Bernard Shaw

by Michael Holroyd

  ‘Our ablest leaders were a greengrocer and a bootmaker, both of them much more capable than most members of Parliament; for it needs considerable character and ability to succeed as a shopkeeper, especially as a publican, whereas persons with unearned money enough can easily get into Parliament without having ever succeeded in anything. I found them excellent company, and liked and respected them for their personal qualities... but in the effective lump we were as ignorantly helpless politically as the mob of ratepayers who elected us, and who would never have elected me had they had the faintest suspicion of my ultimate political views.’

  By their policy of under-rating, these men had by 1900 put the St Pancras Vestry in debt to the bank by £17,000. It was this insolvency that weakened the local authority. A weak vestry, Shaw argued, was at the mercy of its officials and of parliamentary rule. ‘He saw in municipal government a valuable decentralizing balance and counter-check to Parliamentary government,’ wrote H. M. Geduld. ‘It existed to ensure that local necessities were not sacrificed to national interests... Unfortunately, Parliamentary government frequently forces its inefficient decisions upon weak municipalities.’

  The vestrymen deliberately kept the rates down because they themselves, and the people who had voted for them, could not afford a rating figure that would ensure municipal solvency. Shaw strove unsuccessfully to alter the rating system so as to relieve ordinary ratepayers and arrest reckless overdrawing on the bank. ‘There is only one remedy,’ he wrote, ‘and that is to take the burden off the shoulders of the men who do the work & conduct the business of London, & throw it on to those who take enormous sums in rent and interest out of our business to squander in idleness.’ He proposed to do this by the taxation of ground values (‘or, as I want it, taxation of unearned incomes’), with a rating exemption limit and a series of abatement limits as in the case of income tax.

  The London Government Act of 1899 replaced the forty-two vestries with twenty-eight Metropolitan Boroughs each with a Mayor and Council. Wards 7 and 8 of the old Vestry were amalgamated into the Southern Division of the new St Pancras Borough and ten candidates stood for the six available seats at the election on 1 November 1900. For Shaw (who with 704 votes came second only to a clergyman, beating a bootmaker, removal contractor and store proprietor), this was the one successfully contested political election of his career. He campaigned hard, armed himself against failure (‘the relief will be enormous’), and described his success as ‘a sentence of hard labor’.

  He had opposed the London Government Act in that it disqualified women, who had been part of the vestries, from sitting on the Borough Councils, and he attempted to give publicity to the need for women on public bodies, but The Times declined to publish a letter he wrote that threw off ‘the customary polite assumption that women are angels’.

  ‘English decency is a... string of taboos. You must not mention this: you must not appear conscious of that... everything that must not be mentioned in public is mentioned in private as a naughty joke. One day, at a meeting of the Health Committee of the Borough Council of which I was a member, a doctor rose to bring a case before the Committee. It was the case of a woman. The gravity of the case depended on the fact that the woman was pregnant. No sooner had the doctor mentioned this than the whole Committee burst into a roar of laughter, as if the speaker had made a scandalous but irresistible joke. And please bear in mind that we were not schoolboys. We were grave, mostly elderly men, fathers of families... There is only one absolutely certain and final preventive for such indecency, and that is the presence of women. If there were no other argument for giving women the vote, I would support it myself on no other ground than that men will not behave themselves when women are not present.’

  In the Borough of St Pancras women had two unmentionable grievances: first, there were few public lavatories for them; secondly, where these had been provided they necessarily consisted not of urinals but separate closets, entrance to which traditionally cost one penny – ‘an absolutely prohibitive charge for a poor woman’. The grotesque struggle for free lavatories raged for years, and with particular heat round a site in Camden High Road. Some councillors objected that persons who so far ‘forgot their sex’ did not deserve a lavatory; one suggested that the water supply would be used by flower girls to wash the violets that he occasionally purchased for his buttonhole. The site was also assailed as a terror to traffic and a feature so gross as to contaminate the value of all property in the neighbourhood.

