The ringlet-locked novelist and political adventurer had been baptised a Christian at the age of twelve, but he was plainly Jewish by descent and sympathy. He liked Lionel Rothschild. Indeed, there is a passage in Tancred in which he expresses admiration for the whole Rothschild empire. Eva asks Tancred:
“Which is the greatest city in Europe?”
“Without doubt the capital of my country, London.”
“. . . How rich the most honoured man must be there! Tell me, is he a Christian?”
“I believe he is one of your race and faith.”
“And in Paris; who is the richest man in Paris?”
“The brother, I believe, of the richest man in London.”
“I know all about Vienna,” said the lady, smiling. “Caesar makes my countrymen barons of the empire, and rightly, for it would fall to pieces in a week without their support.”
Lionel had helped Disraeli to speculate in French railway stock; and in the very period we are discussing, Lionel was lending Disraeli large sums to pay his debts on his various houses and live the life he felt he deserved. Lionel’s pretty, dark-haired wife, Charlotte, had made friends with Disraeli’s wife, Mary Anne. In fact, the childless Mary Anne Disraeli had developed a slightly odd fixation with Lionel and Charlotte’s five “beauteous” children.
On behalf of his sponsor and of Jews in general, Disraeli now threw himself into the parliamentary fight, with the unpromising argument that the Jews had done God’s work by killing Jesus. They had “fulfilled the beneficent intention” of the Lord and “saved the human race,” he told boggling MPs. Christianity was the completion of Judaism, said Disraeli, for whom the question had become a chance to express his own complex identity.
The Liberals liked the way he was talking. Many of his fellow Tories were appalled. No fewer than 138 rebelled against the party leadership. Augustus Stafford demanded: “Must I cheer Disraeli when he declares there is no difference between those who crucified Christ and those who kneel before Christ crucified?” The Tories had bared their primeval instincts. Once again they had appeared to the public as the party of “No Popery, No Jews.” Their leader, Lord George Bentinck, resigned in despair at the reactionary fumes that rose from his colleagues.
In spite of Tory opposition, a bill to amend the parliamentary oath was passed in the Commons; but now the cause of Jewish emancipation received an even more terrible mauling in the Lords. On the night of the debate, in May 1848, Lionel’s wife, Charlotte, sat up waiting for her husband to come back from Westminster; at 3:30 a.m. the men came in. Lionel was still smiling—“he always had so much firmness and self-control”—but the other Rothschilds and their supporters were red-faced with anger and embarrassment. They told her not to read the speeches, because they were scandalous.
I went to bed at 5 and woke again at 6; I had dreamt that a huge vampire was greedily sucking my blood. . . . Apparently, when the result of the vote was declared, a loud, enthusiastic roar of approval resounded . . . throughout the House. Surely we do not deserve so much hatred. I spent all Friday weeping and sobbing out of over-excitement.
The Bishops had spoken against the bill, especially Samuel Wilberforce, who was to go on to make such a berk of himself in denouncing the theory of evolution. The Duke of Cumberland, uncle to the Queen, said that it was “horrible” to admit to the Commons persons who denied the existence of our Saviour.
In the end Lionel embarked on an audacious (if predictable) course. He just bribed the House of Lords. Don’t pay them until the bill actually passes, his brother Nat advised him. “You place so much at the disposal of the individual in question upon the Bill passing, and you know nothing more about it.” He even seems to have launched a campaign to bribe Prince Albert, since the Queen’s consort was known to be highly influential with their lordships.
In July 1850, only days before Lionel again attempted to take his seat with a modified oath, he contributed £50,000 to subsidise Albert’s pet project—the Great Exhibition, whose glories included the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. When you look today at the 1851 Exhibition’s magnificent legacy of Albertopolis—the museums, the Albert Hall—remember Lionel Rothschild, the struggle for Jewish emancipation and the subtle art of slipping a bribe to royalty.
In 1857, after ten years of stubborn engagement with the British Establishment, Lionel was finally allowed to take his seat in parliament. Upon the suggestion of the Earl of Lucan (fresh from orchestrating carnage in the Crimea), it was agreed that the Commons would change its procedures so that Jews were allowed to swear allegiance while omitting the words “upon the true faith of a Christian.”
It was the complete and final triumph of Lionel, his family and their resolve. Not that he actually went to the Commons, or made speeches, or anything like that: it was the principle of the thing. The Rothschilds in London had done huge service to their adopted country. They had bankrolled the war effort against Napoleon, and so—in the language of the day—saved the Continent from tyranny.
They had helped to make London the centre of the international bond market and so entrench its position as the financial capital of the world. They had shown how private investment could enable the big infrastructure projects, especially railways, that are so important for long-term growth and competitiveness. They had helped Britain to secure the Suez Canal and an inestimable advantage for the empire.
Thanks to the doggedness of Lionel, they had done something even finer. At a time when other cities in Europe were experiencing a post-1848 anti-Semitic backlash, Lionel had helped to make a small but overdue change to the law in the cause of humanity and common sense. In a not negligible way, the Rothschilds had boosted the openness, tolerance and pluralism that were to remain vital to the city’s attractiveness for the next 150 years—and which were to form such a tragic contrast to events in Germany, the birthplace of Nathan Mayer Rothschild and the country then emerging as Britain’s greatest economic rival.
