by Simon Schama
… the unavoidable suggestion of that wide park and that fair large house, dominating church, village and the countryside, was that they represented the thing that mattered supremely in the world and that all other things had significance only in relation to them. They represented the Gentry, the Quality, by and through and for whom the rest of the world, the farming folk and the labouring folk, the trades-peoples of Ashborough, and the upper servants and the lower servants and the servants of the estate, breathed and lived and were permitted.
But even by 1909, that certainty had gone. Although the look of the countryside was the same – ‘The great houses stand in their parks still, the cottages cluster respectfully on their borders, touching their eaves with their creepers. … It is like an early day in a fine October. The hand of change rests on it all, unfelt, unseen. … One frost and the whole face of things will be bare, links snap, patience ends, our fine foliage of pretences lie glowing in the mire.’
Or so Wells hoped, a little prematurely. He, after all, was unequivocal about the dead weight of the past on the British future. And as a scientist – a student of the great Darwinist T. H. Huxley, no less – Wells made it clear many times that it was the future in which he and the rest of us ought to be interested. Nations and national histories were tribal anachronisms. True history was the history of the human species, not some absurdly arbitrary territorial and linguistic micro-division. To save that future needed a planetary view.
That view would come with his great Outline of History in 1919, a work about as far removed from Churchill’s island epics as anyone could possibly get. But for the moment Wells’s future, along with his future histories, was still science fiction. The masters of Uppark/Bladesover and their ilk continued to define Britishness, even if the cheque books that paid for the gardeners were now drawn on business accounts. (Predictably, Wells has ‘Sir Reuben Lichtenstein’ eventually buying Bladesover.) Social democracy was not just over the Fabian horizon. Those who did survive the shake-out of the estates belonged to an even more exclusive elite: by 1914, half the acreage of England and Wales belonged to just 4500 proprietors.
But not all the plutocracy chose to put their money into parks, stables and grouse moors, aping the old blood. Many of them, like Joseph Chamberlain, the screw manufacturer who had committed the unforgivable solecism of wearing his hat when being sworn in as an MP for Birmingham, were now barons of the new Britain and created their own version of estates in the suburbs. Chamberlain’s mansion, called Highbury after the north London district where he had spent his youth, was originally surrounded by 18 acres rather than the thousands typical of the old aristocratic houses. It had been designed by another Chamberlain (John Henry, whose reputation had been formed as the architect of Birmingham’s schools, civic buildings and municipal fountains) and was built in solid orange industrial brick with stone embellishments, the materials of choice for industrial-Italianate. Inside, everything was dark and very shiny. ‘No books, no work, no music’, sneered the patrician socialist Beatrice Webb, ‘to relieve the oppressive richness of the satin-covered furniture.’ Outside, there was croquet, tennis and late Victorian picturesque complete with rushy bogs, dells, brooks and pre-weathered bridges. Chamberlain himself could often be seen on an inspection tour of his orchids, azaleas and cyclamen – each species, naturally, with its own glasshouse.
Not very far from Highbury, just 4 miles south of the then city limits, the Quaker cocoa-and-chocolate magnate George Cadbury built his house, Woodbrooke, also with the standard tennis, croquet and a newly obligatory feature – the seven-hole golf course. But Cadbury had a much more ambitious social vision for his estate than mere vulgar plutocratic self-celebration. As a response to social critics like John Ruskin and William Morris that factory industrialism represented, by definition, the destruction of community, Cadbury built at Bournville a new-old village in which workers would be housed in half-timbered cottages gathered round a green. The resurrected paternalism of Merrie England would be the antidote to the horrifying slum tenements that Cadbury remembered from the days before Chamberlain’s social reforms in Birmingham, which still persisted in the worst sinks of destitution such as the East End of London, graphically documented in Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1892–7). By 1900 there were 140 of Cadbury’s mock-medieval workers’ dwellings, and to complete the effect he had bought two authentically old houses, the 13th-century Minworth Greaves and the Tudor Selly Manor, which he had had moved to Bournville and lovingly restored. This attempt to re-create the imagined ‘organic’ community that Carlyle, Pugin and Ruskin claimed had existed in the medieval past was the precise opposite of the Hanoverian policy of obliteration, by which awkwardly placed villages were removed from the sight of the newly rich. At Bournville, Cadbury even reinvented the old traditions of manorial feasting, organizing fêtes and theatricals and day trips for other workers in the Birmingham area to see what life might be like under the new industrial baronies.
