August [1914]

by Mark Rowe

  Not that politicians or anyone ever had such a debate. They seldom met under the same roof, apart from parliament. The goodwill - and the means of holding such a debate, until the radio - were lacking. Liberal and Unionist politicians, and newspapers, spoke to their own. A speaker would show how bad the other party was, by jumping on a rival’s reported remark; or would simply misquote. The speaker and his side had the right ideas for the country and worked in a statesmanlike way, the other side made plots. A cleverer Unionist speaker would claim that the other side used to have leaders of principle - men now safely dead, such as Gladstone, and Bright - but not any more. In truth a politician the same as any man had to smile, shake hands and do deals with men he might not like, to get through the day. If the party-political speeches were worth listening to, it was because each side said things that the other side did not want to admit even to itself.

  Unionists mocked the Liberals for taking no interest in Home Rule for Ireland, until after 1910, when the Liberals needed the ‘Irish Party’ of Irish Nationalists to give them enough numbers in parliament. The Liberals accused the Conservatives of hypocrisy. Unionists warned of civil war in Ireland, spreading to England, if the Protestants of Ulster could not stay in the Union. Did Conservatives want Ireland to look bad, to make the Liberals look weak? Would some Tories only be truly satisfied if Ireland did fall into civil war? Both sides felt strongly that they were in the right. After a speech in his Walsall constituency in April, someone in the audience asked the Unionist MP Sir Richard Cooper which he hated more, the Home Rule Bill or the Parliament Act (a Liberal law to reduce the power of the mainly Conservative House of Lords). Sir Richard replied: “Let me be quite frank” - always a sign of a politician steeling himself to say something unusually revealing - “we hate them both, and there is an end of it.” Such hatred in politics - the sense that one side was unlike the other - ran deeper than over Ireland or any single issue. Richard Holt and his wife decided to move into Holt’s old family home in Liverpool, after his father died there in 1908, “a home too big for our requirements but from its excellence and size nearly unsaleable - and I should hate to part with the house my father built and loved - perhaps to a Tory”. Hence neither side liked a politician who left one party for the other, such as Churchill (and his changing back again after the war would not help).

  II

  ... I think that most strikes are due to a longing for a break from the deadly monotony of a repetitive job.

  The Lonely Sea and The Sky by Sir Francis Chichester

  The lack of trust between Liberals and Unionists over Ireland - ‘the great burning question of the day’ as the Unionist MP Sir Richard Cooper put it in a possibly unfortunate phrase - made what the two main parties agreed on, all the more significant. Usually the agreement was of a taken-for-granted kind: the monarchy, for example. When people did come into contact with royalty, they might not be impressed, or at least they said they weren’t. In May 1914 Charles Wright wrote from Oxford to his sister Dorothy about a tennis match:

  After tea I had another single with a Trinity man and the Prince of Wales was playing on the next court. He is pretty bad!! His balls with E on and ours with TC on (Trin Coll) kept getting mixed up. He has a beastly squeaky little voice.

  Few, however, came so close to royalty to form a human opinion. At most they would see the king at a distance on a short formal visit to their city, or in a passing horse-drawn coach or motor-car. Few people genuinely queried the monarchy, whether because the king was popular or because all authority stemmed from the crown. While Richard Holt grumbled in June 1911 that royalty was “a horrible nuisance on its ceremonial side tho’ probably the best institution for this country”, he was happy to attend the coronation of King George V that month in Westminster Abbey. Similarly, Liberals and Unionists alike would beware of any groups that did not answer to them, such as trade unions and the Labour Party; and the suffragettes, the campaigners for the vote for women.

