Ramunajaswami made two purchases – a bicycle and a gramophone player – to take back to India. Steaming back from Dover to Calais, the journey of a lifetime behind him, Ramunajaswami proclaimed the impression London had left on him:
O mighty London! How I love thee! … I can never forget thy parks and thy gardens, thy heaths and thy meadows, thy towers and thy monuments, thy tunnels and thy bridges, thy tubes and thy undergrounds, thy busses and thy cars, thy theatres and thy galleries, thy shops and thy hotels, thy halls and thy churches, thy mansions and thy palaces, and, above all, thy police and thy people.
Ramunajaswami had come to Britain an imperial Indian. He left with the attitudes of an Indian imperialist, convinced of the virtues of empire while seeking improvement in India’s position within it. London – world city, national capital, imperial metropolis – had performed its role: to awe all those who came near it with its scale and variety, forcing upon them the impression of London as the inevitable concentration of global power, the acme and justification of empire.
Yet there was something unsatisfactory about this London. When Ramunajaswami came to take his leave of London, his expression of love for the city came in the form of a catalogue. Was London really no more than the sum of its many and varied parts – an agglomeration of people and buildings, squares and gardens? The city was imperial – imperious, even – but it had no culminating point, a place where all its different aspects came together. It lacked structure – it lacked a theme. To Theodore Dreiser, an American writer on a tour through Europe: ‘It seemed to me at first blush as if the city might be so vast that no part was important’.19
Perhaps history was to blame. Unlike Berlin, which had exploded from Prussian backwater to imperial capital in forty years and which was jam-packed with the heroic avenues of a nervous parvenu, or Paris, which had been extensively remodelled by an emperor worried about civil unrest, London had grown slowly over many years, spreading out along the Thames, gradually turning sleepy villages into outlying city boroughs, extending roads along the uneven lines of Domesday hedgerows set down eight centuries before. The city had been added to, yet nothing had been taken away. To the east in particular, in and around the City of London, crooked streets, narrow houses, the absence of public spaces and a jumble of architectural styles defied the modern edicts of scale and unity. Although London had come to contain one-fifth of the population of England and Wales, it had done so with no master plan. The city was the product of a conservatism deep in British culture, an innate suspicion of grand ideas.
For Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India, London’s haphazard development bore comparison with the growth of Britain’s empire, acquired ‘in a fit of absence of mind’ as John Seeley’s famous formulation had put it.20 In a public speech at the Mansion House, the residence of the city’s Lord Mayor, Curzon argued that while ‘we all of us recognize that this London of ours is the greatest, the most populous, the most amazing city in the world’, yet there had never been anywhere in the history of the world a ‘great city that grew up with less forethought, or that rested less definitely on a plan’.21
Both London and its empire, Curzon opined:
… have sprung up almost unawares, their great position being due partly to advantages of geographical situation, partly the blessings of Providence, partly to accident, partly, we like to think, to the genius of our own people; and both Empire and capital have now reached a point at which we have to take stock of our position, and see what we are to do for the future, because in both cases, one of two conditions must result; either the Empire and the capital will break down from their plethoric condition, and from the operation of the numerous centrifugal tendencies that are at work; or, on the other hand, by counsel, by consideration, by forethought, it may be possible both for Empire and for capital city to create a new unity, to obtain a more commanding influence, to ensure a future not less wonderful than their past.
More parochially, Curzon argued that London did not play the same role for England – which for Curzon was interchangeable with Britain – as Paris did for France. Each small town in France measured its provinciality against the capital, aspiring to be a Paris in miniature. For French citizens, time spent in Paris was to be sighed over, savoured, celebrated. London, on the other hand, represented obligation, pomp, power and industry. It commanded pride and loyalty, but not longing or affection. Paris was an idea, refashioned in each retelling; London was a fact, made gross by practical experience. While Frenchmen might dream of becoming Parisians, Englishmen rarely dreamed of becoming Londoners. Rather it was images of the English countryside, of the leafy lanes around the county town, which stirred an Englishman’s deeper emotions. ‘The first thing an Englishman does in the outlying portions of Empire’, Curzon told his Mansion House audience, ‘is to make a racecourse’. The second was to make a golf course; the third was to ‘sever all connexion with London by putting away his silk hat and frock coat, and appearing on all occasions in a straw hat’.
