by Andrew Marr
The science-fiction writer H. G. Wells felt frank relief. He thought the old Queen had been like ‘a great paperweight’ and, now that she was removed, he expected all kinds of new ideas to blow around. So they would – though, as we shall see, they were not always good ones. Henry James, the expatriate American novelist and exquisite snob, thought ‘Bertie’, the new king, ‘a vulgarian’ and believed Victoria had died after being sickened and humiliated by the Boer War: ‘I mourn the safe, motherly old middle-class queen who held the nation warm under the folds of her big, hideous Scotch-plaid shawl.’ He admitted to feeling her death deeply and predicted that ‘the wild waters are upon us now’.5 Young Winston Churchill heard the news in snowy Winnipeg, where he was raising cash on a lecture tour. His father had clashed with Bertie in the past and Churchill showed no trace of sentiment in a letter to his mother: ‘I am curious to know about the King. Will it entirely revolutionize his way of life? Will he sell his horses and scatter his Jews [a reference to Bertie’s financial friends] or will Reuben Sassoon be enshrined among the crown jewels and other regalia? . . . Will the Keppel [Bertie’s mistress] be appointed 1st Lady of the Bedchamber?’6 And the vulgarian himself? Judging by the speed with which he destroyed many treasured statues of Brown, cleared out her photographs and papers, sold her beloved house, Osborne, and tramped around his new palaces in a trail of cigar smoke, he was not in a sentimental mood. Bertie had been a Victorian, he felt, for quite long enough.
The Chocolate Warrior
Saturday 7 July 1900 was a warm, sticky day in the narrow back streets of York. By first light, there were already plenty of people out and about. One of them was a quiet, soberly dressed man discreetly holding a notebook, standing in the shadows, watching the door of a small, dirty pub, one of fourteen nearby. Shortly after 6 a.m., people were already rattling the door of the pub, though it was slow to open this morning. Everyone who entered, and everyone who left, was noted down in the little book. In all, 550 people went in, including 113 children. After twelve hours of standing, the watcher scribbled down: ‘Between 5 and 6 p.m., a woman was ejected. A row immediately ensued, the woman using language unfit for human ears. As usual, a crowd of children were keenly enjoying the scene, which lasted for about three quarters of an hour.’ Just over a week later, on Sunday 15 July, the investigator was back. Even on the Sabbath, in an area with its share of Irish Catholics, all the small shops were open, doing a brisk business, particularly the fried-fish shops. Most of the women standing gossiping in the streets were in ‘déshabillé’, which in this context probably means open shirts, without hats. ‘Children simply swarm . . . In the evening there were several wordy battles between women neighbours, the language being very bad . . . Between seven and eight, three men endeavoured to hold a gospel meeting, but retired after singing a hymn and giving a short address; the people apparently took no notice, but continued their conversations.’ And the note-taker slipped sadly away.
What was happening in York as the old Queen lay ill would play its part in explaining why her son and grandson never faced the kind of revolutionary upheaval that ousted their cousins Czar Nicholas and Kaiser Bill. A large, mustachioed man in his late twenties had become outraged at the conditions of the poor. Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree, of mixed Danish and Yorkshire descent, was no kind of rebel. He came from a powerful, energetic strain of English life, utterly alien to London politics, grown rich on cocoa and sweets. Though clever, he did not go to one of the public schools which had sprouted up all over the country. He did not go to Oxford or Cambridge, either, though his father could easily have afforded it. The Rowntrees were Quakers. So Benjamin went to a local school in York, and then to Owens College in Manchester, set up specifically to educate people who didn’t want to make that little curtsey to the Church of England needed in a country whose spiritual life was dominated by frilly bishops, vicars and the Book of Common Prayer. Rowntree’s father, Jacob, had also written about the poor, and been witheringly critical of ‘British civilization’ while he built his cocoa and crystallized-fruit empire. It was a time of investigations into the conditions of the poorer Britons, with government Blue Books, the work of social investigator Charles Booth in London, and socialists such as the Webbs. But Rowntree, working quietly up in York, was the man who would really shock Westminster.
