Soames Forsyte and his extended family faced all the moral dilemmas and social embarrassments that it is possible for middle classes, in any reign, to endure. Young Jolyon ends his loveless marriage and sets up home with his children’s governess. As a result, he is disowned by his father. Soames, married to the penniless Irene, who is less in love than desperate to escape from her recently acquired step-father, proposes to build a house at Robin Hill in the hope that the pleasure of its possession will increase her wifely affection. But Irene falls in love with the architect, Philip Bosinney. When Soames discovers his wife’s infidelity, he rapes her – or, in the language of the day, ‘exercises his rights’. Bosinney, overcome with horror at the outrage for which he feels, in part, responsible, is killed by a hansom cab as he stumbles home in a London fog. The plot of The Man of Property is unquestionably melodramatic. But it is balanced by the austere character of Soames and the materialism of the Forsyte family. The result is the revelation of all the vices which hid under the smooth surface of turn-of-the-century England.
Even among the Edwardian middle classes, who showed little sign of recognising the revolution within which they lived, one novelist anticipated the great upheaval which was to change the world in 1914. In 1903, when half the Cabinet and distinguished members of both the Board of Admiralty and the general staff were agreed that France was the real enemy, Erskine Childers wrote The Riddle of the Sands. It foreshadowed imperial Germany’s ambition to dominate Europe. Childers, English by birth but Irish by adoption, was regarded at the time as a figure of impeccable respectability whose background and education had qualified him to become a Clerk in the House of Commons. He was later to become so embroiled in the violent agitation for a united and independent Ireland that he was executed by the Army of the Free State for bearing arms against the Dublin government which ruled after partition in 1922. Perhaps his novel, in which two amateur yachtsmen discover the Germans’ secret naval build-up in the Baltic, reveals something of his split personality. The two sailors are men of startlingly different character. One is a natural renegade and the other shares the values of the Establishment. That made The Riddle of the Sands more than a thriller. The two yachtsmen represent respectability and revolt. The novel explores the rival merits of those qualities.
The same can hardly be said about John Buchan’s The Thirty-nine Steps, another novel anticipating the Great War which was written (but not published) before it began. Prester John anticipated by a greater margin the rise of militant African nationalism. Buchan’s books about Richard Hannay, the South African mining engineer who became the hero of Greenmantle as well as The Thirty-nine Steps, all had racist as well as anti-Semitic overtones: in Prester John the Reverend John Laputa, who claimed to be the reincarnation of Prester John, is a far more attractive character than Henriques, the corrupt Portuguese-Jewish trader who supports the African revolt because he is interested in profit not principle. The Empire and the world are saved by David Crawfurd, a clean-cut Englishman, who discovers ‘the meaning of the white man’s duty. He has to take all the risks, reckoning nothing of his life or his fortune and well content to find his reward in the fulfilment of his tasks. That is the difference between white and black, the gift of responsibility, the power of being in a little way a king.’
The war in South Africa and the battle for colonial preferences were both fought by men who shared Crawfurd’s view of the imperial obligation and the duty of leadership which was inherited by the British race. That idea was so strong that it captivated Teodor Josef Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski, a Polish seaman, self-taught literary critic and undisputed literary talent. Lord Jim, his first successful novel, is a classic story of a man who, having failed in his duty, redeems himself through service and the sacrifice of his life rather than the loss of his honour. The book was so well received that the author described himself as ‘the spoilt child of the critics’. He was better known as Joseph Conrad.
Conrad’s greatest novel, the work which elevated him into the highest rank of the English literary pantheon, had an equally dashing plot. In The Secret Agent, a Russian spy, the recipient of St Petersburg gold who has failed to justify his salary, is instructed to earn his keep and foment immediate insurrection by blowing up Greenwich Observatory. The spy’s incompetence makes The Secret Agent a black comedy. But although most of the action is described through the eyes of a Russian anarchist, the attention to detail makes it part of the realist tradition. Even Verloc, the spy with a humdrum home life, has ‘come home’ to South London.