The city itself was fragmented, with numerous different town centres and high streets, each with their own character and history. ‘London’ incorporated the established residential areas of Belgravia, Mayfair and Kensington and the newer areas of Shepherd’s Bush and Queen’s Park; it could mean the mansions of Hampstead or the intermixed factories and slums of the East End. Pushing out, the city’s boundaries were becoming ever more frayed. Local rail lines brought dormitory villages in rural Essex and Hertfordshire into London’s orbit, while the electrified Metropolitan line extended the city’s reach westwards into Middlesex and Buckinghamshire. To the east, the villages of Walthamstow and Leyton gradually merged with the expanding city, as Streatham and Balham already had to the south. To the north, the new semi-urban ‘garden city’ of Letchworth aimed to provide a happy medium between town and country, taking the pressure off London’s expansion and providing a model for future new towns not just in Britain but for the world. In 1913 Ewart Culpin, one of the founders of Letchworth, travelled around the world lecturing on how such new towns would be the handmaidens of social reform.22
Even within the central quarters of the sprawling metropolis there was a multiplicity of cities: a London of business, a London of government, a London of entertainment, a London of museums, a London of monuments and, finally, as Curzon said, ‘the London of the submerged millions, that mysterious, unknown, inscrutable London that always baffles and bewilders’. London might be the centre of the world, the chief city of empire, the capital of the United Kingdom, but where was its own heart?
For some, the heart of London lay somewhere in the West End. Australian landscape artist Arthur Streeton, one of those who had judged the choice of architect for Australia House, picked Trafalgar Square. His painting The Centre of Empire, finished in 1902, shows the square enveloped in mist yet shimmering with light, pigeons circling Nelson’s Column, that celebration of Britain’s greatest naval hero. In the background lie the chimneys of London’s political and royal quarter with the dome of Horse Guards, headquarters of Britain’s armed forces, clearly visible. The painting invited the viewer to peer down Whitehall, the seat of imperial government, home of its various government ministries. Here, Streeton suggested, at the nexus of political authority, military power and royal prerogative lay the centre of empire – and therefore the centre of London.
One vision of the centre of London, the political heart of a worldwide empire. Trafalgar Square, as painted by the Australian artist Arthur Streeton in 1902, with the government offices of Whitehall off to one side.
But it was another nexus – that of trade and money – which was more commonly viewed as the city’s true centre. In The Heart of Empire, painted in 1904, Danish-born artist Niels Moeller Lund placed Bank junction at London’s geographic and moral core. At street level, Bank junction was a congested intersection, thronged with vehicles, faced on three sides by the Bank of England, the Royal Exchange and the Mansion House, where Curzon gave his 1913 address. But Lund chose
a more elevated perspective on the place, taken from above the hubbub of the street. St Paul’s Cathedral hovers above the scene, suggesting the sanction of an Anglican God for the pursuit of imperial Mammon below. It was not the stately squares and wide streets of London’s West End that Lund placed at The Heart of Empire, as Streeton had. Rather, following the views of the City merchants who had commissioned the painting, it was the streets and alleys of the City of London.
