The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Invasion shudders kept coming. Another began with ‘news’ that German battleships had bombarded and then destroyed the forts at Harwich, followed by the arrival of 5,000 troops there, Zeppelin attacks on the dockyards at Chatham and the advance of the German army through Colchester and Chelmsford. As they approach the capital, there is panic in London. Terrified citizens try to stop British soldiers being sent to France to try to hold the line there: ‘April 7, Afternoon. – Serious rioting in London . . . Enormous crowds, converging on Westminster, were repeatedly charged by the mounted police, and finally fired on by the two battalions of Guards which had been assigned to the duty of protecting His Majesty’s person . . . [the population] endeavoured everywhere to prevent the departure of troop trains by invading the lines, tearing up the rails, or laying themselves in front of the engines.’ The government is overwhelmingly defeated in the Commons and is replaced by a new one, with the single purpose of saving London. The Germans arrive in Romford and Woolwich and there is continuous street fighting until they reach Tottenham. Meanwhile the British and French armies in France are totally defeated. On the story goes, in great detail, until finally the tide begins to turn. It is compelling, much more so than Le Queux. So it should be, perhaps. For the author was none other than Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty; and its audience was admiring naval chieftains.

  Yet five years earlier, Churchill had devoted a major speech to ridiculing war with Germany. The two countries needed each other’s trade and the big British colonies were under absolutely no threat from Germans. ‘What remains as a prize to be fought over by two great countries? Nothing but tropical plantations and small coaling places scattered here and there . . . although there may be snapping and snarling in the newspapers and in the London clubs, these two great peoples have nothing to fight about . . . Are we all such sheep . . . Are we all become such puppets and marionettes to be wire-pulled against our interests into such hideous convulsions?’ Churchill’s intimation of slaughter ahead gives the lie to the popular belief that Edwardians had no notion of what a future European war might mean and sauntered towards the trenches. In Wells’s book Anticipations, he foresees ‘the grey old general . . . who learnt his art of war away in the vanished nineteenth century’ with his epaulettes, sword and obsolete horse riding at the head of his doomed column: ‘Nothing can happen but the needless and most wasteful and pitiful killing of these poor lads who make up the infantry battalions . . . The scattered invisible marksmen with their supporting guns will shatter their masses . . . It will be more like herding sheep than actual fighting.’ Thinking Edwardians knew perfectly well what might happen, the catastrophe of a war of cavalry and young soldiers in the age of machines. As with Churchill in 1908, many were determined to avoid it at all costs.

  What changed? For Churchill, it was not simply the move from Trade to the Home Office, with its defence stores responsibilities, and then to the Admiralty itself. Initially he was with Lloyd George in trying to limit the number of super-expensive new Dreadnoughts to four, while the crowds were chanting ‘We want eight and we won’t wait’ – something he later frankly admitted had been a big personal mistake. But the increasingly menacing behaviour of the Germans shifted him, and many more. He knew Germany as well as any senior minister, through friendships with businessmen and having been invited over twice by the Kaiser to watch the German army on manoeuvres. He knew that the Imperial German Navy was expanding very fast and the Kaiser was making it clear that the warships were not for show. The sending of a gunboat to Morocco in 1911, a deliberate provocation to France in a colonial dispute, sent such a shiver through London that serious war preparations had begun. It was only after a menacing speech from Lloyd George, making clear that Britain would come to the aid of the French in any war, that Germany backed down. The famous German Naval Law of 1912 sharply increased the rate of building of warships and the widening of the Kiel Canal to allow free access to the North Sea from the Baltic, both directly challenged the Royal Navy’s command of the home seas. The race between German and British shipyards was frantic, despite calls for a halt, or ‘holiday’, by Churchill, right up to the outbreak of war. In a speech in 1912 which caused grave offence to Berlin, Churchill had pointed out that there was a difference in danger to the two countries. The British navy was a necessity, the German one ‘more in the nature of a luxury . . . It is existence to us; it is expansion to them. We cannot menace the peace of a single Continental hamlet, no matter how great and supreme our Navy may become.’ But Britain could be defeated and ‘swept away utterly’ by naval defeat: ‘It is the British Navy which makes Great Britain a great power. But Germany was a great power, respected and honoured all over the world, before she had a single ship.’

