Visions of Glory, 1874-1932

by William Manchester

  Wealthy Edwardians, like the peeress quoted by Vita Sackville-West, were untroubled by all this. It was the will of God; it was all in Malthus—the supply of food would never match population growth. They seldom visited slums. The only hunger most of them saw was that of beggars and the rheumy old women who sat under arches selling matches; to them they contributed a few coppers, a shilling, or even a half crown. Yet had they but investigated their own homes, they would have seen signs of economic distress. Butlers and lady’s maids were well fed, but scullery maids and other “under” servants were emaciated and sickly. They slept in attics, in basements, or on cots set up in pantries, and they never slept long; there was too much for them to do. Before dawn they were up raking leaves, rolling lawns, lighting fires, drawing curtains, filling vases with flowers, and bringing up breakfasts. Foreign visitors marveled at the miracles wrought by unseen hands before 8:00 A.M., before the households’ masters and mistresses arose, though one Frenchman, E. D. Gramont, found that “this majestic silence got on my nerves. Those great mute corridors, those never-raised voices made me homesick for the Latin hurly-burly; servants shouting, banging pots and pans, slamming doors.”47 But Edwardian hosts enjoyed quietude. Few of them thought of the toil which made it possible. If they did discuss their menials, they were as likely as not to do it in the presence of the help. Domestics were not supposed to have feelings.

  Before the ascendancy of Churchill and Lloyd George, all legislative attempts to provide relief for the unfortunate had failed. In 1905 the government established a royal commission on the Poor Law; the members included the Webbs, but both its majority and minority reports were tabled. Parliament outlawed compulsory trade-union contributions to Labour party candidates. MPs were not salaried until 1911. Financing a campaign cost about £1,000, nearly ten times the annual income of a skilled worker, so that even Liberals tended to champion the lot, not of workmen, but of the middle classes. In the radical Parliament that replaced Balfour’s House, nearly half the MPs were businessmen or financiers, one in six was an Etonian, one in three was a graduate of Oxford or Cambridge, and only one in ten represented the working class. During the thirty years before 1916, half of all cabinet ministers were peers or members of peers’ families. It was, for them, a splendid time, when everyone knew everybody, and gentlemen still wore toppers and ladies wore ostrich-plume bonnets, and there were always fresh strawberries in season on the House terrace, and waltz time was unthreatened by ragtime, and there were more hansoms than automobiles. A defender of Britain’s oligarchic democracy wrote that MPs “have an extraordinarily wide acquaintance with one another from one end of the land to the other. They are connected by marriage, by early association at the public schools and at Oxford or Cambridge, and they are brought constantly together by entertainments in the capital, and visits at country houses. Such a constitution gives to society great solidity and great influence, without the narrowness and rigidity that attends a purely hereditary caste.”48

  That did not satisfy Churchill, who, despite his loyalty to his new party, would be no more a Liberal sheep than he had been a Conservative sheep. He noted that a Liberal party rule enjoined any cabinet member from serving as a director of a public company, yet thirty-one out of fifty-five Liberal ministers were directors, holding among them sixty-eight directorships—a “laxity of principle,” he said, which “is a sign of the degeneration of the day,” reflecting the creed of politicians “who go about preaching the gospel of Mammon advocating the 10 percent commandments, who raise each day the inspiring prayer, ‘Give cash in our time, O Lord.’ ”49 He raised the specter of class warfare, and with justification. The Edwardian sky grew redder each year. In 1902 the British economist John Atkinson Hobson had published Imperialism: A Study, which had an immense impact on Rosa Luxemburg and Rudolf Hilferding in Germany and, through them, influenced Lenin. At the same time, the new British custom of the Pleasant Sunday Afternoon, the P.S.A., was providing expectant audiences for lay speakers who could entertain and divert them: journalists, humanitarians, adventurers, authors, hobbyists—and, more and more, radical propagandists intent upon exploiting forums to spread a secular faith subversive of the established order.

