germans pioneered electric tram cars in the 1850s. It took 50 years for them to appear on British streets. And the Germans, French and Italians were all ahead of us in car design. Where had all the engineers gone? And the investors willing to take a punt?
The 1900 Century Road Race to publicise cars (whose diminished legacy is the annual London to Brighton race). Henry Royce the engineer and Charles Rolls the salesman, a partnership made in heaven. the company went from strength to strength, but Rolls used his share of the profits to invest in airplanes. Lord Northcliffe took up the cause of air flight in The Daily Mail and offered prizes for manned flights across the Channel and from London to Manchester. He was taken for a flight by Orville Wright.
Senior politicians became interested. Louis Bleriot won the prize for crossing the Channel in 1909. Northcliffe arranged a reception at the Savoy and Bleriot’s plane was exhibited at Selfridge’s.
The great race from London to Manchester between plucky Brit Claude Graham-White who, of course, lost to his French rival Louis Paulhan. More competitions followed. Charles Rolls was killed in one (12 July 1910).
Ships: a thorough look at Royal Navy shipbuilding, first the companies and yards around Britain, then the revolutionary introduction of turbine-driven ships in the early 1900s. Commercial liners and the construction of the two huge ships the Mauretania and Lusitania. The Blue Riband competition for crossing the Atlantic fastest. The White Star Line commissions two huge superliners to be named the Olympic and the Titanic. On 14 April 1912 on her maiden voyage the Titanic hit an iceberg in mid-Atlantic and sank, drowning 1,515 people.
The chapter begins to free associate because as it sank, the Titanic sent desperate SOSs out by the newish technology of radio, being picked up by the Carpathia which steamed to the rescue, arriving 80 minutes after Titanic sank and rescuing 700 souls. Impressive technology.
And it leads Hattersley into an account of the scandal of government officials trading in shares on Marconi’s Wireless company as other members of the government were awarding the company the contract to build the Imperial Wireless Chain agreed by the 1911 Imperial Conference. Muck-raking scandal. Accusations of libel. Court cases. Commission of inquiry etc.
Epilogue: The Summer Ends in August
A recap of the very bad personal relationship between Edward VII and his sister’s son (i.e. nephew) Kaiser Wilhelm II, starting with the latter gatecrashing the elaborate ceremonial surrounding the funeral of Victoria. Wilhelm comes over as a tactless idiot, for example the interview insulting Britain he gave to the ‘New York World’ while he was a guest in Britain.
It broadens out to become quite a detailed account of the political, diplomatic and military build up to the outbreak of the Great War, seen exclusively through the prism of British-German relations, and more narrowly still, the erratic, angry, aggrieved behaviour of Wilhelm. It’s a sequence of events, featuring the Entente Cordiale, the naval arms race, the building of the Dreadnoughts, the Agadir and Fashoda crises, and the two Balkan wars, which was drummed into me at school for my history GCSE.
As to one of the most over-determined events in global history, Hattersley’s take is that Germany was determined on war by 1913 i.e. none of it was accidental. Germany had collected almost all her foreign debts while leaving her creditors waiting so that the Bundesbank held record gold reserves. Woodrow Wilson’s emissary to Europe, Colonel House, toured the capitals and reported back that the German Army was determined to attack and conquer France according to the Schlieffen Plan before turning on Russia. According to Hattersley Germany was just waiting for a pretext and the Serbian terrorists supplied it.
Politicians
Tory Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, ‘the most influential Tory in Edwardian England’, was languid and ineffectual, ‘personified the dedicated dilettante’ (p.84).
Joseph Chamberlain was a Unitarian by birth and a troublemaker by nature. (p.255)
Radical Joe Chamberlain banged the drum for a more imperialist foreign policy. He was one of the loudest supporters for the catastrophically mismanaged Boer War (1899 to 1902) in which some 20,000 women and children died in Britain’s concentration camps (p.99; described at length in chapter 5; incompetence p.90).
Chamberlain went on to aggressively support the idea of an imperial customs union, more to bind the empire together than for the economics. The widely reported fact that such a union would almost certainly increase the cost of foodstuffs helped the Conservatives lose the 1906 general election by a landslide (chapter 6: ‘A preference for Empire’).
Two new young stars lead the Liberal government, pro-Boer, anti-imperial, anti-establishment David Lloyd George, and temporary radical Liberal, Winston Churchill.
I was surprised at just how radical Lloyd George was: he told suffragettes that if women had the vote there’d be none of these stupid wars; he declared India would never be properly governed till it was given its independence (p.102).
