After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Orwell, like most English writers of the period, is class-obsessed. He writes that there are two types of clever working-class people. The first remains working-class, goes on being a mechanic or a dock-labourer, keeps his accent, and works for the ILP or the Communist party while improving his mind. The other type uses his cleverness to escape his class background. The only man to have done this without earning Orwell’s disapproval is D. H. Lawrence. Orwell especially hates the ex-working-class types who have become writers or intellectuals. ‘[I]t is not easy to crash your way into the literary intelligentsia if you happen to be a decent human being.’ The man who supposes that he has transcended the class barrier here in fact sounds perilously like an Old Etonian snob complaining about the literary equivalent of counter-jumpers. ‘Literary London now teems with young men who are of proletarian origin and have been educated by means of scholarships. Many of them are very disagreeable people, quite unrepresentative of their class …’ There is something of Marie Antoinette here, a disappointment that the sons and daughters of miners when they come to write a novel or train as a doctor do not go on speaking with an Oliver Mellors accent or tying their moleskin trousers with pieces of string. At the end of the book, Orwell has a fantasy in which the poor middle classes, including himself, will in the future generation all sink down the social scale.

  And then perhaps this misery of class-prejudice will fade away, and we of the sinking middle class – the private schoolmaster, the half-starved free-lance journalist, the colonel’s spinster daughter with £75 a year, the jobless Cambridge graduate, the ship’s officer without a ship, the clerks, the civil servants, the commercial travellers and the thrice-bankrupt drapers in the country towns – may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for after all, we have nothing to lose but our aitches.24

  This ending, after the first half of the book, is bathos of the starkest kind. He has demonstrated that if anyone sank to the level of the poor in the industrial North in 1937 they would lose far more than their aitches. They would lose their health, their liberty, their chance to have a bath or read a book, in the relentless struggle to survive. Just such a slither awaited anyone who had the misfortune to live in a Marxist state. In Orwell’s Britain, there were appalling austerities ahead over the next decade, but when that dreadful decade had passed, little by little the conditions of working-class people improved. Those who had the chance stopped being working-class because they were bored by their parents’ way of life and because – gradually – technological advance rendered such activities as crawling for hours to reach a coal face mercifully unnecessary in order for a modern society to be lit, kept warm, and fuelled. Orwell shows no interest at all in technology, and never in the course of The Road to Wigan Pier does he reflect upon the possibilities of much of the industry he observes being something which technology will render obsolescent. It never occurs to him once that the future will be one in which business, and technology, will transform politics and family life, rather than the other way about. His reflections upon the attractions of fascism are also wide of the mark. It is no surprise that Sir Oswald Mosley and his wife regarded The Road to Wigan Pier as a treasured text, which fully justified all their political adventures.25 Even by the time he wrote the book, the British Union of Fascists was losing support – largely because of its absurd uniforms, parodies of Mussolini, and its thuggery towards small Jewish shopkeepers. Although the National Government failed to bring in a New Deal, it was clear from the example of Roosevelt in America that you could bring in the kind of Keynesian solutions promised by Mosley without embracing the dangerous mythologies of fascism.

  Within two years of Orwell’s book being published, the war had broken out, and the English revolution had begun. This did not mean an end to the class system. That will probably be with the British always. But it meant that encounters between members of different classes, which Orwell describes as such an outlandish adventure, became commonplace with the coming of war. A form of benign state socialism of the kind he advocated in the closing pages of The Road to Wigan Pier was indeed brought in by the wartime government. (When it came, Orwell disliked it and used it as a model for the austere tyranny of 1984.) So although Orwell is nowadays regarded as semi-divine by a certain type of journalist, especially the neo-conservatives who enjoy his digs at ‘vegetarians with wilting beards … earnest ladies in sandals … birth-control fanatics and Labour Party backstairs-crawlers’ (e.g.), it is hard to see him as an especially wise or coherent prophet of his times when he trained his lens on Britain. Animal Farm remains, and will always remain, a classic analysis of the Soviet experiment, but that was a different book, and belonged to a different era from his down-and-out phase.

