The English: A Social History, 1066–1945 (Text Only)

by Christopher Hibbert

  At the same time the barrier between the army and the nation as a whole was becoming less marked, particularly so after the Anglo-Boer War of 1899–1902 in which almost half the combatants on the British side, apart from colonial troops, were volunteers (later territorials), yeomanry and militia.34 During the First World War the barrier almost disappeared altogether, since most soldiers were by then in any case either volunteers or conscripted from civilian life. There were also by then many more officers who had risen from the ranks. In his day the career of William Robertson – who had enlisted as a lancer in 1877, was promoted troop sergeant-major in 1885, commissioned in 1888 and died a field-marshal – was highly unusual; but by 1918 there were numerous officers of field rank who had joined the army as privates.

  After the First World War, however, the army was again dissociated from the nation at large. For most officers their careers once more became of less interest than their sporting and social pleasures, while for other ranks a soldier’s life was usually seen, as it had been in the past, as an escape from poverty and unemployment. There was to be another war before attitudes changed yet again.

  59 Homes and Holidays

  In 1925, in the publication Metro-Land, a Middlesex builder advertised for sale ‘Semi-Detached Brick Built Villas within 3 minutes of North Harrow, 5 minutes West Harrow Stations. Train journey about 16 minutes to Baker Street or Marylebone’. The three-bedroomed houses with bow windows to ground and upper floors, electric light, ‘large gardens’ and ‘facilities for garage’ were offered for £750 leasehold, and £920 freehold. Four-bedroomed houses were also advertised from £950 to £1450. Rates were 8s in the pound, and advances were granted on the properties by the Middlesex County Council under the Housing Acts 1890–1924. ‘Hundreds,’ the advertisement claimed, ‘have been satisfied.’1

  The Housing Act of 1924 was the most recent of several Acts which had encouraged house building by granting subsidies. An earlier Act of 1922 had subsidized building by private firms; and the 1924 Act had subsidized houses built by local authorities. By the late 1930s well over 300,000 houses were being built every year; and when war was declared in 1939 more than 4 million houses had been built since 1918, about half of them for sale, most of the rest for rent by local councils. By 1940 the total amount outstanding on mortgages was nearly £700 million; and there were 1.5 million borrowers in the country, one in eight of all families, many of whom had been required to put down no more than £25 as a deposit. The houses they occupied in the sprawling suburbs that encircled the large towns were neat and comfortable. The specifications for a typical semi-detached house erected in North Ilford in 1934 and costing £745 had three bedrooms, all with electric fires; a bathroom with ‘white glazed tiles to dado height’, ‘porcelain enamelled bath with marbled panels’, ‘lavatory basin bracketed out from wall; heated linen cupboard; heated chromium towel rail. Separate W.C.’ On the ground floor the drawing-room (16ft 3in. by 11ft 9in.) had a fireplace with tiled surround and mahogany mantel, and ‘a five-light, semi-circular bay window’; the dining-room had casement doors to the garden; both floor and walls of the kitchen were tiled. There was a gas cooker in the kitchen and electric power points in most rooms.2

  While such houses were being built all over the country, efforts were being made to control their environment. At the beginning of the First World War the Town Planning Institute had demanded ‘the emancipation of all communities from the beast of ugliness’;3 and by the end of the 1930s, various approved urban and rural schemes had been brought into operation under the Town and Country Planning Act of 1932. Garden cities had been created on the lines of Welwyn Garden City, which had been founded in 1920, and Wythenshawe near Manchester where 7000 houses had been built before 1939. On the outskirts of London, garden suburbs had appeared, among them Hampstead Garden Suburb laid out by Raymond Unwin and Barry Parker – designers of Letchworth Garden City – on some 250 acres between Golders Green and East Finchley. And the Green Belt Act of 1938 created around London a broad band of mostly farmland, parkland and recreation ground in which building development was to be carefully controlled, the pleasures of the countryside were to be provided within easy reach of the city-dweller, and the unrestricted growth of the tentacles of the metropolis were to be prevented from spreading into the so far undeveloped landscape.