There were, of course, Edwardian authors who stood out against the spirit of the age. Arthur Conan Doyle who, in Victorian England, had written of the essentially English Sherlock Holmes and the quintessentially English Doctor Watson, turned to the Monmouth Rebellion and the Napoleonic Wars for inspiration. But Britain at the turn of the twentieth century was beginning to come to terms with the new world of working women, self-educated men and a middle class which challenged the aristocracy’s right to run the country. That new Britain was all represented in Edwardian literature.
*Maud Gonne believed that she had seen Yeats in his father’s studio in 1885. Yeats disagreed.
*It is worth noting that ‘Bloomsbury’ provided little work of importance until the First World War. Virginia Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, was published in 1915, Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians in 1918. They were about in Edwardian England, but reviewing other people’s books for the Spectator, the Nation and the Edinburgh Review.
†See Chapter 17, ‘Would You Believe It?’
*The description first appeared in the North American Review of 1894. It was applied to campaigners for female suffrage who based their views on John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women.
*The most bizarre event in The Old Wives’ Tale is the escape of an enraged circus elephant and its death at the hands of the local militia. Anyone who doubts that such events disturbed Victorian tranquillity should visit the Eyre Arms in Hassop, Derbyshire. It displays a picture of an elephant shot by the Bakewell Volunteers in 1890.
CHAPTER 15
The End of Innocence
Although there was widespread poverty in Edwardian Britain, rea wages of skilled and semi-skilled workers had increased by 30 per cent during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Most women remained tied to oven and sink. But many of the men who had additional money to spend had more leisure time in which to spend it. That was particularly true of the north of England where engineers had finished work at twelve o’clock on Saturdays since 1890 and textile workers, whose hours of work were regulated by Parliament, had worked a five-and-a-half-day week since 1901. A new race of sports enthusiasts was born. Its members were called ‘spectators’.
The influence of northern working men, able for the first time to watch as well as play games, was particularly pronounced in the development of association football. Spectators paid at the gate. So players could be paid. The game which, in Victorian England, had been the preserve of public-school old boys, fashionable regiments and London gentlemen’s clubs was taken over by professionals from the north and the Midlands. Between 1900 and 1914 only three southern teams – Southampton, Tottenham Hotspur and Bristol City – played in the FA Cup Final. Only Tottenham won. The south had to wait even longer for success in the Football League. The first southern champion was Arsenal at the beginning of its long inter-war supremacy in the 1931–32 season.
Football became the people’s game. Nearly 112,000 spectators watched Tottenham Hotspur beat Sheffield United in the 1901 Cup Final – almost ten times as many as saw Blackburn Rovers play Scotland’s Queen’s Park amateurs in the final fourteen years earlier. Ibrox Park in Glasgow was the first ground in Britain to experience the horrors of a sporting crowd disaster. So many supporters – of both teams – crushed into the main stand for the 1902 England versus Scotland international that it collapsed. Twenty-six men were killed and five hundred injured.
In England, cricket came a respectable
second to football as the national spectator sport. On a sunny Saturday, Yorkshire could attract a crowd of 30,000 for the first day of a three-day county championship match against another major county. Athletics appealed more to doers than to watchers. But when, in 1908, the Olympic Games were held in London, 90,000 people packed the White City for the finals of the track events – still the biggest crowd ever to watch athletics in Britain. Boxing moved from public house yards to the small halls, where it proved popular enough to attract the attention of ‘promoters’ who put up the ‘purses’ and collected the gate money. Despite the rival attractions of the Northern Union, soon to be called Rugby League, Rugby Union could attract crowds of 20–25,000 for the early rounds of the Yorkshire Cup. The All England Club determined the popularity of tennis by the amount of gate money which they collected at the Wimbledon Championship. In 1902 it was £3,408. Two years later it was over twice as much.
