The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  Although Britain took second place to France in the air, traditional transport industries fared better – largely because Edwardian innovators and entrepreneurs found it easier to develop and expand existing companies rather than create new ones. The railways – the glory of Victorian Britain – were a particular beneficiary of the continued enthusiasm for investment in visible assets. And they prospered accordingly. In 1904 the combined market value of the twenty-two largest railway companies was over 70 per cent of the quoted worth of the fifty largest British companies.26 That was the direct result of continued investment in rolling stock which produced a capital to labour ratio of £1,500 per employee. The comparable figure for Vickers Sons and Maxims, Armstrong Whitworth, John Brown and Camel Laird was something less than £600.

  Yet the shipbuilding companies of Tyne and Wear, the Clyde, Barrow-in-Furness and Merseyside were amongst the most successful enterprises of the era. The early years of the century were the age of the big battleship. Between 1904 and 1910 the eight main maritime nations spent a total of £1,340 million on warships.27 The Royal Navy generally relied on the Royal Dockyard where the Lords of the Admiralty had no doubt the work was done in the least time, up to the highest standards and at the lowest cost. Foreign fleets had to rely on private companies – two in America, Germany and Britain and one in Italy. Vickers, in the north-east, could compete with any shipbuilder in the world, but Armstrong, in the north-west, ‘was the most successful exporter of warships in the world and held that position by the quality of its production and sales organisation’.28 At the end of the nineteenth century, the company employed 2,500 men. In 1905 the value of their work was demonstrated when the Armstrong-built battleships of the imperial Japanese navy defeated the Russian fleet in the North Atlantic.

  The warship boom swept through South America. In 1902, Chile (engaged in one of the more active phases of its perpetual border dispute with Argentina) heightened the tension by ordering two battleships. Vickers won the contract for the Constitution. In 1904 Brazil announced its intention of adding to its warship fleet. The Minas Gerces was to be built by Armstrong, and Vickers were to build the São Paolo. A third battleship was commissioned from Krupp of Germany, but Armstrong’s chief salesman – Sir Eustace d’ Agincourt, RN (Retired) – convinced the Brazilian minister of defence that the ‘biggest battleship in the world’ could be constructed on the Tyne for a good deal less than it would cost in Bremer-haven, so it was ordered from Britain at an estimated cost of £1,821,000. Each country – Chile, Argentina and Brazil – eventually decided that the ships cost more than they could afford. The three South American fleets were sold second-hand at knock-down prices to other navies, but that was of no account to either Vickers or Armstrong. They did the work, took the money and accepted no responsibility for the direction in which the twelve-inch guns were pointed.

  Shipbuilding – civilian as well as naval – was thriving on a diet of cut-throat salesmanship. In the pursuit of foreign orders, nothing was sacrosanct. But there were some occasions on which officers and gentlemen expected to be kept free of commercialism. Fortunately for the future of Edwardian shipbuilding, one energetic entrepreneur broke the rules and produced, in consequence, one of the era’s greatest industrial success stories.

  In June 1897, 164 warships were assembled – in four lines, each five miles long – for inspection by the Prince of Wales. The Spithead Review was the Royal Navy’s contribution to the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. The Times described it in suitably portentous terms. ‘It possesses a significance which is directly and intimately connected with the welfare and prosperity of the Empire and may be regarded as an inspection or stock-taking of Britain’s sea guard.’29 It also turned into a sales promotion demonstration. As soon as the formal inspection was completed, a tiny ship – one hundred feet from bow to stern – rode up and down the line of warships at over thirty knots. It was called the Turbina and its owner, the Honourable Charles Algernon Parsons, broke the rules of seamanship and the laws of gentlemanly conduct to demonstrate the qualities of invention.

  In fact the turbine engine, which gave his boat its name, was not new, but Parsons had devised a way of making it a practical means of propulsion. And the demonstration of her potential was so compelling that the Turbina’s owner and captain was forgiven his considerable indiscretions – which included twice overtaking the Royal Yacht, Victoria and Albert. The Admiralty began studies of turbine power within a month of Parson’s exhibition. In December 1897 an order was placed for a turbine-propelled destroyer.

