by Geert Mak
The Cumings were eccentric, of course, even in their own day. But they did reflect the mentality of the times, and they said openly what many Britons thought. What's more, they had the wherewithal to draw their personal conclusions. As the current curator has rightly noted, it is a collection that flies in the face of all known international agreements. The Cumings could never have hauled in their Indian masks, Roman toy sheep, Egyptian falcon mummies, Pacific scalps and Chinese inkpots so easily had their country not grown during that same period into the mightiest power on earth. Around 1900, the British Empire stretched from North to South Pole: Canada, Egypt, the Cape colonies, India, Burma, Malacca, Singapore, Australia and so on. The British Navy was strong enough to fight two wars at the same time, its fleet could – theoretically, at least – take on the combined navies of Germany, Russia and the United States. The British aristocracy was imitated all over Europe, not only by the German kaiser and the Russian czar, but also by the German nobility, who preferred to marry English girls, the German upper classes, who liked to stroll through town in English coats and trousers, and by the French haut monde who organised le Derby at Chantilly, le Steeplechase at Auteuil and who met at le Jockey Club.
Only in the distance was there the faint rumble of new powers to come: Germany, the United States, Japan. The British coal and iron industries were the factory of the world, the City of London its financial core. The major European bankers had all moved to London after the currency market in Paris collapsed in 1870, and that was where the big money continued to circulate.
The City was a world unto itself, with its own codes and its own honour system. To a certain extent, the entrepreneurial and the personal mingled there in much the same way as within the royal houses of Europe. The City, wrote Jean Monnet, the son of a French cognac manufacturer and a trainee there in the year 1904, ‘is more than a neighbour-hood of offices and banks: it is also a gathering, socially most exclusive, but professionally open to the world at large.’ Lines ran from the City to Shanghai, Tokyo and New Delhi, to New York and Chicago and back again, and at the same time everyone knew each other personally; from their games of golf, or the hours they spent together, regardless of rank or position, in London's commuter trains. Monnet: ‘It is a closely woven community in which business rivalry is mitigated by personal relationships. Everyone sees to his own affairs, but at the same time to the affairs of the City. An Englishman will therefore not say: “I am sending my son to such-and-such a company or bank.” Instead, he says: “I am sending him to the City.”’
Outside the City as well, the empire lent British society a certain standing. It imposed a lifestyle in which a number of traits were highly valued: militarism, a pronounced awareness of rank and class, a sort of frontier mentality, a typically British, undercooled machismo. A great deal of travelling was done, all over the world, and at the same time as British cosmopolitism upheld a strong sense of its own superiority. A great deal was learned about plants, animals and human cultures, but at the centre of the world stood Britannia. And at the summit of creation stood the Cumings, striving diligently for immortality, at the top of the heap for all time.
In 1862, the city chronicler Henry Mayhew wrote: ‘Because London is the largest of all cities, it is also home to the largest number of human wrecks. Wrecks, too, because their misery seems all the more miserable by reason of its juxtaposition with the wealthiest, most comfortable life in the world.’
From 2.6 million in 1850, London's population grew to 5.5 million by 1891, and 7.1 million by 1911. A hundred years after the start of the Industrial Revolution, Great Britain was still a rural society in 1870. Two thirds of all Britons lived in the countryside or in small towns. By 1914, it was only a quarter.
Between 1850–6, Karl Marx lived with his five children, his wife and a servant girl in two rooms at 28 Dean Street. Marx was and remained a burgher, unlike most of his contemporaries on Dean Street. When thinking of those times, there is always one photograph that comes to mind: the dilapidated shoes of three street urchins, the holes in their soles showing the bottoms of their bare feet, covered by a thick layer of dirt and calluses; six times an engrossing jumble of leather, iron and human skin.
