After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  James Ramsay MacDonald, whose career as Labour Leader was short, seen here after the general election of 1931 which confirmed him as Prime Minister of a National Government

  Neville Chamberlain succeeded Baldwin as Prime Minister in 1937; after vainly trying to appease Hitler, he took his country to war with Germany, and died in 1940

  These slums in Tooting Grove, photographed in 1935, were typical of the working-class homes of Baldwin’s Britain

  Basil Jellicoe, nephew of the admiral and an Anglican priest in Somers Town North London, did much to awaken the conscience of Britain to the consequences of poor housing. He founded the St Paneras Housing Trust and helped to rehouse thousands of poor people in sanitary conditions.

  Beatrice and Sidney Webb, who helped to establish the New Statesman and the London School of Economics were key figures in the history of the British left

  The greatest minds of the past were devoted to philosophy and art. In the twentieth-century they were scientists. Albert Einstein demonstrates here the theory of relativity to a no-doubt bemused lecture-audience.

  Ernest Walton (1903–1995), Ernest Rutherford (1871–1937) and John Cockcroft (1897–1967) were all pioneers in the sphere of nuclear science, discovering the structure of the atom, and methods by which to split it

  John Maynard Keynes’s economic perceptions might have saved millions from unemployment and poverty in the 1930s had they been adopted by British parties of government

  This poster of the 1931 election urges the working classes to support Ramsay MacDonald’s Government of National Unity. It destroyed the aspirations of the Labour Party for a generation.

  The between-war years saw much new urban planning, including the growth of the Garden suburbs. Wehvyn Garden City on a wet day in 1938.

  The first time Malcolm Muggeridge sailed to India on the P&O liner the SS Morea, bound for a stint as a teacher at a missionary college in Alwaye in Travancore, he was struck by a transformation in the passengers. ‘They had come aboard as more or less ordinary middle- or lower-middle-class English, with perhaps, in the second class, the latter preponderating. Now they were changing, the men becoming more assertive, the ladies more la-di-da; as it were, moving farther and farther away from Bournemouth and Bexhill and nearer and nearer to Memsahib status and invitations to Government House. Luncheon was a tiffin, a whisky and soda, a chota peg, and instead of calling for a steward, the cry was: “Boy!”‘14 Muggeridge also noted the fact that when they had passed Port Said, these people brought out their sola topees, heavy, helmet-like items of headgear which, it was believed, protected them from the fateful glare of the sun. ‘Now that the Raj is over,’ he wrote in 1972, ‘practically no one wears a topee, with no ill consequences. It is an interesting example of how medical lore, like trade, follows the flag.’15

  The racialism and snobbery which the Raj appeared to need for its fuel were obviously a source of dismay to any intelligent observer. This is probably what accounts for the high status attributed to E. M. Forster’s novel A Passage to India, published in the year of the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley. Forster fell in love with a young Muslim Indian, which is what occasioned his first visit to the subcontinent. The love was not consummated, or indeed returned, but its sentimentality colours his account of the British in India. With the perspective of time, we can see that Kipling, more than all the British writers who visited India, really had an instinctive feel for the place, and he was the only writer of first rank to emerge from the Raj. The Left found it intolerable that a great writer, as Kipling unquestionably is, should have been a reactionary who supported General Dyer and was the cousin of Stanley Baldwin. It needed a ‘radical’ work of genius to counteract the Kipling influence and seized on Forster’s unsympathetic account of the petty snobberies, and sexual frigidities of a British local governor and his womenfolk. There is a little submysticism thrown in, with the old lady, Mrs Moore, having some kind of instinctive feeling for the wisdom of the East; and there is the rather lame conclusion in which the good Englishman, Fielding, by inference homosexual, wishes the Raj could end so that he could enjoy real ‘friendships’ with the Indians – especially, the reader is left to suppose, with the highly sexed but unfortunately heterosexual Dr Aziz, who has been wrongly accused of raping one of the Englishwomen in the Marabar caves. It is a much less sympathetic, and much less religious book than Kipling’s Kim, the story of the half-caste Irish boy and the Guru, observing all castes, religions and types as they become embroiled in the Great Game. Perhaps political prejudices based upon sexual preference are, at base, just as racialist as those based on crude ideology. In any event, Forster’s book might have seemed more charming to posterity if it had not had ‘classic’ status thrust upon it for political reasons. Perhaps it was the burden of this knowledge which silenced Forster; he never published any other fiction in his lifetime, and he lived forty-five years after the novel’s publication.