  The P.S.A., innocuous on the surface, was actually an institution of immense social significance. Its roots were the decline of the Victorian Sabbath and shrinking Anglican congregations—which in turn weakened the Tories, the Church of England’s most ardent supporters. The solid core of agreed religious belief was gone. The Bible had lost its grip on Englishmen. People were groping for a substitute. Fin de siècle ideas had become unfashionable—the Boer War had tarnished Kiplingesque imperialism even as Oscar Wilde had discredited Yellow Book aestheticism. The new vogues were popular psychology, pragmatism, Nietzscheanism, and, toward the end of Edward’s reign, the philosophy of Henri Bergson and the autosuggestivism of Emile Coué (“Every day, in every way, I’m growing better and better”). But perhaps the most influential ideological works were William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, appearing in 1902, and Sir James Frazer’s eleven-volume Golden Bough, which was published intermittently, in revised editions, throughout the decade. Guided by James and Frazer, the children of nineteenth-century Christian evangelism moved toward a broadening tolerance of all creeds—which is to say, a vulnerability to radical speakers whose dogma provided hard, specific, simple answers to all complex questions.

  That vulnerability was enhanced by a growing concept of a mechanistic universe—the obverse of traditional faith in the soul—which was an unanticipated by-product of the era’s scientific and technological triumphs. Edwardians were bombarded by news of discoveries: glands, hormones, vitamins, genes, Einstein’s E=mc2, Pavlovian conditioned reflexes, Röntgen’s X rays, Madame Curie’s radium, and the subconscious as revealed by Freud, Adler, and Jung. Fruits of inventive genius promised more excitement to come. Because of Guglielmo Marconi, the King talked to President Roosevelt in 1903 by wireless. That same year two Americans flew the first heavier-than-air machine, and Eric S. Porter produced the first feature-length film, The Great Train Robbery. The British formed the Bristol Aeroplane Company; the Daily Mail sponsored the first international aircraft race. The Russians completed the trans-Siberian railway. Sleeping cars were introduced on Egypt’s Cairo-to-Luxor Express. The production of Austin motorcars began in 1905; the following year the Royal Automobile Club turned its attention from steam-powered trucks to internal-combustion engines. In 1904 heels clicked all over Germany when the North German Lloyd steamer Kaiser Wilhelm II set a new transatlantic record of five days, eleven hours. Britons agreed that that would not do, and the Cunarder Mauretania made the trip in four days, twenty hours, and forty-one minutes. The Clyde was turning out bigger and bigger ships. The Lusitania, launched in 1907, was the largest yet: 31,550 tons, 790 feet long, with four screws and staterooms for 2,000 passengers. Meanwhile, the battleship H.M.S. Dreadnought had been launched. She carried ten twelve-inch guns. The kaiser, chagrined, announced that he would not only match her; he would widen the Kiel Canal to permit passage of the huge new fleet he was building. “Dem Deutschen gehört die Welt” (“The world belongs to Germans”) was the slogan of the Alldeutsche Verband (Pan-German League). The British public, however, couldn’t take it seriously. To them it was as free of menace as that catchy tune written in 1908 by the English songwriters Harry Williams and Jack Judge, “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

  But the cumulative effect of all this change, which should have broadened the human vision, gave men a sense of confinement and helplessness. There were new powers at large, many of them incomprehensible, none in accord with the tidy, distinct images of reality they had been taught as children. Apparently there were no limits to the ways in which the world could be transformed. The Empire had provided their parents with a boundless frontier. Now, with the conquest of northern Nigeria in 1903, the map had filled up; Britain’s new imperial challenge was not to get, but to hold. That stifled initiative abroad, and
turned frustrated energy inward, into increased demands for innovation at home. The long peace of domestic law and order was shattered, the framework of Edwardian society shaken. Union organizers, reformers, and agitators told workmen of their plight. The mass-circulation newspapers—owned, ironically, by die-hard Tories—confirmed it. Labor struck, in the mines, on the docks, on the railroads; even in the newspaper composing rooms. In 1907 the Sinn Féin (“Ourselves Alone”) was formed in Dublin, and Ireland flamed anew.