  24

  The Abdication

  1936, a year marked by a phenomenal lack of sunshine,1 was when the roads divided. The divarication left the old Victorian world behind. Britain faced a great crisis and emerged almost unchanged, whereas in other lands violent confrontations both occasioned and heralded a new world. The Italian invasion of Abyssinia shocked observers by its gratuitous brutality. Mussolini from the balcony of the Palazzo di Venezia in Rome gave to the King of Italy the title Emperor of Ethiopia. It has to be said that while Rastafarians like to trace back the Ethiopian Emperor’s ancestry to the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon, Haile Selassie was in fact only the second member of his family to be emperor. Vittorio Emanuele’s family had been kings in Italy since the eighteenth century, and sovereign dukes before that. Although he appeared to be Mussolini’s puppet, it was in the event the king who sacked the Duce, and not the other way about. In the short term, however, Western Europeans were shocked by the bombing of civilians and the use of poison gas to accomplish the political dream.2

  In Spain, another ancient kingdom or pair of kingdoms, now a republic, the Left deposed the moderate President Niceto Alcalá Zamora. The architect of the republic, Manuel Azaña, held together an uneasy coalition of leftists, while the fascistic Falange Española of gunmen made it their business to save Spain from Bolshevism by thuggery. It was obvious that the country was moving towards civil war. In Germany, the Nuremberg Laws against Jews were being relentlessly enforced. The laws removed German citizenship from Jews, forbade sexual intercourse or marriage between Jews and Aryans, and banned Germans from employing female Jewish servants under the age of forty-five.3 Innumerable cases of Race Debauchery were brought against Jewish men who had dared to love Gentile women. While the Olympic Games were held in Berlin during the summer, some of the more blatantly anti-Jewish laws – signs outside Jewish shops telling Gentiles to boycott them – were disguised or removed so as not to scandalize tourists. The ever-popular Führer had occupied the Rhineland on 7 March. On the whole this action caused much less indignation in Britain than did the Italian atrocities in Eritrea. From correspondence in the newspapers and other indications of public mood, it is clear that the majority of people in Britain thought the Germans were entitled to occupy the Rhineland, and even those who deplored the cavalier way in which Hitler had disregarded the Versailles treaty did not view it as a plausible reason for Britain to go to war.

  This was the troubled world background to the dramas in Britain that year which focused upon the royal family and upon the truncated reign of King Edward VIII, who came to the throne on 20 January and abdicated on 10 December.

  The weather that January was miserable: snow turning to cold drizzle and rain.4 On 16 January died Shapurji Saklatvala (1874–1936), a rich Parsee merchant,5 born in Bombay, who in 1924 had been elected as the Communist MP for Bermondsey. His political trajectory, from membership of the National Liberal Club, where he once resided, through the Independent Labour Party, to Communism was largely explained by his detestation of the British Empire, and his disgust at the living conditions of the London poor. Had Belloc met him, he would have found what he had sought in 1926 during the General Strike – ‘one
single gentleman or lady on the side of the poor’. Saklatvala was imprisoned for speaking on behalf of the strikers in Hyde Park – two months in Wormwood Scrubs.6 He lost his seat in 1929 and thereafter came to the view, shared by Mosley on the opposite political extreme, that Parliament was no longer a suitable venue for serious political debate. He spoke tirelessly at meetings up and down Britain. ‘Sak was a comrade who could have chosen the easy path to great riches, to a political career and to a high place in society, but who consciously chose the path of anti-imperialist struggle and revolutionary Communism’ was the tribute of Harry Pollitt, the general secretary of the Communist party.7

