After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  The miners were at the vanguard of the working-class struggle for fairly obvious and visible reasons. With their hard labour they had fuelled the industrial power and energy which had made Britain the supreme economic empire of the world. Until the arrival of oil-fuelled transport or industrial machinery, coal was visibly there, heaped in the factory yards, in the furnaces where Baldwin’s ironworks melted the ore, in the bottle-kilns which fired Colonel Wedgwood’s china: all over the industrial Midlands and North. Every railway station smelt of coal. It was smuts of coal which middle-class passengers wiped from their eyes if they leaned out of the express train window; it was slag heaps they saw, brooding like accursed mountains in a Dantean hellscape, as they steamed through the industrial heartlands. Coal, its dirt, energy and power, was the outward and visible sign of the contract which had been made since the Industrial Revolution began between the people who made and the people who owned the country’s wealth. Those who mined it led short lives. They returned to small houses to be washed in front of the fire in tin baths, their faces grimy, their lungs thick with pneumoconiosis. While the idea of the Labour movement was that all workers were partners, in real terms there was not a great connection between, say, textile workers based in Lancashire and those making nails in Birmingham, between a railway stoker in Barnstaple and a docker on the Clyde. But coal and its visible dirt united them all. The dispute which developed between Herbert Smith and the National Union of Mineworkers and the owners escalated. The owners made a mean-spirited offer, and then threatened lockout if the men refused the terms. The government, and especially the Home Secretary, the evangelical Christian William Joynson-Hicks, believed that a Communist revolution was imminent, even though the Communists were not especially influential in any of the unions drawn into the dispute, certainly not in the TUC, which tried to mediate.

  If the railwaymen came out on strike in solidarity with the dockers they had the capacity to cause damage, but no longer totally to immobilize the country. The government drew up emergency plans, with anyone who could drive being enlisted as lorry-drivers to take food to the main cities. There was some further attempt at mediation between the workers and the mine-owners, but the truth is that the government wanted this strike. On 1 May the dockers were locked out, and on 3 May 1926 a General Strike was called.

  The middle classes responded with a whooping excitement to the challenge. Public-school-educated young men who had always dreamed of doing so drove trains. Those who for recreation rode to hounds now volunteered as mounted police. Millions of strikers were out, and in all major towns there were huge crowds, but they were on the whole peaceful. Four thousand at the end of a week were prosecuted for violence, but this was 4,000 out of crowds of millions. Much violence, on both sides, went unreported.20 Churchill was in his element. He forgot that the job of Chancellor was merely to look after the nation’s economy, and moved immediately into dictatorial mode. ‘He thinks he is Napoleon,’ J. C. Davidson complained to Baldwin. When the first convoy brought food into central London from the docks by volunteer drivers, Churchill wanted it to be escorted by tanks with machine guns tactically placed en route. He tried to commandeer the BBC, but Reith resisted. When the compositors at the Daily Mail went on strike rather than print an inflammatory and inaccurate article, and most of the other printers followed suit, Churchill decided to produce his own government propaganda sheet. The British Gazette was produced from the offices and printing plant of the Morning Post. He commandeered newsprint, paper and machines. By the last day of the strike, he had got the circulation up to 2.2 million.

  His biographer Roy Jenkins calls this ‘a formidable achievement’, without mentioning that his own father, a Welsh miner who became a Labour MP, went to prison for his advocacy of the miners’ cause.21 Two months after the strike, when the House of Commons was debating it all, Churchill turned to a Labour member and said: ‘I have no wish to make threats which would disturb the House and cause bad blood, but this I must say. Make your minds perfectly clear that if ever you let loose upon us again a General Strike, we will let loose upon you.’ He paused. ‘Another British Gazette.’ There was laughter of course from both sides of the House. Churchill could not help being funny and charming, but his actual policy, and that of the government, was very far from charming or funny. He would certainly have been prepared to use machine guns and tanks on men who only eight years before were being asked to die for their country and who were rightly described by Lloyd George as heroes.

