The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age

by Juliet Nicolson

  Word of the liberal atmosphere of Dalton’s got about and soon Belgian and Russian refugees, peers, princes and even the King of Denmark were all jostling against each other on the small dance floor. At first sight the club was filled with ‘decent men and sweet girls’, but Kate became aware of ‘faces stamped with the unmistakable signs of a vicious life’. Nearby the area of Chinatown was taking decadence to a new level. Prostitutes mingled with the Chinese who allowed them into their restaurants. A reporter for the Illustrated London News was shocked by the scene he encountered. Customers ate ‘in full view of passers-by with chopsticks, poking for choice morsels’ and, opening their mouths very wide, proceeded to ‘stoke themselves in a very alarming manner’.

  In early December 1919 The Times carried a short report concerning the arrest of Mr William Change, an elderly Chinaman of Limehouse Causeway, who was charged with being in possession of 9.5 lb of opium and 10.5 lb of morphine. Mr Change confessed that he smoked no less than a quarter of a pound of opium mixed with morphine daily, pleading against his punishment that he was a victim to the drug and would die if he abandoned the habit.

  Drugs were only part of a growing promiscuity spreading across all classes of society. Sir William Arbuthnot Lane, the Army’s chief surgeon during the war, addressing the General Medical Council on the prevention of venereal disease, argued that ‘It is an indisputable fact that irregular intercourse has greatly increased and that the average moral code of young women has altered very materially for the worse.’ He continued in a voice of gloom, ‘That moral degeneration especially among women will not disappear for a very long time in spite of all attempts to educate and improve the tone of the community.’

  Marie Stopes’s outspoken but sensible advice was almost entirely directed at heterosexual couples. But others allowed a sense of postwar liberation to overcome any lingering inhibitions. Men and women lived openly together. Not wishing to be committed by law and regarding such a union in Robert Graves’s words as ‘a social habit rather than a sacrament’, these couples were referred to as being in a ‘companionate marriage’. Women who slept with other women went to the opera dressed in male tuxedos and no one minded, much. In dance halls in the most emancipated parts of London, Chelsea and St John’s Wood among them, lesbians took their licence from Berlin nightclubs and swung on to the dance floor with each other in an undisguised embrace. Homosexual men had to be a little more careful. Unlike the women, they were required to observe a law forbidding their union and Scotland Yard was reputed to hold a list of prominent suspects all of them listed in Who’s Who. And yet the desire to be ‘living one’s life’, as they reminded each other in the popular phrase, gave many homosexuals the courage to ‘break cover’.

  With the increasing awareness and encouragement of freedom given by contraceptive devices, the number of prostitutes in the country was said to be nudging 75,000. They too exhibited a new brazen confidence. In Salford two ‘henna-haired girls from Cardiff’ lived in a ‘hovel’ next to Robert Roberts’s corner shop. Dressed in a combination of frills and nautical serge, they worked the docklands by night and bought their breakfast from the shop in the morning. Mrs Roberts was happy to serve them, but older men denounced them as ‘trollops’ and ‘a bloody disgrace to the neighbourhood’.

  A different class of’moneyed and lonely women’ were encouraged by psychiatrists to speak, for a fat fee, of their ‘feelings’. The sceptical condemned the indulgence of talking about oneself in ‘prattling detail’ as a ‘dredging up from the oozy depths of the mind childish memories of thwarted inclinations which would account for later aberrancies’. But the release of ‘feelings’ from the locked corners of the mind was a source of help that thousands longed for.

  On the first day of December the country’s figurehead, and embodiment of reserve and propriety, was waiting on the platform at Victoria Station. Queen Mary was wearing a new purple and gold toque with a favourite diamond arrow pinned to the front. She was a little nervous. She was aware that the new hat bordered on the fashionable. She watched her husband as he stood a little in front of her on the station platform, while the rain drummed down on the roof above, waiting for the train bringing their eldest son home from his four-month absence abroad on official duty in America and Canada.