  Hundreds of admirers came to the funeral, and the road between the tube station and the crematorium at Golders Green was lined with people watching the cortege.8 Nowhere so much as a crematorium in a large city emphasizes the inexorability of Death, wiping out the young and the old, the just and the unjust, in an unstoppable progression, and often providing incongruous conjunctions. At Golders Green crematorium, the funeral cars, the grieving families, the undertakers and their palaver form lines to wait their turn, so that each ceremony within the chapel, before the casket is confined to incineration, is of necessity brief, intense. Three Parsi priests conducted the final rites for Saklatvala, but the chapel was decked with red flags and Communist regalia as, outside, the crowd sang the Communist International.9

  This hymn to human equality and anti-imperialism could not be heard inside the chapel, but on the tarmacadam outside it rang loud and clear as the next coffin was taken from its hearse, and borne, after a short but seemly interval, into the chapel. The new arrival, who had been carried through the drizzly courtyard only minutes since it echoed to cries for a death to imperialism and an end to British dominion in India, was Rudyard Kipling. Staying at Brown’s Hotel, the great poet of imperialism and celebrant of the British Raj had suffered a burst ulcer and died in the Middlesex Hospital. It was decided to cremate him before the interment of his ashes in the national Valhalla, Westminster Abbey. Though his funeral proper would echo to his own hymn ‘Recessional’, his cremation came hard upon its polar opposite: though perhaps with its vision of empires, the British included, being ‘one with Nineveh and Tyre’, the pessimism of Kipling’s hymn and the destructiveness of the revolutionary vision are not so different in our eyes as they would have seemed to his contemporaries on that miserable January day.

  Kipling’s ashes were attended by eight pall-bearers in the Abbey: the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes, Field Marshal Sir Archibald Montgomery-Massingberd, Sir Fabian Ware, A. B. Ramsay, Howell Gwynne, A. S. Watt and Professor J. W. Mackail, representing Sir James Barrie.10 Anyone seeing these men, the ‘old men who never cheated, never doubted’ of Betjeman’s verses,11 would know that they represented a world under threat. Unpleasing, downright repellent, as some features of imperialist, Conservative Britain would seem to a sensitive, rich Communist such as Sak, what worlds were being brought into being by those who shared his contempt for bourgeois capitalism and imperialist aristocracy? By the National Socialists in Germany? By the Communists in Spain, showing their enthusiasm for the Popular Front by shooting nuns, or by their brutal Falangist enemies? By Stalin, ponderously and murderously enacting his Five Year Plan, or by Signor Mussolini, making new emperors by unleashing mustard gas on the women and children of North Africa?

  The tumult and the shouting dies—

  The captains and the kings depart—

  Still stands Thine ancient Sacrifice,

  An humble and a contrite heart.

  Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

  Lest we forget—lest we forget!

  Would the Lord God remain, as the kings departed? Kipling went as a herald before his king. George V died at Sandringham on 28 January, two days after the man who, though he had refused the Laureateship, and titles, was effectively the Laureate in verse and prose, as Elgar had been the musical accompanist, Lutyens the set designer, of late British imperial glory.

  A number of amusing mythologies grew up about the death of George V: for example that, when a courtier suggested he would benefit from a visit to his favourite seaside resort, Bognor, he received the characteristically robust reply, ‘Bugger Bognor’, or that, to avoid the indignity of the king’s death being first read about in the Evening Standard, the announcement was delayed, so that it could be published next day in The Times. Some have averred that when he wrote on a menu card ‘The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close’ Lord Dawson, the royal physician, had already injected a lethal mixture of morphine and cocaine into his jugular vein,12 an appropriate end for a monarch in the Golden Age of the murder mystery. After dinner, the queen and the royal family gathered round the bed while Cosmo Gordon Lang, archbishop of Canterbury, read the 23rd Psalm and the prayer beginning: ‘Go forth, O Christian soul’. The king died at 11.55 pm, or so they said. M. Poirot not having been present, we must take their word for it.13 Whether or not he had ever said ‘Bugger Bognor’, it was given out that one of his last inquiries from the deathbed had been How is the Empire? an interrogative which could have been answered in innumerable ways, though probably once again Kipling would have agreed with Saklatvala that it was in poor shape.

