The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  So the field was left open for Edward Elgar. Perhaps his contemporary Hubert Parry, who set William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ to music, can claim to have composed the one song which is most associated in the public mind with this green and pleasant land. But it was Elgar who, because of the nature as well as the quality of his work, became England’s Orpheus. Although his music was essentially English, all Britain benefited from his genius. Before Elgar the whole nation had been dismissed in Europe as a musical wilderness, a country which, since Handel and Purcell, had produced no composer whose work was good enough for continental halls. Elgar changed all that with music which spoke of his time and place.

  Three men – Giles Gilbert Scott, Edwin Lutyens and Charles Rennie Mackintosh – are popularly supposed to have set the standards and determined the style of Edwardian architecture. Their individual and distinctive genius is not in dispute, but their influence on the design of buildings which we now regard as typical of the early twentieth century was nothing like as great as the pressure exerted by the largely forgotten Alfred Waterhouse. Arnold Bennett, writing about E. A. Rickards – his friend and architect of Westminster Central Hall – explained why Waterhouse, who died in 1905, had such a posthumous importance: ‘R … explained to me how one man – Waterhouse RA – came to influence the character of nearly all modern building. As most of these are put up for competition among architects and Waterhouse is usually chosen as assessor, the creative men who have made a speciality of such competitions have learned Waterhouse’s preferences and prejudices and are careful to study and stoop to them.’10

  Bennett was overstating the cynicism with which Edwardian architects competed for the commissions which could make their fortunes and reputations. Most of the competitors shared the same basic notion about the style that represented their generation. Rickards described his designs as ‘touched with French and Austrian exuberance’. Waterhouse thought of Wren and Vanbrugh as his architectural antecedents and spoke of the English ‘grand manner’. Both of them described their style as ‘baroque’.

  The differences in their designs were less important than the characteristics which they all had in common. They shared the capacity to represent in stone the pride and prosperity of a great empire, and they represented an aesthetic and intellectual reaction to the indiscipline of what the Victorians called ‘free style’ – three converging, some critics would say conflicting, notions of nineteenth-century modernity. Devotees of the Queen Anne style argued that it was red brick at its restrained best. The Aesthetic and the Arts and Crafts Movements represented strongly held views about the unity of architecture, painting, sculpture and furniture design.

  Each new architectural style owes something to its established predecessor. So, to a degree, Arts and Crafts became baroque when John Belcher, a member of the Art Workers Guild, returned from Genoa, infatuated with the buildings he had seen there. The result was a winning design in the competition for the new building which had been commissioned by the Institute of Chartered Accountants – Arts and Crafts with baroque adornments.

  One attraction of baroque architecture was its undoubtedly indigenous origins, whatever its variations. The national mood was strongly in favour of public buildings which were distinctively British. English baroque was matched, in Scotland, with an even more indisputably native ‘baronial style’. Paradoxically both schools of design, although deeply buried in history, were particularly receptive to developments in building technology. Baroque might have been invented with the idea of hanging a light stone skin on the steel frames which were beginning to revolutionise the building industry.

  Baroque developed in several distinct different forms – defined by critics as grand, capricious and Arts and Crafts. The capricious style produced some buildings of undisputed magnificence. Arthur Davis, influenced by the Parisian Beaux Arts movement – designed the Ritz Hotel, the largest steel frame building in London, and the Royal Automobile Club in Pall Mall. Aston Webb, although he called himself a Baroque devotee, designed for Birmingham University a complex of buildings that included a great hall which was undeniably Byzantine and a tower, named after Joseph Chamberlain, which would have looked at home attached to a mosque.

  Baroque became – in its most exuberant form – the Grand Manner. All that was needed to qualify for the description was the impression of power and wealth. Those two attributes were most eloquently expressed by John Belcher and his partner, J. J. Joass. Their Royal London House in Finsbury Square was a celebration of commerce, and the Royal Medical Society in Henrietta Street was a tribute to Edwardian scientific progress. The apotheosis of the movement was John Belcher’s Ashton Memorial in Lancaster, which had no other purpose than homage to the success of power and wealth in their own right.

