The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Eventually, of course, the sadness was too much, the weight of public stoicism too heavy for living, breathing humans to bear. Those who had survived wanted some fun again. The brittle urban gaiety for which the twenties are known was an essential response to the muffled drums and the silences and the hat-doffing to piles of brick and bronze. Ponderous hymn tunes consoled many. Jazz replied. The war had dulled and shabbied the country, so there followed a time of paint and silliness. Upper-crust girls could shock their parents by aping the masses and using rouge and mascara and lipstick. Women began smoking in public. The Great War, like littler wars, had been an overwhelmingly masculine affair. Boys grew into men very fast, and died as men. Men dressed as modern warriors in thick polished belts, heavy boots, rough, bronze-decorated overcoats and peaked caps. In wartime, beards and long hair were symbols of dissidence which drew angry looks and loud comments. So after it was over the younger men who had just missed the war responded with colourful and, to their elders’ eyes, effeminate clothing. Women, in turn, looked a little more like boys. Tubular dresses, bindings round the chest to disguise the bust and short haircuts, the bob and then the shingle, made girls seem unsettlingly androgynous. When the insolent-puppy writer Evelyn Waugh married a woman also called Evelyn, they were called He-Evelyn and She-Evelyn, and they gaze back from photos in identical trousers and shirts with similarly camp expressions. The upper classes and their arty hangers-on led the way, but thanks to the mass newspapers people across the country watched and in some ways mimicked them.

  Though we think of the most riotous scenes of misbehaviour coming in the twenties, the years of the Bright Young Things, the pattern had been set during the war. A good case-study can be found in the diaries of Duff Cooper, for most of the war working at the Foreign Office and in love with Lady Diana Manners, who had been a great and well-connected Edwardian beauty. His diaries recount an astonishing amount of casual love-making and hard drinking. The affairs are probably mostly not fully physical, because of the dangers of pregnancy, but in variety and number his circle rivalled or outpaced the behaviour of people in supposedly laxer, later days. The fine wines and champagnes gurgled away through the war, as did the old brandies and whisky, and a fair amount of drug taking – morphia, mainly, injected. You could buy what was, in effect, cocaine and heroin quite legally – people sent it to the troops. At one level, it is a record of hedonism and self-indulgence on a scale that would have shattered the constitutions of most rock musicians sixty years later. Yet it is only when set together with the equally astonishing death-rate of their friends that it makes full sense. After yet another friend, an in-law of the Asquiths, has been killed, Cooper recalls Edwardian parties of which he was now the only male survivor and records a day of helpless crying. It ends with him dining in his club: ‘I drank the best champagne – Pommery 1906 – because I felt that Edward would have wished it and would have done so had I been killed first.’ He refuses to go out to eat ‘simply because I was afraid that I might cry in the middle of dinner’. Cooper went on to serve towards the end of the war, with spectacular bravery.

  This determination to drink deep and party while there was still time flowed unchecked into the post-war world. The nearest recent equivalent might be the drug-taking hedonism that flooded American youth during and after Vietnam. As then, in twenties Britain it pitted young and old against each other in an epic generational battle. The jittery, shallow, fancy-dressing army of upper-class children who smashed up bars, invented new cocktails, danced along the counters of department stores, learned to dance the camel-walk, the shimmy, the black-bottom and the notorious Charleston and stole policemen’s hats contained plenty of ex-officers from the front, and many whose brothers, cousins and lovers had been killed. Among those who arrived in London and changed the city’s taste were the first Harlem hot jazzmen, black musicians bringing the allure of early Hollywood pictures and stories of gangsters. Elders and betters looked on aghast; and, as ever, the media, in this case the fashionable new trade of newspaper gossip columnists, stoked up the story. Noe¨l Coward, whose play The Vortex dealt with drugs, was able to pose to a popular newspaper in a silk dressing gown with an expression, it reported, of advanced degeneracy. He promised the London Evening Standard that ‘I am never out of opium dens, cocaine dens, and other evil places. My mind is a mess of corruption.’91 Gangs like the Sabinis and the Titanics (the latter apparently so named because they dressed up poshly, like passengers on the liner) fought across Soho, across the racetracks and for control of the new centres of vice in twenties Britain – the nightclubs. There you could find ex-officers, Sinn Fein men, gangsters, prostitutes, dancers and drug dealers like the famous opium supplier ‘Brilliant’ Chang. There were also homosexual clubs, crowded with men who had failed to heed their monarch: George V, told that an acquaintance was a ‘bugger’, replied with consternation: ‘I thought men like that shot themselves.’