  Within twenty-two years of the British Empire Exhibition India had its independence and the dissolution of the Empire, predicted as inevitable once Ireland went, had effectively happened.

  20

  The ABC of Economics

  It would be a bold person who predicted that any institution, or system, would last for ever. But capitalism has lasted much longer than its Victorian obituarists and their Marxian followers in the twentieth century would have predicted. The company, that Victorian creation,* has proved more flexible and in many ways more productive of human wealth and happiness than the empire or even in some cases than the nation-state. Today we live with the complexities and moral ambiguities of that. Global capitalism has its vociferous critics, and understandably so. But what cannot be denied, as we sit in the twenty-first century, is that the hopes and fears felt during the late 1920s and early 1930s about the actual survival of world capitalism were all groundless. We may hate capitalism. We may want to smash the windows of McDonald’s and Starbucks when we find their branches in every corner of the Earth. But we know that the earlier fear of capitalism’s extinction was simply ill-founded. This knowledge colours our perspective, and makes any memory of those years poignant, painful, at times unbearable. No student of the first hundred years of Christianity can fail to come to terms with the fact that St Paul and friends all believed that they were living in the last days, that Time itself was about to run out like sand in the hourglass, that the reckoning was coming. What happened after that is the fascinating thing called Christian history, but if the founding fathers of Christianity had been right in their predictions, there would not have been such a thing as Christian history or any other kind of history. There would have simply been a New Heaven and a New Earth.

  The terrible fear felt by those running the world in the late 1920s was of a comparable order. Karl Marx was the Apocalypt. Capitalism would not work.

  After the war, economics dominated all political considerations and debates. Some Europeans believed in Sound Money, based on the gold standard. In Britain, these individuals thought that if the pound could be strong against the dollar, if its price could be fixed to the gold standard, then the social and political costs – potentially high unemployment and all its degradations, personal tragedies and real dangers to the stability of the state – would be worth paying. Others believed that the war had changed everything and that a non-interventionist state, a completely laissez-faire economic policy, was no longer a possibility. Political figures therefore had to make economic decisions, they had to be one thing or another.

  But lurking behind many of their deliberations, and haunting all but the sanest minds, was the fear which hindsight knows to be completely false: namely that money itself, as had already happened to the weaker currencies, most notably to the mark in Weimar Germany, would lose its value, capitalism would implode, stock markets would crash beyond any hope of recovery and the world which had begun with such high hopes in the industrial revolution, and which had been speeded on its way by the abolition of the British Corn Laws, wo
uld come to an end. Modern civilization, its manufacturing bases, its large cities, its evolved democratic politics, its liberalism, its very culture, including a free and popular Press, had all grown directly out of capitalism. They would be unimaginable without it. Was the End in sight? The bourgeoisie and the rich, with savings and investments, obviously enough, dreaded this. Sane working-class people, knowing what such fluctuations and disasters did to jobs and prices, also dreaded it. Only apocalyptic Marxists and anarchist revolutionaries could look forward to it with rapture.

  Some terrible fluctuations and disasters did indeed occur. It is hard for us, who know that the ultimate disaster was eventually averted, to remember this. We have to stretch our sympathies to recollect the anxieties which fed so many completely false notions of economics, notions which in turn led so many people into political stances which are grotesque to hindsight.

  In T. S. Eliot’s cryptic rhyme ‘A Cooking Egg’ we read:

  I shall not want Honour in Heaven

  For I shall meet Sir Philip Sidney

  And have talk with Coriolanus

  And other heroes of that kidney.

  The words were published in 1920, and they reflected the fact that the old world, the world of the Hero, had been displaced in the aftermath of the war by the capitalist and the businessman.