The new and more confident working class wanted to play as well as watch. By 1914, 750,000 men and boys were registered players with the 12,000 football clubs which competed in the myriad professional and amateur leagues. In 1907, the London County Council provided 442 ‘reserved’ cricket pitches in its parks and on its recreation grounds. They were used by established clubs with a total of 10,000 playing members and combined fixture lists of 3,000 matches each summer. Hundreds of other rougher pitches accommodated casual games and scratch teams. Eighteen years after its foundation in 1897, the Amateur Athletics Federation had 200 affiliated clubs. By 1914 the number had risen to 502. Rugby Union suffered from the great schism of 1895 and the number of clubs in England and Wales fell from 481 in that year to 244 in 1903. But for the rest of the decade, the two ‘codes’ combined shared an interest in watching and playing rugby which grew at about the same speed as the increase in enjoyment of other games.
Golf, which had prospered in Scotland for more than a century, became so popular south of the border that, by the time King Edward came to the throne, more than half of the ‘club professionals’ in England were home grown. It was not a pastime for ordinary people. The average price of club membership was £18 a year – about two months’ wages for a clerk, the lowest rung on the social ladder from which it was acceptable to swing a mashie or a niblick. By 1914, golf ball sales were worth £200,000 a year and new clubs were looking for open spaces on which to build eighteen-hole courses. Thanks to the increase in life expectancy, the London Necropolis and Mausoleum Company had more land than it needed for burials. What might have been a cemetery became the Woking Golf Club.
Working men had been employed as professional pugilists and cricketers since sport had become a preoccupation of the Regency aristocracy, but they had been essentially rich men’s servants. In late Victorian England the professional became a craftsman, working alongside his amateur social betters. In cricket (which took the distinction between professionals and amateurs so seriously that it employed its own language to emphasise the difference) the increasing number of ‘players’ competing with ‘gentlemen’ for places in the county sides caused the ruling Marylebone Cricket Club continual concern. Part of the problem was the growing tendency for ‘gentlemen’ to expect to be paid as much, or more, than players – albeit in a more surreptitious form. The most flagrant sham-amateur of them all was W. G. Grace, a ‘gentleman’ who received £9,073 from a testimonial fund – four times more than the largest ‘benefit’ a professional had ever collected. But W. G. was above reproach.
In any event, it was not sham-amateurism which most concerned the Bourbons of the MCC. It was the influence that the influx of real professionals was having on the character of cricket. C. B. Fry – as well as a Test Match batsman, the world long jump record holder, English football international and amateur member of the Southampton team which lost to Sheffield United in the 1902 Cup Final – wrote with real passion about how the intense competition of league football ruined the winter game. Fry believed in spectators, not supporters. He was fearful that the same partisan spirit would infect the summer. ‘A magnificently fought-out game, ending in a goalless draw, will leave the crowd sullen and morose. They wend their way home from the ground with black looks, cursing the bad luck of the home side. An undeserved victory for the home team will leave no regrets. There is no sportsmanship in a football crowd … Partisanship has dulled the idea of sport and warped its moral sense.’1
Professionalism, in every sense of the word, spread fast in football after the formation of ‘the league’ in 1888. The payment of players had been accepted by the Football Association since 1885, but the creation of a competitive league – with all its original members in the north of England or the Midlands and its headquarters in Preston – changed the character of the clubs as well as their relationship with the men who turned out for them on Saturday afternoons. After the creation of a ‘second division’ in 1892, football became so popular that, by 1911, there were only four towns in England with populations of more than 10,000 that did not have a professional club – Birkenhead, Gateshead, Halifax and South Shields.2
The new clubs were overtly commercial – limited liability companies which usually included in their articles of association a clause that limited the distributed dividend to 5 per cent. In every case, the self-denying ordinance was unnecessary. Football clubs in Edwardian England rarely made money. When they did, it was ploughed back into the team. The men who ran football – usually the commercial middle classes – hoped for prestige, not profit. Edward Henry Machin, the solicitor’s clerk turned businessman and hero of Arnold Bennett’s The Card, was typical. He made himself sufficiently popular to become mayor by buying a centre forward for Bursley AFC.