It would be safe to say that the twentieth-century Rothschilds have not quite repeated the success of their ancestors. Somewhere along the line the family failed to make the necessary breakthrough in America, and you might argue that in their struggle for social acceptance they went too far. They not only emulated the Barings in acquiring peerages, they succumbed to the vice of every triumphant merchant in this country, and tried to turn themselves into full-fledged, tweed-coated 12-bore-toting members of the landed aristocracy.
The family built colossal pastiche homes and castles all over Britain and the Continent—about forty-one of them at the last count—from Gunnersbury Park to Waddesdon to Ferrières to Cap Ferrat. These things take time. There are horses to be exercised and arboretums to be tended and servants to be sensitively handled. They dissipate the financial energies. Nathan Mayer would not have approved.
Today a young Rothschild can still make the headlines with a knock-out yacht-based party on the coast of the former Yugoslavia. But no one needs his permission to go to war. Gunnersbury Park, Nathan’s country retreat, has been turned into a museum. Waddesdon has been sold to the Gettys, and 148 Piccadilly has been vaporised.
And yet those who like the sweep of history will be consoled to know that N. M. Rothschild is still there where Disraeli used to know it, and still giving good advice on the financing of transport infrastructure. The firm was used by Transport for London in the final dismantling of the disastrous Public Private Partnership and the establishment of a new and better regime for the upgrading of the Tube.
When I think of the barbaric flattening of 148 Piccadilly, and the lost tranquillity of Park Lane, I am reminded of another great piece of potential transport infrastructure. Somewhere on the shelves of the Department of Transport is a brilliant plan to keep the speed and practicality of Ernest Marples’s urban throughways—but to turn Park Lane and the western end of Piccadilly back to the happy and distinguished flower-scented boulevard it
once was. You could tunnelise Park Lane and pay for it with the superb real estate you could create on the western side of the street and in the places where Marples swung his wrecking ball.
Of course there would be a big upfront cost, and we would have to go to a bank to help finance it at a reasonable rate of interest. But Lionel Rothschild knew all about how to do that, and there are plenty of bankers in London today who have learned his lessons well.
* * *
In the year of the Exhibition that Lionel had helped to finance, hundreds of thousands if not millions of Londoners lived in poverty, in hovels surrounded by ash heaps where—in the words of Charles Dickens—the stench was enough to knock over a bullock.
The very poor could hardly afford the entrance fee, and contemporary cartoons show round-eyed paupers pressing up against the glass. It may or may not have been much of a consolation to know that they lived in the world’s leading city—fated by heaven to rule the waves and to heap the riches of the planet on the altar to Mammon that Prince Albert had constructed in Kensington.
To modern tastes, the Great Exhibition was an orgy of unacceptable attitudes—racism, sexism, colonialism, imperialism, cultural triumphalism and turbo-capitalism.
So it is worth remembering that Victorian capitalism enabled a rise in living standards and a degree of domestic convenience that helped to produce the biggest social revolution since print: I mean female emancipation. By the end of the century there would be suffragettes on the street, demanding the right to vote. Long before then, there were two women who came to London, took on the men and refused to take no for an answer—and one of them was from an ethnic minority.
Joseph Bazalgette and the Sewers
* * *
It was great to see the comedian David Walliams earning all that cash for charity by swimming the length of the Thames. He was brave to do it. But if he had done it in the middle of the nineteenth century, he would have been suicidal. The place was worse than a sewer. It was biologically dead. Not a newt, not a fish, not a duckling could hope to survive the vile discharges of the growing city. And the river that gave life to London had become a source of deadly poison for human beings.
In the autumn of 1848, more than fourteen thousand Londoners died of cholera in the worst-ever outbreak to hit the capital. While Florence Nightingale and others persisted in their belief that the infection was borne by air or dirty sheets, a London doctor by the name of John Snow had other ideas. Using a dot map, he worked out that all the victims in Soho had been living near or using a certain water pump in Broad Street—and he concluded that the pump was the source of the contagion.
It was contaminated drinking water that was causing the problem, he suggested—and it was no coincidence that the cholera outbreak had taken place just after the cesspools were systematically flushed into the Thames. That project had been led by the Metropolitan Committee of Sewers, and the assistant surveyor on the project was one Joseph William Bazalgette (1819–1891), grandson of a French Protestant immigrant and a promising engineer.
Eight years later Bazalgette had become the chief engineer of the new Metropolitan Board of Works, and he found himself in agreement with Snow. The existing system of London sewers carried off surface water, full of unspeakable things, and washed it down to the Thames. He proposed a bold solution: a network of new self-cleaning underground sewers, including 82 miles of larger sewers fed from over 1,000 miles of new street sewers. It was an engineering plan on an unprecedented scale. As one would expect, the government turned it down on five separate occasions.
In the summer of 1858 MPs suffered the olfactory onslaught of the Great Stink, and his case was made. The vapours rising from the river were so awful that MPs had to flee the city. The authorities capitulated to Bazalgette, and having secured approval for his plans, the extravagantly moustachioed engineer showed his genius and resolve.
