The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  In March 1889 there was formed the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers of Great Britain and Ireland. After their strike of 1889, initially over the disgusting working conditions at the Beckton Gas Works, they made history, being the first to win the concession of working only an eight-hour day.

  Gasworkers were busy in the dark cold months of winter, but in the summer months, when people needed less heat and light, the workers were laid off. Similar problems faced the London dockers, and after their strike in the late summer of 1889, relations between labour and capital were never again the same. The power of peaceful organized labour had been demonstrated, and it was not a forgettable lesson. Much of its drama stemmed from the fact that, as has already been observed, London’s docklands exhibited with hyperbolic forcefulness the contrasts and injustices of the capitalist system. Thanks in part to the surveys of Charles Booth – The Life and Labour of the People in London, for which some of the research was done by Beatrice Potter – and thanks also to photographic evidence, and to the anecdotal recollections of those who worked with the priests mentioned earlier, in chapter 24, we know in profound detail about the lives of the poorest of the poor in the capital of the richest city in the world. The great ships which came into London Docks from all over the world, bringing to their owners, and to the investors and merchants who profited from them, colossal wealth, were unloaded by men who worked piece-rates. When trade was slack, the men were paid nothing. The pay was variable. In August, the strike began for 6d. an hour.

  You can’t separate the three big things going on at once in the political life of Britain at the end of the 1880s – Ireland, the growth of organized labour in trade unions, and Imperialism. They are all intertwined. The Imperialists saw the Empire as the ultimate dumping-ground for troublemakers, and the best solution for hunger and discontent caused by overpopulation at home. (Without it, Cecil Rhodes believed there would be a civil war in England.) Yet the desire of the Irish for independence cut at the vitals of English power and unity. If a Westminster government could not even hold together a tiny United Kingdom, how could it sustain an empire stretching across the world? Of course it could not, and the ill-starred ‘scramble for Africa’ which took place within a few decades produced an Imperial experiment which could be neither administered nor paid for. The wonder is that it lasted the sixty or seventy years it did before coming apart. (Just about as long as that equally ill-starred venture, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.) It could only work economically by a system of exploiting markets and labour at home and abroad. In India, for example, the shoddily produced cotton fabrics of Lancashire factories or the gimcrack metalwork of Birmingham were bought by an artificially created ‘market’ while indigenous textile or metalworkers were sweated for cheap export.

  The place where all this came home, in every sense of the phrase, was the dock; nor was it entirely accidental that those poor enough to be driven to accept the lousy wages for loading and unloading – the stevedores – were overwhelmingly of Irish extraction.12 The strike was led by Ben Tillett (1860–1943), himself an itinerant labourer, an English-born Irishman, a slight man with the gift of impassioned oratory. Beatrice Webb said he had the face of a ‘religious enthusiast’.

  It was easy enough for Tillett to call the strike; altogether more difficult to persuade perhaps 30,000 strikers, with no previous tradition of solidarity or union discipline, to stay on strike for no pay for as long as the dispute with the directors lasted. (And it lasted five long weeks during which some men were close to starvation, in spite of the soup kitchens set up by well-wishers and the funds collected from as far afield as Australia.)

  Tillett could not have led such a mighty movement on his own. He owed much to the help of Will Thorne (1857–1946), Tom Mann (1856–1941) and John Burns (1858–1943), all members at one time of the SDF. Thorne was the leader of the Gasworkers Union, and could offer the benefit of his experience of a successful strike. Mann had helped – and he alone of the group remained to the end of his days a Marxist, being a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1920.

