The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  From the formation of the Labour Representation Committee of 1900 there was a formal yoking together of socialists and trade unionists. But it was hard going until a tiny dispute in Wales spiralled out of control. The case had begun with the victimization of a signalman in a village who, having agitated for higher wages, was told he was being moved to another job, uprooting his ill wife and ten children. His treatment at the hands of a violently anti-unionist manager of the small Taff Vale Railway Company provoked an angry response. The railwaymen decided to use sabotage. They smeared grease on the rails of a modest slope, so the trucks’ wheels began to spin and the carriages slowed down; at which point the men emerged from bushes along the track and uncoupled the trains. This was dangerous, aggressive and highly effective. It brought the railway company round to talks. But the Taff Vale management were not finished. They sued the men’s union and won, getting the then substantial sum of £32,000 in damages. If this stood, any serious strike or action against a company would bust the union involved. This at last persuaded the old-style union leaders that there was no alternative but politics. They would have to be able to change laws, with their own MPs.

  After Taff Vale, ‘Labour’ candidates began to appear in by-elections. In the 1906 general election twenty-nine of them won seats, soon renamed themselves the Labour Party and helped the winning Liberals reverse the Taff Vale judgment. To start with, Labour MPs made little impact. In a chamber dominated by Oxbridge repartee, they were easy to patronize. Where they were heard, it was on the specific issues they knew about at first hand: workmen’s compensation and the medical inspection of state schools. Will Crooks, a Labour MP for Poplar, got ‘character tests’ to limit old-age pensions struck out of the legislation after asking, ‘What degree of drunkenness was to disqualify for a pension? Half stewed, half drunk, steadily drunk, talkatively drunk, quarrelsome drunk, maudlin drunk, dead drunk?’49 In 1907 at a famous by-election at Colne Valley a young and charismatic former divinity student called Victor Grayson won a spectacular victory as an independent socialist over both the main parties, and there was much talk of a revolutionary breakthrough. But Grayson was an alcoholic and lost his seat three years later. By 1912 the acerbic Beatrice Webb was writing: ‘The majority of Labour MPs are a lot of ordinary workmen who neither know nor care about anything but the interests of their respective trade unions and a comfortable life for themselves.’

  The industrial scene was more exciting than that. Perhaps Britain was instead heading towards a workers’ uprising that was choked off only by the extraordinary circumstances of the First World War? For all the incendiary talk and the movements of ships and troops, and occasional outbreaks of violence, it seems unlikely. The demands of most trade union members were straightforward and modest – another penny or two on the hourly rate, fair differentials, an eight-hour working day, free school meals for their children and a meagre but guaranteed old-age pension. From the first days of Labour MPs, trade union sponsorship had tended to rein in socialist dreamers, rather than spurring them on. Even the miners and railway workers, more militant than most, who favoured a minimum wage and public ownership of industry, were actually hostile to state welfare because it would undermine their own friendly societies and mutual aid organizations.

  There were, however, serious revolutionaries abroad in Edwardian Britain: the SDF supporters who would eventually form the core of the Communist Party, plus European and Russian anarchists and Marxists. Britain prided herself on having a liberal attitude to political dissidents and refugees, much to the anger of foreign governments. In 1907 Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Gorky and a host of Bolsheviks and others gathered in Islington for a congress to debate differences. Lenin and his mistress Nadezhda Krupskaya stayed in the Hotel Imperial in Russell Square while Stalin and many of the lesser-known comrades bedded down in doss houses and rented rooms in the East End. The future Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald, in white tie and tails, then met Lenin and Stalin at a Chelsea drinks party. The Daily Mirror reported that young Bolshevik girls were training themselves with revolvers, but the nearest anyone came to real violence was Stalin, already a hardened gangster and terrorist, who was nearly beaten up in a pub by dock workers. Lenin took the revolutionaries to his favourite pub and ensured supplies of beer and sandwiches for their meetings but few of them seem to have enjoyed London very much.

