The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  By then, Joe was well on the way to destroying the Conservative government that had come in under Salisbury, but was now led by that great bison-like grandee’s nephew Arthur Balfour. A sprig of one of the oldest and grandest political dynasties, Balfour had seemed an effete creature to fellow MPs. When he was given his first political job by Salisbury, it was widely assumed to be an act of family patronage extreme by the standards even of late-Victorian England and it gave the English language the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’. Known as ‘Pretty Fanny’, Balfour was a member of the ‘Souls’ group of bright, self-consciously elitist young aristocrats who met, flirted and exchanged clevernesses. His philosophical writings were admired but the strain was a dying, elegiac one. Among his best-known sayings was ‘Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all’, while his best-known book was entitled Defence of Philosophic Doubt. In an age of vigorous social and scientific debate, he seemed languidly pessimistic to the point of fatalism. He took the long view: ‘The energies of our system will decay, the glory of the sun will be dimmed, and the earth, tideless and inert, will no longer tolerate the race which has for a moment disturbed its solitude.’ This, while undeniably true, is not the stuff most prime ministers are made of.

  Yet once getting into office, in charge of Ireland, Balfour had proved ruthless enough to get a second nickname, ‘Bloody Balfour’, and became one of the leading Conservative statesmen of the age, a natural successor to his uncle. As prime minister he was tested by a series of crises but was mostly merely struggling to keep together his coalition of Conservative and Liberal Unionists, as Chamberlain’s rampaging threatened to tear it apart. Chamberlain had already lost one important battle, against Balfour’s Education Act of 1902, disliked by nonconformists because, although it created a unified school system in England, it also made local ratepayers subsidize Anglican schools. Balfour, who had worried that Chamberlain might snatch the premiership away from him, was simply trying to keep his administration afloat. On tariffs, he had few strong views. He prevaricated, offered delays, including the promise of an imperial conference, and produced vaguely reassuring forms of words – behaving as John Major did while trying to hold his Conservative cabinet together when it was riven by Europe in the mid-1990s. He then trickily cajoled both his cabinet’s hard-line free traders and Chamberlain into resigning, and survived himself, undignified but placid, for longer than seemed possible.

  Just as the row was hotting up, Churchill wrote to a constituent:

  It would seem to me a fantastic policy to endeavour to shut the British Empire in a ringed fence. It is very large, and there are a good many things which can be produced in it, but the world is larger & produces some better things than can be found in the British Empire. Why should we deny ourselves the good and varied merchandise which the traffic of the world offers . . . Our planet is not a very big one compared with the other celestial bodies, and I see no particular reason why we should endeavour to make inside our planet a smaller planet called the British Empire, cut off by impassable space from everything else.

  Churchill had but recently returned from making money in America, and had an American mother, but it was not self-interest that led him to worry in another letter, this time to a free-trade Tory in Chamberlain’s back yard, that a tariff wall would cut off Britain from the United States if it ever came to a European war: ‘I do not want a self-contained Empire.’17 For a man often caricatured as a simple-minded imperial jingo in his earlier career, it was a lucid and noble argument which would soon lead Churchill to desert not just Chamberlain – who was hurt by Winston’s defection – but the Conservative Party itself.

  Five days before Churchill wrote his ‘smaller planet’ letter, Chamberlain had fired off the first shot in what would be one of the most gripping political duels of the young century. On 15 May 1903 in a speech at Birmingham Town Hall – its glass repaired from Lloyd George’s friendly visit – he swept aside all other issues, telling the Liberal chief whip, with magnificent contempt, ‘You can burn your leaflets. We are going to talk about something else.’ The country duly divided, with rival leagues, rival newspapers and rival arguments. Chamberlain, backed by most of the press, raised huge sums for posters, leaflets and full-time workers.