  The rain had been drenching London since dawn and hundreds of umbrellas like shiny black mushrooms had been unfurled against the weather. The Times said ‘there never was, not even in London and in December, a more utterly hopeless heartbreaking day, the air full of yellow fog, a day in which a man would not stay two minutes out of doors to meet his best friend.’

  Standing near the King was a damp collection of men dressed in tailcoats and top hats. These were the most senior members of the Cabinet and included the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, and Bonar Law, second in command in the Coalition Government, the Chancellor Arthur Balfour, the Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon and the Minister for War Winston Churchill.

  The train pulled slowly into the station, the feathers of the Prince of Wales pinned to the front of the engine. As soon as the slight figure of the heir to the throne had stepped from the royal train on to the slippery platform, he told the waiting photographers and reporters that his long trip abroad had been ‘a delightful and most valuable experience which will influence the whole of my life’.

  For once Mary was unable to restrain herself. The moment the Prince finished speaking she gripped him tightly, relieved to see that the swelling on his right hand had subsided, and that the bruising, a result of an excess of enthusiastic New World handshaking, had faded. ‘Put it right here, Ed,’ he later told his mother, had been the constant and undeniable request.

  The Pall Mall Gazette noted with appreciation that Mary ‘gave him a truly motherly caress’ while the Prince kissed her on both cheeks and then, most surprisingly, repeated the gesture to his father. His grandmother, regarding the return of her favourite grandson as a perfect present on the day of her seventy-fifth birthday, gave the young man a huge hug that produced the Prince’s characteristic blush of pleasure beneath his fair skin. The scene as witnessed by the Tatler was one of ‘a most astonishingly united family’ and it commented approvingly that the Prince was ‘better looking than ever by the way he carries his clothes and things and hasn’t left behind him any of that charm – Barrie’s immortal power’.

  During his time in America the Prince had been attracted by the East Coast fashions, and in particular by the appearance of ‘the slicker’ style. Amory Elaine, a fictional young dandy who had recently graduated from Princeton, was the hero of a first novel by an ambitious 22-year-old writer called Scott Fitzgerald. This Side of Paradise had just been accepted by Charles Scribner, the successful New York publisher, and was due to be published shortly. According to Scott Fitzgerald, the hair of a slicker was ‘inevitably worn short, soaked in water or tonic. Parted in the middle and slicked back.’

  Lunch at Buckingham Palace that day was ‘very cheery’, Queen Mary was pleased to record, and later that evening family harmony was sustained at a welcome home dinner for nearly sixty friends, which to the relief of the Prince of Wales made no concessions to prohibition such as he had encountered at some places in the United States. Indeed The Times noted that a year had elapsed since the unsealing of the cellar doors at Buckingham Palace, after the wartime gesture of abstinence made by the King, which had proved not at all popular with several guests who found themselves required to make the same sacrifice. ‘George made a charming speech and David made a charming reply,’ Mary wrote in her diary that evening.

  During the first few days after his return, the King pressed his son for information about America, fascinated by the size of the buildings, the quantity of cars. He was moved by the Prince’s account of the tragic sight of an exhausted President Wilson. Three months after signing the Peace Treaty in Paris Wilson had fallen to his bathroom floor suffering a catastrophic stroke that had left him paralysed down his left side and blind in his left eye. The Pres
ident had greeted the Prince from an undignified position inside Lincoln’s bed in the White House, wearing what the Prince described as ‘the most disappointed face that I had ever looked upon’.

  The King was also hugely interested in the effects of prohibition and infuriated by the Prince’s habit of whistling a catchy tune called ‘A Pretty Girl is Like a Melody’ that he had heard at the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway. George was even more aghast to learn that Edward had bought a ranch near Calgary, while attempting a half joke that his son’s new interest in property might well lead on subsequent trips abroad to the acquisition of a sheep station in Australia and an ostrich farm in South Africa.

  But it was not only his family who were longing to hear about the Prince’s adventures. The four-month separation from his married girlfriend Freda Dudley Ward had been difficult for them both, but Edward was determined to make up for lost time.

