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

by Christopher Hibbert

  Propaganda reflected and intensified the public mood. Stories emanating from the government’s War Propaganda Bureau – or invented by the proprietors or editors of newspapers whose headlines grew ever larger and blacker – spread hatred of the enemy while glorifying the British cause. Newspaper stories of German atrocities in Belgium were followed by rumours that soldiers of the ‘alien enemy’ had cut off the breasts of nurses, that the corpses of slain English soldiers were being rendered down in the Kaiser’s laboratories for fat and tallow. Posters depicted a little girl asking her father, ‘Daddy, what did you do in the War?’ White feathers were handed out by women to young men in civilian clothes. A boxed announcement in the Daily Mail advised its readers to ‘refuse to be served by an Austrian or German waiter. If your waiter says he is Swiss, ask to see his passport.’ Stones were thrown at German dogs. And, when reports that the Kaiser had described the British Expeditionary Force as ‘contemptible’ were followed in May 1915 by the sinking of the Lusitania and the consequent drowning of 2000 passengers, then by the first Zeppelin raids, and, in October, by the execution of the English nurse Edith Cavell, attacks on shops and other property owned by foreigners increased in numbers and intensity. Directed not only against people of German descent, or with German-sounding names, but also against Russians and Jews, Swiss and even Chinese, the riots spread from Manchester to Leeds, from Liverpool to London. Pork butchers’ shops were smashed and looted; factories employing foreign labour were besieged; and in London foreign restaurants and the premises of hairdressers came under attack.4

  The 3000 cinemas in the country, supplied with material by the Cinema Division of the Department of Information, provided a steady flow of propaganda which, while applauding the heroism of the British soldiers and deploring the perfidy of the Germans, glossed over the horrors of the fighting in which they were both engaged and the appalling loss of life. By the end of November 1914 the British had already suffered almost 90,000 casualties; six months later the number had risen to nearly 400,000. When the war was over it was estimated that 850,000 men had been killed; and of the 8 million men who had been mobilized, 2 million had been wounded. In 1922 almost a million war pensions were being paid.

  A high proportion of the killed and wounded were officers, many of whom had received their commissions on the strength of certificates granted by the Officer Training Corps of the public schools and universities, and many more of whom had gone straight from school to France as second lieutenants before even reaching that not very high standard of efficiency that the granting of a certificate demanded. About one in five of officers from public schools were killed, the exact numbers for Eton being 1157 fatal casualties out of 4852 Old Etonians who served overseas. About one in five of the undergraduates from Oxford and Cambridge who served in the army were also killed; so were one in five of the peerage. By the end of 1914 six peers, ninety-five sons of peers, sixteen baronets, eighty-two sons of baronets, six knights and eighty-four knights’ sons had already been killed.5 The losses among the working classes were proportionately not so severe, partly because many of their occupations excused them from conscription and partly because so large a number of men from poor families failed to pass the standards set by the National Service Medical Boards: in a few industrial areas almost three-quarters of those examined were deemed unfit for overseas duty.

  In order to reinforce units depleted by heavy casualties, the government felt obliged to reduce the standards originally set. At first recruits had to be five feet eight inches tall, but this requirement was soon amended to five feet five and then to five feet three. As losses mounted, and since conscription brought in fewer men than had been expected, the ranks of the army were filled with soldiers who in earlier times would have been discharged, or rejected out of hand. Before the war was over even those who had lost a hand or a foot were kept on to perform what duties they could still undertake, while about half the infantry soldiers in France were not yet nineteen years old.

