The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  The penalty which women paid for constant pregnancy was vividly illustrated in a collection of case studies published by the Women’s Co-operative Guild.

  I was married at the age of 22 and by the time that I had reached my thirty second birthday was the mother of seven children and I am sure that you will pardon me if I take credit for bringing up such a family without loss of even one seeing that it entailed such a great amount of suffering to myself.

  During pregnancy I suffered much. When at the end of ten years I was almost a mental and physical wreck, I determined that this state of things should not go on any longer and if there was no natural means of prevention then of course artificial means must be employed …

  I often shudder to think what might have been the result if things had been allowed to go on as they were.

  Two days after childbirth I invariably sat up in bed knitting stockings and doing general repairs for my family.

  My husband at that time was earning 30/- per week and … claimed 6/6 in pocket money.26

  That woman, with 23s 6d a week to spend, was appreciably better off than many Edwardian wives and mothers. And she was at least spared the burden of taking paid employment. The 1901 Census showed that 77 per cent of women between the ages of 15 and 34 did some sort of paid work. For the age group 35–47 the figure fell to 13 per cent. Almost 29 per cent of women (32 per cent of women over ten, then the statutory school leaving age) were in full employment. Most of the employed women were working class. Unlike their more prosperous contemporaries, they did not begin jobs when their children were grown up. They worked during the childbearing and rearing parts of their lives. That was the time when their families most needed the extra income. Many more were engaged in casual labour or took in home work – according to Howarth and Wilson, very often to ‘meet some definite party of family expenditure, such as children’s clothes and boots’.27 Over 54 per cent of them were widowed or unmarried. In Birmingham, Cadbury discovered that 6 per cent of the working women were widows whose status ‘made it compulsory for them to work’. Since they normally earned less than men in similar employment – even when the men took home subsistence-level wages – those working women and their children were living in dire poverty.

  Most women worked in occupations which could accommodate the rival demands on their time that came with motherhood. The largest single group was in domestic service – 11.1 per cent of the entire adult female population of England and Wales. Some trades employed almost as many women as men. In Stoke, Burslem and Hanley, it was assumed that women like the eponymous heroines of Anna of the Five Towns and Hilda Lessways would work in the potteries. In Leicester, married women ‘finished’ stockings at home. In Scotland, but not in England, printing was women’s work. And some Lancashire textile mills paid equal rates to both sexes, so the female weavers earned more than male farm labourers. But women had still to break into the professions. In 1901 there were 172,000 women teachers and 64,000 women nurses, but only six architects, three veterinary surgeons and two accountants. There were no solicitors or barristers because only men could practise law. But women had, at last, reached the status which is necessary for a slaves’ revolt. They enjoyed enough freedom to make them demand more.

  Although they were not allowed to vote in parliamentary elections, women ratepayers had been able to stand for election as Poor Law Guardians – the controlling committees of workhouses and providers of ‘outdoor relief’ – since 1834, but social pressures had, initially, proved as discriminating as the law. No female candidate was nominated until 1875. Female England awoke during the Edwardian era. By 1914, there were 1,546 women guardians. At the turn of the century, 270 women served on school boards, useful employment which even some men thought suitable to their gentle nature. When the boards were abolished in 1902, the government discovered that the female character had a sharper side. The school board members who were about to lose their seats complained so loudly that the government instructed every local education authority to co-opt two women. Although women remained reluctant to join the principal agent of social protest – they made up only 7.8 per cent of trade union membership in 1900 – they were regarded (in the minds of even the more progressive members of the Establishment) as in league with organised labour in the campaigns to change society. Masterman thought that the parties to that endeavour would help to change ‘the Condition of England’.

  ‘Has there been a row?’ asked a journalist of a gathering at Westminster summoned by ‘Suffragettes’ and unemployed leaders. ‘No,’ was the cheerful reply, ‘but we still ‘ave ‘opes.’ It is a crowd which still ‘’ave ‘opes’ that forms the matrix or solid body of those agglomerations of humanity whose doings today excite some interest and some perplexity among observers of social change.

