After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  The 1906 landslide happened just a decade before the Easter Rising in Dublin. The outgoing Tory chief secretary for Ireland, George Wyndham, did more to help small Irish landowners – with his Irish Land Purchase Act of 1903, enabling peasant and yeoman farmers to have a stake in their land – than any subsequent Liberal. This was the case in spite of the fact that the home secretary in the first Liberal administration was Herbert J. Gladstone, son of the Grand Old Man himself, the passionate advocate of Irish Home Rule.

  Matters of arguably greater moment faced the new foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey, the new secretary for India, John Morley, and the new colonial secretary, Lord Elgin. They were admirable Victorian Liberals, and it should not be said that they did nothing. They tried to reduce the ridiculous arms race with Germany, by having a conference on limitation at The Hague, in their first year of government. Though Grey wanted to reduce the number of dreadnoughts, one was launched just before the Hague Conference. Morley was destined forlornly to resign his cabinet seat when war eventually came. He had been powerless, and most of the Liberal party entirely unwilling, to stop it.

  In South Africa, however, their record is rather better. As soon as the election was over, the new cabinet vetoed the further recruitment of Chinese slaves. The new liberal prime minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, had announced, at a rally in the Albert Hall, that his government would ‘stop forthwith the recruitment and embarkation of coolies in China and their importation into South Africa’. The Liberal imperialist chancellor of the Exchequer, however, H. H. Asquith, reminded the prime minister that licences for the importation of 14,000 coolies, granted the previous November, had not yet been used. The cabinet immediately backed down and prohibited merely the future issuance of licences, rather than bringing the Chinese labour to an end forthwith. It was not legally in its power to do so, and so it was not until 1910 that the last Chinese labourers left the Rand compounds.2

  For the Radical wing of the Liberal party, this was not enough. The new member of Parliament for South Salford, for example, in his maiden speech, demanded that the government begin deporting the Chinese labourers within three months, and at a set rate of, say, 5,000 per month. The man who made this suggestion was Hilaire Belloc, journalist, historian and poet, better known to posterity for his comic rhymes for children than for his parliamentary career. He was a colourful presence in the House, who very quickly came to tire of the compromises which the party system forced upon people. It was not enough for Belloc and his friends that the Liberals had made a step in the right direction. Like all Radicals he was impatient for the career politicians to act upon their promises, to do what they said they would do. It was not enough that Campbell-Bannerman’s government did, in a number of significant ways, undermine the high imperialism of the previous administration. For example, in South Africa, the Liberals replaced the Tory system of complete British hegemony with self-government for the Orange River Colony (homogeneously Boer) and by 1908 they had drafted a constitution for a politically united South Africa which allowed universal suffrage among the white populace. The black majority, one need hardly say at this date, were not given the vote. No one offered it to them. Only the High Tory imperialist John Buchan in his thriller Prester John saw the potency of a black Africa as a political ideal. When the Scottish hero overhears the black clergyman, Laputa, urging the blacks to throw off white oppression (‘a bastard civilization which has sapped your manhood’) Davie cannot fail to be impressed. ‘By rights, I suppose, my blood should have been boiling at this treason. I am ashamed to confess that it did nothing of the sort. My mind was mesmerized by this amazing man.’3

  So quickly had the imperial idea, mooted as an experiment in the mid- to late nineteenth century, been fixed in the British mind! When Frederick Lugard colonized West Africa he had seen it as a temporary measure, a matter of two or three generations to teach the Africans civilization, before the Europeans went home again. Post Boer War, for an African to speak of self-government was ‘treason’.4

