by Simon Heffer
However, there was also a constitutional consideration militating against the Bill. Fisher’s opponents believed the Bill was too radical to be passed in the eighth year of a Parliament, and required the specific mandate of a general election; to some, such as Basil Peto, a Unionist MP, ‘it constitutes a very large advance towards the Socialist theory that children belong to the State, and that the men and women, who are citizens of the State, are to be regarded as mere breeding machines.’61 The measure came into effect before the new school year began in September, the same month as Wells published his novel Joan and Peter, which was devoted to exploring the rule of teachers with ‘no ideas about education at all’ in pre-war Britain.62 By now the country was acutely aware of how under-skilled it had been at the start of the war, and how deficiencies in general education had retarded the war effort. Indeed, some of Fisher’s critics argued that he had not been ambitious enough, and they were right. But he had taken an essential first step to opening up educational opportunity to everyone.
Further help for children, even before they went to school, came in the form of the Maternity and Child Welfare Act 1918, which allowed local government to set up committees to oversee the welfare of mothers and their offspring, funding coming partly from central government and partly from local rates. Ever since the National Insurance legislation of 1911, women in work had had health insurance, but those who did not work were denied it. These welfare committees were an important development in preventive medicine, and sought to improve the health of those who had recently given birth and to reduce the already falling levels of infant mortality and sickness.
The other major social issue the government promised to address – and, as with mentioning health and education reforms, it was with an eye to an imminent election campaign – was housing. William Hayes Fisher, the president of the Local Government Board (and no relation to the education reformer), told the Commons a fortnight before the Armistice what the government would do about housing. ‘A very large policy of reconstruction’ was promised, since he argued there was no point in pursuing policies such as improved child welfare or the elimination of tuberculosis if people had only insanitary, unventilated housing to return to, with no access to sunshine.63 Like ministers before him since the 1870s, Fisher intoned that ‘new houses must be built, old houses must be reconstructed and repaired, and slums must gradually be swept away.’ There would, he promised, be extensive legislation in the next Parliament.64 He raised the question of council housing, promising that councils could take out eighty-year loans to fund it. Town and district councils already had the power to provide housing for the working classes, but this would be extended to county councils.
The lack of manpower to build houses during the war had compounded the problem that in the most populous areas of Britain construction had fallen during the five years before 1914. Ironically, and because of the muscle of the Irish Nationalists, the only part of the kingdom to have had an extensive housing programme before the war had been Ireland. Shortages were so bad elsewhere in the United Kingdom that newspaper advertisements appeared offering rewards for information leading to finding housing in certain large cities. MPs dreaded the return of millions of soldiers to these inadequate conditions; there were calls for a million new houses at least, with every county providing its own assessment of its needs.
A survey in Scotland, whose population was roughly an eighth of England’s, showed that 121,000 houses were needed there alone.65 Some MPs suggested that instead of local authorities competing for loans to fund these, the government should grant them the money in recognition of the special circumstances. Only after that should developments be funded privately. There was also a call for more rural housing, to fit with the government’s policy of persuading returning soldiers to work on the land. However, there were still no promises of capital from the Treasury to fund a building programme, and no compulsion on or incentives for councils to launch one. Many Liberals disliked the idea of state intervention; but as Runciman put it: ‘For my own part, I do not like State action—I think it has been most inefficient and very expensive, but the need is so great at the present time that I place the necessity for houses in the very forefront; and I regard the means by which they are to be obtained as of somewhat secondary importance.’66
Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, a stricter Liberal than Runciman, rounded on Fisher’s proposals: ‘We have before us a Bill to-day which embodies within a very small scope two very important principles. The first is that the State should undertake the building trade of this country, and the second is that it should undertake that building trade on unsound, uneconomic lines.’67 Wedgwood feared that building houses at ‘charity rents’ would wreck the business of every private landlord and undermine private enterprise; and lead to ‘jobbery’ and corruption on local councils as people sought a cheap house rather than one with a market rent. He also feared the creation of an army of housing inspectors to check the satisfactory progress of this new state authority, and the massive expansion of an unproductive state payroll. He in turn was savaged by Lord Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, son of the Duke of Portland: ‘While we have been squabbling in this House before the War and laying down our Early Victorian economics, as the hon Member has just done, vested interests have been driving the people into a corner and depriving their children of any kind of playgrounds except the gutter, the alley and the court, and have been killing off their children by the thousands.’68
IV
Although it was clear from the late summer of 1918 that Britain was heading towards peace, the political class were far from convinced that the transition would be easy, or that the expectations of the public after four years of extreme hardship and sacrifice would be easy to maintain. The urgency with which housing, for example, was being addressed was not merely to keep faith with the fighting man on his return; it was to avoid giving the working classes any excuse to participate in Bolshevik-style activities that had not only transformed Russia, but were threatening to engulf Germany. Memories lingered of Lansbury’s Albert Hall meeting the previous March, to welcome the Russian revolution, the first great public manifestation of support for revolutionary ideals, and at which a packed assembly had sung ‘The Red Flag’. Lansbury had referred to how the Russian army had refused to shoot protestors, and had said: ‘We can understand that when the working classes of all nations refuse to shoot down the working classes of other countries, Government won’t be able to make wars any more. This war would end tomorrow if the troops on all sides march out into No Man’s Land and refused to fight any longer.’69
The next Labour conference, at Leeds in May, called for the establishment of ‘Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils’, like the soviets that now ran western Russia: Snowden was one of the main advocates. A motion was passed to set up the councils, but in the absence of any serious organisation nothing happened. Another conference in late June called for the truce with other parties to end, and for Labour MPs to withdraw from the government in preparation for an election. Henderson held the line, confirming that proper political warfare would break out once an election was called, not before. By then Labour already had 301 potential candidates, and announced that it expected to field another 100. A surprise visitor to the conference was Kerensky, the deposed socialist prime minister of Russia; all but a few hard-line Bolshevists gave him a rapturous welcome. In September, the TUC voted by a majority of 3 million to continue to cooperate with the Labour Party: a minority wanted a trades union labour party that would have been further left than Labour. The vote ensured a coherent labour movement, an essential underpinning of the party’s march to power. The government was thereafter keenly alert to professions of Bolshevism: Sylvia Pankhurst, whose main political aims for women appeared now to have been achieved, was arrested under DORA after a speech in Derbyshire in which she advocated hard-line socialism.
