The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Early on, the heavily laden and cumbersome British forces found themselves outsmarted and at times cut to ribbons by Boers who knew the land, understood the value of digging trenches, and could attack in fast-moving formations they called commandos. This was as shocking for the Empire as Viet Cong guerrilla successes would be for the United States later. Eventually, under Lord Kitchener, the entire area of fighting was divided up with barbed wire fences and blockhouses, and Boer farms were burned to the ground in order to deny these early guerrillas food and shelter. The Boer women and children were homeless and were transported to badly run camps, soon called concentration camps. There, in conditions of squalor, 26,000 Boers died, most of them children. France, America, Austria and Germany expressed their horror. A brave woman, Emily Hobhouse, the daughter of a Cornish vicar, travelled to South Africa to investigate conditions there and returned to tell the British public about the flies, malnutrition and typhoid, what she described as ‘wholesale cruelty’ and ‘murder to the children’. She enlisted political support and is only one of many radical and feisty women who set the tone of Edwardian Britain. This was a land still bestriding much of the world, but angrily self-questioning at home. And it was a well-informed nation too.

  In newspapers and magazines of the day the quantity of foreign news – from the Empire, but also from the United States, continental Europe and Russia – is staggering. Not needing passports, emigrants were flooding out of British ports to Australia, Canada and South Africa. A cascade of talented Britons, fed up with class distinction, grimy towns and lack of opportunity, was flowing into America. In the other direction, refugees from Czarist pogroms or Latin poverty were coming into Britain, mainly to London but also to manufacturing cities and the great ports. There were large German colonies in Bradford and Manchester, Italian merchants and Polish-Jewish areas. For the lucky rich it was a great age of travel and adventure. The better off set out by motor yacht or train to spend months on the Côte d’Azur, at one of the German spas or in Venice. Sporting aristocrats were busy slaughtering antelope, bison and tigers further afield: a whole dedicated class of civil servants and administrators were running the greatest imperial possession, India. With Britain controlling a quarter of the world and the world’s peoples, the planet seemed open and pliant. Literate people, and most were, may well have been better informed than people today, in the age of the internet and twenty-four-hour news. They were probably more interested, because in other ways Abroad was menacing. The German threat was rising, but the danger of invasion by the French had been discussed just as fervently. America was regarded as a hugely wealthy and energetic but politically unimportant power.

  Our world is visible, struggling to be born, in one of the most vivid, teeming, fast-changing, exhilarating periods in British history. London was the world’s largest city, a global capital which lured anarchists and revolutionaries on the run, millionaires from America and countless poor migrants from Poland, Ireland and Italy. The speed of technological change was at least as disorientating as it is now. It was not simply cars and motorcycles and soon the first aircraft, but also impossibly large and fast ships, ocean liners and new Dreadnought battleships, so expensive they changed how Britons were taxed, as well as the new telegraph systems, electric lights and, bobbing on a distant skyline, Germany’s magnificent Zeppelins. Yet the upper classes and their middle-class copy-cats were still insisting on the primary importance of a classical education. More people read ancient Greek and Latin than German or French, though thrusting and ambitious youngsters were opting for science and engineering as the new frontier.

  What were these people like? Still photographs of the Edwardians, like photographs of the Victorians, chemically paint just the wrong picture. For they are still. To ensure a likeness, sitters are caught in a rictus or trance, their faces frozen and serious. They seem impossibly stern, or sometimes merely vacant, whereas we know from the written record that this was a jokey, argumentative age. The jerky energy of early film is more useful. What about ‘the arts’? Are they a way into the reality of Edwardian life? This was a great age of story-telling. The Edwardians lived in the shadow of the great Victorian novelists – though both Meredith and Thomas Hardy survived into the twentieth century, the latter with his greatest period as a poet still ahead of him. But in the ripping yarn, the Edwardians were and are unsurpassed. This decade and a half saw Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles and some of Sherlock Holmes’s greatest cases. It was when John Buchan published Prester John and was working on The Thirty-Nine Steps; when Joseph Conrad’s great sea adventures and his anarchist thriller The Secret Agent appeared, and the hilarious, acid-drenched stories of Saki; when H. G. Wells’s finest novels were written, after his invention of modern science fiction; when Kipling was at his most famous if not at his finest. These were the years of The Wind in the Willows, Peter Pan and The Railway Children, which would spawn further wonderful decades of English children’s stories, so that a golden glow settled on our memory of Edwardian life that has never quite been tarnished by the facts. Today an academic priesthood divides these story-tellers into a hierarchy of seriousness, but it did not seem so then, when Henry James helped Kipling at his wedding, and Conrad dedicated books to Wells. Many of their stories appeared in the teeming magazines and journals of the age such as the Strand and the Illustrated London News. The country needed entertainment. There was no broadcasting. As a result, the Edwardians had richer internal lives than most of us today; their writers will appear throughout what follows.

