With the extraordinary Liberal landslide at the 1906 election the battles for hearts and minds waged by social reformers over the past twenty years seemed to have resulted in a great victory for humanitarianism. Ploughshares had truly become more important than swords. It was accepted that the state had a duty to care for the people in sickness and old age. By 1911 the harsh old Poor Laws had been thrown out and old age pensions and national insurance had been brought in. War went out of fashion and seemed uncivilized; it belonged to a less advanced age. Yet the period was overshadowed by an awareness of the increasing German arsenal. To defence chiefs the disarmament conferences and peace movements of the time could leave Britain disastrously vulnerable. When the period ended in the immolation of the First World War, ten million dead worldwide made a belief in progress seem like vanity.
But at the beginning of the twentieth century the omens were favourable. Telecommunications continued to shrink the globe. In 1901, after experiments conducted with the backing of the British government, the Anglo-Italian Guglielmo Marconi sent the first electro-magnetic signal across the Atlantic, from the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall to Newfoundland–Britain was linked to the North American continent by radio wave. By 1912, some 700,000 British people had telephones. Even the most distant regions of the earth, its North and South Poles, yielded up their secrets. The Briton Captain Robert Scott led his first expedition to the Antarctic in 1900–4 and discovered what he called King Edward VII’s Land, while the American Admiral Robert Peary got within a hundred miles of the North Pole in 1902. London became full of motor buses. The Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines were sunk deep underground, making travel round London much faster.
Around 1905 arose the starry constellation of left-leaning intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Group. A handful of gifted publishers, writers, artists and art historians did more to end Victorian attitudes than the death of the queen herself. Champions of the avant-garde with their art exhibitions, Roger Fry and Clive Bell introduced Britain to the conceptual revolutions taking place on the continent. Often the children of eminent Victorians–like the writer Virginia Woolf, whose father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was the founder of The Dictionary of National Biography–the Bloomsbury circle mercilessly deconstructed the Victorian assumptions they had grown up with. Just as the Cubists refused to go on representing the world literally, writers like Woolf challenged literary form with their fractured, allusive technique. They were mesmerized by the new science of psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the subconscious. Pioneered by Sigmund Freud it began casting its spell at the turn of the century. The importance of the instinct versus the intellect made a huge number of converts, of whom the most famous was D. H. Lawrence, a coalminer’s son from Nottingham whose novel Sons and Lovers came out in 1913.
Presiding over these changes was the old-fashioned figure of the new king. The most abiding image of Edward VII is in the waisted Norfolk jacket he used for his favourite sport, shooting, at his unpretentious house Sandringham. The style of the Marlborough House Set, as his friends were called, harked back to the days of the prince regent. Edward revelled in meals that were not only extremely rich but involved eight to ten courses and port and cigars in profusion. But in his way he was an innovator. He made it his business to get to know people from all walks of life, including union leaders and some of the new Labour MPs. As a young man he had insisted on meeting Italian revolutionary Garibaldi when he visited Britain, to his mother’s consternation. Where Queen Victoria’s court had consisted of the landed aristocracy, Edward VII preferred plutocrats and Jewish financiers.
Edward’s immense girth and genial presence had been a constant feature of ceremonial occasions in Britain and the empire for forty years. But Queen Victoria had prevented him from taking on any real kind of royal responsibilities and jealously guarded her powers. In fact, she disliked her eldest son, and despite protests from ministers, until he reached the age of fifty refused to allow him to read state papers. On his accession he was almost sixty. Deprived of a real role Edward had thrown himself into pleasure and did all he could to live in a way quite different to the Queen. Though the Victorian Sunday was sacred, and for many Victorians began and ended with church services, the Prince of Wales made a point of holding extravagant Sunday-night suppers. Though devoted to his beautiful and elegant wife Queen Alexandra, he had numerous mistresses, the most celebrated of whom were Mrs Alice Keppel and the Jersey actress Mrs Lillie Langtry. The subject of paintings and hundreds of society prints, Mrs Langtry was fondly known as the Jersey Lily. As Prince of Wales, Edward was cited in two divorce cases, but he shocked the manners of the day even more when it emerged that he had played the illegal game of baccarat at a house named Tranby Croft. He was called as a witness in a slander trial when Sir William Gordon Cumming sued some of his fellow gamblers at Tranby Croft for saying he was a cheat.
Once he became king, Edward VII took himself and his role far more seriously. Throughout his reign he was assiduous in maintaining peaceful relations with other European sovereigns, to many of whom he was closely related, gaining the nickname Edward the Peacemaker. His charm and extremely good French made him an important weapon to end the hostility between the two western democracies. After he had made a state visit to Paris, the final thawing out of relations between France and Britain reached a natural conclusion with the diplomatic understanding known as the Entente Cordiale in 1904. In fact ever since Fashoda a series of agreements over territories had started to lessen the hostility between Britain and France, culminating in a historic breakthrough when many old colonial disputes across the globe which went back to the early eighteenth century, including one over fishing rights off Newfoundland, were settled once and for all. France recognized Britain’s occupation of Egypt unconditionally, while the British allowed the French ‘a free hand in Morocco’ which joined up France’s north and west African imperial possessions.
