A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  In Burma he had somehow failed by default. Now he was bent on failing deliberately. Failing, by the lights of people like his father, now seemed to be the only possible success. The oppression with which he had collaborated in Burma was just a symptom of an entire world of social domination, as pernicious in Britain as in the empire. If he were going to write, then he wanted to write about the homeless and the unemployed. And in the mid-1920s, there were more of them than at any time in the century.

  The depth of the structural problems that had beset the British economy before the First World War had been temporarily masked by the wartime boom, but in the 1920s the slump returned on a punishing scale. The problem, as ever, was shrinking demand. Domestic population had levelled off at around 40 million. The dominions, even with India being forced to swallow manufactured goods, were starting their own industries. Textile exports in the late 20s were at half their pre-war level. In 1913 Britain had exported 73 million tons of coal; by 1921, that figure had dropped to 25 million. The share of world markets just kept on shrinking, as it would for the rest of the 20th century. While British manufacturing output was falling, American and Japanese output was accelerating spectacularly. Instead of aiming for higher productivity in order to stay competitive, mine owners, shipbuilders and manufacturers wanted wage cuts or extended hours, and because of rapidly rising unemployment (never much below 10 per cent throughout the 1920s) believed they could get them. The lock-outs and strikes of the immediate pre-war and post-war period became more frequent and more bitter.

  Into this hornets’ nest in 1925 had stepped the Conservative chancellor of the exchequer, Winston Spencer Churchill, now 50 years old. The social distress of industrial England had not done much to mellow his hot-tempered anti-socialism. Nor had writing the volumes of The World Crisis (1923–7), in which he saw socialism, among other things, as initiating the career of an international communist conspiracy that, left unchecked, would devour democracy as well as empire. The obsession led him into absurd positions. In Rome in 1927 he waxed fulsome about the magnificence of Mussolini’s resistance to the Bolshevik menace. And at home he tried to present himself as the ‘Independent anti-Socialist’ candidate. When what remained of the Liberal party declared in January 1924 that they would support the formation of what would be the first ever Labour government, under the leadership of Ramsay MacDonald, Churchill decided that there was no future for them and certainly no future for him in their ranks. There was precious little sign that the grave and sober men (including Charles Trevelyan, the grandson of that pillar of liberalism, the first Charles Trevelyan, and Sidney Webb, now Lord Passfield and president of the board of trade) who got themselves up in court dress for their swearing in at the Palace were about to launch a Bolshevik revolution in Britain. Nevertheless Churchill warned, as he would again in 1945, that ‘The enthronement in office of a Socialist Government will be a serious national misfortune such as has usually befallen great states only on the morrow of defeat in war.’ After another abortive campaign as an Independent (in which, despite the new Tory leader Stanley Baldwin’s attempt to protect him, he lost to the Conservative candidate by 43 votes), Churchill accepted the offer of a safe seat at Epping. He campaigned furiously against Ramsay MacDonald’s loan to the Soviet Union as ‘our bread for the Bolshevik serpent; our aid for the foreigner of every country; our favours for the Socialists all over the world who have no country; but for our own daughter States across the oceans on whom the future of the British island and nation depends only the cold stones of indifference, aversion and neglect’.

  After a Conservative landslide in October 1924 – which, however, preserved 151 Labour seats – Churchill finally declared his return to the party he had left 20 years before. Baldwin rewarded him (before the official announcement, and rather to the surprise of many loyalist Tories) with the chancellorship of the exchequer. His father had held the office for four months; Churchill would hold it for four years. It was, however, a poisoned chalice. Despite his rediscovered conservatism, Churchill wanted to make some gestures to the socially responsible capitalism he had always upheld. And his first budget did in fact propose lowering pensionable age to 65, introducing pensions for widows, and decreasing the income-tax rate by 10 per cent for the lowest earners among the tax-paying population. But his decision to return Britain to the gold standard, suspended in 1914, was, as the economist John Maynard Keynes, author of The Economic Consequences of Mr Churchill (1925), would argue, a monetary disaster with huge macro-economic implications, not least the inevitable devaluation of real wages. Churchill protested that, by once again fixing the value of the pound against other currencies on the basis of its gold value, he was merely following the decision taken by the monetarily conservative Labour chancellor, Philip Snowden. And so he was (along with cutting military budgets in keeping with the orthodoxy of disarmament!). Churchill’s initial inclination, in fact, had been to overturn Snowden’s commitment to the gold standard, and he had even recruited Keynes to deliver ammunition for his arguments. Ultimately, however, the wise men of the Bank of England and the prime minister prevailed, the bank because the gold standard would restore its authority over the treasury and Baldwin because he listened to the bank. Despite being flatly warned by the Cambridge economist Hubert Henderson that ‘a return to gold this year cannot be achieved without terrible risk of renewed trade depression and serious aggravation of unemployment’, Baldwin told Churchill that it was the government’s decision. Winston’s choices at this point were either a change of heart or to follow his father’s example and disappear into the wilderness whence he had come. Perhaps it was precisely the sad memory of those defeated glittering eyes and the increasingly drooping moustache that prompted Churchill to go along with Baldwin and the bank.