  Something similar can be said about the graphic arts and architecture. The Edwardians were a riotously consumerist lot, just like us. Photography was not yet available on a large scale, or in colour. So advertising and illustration depended heavily on drawing and painting. And at illustration, the Edwardians were also unsurpassed. Alfred Munnings, the Victorian miller’s son from Suffolk whose horse and gypsy paintings would make him rich, got his first break doing advertising posters, notably for Caley’s chocolate factory. William Nicholson and James Pryde, two gloriously talented artists encouraged by Whistler, set up J. & W. Beggarstaff making posters for the theatres, woodcuts and adverts for Rowntree’s cocoa. Everywhere there was drawing, from the political caricatures of Spy to the Punch work of G. D. Armour and Phil May, the latter one of the greatest geniuses of simple line drawing ever. In general Edwardian artists drew far better than artists are able to now. They were properly trained and specialized in bold, striking and often funny designs. The cities were brightly decorated, spangled with colour and wit. In grand painting, for the richest patrons, Britain was under the spell of an American, John Singer Sargent, whose technical skill and bravura still leave the observer breathless today. He had the same sort of status that Van Dyck, another incomer, once enjoyed. Below him there were confident artists such as Philip de Laszlo, who has not lasted well, and William Orpen, who has. As the decade advanced, so did the march of post-impressionist painting, then Fauve and cubist influences, as well as the Scottish Colourists. The history of art inevitably celebrates the new, but British Edwardian art was much richer than follow-the-French.

  A similar flash confidence ripples out of many Edwardian public buildings. Town councils, major companies and government officials picked a bewildering number of styles, from ornate Dutch gothic to Venice-in-brick, English-cottage-on-steroids to Loire-by-gaslight. But with steel frameworks they created large, stone- and brick-fronted structures of complexity, grace and sometimes humour, which are much more enjoyable than the peevish, meaner buildings which followed between the wars. Their style was less heavy than that of the encrusted Victorians, but showed an innocent enjoyment of decoration which the theorists and minimalists would later banish. Just as Sargent’s portraits show grand financiers or title-loaded aristocrats who smile back with wholly human self-mockery, so the best Edwardian buildings have the scale of an imperial age while somehow managing to avoid pomposity. One way of gauging quality in buildings is to ask how many of a certai
n age are later torn down and replaced. In general, we have elected to keep Edwardian buildings, including the first really popular generation of semi-detached houses, well made with ‘arts and crafts’ influences that flow back to the Victorians.

  So, Edwardian Britannia touches modern Britain repeatedly. They were struggling with small wars abroad. They were convulsed by new technologies: the motor car, the aircraft, the motion-picture camera and the undersea telegraph cable, rather than biotechnology, digital platforms and the web. They were deeply engaged in the wider world yet sentimental about family and home, highly patriotic yet also sceptical about politicians, obsessed with crime stories and jostling each other in crowded city centres yet remarkably law abiding. They were divided by class and income and united by common prejudices and jokes which baffled outsiders. This was a roaring, unstable, fast-changing time but highly self-critical, too. Edwardian Britain was unfair and strange in many ways. But the Edwardians were evolving fast. The past is not a foreign country.