  Finally, the balance between the sexes, the linchpin of the English home, came under ferocious attack. The attackers were idealistic wives. Their issue was the vote. Fewer than a third of all Edwardian Britons were entitled to go to the polls. Voters had to be heads of households, lodgers unencumbered by debts, owners of property, or educated. And they had to be male. In 1903 three militant feminists, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, launched a crusade against sexism by founding the Women’s Social and Political Union. The “Suffragettes,” as the Daily Mail christened them in 1906, never attracted mass support, but they were alarmingly vocal and, in their campaign of civil disobedience, extraordinarily violent. One of them, Emily Davison, made the supreme sacrifice by throwing herself under the hooves of the King’s horse at the Derby. Her comrades smashed shop windows, chained themselves to the gates of Buckingham Palace, bombed monuments, and burned down public buildings. Women like Jennie, who had flourished in the roles men had assigned them, thought that the “female suffrage women” were, as she put it, “too odious.” But other upper-class women were the movement’s backbone. Their husbands were shocked. Some became converts, though enough remained obdurate to defeat a woman suffrage bill in the House. Churchill spoke for them when, reviving a word which had passed out of the language, he said he refused to be “henpecked on a question of such grave importance.”50

  These shadows cast by coming events were very real, and are defined here to qualify the general impression of the Edwardian era as one of absolute serenity. Yet they did not long darken the days of the favored few. In his Mount Street rooms Churchill knew a tranquillity and security unavailable anywhere today. He did not appreciate it, of course; men rarely understand the sources of their strength. His inspiration continued to be the man who had abused him most. Memorabilia of his father dominated the flat. The walls were hung with pictures of Randolph, cartoons of Randolph from Vanity Fair and Punch, and a photograph of Randolph’s champion horse Abbesse de Jouarre—“Abscess of the Jaw,” the jockeys had called it. Winston sat in his father’s carved oak chair behind his father’s immense desk, dipped his pen in his father’s brass inkwell, and toiled nearly every evening on his current work in progress, a two-volume biography entitled Lord Randolph Churchill.

  His baths were drawn, his boots polished, his clothes laid out, and his small cellar of J. and C. Clark wines inventoried by his current valet, George Scrivings. A maid swept the gray pile carpet and dusted the gleaming, dark, heavy furniture, which, this being a typical Mayfair flat, required a lot of dusting. There were petit point chairs, a large Coromandel screen, a “sociable” on which two people of opposite sexes might sit, facing each other but properly divided by the arm; tortured carvings of ebony, Benares brass, a red-and-gold Crown Derby tea set; and mahogany tables littered with family and polo-team photographs, silver cannon models, model soldiers, jade ashtrays, Indian and Egyptian carvings, celadon bowls, a Fabergé cigar box, twin candelabra, and a small clock. The air was exotic with the scents of wax and furniture oils. Books were everywhere. There were even bookshelves in the bathroom. Hugh Massingham, coming to call, found the occupant literally “sleeping with encyclopedias.” Pasted in huge scrapbooks were newspaper clippings on every public topic and on prominent men, particularly Winston S. Churchill. In an unguarded moment he mentioned these to Balfour, explaining that they were useful for reference. AJB’s lip curled. He said disdainfully that he could not see the point of “rummaging through a rubbish heap on the problematical chance of finding a cigar butt.”51

  Impressions of Churchill at this time are varied but vivid. Wilfrid Blunt, meeting him for the first time, described him as “a little, square headed fellow of no very striking appearance, but of wit, intelligence, and originality.” On the other hand, Leslie Hore-Belisha, who was ten years old when Churchill called on his father in Manchester, thought him very striking indeed; Winston was wearing “a frock coat with silk facings and below his chin was a large winged collar with a black bow tie…. I went so far as to buy—and wear in private—a large winged collar. Thus the imagination of a small boy was captured.” Directly after her first dinner-party encounter with him, Violet Asquith had gone to her father and told him that for the first time in her life she had seen genius. Asquith chuckled and said, “Well, Winston would certainly agree with you there—but I am not sure you will find many others of the same mind.” Then he added, “Still, I know exactly what you mean. He is not only remarkable but unique.” Jennie’s new sister-in-law, Daisy Cornwallis-West, was uncharmed; her brother’s marriage, she wrote, “made Winston Churchill a connection of ours, a prospect we viewed with somewhat mixed feelings. I cannot honestly say I ever cared for him very much.” The same trait attracted and repelled: his brilliant, compulsive conversation. His critics called it “bombast,” the “self-advertisement” of an “arriviste.” His admirers delighted in what they regarded as genuine wit. Lloyd George told him he was against the social order. Winston replied: “You are only against those parts of it that get in your way.” Churchill described F. E. Smith’s debating skills: “The bludgeon for the platform; the entangling net and unexpected trident for the Courts of Law; and a jug of clear spring water for an anxious, perplexed conclave.” “The difference between Balfour and Asquith,” he said, “is that Arthur is wicked and moral, while Asquith is good and immoral.”52

