After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  In 1909 two anarchists were involved with the murder of a policeman in Tottenham after an attempted ambush of the weekly wages arriving from the bank at Schurmann’s rubber factory.20 The two men fired over 400 rounds of ammunition and as well as two dead – a policeman and one of the criminals who shot himself – twenty-one were injured. ‘Who are these fiends in human shape, who do not hesitate to turn their weapons on little boys and harmless women?’ asked the Daily Mirror. ‘The answer is: they are foreign Anarchists, men who have been expelled from Russia for their crimes, whose political creed and religion is that human life is of no value at all.’

  Of course, most refugees came not as aggressors, but in flight from dreadful state brutality in Tsarist Russia. But there was enough truth in the Daily Mirror’s words to make them frightening. Dostoevsky’s prophecy of social mayhem in The Devils, when just such an anarchist, nihilist cell, inspired by a charismatic, heartless leader, terrorizes a provincial Russian town, had been brought to the streets of London. Special Branch believed that the organizer of the Tottenham Outrages was a young Latvian named Jacob Fogel. His real name was Christian Jalmish, and he had helped a breakout of prisoners from Riga Central Prison in 1905 in which fifty-two armed fighters of the Latvian Social Democratic Workers Party escaped. They included one Peter Piatkov (‘Peter the Painter’), who, together with some of his Latvian friends, was interrupted by police in January 1911 trying to tunnel into a jeweller’s shop in Houndsditch, East London. There were rumours in the East End among the Russian and Latvian exiles that this shop in a very mean little slum-street was concealing the Tsarist Crown Jewels. The anarchists needed funds, and that was their motive for the burglary. When the police caught them in the act of burgling the shop, they opened fire and killed Sergeant Robert Bentley, as well as another officer, Sergeant Charles Tucker. When P.C. Choate wrestled one of the criminals – Gardstein – for his gun, he too was shot, many times, and eventually killed.21 The criminals then retreated up the tunnel to their adjoining quarters in 100 Sidney Street, Mile End Road, and the house was soon under police siege. Unable to reach the criminals with their revolvers, the police sent for reinforcements from the Scots Guards in the Tower.22

  This required the authority of the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill. He gave it. In addition he ordered up the Horse Artillery from St John’s Wood Barracks, though they were not in the event required, and then, very characteristically, he hastened to the scene of the sieges, where bullets were flying in and out of the windows. The anarchists set fire to themselves in the house, and when it had been gutted by fire three corpses were found in the ruin, one of whom had been shot, the other two asphyxiated.

  Churchill had gone down to witness the scene at first hand partly because he was excited by the whiff of grapeshot and partly because he was momentarily penitent at having attacked what he conceived as a mean-spirited Tory immigration law, the Aliens Bill of 1904. The king’s Private Secretary was not slow to inform Churchill of His Majesty’s hopes ‘that these outrages by foreigners will lead you to consider whether the Aliens Act could not be amended so as to prevent London from being infested with men and women whose presence would not be tolerated in any other country’. Churchill felt there was a case for tightening the laws against aliens. One of his staunchest allies, however, the backbench radical Josiah Wedgwood, whose namesake and forebear had struck the anti-slavery medallion AM I NOT A MAN AND A BROTHER? in their Staffordshire pottery, wrote memorably to Churchill: ‘It is fatally easy to justify them [i.e. draconian anti-terrorist laws] but they lower the character of a whole nation. You know as well as I do that human life does not matter a rap in comparison with the death of ideas and the betrayal of English traditions. Rebelling against civilisation and society will go on anyhow and this is only a new form of the disease of ‘48; so let us have English rule not Bourbon.’ In spite of these wise words Churchill drafted the outlines of the Aliens Act of 1911 which attempted to combat terrorism by forbidding aliens to carry firearms.23