  For the poor, however, housing conditions were often still pitiably inadequate; and despite the large number of new council houses, two-thirds of all householders continued to pay rent to private landlords, a large proportion of them having to part with as much as a third of their incomes for inadequate accommodation, in many cases without a piped water supply. Overcrowding remained a major problem in many large cities, particularly in the north. Nearly 50,000 people were severely overcrowded in Manchester, almost 40,000 in Leeds and 68,000 in Birmingham; while in County Durham 20 per cent of the population were overcrowded, and the proportion was even higher in parts of London. The 1931 census revealed that as many as 35 per cent of the population in England and Wales as a whole were living more than two to a room, and 15 per cent more than three to a room. Nearly half the families in Islington, Finsbury and Shoreditch were sharing their houses, with two or even three families to a house; and in Stepney over 50,000 people were living two or more to a room.4

  Towards the end of the 1930s, however, conditions did begin slowly to improve in most places. In York, for example, most slums had been demolished and replaced; overcrowding had been reduced to 2 per cent of the population; and a piped water supply and satisfactory drainage were almost universal. Here and elsewhere there would have been further improvements had it not been for the outbreak of war. During the war the house completion rate dropped from 330,000 a year to about 5000 in 1944–5; and while numerous houses due for demolition had to be left standing, over 450,000 other houses were destroyed in air raids or rendered uninhabitable. When the war ended the housing shortage was one of the most urgent problems that the new government had to face.

  Parked outside increasing numbers of suburban houses in the 1930s there was a small motor-car. The figure of 132,000 cars in 1914 had increased to about 2 million by 1939; while interest in cars – fostered by the Motor Show, first held at Earl’s Court in 1937 – had spread and deepened all over the country. As well as becoming more numerous, cars were also becoming cheaper. In 1932 an Austin Seven could be bought for less than £120, not much more than half its price ten years before; and it could be driven at far higher speeds than were permitted before the speed limit was raised from twenty-two miles an hour in 1930. Accidents were, however, common. There were over 7000 road deaths in 1934 – the year before driving tests were introduced – scarcely less, than the 7779 deaths in 1972, though there were by then eight times as many vehicles on the roads.5

  In the evenings many of the family cars of the 1930s could be seen parked outside cinemas. It had already been estimated in 1917, when there were well over 3000 cinemas in the country, that about half the population went to the cinema once a week. The number of cinemas rose to nearly 5000 in 1939 and many of these could accommodate over 4000 people, the cheapest seats costing no more than sixpence. By then some 20 million tickets were being sold every week. Every large town had several cinemas. In York there were ten in 1939 and half the population went to one or other of them once a week.6 Returning to Bolton in the 1980s, Leslie Halliwell, the historian of the cinema, discovered that only one cinema survived; in his youth there had been twenty-eight.7

  The influence of the cinema was pervasive. According to the New Survey of London Life and Labour, it could be traced not only ‘in the clothes and appearance of the women’ but also ‘in the furnishings of their houses’:

  Girls copy the fashion of their favourite film star … In all classes of society they wear ‘Garbo’ coats and wave their hair à la Norma Shearer or Lilian Harvey. It is impossible to measure the effect the films must have on the outlook and habits of the people … Certainly today the cinema is par excellence the peo
ple’s amusement.8

  Although it did not rival the cinema as a mass entertainment, broadcasting was also becoming popular. Five years after the British Broadcasting Company’s daily programmes started from Savoy Hill in 1922, well over 2.25 million licences had been issued at 10s each; and by the late 1930s there were over 8 million. Wireless sets could be purchased for £1 and, while John Reith, the first Director-General of the BBC, maintained that to have exploited ‘so great an invention for the pursuit and purpose of entertainment alone would have been a prostitution of its powers’, popular entertainment was offered, dance music as well as classical music. Indeed, in the 1930s such dance bands as those of Jack Payne and Henry Hall could be heard every night, and more people listened to them than went to dance-halls, popular as these were, particularly the larger and celebrated places like the Palais de Danse in Hammersmith, the first to enable those who came alone to hire partners.

  While middle-class people tended to go out more often in the evenings than their parents and grandparents had done, the hours spent in reading at home seem to have increased rather than diminished. Certainly far more books, newspapers and magazines were published per capita than ever before. Nearly 15,000 books were published in 1939 compared with just over 8,500 in 1914; and almost 27 million books were sold in 1939, over three times as many as had been sold ten years before. In the same period borrowings from public libraries increased at an even greater rate, from about 85 million in 1924 to more than 247 million in 1939.9

  As well as public libraries there were mobile libraries and commercial libraries varying in size from the small stock held by village shopkeepers to the large stores available at branches of Boot’s chemist shops. Book clubs prospered, and in 1935 Allen Lane published the first Penguins, sixpenny paperbacks.

