The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Galton tried to calculate the worth of children in each group, subtracting what it cost to bring them up and look after them ‘when helpless through old age’ from lifetime earnings. Thus: ‘The worth of an average baby born to the wife of an Essex labourer . . . was found to be about five pounds.’ By contrast, the worth of a child of the top class ‘would be reckoned in thousands of pounds . . . They found great industries, establish vast undertakings, increase the wealth of multitudes and amass large fortunes for themselves. Others, whether they be rich or poor, are the guides and lights of the nation, raising its tone, enlightening its difficulties and imposing its ideals.’ (People, in short, like Galton himself.) But where radical Liberals and socialists argued against the unfairness of these great divisions, Galton thought them natural. Society should stop the lower sort from breeding so enthusiastically, and encourage the elite to breed more. It would be ‘a great benefit to the country if all habitual criminals were resolutely segregated . . . and peremptorily denied opportunities for producing offspring’. The better sort, meanwhile, should be given grants, diplomas and encouragement to marry each other and produce children, as early as possible. Male fast-breeders would be chosen through exam results and inspection of their family trees. ‘The opportunities for selecting women in this way are unfortunately fewer . . . In the selection of women, when nothing is known of their athletic proficiency, it would be especially necessary to pass a high and careful medical examination.’ Galton wondered whether the aristocracy might help encourage high-value couples without much cash: ‘It might well become a point of honour . . . for noble families to gather fine specimens of humanity around them, as it is to procure and maintain fine breeds of cattle and so forth, which are costly, but repay in satisfaction.’10

  It is tempting to dismiss all this as irrelevant ravings, forgotten in the yellowing pages of Nature magazine, where they sit between a discussion of agriculture in Tibet and a paper on ocean currents. Nothing could be more wrong. Galton was a scientific superstar of his day. Through the early years of the twentieth century, though elderly (and childless) he was energetically promoting eugenics, often through lectures to the newly formed Sociological Society, then carried and publicized widely through the newspapers. Demanding social pressure to stop unsuitable marriage was vital: eugenics had to be ‘introduced into the national conscience, like a new religion’ so that ‘humanity can be represented by the fittest races’. He chose Valentine’s Day 1905 to proclaim his optimism that laws restricting the freedom to marry would eventually come about: The Times lavishly recorded his words. Supporters came from left and right. George Bernard Shaw, at the height of his reputation as progressive dramatist and sage, proclaimed that nothing but a eugenic religion could save our civilization. It was important, he went on, ‘that we never hesitate to carry out the negative side of eugenics with considerable zest, both on the scaffold and on the battlefield’.11

  H. G. Wells had been persuaded by his agent J. B. Pinker to collect some essays about the future that he had published in British and American newspapers. In 1901, alongside Rowntree on poverty, Wells’s resulting Anticipations was one of the talking-point books of the year. It ran to eight reprints in the first twelve months and was one of the bestsellers for the powerful circulating libraries and booksellers Mudie’s and Smith’s. Beatrice and Sidney Webb both thought it their favourite book of the year and were so impressed that they went to visit Wells at his Kent home to help draw him into their circle. He was introduced to A. J. Balfour, about to become prime minister, and fêted by the director of the Natural History Museum. Churchill bought a copy and liked it. As one of Wells’s biographers put it, Anticipations ‘catapulted Wellsian thought into the drawing rooms, railway cars and clubrooms of the upper and middle classes’.12 So what was in the book? Parts are surprisingly accurate about the future. He predicts that English will be the world language by 2000 and that servants will disappear through technology. But his other messages underline the gap between Edwardian thought and ours. ‘If the Jew has a certain incurable tendency to social parasitism and we make social parasitism impossible, we should abolish the Jew, and if he has not, there is no need to abolish the Jew.’ Wells accepted that ‘there is something very ugly about many Jewish faces but there are Gentile faces just as coarse and gross . . . Many Jews are intensely vulgar in dress and bearing, materialistic in thought and cunning and base in method, but no more than many Gentiles.’ And, he pointed out, Jews died earlier anyway. But there was no such shilly-shallying when it came to other races: ‘And the rest, those swarms of black and brown, and dirty white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, not a charitable institute, and I take it they will have to go. The whole tenor and meaning of the world is, they have to go . . . it is their portion to die out and disappear.’