  For those who stayed at home there was more than enough work, and wages were considerably higher than they had been before the war. Munitions factories were producing immense quantities of tanks and guns, aeroplanes, rifles and shells not only for Britain’s army but also for the armies of its allies, including that of America whose entry into the war was crucial to victory. In these and other factories and workshops the rate of increase in wages for both skilled and unskilled workers was almost unprecedented, since the demands of trade unions were felt to be virtually irresistible when labour was in such short supply. A shipyard riveter, for example, whose wages were 37s 9d a week before the war began, was earning 74s 9d when it was over; while the wages of a bricklayer’s labourer rose from 29s 1d to 65s 2d.6 At the same time prices rose sharply: by June 1915 the cost of food was very nearly a third higher than it had been a year before; and by September 1916 it had risen in large towns by 68 per cent and in villages by 62 per cent. The increase in the cost of some foods was far higher even than this. The price of eggs had almost doubled; and sugar was over one and a half times as expensive as it had been in 1914. There were demonstrations against these increases in different parts of the country; one, organized by the National Union of Railwaymen, took place in Hyde Park in August 1916. But, for most workers, wages rose higher than prices; meals in factory canteens remained reasonable – ‘Sausage and Mash, 2½d, Mince and Mash, 2d, Patties 1d, Beans, 1d, Stewed Fruit, 1d, Milk Pudding 1d’ – and, despite the high cost of sugar, people were eating more sweets and chocolates than ever.

  ‘There are now no poor in Newcastle-upon-Tyne,’ the Daily Mail reported; and in the West End of London a shop manager said that his new clientele – ‘rather different than before the war… hardly so discriminating’ were ‘certainly more free with money’: ‘Many of our regular West End clients are economizing, but evidently there is a new and prosperous section of the community taking their places. This new section is so well off that no article is approved unless it is costly.’7

  Similar reports came from shops in much poorer quarters. A man whose mother kept a corner shop in a slummy part of Salford said that ‘some of the poorest in the land started to prosper as never before’:

  In spite of the war, slum grocers managed to get hold of different and better varieties of foodstuffs of a kind sold before only in middle-class shops and the once deprived began to savour strange delights… One of our customers, wife of a former foundry labourer, both making big money now on munitions, airily inquired one Christmas time as to when we were going to stock ‘summat worth chewin’. ‘Such as what?’ asked my father, sour-faced. ‘Tins o’ lobster,’ she suggested, ‘or them big jars o’ pickled gherkins!’

  Furious, the old man damned her from the shop. ‘Before the war,’ he fumed, ‘that one was grateful for a bit o’ bread and scrape!’8

  There could be no doubt, in fact, that many working-class women and children were being better fed than they had been before the war. It was reported in 1918 that School Medical Officers in London had found that the percentage of children ‘in a poorly nourished condition’ was less than half the percentage in 1913.

  The improved lot of women was particularly noticeable. As men left for the front there was far more work for women to do and opportunities to demonstrate that they could do it well. They worked for as much as £2 a week in munitions factories: almost a million of them were doing so by the end of the war, compared with just over 200,000 at the beginning; they worked in the auxiliary branches of the armed services; they worked on the land; they worked as nurses – there were 45,000 nurses in 1917 – they were employed in clerical work and as bus conductresses. The numbers of conductresses rose from a few hundred in 1914 to 2500 in 1918, those of female clerks and typists from 33,000 to 102,000. ‘No woman worker is in greater demand than the shorthand typist,’ the Daily Mail reported as early as September 1915. Her wages had risen from £1 to 35s a week and she could be seen ‘dining out alone or with a friend in the moderate-priced restauran
ts in London’ and ‘smoking the customary cigarette’. The growing independence and self-confidence of women was noted in other ways. ‘They appear more alert, more critical of the conditions under which they work, more ready to make a stand against injustice than their pre-war selves,’ the New Statesman commented. ‘They have a keener appetite for experience and pleasure and a tendency … to protest against wrongs even before they become “intolerable”.’9 They took to wearing shorter skirts – ‘extraordinarily short’ in many cases, one newspaper noted disapprovingly – revealing not only feet and ankles but ‘even more of the stockings’. Some went so far as to emulate the girls who worked on the land and who wore trousers after they had finished work as well as in the fields and cow-sheds. Many others abandoned the old-fashioned camisole for the brassière, an item but recently admitted to the catalogue of fashionable shops. Most spent a good deal more on make-up than they would have dreamed of doing before the war.