  Churchill’s capacity for work was remarkable. His appointment book shows that in his first two weeks as an MP he dined out eight times, attended a trade conference, conducted an inquiry at the Treasury, called on the prime minister, delivered three speeches in the House, campaigned for a Conservative candidate in Manchester, and was there to congratulate him on his victory. One friend recalled in his memoirs that Winston “gave himself to work. When he was not busy with politics, he was reading or writing. He did not lead the life of other young men in London. He may have visited political clubs, but I never met him walking in Pall Mall or Hyde Park where sooner or later one used to meet most friends. I never met him at a dinner-party that had not some public or private purpose.”53

  Once he began writing his father’s biography he attended even fewer parties, and was never seen at dances. The rest of his set hummed Franz Lehár’s new waltzes; Churchill was reluctant even to learn the step. In Anglo-American Memories, George Smalley, a journalist from the United States, described a weekend as Churchill’s fellow guest at Dunrobin, the seat of the Duke of Sutherland. Winston invited him into his bedroom, and Smalley gaped. The room, he wrote, “had been turned into a literary workshop, strewn with books and papers and all the apparatus of the writer. He had brought with him a tin box, some three feet square, divided into closed compartments. This was his travelling companion on journeys of pleasure…. His hostess had provided him with a large writing-table. This was covered with papers, loose and in docketed bundles, but all in exact order for ready reference…. When we left Dunrobin we found that Winston had reserved a compartment in the railway train for himself and for his big tin case of papers. He shut himself up there, and during that long journey read and wrote and worked as if a Highland railway train were the natural and convenient laboratory in which literature of a high order was to be distilled.”54

  Yet this view of Churchill may have been exaggerated. Like most men of affairs, he had learned to use his time efficiently, and in London he was all business. But he was not what today would be called a workaholic. Many of his leisured friends, it must be remembered, did not work at all; very little dedic
ation was necessary to impress them. His appetite for statecraft did not prevent him from playing when he chose. He followed the races—at a Warwick Castle house party he astounded his fellow guests by reciting the names of the last fifty Derby winners and their breeding—and he always found time for polo, boar hunting, duck shooting, and holidays abroad. In Egypt he sailed up the Nile on a dahabeah with his aunt Leonie, Hicks-Beach, Sir John Gorst, the Duke and Duchess of Connaught, and Alice Keppel. In Switzerland he was the guest of Sir Ernest and Lady Cassel, and at Balmoral he stalked stages with His Majesty. (“You will see the King on Weds when he comes to Invercauld,” he wrote his mother; “mind you gush to him about my having written to you saying how much etc etc I had enjoyed myself here.”) After observing German military maneuvers as the guest of another personage, HM’s nephew the kaiser, he traveled by stages through Breslau, Vienna, Venice, Bologna, Ravenna, Rimini, Urbino, San Marino, Perugia, Siena, and Eichorn. “Such a lot of churches we have seen and saints and pictures ‘galore,’ ” he wrote. “It has been vy pleasant.”55 Similar expeditions were always available to him; indeed, he had difficulty avoiding them. He knew so many members of society, and was such an eligible bachelor, that he had to go into hiding to finish his father’s biography. Sunny, not yet troubled by his growing radicalism, turned Blenheim over to him for three or four months each year. The book was completed in the palace and, when published, was well received, though Balfour found the passages mentioning him objectionable. In the first four months the set sold 5,827 copies. An American edition, and then a one-volume British edition, were equally successful.