The way he did it was to concentrate not on one of the infamous areas of a great industrial city, which everyone knew about, but on a relatively normal, middle-sized English town known best for its great minster and quaint medieval streets. His work was astonishingly meticulous and careful. He and his investigators went from house to house from the autumn of 1899, finally reaching 11,560 families in 388 streets. The notebook jottings still provide one of the most remarkable and vivid portraits of life as it was being lived at the heyday of the British Empire by a vast swathe of native-born Britons. First, there were brief notes, house by house, going from shoemakers to labourers, widows to factory workers: ‘Five children (three by first wife). Husband not quite steady, wife delicate-looking. Respectable: one boy sent to truant school . . . Father has lost an eye. House not very dirty . . . Disreputable old woman. Hawks when able. House very dirty, probably used as a house of ill-fame . . . Four boys, three girls (young). Very poor, little work. House dirty, very little furniture . . . Nine young children. Had parish relief stopped for illegitimate child. Children dirty and unruly. Query: how do they live?’
As the investigators homed in on housing conditions, again street by street, the descriptions become more detailed, and horrifying. In one street, for instance, they report of a pair of houses: ‘There is only one water-tap for the whole block. There are no sinks, slops being emptied down the street grating. There are two closets [toilets] in the yard but only one is fit to use, and it is shared by fifteen families.’ As the investigators dig deeper through the streets of York, their nausea and anger become more clearly visible through the dry notes. A lady inspector, probably a tough-sounding woman called May Kendall, who refused a salary and seems forgotten by history, makes her way across a brick floor, slimy with filth: ‘Dirty flock bedding in living room placed on a box and two chairs. Smell of room from dirt and bad air unbearable.’ Nearby, she finds no fewer than sixteen families sharing one tap: ‘the grating under this water tap is used for the disposal of human excreta and was partially blocked with it when inspected . . . When inspected the table and floor were covered with crumbs, potato parings, scraps of meat on newspaper, dirty pots, etc.’
There would be a spate of similar surveys of villages and towns across England. What made Rowntree’s work different was that he dug into the causes of poverty. The way wealthy Britain had dealt with it so far was to mix voluntary and religious help with a great deal of moralizing. The slums were disgusting, yes, but they were rare (Rowntree showed they were everywhere) and they were the fault of thriftless, drunken or immoral people. As The Times put it, responding to the furore caused by Rowntree’s book, which was finally published in the year of Victoria’s death: ‘their wages would suffice to keep them strong and healthy, but they are thriftless; they drink and bet, or they are ignorant and careless in housekeeping’.7 Rowntree was no stranger to moralizing – he was, after all, a teetotal Quaker – but he set out to clinically destroy the argument that poverty was the fault of the poor. He found two-thirds of people who literally did not have enough to live on ‘were women deserted by men, or widowed, or people no longer able to work through illness or old age’. Others were people in work whose families were too big to feed properly. As he pointed out, he was writing at a time when the trade cycle was up, and business was good, yet for workmen at the bottom of the heap, their position ‘is one of peculiar hopelessness. Their unfitness means low wages, low wages means insufficient food, insufficient food means unfitness for labour, so that the vicious circle is complete.’ Again and again he finds women who tell him they hide the desperate lack of food from their husbands in order to keep them strong enough to carry on working. Hunger ha
ppened in private, among the women and children: ‘Jim ollers takes ’is dinner to work, and I give it ’im as usual; ’e never knows we go without, and I never tells ’im.’
