The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  Masterman was at least as concerned with preserving social tranquillity as he was with the plight of the poor. He wrote of the ‘huge and unexplored region which seems destined in the next half-century to progress towards articulate voice and to demand increasing power’. By that he meant the people whom Matthew Arnold called ‘The Populance’, a class which Masterman said would ‘endure almost anything, in silence, until it become unendurable’. His fear was that the heroic stoicism would not survive the changes in the moral values that characterised the new century. He had observed with evident disapproval the conduct of ‘that section of society which regards its possessions as a trinket, a plaything and, amid an atmosphere of triviality, is engaged in squandering its brief existence through every variety of passionate pleasure’. How long, he wondered, would ‘the obscure multitudes, who labour with scanty return, be satisfied with what [to them] appears so improvident a bargain?’ Masterman was not writing only about the desperately disadvantaged and the deeply dispossessed. He was anticipating the alienation of the whole working class. But at the turn of the century most commentators concentrated their criticism on the condition of the poor.

  Attention on the extent of the problem was focused by the two historic surveys which revealed, in irrefutable statistical form, the way the poor lived. The first was Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People of London, published over the fifteen years between 1889 and 1903. Booth could not resist the occasional moral judgement. Despite all the sentimental talk of family solidarity, only 30 per cent of London families took responsibility for grandparents. And when he extended his surveys to outside London, he noted that in Richmond, Yorkshire, ‘filial duty was at a low ebb’.11 But he did identify age and unemployment, rather than character weakness, as the chief cause of destitution. The second social survey, Poverty, a Study in Town Life (begun in 1889 and published in 1901), was, perhaps, even more important. Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree’s examination of poverty in York disposed of the argument that Booth’s principal survey proved only that poverty was endemic in the overcrowded capital. And it established, in the official mind, a distinction between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ poverty.

  According to Rowntree, 9.91 per cent of the York population lived in ‘primary poverty’ and were unable to maintain ‘merely physical efficiency’ while 17.73 per cent lived in ‘secondary poverty’, able to ‘meet physical efficiency, were it not for some other expenditure either useful or wasteful’. Compassion combined with the national interest. Over a quarter of the population were prevented, by their material condition, from making a proper contribution to the national economy.

  Poverty was greatest in Edwardian Britain among the agricultural labourers. It was argued that living in the country – and therefore being able to supplement basic diets with local produce – enabled families to subsist satisfactorily on a lower wage than that which they would need in a town. The survey carried out by P. H. Mann during 1903 in Ridgemount, Bedfordshire, disproved that sentimental assumption. Rowntree, in his survey of York’s poor, had set out the ‘poverty line’ at earnings of 21s 8d a week. Families which lived on less survived in profound deprivation. Because most farm workers occupied rent-free cottages, Mann adjusted that definition down to 18s 4d a week. Even at that reduced income level, 38.5 per cent of all the working-class families (41 per cent of the working-class population) lived in poverty.

  Ridgemount proved to be typical. The 1906 Earnings and Hours of Labour Enquiry discovered that in England the average weekly earnings of agricultural labourers was 17s 6d. Horsemen and cattlemen did rather better. They received 18s 4d. In Wales, farm labourers earned more than their English counterparts: the average wage for all agricultural workers was 18s.

  Maude Davies, writing in her Life in an English Village about Corsley in Wiltshire during the years 1905 to 1907, reported that 37 of the 220 households were living in ‘secondary poverty’, a condition for which she offered an unusual, but nevertheless significant, definition – ‘all households whose income does not give 1/- per head above primary poverty, as well as those households where the income should be sufficient but where it is squandered and the members are obviously living in want’.12 On that basis, her survey concluded that in Corsley, 12.7 per cent of households were in primary and 16.8 per cent in secondary poverty. Some of that total figure, 29.5 per cent in all, were old or sick. Amongst families in which the head of the household was employed – in fact the families of farm labourers – the number in poverty (primary and secondary) was 23 per cent.

  The situation barely changed with the years. The first decade of the twentieth century is thought of as a period of progress. Yet How the Labourer Lives, a survey carried out during 1913, revealed that, with five exceptions (North Cumberland, Durham, Westmorland, Leicestershire and Derbyshire), the average earnings in every county in England and Wales were below the poverty line. Wages paid by farmers were too low to enable workers to maintain a state of ‘physical efficiency’ – with all the consequences of that condition.

  It means that people have no right to be in touch with the great world outside the village by so much as taking a weekly newspaper. It means that the wise mother, when she is tempted to buy her children a pennyworth of cheap oranges will devolve the penny to flour instead. It means that the temptation to take the shortest journey should be strongly resisted. It means that toys and dolls and picture books, even of the cheapest quality, should not be purchased: that birthdays should be practically indistinguishable from other days. It means that every natural longing for pleasure should be ignored or set aside. It means in short, a life without colour, space, or atmosphere that stifles and hems in the labourer’s soul as in too many cases his cottage does his body.13

  That describes not the condition of the unemployed but the state of the working poor. The extent of their social deprivation can be assessed against even the simple pleasures of Kate Jarvis, nursemaid to an admiral, and Rowland Evans, the teenage son of a Bradford Congregationalist Minister. On Monday 22 December 1902 young Rowland:

  in the morning played football and also in the afternoon. At night borrowed 3d off Father and went to town to buy some presents … Bought 5 in all.