This was a time of anxiety for Britain, for the Boer War had revealed her as having no friends in Europe. The early part of Edward VII’s reign saw a great many attempts to improve Britain’s relations with the rest of the world. Though Britain’s territories had never been more widespread, the last few years had been an inglorious period, and the once magnificent isolation seemed positively irksome. To counter it, in 1902 under the new foreign secretary Lord Lansdowne, Britain made her first alliance with Japan, the rising power in the east.
Like many British politicians the king was disquieted by German intentions. His wife Alexandra, the former Danish princess who had watched with horror as Prussian troops marched into her country, regarded most Germans with suspicion. For all Edward’s desire to be a peacemaker, he greatly disliked his nephew, the rash and often scintillating know-all Kaiser Wilhelm II. The kaiser’s personal diplomacy was unpredictable: he would send messages abroad or make speeches on foreign affairs without consulting ministers. Born with a withered arm, into a militaristic society which detested his mother for being English and therefore a dangerous liberal, the kaiser both admired and resented his English relations. But, though the English laughed at him and found his obsession with uniforms absurd, William was deadly serious about building a navy to rival his uncle’s.
In the face of that fleet-building, Britain’s greatest threat suddenly seemed to come from across the North Sea instead of from across the Channel, as it had done since the late seventeenth century. The king had strongly supported the commander of the Mediterranean fleet and future first sea lord ‘Jacky’ Fisher, when he had insisted that a naval base be built at Rosyth in 1903 on Britain’s east coast to guard against attack from the north coast of Germany. To counter the German menace Fisher invented the huge ironclad battleship called the Dreadnought and the fast and heavily armed battle cruisers. The Dreadnought made every other warship of lower tonnage and smaller guns obsolete against it. By 1907 for the first time Britain had a General Staff; it was felt that she could no longer do without one when all the other major European powers had possessed them for
the previous fifteen years.
Britain began to tie her naval security arrangements together with those of France. The Mediterranean fleet based on Malta was reduced as part of an exercise to bring more of the Royal Navy into home waters. Britain would rely on the French navy to help her patrol the Mediterranean. The two nations were to let one another in on their military secrets. There was no quicker way to draw an Entente closer together, although for fear of angering the ever touchy Germany British diplomats perpetually avoided a final commitment to France.
The last years of the Conservative government have an air of played-out exhaustion about them. Lord Salisbury resigned in July 1902 on grounds of ill-health, and was succeeded as prime minister by his nephew the gifted intellectual A. J. Balfour, formerly the chief secretary to Ireland. The Irish Land Purchase Act of the following year was the most successful attempt made by Britain to solve the Irish land problem. It put loans of £5 million a year at the disposal of tenant farmers wishing to buy out their landlords. By an annual redemption payment or mortgage, tenants would become owners of their farms after sixty-eight years. Two hundred and fifty thousand people had taken up the scheme by 1909. But, with belief in a separate Irish state gathering momentum again, the fact remained that a separate nation for the Irish was going to be a far more powerful idea than mortgages.
Balfour addressed Britain’s industrial decline with a new Education Bill in 1902 which brought secondary education under control of the state and caused the building of hundreds of local grammar schools. But the problems of the poor in Britain were too immediate to be dealt with by the education of the future. An incontrovertible shock had been given to the empirically minded and practical British by the youthful science of statistics. The solid evidence of Charles Booth’s figures showing the almost inevitable link between poverty and old age, published in his exhaustive Life and Labour of the People in London in 1903, combined with the equally influential B. Seebohm Rowntree’s groundbreaking 1901 Poverty: A Study of Town Life in York, could not be denied. It appeared that around a third of the British people were living below what Seebohm called the poverty line.
Joe Chamberlain’s faith in an ingenious new form of imperialism, an Imperial Customs Union which would have preference over the rest of the world, did not fit the mood of urgency. The Tariff Reform League–which he formed after resigning from the Colonial Office–and the import duties that would fund social programmes at home were denounced as a threat to food prices. It was Chamberlain’s fate to split parties: this time it was the Conservatives’ turn. Free trade was a shibboleth on which Britain had built her immense prosperity. Conservative free traders like Winston Churchill believed that an Imperial Customs Union would drastically increase the cost of living because other countries would slap on their own retaliatory import duties. The Tory free traders accordingly went over to the Liberals to campaign for the forthcoming general election under the slogan of the Big Loaf (free trade and the Liberals) against the Little Loaf (tariff reform and the Conservatives). In December 1905 the Conservative government had to resign and the Liberals under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman–whose moral bravery in attacking the conduct of the Boer War at the height of war fever united a party split into imperialists and anti-imperialists–returned to power. Chamberlain himself suffered a stroke the year after and had to retire from politics. The Tories had come to represent a sort of callousness. It became known that, with the high commissioner Lord Milner’s acquiescence, Chinese labourers were being imported to work in the Rand goldmines on contracts that were little short of slavery. Much was made of their treatment at a time when the Labour movement was starting to feel its strength.