But what is enough food? Rowntree talked to experts in nutrition, and studied the diet handed out in the York workhouse to destitute people there. He then cut that back to produce the basic needed for ‘bare physical efficiency’ – and found that in York the wages paid for unskilled labour were not enough to provide food, clothing and shelter to sustain a family of moderate size at merely physical efficiency. Rowntree’s book, called simply Poverty: A Study of Town Life, is generally written without apparent anger, but at times he simply lets rip:
And let us clearly understand what ‘merely physical efficiency’ means. A family living upon the scale allowed for . . . must never spend a penny on railway fare or omnibus. They must never go into the country unless they walk. [Rowntree himself was a great lover of nature.] They must never purchase a halfpenny newspaper or spend a penny to buy a ticket for a popular concert. They must write no letters to absent children, for they cannot afford to pay the postage . . . The children must have no pocket money for dolls, marbles or sweets. The father must smoke no tobacco, and must drink no beer. The mother must never buy any pretty clothes . . . Should a child fall ill, it must be attended by the Parish doctor; should it die, it must be buried by the Parish. Finally, the wage earner must never be absent from his work for a single day.
Break any of these conditions, and the family would not have enough food to keep them going. Rowntree worked out that any labourer with three children or more, ‘must pass through a time, probably lasting for about ten years when . . . he and his family will be underfed’. He also demonstrated, with exhaustive tables and diagrams, that almost a third of the population of York were by his definition sunk in such poverty.
Yet there were moments of jollity. Rowntree and his investigators left a vivid picture of the poor making their own entertainment in the year 1901 which deserves its place as a contrast to the unbearable bleakness of the rest of his report. He found a lot of singing:
The rooms are, as a rule, brilliantly lit, and often gaudily, if cheaply, decorated. In winter they are always kept temptingly warm. The company is almost entirely composed of young persons, youths and girls, sitting round the room and at small tables. Often there are a considerable number of soldiers present. Everyone is drinking, but not heavily, and most of the men are smoking. At intervals, one of the company is called on for a song, and if there is a chorus, everyone who can will join in it. Many of the songs are characterized by maudlin sentimentality; others again are unreservedly vulgar. Throughout the whole assembly there is an air of jollity and an absence of irksome restraint that must prove very attractive after a day’s confinement in factory or shop. In a round of public houses which the writer made one Sunday evening in May 1901, the fact of their social attractiveness struck him very forcibly.
And Rowntree pads back for his cocoa with the brave thought that it all pointed to the need ‘for the establishment on temperance lines of something equally attractive’.
Rowntree’s book arrived like a bomb in British politics. It showed that at the heart of the Empire, with all its pomp, wealth and self-satisfaction, around a third of people were so poor they often did not have enough to eat, and many were sunk in utter poverty as bad as that of the Czar’s empire against which the communists raged. It did this clinically and statistically, in a way that was impossible to refute. Its influence, with repeated reprintings, would last until the First World War and it would later be seen as one of the seminal works of sociology, undoubtedly one of the most important books of the Edwardian age. David Lloyd George, another nonconformist shaker-upper idolized by Rowntree, would wave it at meeting after meeting. Rowntree himself, though a rather more nervous speaker, lectured across Britain, from Glasgow to Bristol, spreading the message. When he reached Birmingham and patiently explained his figures, the local screw manufacturer Arthur Chamberlain, brother of the great politician Joe, got slowly to his feet and announced that, try as he might, he could not find a hole in Rowntree’s argument. Therefore, first thing the following morning, he would find out how many people in his engineering companies were getting less than 22 shillings a week, and put it right. He did just that. (There was then a strike by workers paid more than 22s, who wanted their differential maintained; but it was still an extraordinary tribute to the book.)
In the cloisters of Balliol College, Oxford, the master told a young student called William Beveridge that once he had learned all the university could teach him, he must ‘go and discover why, with so much wealth in Britain, there continues to be so much poverty’.