  It was now a choice, he said, between defending the Empire and sticking with the free-trade beliefs of ‘a small remnant of Little Englanders’. His language about Britain’s future without protection was apocalyptic, as in this typical speech, made at Greenock on 11 November: ‘Agriculture, as the greatest of all the trades and industries of this country, has been practically destroyed. Sugar has gone, silk has gone, iron is threatened, wool is threatened. The turn of cotton will come. How long are you going to stand it?’ These industries, he said, ‘are like sheep in a field. One by one they allow themselves to be led out to slaughter.’ In an initial dozen major events Chamberlain took his arguments from Glasgow to Newcastle and Tynemouth, then west to Liverpool, down to Cardiff and Newport, and back up to Leeds. His language shifted as the influence of the worried manufacturers grew – less of empire, more about saving those industries. A typical Tariff Reform League poster showed a cowed John Bull being pelted from above by American trains and trams, German cars, Austrian furniture and Belgian steel. In Limehouse in London he opened a new line of attack, on recent immigrants. Chamberlain the social revolutionary was gone. His Liberal Unionists were middle class and hostile to grand reforms, and he dropped, for instance, his enthusiasm for old-age pensions. Having joined forces with the right, he now became right.

  Against him the Liberals, who had been divided by the Boer War, came together and went on to the attack. Lloyd George, who had been burned in effigy after the relief of Mafeking, and relishing the chance to punish his old enemy, was particularly virulent and witty. You had to go back fifty years to the time when the people’s bread was taxed, he told one audience, ‘and over three thousand years, to the time when a great Empire was governed by a man called Joseph . . . But there is this difference – the ancient Joseph in his dreams made provision for an abundance of corn for the people. This modern Joseph is dreaming about a scarcity of corn.’ (There is nothing like a biblical education to raise the quality of vituperation.) And again: Chamberlain fancied himself a little Bismarck, ‘the man of blood and iron’. Instead he was ‘the man of screws . . . that is all the iron in Mr Chamberlain’s Imperialism’.18 Yet it was not Lloyd George but the duller Liberal Henry Herbert Asquith who really scuppered Joe. For this stolid-seeming lawyer also criss-crossed the country, to Clydeside, Newcastle, Paisley and Worcester, patiently knocking down Chamberlain’s arguments with hard facts, challenging his grasp of history, essentially out-thinking him, as he had always supposed he would. Immediately after Chamberlain’s opening Birmingham blast, Asquith had taken the newspaper into his wife’s bedroom and exclaimed: ‘Wonderful news today; and it is only a question of time when we shall sweep the country.’19

  For a while it seemed that Chamberlain was winning. His canvassers went from door to door, explaining the arguments and ticking off support. The young P. J. Wodehouse turned out pro-Chamberlain verses for the Daily Express featuring a parrot, parroting the cheap-food line of the Liberals. These were so successful they became a music-hall turn and parrot competitions were held. Another music-hall song went: ‘When wealth and mirth refill the earth / Let each man tell his neighbour / All this we owe to Chamberlain’. The whole country seemed to be caught up in what was, after all, an argument about economic theory. Yet this was an argument bigger than governments. Modern Britain became a country with a strong financial and City tradition, always trying to break down trading barriers and shaped by outside connections, not least with the United States. That Britain was the one that tariff reform would have killed at birth.

  And in the end Asquith was proved right. Chamberlain was pulverized. It was partly that the business climate improved, so that the spectre of unemployment and mass bankruptcies that had helped him in the early days f
aded away by 1905. But it was also that he simply lost the argument. When the election was finally called in 1906 it produced a huge Liberal landslide. Even Balfour, the prime minister, lost his seat, though another was soon found for him. The Liberals would stay in office deep into the First World War and, so far as Edwardian Britain was concerned, the Conservatives became merely an embittered opposition. Chamberlain had smashed his second party. After his stroke, what Beatrice Webb called his ‘mechanically savage persistence’ would keep him going until 1914, when he finally died of a heart attack. A new age in politics was dawning, when the problems of the poor, and the Empire, would be dealt with in very different ways by the men who had beaten him: Asquith, Lloyd George – and Winston Churchill, who had now left the Tories on a long, strange journey of his own.