In 1885, the socialists claimed, one out of every four Londoners was living in dire poverty. The shipping magnate Charles Booth wanted to find out for himself, so he organised the world's first large scale sociological study, based on figures from the Poor Act, police reports and a massive door-to-door survey. Between 1891–1903 he published seventeen volumes of Life and Labour of the People of London, complete with maps and large black and dark-blue sectors. Booth divided the poverty he found into neat categories: ‘Lowest class, vicious, semi-criminal.’ And, beside that: ‘Very poor, casual. Chronic want.’ The situation was actually worse than the publication made out: one third of London's population, Booth found, fell under the latter two headings.
28 Dean Street. I can't help myself, I have to take a look. The house is still there, but the ground floor is now a trendy restaurant. The waitresses don't mind my going upstairs for a look. The one-time Marx residence, it seems, has been converted into a modern meeting place for young urban professionals, with halogen lighting, anonymous pastel-blue walls, a table with a dozen chairs and a big white poster with ‘Karl Marx’ written on it in little black letters. That's it. ‘Sorry,’ one of the girls says. ‘I don't know anything about Mr Marx either.’
What would Karl Marx himself have seen along the way as he fled from overcrowded Dean Street to his table in the Reading Room of the British Library? Foreign visitors of the day spoke of ‘paths by Oxford Street, thick with human excrement, gangs of pale children loitering on filthy steps; the embankment by London Bridge where whole families huddle together through the night, heads bowed, shivering from the cold.’
Booth's surveyors found thousands of sweatshops for women in London's back rooms. There they made brushes, glued matchboxes, folded decorations, filled mattresses.
London's poverty never let up. In the summer, half the city stank of excrement. There were more than a hundred different sewer systems, run by eight different boards. During times of heavy rainfall, all the systems overflowed. Most of the faeces of the millions of inhabitants ended up in the Thames. To ward off the stench, sheets drenched in chloride were hung before the windows of the Houses of Parliament. The nuisance reached its peak in 1858, the year of the ‘Great Stink’. Only after the government intervened was a modern sewage system built.
All this filth, stench, humidity and darkness was aggravated even further on the days of smog, the notorious London fog, an extreme form of air pollution that regularly blanketed the city up to the 1960s. The fog would come up suddenly, and throughout the years dozens of varieties of smog were noted: black as night, bottlefly green, pea soup, brown, plain grey, orange. On such days the city floated in a cloud of yellow, brown or green, with here and there a feeble dot of light from a gas lamp.
London was the capital of a worldwide empire, but you couldn't tell that by looking at the city itself. Paris, well, now – there was a capital. A number of other European cities had modernised themselves in similar fashion. But London was an affront to the self-esteem of many Britons. Their capital was almost devoid of beautiful squares or elegant boulevards, the traffic snarled, the streets were split by puffing steam trains on viaducts, one neighbourhood after another was destroyed for the construction of railway stations and Underground lines, the city's centre was encircled by endless slums.
All this was largely due to the medieval manner in which the city was run. Strictly speaking, London itself consisted of only one little town, the City of London, with around it a series of ‘parishes’ responsible for running the metropolis at large. Government after government ran into a brick wall of fiercely defended parish rights. Central planning, indispensable for any metropolis for the construction of roads, water systems, sewage and rail connections, was almost impossible in London.
For some, however, the chao
s of London, this piling up of wayward building styles without much in the way of planning, constituted a political statement: an act of defiance against the absolute power of a ruler, against a bureaucracy, against a Haussmann. Many British subjects – then and now – attached great importance to their own domain. They were willing to conform to the rigours of a tightly run public life, but as compensation they demanded great freedom in their own, private realm. Within those private boundaries they could behave as eccentrically as they liked. ‘My home is my castle’: the government was expected to rein itself in, the planners could only go so far, chaos was simply the price one paid. According to the urban historian Michiel Wagenaar, it was in this way that there arose ‘the urban landscape of the free market’.
And that was not all. Filthy nineteenth-century London virtually forced its own inhabitants to get out, and before long that exodus was actually made possible by the construction of a rail network. It was around London, therefore, before anywhere else in Europe, that there arose a new phenomenon: the rural estate, the anti-city of the stately suburb, home front for a new generation of comfortable merchants, a place in which they could foster their own norms and values, their own forms of leisure and, ultimately, their own ideas about nation, religion and politics.
