The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Royce was never much impressed by flying but Charles Rolls was smitten. By June 1910 he was the best-known aviator in the country, famous for his long-distance flights. He negotiated a strictly private deal with Royce and the other directors which saw him retire from day-to-day work as the car firm’s technical managing director. A few days later the thirty-two-year-old Rolls set off for Bournemouth by train because he had been booked for speeding in Hyde Park. He was on his way to that town’s centenary celebrations, which featured musical concerts conducted by Sir Edward Elgar, masked balls, processions of Boy Scouts – and an air show. A new aerodrome had been created in the town’s Southbourne suburb. Hedges had been torn up and more than forty vegetable allotments removed. A system of multicoloured flags had been prepared for tests of aerial derring-do. Large cash prizes were on offer. Later an over-excited journalist claimed that Rolls arrived in the resort with ‘a look of doom, some strange prognostication of a sudden and fearful end that turned his cheeks grey’. It was very gusty, bad weather for the flimsy biplane, a Wright, that he had brought. A French rival, Edmond Audemars, who had already been up and had crashed without injury, went over to warn him to delay. But Rolls refused and took off, planning a circular flight to be followed by a landing on the appointed mark, close to the judges’ tent. Those watching thought he was coming in too high and reported ‘a sickening snap’ as part of the aircraft came away. He plunged down and crashed. He was thrown to one side of the wreckage and at first sight looked untouched, perhaps only knocked out. But he had been killed instantly. Friends and admirers formed a circle around the body. A news photographer who tried to snap him was set upon; his camera was grabbed and smashed.55

  So a pioneer of British motoring died a pioneer of flying, one of a small band whose efforts would produce the world’s first air battles four years later. He was clearly bored with Rolls-Royce by then, though Royce’s infamous lack of interest in air travel did not stop the company itself playing a dominant role in the aircraft age. Its engines would power the first plane to make a transatlantic crossing, and the Spitfire, and one day Concorde. Rolls had played a key part in creating the company, however. He might have had a short attention span, and never quite understood the fanatical attention to detail and management displayed by Royce, always giving the older man full credit as the engineering genius. But Rolls understood that breakthrough consumer products needed allure, a sprinkling of the magic dust of media attention. His circles and connections ensured that Rolls-Royce cars were winning prizes, were admired and written about by the new mass media, and had a patriotic flavour in a market until then dominated by German, French and American competitors. Had landed wealth and élan worked with northern engineering grit a little more frequently, the industrial history of modern Britain might have been rather more sparkling.

  Rider and Rud: How Shall We Live?

  Many times in the years before the First World War, had you been able to peer through the mullioned windows of a Jacobean house in the Sussex weald, or through the windows of one of London’s men’s clubs, the Savile, you would have found two men talking passionately about the future of the English race and the Empire. One was fat, in his fifties, and thickly bearded, a squire-like figure. The other had a jutting jaw, a thick moustache and equally thick spectacles. Sir Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling were among the most famous men in the English-speaking world and firm friends. Haggard’s yarns such as King Solomon’s Mines and She had made him a celebrity, courted by US presidents and cajoled onto royal commissions. Kipling was the poet of the Empire, a short-story writer and author of children’s tales which were (and are) loved everywhere. Though Haggard had been brought up in East Anglia, he had grown up, fast, in South Africa in the days of the Zulu wars. Kipling had been born in India, and had spent his years of early adulthood as a journalist and poet in Lahore and Simla. Both, now unsettled but settled back in rural England, were in unsatisfactory and dutiful marriages. Both had lost a loved child to illness. By now their most vigorous work was behind them, but as public figures their views on the future of the British in the world were urgently sought.