  The General Strike lasted nine days. The miners held out for six months until starvation drove them back to accept worse conditions than before, lower wages and longer hours. Coal mines remained, until the Second World War, the largest employers of labour.22 The behaviour of the owners was not forgotten, however, and this was one of the chief reasons why the coal-mining industry was nationalized as soon as there was a powerful and effective Labour government in 1945.

  The King wrote in his diary: ‘Our old country can well be proud of itself, as during the last nine days there has been a strike in which four million people have been affected, not a shot has been fired and no one killed. It shows what a wonderful people we are.’23 But who needs to fire a gun if you have hunger and fear to drive people back to work?

  The union leaders certainly did not want Britain to become communist. But for eight years since the end of the war, the working classes had waited for some of the promises of politicians to be fulfilled. Where was the Land Fit for Heroes to Live In which Lloyd George had promised? How did they live, in their back-to-back houses, and their tenements? How did they wash? How did they go to the lavatory? What happened to them when they were ill? What sort of schooling was offered to their children? Of course these were not the issues in the General Strike, but they were the circumstances which explained how and why so many people went out. It was a yelp of pain and anger, not an organized political programme. The Conservatives could capitalize on all the fears which the strike had aroused, by bringing in the Trade Unions Act of 1927. It greatly expanded the class of ‘illegal strikes’. It banned all strikes ‘designed or calculated to coerce the Government either directly or by inflicting hardship on the community’. Workers who refused to accept changes in their working conditions were now deemed in the eyes of the law to be on strike. Peaceful picketing was banned. Civil servants were forbidden from joining a trade union. The comparative benignity of the Employers and Workmen Act of 1875 was swept away. Trade unions were limited in the extent to which they could fund political parties, so that the government was able, while limiting the power of the union, to ruin, financially, the Labour party, since trade unions were the principal sources of Labour party funding. Labour could now collect money only from trade union members who had specifically ‘contracted in’ to pay for party funding; this at a time when wages were being reduced and unemployment always threatened. Labour party membership fell from 3,388,000 in 1926 to a little over 1 million in 1927.24

  There was now on the statute book a system of iron control over the disgruntled workforce, and the painstaking trade union movement, which had built up its rights and its power base over the previous century, was now firmly knocked into submission. In so doing, the Conservatives undoubtedly strengthened the Labour party in the long term, since many more individuals, as opposed to union people, joined the party over the coming decade, and for every one who joined there were ten who were sympathetic fellow travellers, and potential Labour voters when the next election came.

  The General Strike had been an ugly episode. It did not show what a wonderful people the British were. It showed how selfish their middle classes were, and how strong was their monied power. On 28 October 1926, Hilaire Belloc wrote to his friend Katharine Asquith: ‘We are in a state of permanent and sullen civil war, modified by general patriotism and terror of the police and the troopers. The rich are seeing to it that these divisions shall grow more acute. God has blinded them. I have not met one single gentleman or lady on the side of the poor in
this crisis. That’s ominous!’25

  18

  The Secrets of a Woman’s Heart – Marie Stopes, Radclyffe Hall

  If Belloc had not heard any rich people speaking up for the poor, in the sense of defending strike action on a national scale, it would have been wrong to say that it had no effect outside the immediate dispute between employers and union leaders. The strike did alert many people to the plight of the poor and of the unemployed. Immediately after the General Strike, the Conservative member of Parliament for the Sutton division of Plymouth, accompanied by Margaret Wintringham, MP for Louth, 1921–4, broadcast on behalf of the Save the Children Fund, a charity which had been started after the First World War. The MP and Mrs Wintringham also toured the mining districts of South Wales. ‘We found such kindness and courage, and no bitterness among the miners and their wives … We returned with a longing to help, not only with milk and food, but in bringing about some method of settling disputes by some other way than war – for industrial disputes are war, in which women and children suffer most.’ … ‘Please send your gifts, remember that by doing this you will help to keep alive not only the bodies and spirits of those who are suffering, but, what is more important, their faith in their fellow men and women.’