  Trade unions and socialists talked well. Ben Tillett, the dockers’ union leader, told an open air meeting in Walsall in June 1914: “They were taught that the king was really the king and their children were taught to sing God save the King [here the audience laughed, according to the local newspaper report] but in any real sense there was neither control nor real power in either the cabinet or parliament. The real power belonged to those who owned the land, the wealth of the country, and the machinery of production.” Tillett then predicted (wisely) that even a Labour cabinet, under the present system, “would be as supine, as stupid, as was the present government”. Tillett was hinting at revolution as the only answer. Until then, socialists - who wanted political change - were not working for quite the same things as trade unionists, who sought better pay and hours for the men in their union. Seldom did anyone ask whether the workers not in a union, and even the workers who were, might well be happy with the way the country was run, and merely wanted a better deal in it. Tillett hit home when he told working men that everything - schools, the national anthem - was for a reason, to make them, and the generations to come, know their place. Even if Tillett’s audience laughed in agreement, what were they going to do about it? As Tillett foresaw, striking for a penny more, or for an hour less, or voting Labour, would not change who was truly in power. Was Tillett good, however, for anything besides talk?

  Apart from the socialists, as sure, as faithful, as talkative and as few as the Christian apostles, most people wanted, or at least said they wanted, fairness and things done ‘sportingly’. This did not mean that men wanted to carry the sports they played into the rest of their lives; many using the name of sport may have been too old to play sport any more, or never did play. Football was a battle without weapons that left you hurt and dirty. Instead, people were appealing to what people thought sport stood for; they were trying to make a political demand sound more reasonable by sounding less political.

  In sport as in politics between Liberal and Unionist, one side faced another. Each side felt it ought to win; but had to tussle, and abide by the result. To be ‘sporting’ was to play within the rules and to either accept defeat or not crow too much in victory. You could tell winners and losers in politics or business, by who made a profit and who won an election. Beyond the obvious numbers, you had to contend with morals, the law, and groups with their own followers and interests. A Unionist parliamentary candidate, Philip Ashworth, made no sense when he said in Stafford in April that the Home Rule Bill was ‘framed on un-English, unfair and unsportsmanlike lines’. If Home Rule was, as he was suggesting, like a match between two sides in some sport, surely the stronger side in the end would win, and the other lose? What he might have been trying to defend was a principle, that people should be allowed to keep what they had - whether a geographical region like Ulster, the ownership of things such as property, the respect due to a name or title, or the going rate for a job. To sum up, if unionists in Ireland gave something (loyalty to the United Kingdom), they wanted something in return (their own way over Irish Home Rule, and no parliament in Dublin where they would always be out-voted).

  This sense of wanting a fair deal - a quid pro quo - ran deep, though was seldom aired. An anonymous watcher of cricket, signing himself ‘Quid Pro Quo’, put it as well as anyone, in the Walsall Observer of July 25. He complained: “When I go to a county cricket match I get a good, sound comfortable seat commanding a good view of the game, for sixpence. At Gorway [Walsall cricket club’s ground], for a Saturday afternoon league match, I am charged ninepence, and can take my choice of a front seat on a ricketty old bench which is likely to let me down if I attempt to lean back, or a back seat on an uncomfortable plank with a backing of pailings, the whitewash of which adheres with sorry results to the attire of those who are misguided enough to rest their backs upon them. This, surely, is not fair value for ninepence.” He closed by wondering what the three-penny seats were like; next time, he would try them; ‘they cannot be much wo
rse’.

  Here, then, was a metaphor for England that men from one political extreme to the other - Lord St Aldwyn to Ben Tillett - could recognise; though they would argue over what (if anything) to do about it. All classes paid to enter; the more you could afford, the more comfort you could expect. If you did not care for the deal, you could try elsewhere. You could emigrate as Eva Tibbitts did, or go on holiday to miss the winter, as the very richest such as Gerald Legge did. What if, like Mr Quid Pro Quo, you wanted to stay where you were, because for all its faults you liked it? St Aldwyn believed, against the democratic tide of the time, that labourers, shopkeepers and landowners ought all to accept their place. Quid Pro Quo felt differently: paying a few coins gave him the right to say how a cricket club (or a parish, or country?) ran its business.

  This wish for a fair deal was widespread - wider than any political party, let alone a movement such as socialism. It made England sound like the supposedly more equal and progressive Australia. It suggested some national unity. As St Aldwyn hinted, all classes had duties as well as rewards. Shops and factories could sell at a profit, but had to be fair to staff and customers. Lords had more wealth than labourers, and more responsibilities, as charitable leaders of their district, especially in hard times. Men could disagree over what was fair and what was ‘taking a liberty’, but agreed those were the terms of the argument. As in a good marriage, if you took, you had to give. What indeed about women in all this?