  In Edwardian Britain the Empire was emphatically not the sole property of the public-schoolboy adventurers, proconsuls or ‘flannelled fools’ (Kipling’s term). Only a few people expressed openly anti-imperial thoughts – some Christian radicals, some Marxists, some Irish nationalists and free spirits such as Wilfred Scawen Blunt, the adventurer and diarist. Progressives and Conservatives both still believed that the Empire was in principle a great civilizing achievement. They might differ about when different parts of the Empire could advance towards self-government; about whether Canada was fated to be incorporated into the United States and about the way to treat ‘native’ peoples with their own legal and religious cultures. But the sense that Britain had a civilizing mission was general. By the Edwardian age the most violent expansionists were history. Cecil Rhodes had been buried in 1902 with a Matabele salute. Only very rarely, as with Francis Younghusband’s assault on Tibet a year later, did the Empire push outwards. A lust for more land and dominion was more likely to be found in Teddy Roosevelt’s Washington, or the Kaiser’s Potsdam. The British heroes were explorers, Captain Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton with their reinforced ships in the Antarctic, or Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon searching through the dust and stony piles of Egypt. Once the British had climbed or slogged with a flag, to take territory and make fortunes; in the years before the First World War they were more often climbing and slogging for the sake of it.

  Haggard and Kipling were more interested in turning imperialism inwards, to change the British, who they both felt had become soft and corrupted by politicians. Haggard admired the Zulus, with their ancient laws and clear morality: ‘Where they differ from us mainly is that they do not get drunk until the white man teaches them to do so . . . their towns at night are not disgraced by the sights that distinguish ours, they cherish and are never cruel to their children, although they may occasionally put a deformed infant or a twin out of the way, and when they do go to war, which is often, they carry out the business with a terrible thoroughness.’56 As to the rights of white men to arrive in their land, he said that God could not have given to one race the right or mission of exterminating or robbing the other: ‘It seems to me that on only one condition, if at all, have we the right to take the black man’s land; and that is that we provide them with an equal and just Government and allow no maltreatment of them . . . Otherwise the practice is surely indefensible.’ If the Empire was to work, then more able-bodied, bright, tough people had to emigrate. Yet meanwhile Britain herself was in a horrible state – declining agriculture and filthy, rotting cities.

  Kipling took just the same view. In his early years in India he had lauded the selfless administrators, struggling with cholera, female infanticide and the caste system, writing to a cousin: ‘For what else do the best men of the Commission die from overwork, and disease, if not to keep the people alive in the first place, and healthy in the second?’57 For him the Empire was a moral cause, little understood by the enfeebled, swarming masses of the industrial cities at home. Central London he found ‘four packed miles of seething vice’, a pullulating place of literary and moral corruption, choking yellow fogs and bitchery. Like Haggard he was a believer in the imperial tariffs crusade of Joe Chamberlain, even if he thought most politicians corrupt and democracy a sham. The thrashing the Boers had administered to Britain provoked a bitter poem, ‘The Islanders’, in which Kipling denounced British feebleness, mocking the ill-prepared soldiers and their political leaders: ‘Sons of the sheltered city – unmade, unhandled, unmeet – Ye pushed them raw into battle as ye picked them raw from the street’. He was equally derisive about the cricketers and footballers footling at home – the ‘muddied oafs’ – and the pheasant-shooting squires. Once he had returned from India, Kipling became increasingly convinced that the soul of the nation was in the soil and timeless agricultural wisdom.

 
Like Kipling, Haggard was worried about the condition of England and saw land-plus-empire as the only way out. Young men were crowding to the towns ‘to seek a living there, sometimes to succeed, sometimes to sink to misery, or the earning of bread by hanging round the dockyard gates in the hope of a casual job’. The answer was to recreate the England of yeomen. To give people a stake in the land, without setting class against class, as the radicals would, he ‘earnestly advocated the division of land amongst about ten times as many as hold it at present, thereby spoiling a great many estates and often interfering with the interests and pleasures of those who shoot and hunt’. He was soon being talked about in rural Suffolk as a dangerous socialist. At a time when General Booth’s Salvation Army was running training camps to redeem broken urban alcoholics and prostitutes, Haggard proposed something similar on a much larger scale in the colonies. The government sent him to Canada to investigate further. Because the Empire disappeared, it is easy to forget how influential the imperialists once seemed. For much of thinking Britannia, Haggard and Kipling represented a clear vision of the future – not the socialists, Liberals and other confused types. Kipling, however, was entering his ‘decade of hating’. His ‘range of loathing’ encompassed Indian nationalists, Irish nationalists, the Germans and all Liberal or soft-Tory politicians. But by 1912 ‘in England it encompassed trade unions, democracy, liberalism, Free Trade, socialism and bungalows’.58 Did the Empire still count? It would be a challenge to the Empire, one close to home, that would rouse Kipling to his most extreme passion.