  In some ways, though, the most powerful figure among the strike-leaders was John Burns – he who had been arrested on Bloody Sunday. His Scottish father died when he was young. One of eight children, he grew up in poverty in South Lambeth. On his re-election as a Member of Parliament he said, in a speech in 1901 in the Commons, ‘I am not ashamed to say that I am the son of a washerwoman. Two of my sisters used to be the ironers in the laundry which now does the laundry work for the House of Commons.’ He trained as an engineer, but all his life he was not merely bookish but a voracious collector and reader of books. One of his boyhood memories dated from when his mother had moved to Battersea. Crossing the Thames, Burns found himself walking in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, where he saw an old man in plaid trousers, a long Inverness cape and a wideawake hat. A gust of wind blew the hat away and Burns retrieved it for its owner. ‘Thank you verra much, my little monnie,’ said the old man. A policeman who witnessed the incident told Burns, ‘Go home and tell your mother and father you have picked up the hat of a great man, Thomas Carlyle.’13

  As a foreman engineer, the teenaged Burns, like some character in Conrad, sailed the West African coast. He once dived into the sea to rescue the cook, who had fallen overboard, and it was while recuperating that he read John Stuart Mill’s Political Economy. The chapter on communism converted him to socialism.14

  By the mid-Eighties, he returned to London. Burns was an active trade unionist and a keen orator, advocating universal adult suffrage, an eight-hour working day, legislative independence for Ireland, and the power of making war or peace vested solely in the democratic vote of the people. There were two significant contributions he made to the success of the Dock Strike.15 One – a conspicuous figure now in his white straw hat and black beard – was his organization of processions through the City of London. Probably not since the reign of Mary Tudor had the Square Mile seen such an array of banners, with floats and carts like some Corpus Christi Miracle Play. Only instead of religious tableaux, here were coal-heavers with their baskets on poles, and the Social Democratic Federation – ‘Justice not charity’ the motto on their bright banners – and tens of thousands of followers. The second thing on which Burns insisted in his speeches was that workplaces be picketed and those who continued to work, the scabs, be verbally and physically abused. The intimidation was effective. Burns was later regarded as a renegade to the Labour movement, when in 1905 he accepted a seat in Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal Cabinet, but he has his place in the history books as the first working man to become a government minister. The docks directors and the City bosses, when they heard his speeches, did not see a future Cabinet minister and bookman – they saw a revolutionary.

  If the directors had been callous enough to hold out until the winter they might have broken the strike. It was essential that the strikers should find a friend in the ‘establishment’ who would negotiate a settlement. Disraeli, if he witnessed the strike from the Empyrean, would have smiled to see who these workmen, many of them Irish, chose. It was the same man who had been the confidant of Charles Dilke, a go-between for Gladstone and the Irish bishops, a furious opponent of Bradlaugh, an unpopular advocate of Papal Infallibility – in short the cardinal with a finger in every pie – just like Disraeli’s Cardinal Grandison – Henry Edward Manning. He it was, together with the MP Sydney Buxton, whom both sides – strikers and directors – felt they could trust. After five weeks out on strike, the men got their sixpence an hour (eightpence overtime) and the greatest port in the busiest and richest capital in the Empire was once more open, and operative. In unfurled silk which would not look out of place in a Catholic cathedral, the Amalgamated Society of Watermen and Lightermen (Greenwich branch) wove an image of Manning into their banner.16

  It is remarkable that Manning – the old Harrovian Tory archdeacon of Chichester in his Anglican incarnation – should have evolved not merely in
to a prince of the Universal Church, but into an engaged prime social radical. Next to that other old Harrovian, Lord Shaftesbury, indeed, he stands out as one of the few of the great Victorian public figures to be aware of the true dimensions of the social problem. No doubt this was partly because, as he said to William Morris, he had upon him ‘the burden of the poorest folk in London’17 – the Irish refugees from the landlords’ policy of coercion, who lived on casual labour when they could get it. Becoming a Catholic in England made Manning into a Radical – he confided in Dilke that if he was ‘not Cardinal Archbishop he would stand for Westminster in the Radical interest’. Then again, the contradictions in his fascinating character are found in Dilke’s adding, ‘Radical though he be on social questions, he is a ferocious Jingo’.18