  Falling from Grace: Nightclubs and Peers

  The ‘Queen of the Nightclubs’ was a woman of the most respectable background, whose children were sent to Harrow and Roedean.92 Kate Meyrick had been brought up in a house in Ireland called Fairyland, and when she and her doctor husband split up, faced with having to earn a living, she resolved to create some enchanted spaces of her own. She opened her first club in Leicester Square in 1919, where her guests ranged from the King of Denmark to Russian refugees, gangsters and Marie Lloyd. There were pistol shots and confrontations, attempted blackmailings and rows over the drinks licence. She was beaten up by a Soho gangster for refusing him entry, raided by the police and fined, but her little empire expanded. The Manhattan, the Little Club, the Silver Slipper and many more made Meyrick one of the most powerful entertainment figures in the capital. The most famous club she owned was known simply as the 43 after its address in Gerrard Street, Soho. It was a large building and photographs show a rather bare, even stark dance floor, with bentwood chairs of the kind you find in church halls, and white tablecloths. Yet the 43 was destined to become the most notorious nightclub in Britain. Its clientele included Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, many peers, socialist and Tory MPs, a couple of infamous murderers, financiers and hundreds of ordinary middle-class people looking for fun. The Silver Slipper had a glass dance floor, lit from underneath by coloured lights and with a wave-effect: in the mid-twenties it was the most sophisticated club in Britain. Mostly the nightclubs catered for nothing more than late-night dancing, drinking and flirting, but they became a symbol of decadence and youth revolt.

  If Kate Meyrick was the face of the fun-loving twenties, the face of authority throughout most of her career was the round, pink one of ‘Jix’ – as Sir William Joynson-Hicks was universally if unaffectionately known. A teetotal hard-line right winger who had fought and beaten Churchill at a famous Salford election before the war, Jix was famous for defending all the most conservative causes. He fought against reform of the Prayer Book, he defended General Dyer for massacring Indians at Amritsar, he would have supported rebellion and civil war to keep Ulster British and he had no time for Jews or foreigners. He first arrived as home secretary under Baldwin in 1924 and, when asked exactly what he did, replied with barely a twinkle in his eye, ‘It is I who am ruler of England.’ About the only moment of self-questioning in a life devoted to simple certainties was when he arrived one day at Buckingham Palace only to realize he was wearing brown shoes.93 Luckily disaster was averted with a borrowed pair and the King, fine fellow, laughed heartily about it for days. Jix never faltered. He began a campaign against the 242,000 registered ‘aliens’ in Britain and fiercely toughened up the ports of entry against would-be immigrants. He ran vehement campaigns, too, against vice in public parks, supported prosecutions against ‘indecent’ poems (including privately printed ones by D. H. Lawrence) and pictures (getting into trouble when drawings by that louche contemporary figure William Blake were seized) and did his best to stamp out homosexual beastliness.

  Jix also developed a near fixation with ni
ghtclubs. By 1928 he managed to have sixty-five clubs raided and prosecuted for infringements of their alcohol licence and sixty-two of them closed down: but Mrs Meyrick’s 43 was strangely and infuriatingly immune. Finally, it was discovered that a member of the vice squad, a station sergeant at Soho called George Goddard, had been taking bribes. Mrs Meyrick was sentenced to fifteen months’ hard labour – one of her five visits to Holloway before she died in 1933. For a conventionally minded middle-class woman this was a terrible ordeal: the hard-labour women, she recalled, had to do all the prison laundry, boot-repairing and oakum picking; the grave of a woman recently hanged, who had gone to her death screaming and kicking, was clearly visible as they were marched for exercise. From this world, time and again, Mrs Meyrick would return to hobnob with the leading society figures of the day. Then, when Jix, armed with DORA – the repressive wartime Defence of the Realm Act, which remained in force – pounced the next time, back she would go to jail. But she, perhaps, had the last laugh. She stares out of photographs boldly and proudly and never showed any shame about her periods of imprisonment. Of her daughters, two – equally direct and striking – married into the peerage, one becoming Lady Kinnoul and the other Lady de Clifford.

