1
The sun never rises
The greatest shock of the Second Boer War was not the protracted and bloody guerrilla warfare, but the wretched condition of the British troops.* The conscripts were malnourished and sickly, their morale low. After the war was over in 1902, an inquiry revealed that 16,000 servicemen had died of disease, due to poor rations and constitutional weakness. Many of the English soldiers had been press-ganged by penury, but around 60 per cent of the volunteers had been rejected as unfit for service. This finding prompted further investigations into the ‘deterioration of certain classes of the population’, though they came at least fifty years too late.
Investigations into the military conduct of the war were equally disturbing. It had taken almost half a million British troops to subdue a Boer population similar to that of Brighton, at a cost of £250 million. The publication of these inquiries prompted the government to create a Committee of Imperial Defence to coordinate the armed forces, and stemmed the tide of English jingoism. In 1900, during the triumphant opening phase of the war, a wave of imperialist enthusiasm had carried the Conservative and Liberal Unionist coalition to power at the so-called ‘khaki election’. The Tory-dominated coalition secured a large majority over the Liberals, defying the ‘swing of the pendulum’ law of British politics.
As the war continued, those who had previously felt imperial pride expressed disappointment and shame. The working classes even declared their admiration for the Boer rebels. ‘What’s the good of talking about the Empire on which the sun never sets,’ one Londoner put it, ‘when the sun never rises on our court?’ By the end of the decade, patriotic platitudes concerning the ‘Great Empire’ provoked laughter.
Were the British army’s deficiencies symptomatic of a wider national degeneration? In the nineteenth century, many people had believed that English enterprise and integrity had helped to bring order to the distant territories and diverse cultures of the British Empire; at the beginning of the new century, they no longer believed these boasts. After the Boer War, it was customary for politicians to speak of the ‘consolidation’ or ‘integration’ of existing colonies, dominions and ‘spheres of economic influence’. It was thought that strengthening political and economic ties within the empire was crucial if England were to survive as a great power, at a time when Germany, Japan and the United States of America were flourishing.
Some politicians argued that the creation of a system of ‘self-governing dominions’ within the empire was the only way to secure unity, given the limited capacity of British troops and increasing nationalist sentiment in territories under British control. In the late nineteenth century, India’s educated elite had developed political theories based on the principle of ‘representative national institutions’. In Ireland, popular support for ‘Home Rule’ had been paramount for decades, and anti-English sentiment became more intense.
Similar criticism could be heard in England. The burning of thousands of Boer homes and farms by British troops, and the construction of 8,000 ‘concentration camps’ to house the evicted Boers, provoked outrage, and when around 20,000 women and children died in the camps, the anger grew. Then news reached England that the government had allowed 50,000 Chinese labourers to work in South African mines for paltry wages and in appalling living conditions. On the opposition benches, Liberal politicians took up the cry of ‘Chinese slavery’. Imperial expansion had been justified by the argument that Britain was bestowing civilization on ‘primitive’ societies. At the end of the nineteenth century, the English viceroy of India had boasted of importing ‘the rule of justice’ to the country, along with ‘peace and order and good government’. But in the wake of the Boer War, many observers regarded Britain’s ‘civilizing mission’ as an excuse for exploitation.
After 1900, the English were also forced to confront their economy’s diminishing international status. In the Victorian era, English manufacturers had dominated world trade. A combination of technological innovation and cheap labour had allowed goods to be produced inexpensively in England; the availability and expansion of imperial markets, as well as mastery of the seas, had ensured they could be safely sold around the world. Meanwhile, Britain’s colonies had commissioned elaborate engineering projects from English firms, with money borrowed from the City of London. The United Kingdom had been responsible for a third of the world’s manufacturing in the 1870s, but in the early 1900s this figure fell to 10 per cent.
England could no longer claim to be the ‘workshop of the world’ – that title was now contested by Germany and the United States, which had been strengthened by unification in the second half of the nineteenth century and had developed modern production methods during recent wars. By 1900 the United States produced more coal and iron than England, while Germany’s mining technology, electrical engineering and chemical industries were superior. Part of England’s problem was that it had industrialized long before its rivals, and neither the government nor the representatives of capital and labour had the vision or the will to reinvigorate the manufacturing sector. England was technologically sclerotic, unable to add to its imperial territories and shut out from many international markets by the tariffs of foreign governments. Her staple export industries of iron, wool, shipbuilding and coal had entered their senescence. To compound the problem of declining exports, England was increasingly dependent on foreign imports. After 1900 there was a balance-of-payments deficit, with more money leaving the country than coming in. Over the next fourteen years, economic growth halved.