I have been invited to tea at the home of Nigel Nicolson, eighty-two years old, publisher, diarist and former Member of Parliament. He is the grandson of the third Lord Sackville, and the son of diplomat and MP Harold Nicolson and the writer Vita Sackville-West – also known as the protagonist of Virginia Woolf's Orlando. It is late afternoon, the sky is beginning to change colour, and among the rolling hills around Sissinghurst Castle one occasionally hears the report of the pheasant-shooters’ guns.
We are sitting in the kitchen, where it is almost cold enough to see our own breath. Most of the castle has now been surrendered to the National Trust – money! – and the day trippers. Nicolson lives alone. He is wearing an unusual quilted robe.
The afternoon is destined to be a memorable one. He tells me about the lives of his parents – one of the most oft-described of English marriages – but most of our time is spent trying out the brand new microwave oven he has recently received as a gift. ‘A miracle, a miracle,’ he keeps shouting. ‘But how on earth does one go about heating up a mince pie?’
I teach him how to boil a cup of milk using the microwave, and he tells me about his years growing up at Knole – hundreds of rooms and chimneys – and at Sissinghurst. ‘We didn't have a normal mother-son relationship,’ he says matter-of-factly. ‘My mother spent all day working in her room in the tower here. In the space of thirty years, I may have gone in there three times. The one who always busied herself with my younger brother and I was Virginia Woolf. Some funny woman once said to me: “You do know, I suppose, that Virginia loves your mother?” To which I replied: “Of course she does! Don't we all?”’
Virginia was the ideal ‘auntie’. ‘She taught us to look at things through the eyes of a true writer. She always wanted to know more. ‘What colour coat was that teacher wearing?’ she would ask. ‘How did his voice sound? How did he smell? Details, details!’ One time, when we were catching butterflies, she asked us: ‘Tell me, what is it like to be a child?’ I still remember my reply: ‘You know very well what it's like, Virginia, because you were a child once yourself. But I have no idea what it's like to be you, because I've never been big.’
I asked him whether having such celebrated parents was ever a burden to him. ‘A film was made about their lives, even a television series. But they weren't like that at all. Harold, my father, was portrayed as a wet, while in fact he was a very astute man. With such parents, a certain undeserved fame rubs off on one. But at the same time, it has also worked very much to my advantage. My inheritance was not extensive in the financial sense, but rich in contacts and influence. And it lent me a natural self-confidence, a background against which I could place myself. My father put it this way: “I detested the rich, but I was wild about learning, science, intellect, the mind. I have always taken the side of the underdog, but I have also adhered to the principal of the aristocracy.”’
The next day, at a café. We snow is falling outside the window. A couple of tired-looking men are drinking coffee. One of them is picking languidly at a steak and kidney pie. Between the mirrors on the walls are colourful pictures of blossoming balconies in summer, and of a pavement café in a warm, sunny village.
The tabloid paper the Sun has been busy for days demolishing the reputation of an adulterous cabinet minister. The facts have long been known to all and thoroughly hashed over, and now the man is being slowly, bone by bone, broken on the wheel. Finally, it's off with his head. ‘WOULD YOU SLEEP WITH THIS MAN?’ yesterday's headline read; below it an unflattering portrait of the victim and two phone numbers, one for ‘YES’, the other for ‘NO’. ‘Some call him a dwarf, others compare him to a shrimp, yet still he continues to attract women. Why?’
The next day the tabloid opens with: ‘966 BRITONS WANT TO SLEEP WITH ROBIN COOK, BUT WE'RE NOT GIVING THE MINISTER THEIR PHONE NUMBERS.’ A ‘leading’ psychologist is called in to explain the phenomenon. The inside page contains a cut-out mask of the unfortunate minister's face.
Today Sun journalists donned Robin Cook masks and went into town to note the public's reaction. ‘In Soho, a café emptied out in a panic.’