  I shall not want Capital in Heaven

  For I shall meet Sir Alfred Mond.

  We two shall lie together, lapt

  In a five per cent. Exchequer Bond.1

  Sir Alfred Mond (1868–1930) was one of the great industrialists and financiers of the early twentieth century, a pioneer of huge manufacturing corporations. The young son of a Jewish immigré from Kassel, he was educated at Cheltenham College and Cambridge, and then went into his father’s business, the great chemical firm of Brunner, Mond and Co. Mond Junior was one of the great liberal pioneers of modern business. He believed that old laissez-faire was no longer the way to produce general prosperity, and he was an opponent of confrontational approaches to industrial relations. Economies, and businesses, needed planning. He believed that by expansion and conglomeration, businesses could realize more capital and provide better conditions for the workforce. He virulently opposed lockouts and strikes as methods of settling disputes, and thought there should be profit-sharing, employee shareholding and what would today be called a stakeholder economy. ‘In the industry in which I am mainly interested,’ he wrote in Industry and Politics (1927), ‘we have succeeded in avoiding for a period of over fifty years any serious industrial dispute. This has been largely due to a liberal, far-seeing policy, which did not consist in waiting for claims to be made and then yielding to them reluctantly, but in foreseeing reasonable demands and in granting them even before they were asked.’

  In 1926, the year of the General Strike, Mond was responsible for the consolidation of smaller firms under the umbrella of Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI), with £95 million of capital and a vast influence throughout the economy not only of Britain but of the Empire as a whole. He was also chairman of Amalgamated Anthracite Collieries, which effectively controlled most Welsh anthracite production from the late 1920s onwards; as well as the International Nickel Company of Canada, the Mond Nickel Company, South Staffordshire Mond Gas (Power and Heating) Company, the Westminster Bank, and the Industrial Financial Investment Corporation. The year after the strike, Mond formed a committee of employers to meet Ben Turner, the chairman of the Trade Union Congress. Observers such as Hilaire Belloc saw this agreement as the end of the working man’s chance of freedom. The unions had thereby abandoned the struggle for joint ownership of business, and by denying themselves the right to negotiate wages except through the union they had in effect made their members into wage slaves. Years before, Belloc had written a book called The Servile State, in which he had tried to demonstrate that socialism and capitalism were both systems which enslaved men and women, reduced their very capacity to be independent. As Ezra Pound was to put it, ‘The minute I cook my own dinner or nail four boards together into a chair, I escape from the whole cycle of Marxian economics. I know, not from theory but from practice, that you can live infinitely better with a very little money and a lot of spare time, than with more money and less time. Time is not money but it is almost everything else.’2 Fine if you are a poet, living a Bohemian life in Rapallo, and can hope for a bit of money now and again from publishers, magazine editors, patrons and the like; less easy if you are an unskilled man with a family to support in an industrial town in the late 1920s.

  There is no doubt that the ‘Marxian cycle’ imprisoned millions of lives in the Western world, but what practical alternative could Ruskin in the Victorian age or Belloc and his friend G. K. Chesterton or the radical fascism of Ezra Pound offer in the twentieth century? The idea that more freedom would result if everyone had three acres and a cow was not one which any existing political system would realistically promote. The Distributists, as the enthusiasts for this way of thinking called themselves, could think negatively: it was all right for a grocer to have one shop, but not when he wanted to own two shops, or a chain of a hundred.3 But does money work like that?

  As well as being a businessman, Sir Alfred Mond was also in the House of Commons, sitting as a Liberal representing Chester from 1906 to 1910, then as an MP for Swansea from 1910 to 1923. Finally, from 1924 to 1928 he represented the rural market constituency of Carmarthen in West Wales. His conversion to British Empire protectionism à la Beaverbrook led to his joining the Conservative party, but his constituents in Carmarthen asked him to continue as their MP, which he did until taking a peerage with the title Lord Melchett. In 1923, when Philip Snowden denounced the capitalist system in the House of Commons, Mond replied with what became in many people’s eyes a classic defence of liberal capitalism. He spoke of his father’s risk-taking and altruism, of the dangers they had endured to build up a huge business, and of the socially beneficial results. His father, his business partners and Mond himself had, he claimed, given work and prosperity to thousands, an enterprise which ‘could never have been commenced under any Socialist system that I have ever known’.4

