The History of England Volume VI: Innovation Read online

  Peter Ackroyd

  THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND

  VOLUME VI

  INNOVATION

  Contents

  List of illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  1. The sun never rises

  2. Home sweet home

  3. The lie of the land

  4. Plates in the air

  5. The most powerful thing

  6. Demands for reform

  7. The Terrible Twins

  8. What happened to the gentry?

  9. Car crazy

  10. Little hammers in their muffs

  11. The Orange card

  12. The black sun

  13. Forced to fight

  14. The regiment of women

  15. The clock stops

  16. England’s Irish question

  17. Gay as you like

  18. Labour at the summit

  19. Where is the match?

  20. Get on, or get out

  21. Crash

  22. The rituals of suburbia

  23. Now we can have some fun

  24. The country of the dole

  25. The Fasci

  26. The bigger picture

  27. The Spanish tragedy

  28. This is absolutely terrible

  29. The alteration

  30. The march of the ants

  31. Would you like an onion?

  32. The pangs of austerity

  33. The cruel real world

  34. An old world

  35. The washing machine

  36. Plays and players

  37. Riots of passage

  38. North and south

  39. Elvis on a budget

  40. This sporting life

  41. Old lace and arsenic

  42. The new brutalism

  43. The soothing dark

  44. In place of peace

  45. Bugger them all

  46. The first shot

  47. The fall of Heath

  48. The slot machine

  49. Let us bring harmony

  50. Here she comes

  51. The Falklands flare-up

  52. The Big Bang

  53. The Brighton blast

  54. Was she always right?

  55. Money, money, money

  56. The curtain falls

  57. The fall of sterling

  58. One’s bum year

  59. Put up or shut up

  60. The moral abyss

  61. A chapter of accidents

  62. The unhappy year

  63. The princess leaves the fairy tale

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of illustrations

  1. Edward VII (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)

  2. King George at the opening of the Festival of Empire in 1911 (World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)

  3. A tram in Yarmouth (Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo)

  4. The Boy Scouts in 1909 (Hulton Archive / Stringer)

  5. Emmeline Pankhurst in 1914 (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)

  6. Herbert Henry Asquith (Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo)

  7. David Lloyd George (Bettmann / Contributor)

  8. The British Empire Exhibition, 1924 (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)

  9. Flappers in 1925 (General Photographic Agency / Stringer)

  10. The General Strike of 1926 (Vintage_Space / Alamy Stock Photo)

  11. A Butlin’s poster from the 1930s (Retro AdArchives / Alamy Stock Photo)

  12. Members of the Bloomsbury Group in 1928 (© Tate)

  13. Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (Masheter Movie Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)

  14. George VI on the day of his coronation (Hilary Morgan / Alamy Stock Photo)

  15. Winston Churchill in 1940 (Keystone-France / Contributor)

  16. The Empire Windrush arriving in Tilbury (PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo)

  17. The birth of the National Health Service (World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)

  18. Rationing in 1949 (Popperfoto / Contributor)

  19. The coronation of Elizabeth II (Shawshots / Alamy Stock Photo)

  20. The Suez Canal in October 1956 (John Frost Newspapers / Alamy Stock Photo)

  21. Harold Wilson (Popperfoto / Contributor)

  22. The premiere of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (Frank Pocklington / Stringer)

  23. Mary Quant (Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo)

  24. The 1966 World Cup final (Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo)

  25. The Beatles (Keystone Press / Alamy Stock Photo)

  26. The queen watching television in 1969 (Joan Williams / Shutterstock)

  27. A British family watching television in the 1970s (Homer Sykes / Alamy Stock Photo)

  28. The three-day week (J. Wilds / Stringer)

  29. The miners’ strike of 1984 (Manchester Daily Express / Contributor)

  30. Margaret Thatcher (peter jordan / Alamy Stock Photo)

  31. Princess Diana (Tim Graham / Contributor)

  32. Tony Blair (Dan White / Alamy Stock Photo)

  33. The Millennium Dome (Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo)

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank my research assistants, Murrough O”Brien and Thomas Wright, for their invaluable assistance in the preparation of this volume.

  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 cruci
al 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. W
hile 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.