After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  All these movements – the colonists who saw the country as therapy, the folk song collectors who saw it as a musical trove – idealized the country, as did the essentially urban Lutyens, Jekyll and Country Life. The Edwardian countryside was in seemingly irreversible decline. Edward VII was the first monarch of a predominantly urban Britain, most of whose population lived in towns. It was, in the words of the Liberal politician C. F. G. Masterman, ‘the largest secular change of a thousand years: from the life of the field to the life of the city’.17 The drift to the towns which had been a feature of the first thirty-five years of his mother’s reign became a stampede during the agricultural depression of the 1870s. Land rents went into steady decline over the next quarter-century.

  It is true that some of the worst reverses, during the worst periods of Victorian depression, were arrested during Edward VII’s reign. Grain prices had begun to rise again from the mid-1890s and as American beef imports diminished, after 1908 – something which reflected the fall in cattle sales from American ranches – the price of British beef rose. But the bulk of the meat market was imported. Edwardian Britain imported three-fifths of its beef, mutton and lamb, three-quarters of its wheat and cheese. Britain was harder hit than other European countries because so many farms specialized in wheat and other grains.18 Many Edwardian farmers had to take on secondary occupations. A survey of thirty-four farmers listed in Corsley, Wiltshire, in 1905–6, including five who held over 100 acres of land, showed that twelve had taken on secondary work – running a bakery, hauling coal, or a carrier’s business. Ellis Rhodes, farming at Shelley in Yorkshire, combined running the farm with carting coal for the local gas-works, and working in the brewery. He was a part-time manager in the colliery where he was killed in 1907 in an accident. Thereafter his family left the farm. Not much Merrie England here. As for the labourers, their hours were long. They were ill- or … even non-educated. While the cost of living rose 10 per cent between 1900 and 1910 the labourer’s wage rose by only 3 per cent. Prices increased by an average of 5 per cent, so the poverty of agricultural labourers was worsened during this reign.19

  Real countrymen and countrywomen saw the rise of ‘week-end’ or golfing cottages. The villages within reach of London all found the old places scarred with new buildings, new roads. George Sturt, writing of The Bourne, near Farnham, Surrey, said his hamlet ‘had ceased to be a country place, and had been turned instead into a suburb of the town in the next valley … The once quiet high-road is noisy with the motor-cars of the richer residents and all the town traffic that wails upon the less wealthy’. The toiling labourer could hear, drifting towards him over the fields, the sounds ‘of piano playing coming to him, or of the affected excitement of a tennis-party; or the braying of a motor-car informs him that the rich who are his masters are on the road’.20

  The motor-car was introduced to the English public at a Crystal Palace exhibition in 1896. In 1900, 800 cars were purchased in Britain; by 1913 the figure had risen to 33,800. (Fatal accidents involving cars exceeded those involving horse-drawn vehicles for the first time in 1910.) Edward VII, who as Prince of Wales was photographed taking his first ride in one in 1898, stated, truthfully: ‘The motor-car will become a necessity for every English gentleman.’21 This would have revolutionary consequences not merely for the English countryside but for the world. Areas of the globe which possessed oil reserves, some of them previously poor, began to assume an overwhelming importance in the scheme of things.

  In ancient Mesopotamia, present-day Iraq, the Babylonians knew of an inflammable material which they called ‘naphtha’ or ‘the thing that blazes’, using what was probably a loan-word from Greek. This seepage from rock asphalt could be used for bitumen, but it had no other very obvious use. Though medicinal purposes were found for it in sixteenth-century Europe, and though in late seventeenth-century Shropshire, at Pitchford-on-Severn, a variety of turpentine was patented, made from boiling sandstone shale and water, the human race remained innocent of any need for what a sixteenth-century German philologist, Georg Bauer (Georgius Agricola), had nicknamed, in Latin, rock oil, petra-oleum.22

