The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  One of the more markedly eccentric – and to me attractive – features of the Queen’s character was shown in her passionate partiality for individual servants. John Brown, the Highland ghillie, certainly enjoyed an intimacy with his royal employer which gave rise to gossip.7 There was even a scurrilous pamphlet published – Mrs John Brown. Courtiers who saw them together were irritated by Brown’s throwing his weight about. He ‘could do practically what he liked with the other servants’ and was impertinent to equerries, royal doctors and the like. But Frederick Ponsonby – son of the Queen’s private secretary and himself a royal servant of long standing, was surely right to conclude that ‘whether there was any quite unconscious sexual feeling in the Queen’s regard for her faithful servant I am unable to say, but judging by what I heard afterwards … I am quite convinced that if such a feeling did exist, it was quite unconscious on both sides, and that their relations up to the last were simply those of employer and devoted retainer.’8 The court grew used to the Queen’s adopting Brown’s locutions. When the Duchess of Roxburgh and Lady Stopford (a woman of the Bedchamber) were not on speaking terms, Sir James Reid, the Queen’s doctor, suggested that the Duchess might visit her. ‘Oh no,’ exclaimed the Queen. ‘There would only be what Brown calls Hell and hot water.’

  Perhaps only those, in our own day, who have befriended old ladies who still employ servants can recognize how deep and close the bond between them can grow. The Queen had been in effect an only child – though she had a half-sister she was brought up as a solitary, uncertain of her mother’s love and yet monarch of all she surveyed. She also inherited the classic Hanoverian distaste for her heir, and she had the terrible misfortune to be widowed young. Neither from parent nor from first-born son could the consolations of affection be found, nor the even more deeply consoling qualities of dependability, obedience, affection for her whims. It is no surprise that she numbered her servants among her best friends.

  When Brown died in 1883 she was devastated, and was still thinking loving thoughts of him on her deathbed nearly eighteen years later. No servant ever replaced him in her affections, but there was one ‘about whom’ – to quote from her doctor – ‘the Queen seems off her head’.9

  At the end of June 1887 she engaged her first two Indian servants – Mahomet Buksh, a plump smiling young man, and Abdul Karim, aged twenty-four, both of them khidmutgars (waiters). They were engaged to serve at table, but it was not long before the Queen had given her secretary a Hindi vocabulary to study. ‘I am learning a few words of Hindustani to speak to my servants. It is a great interest to me for both the language and the people,’ she said.10

  After a couple of months at Osborne the Queen, exhausted by the rare experience of fulfilling a few public engagements for her Jubilee, moved the court, as usual, to Balmoral, giving to Major-General Sir Thomas Denneby, her groom-in-waiting, important instructions:

  Mahomet Buksh and Abdul Karim should wear in the morning out of doors at breakfast when they wait, their new dark blue dress and always at lunch with any ‘Pageri’ [pagri] (Turban) and sash they like only not the Gold ones. The Red dress and gold and white turban (or Pageri) and sash to be always worn at dinner in the evening. If it is wet or cold the breakfast is in doors when they should always attend. As I often, before the days get too short take the tea out with me in the carriage, they might do some extra waiting instead, either before I go out, or when I come in. Better before I go out, stopping half an hour longer and should wait upstairs to answer a handbell. They should come in and out and bring boxes, letters, etc. instead of the maids …

  And so on for pages.

  Purists will note with interest that the Queen refers to ‘lunch’ not ‘luncheon’ and that in the frenzied excitement of contemplating her beautifully dressed new servants, she has abandoned the protocol of referring to herself in the third person.