  Two turbine destroyers, the Cobra and Viper, were in service by the beginning of the new century, but in August 1901 Viper fouled a tug off Alderney and Cobra unaccountably broke in two while anchored off the Lincolnshire coast. The Court Martial – which always follows the loss of a Royal Navy ship – exonerated the Cobra’s captain on the grounds that the design produced a result ‘weaker than other destroyers’ and added to its judgement a gratuitous codicil: the Tribunal ‘regretted that such a ship was purchased into Her Majesty’s Service’. The Board of Admiralty, still anxious to exploit the speed which turbines could provide, disagreed. A Committee of Enquiry was set up ‘to examine the future construction of torpedo boat destroyers’. It gave a clean bill of health to turbine propulsion – perhaps not unexpectedly since Parsons was included in its membership. As a result, the character of shipbuilding changed.

  The King Edward, the first turbine-propelled passenger ship in the world, was ferrying passengers along the River Clyde before the Admiralty took its decision to change engine type. In 1902, an almost identical ship, the Queen Alexandra, joined it in Port Glasgow. Then the cross-Channel turbine-driven package steamers the Queen and the Brighton came into service. In 1903, the steam yacht Emerald crossed the Atlantic under turbine power. The Allan Line chose turbine engines for the 13,000-ton Virginia and Victoria and the Cunard Company did the same for the 30,000-ton Carmania. Turbines had been accepted as safe and suitable for passenger liners. And they offered an opportunity to restore some of the maritime prestige which at the end of the nineteenth century had been unexpectedly diminished by Germany.

  While the Turbina was showing its paces to the assembled fleet off Spithead, Norddeutscher Lloyd were planning an even more spectacular feat of speed. The company, supported and subsidised by the Berlin government, built the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse which, within months of its launching, won the Blue Riband of the Atlantic. The Kaiser was not satisfied. The Hamburg-America Line was encouraged to enter the competition. The Deutschland, launched in July 1900, broke the Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse’s record. It was a pyrrhic victory. At high speed the ship vibrated so violently that its luxury (which was its main attraction for first-class passengers) was diminished to a point which deterred bookings. The Deutschland slowed down. But in 1902, the Kronprinz Wilhelm regained the title for Norddeutscher Lloyd. The Deutschland, regardless of its passengers’ comfort, then broke the record for a second time and kept the Blue Riband for five years.

  The response of the British government was dilatory but eventually decisive. The Cunard Shipping Company was lent £2.6 million at 2¾ per cent interest and promised an annual subsidy of £150,000 on condition that it built two turbine-driven liners which were capable of sustaining 25 knots – two more than the speed at which the Germans had challenged and beaten each other. The Cunarders were to be designed in a way which enabled their conversion to battleships in time of war. It took almost three years for the company, the government and Swan Hunter – the initially favoured shipbuilder – to agree the plans. But in late 1904 the deal was done. The result was the Mauritania and the Lusitania.*

  Originally, the Lusitania was to be built in Barrow. But trials – with a forty-seven-foot replica in a tank which simulated Atlantic conditions – suggested that a broader ship would need less power to achieve the stipulated speed. A beam of eighty-eight feet would make possible a top speed of 26.7 knots but it would also make the ship too big f
or construction in Vickers’ yard. John Brown were more resourceful. They widened and deepened the Clyde. The keel was laid in May 1905 and the Lusitania was launched in June 1906. She went out on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to New York on 9 September 1907.