  It is only fair to add that Wells revised his views on race a few years later, but the eugenics remained unapologetic when it came to drunkards, gluttons and others with inherited diseases. In his follow-up book, Mankind in the Making, published in 1903, he said it was ‘absurd to breed our horses and sheep and improve the stock of our pigs and fowls, while we leave humanity to mate in the most heedless manner’. For people with hereditary diseases, or alcoholics, the state should use everything ‘short of torture’ to punish those who tried to breed. (Wells’s own exuberantly unfaithful sexual habits made the finger-wagging about people mating in a heedless manner particularly hypocritical.) The point is that he was then splashing along self-confidently in the mainstream of advanced political thinking. Lord Rosebery, the former Liberal prime minister, expressed his great interest in Galton’s eugenics. In 1907 the British Eugenics Education Society, with at least half its members professional women, was launched and became hugely influential. Middle-class conversations were reported to Galton: a badly behaved child, or delinquent youth? ‘Well, it wasn’t a eugenic marriage, you see.’ A few years later a Mrs Bolce named her daughter Eugenette, thereby boasting about her and her husband’s excellent breeding stock.

  In July 1912, six months after Galton’s death, the First International Congress of Eugenics opened at the grand Hotel Cecil, overlooking the Thames. Its vice presidents included the Lord Chief Justice, the president of the College of Surgeons, the Lord Mayor of London, the vice chancellor of London University, the Bishops of Ripon and Birmingham, the inventor Alexander Graham Bell, the First Lord of the Admiralty . . . and Winston Churchill. Major Leonard Darwin, the great scientist’s last surviving child, gave a rousing opening speech calling for action against the genetically undesirable. The purpose of the congress was ‘to spread far and wide the great new creed with its glittering goal of race and class improvement through selective breeding’.13 Tragically, in this it was successful. Compulsory sterilization of different groups of people began in some American states and President Calvin Coolidge explained his 1924 Immigration Act: ‘Biological laws show . . . that Nordics deteriorate when mixed with other races.’ Worse still, the message was well heard on the continent of Europe, in France and Scandinavia but above all in Germany, where papers on eugenics were soon being written and where, in 1905, an organization called the Race Hygiene Society was formed.

  Joe’s Great Rebellion

  One hint of greatness is when a person attracts phrase-makers. Two of the most overused phrases used about a politician today are that all political careers end in failure and that so-and-so ‘makes the political weather’. Both were first said about that party-smashing comet of late-Victorian and early-twentieth-century British politics, Joe Chamberlain. Enoch Powell, a later iconoclast, just as dangerously tempted to see ideas through to their logical conclusion, said of his fellow Midlands platform-strider: ‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.’ And according to Winston Churchill, Joe’s sometime admirer and enemy, he ‘was incomparably the most live, sparkling, i
nsurgent, compulsive figure in British affairs . . . “Joe” was the one who made the weather. He was the man the masses knew.’ Today his surname is used as shorthand reference to his younger son, the man who tried to appease Hitler at Munich. This would have staggered an Edwardian: Joe could hardly have been more famous in his day. His cartoon image was everywhere, his name was sung in music-hall songs, his speeches attracted tens of thousands and the next day filled page after page of the newspapers. His views were followed in Berlin and Moscow; he was vilified in French cartoons and he was front-page news in New York. But it did all end in failure, smashing electoral defeat in 1906, and worse. On his seventieth birthday he was greeted by a vast celebration in his political citadel, Birmingham, an orgy of processions, speeches, meals and cheering crowds – something like the civic welcome a cup-winning football team might expect today, but more so. Two days later, back home at his London house, the hero failed to appear downstairs for a dinner appointment. He was stuck on the bathroom floor, hit by a stroke which condemned him to a pitiful afterlife, lolling voiceless on the Commons benches where once he had commanded.