  The Great Paperweight Is Lifted

  Queen Victoria had died in bed, holding a crucifix. If there to ward off evil spirits, it was not powerful enough. She was being supported from behind by the Emperor of Germany, Wilhelm II, her dangerous grandson, his arm by her pillow. Immediately after she had gone, Kaiser Bill reflected: ‘She has been a very great woman. Just think of it; she remembers George III and now we are in the twentieth century.’1 Cousin Willy, as the family called him, would do his bit to ensure that it became the bloodiest century in human history. Nor was his history accurate. Though Victoria was alive when George III died, and so provided a kind of human bridge to the age of Nelson and Samuel Johnson, she was just eight months old at the time. Still, the length of her reign had been extraordinary. It made her death, coming so soon after the start of the new century, and though hardly a surprise, one of those moments which sent a shudder of awe through most of the world.

  In the year of her birth, 1819, Europe had still been adjusting to the aftermath of Waterloo, British cavalry massacred eleven protestors in Manchester, Keats was writing ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and Beethoven was beginning his great Missa Solemnis. In the midst of all this, the pregnancy of the wife of old King George’s fourth son, the fat, garlicky, sadistic and fifty-year-old Duke of Kent – ‘the greatest rascal left unhung’ in the summing-up of one contemporary – was of significance for only one reason. Though the British crown would pass to the atrocious Prince Regent, later George IV, there was then a problem: of fifty-six grandchildren, not one was legitimate. To ensure that his child would become Queen one day, the Duke and his heavily pregnant wife, who had been living in Germany, careered across France with borrowed money in a nine-coach convoy of doctors, dogs, songbirds, maids, footmen and cooks, so that the girl was born in London – ‘plump as a partridge’ – as she would remain. Her uncle, soon to become George IV, hated the very idea of her and when her father died of pneumonia in Sidmouth, Devon, the outlook for the baby and her German-speaking mother had been bleak. But he mellowed. Victoria remembered his grease-painted face and wig. The next king, the cheerful old William, tried quite hard to get her outlandish name changed for the day she ascended the throne.

  Had he had his way, the name he wanted, she would have been Queen Elizabeth II. Instead, she became Queen Victoria at the age of twenty in 1837 and her name became familiar to everyone who speaks English. She was a politically active, opinionated and talented woman, who not only spoke German, French and some Italian, but later learned Hindustani too. She survived periodic outbreaks of republicanism, several assassination attempts and the death of her adored German husband, Albert, though this threw her into a decades-long gloom, earning her the dismissive moniker the Widow of Windsor. Earlier, she had been an earthy creature, who gobbled her food and had a loud laugh, particularly when her first prime minister, Lord Melbourne, was teasingly scandalizing her with his cynical stories. But slowly, as the wilder Britain of the 1840s gave way to the more ponderous, self-important imperium of the later nineteenth century, she too became a solemn, heavy-lidded presence. This is how she is remembered, a kind of fat, white queen bee, gorged on the royal jelly of imperial pride by buzzing flatterers such as Disraeli and surrounded by sleepy-eyed progeny.

  Yet the nearly sixty-four years of her reign had seen Britain changed from a country ruled by a few mainly aristocratic families, still dominated by the values of landowners and protected by oak-sided sailing ships, to the centre of a global empire and an industrial urban nation in which workers had become voters. Waves of political reform in 1832, 1867 and 1884 had brought successive groups of men – property-owning, then ‘respectable middle class’, then working class – into the franchise. No women, yet, of course: the only woman in the land with any real political power was Victoria herself. She was well aware of the hideous conditions of industrial Britain. As a girl, she had travelled through the mining country of the Midlands, noting in 1832, the year of the first great Reform Act, that ‘men, women, children, country and houses are all black . . . The grass is quite blasted and black. Just now I saw an extraordinary building flaming with fire. The country continues black, engines flaming, coals in abundance, everywhere smoking and burning coal heaps, intermingled with wretched huts and carts and little ragged children.’ Blake, Engels or Orwell could hardly have put it better. But ‘democracy’ was seen as an enemy by the Palace and most of her titled ministers, a menacing, mysterious force that could not be wholly resisted but must somehow be tamed. When she became queen, politics was mainly conducted among a few families, behind closed doors, on handwritten notes and in self-consciously classical speeches in the Commons and Lords. When she died, political rows were being fought out among titled renegades, self-made men from the Midlands and uppity lawyers with a talent for rough talking, at raucous public meetings or through newspaper columns.