  For some reason, it was the Mauritania, the Lusitania’s sister ship – built by Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson on the Tyne, and launched in September 1906 – which had the popular appeal. Reason demands that the Lusitania should enjoy the accolades of history. It was the first four-propeller-driven liner and, at 40,000 tons, the biggest ship afloat. The Liverpool Landing Stage had to be extended to allow her to dock and in October 1907, a month after her maiden voyage, she won the Blue Riband for both the eastwards and westwards crossing. But two months later, the Mauritania made her first Atlantic crossing – and immediately broke the Lusitania’s record. The editor of the Shipbuilder, who was a passenger on that journey, regarded the ship as ‘a floating palace’. Lack of originality did nothing to lessen the image’s impact. The description which followed illustrated why journalists had been invited on the maiden voyage: ‘The great entrance and staircase are treated in the fifteenth-century Italian manner. The woodwork is French walnut, the panels being veneered with some of the finest wood one could wish to see … The first-class lounge or music room is a noble apartment treated in the style which obtained in France in the last quarter of the eighteenth century.’30

  That luxury was all available in a ship which possessed the speed that allowed it to cross the Atlantic in barely five days and, because of that, held the Blue Riband of the Atlantic for twenty-two years. And the record speeds could be sustained without unacceptable vibration because of the way in which Britain – in particular the Honourable Sir Charles Parsons and his Marine Steam Turbine Company – had developed a new nautical engine. British shipbuilding was again on top of the world.

  British ships were not, however, always turbine-powered. The Oceanic Navigation Company, known, because of its flags, as the White Star Line, did not power its liners with turbine engines. It chose luxury in place of speed for no better reason than the technical limitations of the yard which built the ships. The two liners which they commissioned to rival the Mauritania and the Lusitania were commissioned from Harland and Woolf, a firm which neither possessed nor professed much experience of turbines. But the Northern Ireland company could claim both enthusiasm and initiative. The Oceanic Navigation Company wanted both new ships to be built simultaneously. So Sir William Arroll – famous for the construction of the Forth Bridge – was employed to erect a new gantry in the Belfast dockyard. It was 840 feet long and 240 feet wide – enabling the two keels to be laid side by side. One was for a ship to be called the Olympic. The other was for the Titanic.

  Thomas Andrews, managing director and chief designer of Harland and Woolf, believed that the two new liners surpassed in splendour anything that Cunard could offer. He was equally sure that, because it had a double-bottomed hull and was divided into sixteen watertight sections, his new ships were unsinkable. It was for that reason that he provided enough lifeboats to accommodate only 1,178 of the 2,222 passengers and crew who set out on the maiden voyage from Southampton to New York in April 1912. Six hundred miles south of Newfoundland, during the night of the 14th to 15th, the Titanic struck an iceberg. Five of the watertight compartments flooded and the ship sank, drowning 1,515 men, women and children. Among them was W. T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette and prophet of the ‘new journalism’.

  Stead had, for several years, been fascinated by the supernatural – particularly ‘automatic writing’, which he either believed or hoped might enable him to have conversations with ‘the other side’. He had made a pact with Julia Amos – a journalist on the Union Signal of Chicago, with whom he conducted a long and learned correspondence about the Oberammergau passion plays – that whichever of them died first would send a message from ‘the other side’. Julia’s first message was received in 1893. Then, in the following year, Stead’s son, William, died. For the rest of his life the bereaved father was obsessed with ‘keeping in touch’ with his son. Spiritualism came to dominate his life – to the great detriment of his reputation and his career. Sometimes his premonitions were published in his paper.

  Even before spiritualism became an obsession Stead made prophesies – based, he said, on intuition – about ‘the shape of things to come’. In 1886, the Pall Mall Gazette had published an account of a mighty liner sinking in the Atlantic with immense loss of life. It ended with the warning, ‘This is exactly what might take place and what will take place if liners set sail short of boats.’ In the account of the Titanic sinking, the Review of Reviews, not altogether reasonably, blamed officialdom for not heeding Stead’s warning. ‘After twenty-six years of progress, the Board of Trade is responsible for the loss of 1600 lives … because there were not enough lifeboats.’