  It is a curious feature of twentieth-century history that the businessmen who created what wealth there was for the majority of the population were automatically lumped together with the villains. Even when an enterprise produced as many jobs, and as much money for other people, as ICI, a figure like Mond could still be written about as if he were Mr Melmotte, the cunning and entirely fraudulent capitalist of Trollope’s The Way We Live Now. In his English Journey, a sort of sub-Cobbett ramble round the nation published in 1934, J. B. Priestley dismissed the ‘shoddy, greedy, profit grabbing, joint-stock company industrial system’. C. S. Lewis, Oxford don and self-appointed Christian pundit, when speaking of Lord Nuffield, said: ‘How I hate that man.’5 Nuffield (1877–1963), who confusingly bore the same name as one of the most celebrated Victorian anti-industrialists and socialists, William Morris, started his own bicycle shop in Longwall, Oxford, with a capital of £4. He graduated to making motorcycles, and by 1910 he was a motor-car manufacturer and engineer, pioneering the Morris Oxford in the 1912 Motor Show. It was a fantastic car; the original 8.9 hp two-seater did 35–50 miles to the gallon and had speeds of up to 50 miles per hour. During the war, his Cowley factory concentrated upon making munitions, but he had already pioneered the 11.9 Morris Cowley, and in the postwar boom of 1919–20 he was selling 280 cars a month. He saw out the slump of 1921 by reducing his prices, and by 1923 Morris Motors were producing 20,000 cars a year; by 1926, 50,000, some one-third of the entire national output. He owned firms which made bodies, engines, radiators. During the Thirties, Morris Motors Ltd would expand to take over the MG Car Company and the Wolseley Company. He brought levels of prosperity to the working classes in Oxford which would have been unthinkable if they had all been living in the beautiful neomedieval pre-industrial world of his namesake the visionary William Morris. By 1926 he had endowed the King Alfonso XIII
chair of Spanish studies at Oxford. During his lifetime he gave away some £30 million; he endowed a new medical school at Oxford, a residential Royal College of Surgeons, he was a benefactor to dozens of hospitals, and established major orthopaedic hospitals in Oxford, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. He also endowed the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust, as well as founding Nuffield College, with the primary aim of studying social, political and economic problems. The Nuffield Foundation continues to this day to finance research programmes and pioneering activities of all kinds.

  It is to institutions founded by capitalistic benefactions from the likes of Mond and Nuffield that refugees from socialist states have gratefully come; not the other way around. Some British workers, especially coal miners, and dockers, were communists, but very few chose to seek work in the Soviet Union. Nuffield’s car manufacturers at the Cowley works might have been a blight on the landscape as far as the nearby Oxford dons were concerned – and it is not difficult to guess what John Ruskin would have made of them. But they were not all clamouring at the first opportunity to go and find work in Stalin’s Russia. And yet almost all intellectual people, from left such as Priestley or right such as T. S. Eliot, have regarded industrial capitalism as sinister.

  In many areas, as at the very beginning of British expansion in the East India Company, it was not trade which followed the flag, but the other way about. British companies, circumscribed by the tariffs imposed by many of the European powers in the pre-First World War world, were not content to be exporters, but went abroad and became multinationals. William Lever, the British soap king, who died in 1925, was Britain’s biggest manufacturing employer. At home he built Port Sunlight, a model town for his workers. He also got round protective tariffs in Germany, France and America by building factories in those places, as well as in Australasia. By 1914, roughly half Britain’s largest companies had at least one factory abroad; Dunlop, Courtaulds and Vickers are only three famous examples. Like the Germans, the British established overseas trading companies in South America and the Far East. There was abuse and exploitation of cheap labour by many overseas firms, and imperialist despoiling, but there was also wealth creation. Hong Kong was the creation of Swire and Jardine Matheson as much as it was made by politicians.6