  As in the case of twenty-first-century paranoia against terrorism, some of the fears were justified – desperadoes with guns really were killing policemen – and some of the fears were expressions of unease about something else. Those who are confident in the idea of their own country, who truly believe in it and its values, do not believe that they can be brought down by a few fanatics with guns. Churchill at Sidney Street must have wondered as Conrad wondered when he wrote The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes whether the values or institutions of the West really were that strong. Christianity, for Churchill’s generation, was a thing of the past. He certainly did not believe in it.24 As the Parliament Act made clear, you could remove power from the Lords at a stroke. (Churchill favoured at this date the total abolition of the House of Lords.25) Even before the collapse of the Prussian, Austrian and Russian monarchies at the end of the First World War, there were signs of change in the air. Portugal became a republic in 1910, and between 1901 and 1914 at least three monarchs and a number of Russian grand dukes were assassinated. Churchill had enough historical sense to know that it took very little to unseat a monarchy. And what would be left? Dear old Jos Wedgwood’s ‘ideas and English traditions’. What if these did not amount to very much against the more articulate forces of Marxism, or against nationalist expansionism, or anarchism, or Prussian militarism, or America?

  There was a palpable sense in the early years of George V’s reign that, prosperous and powerful as Britain was, all was not as it had been. The image of shipwreck came to mind, and in April 1912 there occurred one of those catastrophic events which possess, almost as soon as they happen, the qualities of a defining myth – what in the early twenty-first century could be seen as a 9/11 moment. It was an essential part of this myth, of the wreck of a luxury liner, that it was on its way to the United States of America.

  A myth is a story by which people define themselves. No less than the peoples of pre-literate or semi-literate ages, the peoples of the Western world in the twentieth century projected myths about themselves in order to place themselves in the universe, to make sense of their predicament. The sinking of the RMS Titanic on its maiden voyage almost instantaneously took on a mythic dimension.26 For example, one of the things which ‘everyone’ knows about the Titanic is that it was known as ‘the unsinkable ship’. In his seminal book about the disaster, A Night to Remember, made into a film by the J. Arthur Rank Organisation in 1958, with Kenneth More, Walter Lord stated: ‘The Titanic was unsinkable. Everybody said so.’27 But when did everyone say so? Not before the voyage, as you might expect: but after it. It is true that in 1911 the small-circulation trade publication The Shipbuilder, describing the watertight doors that divided the bulkheads in the liner, stated that the capacity of the captain to close the doors by flicking an electric switch made ‘the vessel practically unsinkable’.28 Such language was not, however, used in any of the promotional literature to advertise the maiden voyage, nor by any of what we could call the journalistic hype beforehand. When Harland and Wolff, the Belfast shipbuilders, were commissioned to build the luxury liner for the Liverpool-based White Star Company it was recognized that to make the operation lucrative they would need to make weekly transatlantic crossings. This would require three ships of identical speed and capacity to provide a reliable ‘ferry’ service, one at each end and one on stand-by. The first two to be built were the Olympic and the Titanic, with the Gigantic ordered.

  The Olympic and the Titanic were the biggest ships ever built. The White Star publicists put out brochures of one of the liners up-ended so that potential voyagers could see it outsoaring in height Cologne Cathedral, St Peter’s in Rome, the Great Pyramid of Giza and even the New Woolworth Building, NYC.29 At over 46,000 tons gross they were considerably larger than the existing record-holders, the liners Lusitania and Mauretania, which weighed in at a little less than 32,000 tons. The Olympic was launched on 20 October 1910, the Titanic on 31 May 1911. The two ships were identical in construction, with exact
ly similar hulls, construction and propulsion, and the advertising was for both ships – ‘OLYMPIC and TITANIC’. Only an obsessive expert could spot differences between the first-class promenades on A-deck in the two ships. Indeed, in the sale catalogue for Titanic memorabilia at Christie’s in 1992 the cover uses an illustration of the Olympic. The ships were built by the same yard, owned by the same company and captained on their maiden voyages by the same man, Captain Edward John Smith. Of the two, however, only the Titanic is remembered as the ‘unsinkable’ ship. The Olympic which did not in fact sink, and which stayed afloat until 1937, winning the sobriquet Old Reliable’, until it was scrapped in Scotland, was never described as ‘unsinkable’.