At the beginning of 1901, The Annual Register described the outlook for England as ‘full of misgivings’. A few weeks later, on 22 January, the nation’s anxiety was compounded when Queen Victoria died. As the news spread across the country, church bells tolled, theatrical performances were abandoned and traffic halted, as people poured onto the streets. For many, despair was coupled with bewilderment. It is sometimes said by foreign observers that monarchism is the religion of the English, yet by no means everyone in the country was a believer: the novelist Arnold Bennett thought that Londoners ‘were not, on the whole, deeply moved, whatever journalists may say’.
All the commentators agreed, however, that the queen’s death marked a transition in the country’s history. ‘We are less secure of our position,’ announced The Times. ‘Our impetus’ as a ‘nation may be spent’. Soon after Victoria’s death, the passing of the ethos of Victorianism was also predicted. In his parliamentary address, the Tory leader of the Commons, Arthur James Balfour, announced ‘the end of a great epoch’.
It was not long before another pillar of the Victorian establishment fell. In July 1902, Lord Salisbury resigned as prime minister on the grounds of bad health, his gargantuan weight placing an inordinate strain on his legs and heart. Ever since the split of the Liberal party over Irish Home Rule in 1886 and the defection of the Liberal Unionists to the Conservatives, the Tory grandee had controlled political life, holding office for all but three of those sixteen years. A Tory aristocrat of the old school, he abhorred the democratic tendencies of the modern age, seeing his party’s mission as representing the landed ‘governing’ class and maintaining the status quo in their interest. ‘Whatever happens will be for the worse,’ was his most famous political pronouncement, ‘and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.’ Some observers saw, in the manner of Salisbury’s passing in the following year, an omen of the imminent collapse of the British Empire; others regarded his death as confirmation that the Victorian era had ended.
Nevertheless, Conservatives in the Salisbury mould endeavoured to deny the demise of the old order. To Tories, the Victorian verities, including laissez-faire economics and politics and the centrality to national life of the aristocracy, the crown, the Anglican Church and the empire, were sacred. Though the Liberals represented the commercial and Nonconformist sections of the English population, an influential aristocratic element within them was even more passionately committed to free-market capitalism than its rival party.
The passivity within the two parties reflected the inertia in the political system. The ‘first-past-the-post’ system of British elections made it virtually impossible for a new party to achieve an electoral victory. As a consequence, the Tories and the Liberals had shared power for decades. The right to vote was limited to males who paid an annual rent of £10 or owned land worth the same amount, which meant that 40 per cent of English males, as well as the entire female population, were excluded from the franchise. Since MPs were unpaid, only the wealthiest men could afford to stand for election to the Commons. Once elected, MPs devised legislative proposals that were modified or rejected by an unelected, Tory-dominated House of Lords, before being submitted to the monarch for approval. In addition to being the head of Britain’s church, army and aristocracy and one of its biggest landowners, the ostensibly ‘constitutional’ monarch actually enjoyed extensive executive powers known as the ‘royal prerogative’, which included the freedom to dismiss and appoint prime ministers.
In contrast to the English politicians, the country’s intellectuals celebrated the end of Victorianism, and eagerly devised plans for a brave new world. H. G. Wells compared Queen Victoria to a ‘great paper-weight that for half a century [had] sat upon men’s minds . . . when she was removed their ideas began to blow about all over the place haphazardly’. Radicals such as Wells used ‘Victorian’ as a pejorative term; a fairer, more rational era was coming. The Liberal economist J. A. Hobson remarked on the way increasing numbers of people suddenly appeared ‘possessed by the duty and desire to put the very questions which their parents thought shocking, and to insist upon plain intelligible answers’. What is the role of the state? What is the purpose of the empire? Why should women and the working classes be excluded from the electoral process? And what are the causes and cures of economic and social inequality?