  The MP concerned represented a poor part of Plymouth, and was able, thanks to money from her husband’s immensely rich family, to set up a housing trust on the model of those of Basil Jellicoe in Somers Town, and to establish, as well as cheap, healthy housing, a gymnasium, a carpenter’s shop, a cinema, a printing-press and other facilities.1 Many of the pioneers of women’s suffrage must have been surprised by the fact that, when a woman first took her seat in the House of Commons, on 1 December 1919, it should have been as a Conservative. Others would have been surprised, too, that she was an American. A divorced and remarried American at that. (Fifteen years later such a biographical history would disqualify another American lady from an important role in British public life.)

  Nancy Langhorne (1879–1964) had been born in Danville, Virginia. At the time of her parents’ marriage her father, Chiswell Dabney Langhorne, had been an officer in the Confederate army. The reduced post-bellum circumstances in which they grew up gave credence to Nancy’s later claims that she knew about poverty. The family lived in a four-roomed wooden house. Nancy was the fifth child in a family of eleven. In 1897 she married a rich Bostonian named Robert Gould Shaw II, largely because she so admired his horsemanship. They were divorced in 1903, and she came almost at once to England, with her beautiful little son Bobbie Shaw, destined for a tragic, homosexual existence, her mother and a female friend. She had good introductions, and enjoyed hunting, and this beautiful, spirited woman did not lack for invitations. Her sometimes abrasive manner charmed people. When General Tom Holland offered to help her up on to her horse after a fall, she yelled: ‘Do you think I would be such an ass to come out hunting if I couldn’t mount from the ground?’ They were friends for life. Soon she captured the heart of Lord Revelstoke, head of Barings’ Bank. Nothing came of the relationship, however – he was too shy to speak out – and on a voyage back from America in 1905, she met Waldorf Astor.

  Waldorf’s father, William Waldorf Astor, had left the United States on the somewhat Jamesian grounds that ‘America is not a fit place for a gentleman to live.’ Having spent some of his fortune acquiring stupendous art works in Italy, and written a novel about the Borgias, he had settled in England. He lived in style in London, owning a house in Carlton House Terrace. His Tudorbethan offices on the Victoria Embankment had door handles which opened only on the inside, and the whole building – so obsessed was he by the possibility of kidnap – had centrally controlled security locks. He bought two stupendous country houses, Hever Castle in Kent, and Cliveden, Barry’s Italian palazzo, in Buckinghamshire. He also became a newspaper proprietor, owning the Pall Mall Gazette, and later the Observer. When Nancy married Waldorf she wore a tiara containing the Sanci diamond, which had belonged to James I and Charles I and which had been worn by Louis XIV at his coronation. There could hardly have been a more eloquent demonstration of the conquest of Old Europe by American money.

  Cliveden is one of the most beautifully situated houses in England. From its Italianate terraces, the lawns and gardens slope into a blue-green vista, through which snakes the silvery Thames. The statues and the balustrades come from the Villa Borghese in Rome. Nancy was a spirited hostess, and not consumed by guilt. She had a deep spiritual strength, enhanced in 1914 by her conversion to Christian Science – Mrs Baker Eddy’s belief that evil was illusory being somehow suited to her brand of optimistic puritanism. She was a prig, a teetotaller, and as a mother, she was something out of Eugene O’Neill (Bobbie had four Astor half-siblings). But although many old suffragists must have been a little wistful about it being her, rather than Mrs Pankhurst or Ellen Wilkinson or some other feminist worthy, who first took her seat in Westminster, the important thing was, she had done it. One veteran suffragette pinned a badge on to her as she arrived at Westminster and touched her, as if she were semi-divine. ‘It is the beginning of our era,’ said the older woman. ‘I am glad I have suffered for this.’