Issues
Edwardian society was riven by disputes about: the Boer War; imperial tariff reform; the controversial 1902 Education Act; votes for women; Irish Home Rule. The 1906 Liberal government went on, in 1909, to propose a Budget designed to raise taxes on the rich and landowners in order to fund radical social reform, namely the provision of old age pensions, national insurance and unemployment benefit. When the bastion of privilege, the House of Lords, rejected the bill, it led to a constitutional crisis in which the Liberals called and won two elections in 1910, and persuaded King Edward to threaten the Lords with creating hundreds of Liberal peers who would flood the Lords and ensure the budget went through (570, to be precise, p.168) . In order to avoid this outcome the Lords voted reluctantly to pass the budget.
Poverty
If you like social history and poverty porn, chapter 4: ‘The Condition of England’ is entirely devoted to the appalling poverty revealed by the many reports, studies and surveys published during the 1890s and 1900s, which lay behind Lloyd George’s righteous anger and his and Churchill’s radical proposals to improve the lives of the poor. Millions of Britons lived in squalid one-room shacks or tenements, slept in the same beds, didn’t have enough money to feed or clothe themselves. A 1904 report concluded that about a third of all British children went hungry every day.
The theme is renewed in chapter 7: ‘Uniting the nation’, a thorough description of the 1906 Liberal government’s attempts to develop social policies, and includes the fascinating factoid that William Beveridge, the young Oxford social scientist, was sent to Germany to learn what he could about their system of national insurance, unemployment benefit, labour exchanges and so on. Here, as in so many other things, we copied the more advanced Europeans (p.465).
International rivalry
One of the leading anxieties of the age was fear of international competition, economic and military. As anyone with a passing interest in history knows, the Edwardian period was obviously one of increasing rivalry and tension between the great powers of Europe, who developed a network of alliances and pacts which, when triggered by the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, fell like dominoes to trigger the First World War.
Whether this sequence of events was ‘inevitable’, whether the war was the inevitable result of commercial and imperial rivalries, or of the alliance system, or of the creation of a large ambitious German state in the centre of Europe, or, on the contrary, was the result of a handful of miscalculations and misunderstandings, the kind of spats which had been defused and managed in the past and could easily have been defused and resolved in this instance, are issues which have kept, and will keep, historians happily occupied till the end of civilisation.
As to the commercial rivalries, it is probably a little less known among the general population than the First World War but, again, anyone with an interest in modern history knows that by around 1900 Britain had been definitively overtaken in terms of production and gross domestic product by its main rivals, Germany and America (pages 67, 109, 465). Only Britain’s ‘invisible’ exports of financial and banking services, largely to the colonies, kept Britain’s balance of payments from being in the red, based on the fact that the pound sterling was the global currency of choice (p.68). That and the large amount of goods we were able to sell to protected colonial markets, the most important of which was India.
It was this commercial anxiety which explains the appeal to many businessmen, politicians and commentators of Joseph Chamberlain’s impassioned campaign for an imperial customs union from 1903 (described at inordinate length in chapter 6: ‘A preference for Empire’). Joe wanted:
to make the empire a worldwide customs union which was held together by bonds of trade as well as the ties of history. (p.111)
Hattersley gives us an eventually mind-numblingly detailed account, not of the policy itself, but of the extraordinarily complicated political manoeuvring it triggered within the Conservative cabinet, 1902 to 1905. All of which proved pretty pointless because tariff reform, like everything else the Tories stood for, was swept away in the Liberal landslide election of January 1906, and soon afterwards Chamberlain himself suffered a crippling stroke (July 1906) and was forced to withdraw from public life.
Speed of change
Like so many historians of this era, Hattersley lists the dramatic advances made in practical technology (electric lights, the early telephone, bicycles, the swift spread of the motor car), in science (X-rays, radioactivity) and theoretical physics (no history of the period is complete without perfunctory reference to the world-shaking theories of Einstein and Freud) without really conveying their social impact. They are listed but not really assessed…
The endurance of deep structural issues
As regular readers of this blog know, one of the things which strikes me most about reading history or old novels is the continual reminder that problems, issues or ideas which we like to think of as new and exciting but have in fact been around for over a century. And the fact that they’ve been around for so long strongly suggests they are somehow hard-wired into the human condition or into the societies we inhabit.
Thus when you read about politicians’ and businessmen’s and commentators’ anxiety about Britain’s technological and industrial failings, and about the poor shape of British education compared to leading rivals on the continent (Germany, the Scandinavian countries) being expressed in 1901, and realise exactly the same sentiments are common now, one hundred and twenty years later, it can’t help but make you wonder whether these kind of issues are too deeply engrained in British society ever to be changed.
This came over when reading the chapter about the challenge facing Edwardian politicians of trying to solve the very widespread and horrifying poverty, ill health and pitiful life expectancy of the poor of their time. The debate about the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor, about whether the poor bear any responsibility for their poverty or are victims of a system which chews them up and spits them out as it requires, about how much financial help the state should give the unemployed, destitute and long-term, sick, what kind of support the unemployed need to get into work, debates about trying to improve basic wages – all these are debates we are still having today. And that, in my opinion, is because we still live under the kind of laissez fair (nowadays called neo-liberal) capitalist economic system that the Edwardians lived under.