Attempts to answer these questions produced a plethora of political and cultural movements. Socialist, anarchist and feminist groups were founded, while trade unions flourished. Some intellectuals turned to religious philosophies such as theosophy, or took up single-issue political causes including anti-vivisection and anti-vaccination. Many reformers looked to science to point the way to a brighter future. While different radicals promoted different means, the Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb believed they were all working towards the same end: ‘The whole nation’, she wrote, is ‘sliding towards Social Democracy’.
The men who replaced the falling giants of the Victorian establishment did not quite match their stature. Victoria was succeeded by her eldest son Edward who, at the age of almost sixty, ‘got his innings at last’, in the words of the young Tory MP Winston Churchill. Born in 1841, Edward had a distinctly nineteenth-century appearance, with a thick moustache and rotund figure. He had a taste for cigars, women, gossip, jokes and military uniforms, but his greatest passion was food. The tone of his reign was set when his coronation had to be delayed as a result of an illness brought on by overindulgence. The new king’s conspicuous consumption was a source of embarrassment to the court, at a time when a large percentage of his subjects lived in poverty.
Edward was also animated by the conviviality, energy and exuberance that was characteristic of the Victorian era. Eyewitness accounts describe him as ‘roaring like a bull’ as he vented the ‘hereditary Hanoverian spleen’. Many of his political views also marked him out as a man of the previous century. In imperial affairs he deplored the idea of granting autonomy to the colonies. Yet compared to his fervently Tory mother, Edward was more neutral in party-political terms, and less inclined to interfere in the affairs of government and parliament. On the other hand, the new king was eager to exercise a decisive influence over the government’s diplomacy. As the speaker of a variety of continental languages and as a man who prided himself on being a ‘good European’, he was better qualified than most modern English monarchs to do so.
Victoria had not been amused by the hedonistic lifestyle of her eldest son, yet Edward’s amiability, elegant dressing and fondness for public appearances gained him numerous admirers. When his coronation eventually took place, it was enthusiastically celebrated, and he remained a popular king throughout his reign. The author J. B. Priestley, who grew up in the ‘Edwardian age’, recalled the enthusiasm the monarch inspired throughout the country, and believed Edward to be the most popular English king since Charles II. The overwhelmingly right-wing English newspapers presented the king as an icon through whom they could enjoy vicarious power and pleasure.
Like the succession to the throne, succession to the office of prime minister was a family affair. When Lord Salisbury retired in 1902, there was no election; instead he appointed his nephew, Arthur Balfour, as premier. This was by no means the first occasion on which Salisbury had promoted a relative within his government, and nothing better illustrates the hegemony of England’s aristocratic governing caste, or the essential identity of the Conservative party.
Balfour offered a striking contrast to the king whose government he led, with his languid posture and subtle intelligence. His most famous publication was a philosophical tract called A Defence of Philosophic Doubt, and his taste for philosophic inquiry was accompanied by a genius for rhetoric. Yet this mastery of the parliamentary medium often made it difficult for others to identify his message. Balfour never appeared to advocate or condemn a point of view; instead of proposing a course of action, he preferred to analyse all possible options until none seemed viable. As a patrician Tory he had little interest in altering the status quo, yet there was something idiosyncratic about his suspicion of all forms of political passion. It was as though he was petrified by the prospect of anarchy, and he laboured to keep it at a distance through irony, oratory and even coercion. As chief secretary for Ireland in the 1880s he had been known as ‘Bloody Balfour’ for his draconian policies. ‘To allow’ the Home Rulers to ‘win’, he had said, ‘is simply to give up civilisation . . . and authority’. Balfour regularly defended Conservative ‘values’, but he felt no enthusiasm for any specific political issue. Politics was an art to be pursued for its own sake rather than a means of getting things done.
Many of Balfour’s critics dismissed the prime minister as effete and ineffectual, while others lamented his lack of interest in the people he governed. It was said that he had never read a newspaper in his life. With little interest in the ‘lower orders’, and nothing but contempt for a middle class ‘unfit’ for anything ‘besides manufacturing’, the Tory prime minister epitomized the hauteur of the governing aristocratic elite. Was this the leader to face the challenges of a new era?