  It was Edwin L. Drake, in 1859, who had first drilled for oil in northwestern Pennsylvania, and thereby established the groundwork for the modern petroleum industry. But Drake and his followers – he drilled 69.5 feet or 21.18 m through bedrock – saw the fossil fuel as an illuminant. Within fifteen years, production in the Pennsylvania field had reached 10 million 360-lb (163.3-kg) barrels a year. The Russians had drilled at Baku in 1873. These early pioneers boiled the crude oil at 160°–250°C to produce paraffin (kerosene) for lamps, but the greater fraction of the crude thus processed became a highly flammable substance known as petroleum or gasoline, for which no obvious use could be found.23

  By the time kerosene lighting had been made obsolete by the advent of electric lighting (four manufacturers had filament lamps on display at the first International Electrical Exhibition in Paris in 1881, and by the end of the decade there were several electrical power stations in Britain illuminating houses and streets in Brighton, London, Glasgow and elsewhere 24), the petrol-fuelled internal combustion engine had been developed.25

  Almost simultaneously in 1886 Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach produced single-cylinder Otto-cycle engines using petrol and a carburettor, and by the end of the Nineties, Daimler had converted from the perilous flame-heated hot tube to electric spark ignition. Rudolf Diesel invented the compression ignition engine, pioneered in 1892–3.26

  These inventions which were to change the story of land transport were also destined to have the most extraordinary effect on aeronautics. In 1893–4 Sir Hiram Maxim, he of the machine gun, had built a huge steam-fuelled carriage which, it was calculated, would need a mounted wing surface of 400 sq. m to make it fly. A Yorkshire landowner, Sir George Cayley, during the Regency period, had tried to work out a system of propelling flying machines by clockwork. Otto Lilienthal in the 1890s in Germany had pioneered the design of small gliders. They were really little more than aerodynamic hang-gliders. Lilienthal died while trying to fly one. Until the arrival of petroleum, and a suitably small engine, there was no practical possibility of heavier-than-air flying machines.

  Wilbur and Orville Wright of Dayton, Ohio, powered a glider with a light four-cylindered petrol engine and made the first powered flight with a heavier-than-air machine on 17 December 1903 near Kill Devil Hill in North Carolina. By October 1905 they had so perfected the machine (after an heroic 120 unstable flights) as to remain in the air for half an hour. The Voisin brothers in France built a biplane which they developed in 1908–9, and Louis Blériot in his Type XI aircraft, fuelled by a three-cylinder Anzani engine and a wooden propeller (designed by Raymond Saulnier), flew the English Channel on 25 July 1909. All aircraft propellers were wooden until the 1920s.

  The uses to which petrol-fuelled vehicles on land and in the air, and petrol-fuelled ships at sea, might be put was something which history was all too soon to reveal. The extent to which the human race would try to become the lords of petroleum, instantly thereby becoming its slaves, would change the subsequent map of the world. In a steam- and coal-powered world, Britain and Germany would remain triumphant, rivalled only in the East by an emergent industrialized Japan. Trade depended, as Alfred Tennyson wrote in Locksley Hall (published 1842), ‘In the steamships in the railroad in the thoughts that shake mankind’, but there were many factors involved in the story of Britain, a trading nation transforming itself and the Asian and African countries it occupied into an Empire. From 1910 onwards, as the world became dependent on oil, for its motor cars, motor-buses, motorized military vehicles, petroleum-fuelled aircraft and ships and submarines, and petroleum-fuelled industrial machinery, the oil-producing nations acquired new strengths, new vulnerabilities. The United States has appreciable oil reserves; it has always, historically, had the largest cumulative production in the world.27 Russia has the third-largest cumulative production and a much larger oil rese
rve. But apart from the considerable amounts of oil in Mexico and Venezuela, the major oilfields of the world were to be discovered in the Arabian–Iranian basin. Add up the oil reserves of present-day Saudi Arabia (261.2 billion barrels), Iraq (100 billion barrels), Iran (93 billion barrels), Kuwait (97.5 billion barrels) and the United Arab Emirates (98.2 billion barrels) and you have a present-day total of 649.9 billion barrels of oil possessed by the Arab world, compared with a mere 50 billion barrels of oil reserves beneath American rock or soil. The implications of this were not to strike the European nations immediately, but we cannot be blind to them. The flying machines and motor cars of the Edwardian era look like toys built for the amusement of Mr Toad, but they are harbingers of a new world order. Moreover, the Mr Toad at the wheel would be unlikely to have owned Toad Hall for more than a generation.

