by A. N. Wilson
Many novel reviewers would feel they had exaggerated when they attributed this degree of influence to what was, after all, only a love story. But James Douglas still had more to say. In a final flourish, he managed: ‘I would rather give a healthy boy or a healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.’26
The Well of Loneliness was referred to the Director of Public Prosecutions by the Home Secretary, Joynson-Hicks. Poor Radclyffe Hall, John, as she liked to be called, with her slicked-back Eton crop hairstyle, her men’s suits and bow ties, found her book described by the judge as an obscene libel which would tend to corrupt those into whose hands it fell. He ordered all copies to be impounded, and the publishers, Jonathan Cape, had to pay costs of 20 guineas. The verdict shocked sensible people, but none more than the author:
I have been a Conservative all my life and have always hotly defended that Party. When people told me that they stemmed progress, that they hated reforms and were the enemies of Freedom, I, in my blindness, would not listen. I looked upon them as the educated class best calculated to serve the interests of the country. And yet, who was the first to spring to my defence, to cry out against the outrage done to my book? Labour, my dear, and they have not ceased to let off their guns since.27
John still had her great love, Una, Lady Troubridge, and she could still go on writing her books. She had not actually been sent to prison, as male homosexuals were at this date (in 1931, Bobbie Shaw, Nancy Astor’s son, was arrested for an offence against public decency)’28 but she was right to have seen it as a political absurdity, a state intrusion into private sensibility which was essentially at variance with a Conservative point of view. In this sense, the prosecution of The Well of Loneliness was a feminist concern, touching on that generalized issue of whether a male-dominated state (or come to that any state) has the right to interfere with what a woman does with her own body, and what she feels in her heart.
19
For the Benefit of Empire
On St George’s Day 1924, in the presence of about one hundred thousand people, the King-Emperor had opened the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. If the General Strike, two years later, was to make the British momentarily wonder whether they were on the verge of class war, the Empire Exhibition, and the abiding feelings about the Empire in the pre-1939 years, brought into play very different sensations: feelings of unity and pride, focused on the sovereign. Queen Victoria had never been an especially popular monarch until her old age, when love for her became bound up, especially at the times of her Golden and Diamond Jubilees, with feelings about the Empire. Monarchical feeling in Britain is still, in the twenty-first century, much stronger than any blasé or grown-up commentators would wish. When Queen Elizabeth II celebrated her Golden Jubilee, a crowd of a million gathered outside Buckingham Palace. It was easy to say that they were only tourists, or only this or only that. The fact is, they were there, and in far greater numbers than any politician could ever amass on British soil.
It is therefore glimmeringly possible for our generation to reconstruct what royalist feeling was like in the reign of Georges V and VI, but only glimmeringly, when we speak to the very, very old. Today’s monarchists hold their faith with a measure of irony, and with a recognition that the stars of the royal show are far from being perfect individuals. They have all read or seen satirical journalism, TV shows, which mock the queen and her family, and they know that there are many people in the world, both in the former dominions and in Britain, who actually detest the royal family. In the 1920s, republican feelings were very unusual outside Ireland. Monarchism was serious stuff. When T. S. Eliot was converted to it, he was not simply being whimsical. Whereas the Victorians, those grown-up people who could live with doubt and contrarieties, could sing ‘God Save the Queen’, but at the same time recognize that there was something ridiculous and even on occasion scandalous about the queen and her son, the generation who had lived through the First World War had a much less quizzical viewpoint.