From London’s seven million strong population, only 20,000 actually lived in the square mile of the City. But nearly twenty times that number worked there each day, uniformly bowler-hatted figures arriving at their places of work each morning, to be penned in behind a ledger in a bank or behind a desk in an insurance company. ‘From the hour of 6 a.m. until nearly noon’, wrote Ellis Powell in The Mechanism of the City, ‘a constant stream of humanity, numbering thousands and tens of thousands in its aggregate of individuals, pours into the small area, the “one square mile” which we call the City of London’.23 (The Economist calculated that passenger journeys on public transport were now approaching two billion annually.24) At 4 p.m., the tide reversed, and the City’s workers were gradually expelled:
The phenomenon may be seen on every day from year’s end to year’s end. At certain points where the mass of humanity is more than usually congested … the spectacle is really startling, alike in the magnitude of the aggregate, and in the hurried, serious, preoccupied aspect of the human units who compose it. No thoughtful observer, whether of this or of another world, could possibly look upon it without asking himself the question, ‘Who are all these people, and what is the purpose of their daily anxious oscillation between their suburban sleeping places and this teeming arena of diurnal activity?’25
For the City clerk, poised between working-class poverty and middle-class respectability, the City’s square mile contained within it the totality of professional aspirations, hopes of advancement and fears of slipping into London’s poorer underworld. ‘All men are equal’, thinks Leonard Bast, the tragic clerk of E. M. Forster’s novel Howard’s End, ‘all men, that is to say, who possess umbrellas’.26 When City men referred to ‘the House’, they meant the Stock Exchange, not the Houses of Parliament, still less their own homes.
In January 1913, the City was broadly optimistic about the future. ‘If Sir Edward Grey [Britain’s Foreign Secretary] could guarantee us a year of peace in Europe and a friendly understanding with Germany’, The Economist editorialised, ‘a year of even greater prosperity than the last might be confidently predicted’.27 The prospects for peace appeared brightening at the beginning of the year, with Europe’s great powers working more closely than ever to secure it. The men of the City, though thoroughly imperialist, were nonetheless amongst the most avid consumers of Norman Angell’s thesis that economic and financial integration made war unprofitable. The previous year Angell had delivered a well-received address to the Institute of Bankers, flattering them with the observation that simply by continuing to operate internationally, binding the world ever tighter with rings of gold, they were contributing to the cause of peace.28
An alternative vision of London as the world’s financial hub. The City of London depicted in The Heart of Empire (1904) by Danish-born artist Niels Moeller Lund.
The City’s role as meeting place of the world’s money seemed unchallenged. Indeed it seemed mandated by economic law. ‘Free-trade and a free gold market’, thundered the free-market Economist, ‘are two of the key different advantages which we enjoy over all our competitors, and the chief means by which London maintains itself as the banker and financier of the universe’.29 The stability provided by gold as the anchor of the world’s economic system was axiomatic. All currencies were fixed against each other through the medium of gold. When there were trade imbalances, these would be settled by flows of bullion from one country to another. The consequent interest rate differentials between these countries would, over the long term, bring them back into alignment. ‘This is the known established theory of international trade’, President of the Board of Trade Winston Churchill told his Manchester constituents in 1908, ‘and everyone knows, ever single businessman knows, it works delicately, automatically, universally, and instantaneously’.30 ‘It will be the same’, he concluded, ‘when the year 2000 has dawned upon the world’.
Nonetheless, for the more thoughtful observers there was the seed of a worry in the City’s pre-eminence – a concern for the possibility of divergence between the internationalist interests of finance and the more parochial interests of the country at large, or of the empire of which it was a part. As the City loomed larger and larger in the national economy, as it became more and more global (rather than more and more imperial) the scope for divergence would inevitably increase. In time it might become acute.