  Death by Three Million Roses

  Even The Times thought that three million roses might be overdoing it, but conceded that on the evening of 1 July 1912 the blooms, together with the wisteria, the flower-wreathed coloured lights and the gold Renaissance ornaments, produced an effect of ‘light and airy elegance’. The Palace theatre in London’s Shaftesbury Avenue had originally opened as a grand opera venue in 1891, with Arthur Sullivan’s Ivanhoe. But the London public’s thirst for opera was limited. It soon moved briskly down market, becoming a ‘theatre of varieties’ famous for its high-stepping showgirls. It was for variety theatre that the endless boxes of roses had been ordered, but that night the crowd was not dressed in the usual jackets and cheap glad-rags, but in formal evening dress. For this was the first ever Royal Command performance at a music hall. King George V and Queen Alexandra were among the guests to see the Palace Girls kick, Vesta Tilley do her male impersonation, Harry Lauder sing ‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’’, the great comedians of the day George Robey and Little Tich perform their famous sketches, the sensational juggler Cinquevalli, and many more. It was, in its way, a historic moment. For seventy years or so, a working-class tradition that had begun in the back rooms of pubs had been slowly forcing its way into the heart of the cities, into ever more lavish venues. Sneered at, campaigned against, brimming with broken marriages, alcoholics and fortunes lost as well as made, by Edwardian times music hall could not be ignored. From its hippodromes, palaces, empires, coliseums and palladiums, the songs poured out that you heard in the street, in the railway carriage and in the parlours. Now, even the other palace had come to pay homage.

  Except that there was something wrong on that warm July night. Someone was missing. And though the newspapers wrote up the experiment as a great success, it is clear that it was not quite as sparkling as a really good music-hall night should be. The Times man thought some of the performers ‘a little overawed’ and therefore lacking ‘the sparkle of the oddity which endears them’ to their usual crowd. Another found it ‘a rather dull performance’. Was there a feeling, despite the presence of the King and Queen and the stellar list of performers – 150 took part in the ‘garden party’ finale – and the three million roses, that somehow the real action was taking place somewhere else? It surely was. Just a few hundred yards to the west, in fact, at the London Pavilion theatre (its shell is now the Trocadero) a very angry, very proud woman was on stage all by herself. The crowd were going wild. She sang and sang, one hit after another, and they would not let her stop. Marie Lloyd had been considered too rude, too ‘blue’ to appear at the Royal Command, despite being the most famous variety singer of them all. Snubbed, she had hired the rival Pavilion and, according to legend, put out her own posters announcing: ‘Every Performance Given by Marie Lloyd is a Command Performance by Order of the British Public’.

  Music hall could not be tamed or aimed at the respectable middle classes – not without losing its soul and dying, which it soon would. It was a working-class entertainment, for the people by the people. Its humour was sentimental, patriotic and bawdy, its most celebrated circus acts eye-popping and its songs simple but infuriatingly difficult to dislodge from your ears. ‘Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer, Do’, ‘The Boy in the Gallery’, ‘I Belong to Glasgow’ are still being hummed across the English-speaking world today. Yet the songs, which survived in print and in some scratchy recordings, are only a small whiff of the spirit of music hall. Most of the great performers never recorded. Most were never filmed. A few were, but long after their heyday. We cannot really hear what the great comics said in their ‘patter’, partly because it was often thought too rude to write down. We can’t quite imagine the noise, smell and sound of the Victorian and Edwardian halls. They stank of sweat and dirty clothes. Most of the men in the stalls and galleries would have been smoking pipes or cigars; many customers would have been drinking heavily and eating during the performances. The gaslights were extremely dangerous and a remarkable number of the halls burned down.

  Performers had seconds in which to grab people’s attention. Different towns had different traditions about what to do when an act failed. Shipbuilding cities like Glasgow or Newcastle used to specialize in throwing steel rivets. In the East End of London, trotter bones and vegetables were apparently more common. Heavy pewter mugs also made good missiles, which could cause a satisfyingly bloody wound on a struggling singer. Dead cats and dogs were not unknown. Some patrons removed their boots and threw those. In many of the rougher halls, the small orchestra performed below a wire mesh to keep them safe.