  T. E. Lawrence was preoccupied by a different sort of urgency. That spring Lawrence had begun writing a memoir of the war that was turning out to be longer than he had anticipated. But he was not a naturally fluent writer and the process was becoming a struggle. He began writing more intensively, travelling up and down from Oxford to London by train, dividing his writing time between his dark oak-panelled rooms at All Souls and an attic room in Barton Street in Westminster that had been lent to him at the beginning of the summer by the architect Sir Herbert Baker. In the most basic of accommodation, without heat or hot water, he wrote throughout the night and slept by day, never smoking or drinking, and existing on bars of chocolate. When delirious with hunger after working for more than twenty-four hours without sleep, he would make an occasional visit to a nearby café for egg and bacon or fish and chips.

  Shortly after the Great Silence he had been changing trains at Reading station before catching the fast service to Oxford. The manuscript of the nearly completed book, eight of eleven planned chapters all written in Lawrence’s neat hand plus many original photographs and notes made while still in Arabia, had all been packed into an official army attaché case, similar to the kind used by bank messengers for transporting gold between branches. Lawrence was hungry and found he had a few minutes between connections. The refreshment room offered a delicious range of cakes, and safely storing his bag on the dining table beside him, he deliberated for a few moments over which cake to choose, after the self-imposed denial of the Westminster attic room. Suddenly the train to Oxford was announced and Lawrence had to run to catch it. One hour later, frantic telephone calls from Oxford were answered by the apologetic stationmaster who was obliged to report that neither a bag nor any ring-bound ledger had been found although the station had been turned upside down in the search. Yes, Lawrence was told, they realised there was only one copy. Yes, they realised how important it was.

  Lawrence was distraught. But his great friend and mentor, D. G. Hogarth, Keeper of the Ashmolean Museum, persuaded Lawrence that he had no choice but to start again. Lawrence, a perfectionist, was appalled at the thought of the effort involved and L. P. Hartley, a young writer friend at All Souls, believed that ‘only a masterpiece could satisfy his pretensions’. Lawrence began to write at ferocious speed, averaging a sizeable four to five thousand words a day, telling Robert Graves that he had once completed thirty-four thousand words in twenty-four hours. Sometimes he neither ate nor slept, nor changed his clothes for several days, although he would occasionally take a sixpenny dip in the Westminster public baths and every so often he would check himself into the Savoy, give all his laundry to the housekeeper and spend a night of luxury before returning to the Westminster garret.

  The chapter which gave him most pleasure in writing was that devoted to a description of an aeroplane flight to Egypt. His friend and landlord Herbert Baker realised that ‘his weakened nerve-batteries, as with so many but less sensitive war-shocked men, required recharging with the alcohol of speed’. As a way of relaxing Lawrence would ride his motorbike through the tram tunnel under Kingsway and down the Duke of York’s steps. Lawrence mischievously suggested that the Prince of Wales might ‘make more of a dash’ if he drove his car up and down the same route from Carlton House Terrace to the Mall. The speed brought Lawrence a sense of supreme release from the tensions of a year of politics, writing and largely unwelcome fame.

  There was no such release for the Prince of Wales who was, he began to realise, embarking on a seemingly unshakeable lifetime of demands although he shared with Lawrence a sometime aversion to the stardom that life had bestowed on both men.

  11

  Expectation

  Mid-Winter 1919

  A rich, twice-married American divorcee who lived in one of the grandest houses in the land was not an obvious candidate to represent the post-war female electorate. At Nancy Astor’s house, Cliveden in Berkshire, there was a resident French chef to cater for Nancy, her husband and the five children. Horses wearing special boots designed to prevent their hooves from damaging the turf pulled the machines that mowed the smooth and lovely lawns.

  But on the same day that the Prince of Wales arrived home, his exuberantly youthful appearance beginning to restore many people’s faith in the future of the monarchy, an elegantly dressed woman was giving hope for a new future to millions of her own sex. With the vote now awarded to most women, with some qualifying restrictions, Nancy Astor was taking her seat in the House of Commons as the first woman Member of Parliament.