  In the course of his career, Chamberlain had been a radical tyro, the greatest reforming civic leader in England, the man who split the Liberal Party in protest at Gladstone’s decision to grant Irish self-government, and an imperialist statesman whose leadership in the South African war had made him even more famous and divisive. But in this story, it is Chamberlain’s last and most dramatic campaign that matters. ‘Tariff reform’ meant building a wall of taxes around the British Empire and ending free trade. Like Third World campaigners today who call for ‘fair trade’ to help struggling farmers, the tariff reformers wanted less competition and brutal efficiency. It was an attempt to bind the Empire together in an increasingly dangerous world, to close off a struggling Britain from her European and American rivals. Had the tariff reformers, led by Chamberlain, succeeded, the story of modern Britain, and of the Western world in the early twentieth century, would have been very different.

  In his early life Chamberlain had been nothing but useful. He grew up in London as the son of the owner of a shoemaking firm, and made useful shoes, before going to Birmingham and making the useful nuts and bolts that held together Victoria’s industrial empire – and in particular the screws. At one time his company was making two-thirds of all the screws manufactured in England. Like many Victorian entrepreneurs, he was able to retire early and devote himself to politics. In Birmingham he became a leading man in nonconformist and radical circles, a classic middle-class modernizer, arguing for votes for all, taking up the causes of compulsory and free secular education and campaigning against rural poverty. As he put it, ‘free church, free schools, free land, free labour’. This was also useful. But Chamberlain’s greatest early triumphs came after he was elected Liberal mayor of Birmingham in 1873. He dealt with lethally unhygienic water, incompetent and competing gas suppliers, a dangerous lack of proper sewerage, foul slums and more in a prolonged exhibition of energy, optimism and practical municipal politics that is still used today as the best example of what good local government can achieve. Joe’s Birmingham was soon sporting museums, libraries, cleared and rebuilt public spaces and noticeably healthier citizens.

  Brilliantly equipped to fling himself into the wilder politics being created by the successive Reform Acts of the Victorian age, Chamberlain adored a crowd and marketed himself for a mass audience. His dandyish black velvet coat, soon adorned with an orchid, his scarlet necktie, and above all his monocle, became as well known as Churchill’s hat and cigar, Harold Wilson’s pipe or Margaret Thatcher’s handbag would be. He had a talent for the vivid phrase any advertising man would kill for. Once in the Commons, he set about creating a national organization to make the Liberals more effective, and under Gladstone produced useful legislation on such down-to-earth issues as electric lighting and bankruptcy reform. But Joe turned darker and dangerous, dreaming of a new politics that bound the most aggressive imperial tub-thumping with jobs and social reform at home. Patriotism plus cash in the hand has always been the two-card trick of the demagogue.

  Wild men looking for a new politics took note. Among those watching him with awed admiration were Winston’s father Randolph, and the young Lloyd George – not to mention Joe’s unlikely friend Henry Hyndman, a leading early English Marxist and revolutionary. These were times of far more fluid and fast-changing political sympathies than the sepia pictures of impassive men in top hats suggest. In 1886 Joe broke with Gladstone and most Liberals over home rule for Ireland, setting up his rival Liberal Unionist organization. Going into alliance with the Tory leader Lord Salisbury (whom he had once denounced as a useless excrescence), he became a leading statesman in the days of the rush for African colonies, the confrontations with China and the growing rivalry with Germany. Joe’s populism left behind the beliefs of many traditional Liberals while distancing him from the plutocrats and aristocrats of old Tory England. He was routinely called a turncoat, which he was, and seemed to enjoy the blood-sport side of politics just a little too much, revelling in one famous Irish Commons debate when the arguments degenerated into fist fights, leaving torn clothing and broken teeth on the floor. His relish for the Boer War led to it being called ‘Joe’s War’, and his conduct of the 1900 ‘khaki election’, attacking Liberal opponents as traitors and whipping up a frenzy of imperial self-righteousness, led to that being called ‘Joe’s election’.