  It was the collision of the Titanic with an iceberg during the night of 14–15 April 1912 which introduced the word unsinkable into the popular vocabulary and began the process of myth-making. On the morning of Monday 15 April, the vice-president of the White Star Line in New York, Philip A. S. Franklin, announced: ‘We place absolute confidence in the Titanic. We believe the boat is unsinkable.’ By then, the ship had sunk: 1,490 passengers were dead and the 711 survivors were bobbing about despondently in the icy waters of the North Atlantic. ‘Manager of the Line Insisted Titanic was Unsinkable Even After She Had Gone Down’ declared a sub-headline in the New York Times. ‘Mr Franklin called her unsinkable’ – the qualifier ‘practically’ has been lost – ‘and last night when he knew at last that the pride of his line was beneath the ocean he could not seem to comprehend that the steamer had sunk. “I thought her unsinkable”, he declared, “and I based by [sic] opinion on the best expert advice. I do not understand it.”‘30

  The gigantic floating palace, hubristic in its self-image, cruising at speed towards disaster, was an obvious emblem of Europe on the edge of self-destruction. For Marxists, the shipwreck seemed a repulsive opportunity on behalf of the capitalist press to lament the death of the rich.

  ‘Among the dead were millionaires,’ wrote ‘Virtus’ in the Italian language Communist paper La Fiaccola (The Torch, Buffalo, NY), ‘and our readers have been able to read in other papers long articles and sensational stories about the 200 rich people who with 1,400 poor, met their deaths, as if the heroism and the grief of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd classes unfolded in the same circumstances!’ La Fiaccola shone its torch-rays on the fact that the 700 crew died like martyrs and went on to lament the deaths of 500,000 in American factories each year, deaths which went largely unreported.31 The Denver Post was more biblical, more elemental, and saw the sea claiming rich and poor, famous and obscure figures alike. John Jacob Astor, worth two hundred million dollars: he ‘would give all he possesses for the place of that woman and child in the lifeboat’.32 Many33 saw it as a Judgement, though quite what the Judgement signified was a trifle vague. ‘The sixteen hundred who went down were typical of mankind …’ opined the Christian Century. ‘Manhood triumphed when the Titanic sank.’34 George Bernard Shaw stirred up controversy by refusing to believe in the heroic tales of the Night to Remember. He pointed out that whereas pious newspapers claimed that the band played ‘Nearer My God to Thee’ as the ship sank, it had actually played popular Ragtime tunes to allay panic. Further, vital information about the disaster was withheld from passengers, especially those travelling 3rd class, and their supposedly unruly behaviour had been exaggerated so as to highlight the heroic and gentlemanlike behaviour of the richer passengers and the officers.35

  To many, GBS’s compulsion to debunk was in the lowest degree distasteful. Had not Benjamin Guggenheim, the American multi-millionaire, gone back to his cabin to change into evening dress and said to an amazed steward: ‘If we have to die we will die like gentlemen’?

  Arthur Conan Doyle36 wrote to the Daily News to denounce Shaw’s iconoclasm, furious at the implication that rich or pushing men found their way into the lifeboats, and that heroism was not displayed by the officers and their class. The conservative Doyle and the iconoclastically socialist Shaw took opposing views of the reporting of the Titanic disaster because they took radically different views of the nature of society. For one man, who was destined to become a spiritualist and who in later life was tricked into believing that some children had managed to photograph fairies, the disaster was heroic, the gentlemen behaved like gents, the officers like officers, while the poor piously praised their God. For Shaw the incident exemplified the unfairness of the social divide and the collaborative need shared by popular newspapers and their readership to invent consoling versions of intolerable truths.

  At the Royal Opera House Covent Garden at a Titanic Disaster Fund Matinee, Thomas Hardy, the old Victorian agonistic pessimist, took the stage on 14 May 1912, the very day of Shaw’s Daily News article, to read his interpretation of events, ‘The Convergence of the Twain’. Hardy’s poem saw it as a fatalistic moment. Now the ship, ‘and the Pride of Life that planned her’, lay at the bottom of the ocean. Even as the ship was being built, however:

  In stature grace, and hue,

  In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too.

  Till the Spinner of the Years

  Said ‘Now!’ And each one hears,

  And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres.37

  Here is the true prophetic note, from the poet.