Britain did not, of course, depend wholly on London’s money men for its prosperity. The country was still, in 1913, a large exporter both of manufactured goods and of raw materials. One million men worked in the country’s coal mines. Although each British miner produced less than half the tonnage of his American counterpart, Britain remained the world’s second-largest producer overall, digging far more out of the ground than could be consumed in the country’s furnaces and fire-grates. Three-quarters of German coal imports, four-fifths of those of Sweden, and two of every five tons of coal imported by France and Spain came from Britain.31 The United Kingdom was still responsible for fourteen per cent of the world’s manufacturing production, a dramatic fall from one-third as recently as the 1860s, and half the share of the United States, yet only just behind Germany, and more than double either France or Russia.32 ‘Almost all branches of British industry have been booming since the recovery from the coal strike’, The Economist reported in January 1913, ‘shipbuilding and shipping, in which Great Britain leads the world, have never been so prosperous’.33
Yet in all these sectors Britain’s relative position had been diminished over time, growing more slowly than those of other countries while retaining the habits and ideologies of a previous era of industrial preponderance. The only area where Britain remained splendidly dominant – indeed more dominant than ever before – was in managing the finances of globalisation, and in exporting the nation’s capital. Nearly half of all the world’s foreign direct investment came from Britain – as much as the United States at its peak in 1960.34 Some returned each year in profits and dividends, most stayed invested abroad. Other returns came in from Britain’s £4 billion in portfolio investments in foreign securities, from Russian railway bonds to shares in rubber companies in Malaya.35 But the growing importance of the City to Britain’s economic arrangements was not uniformly welcomed. Was the country not simply living off its wealth, the product of its former labour? Did the City strengthen both nation and empire by placing itself at the crossroads of global finance, lowering the cost of money in London into the bargain? Or was the City, so important and yet so vulnerable to a changing international scene, a source of potential weakness? By creating opportunities for British investors to send their money abroad, was not the City denying investment to industry at home?
Around the turn of the century, some British industrialists and some British politicians had become convinced that free trade – the twin sister of open capital markets – no longer served them as well as once it had. In Joseph Chamberlain, the former Secretary of State for the Colonies, they found an able advocate of the position that greater protection for home industries and empire trade was required. Britain’s exports to empire – one-third of the total – were greater than ever. But should this trade now be consolidated within some kind of common imperial trading area, with a high wall around it to keep other countries out?36 The call for protection ran counter to long-held principles of free trade, principles that were inculcated into Britain’s economic intelligentsia from a tender age. It also risked cutting across the interests of the City, which lay in the maintenance of open and free flows of money and goods. One option wa
s to deny that the divergence existed at all, taking refuge in the argument that what was good for finance was good for industry. ‘If there is prosperity in the country there will be prosperity in the City of London’ and vice versa, argued one City grandee in 1906, a familiar refrain a hundred years later.37 Many others feared the City’s influence was now outsized, undermining any clear-sighted imperial economic strategy and weaving the money and tastes of the financial nouveaux riches into the fabric of the nation. Was Britain simply becoming, in the words of David Lloyd George, a self-seeking people of ‘footballers, stock exchangers, public-house and music-hall frequenters’?38
In 1913 a scandal appeared to answer this question in the affirmative. At the centre of the scandal was the Marconi company, founded by the Italian electrical engineer who had first transmitted a wireless signal across the Atlantic. Three years previously, the British government had opened discussions with the Marconi company with the intention of commissioning a chain of wireless stations across the world, to allow wireless communication between the empire’s most distant reaches. This was to be the nervous system of empire – allowing the whole to function effectively in peace, and in war. Though these negotiations were in theory secret, the price of Marconi’s stock had risen ten-fold over the course of 1911 and 1912 on the expectation of a deal. It was alleged that government ministers were amongst those who had purchased shares. It was implied that they had abused their positions to gain – and then exploit – market insight.
Two ministers, in particular, were in the frame: Attorney General Rufus Isaacs, whose brother worked for Marconi, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, the very man who had worried about Britain’s decline towards becoming a nation of stock exchangers. Both had indeed bought shares in the company, it emerged, though both denied that they had traded on privileged information. A parliamentary enquiry was called. Winston Churchill leapt to the defence of his fellow Liberal ministers, attacking the enquiry for giving credence to ‘unsupported tittle-tattle’ and for allowing accusations to stand against men’s honour (including his own). The whole affair, he argued, reeked of party politics, usefully undermining the credibility of any parliamentary report before it had even been issued. When the enquiry did report back it was indeed split on party lines – with the Liberals whitewashing their colleagues, and the Conservatives blacklisting them. Britain’s politics descended further into the partisan abyss.
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