  There was much trumpeting of the return of the great, solid, pound sterling and of the ‘shackling’ of the British economy to reality. But beyond the imperial fetishising of sterling, that reality, as predicted by Henderson and Keynes, was shocking. The effect of a pound over-valued at $4.86 was to make the goods and services of the most labour-intensive industries even less competitive in export markets. Prices, and the number out of work, shot up; wages fell. In the worst-affected industries, like shipbuilding, unemployment was already approaching 30 per cent; in Barrow-in-Furness, indeed, it was a massive 49 per cent. The mine owners’ response to the deepening crisis, made even worse by the fact that the German coalfields were back in production, was to demand wage cuts and extensions to working hours. The unions, on the other hand, asked for wage increases and discounted coal prices.

  Worried about the real possibility of a general strike, Stanley Baldwin was cool to the owners, who were bribed with government subsidies to postpone any precipitous action at least until a royal commission could study the problems of the coal industry. A truce had been bought, but when the Samuel Commission reported in March 1926 its first recommendation was a cut in wages. The union response, voiced by the miners’ leader, A. J. Cook, was ‘not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day’. Positions hardened. Churchill’s old friend F. E. Smith, now Lord Birkenhead, said, with his usual tact, that he thought the miners’ leaders the stupidest men he had ever met until he met the mine owners. As if to vindicate him, the owners locked union members out on 1 May 1926 and the Trades Union Congress (TUC) called for a general strike for the 3rd. The Bishop of Durham first wrung his hands, then shook his fist, declaring that ‘England has ceased to be a constitutional monarchy and is making its first advance towards the dictatorship of the proletariat’.

  The strike lasted just nine days. Some 1.5 million workers (90 per cent miners) came out in response to the TUC. Whilst the popular image is of Oxbridge undergraduates driving buses, the reality was that most of the strike-breakers were as working class as the strikers. In the end the TUC agreed to a compromise, deserting the understandably embittered miners. During the ‘nine days of May’ Churchill mobilized resources as if he were fighting a war. Troops delivered
food supplies; he set up the British Gazette and ran it as a government propaganda sheet, with more soldiers guarding the printing presses. Both food shipments and Gazette deliveries were sometimes escorted by tanks. Attempts to press Lord Reith’s BBC, inaugurated in 1922, to broadcast government bulletins and opinions were, however, defiantly resisted – a turning point in the fight to make the corporation truly politically independent, but no thanks to Churchill.

  The official strike might have been over by 12 May, but the bitter polarization of classes remained. The miners tried to fight on alone, but in the end were forced back to work on the owners’ terms. Whilst the participants in round-table talks between the unions and management, convened by the chairman of Imperial Chemical Industries Sir Alfred Mond, pretended over tea and sandwiches that men of good will and common sense could come to an agreement, the substantive action was taken by hard-liners. In 1927 a Trade Disputes and Trade Union Act made any strike intended to coerce the government illegal. Union members who wanted to support the Labour party now had to ‘contract in’ rather than specifically contracting out. The party instantly lost a large chunk of its operational income, as was the idea. On the Thames Embankment, Eric Blair met a ‘screever’ (a pavement artist) called Bozo who specialized in mild political cartoons. One was of Churchill ‘when the Budget was on. I had one of Winston trying to push an elephant marked “Debt”, and underneath I wrote, “Will he budge it?” See?’ Eric saw. Bozo went on to tell him that he couldn’t do any pictures in favour of socialism because the police wouldn’t stand for it. One of his earlier efforts was a cartoon of a boa constrictor marked ‘Capital’ swallowing a rabbit marked ‘Labour’. ‘You rub that out,’ the screever was told by the copper, ‘and look sharp about it.’ Bozo did as he was told. To disobey would have risked being moved on or locked up as a loiterer.