  As a Catholic, he combined these qualities of triumphalism and social concern, being at one and the same time an extreme advocate of papal claims, while never losing sight of the primary evangelical commitment to the poor which lies at the heart of Christianity. His defence of the pope’s claims not merely to Infallibility, but also to temporal power, endeared him to Pius DC, very naturally. The Holy Father on his deathbed said ‘Addio, carissimo’ to the English cardinal.19 The new pope – Pecci – who was elected in 1878 and took the name of Leo XIII, was a stranger to him. He was rumoured to be more ‘liberal’ than his predecessor, which would not have been difficult. Politically, the great question facing the Papacy was whether it would admit that it had lost its temporal power, and accept the new kingdom of Italy. ‘To the Italians it would seem that the Pope had abjured his principles, had abdicated his sovereignty. In Europe his reconciliation with the Revolution would be a triumph to the revolutionary party in every land.’20 So the Holy See stood firm, refused to recognize the Italian king, and put Italian Catholics in the position of having to choose whether to accept the new realpolitik or be loyal to the Church. To vote in elections, or take posts as civil servants, automatically excommunicated them. Manning saw at once that this was a ridiculous state of affairs and immediately modified his ‘ultramontane’ or papal supremacist stance. Together with three other cardinals only, he urged the pope not to ban Catholics from voting in parliamentary elections, and to drop the dream of reclaiming his temporal power by force of arms. His voice at first went unheeded. Little by little, however, the pope began to show common sense in this respect, even going so far in 1901 as to write an encyclical (Graves de communi) which permitted the use of the phrase ‘Christian democracy’, though with the proviso that this had no political implications.21

  Manning’s change of heart about papal power shows his political mind on the move – as it was (though interestingly for this Jingo Englishman, it moved more slowly here) over the Irish question. He was eventually converted to Home Rule.22 What is truly interesting is his identification of himself so firmly with a very minority and forward-looking group within the Catholic Church in Europe who – whatever the pope thought of democratic elections – thoroughly espoused the cause of working people.

  Ignoring the question of whether the pope was ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in his attacks upon the very concept of democracy, one can see, from a purely political viewpoint, that such a policy from the Vatican was going to be potentially disastrous in terms of holding up Church numbers. Anyone who wished to play a part in the newly emerging political systems of the continent would have to choose between their political rights and their religious duties. Many would abandon the Church because of this. Yet, leaving aside the question of the actual political institutions of parliaments, kingdoms and republics, there were many within the Catholic Church, as in the Anglican Church of F.D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley, who felt that to follow the Incarnate Carpenter of Nazareth, they could not but identify themselves with the poor. There was no single dominant group or organization who espoused such ideas, but in France among the more influential were the group who founded the Workingmen’s Clubs in Paris after the Commune. They included aristocrats such as Count Albert de Mun (1841–1914) and Marquis René de La Tour du Pin (1834–1924), who devoted themselves to the social Catholic cause, and Léon Harmel (1829–1915), who turned his father’s spinning-factory at Val-des-Bois near Rheims into a model Christian township, with each worker having his own house and garden, free medicine and partnership in the ownership and running of the firm. In 1885, he took a pilgrimage of 100 workers to Rome; in 1887, he took 1,800, and in 1889,10,000 went.23 Leo XIII, who was an intelligent man, could not fail to grasp what these enlightened Catholics were saying, decided to stand back from the arcane debates about Papal lands and to return to the fundamental implications of the social gospel. What had the Church, founded as Catholics believed by a carpenter who had commended the poor in spirit as blessed, and judged the pursuit of wealth to be vain – what had this Church to say to the world of Capitalism? In Belgium, Germany, France and England, that is, in the primary industrial nations, the question was of urgency, and to a congress in Liège in 1890 Manning wrote a letter, which was read out to the delegates, in which he proclaimed that ‘To put labour and wages first and human or domestic life second is to invert the order of God and of nature.’ He asserted the rights of trade unions, and the necessity for fair working hours.