  Abdul Karim soon became the favourite. Evidently he was very charming, and he was the master of ‘laying it on with a trowel’, the prerequisite, as Disraeli had noted, when flattering royalty. Abdul was – to the amazement of the other courtiers – given John Brown’s room to occupy, almost a sacred shrine in the Queen’s eyes. He was – he assured Her Majesty – the son of a Surgeon General in the Indian army and it was most inappropriate for him to be waiting at table. Before long he was given the title of Munshi Hafiz Abdul Kasim – the Queen’s official Indian secretary. Young Frederick Ponsonby, son of Sir Henry and now a member of the royal household, was dispatched to India to establish the credentials of the ‘Surgeon General’. He found the Munshi’s father was the apothecary in the jail at Agra. The Queen was furious with Ponsonby and told him he had met the wrong man. She did not invite Ponsonby to dine with her for a year.11

  During the summer of 1889 the Queen noted that a brooch had gone missing – it had been given her by the Grand Duke of Hesse and had been pinned to a shawl. The courtiers made investigations and discovered that Hourmet Ali, the Munshi’s brother-in-law, had stolen it. Mrs Tuck the Queen’s dresser retrieved the brooch from Wagland the jeweller in Windsor, who confirmed that he had paid Hourmet 6/– for it. When confronted with this hard-and-fast evidence, the Queen erupted with rage against Mrs Tuck. It was one of those wild tantrums which had so terrified the Prince Consort. ‘That is what you English call justice!’ she shouted, instructing the dresser that no one – not the housekeeper at Balmoral, not Rankin the footman, no one – must be told of this disgraceful episode.

  Historians and biographers have, alas, tended to share the snobbish and racialistic attitudes of the court to the Munshi; even, it has to be said, Lady Longford adopts a tone which implies that there is something inherently ridiculous about an Indian being a royal servitor. The Queen, who could be so maddening and so foolish on many levels, was also able to see that a capable and pleasant fellow such as the Munshi would have got nowhere if he had told the truth about his supposedly low origins. Resuming the haughty and formal third person, the Queen begged to inform Sir Henry Ponsonby that ‘to make out that the poor good Munshi is so low is really outrageous & in a country like England quite out of place … she has known 2 Archbishops who were sons respectively of a Butcher & a Grocer’.

  True, she was insensitive to the dangers of accepting advice on Indian affairs from a Muslim at a time when there were tensions – when were there not? – between Hindus and Muslims. Perhaps she saw some kinship between the moral and scriptural simplicities of the Mosque and the austere Presbyterian worship at Crathie, which she in every way preferred to the Anglican service. Not all her notions were crazy. Salisbury pooh-poohed the notion that he should send Mr Rafuddin Ahmed, a young friend of the Munshi’s, to Constantinople as an attaché at the embassy.12 Surely a Muslim voice representing Britain in the Ottoman capital was perfectly sensible. Victoria’s idea to have not merely decorative servants in turbans but Indian members of the Household contrasts impressively with the record of Elizabeth II, who during a period when her country became supposedly multiracial and multicultural employed not one secretary, equerry or household servant of an Asian or Afro-Caribbean background.

  So, the Golden Jubilee passed away – with a children’s party for 30,000 in Hyde Park, a review of the fleet at Spithead, and well-wishers from all over the three kingdoms, and all over the Empire, saluting their sovereign with bunting and telegraph messages and songs. To read the Queen’s own, and understandably self-satisfied, account of the matter in her Journals you could be forgiven for believing that 1887 had closed in a glow of happiness, with the Empire calmly and prosperously in love with its sovereign and – to borrow a phrase from a modern politician – ‘at ease with itself’. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

  36

  The Dock Strike

  IN MAY 1887, the Queen had been to the East End of London and heard what she described to her prime minister as a ‘horrid noise (quite new to the Queen’s ears) “booing”, she believes it is called’. Salisbury was ‘much grieved to hear it’, but expl
ained to his Sovereign that ‘London contains a much larger number of the worst kind of rough than any other great town in the island; for all that is worthless, worn out, or penniless naturally drifts to London.’ He opined that the ‘booing’ almost certainly emanated from socialists or the Irish – ‘very resentful men who would stick at nothing to show their fury’.1

  The only plausible political group within the parliamentary system who might have represented the interests of the poor against the views of Lord Salisbury were the Liberal Radicals. Yet their leader Joseph Chamberlain had brought down Gladstone over the question of Ireland and would himself one day serve in a Salisbury Cabinet. The split in the Liberal Party put the Conservatives in power for most of the rest of the reign.