  It is not easy to chronicle Shaw’s work as a vestryman and borough councillor. Fearing that his own proposals might not be listened to seriously, he often filtered them through other councillors. Nevertheless, a pattern to his municipal work can be picked out. He voted in favour of more free time for workers employed by the Council (every other Sunday off instead of every third Sunday for lavatory attendants) and for trams against underground railways in the interests of shopkeepers; and he introduced a motion to raise the salaries of the Council’s clerical staff by means of promotion through independent tests of their qualifications. After St Pancras became a metropolitan borough, the Chairman of the Vestry was translated into a Mayor. The Vestry Chairman had been unpaid, and the first Mayor of St Pancras, Alderman Barnes, proposed continuing this magnanimous tradition. Shaw objected, warning the Council against making a new precedent:

  ‘It was, of course, very handsome of Mr Barnes to say he would not accept any salary, but at the same time a definite sum of money ought to be placed at his disposal... He [Shaw] moved that this question of the paying of the Mayor be adjourned for further consideration, because it would not be a proper or democratic thing to pass a resolution that might prevent a poor man accepting the office of Mayor.’

  Shaw’s motion was defeated, but when in 1903 the Council appointed as their second mayor W. H. Matthews, a greengrocer (and the model for Bill Collins in Getting Married), the matter of a salary was again discussed, £200 a year being proposed. Shaw made a strong speech, emphasizing that ‘it was quite legal to pay the Mayor, and no other method would place every man there on a footing of absolute equality.

  ‘But 200 pounds a year was a ridiculous sum; he would multiply it by five. There was no sounder democratic principle than that a man should be paid for public services. At present in that Council when they wanted a man to be Mayor they had first to find out if he could afford it.’

  But he was again outvoted and the office of Mayor continued unsalaried.

  Shaw annoyed his fellow-councillors by a persistent campaign against badges of office, regalia and robes that converted the St Pancras aldermen into ‘animated pillar boxes’. Were not such grandiose uniforms an obvious misuse of public money? Even on issues he supported Shaw looked carefully at expenditure. When the Mayor proposed spending £40 to send a delegation of councillors rambling into the countryside to report on the public installation of a crematorium in St Pancras, Shaw intervened to say that he

  ‘sometimes spent his week-ends near Woking, and if they would lend him a councillor for the purposes of cremation (much laughter) he would bring up a report of all that happened (laughter) without cost to anyone (laughter)’.

  Shaw’s advocacy of cremation was part of a campaign for public hygiene he pursued on the Health Committee. He urged that ‘if earth-to-earth burial was to be continued, the depth below the surface ought not to be more than a couple of inches, and the coffin of the flimsiest material it was possible to have’. As a member of this committee he visited work-houses, hospitals, sweatshops and the homes of the poor, and saw the destitution and disease. Many of the tenements were lice-ridden; there were epidemics of smallpox, and occasional cases of typhoid fever, and even bubonic plague. Houses were disinfected with sulphur candles, on the fumes of which pathogenic bacilli actually multiplied. On asking the Medical Officer of Health why ratepayers’ money was spent on a useless fumigant, Shaw was told that, though the real disinfectants were soap, water and sunshine, no stripper or cleaner would dare enter
an infected house unless it was filled with the superstitious stink of sulphur.

  Shaw accepted sulphur but not vaccination which, he believed, was seen as a cheap prophylactic and employed as an alternative to a decent housing programme. During the spread of smallpox in 1901 Shaw battled with the medical advisers in St Pancras, who were urging on the Council a compulsory vaccination scheme. But he found limited support from the Borough Medical Officer, Dr Sykes. The difference was one of private practice versus socialized medicine. The Council paid half a crown for each revaccination. ‘No doubt the doctors were honestly convinced that vaccination is harmless and prevents smallpox; but the half-crown had more to do with that honest conviction than an unbiased scientific study of the subject.’