For the first time in history, on 23 April 1924, the King’s voice was broadcast. Replying to his son, the Prince of Wales, who as president of the Exhibition had welcomed him, King George hoped that the Exhibition ‘may be said to reveal to us the whole Empire in little, containing within its 220 acres of ground a vivid model of the architecture, art and industry of all the races which come under the British flag … We believe that this Exhibition will bring the peoples of the Empire to a better knowledge of how to meet their reciprocal wants and aspirations … And we hope further that the success of the Exhibition will bring lasting benefits not to the Empire only, but to mankind in general …’1
These words were heard by an estimated 10 million people.2 The sovereign had become almost instantaneously something different. His personal dullness did not matter one jot. He was the centre of patriotic hope. There were recurring strikes on the Exhibition site as it was being built, and on the Whit Monday of 1924 there was an Underground strike. It did not stop the crowds pouring in. (The LNER, London and North Eastern Railway, could get you from Marylebone Station to Wembley in 12 minutes, as its posters gladly proclaimed. ‘All trains non-stop’.)3 During its first week, 321,232 attended the exhibition, exceeding the number who visited the Great Exhibition of 1851 in its first week by 75,000.4
Inside, the visitor was treated to a breathtaking array of pavilions and displays, representing the different parts of the Empire. Hard by the boating lake, and the dignified simplicities of the Australian pavilion, were the minarets and dome of the Malayan pavilion. A replica of Old London Bridge led to the Burmese pavilion, with its splendid pagodas. But the great centre of the exhibition, as of the Empire, was India. In its midst was a concrete replica of the Taj Mahal. In the courtyards, carpet-weavers from Baluchistan were at work, and in an ingenious model could be seen 25,000 miniature (inanimate) pilgrims to Hardwar. In the South African section, every industry of that country was represented, with gold and diamond mining, diamond cutting, as well as wine production and ostrich farming. At night, the whole Exhibition was electrically floodlit. The amusement park was still in action, with miniature trains whizzing through tunnels (there is an unforgettable newsreel of Queen Mary riding on it), and up the plaster mountains the small boats were carried by electric lifts to the chute which whooshed them down into the lake. On display in the Canadian pavilion was a life-size statue of the Prince of Wales carved out of butter. He said it made his legs look too fat.5
The butter has long since melted, and the Prince of Wales, as Duke of Windsor, sleeps in the churchyard at Frogmore. The royal exhibit which everyone remembers from the Wembley Exhibition and which is still on display at Windsor Castle, is Queen Mary’s Doll’s House, designed by Lutyens. On the walls hang original miniature royal portraits by Sir William Orpen. In the library are tiny books written in the very hands of their authors – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Max Beerbohm, Hilaire Belloc, Aldous Huxley. There are miniature stamps in the tiny stamp albums. Wisden made a tiny cricket ball and bat for the games cupboard. Brigg Umbrellas made a doll-sized working brolly. The jewel safe is by Chubb Locks. In the larder are real wines and jams. The beds have sheets and pillow cases. The housemaids’ closet has the modern convenience of a vacuum cleaner. It still attracts the crowds who go to Windsor Castle, but although it is a splendid game, there is something slightly sad about it.
The British Empire Exhibition was a huge propaganda exercise, observed by the Soviet communists, by aspirant German demagogues, by the Vatican. The nineteenth century thought that a few thousand people were a great crowd. The twentieth century could create crowds of hundreds of thousands, and by means of broadcasting, such mass events could reach millions. It was not a medium by which very subtle messages could be delivered to individuals, but excitement, colour, noise and the distinctively twentieth-century phenomenon of crowd-emotion, or mass hysteria, could all be manipulated.