  We are back to the world of Erskine Childers and a planned German strike on Britain. The fact that this never happened, and was ridiculed by Berlin, does not invalidate Churchill’s point. As he sailed happily around the ports and squadrons of the navy in his rather grand Admiralty yacht, organizing new strategies and shifting the whole fleet from coal to oil, Churchill was well aware that a single naval defeat could finish everything. By the time the Battle of Jutland took place, a bloody draw, only the Royal Navy could have lost the war in an afternoon. That this did not happen, despite ferocious shipbuilding and the latest submarine technology from the Germans, is partly down to Churchill, and the panicky, Germanophobic mood of the country which supported him. The spy manias and terrors were often silly. Organizations such as the Navy League were on the far right of Edwardian politics and helped foment suspicion of foreigners and radicals in government. Yet the threat was real all along. Long before Edwardian politicians were sure of it, they had to find some way of paying for the ruinously expensive ships, while keeping their promises on welfare alive. By then Churchill had already sketched out the likely strategy of a European war and the numbers of forces on each side, as well as what the German high command would do, with uncanny accuracy. From now on, he seemed to assume that war was likely.

  Enter the Workers

  A little earlier, a short, angry-looking man in a soft felt hat had sent a letter to Mr Churchill, then home secretary. Ben Tillett said the dock workers ‘shall bring about a state of war . . . Hunger and poverty have driven the Dock and Ship workers to this present resort, and neither your police, your soldiers, your murder nor Cossacks will avert the disaster coming to this country.’ This was written in the hot summer of 1911, as the meat by the wharves began to stink, long rows of butter in barrels turned rancid, huge piles of vegetables rotted, and tempers rose. Edwardian Britain, like Britain today, lived on imported food. Unlike today, it was brought in entirely by boat and unloaded by hand, tens of thousands of ill-paid men – stevedores, lightermen, carmen – trundling barrows and barrels, working cranes, loading drays and unpacking crates for a few pence an hour. For decades they had been pitted against one another, scrabbling for work in mutually hostile groups. Now, under Tillett and his comrades, they were suddenly speaking as one. The government and the capital were helpless before them, unless, like the Czar, Mr Churchill really was prepared to order in the cavalry. The cabinet swiftly buckled and the strike won the eightpence-an-hour victory the dockers had sought.

  Tillett was one of a remarkable group of working-class leaders who had emerged in late-Victorian Britain. Bigamous, violent in his language and wildly inconsistent, he was a man who knew what life at the bottom was really like. He was born into a large and poor family in Bristol, and his mother died when he was one. His father worked in a cart factory when he wasn’t drinking, which wasn’t often. By the age of seven, to pay the bills, Tillett was working in a brick factory cutting slabs of clay from daylight to dusk. Up in Scotland his great rival Keir Hardie, just a little older, had endured early years that were just as harsh and just as typical of Victorian working life. According to family lore he was born to his unmarried farm-labourer mother in a turnip field. After she met and wed a carpenter and moved to Glasgow, t
he young Hardie, aged ten, worked twelve hours a day delivering bread. Trying to help his mother, he was late for work one morning, and was sacked by his master, whom he remembered sitting at a mahogany table with his family round him, the coffee bubbling and their plates loaded with dainties, as he lectured the boy. The anger he felt then stayed with Hardie all his life, keeping him warm on cold evenings in backstreet meetings for decades to come.