  Amongst the tributes which followed Stead’s death was one from a Sir E. T. Cole who revealed that, shortly before he left for America, Stead had told a friend ‘when my work is done, I shall die a violent death. I have had a vision and I know it is true as surely as I am talking to you.’ Survivors of the sinking said that he made no attempt to save himself ‘but stood with the women and children, putting them into lifeboats’ as if he knew that his time had come. Admiral Lord Fisher (with whom he had plotted to promote the idea that the British Navy was scandalously short of battleships) called him ‘Cromwell and Martin Luther rolled into one’ and imagined him encouraging the ship’s band ‘to play a cheerful tune’.31 Praise for Stead’s courage – and speculation about it being the result of a fatalist belief that it was time to meet his maker – punctuated the agonised search for culprits.

  Most of the recriminations concerned neither the design of the ship nor the capacity of the lifeboats. The Leyland Lines’ California was said to be barely twenty miles away but, because its wireless operator was not on duty, it did not receive the Titanic’s distress signals. The Carpathia, a Cunard liner, did pick up the SOS and, steaming at full speed, reached the site of the disaster eighty minutes after the Titanic went down. Seven hundred passengers were saved by the operation of a new miracle – wireless telegraphy.

  When the Carpathia docked in New York, Guglielmo Marconi was waiting on the Cunard pier. During the subsequent inquiry into the disaster, it was alleged that he had insisted that the messages from the stricken ship must remain the exclusive property of his company. The New York Times – which sent a reporter with Marconi to the pier and may, therefore, have had a vested interest in his monopoly of the news – described his compassionate conversation with the survivors. He was planning a ten-million-dollar share issue with which to finance the purchase of the United Wireless Telegraph Company. These were heady days for Marconi and the system which he had perfected. It was taken for granted by Wall Street and the City of London that anyone who had been wise enough to invest in either his American or his British enterprises would make a fortune.

  That view was clearly held by Sir Rufus Isaacs, the Attorney General in the Asquith government. In April 1912, a few days after the Titanic set sail, he bought 10,000 shares in the American Marconi Company from his brother, who in turn bought them from a third Isaacs brother who was managing director of the company. He immediately sold a thousand to Lloyd George (the Chancellor of the Exchequer) and another thousand to the Master of Elibank (the government chief whip) with the friendly intention of allowing them to share in the expected capital gain. In those more innocent days, Ministers of the Crown were allowed to own shares without depositing them in a ‘blind trust’ and could continue to speculate on the stock market. The three Members of Parliament were not, therefore, guilty of an impropriety; but their position was complicated by the fact that, a month earlier, Herbert Samuel, the Post-master General, had accepted – subject to parliamentary approval – the tender submitted by the Marconi Company of Britain for the construction of the Imperial Wireless Chain which the Sixth Imperial Confere
nce, meeting in 1911, had decided was essential to the security of the Empire.

  In fact, the ministers’ conduct was no worse than unwise. The two companies – British and American – were entirely separate and the purchase of the American shares was not the result of any special knowledge which could be described as ‘insider trading’. Equally important, Marconi of America did not hold shares in its sister company. So the value of Isaacs’s purchase was not (directly at least) increased by the government contract. But rumours of impropriety began to circulate at Westminster. They were taken up by the anti-Semite clique led by Hilaire Belloc. Cecil Chesterton, brother to G. K., published the allegation in Eye Witness, the Catholic polemical journal which he owned and edited. Isaacs and Lloyd George wanted to sue. Asquith dissuaded them: ‘I suspect that it has a very meagre circulation. I notice only one page of advertisements and that is occupied by books by Belloc’s publisher. Prosecution would secure it notoriety, which might yield subscribers. We have broken weather and, but for Winston, there would be nothing in the papers.’32

  The Marconi contract should have been ratified by the House of Commons in August. Technical questions about some clauses meant that Parliament’s approval could not be sought before October. By then the rumours of impropriety made an easy passage of the proposal impossible. Herbert Samuel moved a resolution to set up a House of Commons Select Committee to enquire into every aspect of the contract. In the debate which followed, Isaacs and Lloyd George made categorical personal statements. They had bought no shares in ‘the Marconi Company’. They later justified their conduct by arguing that they referred to the British Marconi Company which was the subject of the debate. The House of Commons accepted their assurances and the contract was endorsed.