  There is no doubt that the anarchist and communist cause was greatly helped by having a safe refuge in London, just as Islamist terrorism was eighty and ninety years later. In the Sidney Street siege of December 1910, a gang of Latvians murdered three policemen after a bungled East End jewellery raid, and then holed up and held out with rifles. Churchill summoned Scots Guards from the Tower of London to help, and called up artillery too. Then, unable to contain his curiosity and sense of theatre, the home secretary arrived as well, in top hat and astrakhan-collared coat, where he was photographed glaring at the house and later ordered it to be left to burn when it caught fire. He excitedly told Asquith later that it had been a striking scene – ‘firing from every window, bullets chipping the brickwork, police and Scots Guards armed with loaded weapons . . . I thought it better to let the house burn down rather than spend good British lives in rescuing those ferocious rascals.’ But Churchill was widely mocked for his grandstanding. He proposed a tightening up of the law against illegal immigrants and ‘aliens’, for which he was much attacked by other Liberals. One MP warned him that ‘human life does not matter a rap in comparison with the death of ideas and the betrayal of English traditions’.

  The end of the old landed order, the apparently corrupt and cosmopolitan plutocracy of Westminster, the socialistic demagogues, looming revolution and the failure to build a stronger army – all this flashed and flamed on a paranoid canvas that at times seems very reminiscent of post-war Weimar Germany. But there is an instinct for moderation, compromise and pulling back wherever one looks. Leo Maxse, who had run the Balfour Must Go campaign and encouraged talk of treachery, had his way by the autumn of 1911. When Balfour stepped down he ruefully commented that he and Maxse ‘are probably the two happiest men in London’. Lloyd George, up to visit the royal family at Balmoral at the same time, found King George ‘a very, very small man . . . all his sympathy is with the rich’ and complained the court was civil to him ‘as they would be to a dangerous wild animal’.50 Yet Balfour could joke about inviting ‘Leo’ to dinner and Lloyd George did hobnob with the King and Queen. In its revolt, the Tory leadership had pulled back at the last moment; the King had unhappily accepted that democracy could not be thwarted; nobody had died in the last ditch; and the Lords carried on contesting Commons bills for a long time to come. Fudging and hesitation were also old British traditions.

  Those Magnificent Men

  Lenin, including during his visits to London, used to ask the question, ‘Who, whom?’ He was asking about the universal power relationship: who could do what to whom? But you can narrow the question, making it physical and asking rather, ‘Who goes to whom?’ In a school, office, business negotiation or affair, who summons and who answers? That tells you where power lies. And the point about the first meeting of Rolls and Royce, which took place at the magnificent new Midland Hotel in Manchester in May 1904, was that Rolls went to see Royce. It is not what you would have predicted. The Rt Hon. Charles Rolls was not only the son of a titled landowner on the Welsh borders, who had been to Eton and Cambridge, he was also already a well-known figure to newspaper readers for his feats in new motor cars, and to high society as a successful purveyor of Panhard cars, London driving instructor and all-round petrol-age adventurer. He had a West End showroom and a garage in an old skating rink at Fulham with space for 200 vehicles. Quite naturally, he did not feel it was up to him to leave London and pay court to Henry Royce. For Royce was, by Rolls’s standards, barely educated at all and very bottom drawer. A failed miller’s son, he had left school at nine and struggled to make ends meet delivering telegrams, working in factories and briefly enjoying an
apprentice’s training at a rail yard in Peterborough. He had walked the lanes of northern England looking for work, lived on bread and milk, known bitter cold and poverty and had very slowly worked his way up until he owned a tiny electrical engineering works in Manchester, making lamp-holders, dynamos and small electric cranes.