  The contribution which women made to the war effort was recognized by political concessions. Before the outbreak of war the women’s movement had not progressed far since the publication in 1792 of Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Admittedly, the social position of women had constantly been questioned; and in 1882 the Married Women’s Property Act had enabled women to own their own property. But men still controlled women’s work and education and continued to deny them the right to vote. A number of Bills intended to extend the franchise to women failed to win sufficient support, and were, indeed, condemned by many women themselves. Queen Victoria’s disapproving views on the subject of women’s rights were widely shared by her sex. The frustrations which these failures aroused led to the emergence of a militant feminist movement and to the foundation of the Women’s Social and Political Union. The demonstrations of the suffragettes, their attacks on property, the death of Emily Wilding Davison after running onto the course at Epsom during the Derby, brought widespread attention to their movement but aroused as much indignation as sympathy. And it was not until the war, when the Women’s Social and Political Union threw its influence behind the struggle for victory, and when the essential contribution of women, other than as mothers and housekeepers, to the success of the nation was recognized at last, that the battle for the vote was won. In 1918, the prejudice of some influential anti-feminists being at last overcome, the vote was granted to women aged thirty and over, subject to some educational and property qualifications, by the Fourth Reform Act. This was followed by the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919, which ensured that no one should be disqualified from exercising any public office or appointment by sex, and then, in 1928, by an act granting women full voting equality with men.

  The war had also forced the country to realize that, just as more should be done by the State for women, so should more attention be paid to the needs of children, the number of whom aged fourteen and under in work had increased by four times during the war. In 1918 the first important Education Act for fifteen years raised the school-leaving age to fourteen, and the Minister of Education, H.A.L. Fisher, insisted that a child’s education should continue after this age and that parents should not be required to pay fees in state elementary schools.

  In the years following the war, however, many of Fisher’s hopes remained unrealized. Almost three-quarters of children between the ages of eleven and fourteen in elementary schools were receiving no advanced instruction, merely a repetition of lessons they had already been taught. Only just over 5 per cent were being given advanced instruction and only one in 200 was at a junior technical school. Almost a quarter contrived to leave school before they were fourteen. As few as 7 per cent managed to reach the grant-aided secondary schools. Six per cent attended private schools, including the public schools.

  The number of young people who went on to university was extremely small, less than eight students for every 10,000 people in the country in 1926 and of these only just over a quarter were girls. Most of them came from a very small selection of schools even after the founding of new university colleges such as those at Exeter and Southampton, Nottingham and Leicester. Less than five in 1000 children from state elementary schools reached university at all.

  The school-leaving age was due to be increased to fifteen on 3 September 1939 but it was on that day that war broke out again. The measure had to be postponed as a fifth of the country’s schools were destroyed in air raids; and it was not until the Education Act of 1944 that secondary education for all children became a reality.

  As well as accelerating the women’s movement towards equality with men and prompting advances in education, the war at once strengthened the trade-union movement and stimulated demands for social reform. ‘For the first time in the history of this country since the Black Death,’ the prime minister was told in 1915, ‘the supply of labour has not been equal to the demand.’ It was a situation of which the trade unions were quick to take advantage. There were times when the unions – several of whose leaders became associated with, or even members of, the government – seemed close to losing touch with their members; and on Clydeside and elsewhere unofficial strikes were repeatedly called by shop stewards in defiance of union executives. Yet by the end of the war the number of those belonging to trade unions had risen from just over 4 million to well over 6.5 million; and in 1920 stood at 8.3 million; while the percentage of women who were members of unions rose from only 8 per cent to over 20 per cent, an increase largely due to the flight of women from occupations which were not organized, such as domestic service.10 Thereafter governments were increasingly obliged to pay careful notice to the demands of organized labour as well as to the people’s demands for social reform. A Ministry of Reconstruction was established in order to investigate such matters as housing which had been a principal cause of much social unrest during the war; Ministries of Pensions and Health were also created; and after Lloyd George won a general election, in which the issues of public welfare played a crucial part, a serious attempt was made to reduce the still immense gap between the rich and the poor by increases in death duties and in taxes upon high incomes. Income tax which had stood at is 2d in the pound in 1913–14 had risen to 6s by 1918–19; and, whereas a man with an earned income of £10,000 a year had paid only just over 8 per cent of it in tax before the war, he was obliged to part with more than 40 per cent by the time the war was over. A man with an unearned income of £10,000 had been able to keep about £8000 in 1913, but by 1919 he was left with less than £5000 after tax had been paid.11