Nowhere but in England are the papers so full of fascinating misbehaviour. There is always a scandal brewing, there is always a politician, village vicar or bank manager being pilloried, yet at the same time the country breathes a remarkable sense of order. When I first travelled to England – I was around twenty at the time – I was looking only for the castles, boarding schools, neat lawns, red double-decker buses and businessmen in black bowlers. Clichés, I thought. But from the train between Harwich and London, I actually saw castles in the evening light, and lawns and schoolboys playing cricket, and London was full of bowler hats. The country seemed so predictable, so neat, that during those first few days I had the feeling nothing could ever go wrong here, that even the most minor of traffic accidents was simply out of the question.
That orderliness and those newspapers have everything to do with each other. There is no order without tar and feathers. In part, that civic duty is the product of something else: the remarkable discipline to which the lion's share of the populace has subjected itself since the late nineteenth century.
The worst of the poverty gradually dwindled after 1870, and from 1900 one could speak of something like a state of general welfare. The clothing worn by young workers, especially the women among them, began to look more and more like that of the staid classes: unthinkable only a generation earlier. Around the same time, British political thinking, from left to right, began extracting itself, to a certain extent, from the straightjacket of the class system. London, of course, was still subject to crippling strikes and demonstrations – the entire dockside was paralysed in the summer of 1911 by a strike involving 20,000 workers, until at last the army was called in. But meanwhile the ideal of the ‘organic’ society, the shared citizenry of workers, the middle class and perhaps even the aristocracy was gradually catching on with broad sections of the public.
Did everyone, though, believe in that ‘shared citizenry’? A brief section of newsreel has been preserved of the Derby held in June 1913. We see the horses hurtling around the bend at high speed, neck and neck. In the background we catch a glimpse of the crowd, men in straw hats, here and there a woman. Then something happens, so quickly as to be almost imperceptible: a woman runs onto the track, there is a whirl of bodies, then the horses are past and spectators rush towards a pile of clothing. That is how she entered history. Waving two flags, the narrator says, Emily Davison threw herself in front of the king's horse for the cause of female suffrage. She died four days later.
I wanted to find out more about her. The British Library, though, contained only a short commemorative volume published shortly after her dea
th, a bijou in a finely tooled case. The frontispiece shows a proud woman in a gown, diploma in hand. She is frowning gravely for the photographer, but obviously capable of breaking into a smile at any moment. That impression is confirmed only a few pages later: Emily loved life, she was generous, enthusiastic and exceptionally cheerful.
Her story reads like a classic account of radicalisation. And, at the same time, as a nineteenth-century story, a story about the place where two eras clashed.
Emily Davison came from a good family, but even in early childhood there was something wayward about her. ‘I don't want to be good!’ she often shouted at her nanny. When her parents died she had to leave school. Like many women in her situation she became a governess, but she spent her evening hours studying and so finally left school with exceptional grades. She was at one with the dreams and ambitions of the nineteenth century, but was also brutally confronted with the dark side of that same century: the social pressures, the curtailment of the individual, the double standards, the never-ending conflict between desire and possibility.
Shortly before Emily was born, John Stuart Mill – prompted by his blue-stocking spouse Harriet Taylor – published The Subjection of Women in 1869. The title speaks for itself. The country may have been ruled by a queen, but women in other walks of life had no say whatsoever. A man held absolute sway over his wife's person and her possessions. University degrees were off-limits to women, a situation that continued at Cambridge until 1948. Women frequently earned less than half a man's salary for the same work. Many professions actually barred women from their ranks. Many poor girls turned to whoring to survive.
But, after 1870, there came a change. Women began making themselves heard on subjects such as education, charity work, health care, mandatory vaccination and prostitution. Starting in 1880, the major political parties established women's organisations, and demonstrations for female suffrage began in 1900. In 1908 a window was shattered at 10 Downing Street; in 1913, one wing of Liberal leader David Lloyd George's mansion was blown up in order to ‘rouse his conscience’. With remarkable speed, women who had been brought up as delicate Victorian china dolls were becoming modern physicians, bookkeepers, civil servants and teachers, and sometimes even dyed-in-the-wool feminists.
