After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  The very fact that Churchill himself was recklessly extravagant, and enjoyed the finest wines, the most expensive cigars and the patronage and company of the rich only increased his bewilderment when he allowed himself to be confronted by the cruel reality of other lives. Walking around the streets of Manchester with his friend Edward Marsh as they awaited the results of the 1906 poll, Churchill exclaimed: ‘Fancy living in one of these streets – never seeing anything beautiful – never eating anything savoury – never saying anything clever.’16 It is hardly communism. But it is an indication of why electors voted in the new Liberal government, which Churchill served – as assistant to David Lloyd George at the Board of Trade in 1906, becoming president of the Board of Trade under Asquith’s premiership in 1908, and home secretary in 1910.

  Lloyd George’s brand of radicalism was very different from Churchill’s Whiggery. He was only forty-three when he became President of the Board of Trade. His initial political concerns had appeared to be local, a passionate advocacy of the rights of self-determination of the Welsh. It was during the Boer War, which he opposed, that David Lloyd George had come to people’s notice as an orator of genius and as a self-created thorn in the side of the English Establishment. He was neither left-wing nor right-wing by any recognizable standards. He was a solicitor by training, and he had the lawyer’s knack of taking each case as it came along, and arguing with more passion and wit, sometimes, than consistency. He was against the Boer War, for example, but he was not markedly anti-imperialist. He approved of the British running South Africa, he merely disliked the idea of them fighting, and wasting public money in so doing.

  After Asquith had succeeded Campbell-Bannerman as prime minister in 1908, Lloyd George had the opportunity, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, to demonstrate his social and economic preferences. The budget gave him the chance to bring in a very few measures which would introduce some extremely modest social benefits, and to pay for four dreadnought battleships for which the MPs were clamouring. (Lloyd George ignored their mantra of We want eight and we won’t wait.) He founded a system of labour exchanges, which enabled the unemployed to look for work. (It cost £100,000.) He introduced a tax break for parents, giving them a £10 tax allowance for every child under sixteen. Asquith had already introduced Old Age Pensions in 1908, to start on 1 January 1909. By no stretch of the imagination could Lloyd George’s 1909 budget be regarded as socialist or revolutionary, but he was raising public spending by 11 per cent – £16 million had to be found. Some of it he could get from levies on petrol and a newly introduced scheme of motor licences. That would bring in £600,000. Death duties, a measure which cut at the very heart and notion of family stability and property ownership, were raised to yield £4.4 million a year. Income tax was raised from a shilling to 1s. 2d. in the pound. Duty on liquor was put up. But the real sticking point, the red rag offered to the landowning classes, was a tax on land value – unearned increment in the value of land would be taxed at 20 per cent.

  We shall probably never know whether Lloyd George introduced this measure as a purely economic solution to his difficulties in raising the necessary shortfall for his budget, or whether he did so in order to bait the big landowners. Certainly he enjoyed doing this very much indeed, and he was brilliant at it.

  The aristocrats rose to the bait, and the House of Lords responded in a way which put their very political life in jeopardy. They threatened to reject the budget, and in November 1909 they did so. Asquith moved and carried a motion in the Commons on 2 December 1909: ‘That the action of the House of Lords in refusing to pass into law the financial provisions made by this House for the service of the year is a breach of the Constitution and a usurpation of the rights of the Commons.’

  In the January election, the Liberal vote slipped away: the figures were Liberals 275, Labour 40, Irish Nationalists 82 and Unionists, i.e. Conservatives, 273. It was assumed by Asquith’s supporters that he had told the king, if the Lords rejected the budget in the new Parliament, that the Liberals would create 500 peers of their own political persuasion. In fact, Edward VII, with some canniness, had not given any undertaking to do this. He had insisted that if the new peers were appointed, this would require a second General Election. As it happened, the matter was not to concern the king for much longer. King Edward died at Buckingham Palace on 6 May 1910, with the archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, on one side of the bed and Queen Alexandra on the other.