  Although Edwardian baroque dominated the design of public buildings and represented the optimism which prosperous Edwardians felt, more humble buildings continued to be constructed according to more traditional styles. The most successful of the survivors was Edwin Lutyens, architect of the Cenotaph in Whitehall and the government buildings in New Delhi. The design for the apogee of imperial glory owed nothing to Indian influence. The Viceregal Lodge was described as the ‘Oriental apotheosis of the Grand Manner’. Advised to prepare for his task by visiting three Mogul cities, Lutyens thought that the authorities had gone ‘clean mad on Indo-Saracenic’ and asked, rhetorically, ‘what on earth can an Indian Rajah know about architecture and its ethics’.11 He was more accommodating about indigenous British influences.

  The Arts and Crafts Movement was most vividly exemplified by Munstead Wood, a house in Goldalming which was designed by Edwin Lutyens and decorated by Gertrude Jekyll, for whom it was built. It was the beginning of a partnership which resulted in dozens of south of England ‘farmhouses’ – most of them unconnected to farms and farming. Lutyens demonstrated his adaptability and the eclectic nature of Edwardian architecture by designing Deanery Gardens in Berkshire (Arts and Crafts) for the owner of Country Life in 1901, and the Country Life offices in Covent Garden (the Grand Manner) in 1902. Then followed the great Lutyens monuments to rural grandeur in which the marks of Arts and Crafts were just visible on baronial splendour – Heathcote, near Ilkley, and Castle Drogo on Dartmoor. When he agreed to design St Jude’s in Hampstead, he became unavoidably involved in the essentially theological argument about what sort of church represented the true faith.

  In every generation a movement arises in the Christian church which calls for a return to the purity of the Early Fathers. The Evangelical Movement in Edwardian England argued that church design, no less than liturgy, should reclaim its ancient purity. In 1907, Sir Charles Nicholson read a paper on the subject to the Royal Institute of British Architects.12 Its title was ‘Modern Church Design’ but it advocated the adoption of ancient values. It represented the view of the Alcuin Club, a society dedicated to study of the Book of Common Prayer. Sir Charles reminded the architects of the rubric, describing acceptable church design, which the Prayer Book contained. ‘Church ornament’ should be no different from what it was in 1549, the Second Year of the Reign of Edward VI. Altars should be lower and candles fewer than had become the common practice. The reredos screen should not tower above the east window.

  Naturally the Anglo-Catholics fought valiantly for the rubric to be respected. The Church of England Establishment fought valiantly against the influence of Rome. But Rome was not always confounded. So St Cyprians, Clarence Gate, in St Marylebone (consecrated in 1903) was designed as a virtual reproduction of St Peter Mancroft in Norwich, built in the fifteenth century. Its architect, J. N. Comper, explained that his design ‘neither sought nor avoided originality’. His only wish was to ‘fulfil the ideal of the English Parish Church … and to do so in the last manner of English architecture’.13 The implication was clear. There had been no original church design in England in five hundred years. Nor, during the same period, had a new cathedral (as distinct from a redesignated parish church) been consecrated in Eng
land.

  The Edwardians changed all that. The building of three cathedrals was started, or at least commissioned, during the brief reign. Because of the long gestation period of all things episcopal, their construction was finished – or left still incomplete – in the Britain of George V. Edwin Lutyens designed a new Catholic cathedral for Liverpool, but only the foundations were laid in the years before the First World War, and a new architect was appointed thirty years later. Giles Gilbert Scott was a twenty-two-year-old prodigy when he won the competition to build the city’s Anglican cathedral. That was in 1902. It was consecrated over twenty years later. Charles Rennie Mackintosh, an unsuccessful contender, must have been runner-up to Scott, for his design is strangely similar to the winning entry. Mackintosh was already the architect of Hill House in Helensburgh (a ‘sixteenth-century Scottish tower house’ with distinctive Mackintosh wardrobes in the bedrooms) and of the Willow Tea Rooms in Glasgow. Had he won the Liverpool competition he might be remembered as a monumental architect rather than a furniture designer of genius. As it turned out, he was more admired in Berlin than in London or Edinburgh.