  Masterman’s view of the society around him was not always as patronising as that passage suggests. He was certainly apprehensive about how ‘the crowd’ would behave in the future. ‘No one,’ he wrote, ‘can pretend that a condition of stable equilibrium exists’ in a society in which, despite ‘the removal of super natural sanctions and the promise of future redress, the working people find a political freedom accompanying an economic servitude’.

  Masterman’s analysis of England’s condition is dangerously sentimental. When he quotes from A Poor Man’s House – the account of life in a Devon fishing village written by Stephen Reynolds, an aspiring Edwardian novelist – he chooses the passage which illustrates the virtue of Old England. The fishermen regard haggling over the price of hiring a boat as an ‘unpardonable offence’, not because it reduces their income but because it reveals a lack of gentility in the holiday-makers from the towns. But Masterman does not mention ‘nine year old Tommy [whose] working day was from 3.30 a.m. to 10.00 p.m.’ or the prodigal son, whose brief return is marked by the purchase of so much beer for his old friends that he has to borrow the fare back to London.

  One thing is clear from every page of The Condition of England. The whole nation was changing at a speed which sent a clear message to the politicians. The way in which Britain was governed had to change too. But a nation in transition was ready to redeem its failures and rectify its faults. In Masterman’s words, Edwardian Britain was ‘full of energy and promise’.

  *Marshall’s memorandum, largely ignored by the government of the day, was published as a White Paper (No. 321) in 1908 when the Liberals had come to power.

  *The actual figures were: 1901 – males 17,752,000 females 18,934,000; 1911 – males 19,775,000, females 21,112,000.

  PART TWO

  ‘Enough of this Tomfoolery’

  Two sorts of men had dominated Queen Victoria’s parliaments: aristocrats, and members of the great mercantile families who had achieved both wealth and status in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. They were men of great public spirit and undoubted patriotism. The Cavendishes, Cecils and Primroses (representing bloodline and birth) and the Peels, Chamberlains and Gladstones (representing industry and commerce) thought of Parliament as a calling. But they did not regard it as a job. Their only duty was to preserve the peace and secure the realm. The rival factions represented interests – town versus country, industry against agriculture – rather than ideologies and the notion of party government, together with the manifesto and the mandate, did not become a feature of the British political system until Gladstone won the General Election of 1867. Even then it was slow to take hold.

  At the turn of the century, only one-third of adults had the vote, and the entirely hereditary House of Lords enjoyed equal status with the elected House of Commons. The notion that government was best left in the hands of inspired amateurs was demonstrated by the conduct of Members as well as the composition of the Parliament in which they served. Arthur Balfour, nephew of the Marquis of Salisbury, scholar and the most influential Tory in Edwardian England, personified the dedicated dilettante. Despite his great legislative achievements he behaved as if politics was a gentleman’s pastime.

&n
bsp; Balfour led the Conservative Party to defeat in the Liberal landslide of 1906. He lost his own seat and, after being returned to the House of Commons in a by-election, failed to notice that both the mood and the Membership had changed. Working men sat on the government benches. Fifty-three Members of Parliament called themselves ‘Labour’. Parliament had become a place of work. When he tried to dazzle the House with verbal gymnastics and studied elegance, the new Prime Minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, dismissed him with a couple of sentences. ‘Enough of this tomfoolery. It might have answered very well in the last Parliament, but it is altogether out of place in this …’

  CHAPTER 5

  Unfinished Business

  The Boer War was part of the Victorian legacy to Edwardian Britain and the beginning of a global revolution which was not to be completed until the end of the century. For a hundred years, the white man’s right to rule the ‘lesser breeds without the law’ had been taken for granted and enforced with the maxim gun. Many of the proconsuls who devoted their lives to the Empire believed, with absolute sincerity, that Britain had a moral duty to spread Christian civilisation amongst the savage races of the world. They found it hard to argue that the invasion of Matabeleland by Dr Leander Starr Jameson, the slaughter of three thousand natives and the pillage and burning which followed was carried out expressly in the interest of the indigenous population. But they consoled themselves with the thought that Lobengula, King of the Matabele, had risen up against lawful authority. Few of them had any doubts that God had ordered England to have dominion over the palms and pines of South Africa. Unfortunately a number of extremely pious Boers believed that Providence had provided them with exactly the same mandate.