  In the months immediately following the war there was widespread unrest in the country. Militant members of trade unions threatened and organized strikes. There were race riots in several seaports; violent disturbances at army camps over the slow rate of demobilization; and clashes between the police and crowds of young people. The town hall was burned down at Luton; shops in Liverpool, where the police went on strike, were smashed and looted; troops and tanks were sent into the streets of Clydeside. In February 1919 the miners, railwaymen and the transport workers joined forces in the so-called ‘Triple Alliance’ which had been making plans for a general strike in the autumn of 1914 and which now renewed the call for unified action. The miners were prepared for a fight to the finish; but on Friday 5 April 1921, ‘Black Friday’ as it came to be known, the transport and railway unions, under more conciliatory leadership, called off their strike; and the miners, left on their own, were defeated. Thereafter wages fell in other industries, too, on some occasions after an unsuccessful strike, on others after ineffectual threats of strike action.

  The post-war boom was over. The Economist declared that 1921 was ‘one of the worst years of depression since the industrial revolution’; and by June that year the numbers of unemployed passed 2 million.12 Yet, as Asa Briggs has observed, there was ‘little pressure inside England for revolutionary change’. The Labour Government which came to power in 1924 did nothing to suggest that it wished to carry through a radical programme.


  Nor did a second minority Labour government in office from 1929 to 1931… Indeed, faced with economic crisis, Labour’s prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, who had been a pacifist during the War, chose (without a general election) to head a ‘national’ government consisting predominantly of Conservatives. Clearly the social framework of the country, by then tested by severe economic depression, had not changed as much as many of the commentors of 1919 and 1920 had suggested. Nor should the General Strike called on 3 May 1926 in support of the miners, a unique event in English history, be considered evidence to the contrary.13

  The call to strike was at first completely successful. Scarcely a single trade-union member disobeyed it. But the Conservative Government, which had been returned to power in 1924 under Stanley Baldwin, was able to call upon thousands of volunteers to drive buses and trains, unload ships and to act as special constables. The official British Gazette attained a circulation of 2 million, while other newspapers – which might have advanced opinions in support of the strikers – remained unpublished. The British Broadcasting Corporation supported the view that the strike was unconstitutional, allowing the prime minister to broadcast but not the eloquent A. J. Cook, General Secretary of the Miners’ Federation, or other strikers’ leaders. On 12 May the strike was called off unconditionally, to the ‘intense relief’ of the people everywhere, in the words of the editor of the Labour newspaper, the Daily Herald. By the end of the year the miners had been forced to accept lower earnings and an eight-hour day.14

  From now until the Second World War mass unemployment was a constant shadow over English life, there being never fewer than a million people out of work and, in 1922–3, nearly 3 million, a quarter of the insured working population as compared with 3,177,200 in April 1985 representing just over 11 per cent of the workforce. Moreover, as John Stevenson has observed, since official statistics excluded large groups of workers – among them farmworkers, the self-employed and married women – the total numbers were almost certainly higher than the government’s figures revealed.15 To obtain unemployment benefit under the National Insurance Scheme, which had been introduced in 1911, it was necessary to attend a labour exchange every day. A man with a wife and three children might then receive 23s a week, about a third of the average wage earned by those in work. But many workers, agricultural labourers among them, were not covered by National Insurance and these, when they lost their jobs, had to turn to the Poor Law or to private charity. Meagre as they already were, unemployment benefits were reduced after the financial crises of 1931, and to obtain any ‘dole’ at all after six months – during which he had to prove he was genuinely seeking work even in those areas where no work was available – a man was obliged to undergo a means test carried out by an official of the Public Assistance Committee who was authorized to enter his house to establish that he was not living in undue comfort, to inquire into the amount of his savings and of any wages or pensions received by other members of his family. The most he could receive, having passed the means test, was 15s 3d a week; and many thousands of unemployed were considered ineligible even for this. After months of unemployment, usually depressed and bored and often ill-fed, men tended to fall into apathy; and those who witnessed the ‘hunger marches’ were struck as much by the looks of despair in the eyes of the men who tramped down from the north and from Wales through the Home Counties to London as by their thin, white faces and the poor clothes hanging from their bony shoulders.