Every item of that description was intended to be detrimental to Haldane’s reputation to a greater or lesser degree. In the hierarchy of infamy, Haldane’s racial origins took second place to his radical inclinations. Every time the government of which he was a member exhibited that attribute the King complained. It was his misfortune to be served by the first great radical government in British history, and no progressive policy was allowed to pass unchallenged. The King persisted in the belief that he was, if only vicariously, part of the process of government.
When the Liberals had attacked the Balfour government’s decision to sanction the importation of ‘indentured labour’ into South Africa for work in the gold mines, the King expressed his ‘great regret that so much heated opposition should have been shown to such a necessary measure as the Chinese Labour Bill’.38 When Campbell-Bannerman suspended the Act’s operation without notifying the King he caused great offence. The King’s reaction was incredulous anger. He could barely believe that ‘a reversal of the policy [could be] decided upon after so short an experience in office’.39 But the rush to legislation continued. The King discovered that his government proposed to introduce a Trades Dispute Bill, which freed trade unions from legal liability for all their members’ actions. He responded by instructing Knollys to tell the Prime Minister that ‘the King trusts [that] it will not include a clause allowing what he thinks is rather absurdly described as peaceful picketing’.40 Presented with the Education Bill, which made local education authorities responsible for the management of ‘maintained schools’ and provided a system for part-financing those which remained under the basic control of the churches, he asked, ‘What can the government be thinking of in excluding teaching of religion in our schools? Do they wish to copy the French?’41 He was beginning to share Knollys’s fear that ‘the old idea that the House of Commons was an assemblage of gentleman had quite passed away’.42
Lloyd George, ‘The People’s Budget’, the emasculation of the House of Lords, the creation of a parliamentary Labour Party and the irresistible demand for women’s suffrage were yet to come. So were a new view of the nation’s obligation towards the poor and the decision eventually to partition a partly independent Ireland. There would be a revolt against censorship in the theatre, the acceptance that the motor car would eventually dominate our roads, the acquiescence to professionalism in sport and a growing scepticism about the power of prayer and the redemptive quality of faith. Although the King did not know it, the Edwardian era was to be a time of massive change.
*The Liberal Party was irrevocably divided by the Irish Home Rule Bill of 1886. Liberal opponents of Irish devolution – led by Chamberlain and the then Marquis of Harrington – eventually joined with the Conservatives in a ‘Unionist coalition’.
*See Chapter 6, ‘A Preference for Empire’.
†During his first week at the Colonial Office, he sent Lord Elgin, the Colonial Secretary, a long memorandum which concluded, ‘There, then, are my ideas on colonial policy.’ Elgin added to the foot of the last page, ‘But not mine.’
*For an account of the Finance Bill’s rejection and the conflict which followed see Chapter 8, ‘Who Shall Rule?’.
*See Epilogue, ‘The Summer Ends in August’.
CHAPTER 4
The Condition of England
These days, we think of Edwardian Britain as the time of the lotus eaters, the decade or more of prosperity and pleasure before the Armageddon of 1914. Happy cockneys spent Bank Holiday Mondays in Margate or at the funfair on Hampstead Heath. The metropolitan middle classes ‘dressed’ for dinner. In the provinces, clerks and shopkeepers worked hard and lived well. The aristocracy and the very rich hunted in winter, shot during the autumn and played tennis under the endless blue skies of spring and summer. All that happened. But Edward’s reign began in a mood of national uncertainty. Victoria’s death had disturbed the confidence that comes with continuity. The Boers seemed a match for the greatest empire the world had ever known. The King’s illness meant that the Coronation was more an occasion for relief than rejoicing. And the men who set the nation’s mood – the popular philosophers, the newspaper economists and the political observers – had decided, almost unanimously, that Britain was in moral and economic decline. They were wrong. But it took them some time to discover the nature of their error.
The most imaginative contemporary analysis of the pressures which created Edwardian Britain was provided by C. F. G. Masterman, Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, Liberal Member of Parliament and, for seven years, a minister in Asquith’s government. Masterman was an unlucky politician. In 1912, after six years as a parliamentary secretary, he was promoted to Financial Secretary to the Treasury – an elevation which, by the rules of the day, was regarded as the acceptance of an Office of Profit Under the Crown and required him to resign his House of Commons seat and seek re-election. He lost the by-election, tried again and lost for a second time. It was the end of his ministerial career.
In May 1909 he published The Condition of England. At the time of its publication, the Liberal government, of which he was a member, was locked in mortal combat with the permanent Tory majority in the House of Lords. Added to the emergence of the Labour Party, the increasing militancy of the suffragist movement and the re-emergence of demands for Irish Home Rule, the battle between peers and people filled Masterman’s mind with fear of conflict. The Condition of England consciously reflects the ideas set out by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy. Both men believed in the desperate need for a new ‘Enlightenment’.
Like Arnold, Masterman wanted to unite the classes. He set out his own version of ‘sweetness and light’ and accepted the need to limit the powers and rights of the upper and middle classes (Conquerors and Suburbans – in place of Arnold’s Philistines and Barbarians) if England was to achieve the general tranquillity for which he hoped. But he added a new dimension to the argument. The problem of British society was, Masterman contended, the mismatch between those parts of national life which were changing and those which were not.