  Belief in Anglo-Saxon superiority had convinced the Victorians that Cape Colony, the British outpost in South Africa, would dominate the region for ever. That view was reinforced by the presence in the continent of Cecil John Rhodes. His initial interest in the Cape was gold. But he quickly developed a sense of destiny. ‘I walked between earth and sky and when I looked down I said “This earth should be English” and when I looked up, I said “England should rule the earth"’1 His enthusiasm and uninhibited acceptance of the Europeans’ right to govern – indeed to own – South Africa attracted even some Afrikaners. Jan Christian Smuts, destined to fight against Britain from start to finish of the long Boer War, was explicit about Rhodes’s essentially racist attraction. ‘The Dutch set aside all considerations of blood and nationality and loved him and trusted him and served him because we believed that he was the man to carry out the great idea of an internally sovereign and united South Africa in which the white man would be supreme.’2

  Perhaps Smuts – always a moderate by the extreme standards of nineteenth-century South Africa – would have been content for the Cape Colony to remain the centre of a white man’s paradise. But fate and geology decreed that the whole future of South Africa would be built around the predominantly Boer republic of the Transvaal, ‘given away’, much to the Prince of Wales’s distress, by Mr Gladstone after the defeat of the British Army at Majuba Hill in 1881. Five years later gold was discovered at Witwatersrand, and Johannesburg, the capital of the Transvaal, became the economic capital of the whole region. Within ten years of the gold fields opening up, the annual income of the Transvaal rose from £196,000 to £4 million.3

  The new prosperity eluded most Transvaal Boers. Cecil Rhodes, Prime Minister of Cape Colony after 1890, attributed their relative misfortune to the natural superiority of the English minority which they governed. Whatever the true reason, the consequences were plain for the Boer government to see. By 1896, Uitlanders – British immigrants – made up two-thirds of the Transvaal population. Half of them had entered the republic from Cape Colony and the rest had emigrated directly from Britain. Johannes Paulus Kruger, the Boer Prime Minister, could see his colony gradually being anglicised. And he objected to more than the prospect of immigrants dominating his country. Kruger lived according to the tenets of the Dutch Reformed Church. The presence of so many newcomers who did not subscribe to its exacting moral rules made Johannesburg ‘hideous and detestable’. They encouraged ‘luxury without order, sensual enjoyment without art, riches without refinement and display without dignity’.4 Five years later, when Britain was at war with the Boer Republic, Lloyd George, a bitter opponent of the conflict, described the Uitlanders in very similar language. ‘They prefer to lounge about in the hotels of Cape Town while English homes are being made desolate on their behalf.’

  Kruger wanted the Uitlanders to stay in the Transvaal but planned to make them, if not a subject people, at least second-class citizens. His rejection of their demands for equal civil rights was accompanied by the brusque but entirely justified allegation, ‘It is my country you want.’ If the Uitlanders were given the vote they would, he knew, make the Transvaal an English colony. On the other hand, the British government knew that it had a patriotic duty to defend its sons and daughters from Boer tyranny and confirm its position as the predominant power in South Africa.

  The years between the discovery of Witwatersrand gold and the outbreak of the Boer War were the high point of British emotional imperialism. It was the era in which the Royal Niger Company evolved into a Crown Colony, the Sudan was reconquered and the French expedition to Fashada – a handful of soldiers reconnoitring the White Nile – provoked the solemn warning of the consequences which would follow the ‘unfriendly act’ if relief or reinforcements were despatched to a part of Africa which Britain regarded as in its sphere of influence. The idea of empire achieved its most extreme expression in the raid which Dr Jameson, the victor of the Matabele campaign, led into the Transvaal in 1895. Its organisers – Rhodes among them – believed that, inspired by the courage of the reckless raiding party, the Uitlanders would rise up against their oppressors. Rhodes was wrong.