  In Bristol, Tillett ran away to join Old Joe Barker’s Circus and became an acrobat, until a sister snatched him back and had him taught shoemaking. But Tillett was wild and angry and his father caught him in a theatre and turned him over to the Royal Navy at thirteen. At that age, Hardie was sitting for long hours in a dark room in a Lanarkshire coal mine, operating a trap door to let air into the mine shaft. These were not children who would have needed Seebohm Rowntree’s researchers to tell them about unfairness. Tillett and Hardie would cobble together their education in fits and snatches, Tillett in the navy, until he fell off some rigging and had to be invalided out, and Hardie through his mother and step-father, and with underground exercises in the darkness. They grew up forcing themselves to read and re-read the same books until they understood them – Carlyle and Ruskin, Dickens and Shakespeare. They both attended a Congregational church and began to climb upwards by organizing trade unions for workers in desperate straits. For Hardie, it was the Lanarkshire and Ayrshire miners in the 1880s. Tillett, at just the same time, had left the merchant navy and was living in the vile slums of Bethnal Green working as a docker, one of around 100,000 casual labourers who would queue for work each morning at the gates of the wharves hoping to get hired, when, according to evidence given to the House of Lords at the time, ‘men struggle like wild beasts; we stand upon one another’s shoulders’.

  A sickly-looking man with stubble and a stutter, Tillett taught himself public speaking, co-founding his first union in a Hackney pub. Like Hardie he was roughed up by company thugs and after the epic London dock strike of 1889 he founded the Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers’ Union, which in due course and by merger eventually became the mighty Transport and General Workers’ Union. Hardie, meanwhile, had been working for the Scottish miners and founding Britain’s first Labour party, the Scottish Labour Party. Neither man began as a socialist; both were radical Liberals. They were attracted to Marxism and each knew Engels, but turned from that to become founding members of the Independent Labour Party, formed in Bradford in 1893. They both ended up in Parliament. They seem, therefore, a matched pair. Yet Hardie and Tillett would veer off in wildly different directions, which together explain a lot about the failures and successes of the socialists before the First World War.

  Hardie, a temperance campaigner, preacher and organizer, took the high road of building a parliamentary party. Tillett believed that socialism could come about only through trade union insurgency outside Parliament. For a while the two became rival heroes to millions of workers. In the Commons, Keir Hardie was the first socialist, working-class MP who looked and sounded what he was. In an age when MPs all wore dark frock-coats, stiff collars and top hats, he famously arrived in a simple woollen suit with a red scarf, or tie, and a floppy hat, usually described as a cloth cap but more like a deerstalker. More important, he refused to play the usual Commons game, protesting against the time spent on grovelling addresses to the royal family, insisting that MPs had the right, and duty, to discuss the grimy details of working-class life and supporting strikers everywhere. Today those who remember Hardie tend to see him as an almost Christ-like figure, gentle, bearded and modest. In his heyday he seemed to the middle classes a menacing and ferocious character. His very name was used by nursemaids to scare their whimpering charges.

  Tillett seemed as threatening. In 1912, during the second great London dock workers’ strike, he was openly preparing for violent confrontation. His hat tipped back on his head, he would be found standing in the open air at Tower Hill in front of a silent river and a sea of faces, demanding how many there had some military training and would join the Transport Workers’ Civilian Police. As a forest of hands rose his language became wilder: ‘Sedition or no sedition, I want to say that if our men are murdered I am going to take a gun and I will shoot Lord Devonport’ – he being the leader of the employers with whom he was negotiating. Three weeks later, at Hyde Park, Tillett was again promising violence, and indeed revolvers were used, and men wounded, soon after in fighting between strikers and strike-breakers. Tillett then appealed to God to strike Lord Devonport dead and the crowd chanted back: ‘He shall die, he shall die.’ That strike failed, but there were waves of strikes in 1911–12 in the railways, textile mills, mines and shipyards which shook the Edwardian elite, Liberal and Tory. Revolutionary trade unionism, then fashionable on the left in France and America, was thought a more serious threat than socialist parties.

