The demand to take action against starvation wages had built up in the years before Churchill arrived at the Board of Trade. Sir Charles Dilke – a rising star of the Liberal Party before a lurid divorce case led to his disgrace – introduced private member’s bills in six consecutive years which proposed the creation of government machinery to regulate wages. The Daily Mail ran a campaign which called for the government to take immediate action, and the trades unions – although viscerally opposed to government interference in wage determination – were instinctively on the side of the poor. Tories, who argued for tariff reform, regarded the imposition of higher wages in the sweated trades as providing a sort of protection from the importation of goods made by cheap labour. Women’s groups of every sort – some concerned with morals and others with welfare – supported Dilke’s bills. On 21 February 1908, when the House of Commons debated the idea of regulating the sweated trades, ‘the principle was approved by the whole House without distinction of party or class’.20
The need for legislation had been emphasised by a select committee of the House of Commons. The most moving evidence that it received was given by a Mr Holmes, who described himself as ‘a police court missionary’ working in London.
I was drawn to the home workers first about ten years ago. I met two or three widows at the police court charged with attempted suicide and I naturally took interest in them. I visited their homes and became aware of the conditions in which they lived. The prices paid for their work, the hours generally worked and the amount of rent they paid and the kind of food they ate and everything of that description.
Mr Holmes’s view that the attempted suicides were directly attributable to the deprivation of ‘sweated’ home workers was confirmed by what he discovered about three other widows, similarly employed, who had also attempted to kill themselves. ‘The story of their lives, their manner, their appearance and their broken spirit was a revelation.’ One of the widows ‘had done nothing else than work at these little things [the matchboxes which she assembled] at her own house in Bethnal Green for forty years and her payment for that work is practically the same as it was at the beginning’.21
Churchill’s assault on the sweated trades was so uncharacteristic of his class that it is hardly surprising that his motivation was dismissed as grand seigneurial. ‘He desired in Britain a state of things where a benign upper class dispensed benefits to a bien peasant and grateful working class.’22 But, during his Liberal hour, he advanced policies which were far more progressive than the proposals made, or even contemplated, by any other member of the party. It was his nature to proceed, urgent step by urgent step. At the Board of Trade he developed a ‘grand plan’ with six unquestionably radical elements -’Labour Exchanges and Unemployment Assurancy, National Infirmity Assurancy, State Industries (Afforestation and Rock Quarrying), a Modernised Poor Law, Railway Amalgamation and Nationalisation, and Education, compulsory until 17.’23
On 28 April 1909, Winston Churchill wrote to his new wife, Clementine, that ‘the Trades Board Bill has been beautifully received and will be passed without a division …’.24 The next day he was able to write, in triumph, that the debate had gone as predicted. ‘Such amiable speeches from Mr A. Balfour and A. Lyttelton …’25 The letter included the domestic details which always dominated the correspondence between the Churchills. ‘I hope you communicated with the scrubbing people in Victoria Street and commanded them to scrub forthwith.’ We have no information about the wages of the scrubbing people.