By the standards of the early twentieth century The Condition of England was a ‘best seller’ throughout all the United Kingdom (England being taken to mean all of Britain). Masterman’s diagnosis, if not his prescription, provides a commentary on Britain’s life and times before the great changes which came about during the Edwardian social revolution. There is something of the William Cobbett in Masterman – a yearning for the Arcadian past of his imagination. But his analysis helps to reveal the reality of the Edwardian present with the clarity that comes from a combination of high intellect and deep sympathy.
It begins with a description of the country’s own estimation of itself: ‘We see ourselves painted as a civilisation in the vigour of early manhood, possessing contentment still charged with ambition: a race in England and Europe full of energy and of purpose, in which life for the general has become more tolerable than ever before.’ But he noticed a change in the character of the middle classes, which he observed was ‘losing its religion [and] slowly or suddenly discovering that it no longer believes in the existence of the God of its fathers or in life beyond the grave’. However, the more secular qualities which excited the world’s admiration endured. ‘It is the middle class whose inexhaustible patience fills the observer with admiration and amazement as he beholds it waiting in the fog at a London terminus for three hours beyond the advertised time and then raising a cheer, half joyful half ironical, when the melancholy train at last emerges from the darkness.’
It was from the character of the British people that Masterman believed salvation would come. He rejected ‘Mr Pinero’s jibe’ that Britain was ‘the suburb of the universe’. It was ‘the locality whose jolly, stupid, brave denizens may be utilized in every kind of hazardous enterprise’.1
Other commentators predicted certain disaster. Rider Haggard – having temporarily forsaken science fiction in favour of travel journalism – anticipated an imminent apocalypse. ‘The imp
ression left upon my mind by my extensive wanderings is that English agriculture seems to be fighting against the mills of God.’2 Others forecast nothing worse than steady decline. A. L. Bowley – the most distinguished statistician of the period – judged that real earnings had peaked during the last years of Victoria’s reign and then certainly ceased to grow and in many cases had actually fallen. And many of the social surveys published during the period described such depths of poverty and such widespread illness that, fifty years on, two distinguished sociologists could write, ‘It is no exaggeration to say that the opening of the twentieth century saw malnutrition more rife in England than it had been since the deaths of medieval and Tudor times.’3 That was, in fact, a gross exaggeration. But it is easy to understand, with hindsight, how it came about.
A comparison of per capita income demonstrated that Great Britain was the richest country in Europe, but the gap between the United Kingdom and its main competitors was narrowing fast. In the twenty years between 1893 and 1913 production of coal, pig iron and steel in the United Kingdom rose, respectively, by 75 per cent, 50 per cent and 131 per cent. In Germany the increase in output was 159 per cent, 287 per cent and 522 per cent and in the United States 210 per cent, 337 per cent and 715 per cent. United Kingdom exports of manufactured goods more than doubled. German manufactured exports trebled and America achieved a five-fold increase. British steel production rose, but German output rose so much more quickly that, by 1908, it was producing twice as much as Britain – a shattering psychological blow to the country to which Bessemer had come to perfect his new technique for ‘converting’ iron into steel. Germany subsidised its smelting plants and the reduced price of the raw material gave Soligen a competitive advantage over Sheffield, and Hamburg a head start against the Clyde. But cutlery and shipbuilding went steadily on. The problem with British industry was that its progress was too steady. Production and exports expanded in absolute terms but were in relative decline.
Alfred Marshall, the great economist of Edwardian Britain, attributed the decline to the complacency of the entrepreneurs who had inherited the companies which they owned and so badly ran. They were
content to follow mechanically the lead given by their fathers. They worked shorter hours and they exerted themselves less to obtain new practical ideas as their fathers would have done and thus a part of England’s leadership was destroyed rapidly. In the nineties it became clear that, in future, Englishmen must take business as seriously as their grandfathers had done and as their American and German rivals were doing: that their training for business must be methodical, like that of their new rivals, and not merely practical on lines that had sufficed for the simpler world of two generations ago: and lastly that the time had passed at which they could afford merely to teach foreigners and not learn from them in return.*
The increasing gap between the technological progress of the competing economies was illustrated by a humiliation which was particularly painful to a seafaring nation. The Germans built ocean liners which won the Blue Riband of the Atlantic for three successive years. At least among the Establishment, anxiety about the speed of the competitor nations’ economic progress was moderated by relief that the Mother Country had not descended to their level of commercial vulgarity. Masterman, without quite realising it, demonstrated the problem to which Alfred Marshall referred – the attitude which guaranteed that Britain would fall behind. ‘Already in America one can detect a kind of disease of activity in people to whom “business” has become a necessary part of life. The general effect is of children with over-strung nerves, restless and aimless, now taking up a book, now a play thing, now roaming round the room in uncertain uneasiness.’