  These ideas were also to be found in the pope’s encyclical of 1891, Rerum novarum. Whether or not Manning influenced this encyclical, or even had a hand in drafting all or part of it, will probably never be known.24 Ben Tillett wrote to Manning on 9 June 1891:

  I have just been reading the Pope’s letter – a very courageous one indeed, one that will test good Catholics much more effectively than any exhortation to religious worship. As you know, some of us would disagree very strongly with many of the strictures laid upon Socialists. These are minor matters. The Catholic sympathy abounds in generous strength. I hardly think our Protestant prelates would dare utter such wholesome doctrine.25

  As if to emphasize the truth of what Tillett said, the Church of England, at roughly the time when Rerum novarum was being digested by the faithful, was witnessing the Alice-in-Wonderland spectacle of one of its more saintly High Church bishops – King of Lincoln – being placed on ‘trial’ at Lambeth by an unwilling archbishop of Canterbury, charged with such criminal offences as mixing wine and water in the chalice during the Communion Service and using the sign of the cross when blessing or absolving the people.26 Improbable as Roman Catholic teaching was to many who had gut prejudices against the Papacy or visions of the Virgin, Manning had established that the Church of Rome was a serious institution engaged with the real-life struggles of men and women.

  It was cavalier of Tillett to dismiss the pope’s strictures on socialism as ‘minor matters’, for what Rerum novarum offers is an analysis of the Labour vs. Capital struggle which delicately detaches itself from the Marxist agenda. It foresees the possibility of state socialism being just as prejudicial to individual liberty as voracious capitalism. It asserts – is it the first major political tract of the nineteenth century to do so? – the notion of human rights.

  Rights must be held sacred wherever they exist … Where the protection of private rights is concerned, special regard … must be had for the poor and the weak. Rich people can use their wealth to protect themselves and have less need of the State’s protection; but the mass of the poor have nothing of their own with which to defend themselves and have to depend above all on the protection of the state.27

  The encyclical was inspirational to figures such as Hilaire Belloc, G.K. Chesterton and Eric Gill in the twentieth century, who drew from it the inference that socialism and capitalism were two sides of the same coin, both dedicated to depriving the individual of liberty. What was felt at its first publication was relief that after a generation of issuing denunciations of political liberalism, science and technology (the use of the electric light was condemned by the Vatican), while proclaiming more and more esoteric doctrines about the pope and about the Virgin Mary, the Church had returned to the harder task of applying the
teachings of the Gospel to life in the complex and difficult world of urban capitalism.

  That such ideas were reclaimed for European Catholicism was a key factor in its survival. If the Conservatives (theological and political) had had their way in this, as in most areas of Church teaching, Europeans would have been placed in a position, when democracies began to evolve in the twentieth century, of having to choose between their civic life and their faith.

  In the Protestant world, and in England, such issues perhaps seem marginal. Of much greater impact, in terms both of intellectual developments in philosophical circles and of social theory as practised by politicians and others in the next generation, was the work of Thomas Hill Green (1836–82).

  Green was preoccupied by many of the same concerns as Marx and John Stuart Mill. All three thinkers confronted the realities of nineteenth-century industrialist–capitalist market society, the divisions produced by market capitalism, the inequalities and injustices. But of the three philosophers, in the immediate English context, Green was much the most influential, as you can tell from reading Mrs Humphry Ward’s novel about him. Green is Henry Grey in Robert Elsmere, one of the bestselling books of the century, about a young clergyman losing his faith in traditional Christianity but finding a new religion in Grey/Green’s commitment to social justice for the poor. H.H. Asquith, the future Liberal prime minister, was only one of dozens of influential men and women whose world-view was fashioned by Green. You still read references to him in those journals sympathetic to social egalitarianism by those who see him as one of the key influences on the English Labour Party.