  Disraeli, a London-born man of letters of Jewish origin, saw more clearly than any Victorian statesman that Britain was effectively owned and governed by the same people. That was until the collapse in agriculture, land values and rents. He extolled those squires who had, many of them, held land for generations, since the Middle Ages. As Justices of the Peace, and Members of Parliament and landlords, they had been the primary frame in the social structure of pre-industrial England. By the flexible laws of inheritance in Britain, and by its comparative social fluidity, it was possible to hold on to the aristocratic principle even in an industrial age.

  ‘England’, Disraeli had written in Lord George Bentinck, ‘is the only important European community governed by traditionary influences, and amid the shameless wreck of nations she alone has maintained her honour, her authority and her wealth … But it is said that it is contrary to the spirit of the age that a great nation like England, a community of enlightened millions long accustomed to public liberty, should be governed by an aristocracy. It is not true that England is governed by an aristocracy in the common acceptation of the term. England is governed by an aristocratic principle. The aristocracy of England absorbs all aristocracies, and receives every man in every order and every class who defers to the principle of our society, which is to aspire and to excel.’28 Those words were published in 1852, and they were, to a quite prodigious degree, true for many decades later. Yet, as Disraeli’s own life showed, the very conservative fluidity which was the strength of what he termed an ‘aristocracy which absorbs all aristocracies’ meant in fact that money counted for more than lineage or status, or than land itself.

  When he started out on his political career, he could not appeal to the Tory voters without being landed. His supporters simply bought him an estate and made him into the country gentleman of Hughenden Manor. He loved his country neighbours – rather more than they loved him, alas.29 He enjoyed his visits to the squires and farmers who returned him as their Tory member of Parliament – ‘the Pauncefort Duncombes of Brickhill Manor … Colonel Hanmer of Stockgrove Park, the Chesters of Chicheley, the Lovetts of Liscombe, the Dayrells of Lillingstone Dayrell …’30 Within fifty years of Disraeli’s death, none of these families were still in possession of their estates.

  The very ‘aristocratic’ principle which Disraeli so extolled was partially responsible for the change. In order for the new rich to rise, and to enter the political classes, they in turn bought estates and land from the impoverished squirearchy. Whereas the squires, so many of them, had held on through good times and bad for centuries, the nouveaux riches were the first to get rid of land, and to break up estates, when times were hard again, which accounts for the quite speedy ruination of so many old houses and estates in Britain after the First World War.

  The palaces of the New Rich, both urban and rural, told their own crowing Toad-like tale. The Victorian and Edwardian millionaires liked to flaunt their money. Scotland sprouted spanking new baronial castles. Glen, Peeblesshire, proclaimed the greatness of the Tennants, and the money they had made from chemicals. Tennant’s industrial empire stretched from the ironworks of Lanarkshire to the gold fields of Mysore. His factory at St Rollocks polluted the air of Glasgow with clouds of hydrochloric acid, but at Glen, with its ‘pepper-pot turrets, high-pitched roofs like a French chateau … all was spick and span, superbly groomed and appointed. The gravel was meticulously combed … the lawns as smoothly ironed … only the hills were rugged and unkempt. Everything was new. “Each pineapple we eat costs us five pounds”, Sir Charles Tennant would say as the desert was handed round.’31

  Ballikinrain Castle in Stirlingshire was a vast pile built from a Glasgow dyer’s fortune; Rosehaugh in Ross-shire was J. D. Fletcher’s, who had made his money in Liverpool as a Peruvian alpaca merchant. Ardkinglas, Argyll, was built for Sir Andrew Noble, whose fortune was in armaments – as was Lord Armstrong’s, for whom Norman Shaw built Craigside, the first electrically lit house in Britain.

  The Rothschild Chateau at Waddesdon, built for Baron Ferdinand de Rothschild, is a dream of French opulence in the midst of the Buckinghamshire countryside, as to a smaller extent was Chateau Impney in Worcestershire, built for a local salt manufacturer named John Corbett.