  A sample of the tone can be tasted in Lloyd George’s expedition in December 1901 to speak against the Boer War in Birmingham, Chamberlain’s back yard. Having long lost his admiration for the radical imperialist, the Welshman was under ferocious, sometimes physical threat, as a leading ‘pro-Boer’. Chamberlain was asked to make sure that when Lloyd George arrived in the city he was at least given a fair hearing. He replied: ‘If Ll G wants his life, he had better keep away from Birmingham . . . If he doesn’t go, I will see that it is known he is afraid. If he does go, he will deserve all he gets.’ Lloyd George, never a coward, went and faced a seething mob. A pro-war crowd estimated at an astonishing 100,000 surrounded the town hall before smashing every window, overwhelming the police and using weapons to break into the building before Lloyd George had a chance to utter a full sentence. Fearing for his life, he donned a police uniform, put on a helmet and was smuggled to safety: forty people were injured and two killed. Chamberlain expressed disappointment that his foe had escaped when his spies sent him a telegram at his London club, telling him that the traitor had at least been prevented from speaking.14 At times it seemed as if Joe had little sense of where the clear boundaries of parliamentary and political behaviour lay, something shared with other rising stars of the new democracy.

  By now he had put together in his mind a set of ideas about Britain’s problems and future solutions. Since the great battles over the Corn Laws in the 1840s, free trade had become synonymous with British power and Britain’s industrial revolution. The fundamental policy was to let in cheap food from America and Argentina to feed the cities, and leave the farmers to survive as best they could. The corn fields of Sussex had been out-shouted by the terraces of Oldham. But shrewd observers knew that once a tax on imported corn was announced in spring 1902 to help pay for the Boer War, the argument for a much larger wall around the British Empire was bound to return. Chamberlain had spent much of the past decade worriedly observing Germany, whose industry, prosperity and social welfare had been built up behind high tariff walls; the same was true of France and Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire; America’s tariffs were even higher, and her growth was even faster. So perhaps it was now time to accept that the world was one of rival trade blocks, and build a barrier round the British Empire too? Real wages were stagnating and British industry was growing too slowly. Chamberlain proposed that food should come in cheaply from South Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia; anything else should be taxed severely. Meanwhile, British industry could again thrive, supplying the markets of the Empir
e, which had been effectively closed to outsiders. It was ‘Sinn Fein’ – Ourselves Alone – on a global scale.

  There was one obvious problem. The cost of food was bound to rise. Chamberlain tried to deal with this by arguing that more prosperous British industries and the use of the tariff money for welfare to help the poor would counteract this. There were bigger political questions, too. If Britain went protectionist, and the tariff walls went ever higher, would not the whole world become poorer, and more mutually hostile? Was this not an admission of defeat, stark evidence that British industry, which had been so recently a wonder of the world, could no longer compete on equal terms? On the other hand, the domestic politics of protectionism were intriguing. Those who might benefit were not only the struggling industrialists but the cold-shouldered farmers and landowners – the bulwarks of old Liberalism and of old Toryism brought triumphantly together. Among those who would certainly cheer to support the Empire were the imperial beneficiaries, the military families and colonial administrators. The sharp-tongued Margot Asquith, wife of the Liberal leader, knew what was up. Tariff reform, she said, ‘caught on like wild fire, with the semi-clever, moderately educated, the Imperialists, Dukes, Journalists and Fighting Forces’.15 That was, for the time, quite a coalition.

  Winston Churchill realized it too, during his final days on the same side of the Commons as Chamberlain. Speaking in the Budget debate of April 1902, he said people would soon ask why ‘should we not kill three birds with one stone – collect our revenue, support British industries, and consolidate the Empire’. He went on to wonder, ‘what will happen in this country if the fair trade issue [the euphemism for protection] is boldly raised by some responsible person of eminence and authority. We shall find ourselves once again on an old battlefield. Around will be the broken weapons, the grass-grown trenches and neglected graves . . . and party bitterness, such as this generation has not known. How is it going to split existing political organizations . . . ?’ His biographer son called Churchill’s speech ‘unbelievably prescient’, but young Winston was moving in well-informed circles. A week later, Churchill and his young-gun friends, who called themselves the Hooligans (after Hugh Cecil, one of their number), had Chamberlain to dinner. At the end of it he thanked them for a splendid meal and offered in return ‘a priceless secret. Tariffs! These are the politics of the future, and of the near future. Study them closely, and make yourselves masters of them, and you will not regret your hospitality to me!’16