  John F. Bentley, the architect of Westminster Cathedral – where the first mass was celebrated in May 1902 – is remembered for a design imposed on him by Cardinal Vaughan. Bentley wanted gothic, neoclassical or perpendicular. Vaughan – determined to avoid comparison with Westminster Abbey down the road – insisted on ‘a Roman Basilica with the constructive improvements introduced by the Byzantines’. Two hundred miles north, Scott was allowed by the Anglicans of Liverpool to choose neo-Gothic. Cathedrals were spared the agony of arguments about returning to the purity of 1549. In Hampstead Garden Suburb, Lutyens simply ignored the Prayer Book rubric and called St Jude’s ‘free gothic’. He was no more prepared to take advice from Christians than from Hindus or Muslims.

  In 1907 Lutyens became adviser to the Hampstead Garden Trust which had just bought 243 acres of land from Eton College with the stated intention of building a ‘garden suburb’. It was not the first attempt to remedy a disease which Lord Rosebery attributed to London becoming ‘a tumour, an elephantitis, sucking into its gorged system half the life and blood and the bone of the rural districts’.14 At the turn of the century, Ebenezer Howard had argued that the best way to combat the flood of humanity into London was to organise at least a trickle out into the suburban countryside.

  The textbook of the movement was Howard’s Tomorrow, a Perfect Path to Real Reform. The Garden City Association was formed at the turn of the century, and established its first site at Letchworth in Hertfordshire. The Garden City Limited was founded in 1903. Its board of directors included a Cadbury, a Rowntree and a Lever.15 Its stated object was the realisation of John Ruskin’s dream – houses which are ‘strongly beautiful and in groups of limited extent, walled round so that there need be no festering and wretched suburbs anywhere, but clean and busy streets within and the open country without, with a belt of beautiful garden and orchard round the walls, so that from any part of the city, perfectly fresh air and grass and sight of the far horizon might be reachable in a few minutes’ walk.’16

  The second edition of Howard’s book, Garden Cities of Tomorrow, stimulated what amounted to a national movement. A Cheap Cities Exhibition was held at the Garden City in 1905, and the Great Northern Railway organised cheap day-excursions for prospective tenants, owner-occupiers and pioneers of the new movement. The exhibition had three categories of cottage on display – the £150 cottage, the five-room semi-detached cottages at £300 a pair and larger houses costing no more to buy than £35 a room. The Concrete Machinery Company exhibited houses made entirely from prefabricated blocks, and the New Expanded Metal Company promised, but did not deliver, a cottage made entirely of iron and steel.

  Raymond Unwin, one of the Letchworth architects, became the advocate for the whole garden suburb movement. When the Reverend Samuel and Mrs Henrietta Barnett determined to repeat the Letchworth experiment at Hampstead, he persuaded Lutyens to act as consultant for the entire scheme as well as to design both the Established and Free Church. Lutyens’s plan aimed at creating a rural community on the edge of London. Its aim was to build closes and cul-de-sacs with alternate houses set back from and built close to the road. Every house was thus given a view from both front and back windows as well as easy access to a ‘village green’. The cost varied from £435 to £3,500, a range of prices which the Hampstead Trust believed would attract all classes of resident.

  The Trust was wrong. The prices made a mixture of the classes impossible. Hampstead met only the needs of the progressive Edwardian professionals. The great houses built for the very rich by Lutyens and C. F. A. Voysey (Cragside in Northumberland and the Orchard in Chorley Wood) may well, as Nikolas Pevsner says, have been ‘imitated by speculative builders all along the arterial roads and all over the suburbs’ of early twentieth-century Britain. But it was Hampstead which radiated the respectability of the Edwardian middle classes.