  On 13 June 1906 there was a riot in the Nile Delta village of Denshawui in which a British officer died. It had been precipitated by British officers shooting pigeons against the wishes of the inhabitants. Lord Cromer, the British consul general in Egypt, ordered a summary tribunal. There were floggings of great severity performed in front of the victims’ families, four villagers were condemned to death and twelve imprisoned. Radicals like Belloc protested that there was no chance of an inquiry since Cromer had conveniently destroyed the evidence.5 Belloc’s Sussex neighbour Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the foremost British defender of Egyptian rights, published a pamphlet condemning the atrocities. The case, with the fudging of the issue of Chinese labour in the Natal, ‘together ought to shut English mouths forever about Russia and the Congo’.6

  The British had gone into Egypt to tidy up after a local war. Gladstone ordered the occupation of the country in 1882 to help put down a mutiny against the Turks. The British fleet was sent to Alexandria but had been unable to prevent a riot in which the consul was killed. So they sent troops to support the Turkish Khedive. Before another year was up, General Gordon was making his fateful visit to Khartoum, and in the aftermath of that war, Evelyn Baring, financial adviser to the viceroy’s council in India, arranged a loan of £9 million in aid to the ‘Egyptian’, in fact Turkish, government. Baring became Lord Cromer, the virtual ruler of Egypt from 1883 to 1907, and the British did not leave Egypt until they were forced to do so by Colonel Nasser in 1956 after the Suez fiasco. ‘In the twenty-five years from 1882 to 1907 England is said to have made nearly 120 promises to evacuate Egypt while at the same time pursuing policies which confirmed her hold over the country.’7

  It was the Suez Canal, in which Disraeli had arranged that the British government should buy a majority shareholding, which had led Britain into this disastrous imperialist position in Egypt. And why was the canal so important? Because it was the quickest trade route to India, with whose fortunes in the narrow financial as well as the destinal sense Britain’s were so intimately entwined. The new Liberal secretary for India, John Morley – patient Gladstonian and biographer of the Grand Old Man – put into place reforms in the subcontinent which matched what Britain had done in South Africa. Curzon’s successor as viceroy, Lord Minto, saw his role less as a proconsul than a civil servant, and together with Morley he attempted to extend legislative and administrative powers to Indians. Not much headway was made, partly because these well-intentioned Liberal gradualists met opposition both from Indian nationalists and from Tory British diehards.

  Behind all the public debate about the Empire, which the new government occasioned, there remained the economic issues which had haunted Balfour’s government, and which would continue to dominate British life until the Second World War. These were the related questions of how the Empire enriched the mother country, how the domestic economy of Britain was managed, where British wealth came from, and how sustainable it was politically, given the huge growth of an urban industrialized and at times discontented working class. None of these questions can be studied or answered in isolation. They interrelate.

  The Victorian success story had been entitled Free Trade. The old Corn Laws, by which Tory landowners could guarantee an income by fixing the price of grain, had been swept away by the radicals of the 1840s. The prophets of Free Trade like Cobden and Bright believed not only that it would make Britain rich, but that it would make the world peaceful. They entirely failed to predict that as other nations raced to catch up with Britain in industrial expertise and production they would see one another as deadly rivals, and that among the commodities they would perfect and develop and sell would be armaments.

  Moreover Free Trade could impoverish as well as enrich. The most conspicuous example of this perhaps was the Lancashire cotton trade, Britain’s largest source of export. In the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, British cotton manufactures lost their European and American markets. The Europeans and the Americans develop
ed means to produce and sell cotton goods of their own which were cheaper than the British products. So the British relied almost exclusively by 1900 on the markets of India, China and the Levant. It only needed the Indians to develop the means of industrial cotton-production, or actively to boycott British goods – both things were beginning to happen – for the working classes of Lancashire to face starvation, as they had done when cotton supplies gave up during the American Civil War.

  This large single example will suffice as a paradigm for the whole debate which dominated Edwardian politics between those who clung to the Victorian belief in Free Trade and those who supported tariffs, artificially to shore up the British economy. This debate is related, economically and politically, to two other matters which would dominate the world in the decades following the First World War: namely currency and its fluctuations, and the question, never even considered in Britain until too late, of whether governments themselves could, or should, intervene to tackle employment problems. Carlyle could dismiss economics as the dismal science. In the century which followed Carlyle, economics were central.