  As will always happen eventually when strong interests are not represented within the political system, people took to the streets. Under Gladstone’s government, a new word had been coined to describe the dreadful effects of the slump – ‘unemployment’;2 it was matched by the conditions already described in rural areas – devastation in Ireland, and to a small extent in England, too. The people described as ‘worthless, worn out and penniless’ did indeed come to the cities in a desperate attempt to find work, and in the Jubilee Year they were not always very successful. In the winter of 1886–7 there had been almost daily demonstrations organized by the Marxists, in which lines of ragged men marched out of the East End.3

  During the autumn they had tended to congregate in Trafalgar Square – ‘the most convenient place in all London for an open air meeting’ according to William Morris, but dangerously near the Westminster Parliament at the end of Whitehall, or Buckingham Palace at the end of the Mall. The newly appointed chief of the Metropolitan Police was instructed by Salisbury to crack down on demonstrations. It was Salisbury himself who conceived the idea of railing in the Square – ‘with gates of course’,4 so that in the event of trouble the agitators could be penned in.

  On Sunday 13 November – it was to earn the sombre nickname of ‘Bloody Sunday’ – the Radical Federation announced that it would hold a demonstration to protest against coercion in Ireland, and to demand the release of William O’Brien MP. Both sides, the socialists and the police, had a strategy in place. The demonstrators tried to baffle the police by approaching in many different groups from all sides of the Square. Morris and Annie Besant marched from Clerkenwell Green. Another group marched from Holborn and were met at Charing Cross station by the Radical MP and author R. Cunninghame Graham and John Burns the trade unionist. Others, trying to march from Bermondsey and Deptford, met with mounted police on Westminster Bridge – where twenty-six people were so badly injured that they were carried back across the river to St Thomas’s hospital. What the demonstrators did not realize was that the police, tipped off by spies, had surrounded Trafalgar Square at points in a radius of about quarter of a mile and that behind them were two squadrons of Life Guards with fixed bayonets. Once the marchers had passed through the strategic points marked out by the police they were surrounded and at their mercy. The Times reported that ‘the police, mounted and on foot, charged in among the people, striking indiscriminately in all directions and causing complete disorder in the ranks of the processionists. I witnessed several cases of injury to men who had been struck on the head or the face by the police. The blood, in most instances, was flowing freely from the wound and the spectacle was indeed a sickening one.’5

  Part of the trouble was that the demonstrators, in so far as they were organized at all, imagined that they could fight well-coordinated troops and police against whom they stood no chance. They would have been much better advised to conduct the sort of non-violent resistance to the police pioneered by Gandhi in South Africa – inspired in part by the pacifist writings of Tolstoy.6

  The police numbers were so great – probably 2,000, backed up by 400 armed soldiers – that the 10,000 marchers, many of them beaten up, dispersed without a shot being fired. Cunninghame Graham and Burns, having been badly clubbed, were arrested – and subsequently imprisoned for six weeks. The following Sunday, a smaller number tried to hold another demonstration in Hyde Park. At the same time police in Northumberland Avenue, just south of Trafalgar Square, knocked down a young law-writer named Alfred Linnell, who subsequently died. After some weeks of legal wrangling about whether he had died as a result of injuries caused by a horse kicking him, Linnell’s body was released for burial. It was decided to make the funeral held on 18 December a demonstration.