Anyone who wanted to take refuge in the certainty of Anglo-Saxon superiority could rely for comfort and a false sense of security on what, in Edwardian Britain, seemed to be Britain’s indestructible asset. Invisible earnings – the commercial triumph of worldwide empire – kept Britain a mighty nation on which other countries, with more rapidly expanding manufacturing industry, still relied. Until 1914 world trade depended on the gold standard – in theory the inflow and outflow of bullion to compensate for deficits and surpluses on the balance of trade. In fact it was usually sterling – ‘as good as gold’ – with which the international books were balanced. For sterling to ‘operate on equal terms with gold’4 as a multinational currency, the pound had to be beyond speculation, depreciation and, in terms of transfer payments, short supply. Until 1914 all these conditions were amply met. Indeed throughout the Edwardian era sterling grew stronger as Britain’s trading balance increased. Between 1901 and 1905 average annual net imports were valued at £471.5 million. Average net exports for the same period had a total value of £296.9 million. The consequent deficit on the balance of trade (£174.6 million) was easily offset by income from ‘invisibles’ – £116.6 million from services and £112.9 million from interest and dividends. The result was an average annual surplus of £49 million on current account and an accumulating balance abroad of £2,642 million. And the surplus grew. Between 1911 and 1913, the same pattern persisted – deficit on physical trade was more than liquidated by surplus on the ‘invisible’ account. The result was an average surplus on current account of £206.1 million and an accumulated foreign balance of £3,990 million.5
That once apparently permanent guarantee of overall economic stability was liquidated by the First World War, although, since it depended on worldwide free trade, the growing enthusiasm for protection (including in Britain) jeopardised the role of sterling, and the international status which it gave to the United Kingdom, long before 1914. But the cost of war precipitated the catastrophe. By accelerating the great asset sale, Britain began to pay the price for investing abroad rather than in domestic industry and, in consequence, failing either to diversify or to modernise its basic staple trades. Textiles, coal mining, iron and steel and shipbuilding, on which it had over-relied since the early days of the industrial revolution, died during the second half of the twentieth century, but they were doomed fifty years earlier. In 1907 those four sectors of the economy produced 50 per cent of industrial output and employed 25 per cent of the working population. When they began to contract, so did the whole economy.6
Ironically, during the period when British industry was being overtaken by its United States competitors, American food exports to Britain began to decline. Canadian and Argentinian produce began to take its place. Grain and meat from the New World were still, despite transport costs, cheaper than anything grown and bred on the small home farms and by 1910 there were transatlantic suppliers who could even undercut the United States. So the decline in agriculture, at least in terms of numbers, continued. The 1901 census showed that, by the turn of the century, 77 per cent of the population of England and Wales lived in urban areas – 12 per cent more than in 1890.7 A reduction in manpower is not necessarily the result of a reduction in output or the consequence of economic stagnation. But one sort of farming was the victim of a continuing depression. The great cereal farms of East Anglia were no longer prosperous and, in many cases, barely viable. But the position of agriculture as a whole was nothing like as gloomy as Rider Haggard made out. While some parts of the country were doing badly, others were doing well. It was the idea of rural England that perished during the reign of Edward VII. Masterman mourned its passing.
No one today would seek in the ruined villages and dwindling population the spirit of an ‘England’ four fifths of whose people have now crowded into the cities. The little red-roofed towns and hamlets, the labourer in the field at noontide or evening, the old English services in the old English village church now stands but as the historical survival of a once great and splendid past. Is ‘England’ then to be discovered in the feverish industrial energy of the manufacturing cities?
The collapse of agriculture was nothing like as great or universal as Masterman implied. Even within the hardest hit areas the prospects varied. Some of the wheat farms in the heavy clay-land
s of Essex went out of business altogether, but in Norfolk, where prices had always been higher, the fall in grain prices was at least accommodated to a point at which the farmers struggled on, and some parts of the country took up more profitable types of farming. During the thirty years which preceded the First World War the acreage under crops in England and Wales fell from 24 to 19.5 million. Some farmers, who were willing to switch to produce in newly increased demand, were able to increase their income. Farms with easy access to rail links usually survived and prospered. Britain was eating more meat, more fruit and more vegetables. The price of bread was falling, but wages, by and large, were stable or actually showing a marginal increase.
A. L. Bowley contended that wages rose to a peak in 1900 and then fell away until economic recovery produced a second, though more modest, high point in 1907. Another decline then continued until the fear of world war stimulated production in 1913. On the other hand, the cost of living – at least according to Bowley – rose steadily throughout the period.8 The consequent reduction in real wages was, according to many commentators, the cause of the industrial unrest which affected industry after 1909. However, later (and more sophisticated) work by C. H. Feinstein suggests that, on average, real wages were at worst static and, in many cases, showed a slight improvement. The strikes may have occurred in the unlucky industries. Or perhaps the workers thought that their standard of living was falling. But it is far more likely that the unrest was the result of changing attitudes. ‘Hundreds of thousands [were] living below the poverty line, i.e. without the means to buy enough to keep themselves physically healthy.’9 Militancy was on the march. The stark reality of life in darkest Britain was brought home to an anxious nation by the discovery that 6,000 of the 20,000 men who volunteered to fight for Queen and country in South Africa were unfit even to be considered for military service.10
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