  It explains, for example, how a figure such as Joseph Chamberlain, the Radical mayor of Birmingham, through his advocacy of Empire and his belief in social harmony, should have undergone a total volte-face over the matter of Free Trade. It was Free Trade which made a great city such as Birmingham or Manchester, and which therefore made a successful entrepreneur such as Chamberlain. Equally, he discovered, Free Trade could unmake such places. In 1888 a dire new word entered the English language: unemployment.8 ‘Tariff Reform means work for all’ was Chamberlain’s boastful hope in 1903.9 The Empire became the means of saving ‘dying British industry’. The issue split the Conservative party: it was one of the reasons why they lost the 1906 election, and why Churchill, a keen Free Trader, left the Tories and joined the Liberal party.

  The disparities between rich and poor in Edwardian Britain were by our standards grotesque. You would have to go to South America to find modern parallels. Vast population growth during the Victorian heyday was the essential ingredient in the story: it explained the prodigious wealth of the new plutocracy, and the abject poverty of those who, in an overcrowded market and in overcrowded cities, were pushed out of the possibilities either of work or decent housing. Add to that the fact that much of the rapid building in the mid- to late nineteenth century was of unsatisfactory quality and you have, above the level of the destitute, a large group of badly housed, unhealthy people.

  The booming economy of the mid-nineteenth century needed an expanding population to match. Yet the rub was, when the economy contracted, that there would be a working population surplus to requirements in Malthusian terms. The situation would call for desperate remedies. If the ultimate Malthusian solution were not sought – a reduction of the population by war, massacre, plague, starvation, emigration – then some new, collective form of politics would have to be devised to contain an otherwise anarchic social situation. Yet how could such a solution not destroy the very wealth-creation which fuelled the economic boom in the first instance?

  Had the population simply continued to swell, with no adequate means to increase the amount of food being imported into Britain, then a situation of Malthusian bleakness would have ensued. Indeed, Britain would have been starving. As it happened, however, food imports (while crippling British farmers) provided cheap grain, and meat, from America. And there was a further strange fact. At the moment when some improvement was brought to public health, and the death rate fell, so too did the birth rate. Death rates declined by 18.5 per cent between 1901 and 1913, while birth rates declined by 15.5 per cent.10

  This did not stop the life of the urban poor being hard, nor did it prevent it from feeling overcrowded, wretched. Nor did the population actually decline, so the opportunities for wealth-creation remained prodigious.11 In the closing decades of the Victorian era, vast amounts of money could be made by those selling or making those commodities which the newly expanded population needed. The brewers of eighteenth-century London were among its richest men because no sane person would in those days have drunk the fetid water. So the Whitbreads and the Thrales became rich in a world of well over half a million thirsty Londoners. In the world of a hundred years later the brewer who could use modern technology to make the drink and railways and ships to transport it could be well over thousands of times richer, as was demonstrated by the Guinness fortune.

  Many in the lifetime of Charles Dickens used soap. Some perhaps not. When William Hesketh Lever, however, bought a modest Warrington soap works in Cheshire (output 20 tons a week) in 1885 he rightly reckoned on a world where all respectable persons would like to buy soap. In his second year of ownership production had risen to 450 tons. By 1894 Lever Brothers became a public company valued at £1.5 million. With the fortune he made from Sunlight Soap, ‘Lifebuoy’ (made from surplus oil left over from Sunlight) and ‘Lux’ Flakes he built a model town, a paternalistic fantasy where he was king: Port Sunlight. By the time he died in 1925 he had factories in twenty-five countries, 85,000 employees and a capital of over £56 million.