The bill was, in fact, a modest affair. It applied to only four trades – ready-made tailoring, paper box-making, machine lace-making (an industry which the police court missionary had chosen for particular censure) and chain-making. It covered only 200,000 workers, 150,000 of them females. Committees, made up of employers, employees and independents, were empowered to fix hourly and piece rates. The legislation’s title – Trades Board rather than Wages Board Bill – was meant to emphasise the benefits that decent pay would provide to both sides of industry. And, in case the coded signals of moderation were not deciphered, Churchill emphasised his enduring belief in private enterprise: ‘The methods of regulating wages by law are only defensible as exceptional measures to deal with diseased or parasitic trades. A gulf must be fixed between trades subject to such control and ordinary economic industry.’26
He also emphasised the need for the boards to respect the realities of the market which they replaced. ‘The screw up of home wages without a proportionate movement of factory wages might only improve the home worker into extinction.’ But that did not prevent him from arguing that the government should intervene in areas of particularly high unemployment. Because of a slump in shipbuilding, ‘the distress on the Tyne and on the Clyde [could not] fail to be exceptionally acute’ and was likely to ‘produce a grave unrest among the artisan class.’27 It was therefore only sensible, he argued, to bring naval contracts forward and create jobs. In addition, he proposed that ‘certain recognised industries of a useful, but uncompetitive, character like, we will say, afforestation’ should be ‘managed by public departments’ ‘since they are capable of being expanded or contracted according to the needs of the labour market’.28
Churchill’s radicalism was more the result of a temperamental need to promote and participate in feverish activity than an ideological conviction that the nature of society should be altered. But the result – combined with, or despite, his open desire to rise to the pinnacle of parliamentary politics – made his promotion from the Board no more than a matter of time. After the general election of 1910 – with the government weakened both by a reduced majority and the impending constitutional conflict with the House of Lords* – Churchill was offered the Irish Office. He declined with a recklessly frank explanation of his reasons: ‘Except for the express purpose of preparing and passing a Home Rule Bill, I do not wish to become responsible for Irish administration.’29 The Prime Minister had spent much of the previous decade trying to edge the Liberals away from the Home Rule policies which had split the party in 1886; but Churchill, who had the knack of getting away with lese majesty of every sort, was made another, more acceptable, offer. He became Home Secretary. It provided him with the opportunity to implement the theory of active government which was consistent with his character if not his political philosophy. Churchill believed in more than the government ‘holding the ring’. In much the same way that employment opportunities had to be created for men who wanted work, the criminal justice system had to do more than punish wrongdoing. It had actively to promote lawful behaviour. Churchill believed in the government getting involved in the daily life of the nation.
The Edwardians took crime and punishment seriously. Between 1900 and 1910, as the population rose from 35.7 to 39.2 million, convictions in superior courts increased from just over 8,000 to almost 12,000. But it was not just the disproportionate rise in the number of proven offences (30 per cent as compared with a 10 per cent population growth) that troubled respectable opinion. The problem was the number of crimes which did not lead to conviction. In 1901, 29,079 indictable offences had been committed in England and Wales. Less than 20 per cent were ‘cleared up’.
In the early years of the century, the Metropolitan Police were 2,000 constables under strength and neither the hard-pressed London officers nor the better staffed provincial forces commanded the confidence of the general public. It was widely believed that incompetence was matched by corruption. In a press which specialised in sensation, every alleged misdemeanour was described in lurid detail. The most famous cause célèbre was the prosecution of George Edalyi, the son of a Parsee Church of England rector. Edalyi was convicted and imprisoned for horse maiming. Conan Doyle – whose Sherlock Holmes stories had convinced popular opinion that every crime was capable of solution by the inductive method of detection – initially suspected no more than that Edalyi’s race had induced the judge to sentence him to a savage seven years of hard labour. His investigations led him to believe
that the Parsee – a short-sighted solicitor’s clerk who had written the standard text on railway law – was innocent. Conan Doyle’s claims that Edalyi was the victim of racial prejudice were published in a series of Daily Telegraph articles and the conviction declared ‘unsafe’.
The sensationalisation of murder trials made the dramatis personae national celebrities. Sir Bernard Spilsbury, forensic pathologist, and Sir Edward Marshall Hall, King’s Counsel, commanded as many inches of newsprint as the stars of the music hall. They were not, however, as newsworthy as the defendants – particularly if they were murderers. During 1910 Hawley Harvey Crippen was the most talked-about man in Europe. Frederick Seddon, a poisoner, was a classic villain and Ruxton provided added excitement by being black and called ‘Buck’ by even his closest friends. Crippen had the remarkable distinction of figuring in the first pursuit and capture of the new scientific age. After he killed his wife, he fled to Canada with his mistress, Ethel le Neve, who was disguised as a boy. He was recognised by the captain of the liner on which they travelled. A message was sent to the owner ‘by wireless telegraph’ and Inspector Drew of Scotland Yard pursued the couple in a faster vessel and effected the arrest at sea.