  In Everywoman’s Encyclopaedia for 1912, W. S. Rogers (a civil engineer) offered middle-class families advice about choosing a house.

  When, owing to the smallness of the household or slenderness of means, one has to seek a house of moderate rental, a difficulty will be found in regard to the class of people who may be one’s neighbours. In towns and suburban districts, the street takes its character from the majority of its occupants, and persons of refined tastes would find it impossible to live up to their usual standards of comfort in a district inspired by a different set of ideals.

  He went on to list the horrors of choosing the wrong district – ‘the presence of noisy children in the roadway, street music in generous abundance, hawkers of sturdy voice and disturbances from early risers and late home-comers’. Hampstead could offer the Edwardian middle classes a refuge from all of those Edwardian manifestations of the lower orders.

  The lower orders were not, however, ignored. Indeed work on their behalf helped to keep alive and vigorous the other two elements in the Free Style Movement which Edwardian Baroque was able to overwhelm but not eliminate. The Housing of the Working Classes Act (1884) had given local authorities the power to build. The County Council Act of 1888 had extended those powers, and the Education Act of 1902 had given the larger authorities responsibility for schools and therefore school building. Each extension of municipal responsibility had led aldermen and councillors to believe that they must create edifices worthy of their status. ‘Queen Anne style’ – a reflection, its exponents insisted, not a pastiche of a golden period in British domestic architecture – flourished in the creation of London board schools. Arts and Crafts thrived in the work of the London County Council’s Architects’ Department and the Millbank Housing Estate, built over six years between the Tate Gallery and Victoria Station, is still occupied in the twenty-first century.

  The third element in Free Style, the Aesthetic Movement, neither expected nor received local authority commissions. Its greatest exponent was Edward Godwin, friend of Oscar Wilde, who, as a young man, had shocked respectable society by conducting a long and public affair with Ellen Terry, the actress wife of George Frederick Watts, the portrait painter. The movement which he led shared with Arts and Crafts the belief in artistic unity. But its members took the idea a stage further. Music, literature and art should all be as one. They survived the ridicule of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience and became, in their way, the advance guard of Bloomsbury.

  Despite the insistence on their own distinction from the uncouth world around them, they shared with Edwardian Baroque, Queen Anne style and even the medieval purists of church architecture one common characteristic. They were looking for something which was both new and native to Great Britain. Architecture, no less than music, wanted to come home.

  Fine art, on the other hand, reacted to the new world in a dramatically different way. It looked abroad for inspiration.

  The Bloomsbury Group – intellectuals who hovered precariously between the aesthetic and the decadent �
� developed a habit of identifying moments when the earth stood still. J. M. Keynes felt transported to a ‘new heaven and a new earth’ when, in 1903, he first read G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, and Virginia Woolf claimed that the world had changed out of all recognition as a result of an exhibition which opened at the Grafton Gallery in 1910. Perhaps she meant not that the world changed but that she, and people like her, began to look at it in a different way. The Post-Impressionists, as the artists on show came to be called, were thought, by their fiercest critics as well as their most devoted supporters, to offer a new view of life as well as a new school of painting.

  They were not, however, the first Edwardian painters to disturb the tranquil surface of the Victorian artistic legacy. The artistic Establishment continued its belated love affair with the Pre-Raphaelites, the aristocracy commissioned portraits which were larger (and more beautiful) than life, and the middle classes maintained their affection for scenes of village life which painted a moral. But new and revolutionary ideas were already abroad – they were to be found in Camden Town.

  The Camden Town Group was not officially launched until 1911, by which time its devotees had already superseded the members of the New English Art Club as the principal radical painting group in Britain. Seven years earlier, Walter Sickert, the Camden Town Group’s founder and continual inspiration – had returned to England from France. He had immediately begun to exhibit what William Rothenstein, a more conventional artist, called his ‘genius for discovering the dreariest houses in which to work’.17 His Fitzroy Street Group, named after his studio, had attempted to bring British painting down to earth a whole decade before the more famous Camden Group was created.