Wembley was designed with the very g
randest motives of imperial propaganda. In its modernity, its efficiency, its blend of cheapness and grandiosity, it was an embodiment in concrete of those imperial ideals celebrated in Kipling’s verse and tales. The firm engaged to build it was Sir Robert McAlpine and Sons. ‘Sir Robert started life as a boy on railway construction works 68 years ago, and before he was 20 years of age had launched out in a small building business in Glasgow.’ The catalogue informs us that he was responsible for building the huge Singer sewing machine works in Glasgow as well as ‘the erection of the immense factories of British Dyes Ltd at Huddersfield; the Spondon factories and housing schemes of the British Cellulose and Chemical Manufacturing Company near Derby; the vast mechanical transport depot near Slough; and scores of other factories and works for the Government during the war, both in this country and in France’. Sir Robert, in short, proud to call himself ‘the Concrete King’, was one of those ‘hard-faced men who had done well out of the war’. The architect was Maxwell Ayrton. The vast arena he constructed for the central stadium was Roman, the huge twin towers at the North Front Moghul in inspiration. The pamphlet begins:
When Titus of Ancient Rome built the vast Amphitheatre, known on account of its colossal size as the Colosseum, taking sixteen years to do the job, it probably did not enter his imperial mind that one day a stadium almost three times as large, and infinitely more enduring, would be constructed in less than a tithe of the time by a nation he and his forebears thought it scarcely worth while to conquer. Yet the task has been done, and in its accomplishment all records for speed of erection, size, beauty, accommodation and – in the opinion of experts – permanency – have been beaten.6
The claims to permanency are repeated throughout McAlpine’s tract, and are very much part of the ethos which the Exhibition intended to convey. The everlasting British Empire which this concrete monster was supposed to represent had in fact only a quarter of a century to endure.
The Exhibition was deemed to be such a success in 1924 that it was repeated the following year, with the same ceremonies, even bigger massed bands, choirs and military displays. It was here that the Military Tattoo was first pioneered: that amalgam of gymnastics, son et lumière, and display of military hardware. The glorious story of the British army, from Waterloo to the present day, had become a show.
Readers of Nietzsche who attended such displays might have remembered the essay, written in 1873, in which he reminded his fellow countrymen that a victory in war can be more calamitous than defeat. ‘It is capable of converting our victory into a complete defeat: the defeat, even the death, of German culture for the benefit of the German Empire.’7 It was, and is, an essential part of the British self-image that whereas the patriotic and military displays of other countries are foolish, or even sinister, those held by Anglo-Saxons are essentially benign. Just as the British liked to believe that it was their moral superiority to the Germans, rather than their superior artillery and the assistance of over a million American servicemen, which won the war, so the displays of imperial might at Wembley, including an exhibition of fighter planes and ‘a large bomb 12 feet in length; needless to state, the bomb is empty and is not fuzed [sic]’, are essentially benign. The Empire Collect, read by the same Bishop of London whose ambition was to dance round a bonfire of flaming contraceptives, prayed that the Almighty would ‘raise up generations of public men who will have the faith and daring of the Kingdom of God in them, and who will enlist for life in a holy warfare for the freedom and rights of all Thy children’.8
This aspiration could be interpreted in many ways. If ‘freedom and rights’ implied self-determination, or at least indigenous populations having a say in the running of their own affairs, then the words of the Collect must have sounded a little hollow to Asians and Africans. For example, the Government of India Act, 1919, was designed to appease left-wing opinion in Britain and India, but the pace of reform was very slow. By 1939 the Indian Civil Service was only about one-quarter Indian. Beneath this British-dominated administrative structure, there were some million government workers doing what their masters told them to do. Although since 1858 admission to the ICS was ‘race blind’, the examinations were held in England, and the age limit of entrants was lowered to favour British candidates. In Nigeria, under Lugard’s system of Indirect Rule, the plan was for the ‘civilized’ rulers to hand over eventually to the indigenous inhabitants. In practice, all the important administrative jobs were given to whites, and Lugard had a particular prejudice against educated Africans.9 Enthusiastic imperialists were enchanted by the exoticism of the Exhibition. ‘Dusky figures flit about the spot as if one was actually in Africa, instead of a few miles from Charing Cross.’10 Black faces, today as numerous in Wembley as white ones, were a quaint oddity, though the writer felt the Exhibition area was so large that he could have done with a few Zulu rickshaw boys to assist the footsore. Actual Africans felt patronized. The Union of Students of Black Descent felt that their kinsmen were demeaned by being made into exhibits in a raree show, and wondered why it had been necessary to harp on African sorcery and witchcraft in the Exhibition catalogue.11
There were other Empire Exhibitions before the Second World War, most notably in Dunedin, New Zealand, in 1925–6, in Johannesburg in 1936–7, and in Glasgow in 1938, a more ambitious event even than Wembley, in a modern Art Deco stadium, which attracted over 12 million visitors.12 In Wembley, there were considerably fewer visitors in 1925 than in 1924 and there was not the money to keep the Exhibition open at a loss. The Great Exhibition, which was in essence a trade exhibition, had made such a colossal profit that they had been able, with the proceeds, to build the Albert Hall, and the South Kensington museums. The Wembley Empire Exhibition, which was a political propaganda exercise, had made a loss. The stadium, which had cost £750,000 to build, was sold to the Wembley Stadium and Greyhound Racecourse Ltd for £150,000. They built a huge car park, capable of holding four thousand vehicles, opened a cocktail bar, a restaurant and a luxury smoking lounge. The Empire had literally gone to the dogs.