2
Home sweet home
Beyond the palace and parliament lay numberless streets of newly built houses. They were semi-detached or detached two-storey red-brick buildings, with slate roofs and bow windows, timber frames, casement windows and small front gardens. Peering over the hedges that protected the privacy of these new homes, the passer-by could discern carefully arranged window displays behind lace curtains. In their tidiness, cleanliness and air of modest comfort, the homes of the ‘suburbs’ seemed to proclaim a prosperous and content population. During Edward’s reign, the suburban population exploded: in 1910, there were almost a million people living in ‘outer London’.
The new houses were given names like ‘Fairview’, or ‘The Laurels’ – the name of the home of the archetypal suburbanite Charles Pooter, hero of George and Weedon Grossmith’s late-Victorian classic, The Diary of a Nobody. They were typically clustered in squares or along truncated streets. Nearby there would be a park, a bowls or tennis club and a row of shops. Men in dark suits and bowler hats would leave the houses for work, umbrella in hand; young mothers would push perambulators, and boys from the grocer’s and newsagent’s would make their deliveries. Few children could be heard playing in the streets. This was the deep consciousness of ‘middle England’.
The suburbs were characterized by a removal from the commercial and industrial concerns of urban centres. Pervaded by a spirit of rural and romantic make-believe, with their tree-lined streets and patches of grass, they formed cityless cities for those who could afford to escape the tumultuous streets of the centre. The more leafy and spacious the suburb, the higher the house prices and the higher the percentage of owner-occupiers. A house in the green south London suburb of Balham cost over £1,000 to buy or 12 shillings a week to rent, prices that only the middle classes could afford.
At the lower end of the suburban cohort were skilled craftsmen and artisans, who had authority at work and were addressed by their ‘betters’ as ‘Mr’ rather than just by their surnames. This group also included shopkeepers, tradesmen, publicans, teachers, boarding-house keepers and small-scale merchants. They generally rented houses in the ‘inner suburbs’ and sometimes kept a servant – a necessity in the labour-intensive Edwardian home, as well as a status symbol to demonstrate that they were a level above semi-skilled or unskilled factory workers or labourers. Members of the lowest of the ‘servant-keeping classes’ felt too superior to mix with the working people in the public house but could not afford to frequent middle-class restaurants. In fact, they often struggled to maintain their social status, which was everything in Edwardian England – slipping down the scale and moving from the inner suburbs to the inner city was perceived as tragic and irreversible. Bankruptcy, loss of employment and the sickness or death of a family member might be the cause of this misfortune.
Clerks in city offices were more secure in their social position; so too were civil servants, bookkeepers and assistant managers, who earned between £300 and £700 a year. Such people kept two or more servants and could afford to buy houses in inner suburbs, such as Chorlton and Withington just outside Manchester. Yet more leafy outer suburban areas were beyond their means, though not their aspirations. The most attractive and genteel suburbs were colonized by the upper middle classes – manufacturers and wholesalers, along with the accountants, architects, solicitors, barristers, doctors, vets, bankers, actuaries and surveyors who comprised the professional classes. As the nineteenth century had progressed, they had become increasingly powerful and well-organized, with the creation of associations for each occupation. They could afford to keep several servants and privately educate their children. After schooling, boys would often take up the same professions as their fathers; girls were encouraged to become shorthand writers or governesses while they awaited marriage.
Suburbanites could commute to work in the city along the recently established transport links, which included electric trams and omnibuses, as well as overground and underground trains. Balham, for example, was connected to the City of London via underground stations at Kennington and Stockwell, and Didsbury was connected to Manchester Central Station by an overland train. Trams were the cheapest way to travel, with special ‘workman’s fares’ for early-morning journeys allowing passengers to travel up to ten miles for a penny. Yet precisely because trams were popular with workers, the middle class tended to shun them and instead take the train.
Whenever a new train station was built just outside a city, estate agents’ offices would emerge nearby, offering land to speculators, construction firms and private buyers. In 1907, Golders Green in north London was connected to the City by the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway; immediately afterwards, the armies of builders arrived. ‘All day long’, remarked a local paper in 1910, ‘there is a continuous hammering which reminds one of distant thunder’, as the tiled, gabled and half-timbered ‘semis’ grew up around the station, the railway line and the roads. There was no development plan and local authority control was virtually non-existent, so the houses were built close together to maximize profits. It was a sprawl that failed to take into consideration either the quality of life of the new inhabitants or the preservation of the countryside. By 1914 it was impossible to believe that Golders Green had been full of trees and hedges only a decade before.