  Even as his father lay dying, the Prince of Wales, impatient with the discrepancy between Sandringham time and Greenwich Mean Time, gave orders that all the clocks in the house should be altered (put back) to conform with the rest of the country (‘I’ll fix those bloody clocks’). It was a symbolic act of defiance, deliberately disrespectful to his parents. ‘I wonder’, sighed Archbishop Lang, ‘what other customs will be put back also.’14

  The new king was in his early forties. The Prime Minister, Mr Baldwin, was nearly seventy. Queen Mary was the same age. Cosmo Gordon Lang, who would be responsible for placing a crown on the new sovereign’s head, was seventy-one. Of prominent members of the cabinet, Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was in his late sixties; Lord Halifax, the comparatively youthful Lord Privy Seal, was fifty-five when the new king succeeded. The only member of the government even close to him in age was Anthony Eden, the new Foreign Secretary, who was hardly sympathetic to him. He was a young(ish) man becoming the constitutional monarch of a country ruled by old men, and which would go on being ruled by old men for years to come. At a visceral level, the old men felt fear and resentment of the new man, who moved in a fast, rather spivvy set, and who visibly derided, or was bored by, the values of his parents. Above all, the Old Guard feared the new king’s popularity. He was not particularly clever. By royal standards, though, he was a ball of fire, capable unlike his poor younger brother Bertie, Duke of York, the future George VI, of speaking two sentences without an appalling stammer; able, unlike his brother Harry, Duke of Gloucester, to drive a car without hitting a tree or a ditch; and, unlike his in many ways more charming brother George, Duke of Kent, heterosexual. He caused some confusion over this question in 1924 when on a private visit to the United States. He turned up at the Belmont Park races wearing suede shoes – always, in King George V’s eyes, the sign of ‘a cad’, but in the America of the 1920s something which carried the connotations of homosexuality. Once he was told this, he never wore them again.15

  For parallels in our own times for the public impact of a royal person, we must think of Diana, Princess of Wales. As with her, part of the ingredient in his widespread popularity was beauty – a beauty which in adolescence and young manhood had been breathtaking. Part of the magic, too, stemmed from a personal unhappiness which was palpable. Those who are happy within, happy in a fulfilled relationship, don’t make very good idols. It is the unhappy, with their unsatisfied need to be loved projected on to the masses, who produce – a Valentino, a Marilyn Monroe, a Diana, an Edward VIII. His socialite bisexual American friend ‘Chips’ Channon did not exaggerate when he called the new king-emperor the ‘adored Apollo’ of the country and the Empire.16 Another homosexual courtier, this time
of Edwardian times, the second Viscount Esher, noted when the prince was twelve years old ‘the look of Weltschmerz in his eyes’ which he could not ‘trace to any ancestor of the House of Hanover’. The same Esher, when David – as the prince was always known by his family – had served with bravery in the war in France, recorded meeting Queen Mary. ‘She is proud of the Prince of Wales. I tried to make her see that after the war thrones might be at a discount, and that the Prince of Wales’s popularity might be a great asset.’17 It is revealing that even at such a moment, Esher felt he had to persuade the mother to see the son’s good qualities. The Weltschmerz might have been something new in the prince as far as the House of Hanover was concerned, but the king and queen kept up the time-honoured tradition of that House of treating their children with distant contempt, and of fostering a positive loathing for their firstborn.

  Towards the end of the war, David fell deeply in love with a married woman called Freda Dudley Ward. They met during an air raid, huddled in the cellar of a house belonging to one Mrs Kerr-Smiley – the sister, as Fate or Chance would have it, of that Ernest Simpson who would play so momentous a part in the royal story. So began a sixteen-year love affair between David and an attractive, discreet, pretty, affectionate and pleasure-loving woman.