  Mrs Meyrick’s story helps unlock other aspects of post-war society. At one level, Edwardian ‘society’ was back. The nightclubs’ magic required ancient, famous names to be there, mingling with the Americans and the new rich. The presentation of debutantes to the Queen in ‘the Season’, with parties for the aristocratic youth in grand London houses written up with grovelling attention by the press, was as important to a titled young woman or ‘Hon’ in 1922 as it had been in 1912. The country-house parties of Waugh’s generation were not so different from those of their Edwardian parents. In politics, class continued to matter – in some ways more, as Lloyd George’s government was replaced by a Conservative regime. Country-house politics seemed to be back. In 1922 a pro-Lloyd George Tory MP, Arthur Lee, gave his own country house, Chequers, to the nation for the personal use of prime ministers, in case they did not have one. Grand old names predominated – Cecil, Derby, Devonshire, Balfour, Curzon. Even the rebels tended to be titled. The Irish revolutionary heroine Constance Gore-Booth, Countess Markiewicz, was of aristocratic stock and related to families such as the Westminsters, Zetlands and Scarboroughs. The socialists were supported by aristocratic renegades like Lord Strabogli, Lord Parmoor and Stafford Cripps. The imperial state seemed to require an endless supply of aristocratic proconsuls, while any respectable public company had a baronet or two on the notepaper. It was the great age of London’s gentlemen’s clubs; but not only London – every big city had its exclusive clubs. The novelists kept the notion of the grandees alive to the general middle-class reader. There was Waugh and Wodehouse, Brideshead and Blandings; but Compton Mackenzie had his ancient Highland lairds, barely touched by time, and the new fad for crime novels required murderous butlers as well as the ‘big house’ up the hill from the village. It is all a very long way from the devastation wreaked on the aristocrats of Russia, never mind the landed gentry of Germany or France.

  Yet the fact that Mrs Meyrick could marry two daughters into the aristocracy shows how thin the veneer of high-born life had become. In the nightclubs, the titled youngsters were fawning on stars who had blown in from Hollywood and rich, talented outsiders, as much as the other way round. Agricultural depression would swiftly return to force a mass sell-off of estates and the destruction of many country houses. The London Season might continue, but many of its venues were going. The world of Galsworthy’s Forsytes, in their huge Mayfair palaces, was giving way to the London of hotels and blocks of flats. In the first year after the war, the Cecils’ grand house in Arlington Street was sold, as were Devonshire House and Lord Dartmouth’s Mayfair mansion. No axes swung over the aristocrats, but the demolition balls were swinging through their homes. Dorchester House, Lansdowne House, Chesterfield House, Sunderland House and Brooke House would all go. In their place came entertainment venues and apartments: Mrs Meyrick’s nightclubs were catering for a new urban scene which was moving from private ballrooms and dining rooms to public spaces, open to anyone with enough cash and a clean shirt front. The leaders of Edwardian high society were clear that ‘society’ as they had understood it before the war, with its strict codes, interconnected family circles and prestige, had at last gone, smashed by war and tax. The pre-war Liberals had begun to mine through its ancient privilege and it was now less a grand edifice than a sponge, full of holes into which democratic culture was seeping. We only speak about Brideshead, after all, because a suburban publisher’s son got himself invited to very posh parties.

  The war had shaken up the old order but had failed to impose anything else. ‘Jix’ represented a strong instinct for a return to Victorian values, or at least to an imaginary less turbulent pre-war England, where the bishops were taken seriously and the hangman’s work was never done. But he was also much mocked, even by other ministers. He seems to have known that the spirit of the times was against him, or at least to have enough of a sense of humour to collect the numerous cartoons satirizing him. The truth was that the kind of authority he represented, Crown and State, had diminished. It had not collapsed, as in Russia or Germany. The older, more conservative sections of the country took it seriously. Church-going remained strong. Organizations such as the Scouts, the Boys Brigade and now the British Legion were at their zenith. But much of the rest of the country simply ignored the old authorities and went their own way. The pre-war question – how then shall we live? – came back with extra force and this time with a more personal edge. Mrs Meyrick, the entrepreneur of fun, deserves to be remembered as a truly emblematic figure, as significant in her way as T. S. Eliot or Edward VIII. An age of experiment in politics, drugs, sexual behaviour, art and writing had opened. The age when Westminster really dominated Britain had begun to ebb, just as women finally got the vote. For that, the politicians themselves were mostly to blame.