  III

  History has been kind to all three of the main protest movements around 1914: few would now deny women the vote, or workers the right to combine in trade unions; and if Nationalists and Unionists are each unhappy still with what they have in Ireland, at least they can be happy that the other side is unhappy. Of the three, the suffragettes have the best reputation, whether because half of Britain can always identify with them, or because of the shortcomings of later trade unionists, Nationalists and Unionists. Odd, then, that in 1914 the suffragettes should have been so despised. They had failed, and gone to extremes, itself a sign that their campaign was not working.

  To take two of many court cases: on Wednesday morning, July 15, Mr McKinnon Wood, secretary of state for Scotland, was on the doorstep of his Portland Place home, speaking to his butler, Walter Hanscomb, when Janette Wallace and Bertha Watson rushed up. The butler seized Wallace while Wood warded off Watson with an umbrella. A nearby policeman claimed to hear Wallace say: ‘You Scotch pig, if you don’t stop forcibly feeding we shall smash you up and you can’t say you haven’t had a thrashing from a woman.’ Watson meanwhile told the Liberal minister: ‘You are a dog and a lot of hounds and stop forcibly feeding.’ When searched, she was carrying an egg with the words written ‘refreshing fruit’. When fined £1 each - or two weeks in prison - they screamed and had to be carried out of court. A few weeks earlier, Watson and another woman, who would not give her name, tried to chain themselves to railings in Downing Street. Fining each £2, a Bow Street magistrate told them: ‘There was a time no doubt when you had a case which might have been worth fighting for, but you must recognise now that it has been killed by you and your friends long ago.’

  Where to start with such sorry - and unladylike - behaviour? The suffragettes had, on purpose or by mistake, allowed their grievances to get in the way of their goal. Hence Watson’s call to the minister to stop forcibly feeding the suffragettes starving themselves in protest in prison. How did the suffragettes expect to be taken seriously, as seriously as men, if they acted childishly in court? How would they ever have the ear of politicians, if they were hitting them about the head with riding whips? As for public goodwill, the suffragettes - again, whether deliberately or stupidly - only hurt or offended men and women, every time they interrupted a church service, set fire to places, poured some sort of tar in postboxes, or broke windows. By going to extremes, the suffragettes were not campaigning harder; they were showing their contempt for everyone but themselves. Suffragettes by 1914 had turned from calling for the vote to fighting against every institution. They were the first modern campaigners. They were not proposing something but flailing against something; things which later would be as varied as the United States in Vietnam, South African apartheid, airports, power stations, and the testing of animals in laboratories.

  All such protesters believe in how important their cause (and they) are; historians generally agree. That women did get the vote after the1914-18 might give the impression that the suffragettes succeeded. Only the fact that the suffragettes stopped their campaign in August 1914 - when even they understood that Britain had no time for them any more - made success possible. Even before Continental war, the public had lost patience with suffragettes. On July 23 - the third day that King George hosted the Nationalist and Unionist leaders, Mr Asquith and others at Buckingham Palace, to seek some agreement on ‘Home Rule’ - a woman tried in vain to enter the palace forecourt. When she shouted something about the king receiving rebels, but not women, the crowd gave such answers as ‘duck her in the fountain’, ‘what about your husband’s dinner’, and ‘you ought to be ashamed of yourself’.

  That suffragette did have a point; why one rule for Irish men, because they were threatening bloodshed, and another for women? While we have no way of knowing who in the crowd made those taunts, or even whose side the crowd was on, presumably the crowd was fairly representative of the country: the curious and well off, of any political side, who could spare the time to gawp outside the place of most political drama in London that day. Some, evidently, believed a woman’s place was in the home. Someone, at least, felt the suffragette should feel shame, or even felt shame for her; because what the protesting woman shouted cut both ways. Trade unionists and the Irish, Nationalists or Unionists were not - yet - burning buildings and breaking things, or people; only suffragettes were. An interesting speculation is what would have become of trade unionism or Irish nationalism, without war in 1914, if a few extremists in each movement had, like the suffragettes, decided on violence. Irish Nationalists did take up arms, in Easter 1916, and after 1918; and won independence. Trade unionists stayed peaceful, because they and their members were working men, bettering their pay and hours to feed their families, not to become revolutionaries.