Science was coming to the police’s aid. In 1902 the technique of fingerprinting was introduced, if not perfected. On Derby day, fifty-two men were arrested at Epsom for pickpocketing. They were fingerprinted and, although the results were not accepted in evidence, twenty-nine of them were identified as possessing previous convictions. The identity of a burglar who mutilated his own hand in a Clerkenwell warehouse gate was proved on the evidence of the amputated finger rather than the print. But, on 14 September 1902, a burglar who had broken into a house in Denmark Hill was convicted on the evidence of fingerprints alone.
Unfortunately, the police were slow to take advantage of other scientific developments. The Police Gazette, which circulated details of wanted men, illustrated the descriptions with woodcuts long after photographs could have been used to improve the prospects of identification. Until about the time of Churchill’s arrival at the Home Office, the telegraph was preferred to the telephone because of the fear that operators might overhear the conversations, and the Criminal Records Office did not co-ordinate the details of modus operandi, convictions and sentences until 1914.
The police and the processes of criminal justice were ripe for reform, and Churchill thought of himself as a reforming Home Secretary. But improvements in administration and efficiency were not the sorts of improvements which attracted him. His great concern was prison and prison policy. Before he could follow his natural inclination, he had to deal with a more immediate cause of concern. In 1910 two mining disasters reminded the nation that a collier who completed his whole working life in the pits had survived a one-in-twenty chance of being killed. Most years, a thousand coalminers were killed by roof falls, flooding and explosions. Generally they died in small numbers, which attracted little attention, but in 1910, 132 miners died in an underground explosion in Cumberland and 320 lives were lost when a roof collapsed in a Bolton pit. Churchill’s Mines Bill – not passed into law until late 1911 when he had moved on to the Admiralty – increased the minimum age for employment in the pits from thirteen to fourteen, improved the training of mines inspectors and stipulated minimum standards for safety and haulage machinery. Having prepared a Coal Miners Bill for enactment by his successor, Churchill then completed the passage of the Shops Bill – limiting hours of employment to sixty hours a week – which had been prepared by Herbert Gladstone before he left the Home Office to become Governor General of South Africa.
Gladstone’s valedictory letter to his successor had concluded, ‘as regards prisons, it won’t be a bad thing to give a harassed department a rest’.30 It was not advice that the new Home Secretary was inclined to accept. Wilfred Scawen Blunt – poet, libertine, Tory supporter of Home Rule and friend of Lord Randolph Churchill – had served two months in Kilmainham gaol. Churchill, after hearing a harrowing account of Blunt’s experiences, announced, ‘I am dead against the present system and, if I am ever made Home Secretary, I will make a clean sweep of it.’ Six months later, when he got the job, he began to make good his promise.
Although Churchill was against prison, he was absolutely opposed to the relaxation of other punishments. He arranged for the defeat of a private member’s bill that aimed to abolish flogging and he attempted to introduce a new punishment into the criminal lexicon which he called ‘defaulters drill … Swedish gymnastics with or without dumbbells … The boys should not be exhausted but training should be severe and rigorous discipline preserved.’31 Despite the strong objections from the Chief Constable of Birmingham – ‘punishment which is not improving to individuals … is not good to any person and breaks a man’s spirit’32 – the proposal was included in a Cabinet paper. Only the legislative logjam, created by the government’s conflict with the House of Lords, prevented the plan becoming law. Churchill had already chosen a title for the Bill: the Abatement of Imprisonment.
Throughout his political life, Churchill’s policy decisions were built upon sudden impulses that his admirers called inspiration. Great pronouncements, which owed more to instinct than careful study, set out the boundaries of his philosophy of government. The principle on which he based his Home Office reforms was to guide all of his most enlightened successors. ‘The mood and temper of the public with regard to the treatment of crime and criminals is the one unfailing test of the civilisation of any country.’33 Within a week of becoming Home Secretary, he attended the first night of John Galsworthy’s Justice in the company of Evelyn Ruggles-Brise, the chairman of the Prisons Commission. The play convinced the new minister that ‘separate confinement’, imposed on all prisoners for the first nine months of their sentence, was inhumane. Herbert Gladstone had already planned to reduce the regime to three months. Churchill reduced it to one month for all but recidivists. The play changed the language as well as the policy. Prisoners and prison reformers began to talk of ‘solitary confinement’.