At the general election in June 1906 the Liberals won a landslide victory, 377 Liberal seats against only 157 Conservatives and Liberal Unionists, which gave the new government a convincing mandate from the nation to implement real social reforms. But it contained a great surprise. The number of Labour MPs had leaped from two in 1900 to fifty-three (twenty-nine for the Labour Representation Committee and twenty-four others who counted themselves Labour). The Liberals’ passive acceptance of the landmark 1901 Taff Vale legal decision, which allowed a trade union to be sued for damage caused by its members during a strike, had driven the unions towards Labour. The large number of MPs fielded by the Labour Representation Committee pointed to the desire for radical change in the way that the working man was treated. After the 1906 election the twenty-nine LRC members called themselves the Labour Parliamentary party and Keir Hardie became its chairman. In fact the mood of many Liberals was very close to the new Labour party; after all, until recently the Liberals had been the party representing the working class, and in many constituencies they still were. The Liberal MP John Burns, who became minister for the Local Government Board, was the first working man to be a member of the Cabinet. A socialist engineer and trade unionist, he had been one of the chief instigators of the great strikes of the late 1880s.
The new Liberal administration contained some of the twentieth century’s most outstanding politicians, future prime ministers who would steer Britain safely through the First and Second World Wars. The chancellor of the Exchequer was H. H. Asquith, a Yorkshireman and gifted Nonconformist barrister. Somewhat to the surprise of his down-to-earth relations he had married the high-spirited daughter of a chemical bleach magnate, Margot Tennant, a member of the most dashing section of Edwardian society. David Lloyd George, the solicitor known as the Welsh Wizard, was at the Board of Trade but would soon become chancellor of the Exchequer; his views were informed by personal experience of the poverty he had grown up with in the Welsh valleys as the nephew of the local cobbler. Winston Spencer Churchill, under-secretary at the Colonial Office but about to go to the Board of Trade and then to the Home Office, was the son of the Tory Democrat Lord Randolph and the American beauty Jenny Jerome. He may have been born in Blenheim Palace but he had a hatred of injustice as strong as Lloyd George’s. The Northumbrian landowner Sir Edward Grey became foreign secretary, a post he would hold until after the outbreak of the First World War. In 1906, to all these men the twentieth century promised a fresh start in attempts to solve the problems that had disfigured the nineteenth.
In the case of the African colonies, as in India, most Liberal and Labour politicians believed that the British Empire was merely a trustee for the future. Britain’s role was to guide them to democracy when they were ready–which meant when education had become widespread.
The black African colonies began to be governed at arm’s length by Britain, the Liberals preferring to rely on local leaders and local institutions, or ‘indirect rule’. British MPs formed an important part of the international mission in 1908 which investigated rumours that King Leopold had ordered massacres of African people in the Belgian Congo. When it reported that the ‘mission to civilize’ had resulted in the Congo becoming a private slave kingdom for Leopold, where any resistance was met by death, the king was forced to hand over its administration to the Belgian state.
As a result of Campbell-Bannerman’s outspoken defence of the Boers during the war, he found their leaders easy to deal with. The Boer War peace treaty of 1902 had anyway been generous. None of the leaders was punished for going to war with Britain, and £3 million compensation was given to restart the farming destroyed by Kitchener’s scorched-earth policy. The Liberal decision to grant the Boers self-government in 1907 also improved relations, although two former rebel leaders, Louis Botha and Jan Smuts, became the most important figures in the Transvaal government. In 1908 the Liberal administration invited the four South African colonies, the two Boer ex-republics and the two British, the Cape and Natal, to form a Dominion of South Africa.
However, the price of creating another Dominion, as the self-governing colonies had elected to be known since 1907, was black votes. Despite their idealism, it was a price the majority of the British government was willing to pay. When the four colonies created not a federation of colonies but a Union of South Africa i
n 1910, Boer ideas predominated. The old Cape Parliament had a ‘colour blind’ franchise, but under pressure of the Boers the new constitution of the Union included the Boers’ colour bar. A deputation representing the nine million-strong black majority in South Africa led by William Schreiner, and protests from the Aboriginal Protection Society and others like the Liberal MP Sir Charles Dilke and the Labour MP Ramsay MacDonald, were ignored. The Liberal government washed its hands of the affair, on the ground that insisting on safeguards for black African rights might cause the peaceful Union process to collapse. Ministers did assure Schreiner, however, that the three black High Commission territories of Bechuanaland, Basutoland and Swaziland, which had no white population whatsoever and which were to be absorbed into the new Union, would be protected by various guarantees, and they were. But the colour bar passed. Relations with London grew much more amicable. South Africa came into the war on the side of the British Empire in 1914. Smuts, who had followed Botha as prime minister, became a member of the British War Cabinet.
Campbell-Bannerman’s energy had been exhausted dealing with the aftermath of the Boer War. Some important domestic measures were passed under him, but it was not until after April 1908, when on account of Campbell-Bannerman’s ill-health H. H. Asquith took over as prime minister, that the progressive wing of the party came to the fore. A flood of bills made dramatic changes to the social fabric of Britain.
The Story of Britain Page 78