  The by-election for the Conservative seat at Plymouth had arisen by accident. A month earlier Nancy’s father-in-law, Lord Astor, had suffered a fatal heart attack after dining alone on a hearty plate of mutton and a glass of good red wine. On inheriting his father’s title, Waldorf Astor, the MP for Plymouth, was propelled from his seat in the Commons into the House of Lords. An opportunity presented itself, and after much speculation in the press as they awaited her decision Nancy, at the age of 40, declared her intention to stand for her husband’s recently vacated seat.

  At once she became a symbol of hope for women throughout the country. Curiously it was her very foreignness that released her from the class constraints under which the well-born and smartly spoken Pankhursts had suffered. Her no-nonsense, non-militant, ‘merry mixing’ ways attracted many men as well as women. ‘We are not asking for superiority,’ she had said of her own sex, ‘for we have always had that; all we ask is equality.’

  At a campaign rally on 19 November she had not for a moment been put off her stride by a cynical question hurled at her from the audience, wondering whether there was a shortage of work for an American woman in America. Nor had she been thrown by an editorial in the Sketch full of potentially unsettling sarcasm: ‘Lady Astor, I am sure, must have some definite reason for all this expenditure of energy other than the desire to be the first person to sit in Parliament. She would not waste her time and her own money on such a silly little motive.’

  The Saturday Review of 15 November, however, had been openly hostile to the proposed candidate, accusing her of treating her candidacy as a ‘nursery romp’. ‘If we must have women in Parliament,’ the journal expostulated in shrill tones, ‘let them at least be Englishwomen who have the peculiar knowledge of English habits and life and wants that comes only to those who are to the manor born.’ Challenging Nancy’s marital status, the magazine continued to table-thump. ‘We deny that she has any qualification for the duty of representing Plymouth, particularly its women. Perhaps there is no subject more interesting to the female voters than the law of divorce. We are surprised that no elector has elicited Lady Astor’s view on the question.’ The journal accused the constituency of Plymouth of being the most frivolous and corrupt constituency in the country and called for its disenfranchisement.

  A year earlier in the Coupon election, Countess Markievicz, beautiful, Irish and friend of the poet W B. Yeats, had been the first woman to win a place in Parliament. However, after refusing to take the oath of allegiance, she had not taken up her seat in the House and now became one of Nancy Astor’s fier
cest critics, calling her ‘upper class and out of touch’. In some ways the Countess was right. Nancy was poorly qualified to stand as a Member of Parliament. She was largely uninformed about the dominant political issues of the day and her charitable work was driven by a strong Protestant and fiercely anti-Catholic commitment and an unbending moral certainty. In her firm but musical voice she had denounced France as ‘just one big brothel’. Her position as a Christian Scientist had become well known during the war as she made clear her belief that God was responsible for the good in the world, and that mankind must take the blame for evil.

  But Nancy was a spirited and forthright woman and her political campaign had revealed her energy and her willingness to take on the hecklers, to stand firm, to visit the poorest parts of the constituency, even while wearing her best pearls and white gloves, her hands on hips as she stood to address them. Oswald Mosley, the youthful Conservative MP for Harrow who had his own ambitions for high office, was one of Nancy’s campaign organisers and he marvelled at her electioneering technique. ‘She had, of course, unlimited effrontery,’ he observed. ‘She was less shy than any woman - or any man - one has ever known. She’d address the audience and then she’d go across to some old woman scowling in a neighbouring doorway, who simply hated her, take both her hands and kiss her on the cheek.’

  The people of Plymouth also admired her for her outspoken manner. She was not afraid to confront the disparaging comments that she knew were being whispered behind her back. And they simply loved her jokes. ‘And now, my dears,’ she would cry from her electioneering carriage, her silk-hatted coachman guiding the red, white and blue-ribboned reins of his horses through the Plymouth crowd. ‘I’m going back to one of my beautiful palaces to sit down in my tiara and do nothing and when I roll out in my car I will splash you all with mud and look the other way.’ The self-denigrating wit was hard to resist.