  The constitutional crisis which had been precipitated by the Lloyd George budget was to be of interest to future historians. In terms of the status quo it left nothing changed. It was not surprising that a disillusioned Hillaire Belloc chose not to stand for re-election during the second election of 1910, which had been caused by the king’s death.

  The accursed power which stands on Privilege

  (And goes with Women, and Champagne, and Bridge)

  Broke – and Democracy resumed her reign:

  (Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne).17

  Giving very minimal social welfare such as the Old Age Pension was considerably cheaper than keeping more and more urban indigents in workhouses where food and bedding, no matter how grudging, had to be provided. Lloyd George and his allies knew this, as did the many canny Liberal capitalists who supported him. This is not to decry these first steps towards using the tax system for the purposes of charity. But it is to doubt whether the measures considered were as revolutionary either as the Tory diehard peers dreaded in 1909, or as subsequent advocates of full-scale State Benefits might have wanted to suppose.

  To many in 1909–10 it must have seemed as if the debates in Westminster about the budget, or about the relative power of the Commons versus the Lords, were a galanty show, a distraction from the really searching issues of the day – an unwieldy and perhaps untenable British Empire not facing up to the realities of, for instance, Indian aspirations to independence; a desperately unstable European situation, in which the national leaders and their diplomats appeared to be sleepwalking towards disaster; a tinderbox in Ireland, waiting to explode; a potentially revolutionary situation in British factories and slums, where hundreds of thousands of people felt themselves to be trapped by poverty, bad housing and uncongenial work, which was preferable to no work at all. And there was, in addition, the quiet revolution which had, in the country at large, though not in the political sphere, already taken place: the change in the position of women.

  To say that women’s position had changed is not to say that late Victorian or Edwardian women were ‘liberated’ in the sense of the word which would be meaningful in the mid- to late twentieth century. Women, in houses without servants, still did all the domestic drudgery; and in houses with servants it was left to the females on the staff to sweep the stairs, lay the grates, empty the chamber pots and peel the potatoes. Except for a tiny handful of privileged (not necessarily rich, but privileged) young women who attended the newly formed university colleges in London, Cambridge and Oxford, women still lacked the educational opportunities given to males. But things had, during the mid- to late Victorian years, altered. Women now were educated. They had achieved some significant parliamentary victories and changes in the law. The Married Women’s Property Act of 1882, for example, had abolished a husband’s absolute control over his wife’s property. Women were now technically independent under the law. It was a huge advance, though many might not have felt its immediate benefit.

  Thanks to the pioneering bravery of Elizabeth Garrett (Anderson) (1836–1917) – who qualified as a doctor in 1865 – and to Dr Sophia Jex-Blake, who founded the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874, it was now possible for women to aspire to the same professional careers as their brothers. When Christabel Pankhurst (1880–1958) applied to study law at Lincoln’s Inn, her father’s old Inn of Court, she was turned down because she was a woman, but she studied law at Manchester University. Very many women lower down the social scale had worked in mines and factories and mills and the Matchmak
ers’ Union (not a dating agency, but a trade union based around Bryant and May’s match factory in the East End of London) was founded by a woman (Annie Besant) for an almost entirely female membership. Their successful strike for slightly better pay and conditions in 1888 gave male workers the courage to start strikes of their own, and it was a key moment in British labour history.

  The story of the political emancipation of British women, like the story of Ireland, is one which is still being written, and it poses important questions, beyond itself, about the nature of democratic change. In his smug history of this decade, The Edwardians, J. B. Priestley says that the ‘militant’ wing of the feminist movement, by their ‘extreme’ behaviour, actually delayed the arrival of Votes for Women. In a somewhat similar vein, it is suggested that if only the blacks, or the Irish, had been patient enough to trust their lords and masters, they would have been given their independence all in good time.