The Exhibition happened against a background of Indian discontent. The suave Harrow- and Cambridge-educated Jawaharlal Nehru, brought up as a Westernizing playboy lawyer, had had his political awakening after Amritsar, and been twice to prison for joining a picket-line in Allahabad to discourage Indians from buying British-made fabric. This well-groomed and beautifully attired young man made a surprising disciple of the Mahatma, and there were many features in Gandhi’s campaigns which he found cringe-making, especially his repeated reference to the coming of Ram rajya, the rule of the Hindu god, Ram. Nehru also remained unconvinced by Gandhi’s insistence upon non-violence as the only way forward to achieve their political goals. But there is nothing like prison for radicalizing the most unlikely persons, as the British had demonstrated again and again in Ireland. By putting this fastidious young man in a fetid Indian gaol in Nabha state, where he contracted typhoid fever, the British had found themselves another formidable adversary. In the late Twenties, the Nehrus moved to Geneva for a few years, where Jawaharlal focused his thoughts in writings such as ‘The psychology of Indian nationalism’. He visited Britain, and was shocked by the changes since his undergraduate days, finding the miners and their families cowed by fear in the aftermath of the General Strike. The proximity to the League of Nations in Geneva offered a hope of a supportive international community outside the Empire.13
Radclyffe Hall, the chronicler of Sapphic love, had the painful experience of seeing her novel The Well of Loneliness banned by law. Seen here with her lover Una Lady Troubridge.
The first two women MPs – Margaret Wintringham (Labour) and the American Nancy Astor (Conservative)
Marie Stopes’s stormy and unhappy experiences of marriage helped drive forward her campaigns for a more open approach to family planning and sexual problems
Lawrence of Arabia was classically a man of the century where image outweighed substance. Though his campaigns in the First World War were of minimal str
ategic importance, he developed mythic status.
The early Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was a successful radical lawyer working for human rights in South Africa
Gandhi’s incarnation as an Indian national leader was as a holy man. Here he is seen fasting as a protest against British rule in India.
The Canadian-born Max Aitken, later Lord Beaverbrook, was one of the great newspaper proprietors
Alfred Charles William Harmsworth, the first Viscount Northcliffe, founder of the Daily Mail, proprietor of The Times and effectual inventor of modern journalism. He died on a rooftop in Mayfair, having tried to telephone through to his office the sensational scoops that he was going mad, and that God was homosexual.
In the Golden Age of the Detective Story, Agatha Christie was perhaps the most deft practitioner of the craft
The borderlines between silliness and art were explored by the Sitwell family. Edith (1887–1964) and her brother Osbert (1892–1969) both saw themselves as poets but they are remembered today not for their verses, which are completely forgotten, but for their exhibitionistic lives.
Noël Coward is photographed here with Gertrude Lawrence in a London theatre in 1935. He mocked the Sitwells, earning their eternal enmity. Behind their hostility must have lurked the knowledge that Coward was an authentic genius. His lyrics and music are the glory of the mid-twentieth-century in England.
SOME PRIME MINISTERS
David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, depicted in 1910 before either of them attained that office
Stanley Baldwin presided over cruel economic conditions at home, and pursued a policy of appeasement with the European dictators. He remains a widely popular figure in Conservative annals.