  In November 1910 striking miners at Tonypandy in south Wales began a three-day riot which the police could not control. Churchill, as home secretary, was asked for hussars and infantry. Contrary to his later reputation for impetuous violence against strikers, Churchill refused to allow them to proceed but halted them at Swindon while he telegraphed an appeal to the miners to stop. Instead, he ordered police reinforcements from London. In a telegram to the King he explained that constables were better. Troops would not have arrived in time to stop the looting of shops and ‘infantry soldiers can if attacked or stoned only reply by fire from long-range rifles which often kills foolish sightseers . . . or innocent people’. The cavalry and infantry were eventually sent but by then the rioting had stopped. Churchill was angrily attacked for his weakness in The Times and defended in the Manchester Guardian, which reckoned he had saved many lives by holding back the troops, who would simply have bayoneted rioters. It is curious that about the only fact ‘everyone knows’ about Churchill’s early political career was that he sent in troops to kill strikers at Tonypandy. Liverpool’s dock strike was in fact a much more serious affair, with a week of serious violence and appeals from its mayor who told ministers it was not a strike but that a revolution was in progress. Again Churchill urged the use of police, not the army. But the strikes spread throughout Liverpool and, once a national railway strike began, the mood became uglier. The Riot Act was read, the entire Aldershot garrison was sent north and a warship appeared off the coast at Birkenhead. Huge meetings in the city and further rioting left two men dead.

  King George V sent a telegram to Churchill warning against ‘half hearted deployment of troops’. They should only be used as a last resort but, his telegram ended, ‘if called on they should be given a free hand & the mob should be made to fear them. GEORGE R.I.’ Meanwhile the panicking mayor of Birkenhead told the Home Office: ‘I do not think that I have sufficient resources at my disposal. If you cannot send me more military or naval support, I cannot answer for the safety of life or property.’ In the circumstances, though Lloyd George’s talks which stopped the national rail strike were the real breakthrough, Churchill’s moderation is quite impressive. Elsewhere, there was panic. Upper-class gents rushed to buy revolvers to protect themselves in their London clubs and army encampments appeared in Hyde Park, Regent’s Park and Battersea Park. It was reckoned that every soldier in the country was on standby and there was much talk of the coming revolution. The vast coal-miners’ strike of 1912 saw 850,000 miners stop working, with another 1.3 million workers affected. This was only halted after most of what they wanted was conceded in Parliament.

  It seemed that perhaps the syndicalists were right. Keir Hardie began to argue for a single massive union to batter down the walls: ‘The old idea of separate unions has passed away. The colliers, the iron workers, the steel workers, the artisans, the railway men, the shop assistants, the school teachers, the gas workers and the street cleaners have all got to stand together . . . as members of one class.’46 Tillett’s second dock strike was a failure, the men effectively starved back to work, but the strikes and insurrectionary language went on. O
ver in Dublin another huge and violent transport workers’ strike the following year, led by James Larkin and James Connolly, ended with five dead and thousands injured, plus hundreds of strikers arrested and jailed. At the 1913 meeting of the TUC in Manchester, Tillett responded to the slaughter in Dublin by arguing to cheers that strikers had the right to have firearms and use them: ‘War has been declared upon the workers . . . This exhibition of Czardom is something we will fight against, even if it is sedition and civil war to do so.’47 Women factory workers in fizzy-drinks factories, jam factories, cigar factories and chain-making factories all struck during the sweltering 1911 summer. So did schoolchildren, protesting against the use of the cane, and too much homework.48

  Socialism had begun to emerge as a living idea among working-class people in the 1880s. It was about as unformed, vague and prone to splits as any early religion, and its dreams of a better future were fuzzy. For the followers of William Morris and English socialists like Blatchford it promised paradise on earth, a return to simpler lives with no slimy-walled slums or ear-splitting factories. It is easy to mock, but on the edge of the great cities and beyond, plenty of working-class families did keep livestock, grew vegetables and had their own hens to supplement their income. In the mining villages, the countryside was never far away. Among the innumerable small unions there were plenty of self-educated craftsmen. Morris, with his intricate wallpaper designs and olde-worlde typefaces and parables, seems desperately old fashioned now. To many late Victorians, though, he seemed modern, a herald of the future; perhaps the best comparison is with radical environmentalists of our age. For others, socialism was inextricably linked with Christianity. There were Labour churches and socialist churches operating very like nonconformist chapels all across industrial Britain, often knitted together by travelling speakers, including the cyclists and horse-drawn vans of Robert Blatchford’s Clarion movement. In the early days, almost all radicals and socialists were still inside the Liberal family. But it was starting to get harder to see how a party with landowners and mill owners so dominant among its MPs could really be an agent of dramatic social change.