This really came into focus when I searched the internet to find out more about ‘The Condition of England’, a searing indictment of Edwardian Britain published in 1909, by Charles Masterman, radical Liberal Party politician and intellectual (discussed by Hattersley on pages 65 and 66).
On the internet I came across an article about it written in 2009 by David Selbourne, ‘political philosopher, social commentator and historian of ideas’, in the New Statesman. Selbourne highlights the issues raised in Masterman’s book solely to reflect on how little has changed in the subsequent 100 years, these issues being:
- the Edwardian period was one of astonishing technological change (telegraphs, telephones, electricity, bombs and aeroplanes)
- yet ‘moral progress’ had not kept up with material growth, and the ever-growing wealth of some, their ‘vulgarised plutocracy’, ‘extravagance’ and ‘ostentation’ went hand in hand with gross poverty and ‘monstrous inequality’
- between the super-rich and the immiserated poor lie what Masterman termed the ‘suburbans’, members of the commercial and business classes, respectable but ‘lacking in ideas’, comfortable in villas with ‘well-trimmed gardens’, perpetually complaining about being ‘over-taxed’, hostile to the Labour Party, objecting to welfare for ‘loafers’ – what Disraeli in the 1870s called ‘villa Toryism’, the basis of the Daily Mail reading class which is still so powerful today
- Masterman complains that he lived in a society dominated by money, ‘organised on a money basis, with everything else a side-show’; ‘the people in England and America’ are ‘writhing in the grasp of a money power more and more in the hands of enormous corporations’, a complaint you read every day in 2024
- Masterman sees religion as becoming ‘irrelevant to the business of the day’ which has, probably, been true for decades
- Masterman sees the institution of the Family ‘breaking in pieces’ under the strain of daily existence
- Masterman complains about the ‘vacuous vulgarity’ of the ‘cheap and sensational press’ which actively deceives and excites their mass readership, betraying its duty to the truth
- as for ‘socialism’, Masterman claims there is little real interest in it; whereas the rich may ‘lie awake at night listening fearfully to the tramp of the rising host’, then as now, the ‘people’ has far more pressing issues on its mind: ‘how to get steady work, the iniquities of the “foreigner” and… which football eleven will attain supremacy in some particular league’
- and the Labour Party? ‘They may perhaps stand for the working man in opinion’, says Masterman, but ‘the majority of them are certainly remote from him in characteristic’, while ‘a Labour leader, if successful, tends to become conservative’
- Masterman even complains about the ‘strange mediocrity’, the poor quality of British leaders in ‘high positions in church and state’, something I read about in the press almost every day
In other words, Masterman’s analysis of Britain 1909 can appear, at first glance, like an astonishing anticipation of Britain 2021, except that… it isn’t, as I so often insist, an anticipation: It is an indication of how much hasn’t changed in a century and surely a demonstration of the deep economic and social structures which make up England, which are not somehow extraneous to English society, which are not additional extras which can be easily tweaked if only we elected the right politicians – but which make up the fundamental essence of English society and the English character.
Errors
A couple of errors leaped out at me. George Eliot’s novel ‘Middlemarch’ was not published in 1891-2 (p.308) but 1871-2, and General Gordon was not killed in Khartoum in 1865 (p.341) but 1885. The Russian Revolution did not take place in 1916 (p.359). The Christian states of the Balkans did not form a secret alliance in 1914 (p.475) but in 1912 on the eve of the First Balkan War.
Maybe the proofreader had become as overwhelmed with factoids as I felt.
Conclusion
Most of this is familiar – not necessarily a lot of the details, but certainly the general shape of all the issues. The book is packed with information but the reader gets to the very end and discovers that they really haven’t learned that much. The Edwardian decade was an era of rapid social, cultural and technological change and fraught with a number of political crises? Well, which decade of the twentieth century wasn’t?
Gaps
Having made it to the end of this 480-page marathon one glaring omission stood out – the British Empire. There should have been a chapter about the empire, probably divided into white and non-white i.e. a summary of political and economic developments in Canada-Australia-New Zealand; and then ditto for the non-white colonies starting with India (the partition of Bengal, the founding of the Muslim League) and then Africa (for example, the amalgamation of various colonies into Nigeria), maybe others in the Caribbean or elsewhere. The book was only published 20 years ago but already, with our greater than ever awareness of imperial sins, and the relentless multiculturalisation of Britain, this feels like a glaring absence.
Credit
The Edwardians by Roy Hattersley was published by Little Brown in 2004. All references are to the 2007 Abacus paperback edition.
Books & Boots 