  Others, whatever their view of trouble, by whomsoever it is made, will rather doubt this. For every male member of Parliament who was enlightened, there were dozens who were not. Take the example of Hilaire Belloc. Hardly a typical backbencher, you would say, and you would be right. But his mother, Bessie Parkes, had been a pioneering feminist radical, a friend of Barbara Bodichon, George Eliot and others. Yet he grew up with views which seemed to reflect none of this. He opposed female suffrage. Winston Churchill claimed, as a Liberal MP, to support female suffrage, and did once vote in its favour during a division in the House of Commons which was never going to bring the vote to pass. Using the militancy of suffrage activists, or ‘Suffragettes’, as his excuse for dragging his heels, he said: ‘I am not going to be henpecked on a question of such grave importance’ – a sentence which might have been echoed by many males who considered themselves enlightened so much as to consider the matter. As Home Secretary in 1910 he allowed the straitjacketing and force-feeding of suffragette political prisoners – though another Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins, in his biography of Churchill says that he did not demonstrate ‘heavy-handedness’ in this respect.

  The truth is, we cannot know how quickly the all-male Parliament and the male monarch would have decided to give women the vote in Britain had they not been ‘hen-pecked’. The historical evidence, which belongs later in this book, is that, as in the case of Ireland, and as in the slightly different case of India, political action became evident in the chamber of Parliament only after very disruptive action was taken on the ground by the ‘militants’.

  As with the Chartist movement, there were two broad strands of female suffragists: the ‘moderates’ who hoped to achieve their ends merely by argument, and those who favoured demonstrations of force. The most distinguished advocate of the former path was Millicent Fawcett (1847–1929), who at eighteen had married the blind professor of economics at Cambridge. She took part in the foundation of Newnham College, and knew all the grandees of Victorian radical thought – above all John Stuart Mill. Like many women who supported the suffragette cause, Millicent Fawcett was naturally conservative in other areas of political life. For instance, when the South African War broke out in 1899, she made many patriotic speeches, much to the horror of some of her suffragette supporters, and she even went to South Africa in an attempt to play down the stories coming out about British concentration camps, and the maltreatment and starvation of Boer women and children. She was president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, whose sole aim was the obtaining of votes for women ‘on the same terms as it is or may be granted to men’.18

  Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928) favoured the militant approach. Like Millicent Fawcett, she was married to a much older man, and when he died in 1898 she was left in very reduced circumstances in Manchester. She became the registrar of births and deaths at Rusholme in an attempt to make ends meet for herself and four young children (her eldest son having died). She tried to juggle this tedious job with her work for the cause, but by 1907 it was impossible, and she gave up work, and the hope of a pension. In 1903, with her fiery daughter Christabel, she founded the Women’s Social and Political Union. During an election meeting in October 1905, when Sir Edward Grey was speaking (a moderate Liberal supporter of female emancipation), Christabel asked Sir Edward what would be the new government’s policy on votes for women. She and Annie Kenney unfurled a large banner reading VOTES FOR WOMEN, upon which the two friends were expelled from the meeting. There were some highly satisfactory scuffles in the street outside and the Manchester newspapers devoted considerably more space to the women’s issue than they would have done had they accepted Sir Edward’s brush-off with demure silence.

  Christabel and Annie Kenney made a splendid pair. Christabel had a marvellous speaking voice and beautiful skin. Annie, more abrasive and Yorkshire, had fair hair and blazing blue eyes. After their triumph of disruption at Sir Edward Grey’s meeting, Annie went to the Albert Hall and disrupted a rally by the new prime minister, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, and by 1906 her rowdy attempt to force a meeting upon the then new home secretary, H. H. Asquith, landed her with two months in Holloway Prison – a place to which she would return. After the activity of these two spirited young women, women all over England flocked to the cause. As the heroines of the movement chained themselves to railings, broke shop windows, waved flags in the faces of pompous politicians, thousands of women, in quiet homes and provincial towns, joined Mrs Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union. When Emmeline Pankhurst herself was jailed in Holloway Prison in 1908, the women of Britain did not feel that they should accept what the males told them. Women had been given the vote in Australia in 1902. The obfuscations and delays of an all-male Parliament, and the resort where necessary to brutal suppression of the rebels, backfired badly.