  If Rolls symbolized the derring-do of the moneyed Edwardian male, a posh petrolhead thrilled by the adventure of speed technology, Royce was a prime example of the grimly obsessive working-class man who had clawed his way up. He was an industrial engineer of genius. As his business had grown, he had bought his first car. Unlike Rolls, who had been an early convert to the Panhard cars created by the French pioneer, Royce was instantly dissatisfied with the quality of the second-hand car he had bought, also French, a Decauville. So he took it to pieces and bit by bit, from the cylinders to the carburettor, the ignition system, distributor, cooling system, gear box, suspension, brakes and lubrication, completely redesigned it from the inside. By the time he had finished . . . except that the lanky, bearded, workaholic Royce never finished, and was soon building an entirely new car. It did not look like much but when the new vehicle, registration number M 612, began to trundle round the roads of Cheshire, it was very unusual: it was remarkably quiet, it was comfortable, and it did not break down. Back in London, Charles Rolls was having increasing trouble selling his Panhards. Though they laid down the basic design followed by most car makers for the next fifty years, the French machines were by 1904 looking rather old, box-like and slow. So when Rolls heard about the new car from a friend, Henry Edmunds, he was instantly intrigued. Perhaps Royce might like to come down and see him? On 26 March 1904 Edmunds wrote a note to Royce: ‘I saw Mr Rolls yesterday, after telephoning to you, and he said it would be very much more convenient if you could see him in London, as he is so very much occupied.’ But no go. Royce would not budge.

  So Rolls took the train north to Manchester. Who, whom? On the way, in the dining car with Edmunds, he confessed that what he really wanted was a car connected with his name, ‘so that in future it might be a household word, just as much as “Broadwood” or “Steinway” in connection with pianos; or “Chubbs” in connection with sofas’. This tells you much about Rolls, just as Royce was later revealed in his true colours when it was put to him that success in the car industry would come from making reliable vehicles at a low price for a mass market, and he replied that no, he was only interested in making the best car in the world, regardless of price.51 Henry Ford and young William Morris, who had started his tiny Oxford Automobile Company the previous year, would take the other road. Meanwhile, Rolls and Royce found their common enthusiasm removed any social stiffness. Their lunch was a roaring success, as was the trip in the car that followed. From this meeting came, of course, one of the great British engineering success stories of modern times. Rolls-Royce would get its first breakthrough in the frequent car races of the time, and its second with the extraordinary Silver Ghost of 1906, which with 40 horsepower could do a top speed of around 80 m.p.h., yet was remarkably quiet. Though such cars became symbols of wealth and status, when they were first produced it was their performance that flabbergasted even hardened automobilists. One wrote later: ‘There arrived before my house the most astonishing motor car I had yet seen. The length of it, the silence, the stately form of it were beyond anything the motor world had yet known. It was, I was told, the work of a great engineer, one F. H. Royce . . . We glided through the traffic with an ecstasy of motion which left the passenger astounded. We floated up hills at top speed.’52

  A year after Rolls and Royce had started working together, the plugged-in marketing aristocrat and the obsessed engineer, the number of cars on British roads had risen to 16,000, and through the Edwardian age they would start to become common, if not quite ubiquitous. By the time the First World War began there were 132,000 registered motor cars in Britain, and observers described roads ‘swarming’ or ‘alive’ with traffic. A century earlier Britain had been a pioneer in the ‘horseless carriage’ but had long since fallen behind. As early as 1803 a Cornishman was running the London Steam Carriage Company and in the 1830s large steam-driven coaches owned by ‘Squire and Macerone’ ran between Paddington and Edgware to the north-west of London, reaching speeds of 20 m.p.h. – probably about today’s average. Glasgow and Paisley had a steam-carriage route, carrying up to sixty people at a time, and by the early 1830s parliamentarians were predicting the replacement of horses by steam cars.53 Boiler explosions and the arrival of the railway age proved them wrong, though steam-powered cars, early ancestors of new vehicles being developed for the global-warming age, remained popular well into the twentieth century. The early garages in Edwardian Britain sold a wide range of electric cars. Even the King had one.

  But apart from the pneumatic tyre, invented by the Scotsman John Boyd Dunlop, all the key developments in the car were made in the 1880s by Germans – famously Gottfried Daimler and Karl Benz – or Frenchmen. This was partly because of the state of British roads. The railway age had left the country with badly tended, slippery tendrils of ancient roadway, quaint and looping but hardly efficient. It was also because of the equally out-of-date state of transport law. In the 1860s self-propelled vehicles had been given speed limits of 2 m.p.h. in towns and twice that in the country, in both cases to be preceded by a walking man carrying a red flag or (at night) a red lantern. The flags were later made voluntary but the enthusiasm of the British police for apprehending and fining early motorists was vigorous long before the arrival of the speed camera. In 1895 John Knight successfully built his own petrol-driven car and triumphantly rode it through the streets of Farnham at eight miles an hour. He was promptly arrested and fined for speeding.

