by Andrew Marr
For Britain, the lesson of the Irish revolt and war was simply that no empire can hold peoples down unless it is prepared to be ruthless and to ignore public opinion. Rightly or wrongly, Collins had suggested the IRA were close to being beaten before George V’s intervention, but Britain could only have held Ireland at a very heavy cost, one that this growing democracy was not prepared to pay. India, Egypt and the sub-Saharan African colonies were, of course, much further away but the same would eventually apply to them. Britain did not bestride the world after the first German war in the same way that America did after the second. She had the appearance of world power but could not continue both as a vast imperium and as a democracy. Lloyd George and the many other senior politicians failed to understand that democracy and empire are opposing ideas and cannot live long together. Britain in 1920 was closer to being a democracy than ever before, and had experienced how an interventionist state could shake things up. She was on the way to being modern. But she remained in many ways an inefficient and old-fashioned country, yearning for some kind of Roman imperial past and confused about the future.
As for Lloyd George, his time was now over. He had hugely enjoyed the drama of the world stage which victory had brought him, and he was as full as ever of ruses and wheezes. But though he was Everything, he was also Nobody: he had no real national party to lead, and no agenda that would enthuse the Conservative MPs he didn’t quite lead. When, in October 1922, the Tory backbenchers met at the Carlton Club and decided they wanted to fight the general election as Conservatives, chucking aside Lloyd George and the coalition, he could give them no reply. The meeting cast a long shadow: even today the Tory backbenchers’ organization is called ‘the 1922 committee’, or just ‘the twenty-two’. It was an extraordinary moment, when the ordinary MPs of a party founded on deference and order rose up against their grandees, Austen Chamberlain, F. E. Smith and the rest. Leading the revolt were Bonar Law, who had been outside government and was already ill, and Baldwin. Having burned some of his fortune, he had taken a further bold step by telling the rest of the Unionists in government he would not under any circumstances continue to serve under the Goat. Now, his speech was devastatingly simple. He merely pointed out that Lloyd George was ‘a dynamic force . . . A dynamic force is a very terrible thing.’ This one had smashed the Liberal Party to pieces and would smash the Tories to pieces too. By 185 votes to 88 they decided to ditch Lloyd George and return to independent Toryism. It was an act of defiance unmatched until the ‘peasants’ revolt’ which installed Margaret Thatcher. The grandees were offended and sulked, though Lord Curzon came round soon enough.
The election which followed saw a slaughter of Lloyd George’s supporters. He survived, almost alone of the leading National Liberals, left in very much the same position of humiliated impotence as Asquith had been a few years earlier. Time brings in its revenges. Lloyd George would continue to speak, write and plot, trying to answer his military critics in voluminous war memoirs, and would later propose a massive programme of state works and Keynesian spending to beat the Great Depression – a democratic version of the economics of the great dictators (and of Roosevelt’s concurrent New Deal). He quickly made a kind of peace with Asquith and later became leader again of a more or less united Liberal Party, giving the larger Labour Party a few nasty shocks before withering. Then, with the formation of the National Government, he was once again in the wilderness. In his worst misjudgement of all he would go to fawn on Hitler, calling him, bizarrely, ‘the George Washington of Germany’. He recanted and in the early stages of the Second World War helped destroy Chamberlain in the Commons, making way for Churchill’s return. But once the war was fully engaged, he became defeatist. Had Hitler successfully invaded Britain, it is horribly possible that Lloyd George would have been used as our Pétain. He had been a great radical and a great wartime prime minister but he had smashed his party and never again found a way to count. A dynamic force is indeed a very terrible thing.
Britain would be spared another such force for years to come. After Bonar Law took over as Tory leader and then prime minister, winning a massive majority in 1922, he ran a brief and unmemorable administration. His admirers, notably Beaverbrook, had assumed he would bring in protection, or ‘imperial preference’, finally ushering in the paradise Joseph Chamberlain had conjured up twenty years earlier. But by now he was a caricature of his former self, and even his former self had never been inspiring. He was pallid, nervous, indecisive, tobacco-scented and increasingly frail. His voice disappeared. Baldwin had to sit beside him in the Commons and speak for him. Bonar Law was sent on a holiday to recuperate in the Mediterranean – it is a safe rule of thumb that all British politicians of the period are to be found in the South of France almost as often as they are in London. There he deteriorated further. The same doctor who had told him ten days earlier he just needed a rest was summoned to Paris, where he noticed that poor Bonar Law was suffering from inoperable throat cancer and would be dead within a few months. Bonar Law did not concern himself with who his successor should be. King George V, having intervened in Ireland, would now be called upon to intervene again.