  Magazines proliferated, children’s magazines like the Boy’s Own Paper, Rainbow, Dandy, Beano and Film Fun; women’s magazines such as Woman’s Journal, Woman and Home, The Lady, Woman’s Own and, most widely read of all, Woman launched in 1937 and costing 2d; political and literary weeklies, including the Spectator, a survivor from 1828, and the New Statesman, founded in 1913; magazines which came to be known as glossies, among them Harper’s Bazaar and Vogue; magazines for country people like Field and Country Life; magazines containing pictures of smart parties such as those in the Tatler; news magazines of which Picture Post, with a circulation of more than 2 million in 1939, was by far the most successful; and a bewildering variety of specialist magazines catering for bird fanciers, model-makers, stamp collectors, cyclists, cinemagoers, gardeners, golfers, publicans and sinners.

  Sales of newspapers also increased dramatically, notably those of the popular national newspapers. The Daily Express was selling nearly 2.5 million copies a day in 1939; the Daily Herald about 2 million; and the Daily Mail (established by Lord Northcliffe in 1896 and selling initially at ½d) and Daily Mirror about 1.5 million each. Circulation of the so-called ‘quality’ papers was also growing rapidly: The Times, which had sold less than 50,000 copies a day before the First World War, was now selling 213,000, the Daily Telegraph 640,000 compared with 230,000. The two Sunday newspapers, the News of the World and The People, sold more than 7 million copies between them. In 1939 it was estimated that, in all, nearly 70 per cent of the population over sixteen years old read a national newspaper and over 80 per cent a Sunday paper.10

  While more money than ever before was spent on reading, so it also was on holidays.

  Sea-water, so an eighteenth-century Brighton doctor, Richard Russell, had advised, was a sovereign remedy for all kinds of complaints from tumours and abscesses to tuberculosis and gonorrhoea. It was beneficial both to bathe in it and to drink it, either on its own, a pint or so before breakfast, or in conjunction with concoctions of crabs’ eyes, vipers’ flesh, burned sponge, cuttlefish bones, snails and woodlice.11 After 1850 very few people were to be found who continued to advocate sea-water as a medicine, but sea bathing was becoming increasingly popular. Indeed, bathing had been recommended as a cure long before Dr Russell’s day and at least as early as 1735 bathing-machines – small sheds on wheels in which the occupants were dragged by horses into the water – were in use on the beach at Scarborough and were soon afterwards to be seen at Brighton and other seaside resorts.12

  These resorts were gradually replacing the inland spas as fashionable holiday retreats. King George III had favoured Weymouth where no sooner had ‘he popped his royal head under water than a band of music, concealed in a neighbouring machine, struck up “God save great George our King.”’13 His son, the Prince of Wales, preferred Brighton; his daughter-in-law, Princess Caroline, went to Worthing; his granddaughter, Princess Charlotte, was taken to Southend and Bognor; and his great-granddaughter, Princess Victoria, later spent childhood holidays at Ramsgate and Broadstairs.

  It was not until the coming of cheap public transport, however, that these places were frequented by the common people. Before that the poor had been obliged to spend their holidays at home, and while most of them enjoyed a number of days off work, either on permitted holidays or on such stolen breaks as ‘St Monday’ or even ‘St Tuesday’, the week-long holiday was very rare. But first cheap steamboats taking passengers to Gravesend and Southend, Margate and Ramsgate and, from Liverpool, to the Wirral and Rhyl, and then the railways enabled wage-earners to go to the seaside for prices they could afford. In the days of the stage-coach it cost about 21s to travel inside from London to Brighton, whereas by 1844 the third-class railway fare was only 4s 2d and in the second half of that year some 360,000 passengers made the journey. In 1859, 73,000 people went to Brighton in one week alone.14

  Seaside resorts grew rapidly in consequence. The population of Brighton rose from less than 66,000 in 1841 to over 123,000 in 1901; that of Blackpool more than tripled in fourteen years from 1857 and increased from 8000 in 1871 to 47,000 in 1907. Welsh seaside villages grew rapidly into towns, as did the fishing villages of the Isle of Wight.