Winston Churchill went straight out for a copy and was soon telling an audience in Blackpool about how it ‘fairly made my hair stand on end’. In one review he wrote about the York poor: ‘Although the British Empire is so large, they cannot find room to live in it; although it is so magnificent, they would have had a better chance of happiness if they had been born cannibal islanders of the Southern Seas . . . this festering life at home makes world-wide power a mockery.’ Writing to the chairman of the Midland Conservatives, Churchill returned to the theme. American labourers were better fed and more efficient than British ones: ‘this is surely a fact which our unbridled Imperialists, who have no thought but to pile up armaments, taxation and territory, should not lose sight of. For my own part, I see little glory in an empire which can rule the waves and is unable to flush its sewers.’8
Rowntree had begun to show that the condition of the poor was not simply a matter of their moral failure. Dickens himself, followed by others, had turned Victorian sensibility round from a purely moralizing hardness to a dawning awareness of the real lives of the people of the gutter and the swamp. Yet most turned their eyes away and dreamed of finding some way of dealing with the poor that did not involve either the danger of revolution, or the character-rotting effects of more generous levels of welfare. These are the years when the Labour Party is beginning to appear as Liberal trade unionists come together, and when socialist ideas are filtering through parts of Britain via the activities of small bands of intellectuals and agitators. But most thinking people were not socialist and, before Lloyd George and Churchill broke through the crust of complacency, were against a welfare state. So what could be done? This takes us to a second character, working busily away as the old Queen expired.
Basset Hounds and Breeding
Francis Galton was one of the last survivors of the heroic period of Victorian science. He looked a little like a smaller version of Charles Darwin, which was appropriate, because he was Darwin’s half cousin. They shared in Erasmus Darwin as grandfather one of the great luminaries of generous, ambitious eighteenth-century science, and Galton’s family tree was festooned with genius and public service. He had been an explorer and statistician, a renowned mathematician whose discoveries ranged from the bizarre to the useful – it was Francis Galton, for example, who showed that fingerprints were unique and did not change during life, a discovery immediately put to good use by Scotland Yard. Though disagreeing with Darwin about some aspects of evolution, he was also fascinated by the subject, particularly as it applied to people. At the Science Galleries of South Kensington – a place which will recur in this book – Galton had been collecting the heights, weights, strength of squeeze and pull of English schoolchildren, trying to establish a human database. But his breakthrough moment came when he stumbled upon a book by the son of the Pre-Raphaelite painter, the sturdy squire Sir John Everett Millais. This was not a work of science or fiction, but rather more down to earth. It was the Basset Hound Club Rules and Studbook of 1874–96. Sir John kept himself amused by detailing the limited number of splodges and colours of each puppy from each pairing of basset hounds. Galton took from this what he believed to be a foolproof theory of heredity – how much of each parent, grandparent and so on, we each possess. The crucial discoveries of Mendel were not yet known
in Britain, so this cannot be called in any real sense genetic science. Galton invented a new word, instead: eugenics.
In October 1901 Galton stood up and delivered the second Huxley Lecture (in honour of ‘Darwin’s bulldog’ and defender, who had recently died) to the Anthropological Institute. He called it ‘The Possible Improvement of the Human Breed under the Existing Conditions of Law and Sentiment’. An intellectual link between the basset hound studbook and the policies of Nazi Germany was about to be forged. Galton had created, he believed, a statistical bell curve of human qualities – the proportion of the population that was very bright, healthy, middling, and so on. This was done in detail and went far beyond easily observable differences such as height. He classified people by their ‘civic worth’. Galton then applied his theory to the vast statistical and highly opinionated survey of the London East End poor by Charles Booth. As with the Poor Law Guardians and much ordinary debate at the time, economics and morality were inextricably mingled. Thus ‘Class A’ consisted of ‘criminals, semi-criminals and loafers’ while Class B comprised ‘very poor persons who subsist on casual earnings, many of whom are inevitably poor from shiftlessness, idleness or drink’. The largest class, E, were ‘All those with regular standard earnings of 22 to 30 shillings a week. This class is the recognized field . . . for trades unions . . . essentially the mediocre class, standing as far below the highest in civic worth as it stands above the lowest class of criminals.’9 At the top, of course, were the rich and clever.