  Alongside the arms race between the Great Powers, and the desire for the British and the Germans to have more and bigger battleships than one another, European and American companies vied with one another for larger, faster and speedier ocean liners. The British led the field with 17 vessels of 12,000 tons and upwards in June 1910 as against 14 Germans, but the German boats – the George Washington, Kaiser Auguste Viktoria, Cleveland, Kaiser Wilhelm der Grosse and others – were magnificent, luxurious boats.38 You could say that the rivalry was one of the things which caused the disaster on the Titanic. Shaw scornfully wrote: ‘the one thing positively known was that Captain Smith had lost his ship by deliberately and knowingly steaming into an ice field at the highest speed he had coal for’.39 You could certainly see the Titanic as the very embodiment of the enterprise and ambition which created it. The entrepreneurial ambition of a Liverpool shipping company called on the combined skill of Scottish engineering – Harland – and Jewish finance – Wolff – to make a floating emblem of the Edwardian class structure. Everyone knew, didn’t they – surely they did – that the British Empire was one on which the sun would never set? It was an unsinkable vessel … wasn’t it? At its summit were gentlemen and officers who, even though they kept company with extravagant millionaires and vulgarian financiers, would behave like heroes – wouldn’t they? When disaster struck? Wouldn’t they? And if the unthinkable happened the disaster would not be accompanied, would it, by the airs of Ragtime and Dixie, but by the dignified melancholy of the old hymn, ‘Nearer My God to Thee’?

  Generations of American children have sung the song round campfires:

  O they sailed from England and were almost to the shore,

  When the rich refused to associate with the poor,

  So they put them down below, where they were the first to go.

  It was sad when that great ship went down.

  It was sad, it was sad,

  It was sad when that great ship went down.

  Husbands and wives, little children lost their lives –

  It was sad when that great ship went down.40

  For those attentive enough to recognize it, Europe, and certainly Britain, had reached a crisis in its destiny. Something was about to change, or had changed, for ever. D. H. Lawrence’s greatest novel, The Rainbow, which he was writing as the world sleep-walked into the most destructive war in its history, is full of this sense of loss, of elegy. So are Lawrence’s letters which must rank among the greatest ever written in English. To his friend Lady Cynthia Asquith he wrote from an Oxfordshire manor house where he was staying in November 1915:

  When I drive across this country, with the autumn falling and rustling to pieces, I am so sad, for my country, for this great wave o
f civilisation, 200 years, which is now collapsing, that it is hard to live. So much beauty and pathos of old things passing away and no new things coming: this house of the Ottolines* – It is England – my God, it breaks my soul – this England, these shafted windows, the elm-trees, the blue distance – the past, the great past, crumbling down, breaking down, not under the force of the coming buds, but under the weight of many exhausted, lovely yellow leaves, that drift over the lawn and over the pond, like the soldiers, passing away, into winter and the darkness of winter – no, I can’t bear it. For the winter stretches ahead, where all vision is lost and all memory dies out.41

  * Ottoline and Philip Morrell lived at Garsington Manor, Oxfordshire.

  9

  An Asiatic Power

  Nearly all general histories of the First World War, especially if directed to British, American, French or German readers, concentrate upon the mass slaughter of young men in the trench warfare of the Western Front. Given the numbers who died, and the sufferings all combatants endured, this is hardly surprising; but it can make a puzzling war – just what did they think they were doing, committing mass murder in the mud for four years? Shift the geographical focus, and the war is perhaps easier to place in some kind of perspective.

  It is possible that we shall fail to understand the First World War, and its development, if we forget Disraeli’s quip that Britain was an Asiatic rather than a European power. George V was the first, and last, king-emperor of India to visit his Eastern Empire as monarch. The Delhi Durbar which saluted the beginning of his reign even outsoared the magnificence of that ceremony a decade earlier when Lord Curzon and the daughter of a Chicago department store-owner had wobbled into Delhi on the back of an elephant. The new king entered the city on a small brown horse in a field marshal’s uniform and a sun helmet. George V had proposed to crown himself as the central act of the Durbar, but the Archbishop of Canterbury had vetoed any such Napoleonic gesture. In the event, he arrived wearing a crown, but since the Imperial Crown in London was far too heavy to be worn for three hours of a ceremony in blazing heat, they ordered a new lighter model from Garrard’s, the Crown Jeweller, at a cost of £60,000, borne not by the royal family itself, still less by the British tax payer, but by the people of India. After the imperial visit, the crown was moved back to London, where it has been preserved ever since in the jewel house in the Tower of London. If ever there was a case for some London exhibit being returned to its rightful owners, it is surely not the Parthenon Marbles, for whose purchase Lord Elgin ruined himself, but the Indian crown jewels, for which no Britisher, royal or commoner, paid so much as one penny.1