  The music-hall age had started when Victoria was still a small girl, in rooms of taverns where professional entertainers and amateurs performed, known as ‘free and easies’. The money came from the drink sold, as much as the admission prices. They could be found in basements across London from the 1840s. The Star Inn at Bolton, which was in business by 1842, is often spoken of as the first music hall outside London; ten years later the town had ten free and easies. In Scotland, by mid-Victorian times, there were protests about the almost-naked women dancing, the coarse and blasphemous songs and the audience – many of whom were barefoot girls and boys under thirteen. The early purpose-built entertainment halls were wholly different from the respectable theatres of the day. They had tables laid out for eating and drinking, plus a chairman raised at one end by the stage, whose job was to both boost the next act – a juggler, a singer, a comic turn, a ventriloquist – and try to keep some kind of order. By the final years of Victoria’s reign the capital had more than 500 halls of different sizes and varieties, with names like Gatti Under-the-Arches, the Cosmotheka, the Old Mo and the Falstaff, and at least fifty grand, specially built music halls, with a further 200-plus round the rest of the country.

  The technologies of the time – trains, newspapers and pianos – pushed music hall forward until the First World War. Now that the country was covered with an intricate web of railways, performers travelling in railway carriages bedecked with their own promotional placards could go almost anywhere, and the hit London songs could be heard within days in Exeter, Belfast or Dundee. Some of the most famous acts had come originally from Europe or Australia, while British singers were much in demand in the United States. Towns which had seen almost no outside entertainments coming to them regularly were introduced to people with the exotic accents of Scotland or cockney London, suitably toned down to aid understanding; for by late-Victorian times the rough diversity of regional English was just beginning to be softened. And these remote stars were turned into national celebrities, with their own foibles, catchphrases and tangled private lives, thanks to the explosion of the popular-newspaper market from the 1890s onwards. Finally, the arrival of cheap mass-manufactured pianos, mostly German, meant that a vastly increased number of families had a chance of learning and playing the new songs as they arrived. This in turn fed the music-hall star system. The singer would buy his or her own songs direct from the composers: if the songs went well, they could recoup a small fortune in sheet-music sales. Cheap pianos had the same kind of impact on music-hall Britain as electric guitars and transistor radios would have in the age of pop.

  The greatest architect of Britis
h music halls was a prolific Devon brewery manager’s son, Frank Matcham. He had a hand in no fewer than 150 theatres between 1879 and 1920, but of the forty-odd that have been listed as his major music halls, twenty-seven have been demolished, several have burned down and most of the rest altered beyond recognition.20 Only a few of the grandest, such as London’s Coliseum and Hippodrome, the Shepherd’s Bush Empire and the Bristol Hippodrome, remain. We have some no doubt useful spur roads, bingo halls and office blocks instead. In Matcham halls, the classic tiers and stalls arrangements of conventional theatres were copied, and ever more fantastic decorations added. His grandest confection, the Coliseum, boasted the first lift in any theatre in the world, a revolving stage for horse-races and other spectacles, and a small railway to convey the King and his party directly to the royal box. Physicians and others who might receive urgent messages left their seat numbers at a cubicle and would be fished out by messengers. Inside the new halls, thanks to early electric lighting and ventilation, the old scenes of cat-throwing and eating were replaced by something more like a theatrical experience. Even so, during failed or unpopular numbers the noise of hecklers and jeering was often so loud that the performer couldn’t be heard. This could gather to ‘being given the bird’ – hissing so widespread that the act was instantly stopped. A typical evening might include as many as twenty individual acts, each pretty short – jugglers, blacked-up ‘nigger singers’, romantic ballads, comics mocking the new fad for motor cars, and conjurors. In the provinces there were customarily two performances a night, the first more genteel and the second, for obvious reasons, much rowdier. In London and a few other cities, performers would dash from theatre to theatre, covering quite a few in a single evening. On Friday nights many halls allowed amateurs to try their best, in much the same way as TV talent shows today. In some halls, in place of a verbally sadistic panel of celebrity judges, there really was a manager standing watching in the wings with a long hooked pole to pull failures off-stage by their necks.