The History of England Volume VI: Innovation Read online

  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 nonexistent, 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.

  3

  The lie of the land

  Beyond the suburbs lay the old villages of rural England, whose decay was constantly lamented. Over 1 million English people still worked the land, but they represented a dwindling percentage of the workforce. In 1851 a quarter of English males were agricultural labourers, but by 1911 the figure fell below 5 per cent. England was now an overwhelmingly urban nation, with over three-quarters of the population living in towns and cities – a development that alarmed those who believed that the health of the English people was threatened by urban living.

  Rural labourers lived in six main areas of the country – the grazing counties of the north-west, north-east and south-west, and the arable counties of East Anglia, the Midlands and the south-east. The agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century had ravaged the arable sector. In 1870 arable goods had accounted for half of the national agricultural produce, but by 1914 that figure had fallen below 20 per cent. Improvements in transport and preservation allowed producers as far away as New Zealand to export their goods to England; half of all food consumed in the country was imported.

  Wages for those who worked the land were low at the start of Edward’s reign. The average pay for a sixty-five-hour week was around 12 shillings, a sum which the social reformer Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree described as ‘insufficient to maintain a family of average size in a state of merely physical efficiency’. Rural wages would increase by 3 per cent between 1900 and 1912, well behind the general 15 per cent increase in the cost of living over the same period. Where possible, agricultural labourers would rear their own animals for slaughter and cultivate their own allotments.

  The English peasantry owned none of the land it cultivated. After the enclosures of the previous centuries, almost every rural acre belonged to private aristocratic landlords. Even in Ireland, where great swathes of the land had been appropriated by the British from the native Catholic population in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the situation was more favourable to agricultural labourers, after the 1903 Wyndham Land (Purchase) Act offered subsidies to tenants who wanted to purchase land from landlords. Agricultural labour in Edwardian England was often characterized as cheerless toil for someone else’s benefit, while living conditions for the peasantry were frequently desperate. It is hardly surprising that so many labourers either joined unions and agitated for an improvement in their lot or left the land for towns and cities. With the country population decreasing, the traditional rural way of life, with its ancient trades, crafts and pastimes, slowly died out. Village festivals became less frequent and public houses shut down, while bread and meat were now bought from the baker’s and butcher’s vans that came from the nearest town.

  On their journeys to England’s cities, emigrant rural workers would often meet wealthy townspeople travelling in the opposite direction by motor car. Upper-middle-class Edwardians decided to move to the country in order to return to the ‘simpler’ way of life that had been evoked in the works of such Victorian writers as John Ruskin. The magazine Country Life, founded at the end of the 1890s, exerted an even larger influence, with its promises of ‘peace, plenty and quiet’ for the ‘country-loving businessman’. Nostalgia for a largely imaginary version of traditional rural life would be a prominent feature of the urban middle-class imagination throughout the twentieth century. The more country life was destroyed, the greater influence the ideal of that traditional life exercised on the English psyche.

  While rich city folk often claimed to love traditional rural life, they were not prepared to forgo modern comfort. Instead of renovating the dilapidated cottages left vacant by the city-bound peasants, they generally built their own ‘cottagey’ homes replete with modern conveniences. Numerous ‘riverside’ housing developments sprang up along the Thames, with regular railway services allowing their inhabitants to commute to the City. The new houses were in the countryside but not of it. The sounds of a piano or a tennis party would issue from them; city talk now filled the country lanes.

  When the rural workers arrived in a city, they found streets upon streets of indistinguishable houses and shops. The majority of the working-class men who inhabited inner cities were semi-skilled or unskilled labourers employed in factories or in the construction industry for a weekly wage. Others, still lower down the social and economic scale, assumed more precarious occupations, such as scavenger, knife grinder or hawker. According to the 1911 census, the leading occupational category for working-class men and women in England was domestic service, with some one and a quarter million people employed as servants. The number of people in domestic work reinforced the Conservative idea of England as an ‘organic’ hierarchical society in which everyone had a place and knew it.

  Working-class people who were not live-in domestics often resided in the ‘two-up, two-down’ terraced city houses constructed during Victoria’s reign. These cheaply built ‘workers’ cottages’ were poorly insulated and lacked running water, though many were now lit by gas. Family life centred on the ground-floor room at the back of the house, which served as a kitchen and living room. The front room downstairs displayed the family’s best furniture and was used only on special occasions. There was a small garden at the back with an outdoor toilet; the garden could be used to grow vegetables or as a yard where work tools might be stored.

  Just under half of the working classes were officially classified as impoverished. While the national income increased by 20 per cent over Edward’s reign, real wages dropped by around 6 per cent. When working husbands failed to bring in enough money to cover their family’s needs, their wives were forced to pawn the family’s possessions. In the first decade of the new century there were 700 pawn shops within ten miles of the City of London.