A Brief History of Britain 1851-2010

by Jeremy Black

  Once he was Prime Minister, there was, under Gladstone, a particular effort to improve education and to do so by means of standardization and change. This effort owed much to the Methodist impact on Liberal thought and, as such, was an aspect of the importance not only of the Nonconformist conscience but of religion more generally. Nonconformists saw education as critical to their Bible-centred religious views. The 1870 Education Act divided the country into school districts under education boards, and stipulated a minimum level of educational provision in each district. Supervision by central government was a central part of the new system, one that altered the relationship between central and local government. The Endowed Schools Commission founded that year redistributed endowments and reformed governing bodies.

  This was a key aspect of a more general trend by which the role of the parish in education and social welfare declined in favour of new governmental agencies. Municipal and county government were better able than the Church to implement the aspirations of society for reform and control, and in many towns the prestige and authority held by the vicar passed to the mayor. Moreover, as an attempt to establish improved criteria for government, open competition was introduced in the Civil Service in 1870, a significant step in the move from patronage to merit. In 1872, the secret ballot was introduced for elections, an act intended to end intimidation and deference in voting, not least the sway of employers. Disease was attacked alongside disorder. Urban and rural sanitary authorities responsible for the maintenance of sewers and highways in their districts were inaugurated in England and Wales by the 1872 Public Health Act, following the recommendations of the report of the Sanitary Commission (1871). Typhus virtually disappeared by the 1890s, typhoid was brought under partial control, and death rates from tuberculosis and scarlet fever decreased.

  Under Disraeli in 1874–80, there was also much social reform, although his commitment was limited compared to that of Gladstone. Disraeli was to be associated with ‘One Nation’ Conservatism, but in fact argued for the value of the aristocracy, even though he came from a background that was very different. His antecedents were Jewish (although he was baptized as an Anglican at the age of twelve) and, for long, Disraeli was more associated with the London literary world than with that of the country house, and his major public speeches at Manchester and the Crystal Palace in 1872 were very much part of the world of public politics. Yet, Disraeli saw the landed elite as important to the identity of both party and nation, the aristocracy, however, being willing, in his prospectus, to lead in the interests of the nation, rather than those of its class. The duties of status and power were central to Disraeli’s political views, as they were to Liberal supporters of reform. Disraeli himself ended up as an earl with a stately home.

  Some of the Disraeli ministry’s legislation was inherited from the Gladstone government, and most of it did not receive Disraeli’s full attention or support. Nevertheless, whatever the practical impact, the key point was that a Conservative government also sought change rather than opposing or reversing it. By Continental standards, the Conservative Party was notably liberal, while its Liberal rival was particularly popular. Legislation on factories (1874), public health, artisans’ dwellings, and pure food and drugs (1875), systematized and extended the regulation of important aspects of public health and social welfare. The Artisans’ Dwellings Act of 1875 made urban renewal possible, while the Prison Act of 1877 established state control of prisons, a step intended to end abuses.

  As an important sign of the authority of the state, the Definition of Time Act of 1880 made the use of Greenwich Mean Time compulsory throughout Britain. As an instance of the general process of reform, in 1876 the Unseaworthy Ships Act ensured that ships carried a Plimsoll line: a horizontal line, named after Samuel Plimsoll MP (1824–98), that marked the point beyond which a ship was overladen and could not sail legally.

  The larger electorate encouraged developments in organization as well as policy, and, like culture and leisure, was increasingly institutional. Thus, the National Union of Scottish Conservative Associations was founded in 1882. Meanwhile, the process of reform, both political and social, continued with the Local Government Act (1888) creating directly elected county councils and county boroughs, as well as the London County Council. These new councils replaced the government of the localities by unelected justices of the peace and town corporations.

  Moreover, the basis was being laid for a welfare state, notably with the major role of government in education and with legislation like the Workmen’s Compensation Act (1897), which obliged employers to provide compensation for industrial accidents. Government was becoming increasingly involved in the lives of the people it represented. As the state grew, so too did expectation as to its further expansion. People looked increasingly for reform or government control to improve their lives.

  Yet, a common quest for reform did not mean that politics was absent. Instead, to contemporaries, there were serious issues at stake. In particular, thanks to the divisive effect of Gladstone’s support for Irish Home Rule (self-government) on the Liberals from 1886, the Conservatives were in office, with the support of Liberal Unionists, from 1886 to 1892 and 1895 to 1905. They were led by Robert, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, and, from 1902, his nephew (‘Bob’s His Uncle’), Arthur Balfour (1848–1930). Despite Salisbury’s preference for the seclusion of Hatfield House, his stately home, and his lack of interest in managing Parliament, the party sustained power with the popularity of its imperialist policies and the long-term expansion of the middle class, exemplified by the foundation in 1883 of the Primrose League, which stood for Church, Crown, empire, property and order, and proved an effective popular organization for the Conservatives. By 1891, the League had over a million members. Although committed to the Establishment, the Conservatives were keen to reach out and win the active backing of what they saw as the inherent conservatism of the populace. They followed a cautious policy on domestic reform, ceding workmen’s compensation for injury, but not old-age pensions.