  There was a world of difference socially between these various resorts. In the north Scarborough was described as ‘a fashionable watering-place’ in the 1840s, and Blackpool at that time was also frequented by the gentry and wealthy merchants of Lancashire. Lytham and St Annes-on-Sea were both developed as residential resorts for the prosperous, while Fleetwood was more favoured by workers in the Lancashire cotton towns. In Wales, the seaside resorts being further away from the large towns, the visitors were more genteel; so were they for the most part in the west of England, except at Weston-super-Mare where day-trippers came from Bristol at is a head return: Torquay was considered so far from London that in the 1860s to say that you were going there ‘was to create a feeling of envy and astonishment amongst your friends and acquaintances’.15 There was no branch-line to Lyme Regis, which had been Jane Austen’s favourite seaside place, until 1903. And in the 1890s, when Leslie Stephen took his family to Cornwall – his daughter Virginia Woolf ever afterwards considered that to catch a mackerel in a Cornish bay ‘was the greatest excitement under the moon’ – there was scarcely a working-class holiday-maker ever to be seen along the entire coast.16

  In the south, so Professor Perkin has observed, resorts within easy reach of London were ‘subtly graduated in the social hierarchy of middle-class values’:

  [Margate was] merely for tradespeople, [its neighbour, Ramsgate, for] the somewhat higher class depicted in broad cloth and silk in W. P. Frith’s painting of Ramsgate Sands, Dickens’s Broadstairs in between, the first self-described ‘select’ resort for a still superior class, while Gravesend and Southend were ‘low’, a target for day-tripping clerks, shop assistants and artisans. Eastbourne and St Leonards, on the other hand, were for the social élite and were developed respectively by the Duke of Devonshire and Sir James Burton, the architect, on spacious lines for a superior clientele, for whom even Brighton was too noisy and vulgar.17

  Bournemouth also prided itself on being highly select. In 1861 its population was no more than 1750. Donkeys
were banned on the beach and day excursionists were not encouraged. On Sundays sea bathing was forbidden until 1914; the cafés were closed; the bands did not play and the trams did not run. The Winter Gardens were not opened until 1877; and R. L. Stevenson, who lived here between 1884 and 1887, pronounced that the daily round was as monotonous as a weevil’s in a biscuit.18

  By then in most other seaside resorts, however, great efforts had been made and much money expended on attracting as many visitors as could be accommodated. Piers had been built; zoological gardens laid out; shooting-galleries and waxwork shows created. There were regular performances in music-halls, Punch and Judy shows on the beach; bands played in the pleasure gardens, Nigger Minstrels strummed their banjos on the promenade; and the sellers of ginger beer, whelks and jellied eels set up their stalls.

  Frith’s Ramsgate Sands, which was painted in 1854 and bought by Queen Victoria for Buckingham Palace, depicts the variety of entertainments to be found on the beach. Children are shown paddling and digging in the sand with wooden spades; men read newspapers or peer out to sea through telescopes; the women, in their straw bonnets and crinolines, shaded by their parasols from the harmless rays of the pale sun, work at their embroidery, look at books, pretend not to look at exhibitors of trained mice, and carefully ignore the men selling whelks and ships in bottles. Behind them Nigger Minstrels dance and sing; a Punch and Judy man beats his drum to attract children to the next drama of Jack Ketch the hangman, the Blind Man and Toby the dog; and little girls stand on tiptoe to watch the antics of a performing rabbit.

  Bathing was considered more of a health-giving duty than a pleasure. Up till the 1870s it was usual for men to bathe naked, as women, too, had done in the eighteenth century. In 1872 Francis Kilvert found ‘a delicious feeling of freedom in stripping in the open air [on the sands at Weston-super-Mare] and running down naked to the sea, where the waves were curling white with foam and the red morning sunshine glowing upon the naked … bathers’. But two years later, at Shanklin on the Isle of Wight, Kilvert found that it was no longer considered proper to go into the sea unclothed: men were now expected to adopt what he called the detestable custom of wearing drawers; and by the 1870s even drawers were considered immodest and had been replaced by bathing costumes with three-quarter-length sleeves and legs reaching to the knees.