  The few aggressive suffragettes had almost become outlaws, sheltered and paid for by outer rings of sympathisers and donors. Suffragette leaders such as Mrs Pankhurst were physically ringed by bodyguards, carrying ‘Indian clubs’, as a confidential memo from New Scotland Yard’s criminal investigation department told police forces in the regions in July 1914. The Metropolitan Police sent the memo - with photographs and pen-pictures of 80 of the most militant suffragettes - because, in another tactic which was to be taken up by twenty-first century protesters, the suffragettes were shifting to less relevant, but easier, targets; away from London, where the police knew them too well, to the provinces.

  The suffragette movement, by 1914, did not add up, partly because it had rival leaders and was no more united than the trade unions or Irish nationalism. Partly, and again like later protest movements, some suffragettes at least had given up trying to convince others - or had never felt like it in the first place. They had become anarchic, like the woman in the Met memo pictured with her tongue sticking out. (The apologetic police explained that the woman had not co-operated in having her picture taken.) But for the war, these few fanatical suffragettes could only have become yet more extreme, becoming what we would call terrorists.

  IV

  A sign of how the suffragettes bewildered the Liberal Government, and the country, was the lack of punishment for their crimes - which sooner or later, by their use of explosives for example, would kill people, if only themselves. Suffragettes boasted of how they went to jail and came out again to do the same again. This was not because of weak magistrates or judges: courts readily jailed trade unionists for assaulting strike-breakers, for example, on dubious evidence. Nor was it that the courts - all run by
men - shied away from punishing women, for soliciting for example. No: then as now, the British courts had no answer to people who did not want to reform their ways; whether burglars with no other work skills, or fanatics for an idea. The country could tolerate those staunch law-breakers, because they were not making too much trouble, and because making allowances made England what it was; not Prussia or Spain.

  England was what it was; neither divided happily by class as St Aldwyn wished; nor split in two between sensible Liberals and wrong Unionists (or the other way round). Some, like a boxer, or the faithful of a political party, would always see themselves in the mirror of their rival: Liberals and Unionists, Christian and godless, town and country, suffragette or socialist and the uninterested rest. England was like a kaleidoscope, with changing patterns at every turn. You had those who worked with their hands, and those that did not; the rough and the drunken, and the respectable and sober; the educated and articulate, and the ignorant and silent; those who sought change for the better, and those who feared change for the worse. And whether in a family, a workplace, a sports team, or the filthiest ‘court’ of houses backing onto one yard with one water pump and toilet for dozens to share, there were those that did the work, and those that let them.

  Chapter 5

  On the Brink

  What is war? I believe that half the people that talk about war have not the slightest idea of what it is.

  John Bright speech of October 1853, from Selected English Speeches from Burke to Gladstone (World’s Classics, 1913)

  I

  Robin Page Arnot in spring 1914 went from Glasgow to London, ‘like so many writer Scots before me’. He went halfway back in the second half of July, as far as Barrow House, on the shores of Derwentwater in the Lake District, for a Fabian Society conference. While seeking a start on a newspaper in Fleet Street, he had become secretary of the Fabian research department. “Instead, like so many people of my age and indeed of almost any age, of having to work at something not of my choice,” he typed in a memoir 60 years later, “I was doing the thing I most wanted to do in all the world.” That was: working for socialist revolution. He and his new friends wanted to end capitalism, and what they called superstitions (such as Christmas, and birthdays); and to reform dress, language, ranks, and titles, even ‘mister’. This summer fortnight in the country was their chance each year to live as they wanted, earnestly and simply. In the morning they heard reports; in the afternoon they went bathing, rowing and climbing; and later, more speeches. “When the din of discussion had died away each evening I could hear before I slept the tinkling sound of the Lodore Falls within the grounds of Barrow House,” Arnot recalled.