  This emphasis on reform helped ensure that the politics of the period made Britain’s economic transformation possible. There were major social pressures but no serious breakdown in social or political stability or, indeed, large-scale disruption. In part, this was a product of an earlier lack of resort to violence. In contrast to many other European states, there was no political revolution in Britain, either at the time of the French Revolutionary crisis at the close of the eighteenth century or in the mid-nineteenth century, when there were revolutions across the Continent. This does not mean that hardship and discontent were on a small scale, but simply that, in a comparative context, they, and their consequences, should not be exaggerated.

  Ireland and Wales

  Politics were different in Ireland, where there was a violent nationalist streak looking back to the unsuccessful 1798 revolution, a revolution that had been the prelude to parliamentary union between Ireland and Britain in 1801, as a result of which Irish elections were to the Westminster Parliament. Yet, most Irish nationalism was non-violent. The Dublin authorities fostered attempts to improve the lot of the population through reform and firm action aimed at limiting extra-parliamentary agitation. The extension of the franchise in 1867 and 1884 greatly increased the number of Catholic voters, and most of them supported Home Rule which would have left an Irish Parliament and government in control of all bar defence and foreign policy. The Home Government Association of 1870 was followed by the Home Rule League in 1873. Charles Parnell (1846–91) became leader of the MPs pressing for Home Rule in 1879, and this group became an organized and powerful parliamentary party, with eighty-five MPs in 1886, which helped ensure that Home Rule came to play a major role in the political agenda.

  Home Rule brought together issues of national identity and religion in both Ireland and Britain. To an extent that is easy to underplay from the perspective of the far more secular 2000s, religion proved an important issue in politics and one that linked to key concerns of
government. No fewer than 217 Bills on religious subjects were introduced in Parliament between 1880 and 1913. There was criticism of the very idea of an Established (state) Church, and this became an important political issue and a cause of division between the political parties. Church issues were linked to the control and funding of education, matters of great contention. Liberals pressed for disestablishment of the state Church from the 1860s. The Church of Ireland, the Anglican (Protestant) Church, was the official Church in Ireland despite the majority of the population being Catholic. This Church was disestablished by Gladstone in 1869, a major step in Irish politics and in their relationship with Liberalism.

  In Wales there were bitter political disputes over Church disestablishment throughout the rest of the century and beyond. Welsh Liberals were also strongly opposed to Church schools, and especially to measures to provide public assistance to them. Political activism took the form of local, extra-parliamentary action, indicating the extent to which politics was not simply a matter of parliamentary activity. The 1902 Act compelling finance from the rates for Church schools, passed by a Conservative government, led to the ‘Welsh Revolt’, as county councils refused to implement it. By the time the Conservative government fell in late 1905, there had been 65,000 prosecutions for non-payment. Much bitterness was caused by the 100 imprisonments and the 3,000 property auctions to pay the rates. The entire episode indicated the depth of anger that disputes linked to religion could generate, and the extent to which they were not restricted to Ireland.

  Agitation in Wales and Ireland serves as a reminder of the number of political narratives at issue and of the extent to which nationalism was also a question within the British Isles. In both, as in Scotland, there were also factors strengthening links within Britain. To take Ireland, it is possible to write a brief survey that centres on hardship and discord: the aftermath of the potato famine of 1845–8 and the struggle for Irish political autonomy. Both, indeed, were of great importance. Yet, it is also important to recall that other themes can be advanced. Ireland remained within the empire, largely speaking English, there was no collapse into anarchy or civil war, and the Irish economy developed as part of the growing imperial economy. The closing decades of the nineteenth century brought economic and social change, commercialization, continued Anglicization, and the dismantling of landlord power; and, by 1914, Ireland had gained a large share of its economic independence. Thanks to legislation in 1860, 1870, 1881, 1885, 1891 and 1903, landlords were obliged to settle the land question largely on their tenants’ terms: farmers increasingly owned their holdings.

  The position of the Catholic Church markedly improved. For example, in the town of Kildare a convent was established, soon followed by a church and schools, and in 1889 a magnificent Catholic Gothic church whose spire dominated the town was opened.

  Ireland was more closely linked to Britain than hitherto by economic interdependence and the rapid communications offered by railways and steamships, but its Catholic areas were at the same time becoming more socially and culturally distinct. The reform process that characterized Britain was also seen in Ireland. The Irish Local Government Act of 1898 brought to Ireland the system of elected local councils introduced in England by Acts of 1888 and 1894, such that local government was transferred to the control of the largely Catholic bulk of the population.

  In Ireland, as in Britain, the major growth of the police further lessened the need to rely on the Army for domestic control, and this process was important in the transition from popular anti-militarism to a more positive view of military service. Although the Army was still called out to aid the civil power, there was less need for such action.

  In Wales, convergence with England was seen with the increased use of the English language, notably, with immigration, in South Wales. Furthermore, the usage of English was encouraged by members of the emerging middle class. Gentry landowners were commonly English-speaking, but, more significantly, English was the language of commerce, and thus, as the Welsh economy was affected by economic growth and integration, of cattle dealers and drovers, merchants, shopkeepers and master mariners.