  The Select Committee of the House of Commons which enquired into the origins of the raid acquitted Joseph Chamberlain (Colonial Secretary in Lord Salisbury’s last government) of all complicity in the raid’s preparation. Indeed it unanimously agreed that he did not even know that it was planned. The verdict was generally accepted because Harcourt and Campbell-Bannerman – competitors for leadership of the Liberal Party which Chamberlain had deserted – endorsed it. But doubts remained. The South Africa Company refused to release copies of telegrams which, it was rumoured, would have proved Chamberlain’s guilt, and the whole of the Committee’s proceedings were called into question by its composition. Chamberlain, as well as being the subject of its investigation, was a member. The enquiry was conducted according to the mores of the Victorian gentleman’s parliament. And that parliament was about to pass into history.

  Whether or not Chamberlain knew about the Jameson Raid before it happened, he certainly approved of it in retrospect, and Lord Rosebery (the Liberal Leader) praised it as an ‘Elizabethan adventure’.5 With the nation in such a mood, war in South Africa was inevitable. But for months the talk of war rumbled on without either of the eventual protagonists being willing to fire the first shot. The Kaiser infuriated his uncle in Marlborough House by congratulating Kruger on the ignominious defeat of Dr Jameson’s raiding party, and slight alarm was felt in the Colonial Office when the Transvaal and the Orange Free State signed a pact of mutual defence. But there were also moments of hope. Kruger twice met Sir Alfred Milner, the new British High Commissioner, and, at their second meeting, offered a complicated formula for the revision of the franchise which would, in time, give the Uitlanders full civil rights. In return, he demanded that Britain relinquish its claim to sovereignty over the Transvaal. If the interests of settlers had been Milner’s only concern he would have accepted the compromise, but because the glory of empire was his chief preoccupation, he rejected it out of hand. Chamberlain’s note endorsing Milner’s action was written in even stronger language than that which the High Commissioner had used. Yet the peace was still preserved. Lord Salisbury believed that ‘The country as well as the cabinet �
� excepting perhaps Mr Chamberlain – is against war.’6 But the mood was to change – not least because of the partnership which was formed between Joseph Chamberlain and Alfred Milner.

  Milner – half German but educated exclusively in England – began his working life as a journalist on the radical Pall Mall Gazette. He then joined the Civil Service and rose in 1870 to become Chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue at the age of thirty-six. Much of his early life was devoted to radical causes and it was his reforming influence which persuaded Sir William Harcourt to introduce death duties. Had he remained in London, he would, no doubt, have retained the progressive impulse which had inspired his ideas on domestic policy. But he went to Africa and became the archetypal Radical Imperialist. He did not want to fight the Boers. As late as November 1899, Chamberlain told Hicks Beach (then Chancellor of the Exchequer), ‘Both Milner and the military authorities greatly exaggerate the risks and the dangers of the campaign.’7 But Milner believed that war could only be averted, and British interests protected to the full, if Her Majesty’s Government maintained its belligerent stance. Unfortunately the judgement to which he came after the meetings with Kruger proved tragically wrong. His telegram to the Colonial Office insisted that ‘the Boers are still bluffing and will yield if the pressure is kept up’.

  Anxious though he was to avoid war, Milner was even more determined that both the Uitlanders’ and Britain’s standing in the world should be protected. Invited by Chamberlain to summarise the situation in a despatch which could be published, he chose to report home in language he knew represented the prejudice of the Colonial Secretary: ‘The spectacle of British subjects, kept permanently in the position of Helots … does steadily undermine the influence and respect for the British Government within the Queen’s Dominions.’8