Prison reform was not, however, as important to Churchill as effecting a reduction in the prison population. He told the House of Commons on 10 July 1910, ‘The first real principle which should guide anyone trying to establish a good system of prisons would be to prevent as many people as possible getting there at all.’ He expanded that view with a comment on the imprisonment of sixteen- to twenty-one-year-olds which sounded like propaganda in the class war: ‘It is an evil which falls only on the sons of the working classes. The sons of other classes may commit many of the same kind of offences and in boisterous and exuberant moments, whether at Oxford or anywhere else, many do things for which the working classes are committed to prison, although injury may not be inflicted on anyone.’34
The number of juveniles in custody was reduced by the introduction of secondary legislation which cut the number of offences that carried a prison sentence. Churchill was even more successful in minimising the number of men in prison for debt and fine default. In the ten years which followed his appointment to the Home Office, the number of prisoners serving sentences for fine default fell from almost 100,000 to 20,000.
There were other marginal reforms. Some gaols created libraries and others offered rudimentary training to discharged prisoners. But it was the reduction in the prison population which, together with the trade boards and the labour exchanges, was Churchill’s great contribution to the emancipation of the working classes. In his brief ‘new Liberal’ phase, Churchill spoke for men who, during the rest of his political career, regarded him as a natural enemy.
Churchill’s profound antipathy to trade unions (as demonstrated during the General Strike of 1926 and exaggerated after his intervention in the riots at Tonypandy*) confirmed the spirit in which he embarked on all his Home Office reforms. His anxiety to help the poor was moderated by a resentment of their presumption in trying to organise help for themselves. And in Edwardian Britain, as throughout the rest of his political life,
his policies were suddenly changed by the impulses of unrestrained emotion. After visiting Dartmoor Prison and meeting David Davies, a recidivist shepherd who had been sentenced to three years’ penal servitude and ten years’ preventative detention for stealing two shillings from a church offertory box, he circulated the courts instructing that only the most dangerous offenders should be imprisoned to protect society from anticipated crimes rather than as punishment for past offences. When he heard that Charles Bulbeck, a twelve-year-old boy, had been sentenced to birching and six years in a reformatory for the offence of stealing four penny-worth of cod, he instantly intervened. He was too late to stop the birching, but the boy was discharged to the custody of his parents. Sir Edward Troup, the permanent secretary at the Home Office, both suffered from and admired the characteristic which Churchill’s friends called mercurial and his enemies described as capricious. ‘Once a week or oftener, Mr Churchill came into the Office bringing with him some adventurous or impossible projects but after half an hour’s discussion something was evolved which was still adventurous but possible.’35
Perhaps the real Winston Churchill was revealed to the general public on 3 January 1911. Three weeks earlier, a group of men, thought to be Latvians, had been disturbed while attempting to tunnel into a jeweller’s shop. They escaped, after killing two policemen, but were discovered to be hiding in a third-floor flat in Sidney Street, Stepney. Police surrounded the building and fire was exchanged. A detective sergeant was wounded. Reinforcements were called, including seven hundred and fifty police officers and a detachment of Scots Guards with a machine gun. There was talk of bringing up a field gun, sending for Royal Engineers to sap and mine or setting fire to the building. On the second day, the Home Secretary arrived at the scene wearing a top hat and a coat with an astrakhan collar. According to the rumour current at the time, he borrowed a rifle and took a pot shot at the desperadoes. Churchill found trouble irresistible. On the day before the Sidney Street siege he had written to the Prime Minister arguing that, if the reluctant Tory peers – determined to oppose Lloyd George’s budget and the introduction of national insurance – refused to accept the supremacy of the House of Commons, the government should ‘clink the coronets in their scabbards’. However dubious the quality of the metaphor, Churchill was making clear that he was ready to fight the Lords to the death.
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