The unrelenting development of these outer cities gave the impression that the English population was also expanding. Yet the low-density housing of the suburbs, in contrast with the high blocks of flats on the Continent and the older terraces in English cities, revealed a different demographic trend. The new houses suited England’s relatively ageing population. For the first time on record, the increase in England’s population slowed during the Edwardian period. Between 1900 and 1910 the birth rate decreased from thirty-six to twenty-four per 1,000 population; it was only the declining death rate and increasing immigration into the country that kept the population growing.
Declining birth and death rates meant that England was no longer the young, vigorous country it had been at the beginning of Victoria’s reign. In 1841 half of the population had been under twenty, but by 1914 the figure was less than a third. This development provoked further concerns about the robustness of the nation, while increasing immigration prompted xenophobia, with many complaining that England was ‘falling to the Irish and the Jews’. Popular anxiety over the racial ‘deterioration’ and ‘adulteration’ of the supposedly Anglo-Saxon English would inform the 1905 Aliens Act, which was introduced by the Tories to reduce immigration into Britain from outside the empire.
The keynotes of suburban life were privacy, domesticity and respectability. The privet hedge at the front of the semi-detached houses and their fenced back gardens ensured that the suburban family’s ‘home sweet home’ became their castle. Suburbanites could live undisturbed by their neighbours, with whom they might exchange no more than a few words. And yet everyone was aware of their social and economic status – the size of one’s house and its presentation proclaimed one’s ranking. The most affluent families set the standards to which all denizens of a suburb aspired: ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, a phrase coined in 1913, was the aim of suburban life. Everyone in a suburb was also aware of a neighbour’s transgressions from genteel standards of morality, such as an unwanted pregnancy. A group-monitored respectability pervaded these outer cities, and the word ‘respectable’ became synonymous with the suburban middle class.
The aspirational character of middle-class suburbanites offered an obvious subject for literary caricature. ‘We live our unreal, stupid little lives,’ a suburban character comments in a story by the upper-middle-class author Saki, ‘and persuade ourselves that we really are untrammelled men and women leading a reasonable existence.’ Other authors mocked the supposedly unsophisticated cultural societies such as drama, singing, art and flower arranging that proliferated in the new neighbourhoods, together with the tennis, bowls and golf clubs that monopolized so much of the suburbanite’s leisure time. The suburbs themselves were also denigrated and denounced. In his 1910 novel Howards End, E. M. Forster described a stain of ‘red rust’ spreading out into the countryside around London.
Some intellectuals championed suburbia. The radical Liberal MP Charles Masterman predicted that the suburbs would become the major urban form of the twentieth century, replacing the countryside as the breeding ground of a new ‘English yeomanry’. Animated by the Victorian values of self-help, laissez-faire and individualism, it was believed that suburbanites were distinguished by their drive, ambition, worldliness and agnosticism. The suburban middle class was also on the rise as a political force. Partially enfranchised by the reform acts of the 1860s and 1880s and then fully enfranchised in 1918, their electoral choices would determine who governed England throughout the twentieth century. In acknowledgement of the growing power of that class, the 1911 census made the occupation of the male head of the household, rather than the land he owned or his family connections, the main criterion of social position.
Yet the new population had its limitations. Neither political consciousness nor a sense of solidarity could flourish in the suburbs, where private interests took precedence over public concerns. In the absence of a strong community spirit and a compelling code of public ethics, religious observance also declined. It was not that atheism was spreading among suburbanites; it was just that they dedicated their time to their families, to leisure activities and to spending money. Sundays in the suburbs were spent playing golf, tennis and bowls rather than going to church. Most members of the middle class remained Christian in their outlook, but they increasingly did not feel the need to affirm this by attending church. Their indifference to the established Church of England set the tone for the entire nation, and for the coming century. While the Anglican Church would continue to influence English culture in the decades ahead, its popular appeal and political power would be severely diminished.
Copyright © 2021 by Peter Ackroyd