By 1914 there were 158 professional football clubs in England and Wales and thirty more in Scotland, where a league had been formed in 1894. Many of them were subsidised, to some degree, by their directors, but all of them relied for most of their income on money taken at the turnstiles. Football had become a strange variation of big business. The average Edwardian attendance at a First Division League Match was over 15,000 and the ‘gates’ were even bigger at Cup Ties. The partisanship which C. B. Fry so deplored combined with the size of the crowd at the 1909 Scottish Cup Final to create the first football riot. The game was drawn at full time and spectators, angry that there was to be a replay rather than the hope of a result in ‘extra time’, refused to go home.
Big crowds brought big money into football and its use had to be regulated to give less wealthy clubs a sporting chance. In 1901, the English league introduced the ‘maximum wage’, which it set for that year at £4 a week. Players were bought and sold like commodities and usually received a ‘signing-on fee’ when they joined a new club, providing an easy opportunity for the richer members of the league to attract the best players by a large initial lump-sum payment. The ‘signing-on fee’ was, therefore, limited to £10. The attempt to limit the size of the transfer fees – prompted, in 1905, by the first £1,000 signing – failed because the rich clubs wanted to exploit their wealth. The rule that no more than £500 could change hands when a player moved teams was rejected by the clubs whose spending power it was meant to neutralise. The domination of football by the big clubs had begun.
Football’s popularity was both acknowledged and encouraged by its inclusion in the 1906 official elementary school curriculum. Three years later it became an explicit part of the Board of Education’s physical education syllabus. But football’s capacity to create healthy minds within healthy bodies was only a minor reason for the huge increase in its popularity: Britain, ignoring Italy’s claim that football began in the piazza in Siena, regarded the game as its gift to the world. And, throughout the Edwardian era, England demonstrated that it was a game at which the Anglo-Saxon race excelled. Football was an extension of an imperialist foreign policy. Southampton travelled to South America in 1904. The Corinthians (a team of gentlemen whose goalkeeper never even attempted to save a penalty if the captain thought that their opponents deserved a goal) toured Eu
rope and Africa and visited Brazil three times during the first decade of the new century. The English visitors beat the local champions in every match. England was once more demonstrating its superiority over the lesser breeds without the law. An England XI, selected from both amateur and professional players, beat Austria and Bohemia and Hungary in the first international matches ever played and in both 1908 and 1912 England won the football tournament in the Olympic Games. ‘And when they say, “we’ve always won” …’ The achievements of Victoria’s Soldiers of the Queen were replicated in Edward’s Footballers of the King.
Professional footballers became ‘personalities’. Although they never became rich, they did become famous. Their names were mentioned in music hall jokes and their triumphs recorded in popular songs. Steve Bloomer of Derby County and Middlesbrough scored twenty-eight goals in twenty-four appearances for England, and Billy Meredith, who competed with Lloyd George for the title of Welsh Wizard, played 1,568 games for Manchester City and Manchester United. Bob Crompton of Blackburn Rovers earned the distinction of being the first professional footballer to captain England. His fans were astonished to discover that he owned a motor car. He was the first, and for some considerable time, the only, professional footballer to do so. The celebrity footballer had arrived.
The irresistible attraction of ‘the personality’ infected even the Olympic Games, a field of sporting endeavour which proclaimed that participation was more important than success. The most famous participant in the 1908 London Games could rightfully claim that he upheld the Olympic ideal when he became a hero not by winning, but by taking part. Durando Pietri, an Italian competitor in the Marathon walk who shielded his head from the sun with a knotted handkerchief worn in a manner common on the Blackpool beach in summer, was within yards of the finishing line with none of his rivals in sight, when he collapsed from heat exhaustion. The White City stewards picked him up and helped him over the finishing line. He was, of course, disqualified. The British love a gallant loser and Pietri became the favourite of the Games and the recipient of a special gold cup, presented to him by Queen Alexandra.
The Edwardians Page 37