  The self-confidently male Liberals in their frock-coats and top hats were sending out dangerous parables to the world which could now read of such matters in the newspapers and see it in M. Pathé’s newsreels. Indian nationalists, would-be communists or anti-communist revolutionaries could watch and see how a Liberal government could treat its women when it felt ‘hen-pecked’. They could see that for all the rough handling by the police and the prison wardresses, this policy of government restraint, and everything passing through the due processes in the lobbies of Parliament, was not working. The Pankhursts and Annie Kenney sent out messages to the world which the Liberal government of Messrs Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith would much rather had not been heard.

  But as the testimony of countless families in Britain shows, the government had completely lost touch with ‘ordinary’ or ‘decent’ opinion over this question. Look at the diaries of Emily Blathwayt, daughter of an Indian army colonel who had retired to Eagle House, Batheaston, and related to the nearby landowners at Dryham Park. The colonel was not a revolutionary; but he and his daughter’s house became a centre of suffragette fervour, as did the house of a neighbour, a Mrs Tollemache. These, and not the seedy backstreet revolutionaries of Conrad’s Secret Agent, were the sort who organized meetings all over the country, and took delegations of the Bristol WSPU to march on Holloway Prison when Mrs Pankhurst was arrested. When they shouted down a Liberal cabinet minister during a political meeting in Bristol, Emily Blathwayt wrote in her diary: ‘Our women are justified as they have no legal voice as men have.’19

  For as long as women were excluded from Parliament, and from parliamentary elections, the essential redundancy of Parliament was demonstrated. This redundancy would continue, even after the short-term battle was won and women were allowed, together with men, to take part in the sham of ‘democracy’. It was the signal of their exclusion which was objectionable.

  This makes all the more striking the position of those educated and privileged women who opposed Female Suffrage. In the liberal periodical the Nineteenth Century, the issue for June 1889, the popular novelist Mrs Humphry Ward had written an ‘anti-suffrage appeal’. Ward was a strange woman, father-, son- and uncle-obsessed, as well might be the granddaughter of Dr
Arnold of Rugby, the niece of Matthew, daughter of Tom Arnold, and mother of a ne’er-do-well whose gambling habit mopped up most of the profits from such high-minded bestsellers as Helbeck of Bannisdale and Robert Elsmere, books which popularized for a mass market the religio-ethical torments of doubters who had read John Henry Newman and T. H. Green.

  What is so striking is the presence among Mrs Ward’s co-signatories of the name of Beatrice Potter – not Beatrix Potter, the chronicler of clothed rabbits and hedgehogs in the Lake District, but Beatrice, daughter of the railway and timber millionaire Richard Potter, later to be famous by her married name, Beatrice Webb. As a young woman, she had been obsessively in love with Joseph Chamberlain, his brusque atheism and thrusting imperialism both alike wounding to her essentially mystical and religious temperament. Unhappiness drove her into the East End of London, where with such feminists as Octavia Hill she began her life’s work, the accumulation of information (she called it gradgrinding) about the lives of the working classes. The conditions of women and children working in the sweatshops, and the mass misery of slum-dwellers, fashioned her political vision. As one of several researchers for Charles Booth, she worked on The Life and Labour of the People in London, and her study of the Co-operative Movement led her slowly but inexorably towards socialism.

  It was in 1892 that Beatrice Potter married Sidney Webb, the political and economic thinker who was the driving force behind the foundation of the Fabian Society. Together with his friend George Bernard Shaw, Webb believed in state socialism brought about not by revolution but by gradualism (hence Fabian – after Fabius Maximus Cunctator (the Delayer) (d. 203 BC), the Roman general who wore down Hannibal and the Carthagiman invaders of Italy by a policy of slow caution and delay). Not for the Webbs the armed struggle on the barricade, but rather the hours spent in committee getting their supporters elected to the London County Council and the various wards of other cities, to bring about ‘municipal socialism’. In 1898, in two rented rooms of the Adelphi, the Webbs founded the London School of Economics, and just as after a long communion with the God of Israel, Moses descended from the mountain top with the Law inscribed on tablets of stone, so, after twenty years of earnest discussion with their fellow Fabians, the Webbs, in 1913, founded the weekly organ of leftist opinion in Britain, The New Statesman.