  Like many other new things, from passenger air travel to home cinemas and mobile phones, cars began as a toy of the rich. Their promoters included men like Sir David Salomons, the first Jewish Lord Mayor of London. He founded the attractively named Self-Propelled Traffic Association in 1896, which merged into the Automobile Club a year later, stuffed with peers and grand politicians such as Rosebery and Balfour. When a bill was introduced into the House of Lords in 1903 to raise the speed limit to 20 m.p.h., it was attacked as being legislation ‘of the rich, for the rich and by the rich’. Yet the car drivers felt they were persecuted by outdated laws and officious policemen. In 1905 the Automobile Club was splitting, with the breakaway Automobile Association representing the more militant motorists.

  Some sense of how it felt to be an early motorist comes from a remarkable book by Lord Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail, and others. Produced in 1902, though it ran to regular later editions, Motor Cars and Driving was full of advice about which car to buy – an Argyll, perhaps, or a Napier? – and what to do when things went wrong. The usefulness of the motor car was demonstrated by its ability to get you to fox-hunting meets, to remote parts of the countryside for pheasant or snipe shooting, and to Scottish trout lochs. Sir Henry Thompson, Bart, FCRS, contributed an essay on the health benefits of motoring: ‘Personally, I have found my drives to improve general health. The easy jolting which occurs when a motor car is driven at a fair speed over the highway conduces to a healthy agitation; it “acts on the liver”, to use a popular phrase, which means only that it aids the peristaltic movements of the bowels and promotes the performance of their functions.’ It was as effective for constipation, in other words, as was vigorous horse riding. (When next you see film of Edwardians riding, or driving their fine horseless carriages, you can reflect on what they were hoping for.) But, acknowledged Sir Henry, horse-riding also helped develop the leg muscles. This disadvantage in motoring ‘may be to some extent overcome by alighting at the end of a drive of twenty miles and running smartly for about two hundred, or three hundred, yards’. Good advice, no doubt, if perhaps slightly undermined by the fact that by the 1904 edition of the book, game old Sir Henry had become the late Sir Henry.

  Motoring was an outdoor sport. Few cars had proper coverings a
nd much debate took place about what to wear. Baron de Zuylen de Nyevelt, president of the Automobile Club of France, pointed out that motorists’ clothing was the subject of ‘much irreverent ribaldry and . . . in many cases, the chaff has been merited’. Ordinary tweed and cloth were useless, he explained, because ‘the air will be felt whistling round the ribs, and coats become distended behind like balloons’. On the other hand, ‘a leather jacket and trousers are objectionable because the moisture from the body cannot escape, with the result that underclothing becomes dangerously moist and disagreeable’. The baron recommended tightly belted cloth suits, lined with punctured chamois leather, and also rugs split down the middle to wrap around the legs, snow boots, and India-rubber kilts, the latter particularly useful in cold weather because when you alighted to make adjustments, ‘the hot envelope of air is still retained under it’. Best of all, however, was a fur coat worn with the fur outside, and a very high collar, despite the fact that ‘these coats have been a source of very considerable amusement to onlookers and small boys in England’.54

  By the beginning of the First World War, however, cars were almost ordinary machines for getting about in. Car factories sprang up. Laws were changed. Races and processions of cars round the country allowed people everywhere to watch, touch and sometimes ride in the new machines, whose characteristic ‘toof, toof’ noise was no longer causing beasts and people to jump in fright. Famous men such as Field Marshal Lord Roberts, Rudyard Kipling and Winston Churchill were keen motorists, much photographed. In the cities, horse-drawn omnibuses began to disappear in favour of petrol-driven buses. Hansom cabs were replaced by motorized taxis. Lorries replaced carts. Petroleum spirit, which had been available mainly from chemists, was being sold at the new garages. Country taverns began to tout for motorists’ custom, turning their horse-yards into car parks. The victory of the car was faster than the victory of the Labour-voting working classes or the victory of the suffragettes. Rolls-Royce Ltd moved to a sprawling new factory at Derby, lured by the promise of cheap electricity and land. It would soon build military cars and its engines would be used for aircraft too.