  Sleaze in the Old Style

  The years after the Great War offer some of the most dispiriting and third-rate politics in British history. Pudgy nonentities waddle across the stage. It often happens when a Titan falls. In this case the falling Titan was Lloyd George. He was not yet an old man, just fifty-six at the time of the Paris peace conference, though his chaotic yellow-white moustache and untidy hair made him look like something between a walrus and an elderly folk musician. Keynes, who came to know him at Paris, called him ‘this syren, this goat-footed bard, this half-human visitor to our age from the hag-ridden magic and enchanted woods of Celtic antiquity’, which was perhaps going it a bit. His Tory colleagues, with a nod to his propensities, called him simply the Goat. And his feet were solid clay. In photographs, surrounded by other leaders in their top hats and frock coats, he somehow conveys the impression of taking none of it quite seriously. In person he was as mesmeric as ever, still a good listener while exercising near-dictatorial powers, his shockingly blue eyes full of mockery and cheek. He worked hard and played hard. He was undimmed. Yet politically his games were finally catching up with him and, twist and turn as he might, he was a doomed leader almost as soon as the guns had fallen silent.

  In modern terms we would call him sleazy. He sold peerages and knighthoods for cash. This was not new. Political parties have rewarded their supporters (financial and otherwise) throughout history. Long before Lloyd George was in the position to offer any kind of patronage, Alfred Harmsworth had turned down a minor title, explaining ‘when I want a peerage, I will buy one, like an honest man’. Before the Liberal landslide victory of 1906 the Liberal chief whip, Lord Murray of Elibank, was selling the promise of honours to raise cash; after the Marconi scandal of 1911, which nearly brought down Lloyd George, Murray was obliged to flee for a while to Bogotá in Colombia to evade persistent journalists. Long after Lloyd George had departed to the wilderness, the exchange of cod-aristocratic handles and trappings for hard cash continued to be almost routine a
t Westminster; it is still occasionally the subject of angry debate now. What was so outrageous about Lloyd George? Simply, he was blatant. Lloyd George had always taken a practical approach. He admired businessmen, self-made people like himself. Unlike most politicians of the age, he had never had money of his own, and after he became coalition prime minister he had no independent party machine of a truly national kind either. So he set about selling honours to raise funds to keep himself in politics. A tariff was quickly established – in today’s terms it cost about £330,000 to become a knight, and £1.3 million to become a baronet. He was not too particular about whom he charged. And, fatally, he used the services of an old friend and fixer, a clergyman’s son, former spy, blackmailer and rogue named Maundy (like the money) Gregory.

  Maundy Gregory had been a theatre impresario, but it was his years as a secret agent, collecting dirt on half of powerful London, which gave him his true calling. Westminster has always attracted con artists and fantasists. Today, there is a whole industry which survives by convincing outsiders, mainly companies, that its sleek practitioners have fabulous access to power. Sometimes they do. Maundy Gregory, however, took it to extremes. His opulent offices, at 38 Parliament Street, were in sight of the Commons, had a useful back entrance and a curious system of coloured lights to summon taxis. Gregory employed his own ‘messengers’ in uniforms with gold crowns in braid on them, looking strikingly like official government messengers. He published a small-circulation, impressive-looking journal called the Whitehall Gazette with dull articles, information on appointments and patriotic advertisements which was easily mistaken for an official publication. He mixed and mingled with senior ministers, officials, foreign dignitaries and minor royals to the extent that many people assumed he was in some vague way a senior part of the administration himself. His Whitehall offices became a clearing-house for gossip, kickbacks, influence peddling and bribery. Among his friends he numbered the founder of MI5, the Security Service. His views, as expressed in the Whitehall Gazette, were extremely right-wing and anti-Jewish. He lived more or less openly with another man’s wife, his mistress Edith Rosse, and there is circumstantial evidence that, bored, he later murdered her. He was emblematic of the estimated 340,000 profiteers who had done well out of the war, while other men were dying, and who emerged in the early twenties as unbearably and mysteriously powerful.