The scene now shifts to Montacute House in Somerset, a honey-coloured gem of Elizabethan architecture. Best known today as the setting for one of the films of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, it was one of the first grand houses bought and saved by the National Trust after it had been on sale ‘for scrap’. In 1923 it was being rented by Lord Curzon, the insufferable grandee who had been making a good fist as foreign secretary and who had been writing little notes to Bonar Law expressing the hope that he was not about to have to leave public life, though if he was . . . well, Curzon was clear who must succeed him. In a cruel but amusing sequence of scenes we see Curzon placidly strolling through his garden waiting for the summons from the King. We see the arrival of the boy with the telegram – for Curzon was too grand to have a telephone – explaining that the King’s private secretary Lord Stamfordham would visit him at Carlton House Terrace, Curzon’s London home, the following day. We follow Lord Curzon and his wife on the train to Paddington, deciding not to live in Downing Street, discussing the new shape of his cabinet, and even getting down to the appointment of bishops. We wait with His Lordship at Carlton House Terrace, a little uneasily as the message comes from Buckingham Palace that Stamfordham will arrive later in the afternoon. Then we have the horrible denouement as the courtier arrives to explain that, er, actually it is not Lord Curzon whom the King is asking to be his first minister but (as Curzon put it) that ‘man of the utmost insignificance’ Stanley Baldwin.
Curzon, in his devastation, begged Stamfordham to get the King to think again but in fact Baldwin had already kissed hands. Various go-betweens have been blamed for telling George V that Baldwin was more favoured by Bonar Law than he really was. But, given that Baldwin had been Bonar Law’s voice while Curzon had been openly suggesting he replace him, it seems unlikely that Curzon was ever the favourite. Though he was clever and well versed in foreign affairs, he was in the House of Lords and he was famously arrogant. In one of the memos sent to the King, George was asked to contemplate the idea of a delegation of miners’ leaders, or dock workers, meeting Curzon. If that was enough to settle the King’s mind, one can only say it was evidence of the same common sense he had shown in Belfast. So Britain got the leader who would dominate the inter-war years, an apparently stolid and thoroughly decent squire-like man who was, in fact, an ironmaster’s son from Worcestershire. He cultivated the image of a bucolic philosopher, never surprised and rarely roused. Yet he was a nervy creature, really, a man whose eyes darted, whose face twitched, who cracked his finger joints and who was easily exhausted. He had been flogged for writing pornography at Harrow and his family included lush Victorian artists, as well as his cousin Kipling. He was no Lloyd George. But he was more interesting than he pretended.
Interlude at Garsington
Baldwin’s Britain was a country where people went hungry. There we
re deep cracks in the pavements through which anyone could fall. Offend the codes of society and the punishment could be severe. It is as well to remember this when thinking about the great artistic revolutionaries who lit up British life after the Great War. Though he is unfashionable just now, David Herbert Lawrence, a child of the Nottinghamshire coalfields, was among the most significant. He was a seer who changed the country. Today’s sexualized culture, even if it has become horribly commercialized and degraded in ways Lawrence would loathe, owes a lot to the frank gaze of the miner’s son. Without the education reforms of 1870 and then far-sighted scholarships from Nottingham County Council, Lawrence would never have escaped the life of a coal miner. Like many Edwardian men he was sexually uneducated – at around the age of twenty he did not believe women had pubic hair, for instance. What changed his life was a chance meeting in March 1912 with a thirty-three-year-old German, aristocratic Frieda Weekley of the von Richthofen family. She had three children aged between twelve and eight and a highly respectable extended family – a ‘position’, in other words.
For him it was a consummation of sexual joy beyond anything he had experienced, and which lit up his writing. For her it was a lifelong love affair, if a very difficult and often angry one. But it was also a catastrophe. She barely saw her scandalized German family again and her husband had no problem gaining custody of the children. She was reduced to hanging round her son’s west-London school to try to catch a glimpse, and on one occasion breaking into the children’s nursery. The children were entirely against her and she never saw them again until they were adult. As for Lawrence, the suppression of his novel The Rainbow in 1915 torpedoed his literary career. Too sickly to fight, he and Frieda took refuge in a remote cottage in Cornwall. But her German identity stirred up local feeling against them and when the submarine attacks and Flanders slaughters of 1917 arrived, the coincidence of a German woman, a bearded oddity and a house near the coast was too much. They were banned from Cornwall or any coastal area under the Defence of the Realm Act. Back in London, they were tracked by the police, spied on and had their letters opened. After the war, the pair of them fled abroad, to Italy, Sicily, Australia and New Mexico, not properly returning to Britain until 1925.
Yet wherever he was, Lawrence was conducting a dialogue with his homeland. He wrote about leaving England in 1919 and looking back from the Channel steamer at a land which ‘seemed to repudiate the sunshine, to remain unilluminated, long and ash-grey and dead, with streaks of snow like cerements’.97 What might light the old land up again? Lawrence insisted that a true revolution would have to come from inside people’s hearts, not through any of the fashionable political nostrums. He was one of many, including the novelist John Cowper Powys and the painter Stanley Spencer, mixing mystical idealism and a frank interest in sex as they dreamed of mankind remade. They wanted to go back to basic, sensual realities, throwing aside the clothing of decorous post-Victorian society, and emerge afresh, feeling, sniffing, tasting, loving. It was a time when intellectuals gathered together to plot better futures, to think themselves into an alternative England, a green England, a radical escape from the scarred and industrial and half-broken country around them . . . and had the great good luck to be offered spectacularly pleasant places in which to do their plotting.