  Father 1 ounce of Cigarettes 6d

  Mother an ornament 6d

  Mabel a purse 6d

  Oliver a picture book 3½d

  Glyn and Bernard a bagatelle board 6½d

  ___________

  2/4d

  Neither farm labourers’ children, nor farm labourers themselves, could afford such extravagance. They were even less likely to indulge themselves with the Christmas luxuries enjoyed by a child’s nurse. At Christmas 1906 Kate received the typical utilitarian gifts of the thrifty working class. From ‘Dear Mother, A Lovely Petticoat, Dear Father, stockings and a card and Gran 2 prs Bloomers’. Underclothes were not the habit of the very poor.

  Despite the comforting myth about the farm labourer supplementing his income with vegetables grown in his own garden and eggs laid by his own hens, the agricultural poor lived in greater degradation than the poor in the cities. Yet poverty was rife in the cities. Social surveys proliferated in Edwardian Britain. Most of them demonstrated that, among the 77 per cent of the population who lived in urban areas, there were deep and wide pockets of real need.

  Seebohm Rowntree judged that, in 1901, nearly 30 per cent of the population of York lived in poverty and he claimed that the social composition of that city’s population was very similar, if not identical, to that of other towns and cities. The level of deprivation did not change with the years. Rowntree and Lasker, examining the history of 209 men who were unemployed in York during June 1910, found that a third of them lived below the poverty line. The rest were ‘raised above it through earnings of other members of the family’. Every ‘normal’ sized ‘working’ family (defined as parents and three children) passed through poverty of some kind during its collective life. A dozen other surveys confirmed that pattern of life. As in England, so in Scotlan
d. ‘Lady Inspectors’ visited 3029 Dundee families during 1905 to report on the Housing and Industrial Conditions in that city. Because of the nature of Dundee industry – dominated by jute processing – 769 of the 3029 families visited (25.4 per cent) were solely dependent on one (male) wage earner. Slightly fewer (684 or 22.6 per cent) depended on one female earner, 433 (14.3 per cent) on both a male and female earner, 656 (21.7 per cent) on two wages of other sorts (mainly parent and child) and 487 (16 per cent) on three earners. Half of the families which depended solely on one male wage had an income of less than £1 a week and were therefore well below the poverty line. Since women’s wages were, throughout the period, invariably well below men’s, at least four hundred of the families dependent on one female earner lived in similar deprivation. It is, therefore, reasonable to conclude that one third of all working families in Edwardian Dundee lived in primary poverty.14

  Lady Florence Bell, the wife of a Middlesbrough ironmaster, published At the Works, a survey of poverty on Teesside based on ‘voluntary visits’ carried out during 1907. Since only ironworks’ employees were visited, Lady Bell anticipated that few of the families in the study would be in ‘absolute poverty’. But of the ‘900 houses carefully investigated, 125 were found to be absolutely poor’ and ‘never have enough to spend on clothes to be able to protect their bodies adequately, enough to spend on their houses to acquire a moderate level of comfort’. Another 175 houses were ‘so near the poverty line that they are constantly passing over it’.15 ‘Lack of thrift’ and lack of ‘skilful management’ were, in Lady Bell’s opinion, an important contributory cause to the unhappy condition in which a third of her husband’s employees found themselves.

  Even they were well off as compared with the unemployed, particularly the elderly. The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act required the parish to provide relief that was ‘inferior to the standard of living that a labourer could obtain without assistance’.16 Between 1906 and 1914 the wages of men on the lowest rates for unskilled labourers rose from 19s 6d to 21s a week.17 In 1912, at the middle of that period, the Liberal Christian League found that Norwich old people received between 3s 6d and 4s 6d a week, married couples 6s to 7s a week with an extra 2s for each child.

  Maud Pemberton Reeves, who worked in Lambeth to record the lives of working families for a survey called Round About a Pound a Week, rejected the notion that the poor had only themselves to blame. ‘Married men in full-time work who keep their jobs on such a wage do not and cannot drink.’18 She noted the annual volume of beer drunk had declined from an average of 34 gallons a head to 28 gallons over the last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century. The contributing factors in the descent into grinding poverty were neither incompetence nor incontinence but acts of God and nature – births, deaths and illness. Sometimes the very poor were too responsible for their own good.

  It is a common idea that there is no thrift among them. It would be better for the children if this were true. As a matter of fact, sums varying from 6d a week to 1/6d, 1/8d or even 2/- go out from incomes which are so small that these sums represent perhaps from 2½ to 10 per cent of the whole household allowance. The object of this thrift is, unfortunately, not of the slightest benefit to the families concerned.19

  The savings were made to cover funeral expenses.