  It was choreographed by Annie Besant.7 To the solemn music of the Dead March from Saul, fifty wand-bearers, veterans of the Chartist agitation, preceded the coffin, which was emblazoned with the legend, ‘Killed in Trafalgar Square’. They set off from Soho with an open hearse, four horses and six pall-bearers – William Morris, Cunninghame Graham, W.T. Stead, Herbert Burrows, Frank Smith and Annie Besant herself.8 Huge crowds (Mrs Besant reckoned 100,000 people) lined the wayside to the Mile End Road, and the cortège did not reach the cemetery until half-past four. It was nearly dark and rain fell as the burial service was read by Christian Socialist leader the Rev. Stewart Headlam. Orations and laments were spoken, by the light of lanterns, to a vast crowd. Eleanor Marx might have reflected on the strange fact that when her father had been buried in Highgate cemetery in March 1883 only a huddle had collected in Highgate to hear Engels’ panegyric. The obsequies of an unheard-of clerk, however, symbolized for hundreds of people present why the struggle was so important. As Morris put it,

  there lay a man of no particular party – a man who until a week or two ago was perfectly obscure, and probably was only known to a few … Their brother lay there – let them remember for all time this man as their brother and their friend … Their friend who lay there had had a hard life and met with a hard death; and if society had been differently constituted from what it was, that man’s life might have been a delightful, a beautiful one, and a happy one to him …

  Morris’s hymn ‘A Death Song’, set by Malcolm Lawson to music, was not his most accomplished effort but its refrain sent out a message to ‘the rich’:

  Not one, not one, nor thousands must they slay

  But one and all if they would dusk the day.9

  Quite how the revolution might be accomplished or prevented would occupy the politically minded for the next half-century. In England, on the Left, the debate at first was between those who sought purely political remedies, and by revolutionary means – Morris, Eleanor Marx, Hyndman in their differing ways – and those such as Bernard Shaw and ultimately Beatrice (née Potter) and Sidney Webb who advocated gradualism – Fabianism. But it is hard, when reading the writings of the Fabians, to avoid the conclusion that they shared with the bossy Benthamites at the beginning of the century an essential distrust of the working classes; their ambition was not merely to improve the conditions of society but to improve the members of the lower orders themselves. Shaw mocked the Social Democratic Federation as Chartism ‘risen from the dead’; they could have replied that he was Jeremy Bentham with a long red beard. Beatrice Potter, not yet either Mrs Webb nor a fully-fledged socialist, but a close chronicler and observer of the lives of the poor in dockland and among the sweatshops of the new Jewish immigrants in the East End, did not believe that the working classes were capable of organizing themselves.

  The events of the next few years would prove her wrong. ‘The strike,’ she told her diary, of the Dock Strike in 1889, ‘is intensely interesting to me personally, as proving or disproving, in any case modifying my generalizations on “Dock Life”. Certainly the “solidarity of labour” at the East End is a new thought to me.’10

  One of the first triumphs for organized labour happened at the Bryant & May match factory in the East End. The development of the lucifer match in the 1860s had been so successful that Bryant & May had added an extra storey to their factory, thereby destroying the ventilation. Phosphorus fumes filled the premises, and many employees – they were nearly all female – developed ‘phossy jaw’,
a form of bone cancer, or skin cancer. The hours were long – in summer, 6.30 a.m. until 6 p.m., in winter starting at 8 a.m. Latecomers were fined half a day’s pay. There were also fines for dropping matches, talking, or going to the lavatory outside of two short mealtimes. Eating happened on the premises, so that phosphorus was ingested, and those with rotten teeth had them pulled, often against their wishes, by the foremen. Piecework could make a girl 5s. or 9s. per week – many started as young as six. A really hard-working adult could make between 11s. and 13s. It was Annie Besant who drew attention to conditions in this factory (where it will be remembered Karl Marx’s illegitimate son Freddy Demuth worked as a foreman) and her three informants were promptly identified and sacked. In late July 1888, Annie Besant announced that a Matchmakers Union had been formed. They went on strike, and within three weeks the employers had conceded most of their demands – shorter hours, better pay and some improvement in working conditions.11