Nowhere more so than at Garsington Manor in Oxfordshire, home of the amazing Ottoline Morrell and a small paradise, variously compared to the set of a Mozart opera, a scene in a Shakespearean fantasy, an Italian villa or a painting by Watteau. Ottoline and her husband Philip had built a garden filled with flowers, ponds, peacocks and statues. The house was decorated with paintings by the best artists of the age, and a glittering scatter of beautiful pieces of furniture and ornamentation. Ottoline, clever and well born, was one of the first generation of women to get a higher education. Enraptured by her romantic ancestors, she took to draping herself in silks and dresses copied from Velàzquez and Van Dyck. Nearly six feet tall, with cascades of red-gold hair and turquoise eyes, she had the long bony face of a Cavalier officer and was, inevitably, much admired by Asquith.98 At Garsington she created a warm haven for poets, artists, philosophers and novelists. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Augustus John, Mark Gertler, Carrington, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Jacob Epstein, Stanley Spencer, Siegfried Sassoon, Wyndham Lewis, Yeats and her lover Bertrand Russell were just some of the guests. There they were rested and fed while they talked and worked. Lawrence and she were mutually mesmerized, walking for days in the Oxfordshire lanes, talking of love and art; for a while the radical working-class writer and the aristocratic world could go literally hand in hand.
In return for this, Ottoline has been remembered as a freak, an intimidating, yet silly woman, mocked in hundreds of letters and many books. D. H. Lawrence betrayed her in Women in Love, portraying her as the ‘impressive but macabre’ Hermione Roddice, remarkable but ‘repulsive’. Virginia Woolf was more ambiguous. She genuinely loved and revelled in her trips to Garsington, her diary recalling all those clever ‘people strewn about in a sealingwax coloured room’. Yet the index to the same diaries gives some indication of her feelings about Ottoline herself: ‘old, languid, weary . . . rebuffed . . . will be enraged . . . bitter . . . defiling talk with . . . despicableness of . . . and ulterior motives’. Ottoline suspected that she was not loved as she had hoped but never quite knew the true venom of those she offered hospitality to. The old landed classes were failing and the new intellectuals rising, and the collision was not always a pretty sight. Yet without Ottoline and Garsington the story of English radical culture between the wars would have been different. She not only bought work from, fed, sheltered and sustained conscientious objectors and poor artists, but gave people from different backgrounds a place to meet and exchange ideas. She was not an artist or a painter, but Garsington made her a player in the world of radical chic.
Red Clydeside
There were worse worlds for revolutionaries, and more serious revolutionaries too. In the final days of a freezing November in 1923 in a grimy street in Pollockshaws, just outside Glasgow, a former schoolmaster gave his only overcoat to a destitute immigrant from Barbados. Soon afterwards, aged just forty-four, the teacher himself died from cold and hunger. More than 10,000 people marched behind his coffin. A stocky, self-certain Marxist agitator, John Maclean was reputedly described by Lloyd George as the most dangerous man in Britain. He had certainly been discussed by the cabinet and hailed across Russia. In Britain he is mostly forgotten, but his face was once on a Russian postage stamp. Lenin had appointed him the Soviet Union’s consul in Glasgow and he had been made the honorary president of the Petrograd Soviet. From a fiercely religious Presbyterian family of Highlanders, seditious, openly hostile to the war against Germany and repeatedly imprisoned for his speeches, Maclean was the most charismatic revolutionary of the time. The important thing, however, is that he and his comrades were completely unsuccessful.
It had not always seemed that way. The war had meant heavy demands on Clydeside ship workers. Housing was short, rents went up, hours were increased and food prices rose. Maclean and other socialists had their first big victory in November 1915 when a rent strike by tenants refusing to pay more for their foul tenement flats had landed up in the Glasgow courts. Thousands joined them to show their support, including munitions workers. Maclean called on the government to freeze rents for the rest of the war, or face a general strike: the Rent Restrictions Act which followed seemed like a climb-down. He went on making seditious speeches and was repeatedly arrested and finally imprisoned, leading to a nervous breakdown. Let out in 1917 because of his poor health, he was soon back setting up Marxist education classes in Glasgow. By May 1918 Maclean was on trial again, declaring to the judge: ‘I come here not as the accused but as the accuser of capitalism, dripping with blood from head to foot.’ He was duly sentenced to five years in prison, where he went on hunger strike and was finally released early when the war ended on 11 November. He then stood i
n the 1918 election but at a time of patriotic fervour was easily defeated.