  The First World War had changed the ‘position of women’ in very many ways. It was much more than simply the fact, important as this was, that women had worked in munitions factories, as medics, as administrators, and established their place alongside men in the workplace; much more, too, than that they had slowly forced upon a sluggish male establishment the notion that suffrage must one day come. Women over the age of thirty got the vote in 1918. It was not until 1928 that women aged twenty-one enjoyed the same parliamentary voting rights as men and over 5 million voters were added to the national registers. It was that the whole position of women in society, in the scheme of things, had ceased to be a subject discussed by a few enlightened, slightly earnest Victorian feminist friends of John Stuart Mill, heroic as these figures had been, and become rather something which now affected everyone. In 1925, in The Right to Be Happy, Dora Russell, Bertrand’s second wife, spoke of the older feminists who could not ‘see what sex had to do with political freedom’. Stella Browne, another pioneer socialist feminist of the new generation, would have agreed with this, and wrote that the ‘incurably respectable tacticians’ of the old Victorian suffragist institutions had neglected ‘intimate liberation’.2

  Marie Stopes’s Married Love addresses questions more immediately important to people than whether to vote for the Asquithian or the Lloyd George Liberals or whether to come off the gold standard.

  If Simone de Beauvoir was right that ‘la liberté pour les femmes commence au ventre’3 (Freedom for women begins in the belly) then the story of female suffrage and votes for women was only part of the story of political life in the 1920s. Some time before he embarked on an unsuccessful mission to provide democratic self-determinations for the nations of Europe, President Woodrow Wilson was in receipt of a remarkable written question: ‘Have you, Sir, visualised what it means to be a woman?’ If the answer to this question was a negative, he had almost certainly not given his mind to her further question, whether he knew what ‘… it means to be a woman whose every muscle and blood-capillary is subtly poisoned by the secret ever-growing horror, more penetrating, more long-drawn than any nightmare, of an unwanted embryo developing beneath her heart? While men stand proudly and face the sun, boasting that they have quenched the wickedness of slavery, what chains of slavery are, have been, or ever could be so intimate a horror as the shackles on every limb, on every thought, on the very soul of an unwillingly pregnant woman?’

  The author of this letter enclosed a petition signed, among others, by H. G. Wells, Arnold Bennett and Professor Gilbert Murray, none of whom had themselves been pregnant, though they had all – Wells and Bennett in their novels, Murray in his translations from Greek tragedy – made an imaginative stab at getting inside unhappy women’s skins. The author herself, Marie Stopes, had in 1905 been the youngest Doctor of Science in Britain.
(She never qualified as a medical doctor.) She had formed the ambition as a very young person to find herself ‘a place with the Immortals’.4 She wanted her life to fall into three phases. First, she would become a scientist. Next, she would devote herself to poetry and drama, and become a writer. Third, she would devote herself to helping the human race. In her way she did all three things, though rather than being first one thing, then another, and then the third, she was probably always all three at once: scientist, poet and missionary. Her archetypically Victorian idea that she should apply her scientific expertise to human betterment led inexorably to her turning into something else, a twentieth-century ‘character’, one who Stood for Something, a figure whose activities could be caricatured by the newspapers, and whose sometimes quite complicated range of responses to the universe could be summed up in a few shocking banner headlines.

  Marie Stopes was beautiful, she had long flowing hair, she wrote short, compelling books and articles about subjects which obsess almost everyone. She addressed medical and scientific questions in the language of a tuppenny ‘shocker’. Being a very quick-tempered exhibitionist who expressed herself in novelettish prose, she was a gift to journalists and the caricaturist school of history. She made some powerful enemies, and it is not surprising therefore that she should have been more than usually edgy about the exposure of her own private sorrows. In a sense, however, attempts to undermine Stopes’s work by reference to these painful matters only rebound on the teller, since although she disputed the details of bedroom secrets in her two unhappy marriages, she never made any secret of the fact that her work as a sexologist, and her desire to spread a little happiness, sprang from her own private miseries.