  That was the winter of 1927 when Eric Blair took a nose-dive into the underclass; an act of expiation, he later wrote in The Road to Wigan Pier, for his five years policing the empire. He had started his new life as a writer, renting a cheap, one-room flat next to a craft workshop in down-at-heel Notting Hill. It was so cold that Blair warmed his fingers over candles when they became too numb to write. But this was positively well-to-do beside the 30-shillings-a-month squalor he felt should really complete his change of identity. Others had been in the lower depths before him, of course. At Eton he had read Jack London’s chronicle of London’s East End, People of the Abyss (1905), and he may well have been moved by the more recent account given in the new edition of In Darkest London (1926) by G. K. Chesterton’s sister-in-law, Ada Elizabeth Chesterton, a Daily Express journalist who sold matches in Piccadilly (to the horror of those friends who recognized her) or polished the same door knob for three hours to earn the right to sleep in a ‘spike’ (a shelter for the homeless). Here she observed that women were only given the dregs of the men’s tea, and even that an hour or more after it had been brewed. Because only one night’s housing in a spike was allowed, and the spikes were deliberately set far apart, Mrs Chesterton had a fair walk, on her first night of roughing it, from Euston to Hackney: ‘I think I went a little mad. I felt that London ought to be burned down.’

  Orwell followed, almost literally, in the footsteps of Jack London and Ada Chesterton. In Lambeth he sold his clothes for a shilling and received in their place a tramp’s kit, ‘not merely dirty and shapeless’ but covered with ‘a patina of antique filth, quite different from mere shabbiness’. It was his Franciscan moment – the disrobing of the bourgeois imperialist, the embrace of redeeming poverty. Once he felt himself dirty enough to be unrecognizable as a gent, he knew he was on his way. On the street, ‘My new clothes had put me instantly into a new world. Everyone’s demeanour seemed to have changed abruptly. I helped a hawker pick up a barrow that he had upset. “Thanks, mate,” he said with a grin. No one had called me mate before in my life …’

  He spent the same night in a doss-house on the Waterloo Road, in a room reeking of ‘paregoric [opium] and foul linen’ and shared with six others. The sheets smelled horribly of old sweat. Every 20 minutes an old man would be taken by a fit of coughing, ‘a foul bubbling and retching, as though the man’s bowels were being churned up within him’. The morning light was not kind to the scene. Blair could see that the sheets, three weeks away from a wash, were ‘raw umber’ in colour and the washbasins covered in ‘solid, sticky filth as black as boot-blacking’. He moved from common lodging houses to spikes – which were, if anything, even more squalid. At no point did he revel in this. On the contrary, it is hard to think of another great English writer more fastidious about cleanliness, and whose nose was so doggy in its exact registration of a universe of horrible smells. But the more repulsive the experience, the more cleansed he became of imperial guilt, rather like St Catherine drinking a bowl of pus to show that nothing human was beneath her.

  In one particularly diabolical place the St Francis of the spikes finally got down to basic truths:

  It was a disgusting sight, that bathroom. All the indecent secrets of our underwear were exposed; the grime, the rents and patches, the bits of string doing duty for buttons, the layers upon layers of fragmentary garments, some of them mere collections of holes held together by dirt. The room became a press of steaming nudity; the sweaty odours of the tramps competing with the sickly, sub-faecal stench native to the spike. Some of the men refused the bath and washed only their ‘toe-rags’, horrid, greasy little clouts which tramps bind around their feet.