  Dr Sykes’s position was dependent on the good health of the district – it was what Shaw called ‘the position that one wants Socialism to place all doctors in’. He could be dismissed only by the Local Government Board which judged his efficiency by the health statistics.

  ‘Dr Sykes’s income did not get larger when the district got sick. The private practitioners’ did... you could see the private practitioners getting new ties and new hats. When the death-rate went up they always looked better off and happier. That was not the case with the medical officer of health: he looked more worried: it was a bad time for him.’

  What he heard passed in Council convinced Shaw that medical opinion was often little more than a conspiracy to exploit public credulity. Over two years, in a series of what were called ‘curious pathological effusions’ to The Times, the British Medical Journal, the Saturday Review and Vaccination Inquirer, he pressed for an independent re-examination of statistics, and for a socialized health service as a replacement to the money motive in medicine.

  Shaw treated the press as a democratic instrument through which he poured information and advice to the public and from which he hoped to get instructions formed by that advice. The principles by which he tried to reach a workmanlike relationship with voters are revealed by some remarks he made to vestrymen and borough councillors. ‘Never do anything for the public that the public would do for themselves,’ he told them. And: ‘Give the public not what they want but what they ought to want and dont.’ It was the responsibility of councillors and Members of Parliament to persuade the public to want what was best in the long term.

  What Shaw wanted was to command political action without the horror of submerging himself in political life. The need to earn money from his other work made it impossible for him to attend all meetings. Of the possible 321 council and sub-committee meetings he was eligible to attend between November 1900 and September 1903, he turned up at 192.

  In public, Shaw’s attitude to his municipal duties was one of undisguised optimism – which is to say, disguised pessimism: ‘I love the reality of the Vestry,’ he told Ellen Terry, ‘...after the silly visionary fashion-ridden theatres.’ But that had been at the start of his vestry duties. An almanac Shaw kept in the early spring of 1898 shows under what strain this municipal work, with its hours of talk (no less fashion-ridden than the theatre) ‘about our dignity & respectability’, was beginning to place him. ‘Vestry beyond all endurance,’ he recorded on 30 March.

  Shaw was to use his experience in local politics as raw material for his plays. Of Man and Superman he wrote: ‘The mornings I gave to it were followed by afternoons & evenings spent in the committee rooms of a London Borough Council, fighting questions of drainage, paving, lighting, rates, clerk’s salaries.’ Such occupation, he maintained, had enabled him to create realistic dramas so unrecognized in the fashionable London theatre that critics believed them to be fantastical – in fact not plays at all. But what are the picturesque tramps of the Sierra Nevada doing at the opening of ‘Don Juan in Hell’ but holding a St Pancras Vestry meeting? Who are the municipal characters in Getting Married but the aldermen and borough councillors with whom Shaw had sat those long unventilated hours? And where do the conflicting opinions of the medical specialists in The Doctor’s Dilemma come from but the Health Sub-Committee? All this he took from St Pancras; and if he gave back no dramatic triumphs of municipal legislation, he presented it with a theatre of entertainment.

  After half a dozen years, Shaw concluded that the theatre, after all, was a vehicle for social and cultural change better suited to his abilities. Shortly before his fiftieth year, he ‘faded out of vestrydom having,’ he wrote, ‘more important work’.

  In a speech supporting Alderman Matthews as Mayor of St Pancras, Shaw gave an oblique notice of his retirement from local politics, in the parentheses of which we may hear that ‘universal laughter’ drowning Tanner’s words at the end of Man and Superman.