As the Allies’ position became stronger so, paradoxically, did the industrial climate deteriorate at home. A cotton sp
inners’ strike was quickly settled, but a railway strike over demands for higher wages began in South Wales in late September and spread to London and elsewhere in the country. Sensing they had the whip hand, the railwaymen refused to negotiate with the government if the government insisted on negotiating with elected officials: the militants had their own representatives. The government said it would send in the Army to run essential trains – and at once 3,000 men of the London Rifle Brigade went to Newport, a centre of the trouble, and to the Great Eastern Railway’s main depot at Stratford in east London. Even the labour movement disowned the strikers: the British Workers’ League called them ‘Bolshevist and anarchical’.70 J. R. Clynes, the most influential Labour MP in the government, also attacked them, for holding up food and munitions supplies while fellow working men died in the pursuit of victory. Because there were no trains to move coal 100,000 colliers were idle in South Wales, where two-thirds of the Navy’s and the merchant fleet’s steam coal was mined. The government told striking railwaymen they would be conscripted; that threat, coupled with the arrival of armed troops, stimulated a return to work. However, it was then the turn of the South Wales miners to ask for a shorter day, and to threaten to strike otherwise. The War Cabinet offered to reduce the hours within six months of peace, which restored calm.71
At the same time, it threatened conscription to striking shipwrights on the Clyde, who sought a minimum wage of £5 a week and had been told by their union leaders to return to work. While the government reserved the right to prosecute the ringleaders under DORA, it felt the creation of martyrs in such a volatile area would be counter-productive. Conscription of men who refused to work was another matter. On the morning of 28 September a Royal Proclamation was posted around Clydeside that concluded: ‘It is now necessary for the Government to declare that all shipyard workers wilfully absent from their work on or after Tuesday, the 1st October, will have voluntarily placed themselves outside the special protection afforded them.’72 For the avoidance of doubt, the proclamation ended with the promise that such men would be called to the colours by age group, mirroring the threat at Coventry two months earlier. If that was the stick, the carrot was the suggestion that a Whitley Council would be constituted to settle shipwrights’ wages. A ballot held after the proclamation defeated the appeal to return to work by 1,025 votes to 1,014. Since a two-thirds majority was needed to continue the strike, the men were back in time for the Tuesday deadline, with the understanding that a Whitley-style committee would hear their grievances. However, around sixty men under twenty-five who did not return to work received their call-up papers.
Nature, too, then provided an even greater example of adversity. The first signs of what would become a devastating influenza epidemic became apparent in the British Isles in June 1918, even though it was high summer. There had been outbreaks in several parts of Ireland that same month, and it spread to the mainland. It was already known as ‘Spanish flu’ because it was said to have spread through Spain a few weeks earlier; its origins were more likely in a holding camp for American troops in Kansas, where it had struck in March. The necessary mass movement of people during wartime and undernourishment because of food shortages and high prices exacerbated the problem. After Belfast had reported an epidemic, Letchworth, Cardiff and Huddersfield were among the first mainland towns to announce one; Hitchin Rural Council, which covered Letchworth, urged people ‘to avoid picture palaces and other crowded places.’73
By the first week of July London was affected, notably in the textile factories of the east end, where up to 20 per cent of workers fell ill. The symptoms were violent headaches, renal pains and a rapid rise in temperature to 103 or 104 degrees Fahrenheit. Indoor workers were peculiarly vulnerable; outdoor ones seemed ‘practically immune’.74 Outbreaks were then recorded as far apart as Surrey, the Midlands and Tyneside, with collieries in the last two regions badly depleted; high absenteeism badly affected industrial efficiency across the economy. In early July the first deaths were reported, from Dublin and London. Then the munitions industry in and around Birmingham began to be afflicted; and throughout Manchester, and then London, elementary schools closed, mainly because of sick teachers.75 London’s Central Telegraph Office, a crucial communications hub, had 700 people off sick on one day in July.76 Shortly before the summer holidays all the schools in Huddersfield were closed down, and in some places undertakers ran out of coffins. Ammoniated quinine was administered to victims but had no effect. Those proposing quack remedies and others of less doubtful but still uncertain provenance – such as taking cocoa three times a day – had a field day. Newspapers were filled with suggestions for precautions, such as eating porridge, forcing oneself to sneeze first thing in the morning and last thing at night, and to take brisk walks and get plenty of fresh air. Writing from the Garrick Club, a celebrated repository of clinical excellence, a Mr Harry Furniss proclaimed that the only known cure was ‘to take snuff, which arrests and slays the insidious bacillus with great effect’.