  The growth of Thomas Lipton, grocer of Stobcross Street, Glasgow, was no less simple and in a sense demographically inevitable. Lipton was said to feel unhappy if he did not open a shop every week. Having started out aged twenty-one on borrowed capital of £100 he was able to use his rapidly expanding chain of shops more or less to take over the Irish dairy, egg and ham market, and to corner the market in American pork. (His Chicago slaughterhouse alone killed and dressed 300–400 pigs a day.) ‘If you stick to business, business will stick to you,’ he liked to say. When Lipton’s became a public company in 1898 applications for £40 million of stock were received.

  No one seems to care anything but about money today. Nothing is held of account except the bank accounts. Quality education, civic distinction, public virtue seem each year to be valued less and less. Riches unadorned seem each year to be valued more and more. We have in London an important section of the people who go about preaching the gospel of Mammon, advocating the 10% commandments, who raise each day the inspiring prayer, ‘Give cash in our time, O Lord’.12

  Money was not merely important in Edwardian England, it was paramount. Lord Bryce, British ambassador to the United States from 1907 to 1912, believed that Britain was more money-obsessed than America, and in that sense less class-bound. In The American Commonwealth, he wrote:

  It may seem a paradox to observe that a millionaire has a better and easier social career open to him in England than in America … In America, if his private character be bad, if he be mean or openly immoral, or personally vulgar, or dishonest, the best society may keep its doors closed against him. In England, great wealth, skilfully employed, will more readily force these doors open. For in England great wealth can practically buy rank from those who bestow it …

  This was visibly the case, with honours and titles being on sale by all prime ministers from Gladstone onwards, and with a new monarch who needed money and liked the company of rich vulgarians more than that of impoverished old aristocrats. ‘My uncle has gone sailing with his grocer’ was the Kaiser’s amused comment at Cowes, when King Edward spent the day with his friend Sir Thomas Lipton.

  Chiazza Money, a Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society, who became a Liberal MP in 1906, had in the previous year published a survey of Britain which would shock any reader of a remotely egalitarian frame of mind. In the financial year 1903–4, Money reckoned that the national income was £1,710m. Of this sum £830m was taken by 5 million people. The rest of the nation, some 38 million persons, lived on £880m.13

  Money’s survey reveals a large prosperous middle class, and a prodigiously rich, mega-rich apogee at the top of Edwardian society. In this prosperous class Money reckoned 250,000 men supported about 1 million dependants.

  Charles Booth, in his ground-breaking sociological researches into the lives of East Enders in London, Life and Labour of the People in London (1891�
��1903), reckoned that 30 per cent of those living in the capital did so in poverty. It was the capital city of the greatest Empire and the richest industrial power the world had ever seen. Well over a million Londoners lived beneath the poverty line and 37,610 (according to Booth) depended on a breadwinner whose income was less than 18 shillings a week. B. S. Rowntree and M. Kendall in their survey of 1913 reckoned that a family of two adults and three children could barely survive on £1.0s. 6d., and then only if they ate no butcher’s meat, no butter, no eggs and almost no tea.14

  Although surveys of the wages of labourers and unskilled factory workers suggest that real income was on the increase, it did not necessarily feel like this. If industrial action is any indication of discontent and fear among the working classes then the very modest efforts of the Liberal government to improve the lot of the workers and their families did not prevent a prodigious growth in strikes. In 1907 the total trades union membership in Britain and Ireland was 2,513,000. After six years that had risen to 4,135,000. Whereas in 1907 there were a little over 2 million working days lost through strikes, by 1912 this had risen to a mind-boggling 40,890,000 working days.

  Winston Churchill, in the Christmas holiday of 1905, read Seebohm Rowntree’s study of urban poverty in York which, as he said, ‘has fairly made my hair stand on end … It is found that the poverty of the people extends to nearly one fifth of the population; nearly one fifth had something between one and a half and three fourths as much food to each as the paupers in the York Union. That I call a terrible and shocking thing, people who have only the workhouse or the prison as the only avenues to change from their present situation.’15