  The Provisionals at War

  War preparations were well advanced. Some 100,000 men had enlisted, and been drilled and trained by hardened, experienced officers, veterans of many a dusty campaign fighting for the Empire. They were veterans of many marches. They had half a dozen of the latest Vickers Maxim machine guns and 50,000 rifles, many of them brand new. They had paraded beneath the largest Union Jack ever made. They had no artillery yet, nor any air force – this was 1914 – but alongside their regiments and mounted forces they had a motorized corps, more advanced than the enemy could boast, despatch riders, signallers, field telephones and sabotage squads. In their khaki uniforms and caps, the men had already gone through the camaraderie-forming experience of hard training, better-off professionals in civilian life cheerfully learning to take orders from their social inferiors, and all of them bound together by patriotic fervour. Women had been recruited into a large nursing auxiliary for the conflict. Other families, women and children, were already being evacuated. Stocks of food and ammunition had been prepared, plans had been laid for martial law and there were even plans for a wartime currency. Nobody underestimated what lay ahead. The latest warships were ploughing up and down off the coast and large formations of enemy troops were uncomfortably close.

  If this seems a familiar picture of the British preparing to resist German aggression in the summer of 1914, one further fact needs to be added: the enemy here was the British army. This was the Ulster Volunteer Force on the edge of full-scale rebellion. Its political leaders were eminent MPs who had had to scurry fast from Westminster to avoid arrest. Warrants were thought to be being prepared to seize and imprison more than 200 people regarded as traitors by half of Britain, and heroes by the other half. Their cause was supported by the leader of the Conservatives, Andrew Bonar Law, by the great national composer Sir Edward Elgar, by Kipling, by Lord Milner, the former grandee ruler of South Africa, by many of the most important newspapers, much of the House of Lords, an admiral of the fleet and by Lord Roberts, motorist and military hero. The Ulster cause was fervently backed by many less eminent Britons too: its ‘British Covenant’ attracted nearly 2 million signatures. Embarrassingly for the government, many serving British officers and men also supported the rebels. More than the trade unions, the suffragettes or the rebel peerage, this was the crack that threatened to break Britain in two.

  By the summer of 1914 it seemed to well-informed opinion in Berlin, Moscow, Washington and Paris that the United Kingdom was on the very edge of civil war, and that fighting could not long be delayed. A despairing King George V agreed. So did the army’s director of operations, Sir Henry Wilson. Even Churchill thought so. Having misplayed almost every part of this drama, he angrily told the Commons that if it came to rebellion and civil war, the government would fight to win it. Edward Carson, the stone-faced Dublin lawyer who personified the implacable determination of the Ulster cause, now saw ‘no hopes of peace’. Carson, holed up at Craigavon, the ugly house overlooking Belfast Lough which had become the Unionist rebels’ headquarters, guarded by UVF sentries, told his followers they would have to ‘assert the manhood of our race’. In a 1913 Unionist Council meeting, an anonymous but authoritative-sounding assessment had been given: ‘The British Army will hate it, but as a whole I believe they’ll fight against you . . . To impress the English you must not only put up a fight, you must put up a good fight, and I cannot see how you can put up a good fight unless you seize the first move.’ In another paper, the UVF’s ‘No. 1 Scheme’ of early 1914, subtitled ‘The Coup’, plans were duly laid for the cutting of railway, telegraph and phone lines, the capturing of arms and ammunition depots, attacks and capturing of field artillery guns, the closing of roads and blowing up of bridges.59 These were laid by ex-British army commanders with access to plenty of money and tens of thousands of weapons, the best smuggled in by ship from Germany and Austria in a daring operation out of the Kiel Canal and through the sandy Baltic murk of Erskine Childers’s novel. All over Britain, young men had quietly slipped away to join the rebel army.