  Yet, as the usage of English became more common, it also became more politically charged, a consequence in part of debates over the role and nature of public education. Furthermore, in the second half of the nineteenth century, language came to play a role in a powerful political critique directed against Conservative landowners and the Anglican Church and in favour of Liberalism and Nonconformity, both of which were presented as truly Welsh. There was a parallel with the Irish Home Rule movement and the late-nineteenth-century Gaelic cultural revival. Thus, T.E. Ellis (1859–99), elected as Liberal MP for Merioneth in 1886, declared, in his election address, his support for Home Rule for Ireland and Wales, for the disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales, a revision of the land laws, and better education facilities that were under the control of public, not Anglican, bodies. The Cymru Fydd (‘Wales that is to be’ or ‘Young Wales’) Home Rule movement, launched in 1886, was very influential but foundered in the mid-1890s on the antagonism between the south and north Welsh.

  There was also a greater interest in Welsh cultural history and identity, a growth in Welsh poetry, the development of choral singing and, in 1858, two years after the Welsh national anthem was composed, the ‘revival’ of the eisteddfod. A range of new institutions, from University College Aberystwyth (1872) on, testified to a stronger sense of national identity, the institutionalization of which created bodies that had an interest in its furtherance and which provided a vital platform and focus for those seeking to assert Welsh identities. Both the National Library, funded partly from the ‘penny contributions’ of miners, and the National Museum were authorized by royal charter in 1907.

  In political terms, the assertion of Welsh identity was largely represented by Liberalism, but, as later with Labour for both Wales and Scotland, this was as part of a British political consciousness. The key Welsh issues of the late nineteenth century – land reform, disestablishment and public education – could be presented in radical Liberal terms and thus incorporated into British politics. Agitation over rents and tithes led to riots, especially in 1887, but landlords were not shot: the Welsh wished to differentiate themselves from the more bitter contemporary agitation in Ireland.

  Scotland

  Scotland was affected by the same trends as England and Wales, especially industrialization and urbanization. There was, moreover, a strong identification with the British empire. Yet, the nineteenth century also saw the development of a sense of Scottishness centring on a new cultural identity that, however, did not involve any widespread demand for independence: kilts and literary consciousness, but no Home Rule Party. The National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, launched in 1853, was not explicitly nationalist, but was followed by the Scottish Patriotic Association, the Scottish Home Rule Association (SHRA), and other bodies, which all played a role in the development of a stronger sense of political separateness. The SHRA regarded the exerting of pressure on the most sympathetic political party as the best political strategy. In place of the notion of North Britain, which was rejected by the late nineteenth century, that of Scotland returned, although it was an increasingly Anglicized Scotland. The Secretaryship for Scotland, abolished in 1746, was restored in 1885.

  There was more specific opposition in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, where potato famine in the late 1840s had led to emigration and to the clearances of cultivation and settlement from the land by landowners in order to make way for sheep-farming and deer-stalking. By 1884, 1.98 million acres (801,278 hectares), over 10 per cent of Scottish land, was reserved for deer and thus the hunting interests of a small minority. In the 1880s, crofting MPs, opposed to clearances, won five seats in northern Scotland, while the ‘Battle of the Braes’ against clearances in Skye grew more intense. This struggle was a central focus of an Irish-type resistance to clearing: the Land League, modelled on the Irish Land
League, had 15,000 members by 1884. The crisis led to the Napier Commission and the Crofters’ Holding Act of 1886 which established crofting rights and ended the major phase of the clearances. Yet, far from being separate, Scotland was in the mainstream of British politics. The Liberals were powerful there, but so also were the Conservatives.

  Party Politics

  Rather than pressing for distinctive policies such as Irish Home Rule and Welsh disestablishment, the Conservatives did not seek to transform Britain, but they did wish to strengthen it. As later in response to Labour in the 1920s, 1930s, 1950s and 1980s, the Conservatives benefited from the increasing perceived radicalism of Gladstonian Liberalism which drove the satiated and newly anxious middle class, many themselves the beneficiaries of the meritocratic reforms of the first Gladstone ministry of 1868–74, into the Conservative camp. Taxes were a key issue. The spread in the power and activity of government had led to new commitments, for example by school boards, and these commitments pushed up the rates (local property taxes). Rising tax demands pressed on a society that was less buoyant and, crucially, less confident economically than that of the middle decades of the century, and this hit support for the Liberals.

  The Conservatives, who were in power from 1874 to 1880, 1885 to 1886, 1886 to 1892, and 1895 to 1905, also benefited from more positive support, notably the ability to tap populist themes and to present their policies in nationalist terms. They put considerable emphasis on imperialism abroad (both spreading empire and imperial sentiment) and at home (in Ireland), hitting the Liberals on both heads. Indeed, proposals for Home Rule for Ireland, introduced by Gladstone, were defeated in 1886 and 1893 at Westminster; in part because they divided the Liberals as well as energizing the Conservatives. Far from being politically and socially rigid, the Conservatives also displayed an openness to social trends, as with a willingness to recruit Catholics and to mobilize female support. The latter proved particularly useful after women gained the vote in 1918.