  London caught the Parisian fever to hideous effect. To match the palaces put up by financiers and South African diamond magnates, heavy with gilt and festooned with palms, Buckingham Palace was ‘done up’. The Victorian ballroom was remodelled in French style by Frank Verity. The thrones themselves, from which purchased peerages and knighthoods were dispensed, were made in Paris in 1902.

  In the time that Dr Johnson, Burke and Gibbon lived in London, the king of England spent much of his time living in a modest and beautifully proportioned house in Kew Gardens, not much bigger than those of his subjects. In the time of Edward the Caresser, the Palace had to outshine those of his new friends the Beits and the Rothschilds. Such grandiose efforts as Sir Aston Webb’s Admiralty Arch (1911, but designed earlier) reflect that very short period of London’s history when, rather than being a commercial and political capital of a vigorous, small trading nation, it took into its head vulgar imperial notions. Admiralty Arch, and Webb’s other efforts – the splashy new façade to Buckingham Palace, the wedding-cake memorial opposite to the memory of Queen Victoria – now, like a collective hangover, serve as hideous reminders of the brief imperialist aberration. Webb was Napoleonic in inspiration, but it was Napoleon III and the Baron Haussmann who inspired him. What a pity the Luftwaffe never scored any hits against his work. When they bombed Buckingham Palace, they missed Webb’s façade.

  Snobs, at the time and since, have objected that King Edward VII spent so much of his time with the nouveaux riches, but this is to overlook the rather obvious fact that he was a nouveau riche himself. He was not slumming it, he was mixing with his own kind. When Queen Victoria and Prince Albert built Osborne House on the Isle of Wight they did so on the cheap, and they possessed no private fortunes. It was her long years of widowhood, when she carefully squirrelled away her huge Civil List allowances, which enabled her to pass on vast wealth to her son. He squandered it on race horses, women, cigars, which was why he was always pleased to borrow more. But he was not moving out of his class to do so. On the contrary. He was the vulgarian to end all nouveau riche vulgarians, and it was this which dominated not only his private views, but the politics of the age.

  4

  The Accursed Power

  A narrowly political, in the sense of party and parliamentary, history of Edwardian Britain would see the year 1906, and the great Liberal landslide which it brought in, as the crucial moment of change. At the beginning of the reign until the Coronation, the prime minister was the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, High Tory of High Tories, one of the cleverest and most enigmatic men ever to have held the office. He was succeeded by his nephew, Arthur Balfour, tall, languid, cynical, curiously detached from the world over which he exercised such influence. (He once asked one of his female relations to explain to him what a trade union was.) Balfour’s cabinet was composed largely of landed aristocrats or their relations. Exceptions were the rich Birmingham tycoons Joseph
Chamberlain, colonial secretary, who was an imperialist radical Liberal who had split with Gladstone over Ireland, and Austen Chamberlain, one of the few men (until the twenty-first century) destined to lead the Conservative party without being prime minister.

  The 1906 election produced the greatest poll victory on record. The Liberals obtained 400 seats, a majority of 130 over all other parties combined.1 They established the precedent, followed by the Labour governments of Ramsay MacDonald, Harold Wilson and Tony Blair, of a supposedly radical party coming in to a fanfare of excitement from its more optimistic or leftist supporters, only to adopt a broadly conservative set of policies. Though historians of party might see 1906 as a watermark, the incoming government could look at the problems of Britain and the world and quickly learn a policy of indifference which Lord Salisbury would have envied.

  What were the major problems? What of the unresolved question of Women’s Suffrage? You might have supposed that a Liberal party would have been pro-feminist, but it wasn’t particularly. Its natural ‘grass-roots’ support came from the petite bourgeoisie, which was just as anxious as any Tory to keep the little woman in her place. The Liberal government passed the Qualification of Women Act, 1907, which allowed women to sit as councillors, aldermen, mayors or chairmen on county or borough councils; in the GLC election of 1907 there were 600,000 women householders, of whom over 100,000 voted. But the hot potato of women’s suffrage, women’s rights to a parliamentary vote, let alone to stand for parliamentary election, was given no time in the Liberal Parliaments.