  For two years Blair did the Cook’s tour of destitution, including about three months in Paris as a plongeur or washer-up, as well as tramping in and around London. Occasionally he might come back for a night or two to friends’ houses in London or even show up disconcertingly in Southwold, looking grimmer and gaunter than ever before. He went hop-picking with itinerant labourers, working until his hands were shredded; downed enough beer and whisky to get himself arrested, in the hope of accomplishing his heart’s desire to spend a Christmas in prison; collected tramping slang; worked out the fine hierarchies of dossing, from the Embankment benches (get there by eight) through the ‘Twopenny Hangovers’ and the fourpenny wooden boxes called ‘Coffins’ to the high luxury of shilling Rowton houses and Salvation Army lodgings. One morning, he set off with an Irish tramp called – what else? – Paddy, going south on the Old Kent Road towards Bromley. In a meadow that, from the bits of sodden newspaper, rusty cans and worn grass, he could tell was ‘a regular caravanserai of tramps’ Blair sat down beside a patch of tansies, their pungent aroma competing with that of the tramps, watched the two carthorse colts trot around and listened to the men talk about their itineraries: Oxford was good for ‘mooching’ (begging); Kent very tight. The gossip went from stories of suicides to shreds of history, half-remembered, half-invented – ‘The Great Rebellion’, the Corn Laws – carried around with them like the Oxo tins that held old cigarette ends.

  Despite the clichés of the respectable, Orwell knew that not all, not even many, tramps were alcoholics, much less criminals. They wouldn’t even be on the move were it not for that inflexible rule forbidding more than a single night’s stay in any one spike. Tramps were the diametric opposite of the romantic cult of walking with which Britain’s modern age had begun, and which was being resurrected in the rambling movement of the 1920s and 1930s. But for the pseudo-tramps like Orwell, or Frank Jennings, the ‘Tramp’s Parson’, and still more for truly destitute memoir-writers like Terence Horsley, wounded veteran of Passchendaele and electrician who trudged from Glasgow to London and back in desperate search of casual work, walking was not an ennobling experience, nor was hop-picking a merry country holiday of beer and flirting. The itinerant life was a merciless grind and those condemned to it were worn down in body and spirit.

  When Down and Out in Paris and London appeared in 1933, the name on the book jacket was not Eric Blair but ‘George Orwell’. Other names had been considered, such as ‘H. Lewis Allways’. But since the Orwell is a r
iver in Suffolk, not far from Southwold, it is likely that Blair, who in any case loved the countryside with a fierce passion, wanted to identify with the physical nature of England. Somewhere at the back of his mind, surely, was not just Jack London but William Wordsworth, who too sought communion with the authentic England through solitary walks and encounters with the broken and the poor. So Orwell’s non-fiction books would almost all be journeys, for which there was, by the early 1930s, a huge publishing vogue. But no one was ever going to mistake his journeys for those of the writer who had driven the ‘journeying’ fashion: H.V. Morton.

  Morton’s In Search of England was published in 1927, the year Orwell changed his garments and his life. Its premise, announced in its very first sentence, was that it was the record of a ‘motor car journey round England’. Since the distribution of cars between regions (27 per 1000 in Cambridgeshire, 5 per 1000 in County Durham) was extremely uneven, this meant, in effect, the motorized grandee inspecting the biking and Shanks’s pony classes. Instead of the writer seeing the country on foot – bound in toe-rags and gaping boots – he would see it through the windscreen of his motor. He would drive about England (Britain, in fact, since volumes on Scotland (1929), Ireland (1930) and Wales (1932) followed), warning about the infestation of the countryside by the vulgarity of the town, in between filling up his tank with cheap petrol, courtesy of Anglo-Persian or Burmah.

  His book is a threnody for the English Promised Land; Vaughan Williams in a Lagonda: ‘I sped on into a green tunnel of a lane with England before me and the keen air was like wine to me and the green of the young leaves was like music.’ There are moments when the unbearable perfection of the countryside sends Morton into a religious rapture when he tries, and fails, to be the Ruskin of the motoring classes: ‘The low clouds were indigo blue and stormy, the high a soft apricot pink colour. The west was burning with gold light and the edges of the dark clouds were etched with thin lines of fire. The pageant moved, changed … the river against the sun was a sheet of dull silver on which a jet black duck moved noiselessly, a swan silhouetted as if cut in black paper, swam with his neck beneath the water, a wind came fretting the river blowing a handful of pale blossoms into the grass.’ Pity, really, about that duck.