  It seems outlandish. People in Sussex or Glasgow taking up arms because of Belfast – surely not? Yet it did not seem so strange at the time. At Blenheim Place, birthplace of Churchill, Bonar Law, the Tory leader, had told the Duke of Marlborough and the assembled worthies that Winston and his Liberal government were nothing less than ‘a revolutionary committee which has seized upon despotic power by fraud’ and promised there was ‘no length of resistance’ which he would not support. If force was used, the Conservative Party would support it. At another demonstration in London, peers and highly respectable old gents from their clubs, in top hats and astrakhan coats, joined to cheer the rebels. The Times was in support. In Liverpool shipyards and Hammersmith pubs, working men had stored huge quantities of smuggled arms for Ulster. On Tunbridge Wells Common a pro-Ulster demonstration began, according to the Times reporter, with ‘a mounted escort of sturdy Kentish yeomen’ leading a long procession round town, with bugles and hymn-singing. Then Kipling spoke in the most extraordinarily incendiary terms. After attacking the corruption of the government, he said the Home Rule Bill had broken the faith of generations: ‘it officially recognized sedition, privy conspiracy and rebellion; it subsidized the secret forces of boycott, intimidation, outrage and murder’. It meant, said the poet, ‘life or death – and better death than the life it would impose on [Ulster’s] sons’. There were cheers. Kipling went on that it was also a matter of life or death ‘to every freeman in these islands. Ireland is sold today. Tomorrow it may be the turn of the Southern counties to be weighted off as a makeweight in some secret bargain. Why not?’

  This life or death crisis, causing troop movements and something close to paranoia throughout Conservative Britain, had been provoked by a bill proposing a form of home rule for Ireland (a Dublin-based parliament) that was very far short of independence and would have kept Ireland well inside the UK and empire. It was little more than devolution, since defence, trade, foreign policy and imperial issues would all be kept by London. Yet Ireland had been England’s first colony. Dublin rule would mean Roman Catholic domination, and the end of the Protestant ascendancy. At the very least, Protestant Ulster must be allowed to go its own way. Kipling and his friends – including perhaps half of middle-class Britain – thought it meant the beginning of the end for the Empire. Ireland was not a foreign country – not, at least, to the great Tory landowners and aristocrats who bulked so
large in Edwardian London. In the Punch stories and cartoons, in the Irish hunting season, in the grand houses of the Protestant ascendancy and in the Irish baronetcies so freely scattered through polite society, the world of southern Ireland felt close to home. Even the Irish nationalists in the Commons, fierce men in their day, had become part of the familiar furniture of political life, grand witty fellows, most of them. Now it was all to be spoiled because the damned Liberals relied on Irish nationalist votes in the Commons and Asquith had done a devil’s deal.

  In the 1910 general elections, Asquith had barely mentioned Ireland. Now he was suddenly threatening the very future of the UK, as the price of power. The fact that Lloyd George had just escaped by the skin of his teeth being caught corruptly dealing in shares, and that the Lords had finally been neutered, added to this obscure but real sense of political grievance, of being cheated, so eloquently exploited by Kipling. Carson’s great Ulster covenant, signed by nearly half a million people, and the flag-draped ceremonies in town halls and in Belfast, made a big impression on British minds. For years the nationalists had indulged in violent attacks, jeered at the British flag, complained about their lot and now seemed to have Asquith in some kind of parliamentary armlock. The Ulster Unionists flew the flag and practised, in their quiet Scottish way, the virtues of hard work and thrift while appealing quietly to their King. So how had it come about that, as a result of a parliamentary deal, Britain was backing her critics against her friends?