  Reeves pointed out that, if the families had not invested in funeral insurance, social pressures would have forced them into other expedients for raising the funds that were necessary to finance ‘a good send-off’. It could easily be argued that a near-pauper family, which neglected food and clothing in order to pay for one ham tea, might be described as incorrigibly irresponsible. The defence against that charge is more than the irresistible force of superstition and convention. Families which neglected to show proper respect at funerals would have fallen foul of the Edwardians’ distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor. The phrase was immortalised in Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, written in 1912. Alfred Doolittle, the dustman father of Eliza, happily accepted the accusation that he had no morals. ‘Can’t afford ‘em.’ He then went on to admit, ‘Undeserving poverty is my line.’

  Maude Davies found very few Alfred Doolittles in her English village. Her enquiry showed that what she described as ‘deficient children’, even when they had ‘every advantage of good air and healthy surroundings’, was a condition ‘mainly due to malnutrition’. Only market gardeners, who enjoyed access to cheap fruit and vegetables, ‘succeeded by some means in avoiding the deadly grip of poverty’. Unless we make the unreasonable assumption that market gardeners were more responsible parents than other employees in other trades, we have to accept that circumstances rather than character deficiencies were the cause of poverty and the malnutrition which followed.

  In 1904, the Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration concluded that a third of all schoolchildren ‘went hungry’, and Rowntree’s examination, Poverty (which was published in the same year), judged that ‘mothers and children habitually go short’. The principal working-class foods were bread, potatoes, milk, eggs, vegetables, sugar, jam and occasionally meat (usually beef). In Glasgow, labourers’ families survived on the ‘barest necessities of life’. The ‘monotonous existence’20 which such limited ingredients made unavoidable was rendered all the more tedious by the way in which food was prepared. It had to be easily and quickly prepared by women who had few cooking utensils and little time to spend on cooking. As a result bread was the staple diet.

  It is cheap … It comes into the house ready cooked. It is always at hand and needs no plate or spoon. Spread with a scraping of butter, jam or margarine – according to the length of purse of the mother – [children] never tire of it as long as they are in their ordinary state of health. They receive it into their hands and can please themselves as to where and how they eat it.21

  In London, out-of-work families sometimes spent as little as a penny per day per person on food and, as a result, ‘the lives of the children of the poor [were] shortened and the bodies of the children of the poor starved and stunted’.22 Surveys attributed rickets in Glasgow and tuberculosis in Birmingham directly to poor diet. Booth’s Life and Labour, which analysed 1894 working-class family budgets, noted that, in London, something like 3 per cent of food expenditure (more than in any other part of the country, and more than was spent in London on sugar, potatoes, fish and vegetables) was devoted to meals out. That extravagance turned out to be fish and chips.

  The most thrifty families struggled on with an existence which, though frugal, was thrown into crisis only by a sudden emergency that it was impossible to anticipate and for which no preparation was therefore possible – illness or unemployment. Lady Bell concluded her Middlesbrough survey with a reproof and a confession.

  We forget how terribly near the margin of disaster the man (even the thrifty man) walks, who has in ordinary normal conditions but just enough to keep himself on. The spectre of illness and disability is always confronting the working man, the possibility of being, from one day to the other, plunged into actual want is always confronting his family.23

  Family members tried to help one another. ‘Reciprocity between the generations, mutual support in times of need was as notable as the dependency of aged parents.’24 But there were sudden emergencies which even generous siblings or willing children could not overcome. Then more desperate remedies were necessary. ‘The curve of income and expenditure is, to some extent, smoothed by the help of the pawn broker, the money lender or both. In bad weeks, clothes and furniture are pledged and debt incurred. In good weeks the surplus is spent on getting straight again.’

  Although low wages remained a feature of Edwardian Britain, and working families on each side of the poverty line suffered all the detriments of an inadequate diet, one section of the population saw the belated glimmerings of a better life. Women – by 1900 a majority of the population* – began to enjoy improved health as the direct result of a reduction in family size and birth rate. By 19
00, the process had only just started, though couples married in that year had only half as many children as had been born to their parents. The trend continued. In the early Edwardian years, ‘professional’ families averaged 3.5 children while miners (the most fertile occupation) fathered, on average, 7.36 sons and daughters.25 From 1900 onwards the birth rate fell. ‘The headlong collapse of the birth rate of this country during the past twenty years – a fall greater than that in any other nation in Europe – is a phenomenon to which all the classes, save the very poorest, are probably contributors.’

  Masterman – too much of a gentleman even to consider how the birth rate might have been affected by the increased availability of contraception – recognised that family limitation was a conscious decision by men and women who were dissatisfied with their standard of living. Unable to increase their wages, they attempted to improve their material well-being by making sure that they had fewer mouths to feed. Masterman called it ‘climbing through the window when the door is closed’. That was not, in its context, the happiest of images. But the idea behind it – the relationship between a fall in the birth rate and the desire for a better material life – was undoubtedly correct.