  ‘Councillor G. Bernard Shaw was glad, speaking from the Progressive part of the chamber, to support the nomination of Alderman Matthews, although it was difficult for them to realize the extent of his (the speaker’s) self-sacrifice in taking that course (laughter)... He regarded him as a respectable gentleman (laughter), with little to say and with no political opinions whatever (much laughter). He never was more astonished than when Mr Matthews was out of the chair, because then he found him an active politician with a great deal to say for himself (laughter). In the chair he was most admirable and orderly, out of it he was the most disorderly man he had ever met (laughter). His (the speaker’s) self-sacrifice he told them was very great, because he wanted to be the man for Mayor (laughter). He had looked forward to the time very fondly when he would find his life crowned by becoming Mayor of St Pancras (laughter). He had carefully calculated the number of years it would take him to get it, and came to the conclusion that when all the Aldermen of the present Council, all the chairmen of the old Vestry, and some of the more prominent Councillors, had their turn, that the number of years would be 22 (laughter). That was the prospect before him (laughter), and thus it would come to pass that in the year 1924 an old man, with white hair, dim of sight, and hard of hearing, would be elected Mayor of St Pancras and would pass up the Council chamber to the chair amid encouraging cries of ‘Good old Shaw!’ and sympathetic murmurs of ‘Poor old chap!’ (laughter). Having said that, he had now to say that nobody supported the nomination of Alderman Matthews more heartily than himself (applause)... He (the speaker) had spent the greater part of the preceding day with Sir James Hoyle, the Lord Mayor of Manchester, who like their out-going Mayor, Councillor Barnes, had become a distinguished public man in connection with education. They had a technical school in connection with the City Council of Manchester... on the school was spent 30,000 pounds a year out of the rates. The population was not more than twice as large as St Pancras, where they had not the courage to make sufficient rates to cover their liabilities. As time went on he hoped their ideals would expand, and instead of trying to resist the County Council they should enter into competition with it, and try as far as they could to take this part of London off their hands. In the name of the Progressives he supported the nomination from that intellectual part of the Council chamber (laughter and applause).’

  2

  Courtship Dances

  His sensuality has all drifted into sexual vanity – delight in being the candle to the moths – with a dash of intellectual curiosity to give flavour to his tickled vanity. And he is mistaken if he thinks that it does not affect his artistic work. His incompleteness as a thinker, his shallow and vulgar view of many human relationships... all these defects come largely from the flippant and worthless self-complacency brought about by the worship of rather second-rate women... Whether I like him, admire him or despise him most I do not know.

  The Diary of Beatrice Webb (8 May 1897)

  If Shaw could settle down to marriage as she and Sidney had done, Beatrice Webb felt certain she would come to like him better. Already, almost in spite of himself, she was beginning to see ‘a sort of affectionateness’ beneath his layer of vanity. He was so extraordinarily good-natured, spending days over Sidney’s and her Industrial Democracy and Problems of Modern Industry. H
is method, which turned everything inside out to see whether the other side wouldn’t do as well, was genuinely interesting. ‘If only he would concentrate his really brilliant intellect on some consecutive thought.’

  Shaw was seeing a good deal of the Webbs in the mid-1890s. But this was different from his previous triangular relationships. He could not flirt with Beatrice and retain his friendship with Sidney; and so he could not flirt. He felt painfully excluded watching them petting each other as if, he noted, they were still honeymooning. ‘I – I, George Bernard Shaw – have actually suffered from something which in anyone else I should call unhappiness.’ His body ached for ‘a moment of really sacred intimacy’. He was physically attracted to Beatrice and sensed that she found him attractive, in much the same hostile way as Judith Anderson in The Devil’s Disciple is unconsciously drawn to Dick Dudgeon. Feeling her embarrassment, her antipathy, he also felt the strain of all that was unspoken between them rising to ‘a perfectly devilish intensity’.

  What he was witnessing in the Webbs’ marriage was the merging of passion into a shared obsession for work. That was a marriage he could understand. But could he ever make such a partnership for himself? Beatrice decided to find out.

  Bertha Newcombe looked a good candidate. That she was Fabian was essential; that she was ‘lady-like’ no disadvantage; and that she was ‘not wholly inartistic’ an unlooked-for bonus. She was in her thirties and, despite her aquiline features, thin lips and a figure that put Beatrice in mind of a wizened child, not perhaps lacking absolutely in all attraction. At least she was quite smartly turned out, petite and dark, with neat, heavily fringed black hair. And she was devoted to Shaw.