  By then the vast gap between how Britain saw herself, and how she really was – the chasm in which twentieth-century life would be lived – was already clear to anyone with eyes to see. Vast fleets of ironclad battleships, the clatter of lancers and hussars, the giant public celebrations, jubilees and durbars, could not hide the massive embarrassment of the British army being humiliated by the sharp-shooting Dutch farmers of South Africa. In the Foreign Office by the light of gas lamps, aristocratic young men with beautiful Greek were worriedly studying German and Russian plans to drive south through the Muslim Middle East towards India itself. That great scattering of white settlers in Africa, Canada, Australia and New Zealand might have produced satisfactory washes of pink colouring on the map, but it was a thin scatter: in 1900 there were already fewer white people in the British Empire (54 million) than in Germany (56.3 million)2 and far fewer than in the United States, which had a population of 75 million. The onetime workshop of the world was struggling too with high tariff walls overseas and old-fashioned industries. When Victoria died, Britain was importing huge quantities of German and American steel, and trying to plug the difference by digging and selling more of the coal on which these islands partially sat, hardly the sign of advanced industrial success. The shipyards were still ahead, but not always in technology. Four years before the Queen’s death her son Bertie, the Prince of Wales, had retired from his favourite sport of yacht racing at Cowes. His nephew the Kaiser had beaten Bertie’s Britannia with his new boat, and had taken to parading the latest ships of the German navy off the Isle of Wight at the same time. Bertie complained that ‘Willy is a bully’ and retired in a huff. In the same year the Blue Riband for Atlantic crossing times had been lost for the first time to the German liner Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse, followed by the Deutschland in 1900. Everywhere one looked, from Gottfried Daimler’s new high-speed internal combustion engine to the new electric trams, British ingenuity was failing and falling back.

  So there was a grey undercurrent of melancholy and uncertainty when the Queen, in her lead-lined coffin, with a photograph and lock of John Brown’s hair by her, was finally taken to Portsmou
th. The Countess of Denbigh watched the Royal Naval fleet and the visiting German warships give salute after salute as the Royal Yacht Alberta passed. By 3 p.m. the blue sky was fading and ‘a wonderful golden pink appeared in the sky and the smoke rose slowly from the guns . . . like the purple hangings ordered by the King’. She observed ‘the white Alberta looking very small and frail next the towering battleships. We could see the motionless figures standing round the white pall which, with the crown and orb and sceptre, lay upon the coffin. Solemnly and slowly it glided over the calm blue water . . . giving one a strange choke, and a catch in one’s heart.’3 Days on, after a massive military commemoration in London which involved more men than set off in 1914 as the British Expeditionary Force to France, the Queen was finally taken to the Royal Chapel at Windsor – but because of faulty equipment (a broken trace), her horse-drawn final journey had to be completed by sailors hauling her home using the communication cord from a train, hurriedly removed for the purpose. This was hailed as a great sentimental British moment. Whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t Prussian, or American, efficiency.

  L. F. Austin, editor of the Illustrated London News, thought that when the old century had ended ‘nobody was heart-stricken, for the world does not grieve over an imperceptible point of time. But at the end of the Victorian era, who is not conscious of a great blank?’ The very words to ‘God Save the King’ would, he thought, sound odd, ‘a phrase so strange upon our lips that it almost makes a stranger of him. Within the last few days, I have heard men murmuring “the king” as if they were groping in their memories for some ancient and unfamiliar charm.’4 Yet others were already impatient and keen for change. Beatrice Webb, co-founder with her husband Sidney of the Fabian Society, Britain’s successful socialist think-tank, wrote to a friend a few days later with bitter irony: ‘We are at last free of the funeral. It has been a true national “wake”, a real debauch of sentiment and loyalty – and a most impressive demonstration of the whole people in favour of the monarchical principle. The streets are still black with the multitudes in mourning, from the great ladies in their carriages to the flower girls, who are furnished with rags of crêpe. The King is hugely popular . . . as for the German Emperor, we all adore him!’