He took his plans and doubled them. He looked at the density of the population of the city, and then carefully calculated the width of the pipe that would be needed to carry away the effluent. He then spoke words that should have been used by the builders of the Tube tunnels and indeed whoever first decided on the location of London’s hub international airport.
“Well,” he said, “we are only going to do this once, and there is always the unforeseen.” He multiplied the width of the tunnels by two. Recent studies have shown that if he had kept to his original calculation, then the network would have reached capacity in the 1960s. As it was, Bazalgette’s masterpiece was used as a blueprint for urban sewer networks across the globe, from New York to New Zealand.
A network of sewers designed for 2.5 million people has survived to deal with the sewage of 7.7 million people. It is a tribute to the Victorian that it is only today that we are building again on his scale. Once we have completed the Thames Tideway Tunnel—a Cloaca Maxima running underneath the bed of the river—we will finally be able to deal with the unmentionable consequences of what happens when the Bazalgette interceptors overflow. The river will not only be safe for trout but for charity swims of all kinds.
* * *
Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole
Who pioneered nursing
Lo! In that hour of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glorious gloom
And flit from room to room.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW, “SANTA FILOMENA”
On the whole it must have been a wearying evening for Florence Nightingale. She didn’t really do banquets. She didn’t get drunk. Indeed, she disapproved of alcohol.
Here she was on 25 August 1856 in the Royal Surrey Gardens, Kennington, and the noise was deafening. Around her were two thousand roaring, red-faced, tail-coated soldiers drinking her health with an intensifying ferocity; and their songs reverberated around the wrought-iron pillars and balconies of the newly built music hall.
They were delighted to have survived the madness and carnage of the Crimean War. They were proud of the little lace-capped angel who occupied the place of honour, and again and again they toasted her name until they became as magnificently plastered as the ceiling of the music hall itself.
Then there was an even greater commotion. There was another woman in the company—almost as famous, just as much loved. Amid tremendous acclaim she was hoisted aloft, and the very chair she sat in was carried on the shoulders of four large men; and we should not be surprised if Nightingale saw this gross manoeuvre and shuddered at the exposure of the lady’s petticoats.
Now the rival heroine was being borne through the crowds, and two burly sergeants went with her to push aside anyone attempting familiarity with the hem of her garments. And the face of Mary Seacole turned, beaming in the light of the gas lamps, and everywhere she looked there was a cheer.
She radiated the simple joy of a nurse who had always loved her “boys,” and who was no stranger to a piss-up; and she shone with the pride of knowing that for the first time in England and indeed in the Western world there was public adulation being paid to a woman who was patently black.
High up on the podium, in the seat of honour, Florence Nightingale looked down her beaky nose. She watched the lionising of Mary, her fellow nurse from the Crimea. She watched and wondered.
It must be about eight years ago now that I went to a morning assembly in an Islington primary school and saw one of my children appear in a historical pageant about the Crimean War. She was playing Queen Victoria, and her role was to pin medals on the breasts of two other children, playing Florence Nightingale and Mary Seacole. Queen Victoria’s line, which I had heard rehearsed many times, was “Well done, Florence and Mary! Without you we would not have won the war.”
I am afraid to say I snorted a bit at this. Pshaw, I said to the Islington mums after the assembly had ended. Whoever heard of Mary Seacole? We were never taught about her when I w
as a nipper, I said with revolting assurance.
She’s just been added in there for the sake of political correctness, I said, half hoping to shock them.
One of the parents must have found my comment objectionable, because I went away and looked up Mary Seacole, and it didn’t take me long before I realised I had been wrong. Not only did I find a description of the Royal Surrey Gardens banquet but discovered that she was so huge that the following year the same venue saw a “Seacole Fund Grand Military Festival.” There were over a thousand artistes, including eleven military bands and an orchestra conducted by some French maestro. They charged an ambitious 8 shillings a head for the first night, and yet the audience was forty thousand.
Mary Seacole’s bust was carved by Count Gleichen, who also did King Alfred. She published a racy and amusing two-hundred-page “autobiography”—the first such document ever published by a black woman in the country. If you read it—and I can thoroughly recommend it—you will see that she was a very remarkable woman indeed.
“See, here is Mary Seacole,” says Salman Rushdie in The Satanic Verses, “who did as much in the Crimea as another magic-lamping lady, but, being dark, could scarce be seen for the flame of Florence’s candle.”
That was more than twenty years ago. No one could now say that Mary was “unjustly neglected” or “half-forgotten.” The Seacole industry is in full-throated roar. Her place on the curriculum is assured. But what I find fascinating is that she really did fade from the story, and for about a hundred years. I was wrong to say that she was unimportant; I was right to say that we didn’t hear much about her forty years ago.
By 1877 the Royal Surrey Gardens had been burned down and the park sold for development. The memory of the Mary Seacole fund-raisers was lost with the music hall. It is partly, as you might imagine, a tale of racism and sexism. To these we must add the suspicions of some modern scholars that poor Mary was the victim of the prejudices . . . of the Angel of Scutari herself.
Johnson's Life of London Page 25