In October the epidemic entered a second and more deadly phase. When Sir Hubert Parry, the composer, succumbed on 7 October he was one of eighty people to die in London that week.77 The new epidemic quickly took hold, with outbreaks in Liverpool, Dublin and Middlesbrough by mid-October. The death rate in Southampton rose from fourteen per thousand to forty-four; in Glasgow it rose from twelve per thousand to forty-one, with five hundred and ten deaths in the third week of October.78 Half the deaths in Hornsey in the four weeks to 21 October were from flu; schools closed across north London, which was especially badly hit, because of sick children and teachers.79 In Ilford, where 11,000 children were sent home from schools and long queues formed outside doctors’ surgeries, undertakers complained they could not cope, and in neighbouring East Ham children under fourteen were banned from public places of amusement. In Leytonstone, nearby, so many were felled by the flu that families gave the local doctor keys to let himself in and out of their houses. Elementary schools in Brighton were ordered to be closed for a month. When the Local Government Board, three weeks into the new wave of the epidemic, issued advice on how to avoid the disease, The Times remarked that ‘it would have been better to lock the stable door before the escape of the horse … the need for a Ministry of Health to protect the public in matters of this kind has never received a more forcible illustration.’80
On 28 October the government admitted that the mortality rate had risen enormously, though Hayes Fisher, who had the cabinet responsibility for dealing with the problem as president of the Local Government Board, said matters were not yet so bad as in Paris or Vienna: even so, an estimated 4,000 people died in a week. The transport of troops was thought to aggravate the problem, with Fisher saying the deaths were caused largely by flu victims contracting secondary infections that had been passed on by a highly mobile population. In Sunderland, it was reported that queues of funeral cortèges had to be managed around the city’s cemeteries and churches.81 Death could come swiftly, and people were seen dropping from the disease in the streets. Inflaming an already delicate situation, it was reported at the end of the month that 111 ‘political’ prisoners in Belfast jail were afflicted. Worse still, given the shortage of men for the forces, was the report that at the RAF camp at Blandford in Dorset, where the average daily complement was 15,000 men, there had been 252 cases of flu in five weeks, 198 of which had required hospitalisation and 59 of which had resulted in death.82
The Medical Research Council spent an increasing amount of its resources on seeking how to prevent the spread of the flu; but because of the work it was doing on the treatment of wounds, it could not devote anything like the necessary effort to the epidemic. The Local Government Board, operating on a skeleton staff of a medical officer, four assistant medical officers and twenty health inspectors to cover the whole of England and Wales, oversaw the production of posters, leaflets and press announcements to warn the public of the best ways of preventing infection: though the only certain way was to lock oneself in
doors and avoid contact with anyone else. Schools were closed and the public was warned to avoid crowded spaces such as cinemas; and in them the time between performances was greatly increased, to allow for a complete change of air inside the building. The uncertain response to the epidemic was, as The Times and many others had predicted, a factor that would soon result in the creation of a Ministry of Health.
V
The flu epidemic, unprecedented in living memory and reaping its own holocaust, provided an unexpected context for the dawning realisation that Germany was near being driven to surrender; and contributed to a strange sense of ambivalence about it. Lady Cynthia Asquith, whose husband would survive the war but two of whose brothers, a brother-in-law and several close friends would not, wrote on 7 October: ‘I am beginning to rub my eyes at the prospect of peace. I think it will require more courage than anything that has gone before. It isn’t until one leaves off spinning round that one realises how giddy one is. One will have to look at long vistas again, instead of short ones, and one will at last fully recognise that the dead are not only dead for the duration of the war.’83 In her diary on 4 November Mrs Webb asserted that ‘there is little or no elation among the general body of citizens about the coming peace’: she felt this was because Britain shared her earnest apprehension at the prospect of a dislocated society, an overbearing government and huge public debt.84 However, these were things she and the political class felt far more keenly than did the masses, whose displays of joy awaited the declaration of peace. She herself took no pleasure in it. ‘Great Britain and France are themselves exhausted, living on their own vitals, whilst they smash German civilisation. For whose benefit?’ But even among the victors the realisation of an approaching peace could be salutary.