At Port Sunlight, on the banks of the Mersey near Liverpool, Bolton-born William Hesketh Lever, who had also made his fortune by processing a colonial raw product (in his case palm oil), did the same for his soap-factory workers. Some 30 architects were commissioned to create a complete ‘garden’ village in what was unapologetically called the ‘old English’ style – a lot of Jacobean-Flemish gables, much ornamental plaster pargetting and, of course, ubiquitous exposed timbering and leaded windows. To complete the effect of an old England reborn through the ‘Spirit of Soap’, two cottages were built as ‘exact’ reproductions of Anne Hathaway’s house. Rents for the Port Sunlight cottages – there was a basic ‘kitchen’ type and a fancier ‘parlour’ type, but both, as at Bournville, had their own running water and indoor bathroom – were benevolently pegged at around one fifth of the average weekly wage of 22 shillings. To help sustain the family life that critics of industrial Britain claimed had been destroyed by factory work, schools were built for the 500 children of Port Sunlight and, for girls and working wives and mothers, special classes were offered in cooking, dressmaking and shorthand. By 1909 there were 700 cottages, a concert hall and theatre, a library, a gymnasium and an open-air swimming pool.
Fortunate as the industrial villagers of Bournville and Port Sunlight undoubtedly were, they were hardly typical of the condition of the 40 per cent of Britons who, by the turn of the 20th century, lived in cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants. Surveys of late Victorian slums, like Booth’s of the East End or Seebohm Rowntree’s 1901 study of poverty in York, gave the impression to social critics then and since that life for working people in the larger cities must have been hell on earth. Of these notoriously and persistently squalid concentrations of overcrowded destitution there were perhaps none worse than those in turn-of-the-century Glasgow, where unskilled workers still lived in a single room or at most two in a tenement block. That small space would have to do for a family’s sleeping, eating and such ablutions as were possible. Even by 1911, 85 per cent of Glasgow’s accommodation consisted of three rooms or fewer.
But true slum-dwellers constituted perhaps no more than 10 per cent of the total urban working population. Insecure and unpredictable as employment might be in a trading world now less favourable to industries traditionally dominated by British exports such as coal, textiles and heavy engineering, for the vast majority of people the physical conditions of their lives – diet, health, housing, crime rates – had been transformed since the Great Exhibition of 1851 or even the queen’s Golden Jubilee of 1887. Cities like Cardiff, with 128,000 inhabitants riding the crest of the south Wales coal export boom, had grown by seven times since the mid-19th century. In older cities like Manchester or Sheffield, the most noisome tenements had been taken down and replaced with two-up, two-down, four- or even five-room terraced houses (six in the Midlands and southeast), built in brick, sometimes faced with a little stone or stucco, of the kind that gave the industrial towns of England and Wales their classic look. To guard against ove
rcrowding local by-laws, enlightened for their time, laid down regulations about the width of streets or the heights of ceilings. Today, of course, those streets look like some of the more depressing relics of the vanished industrial empire (although, arguably, they have weathered Britain’s 20th-century history better than the post-Second World War tower blocks that replaced many of them).
Unlike the housing of virtually the rest of the industrial world in Europe and America, British terraced houses were based on the nuclear family unit, perhaps with extended family such as uncles, aunts and grannies, as well as neighbours, congregating in back gardens and sometimes on the street and in local shops, churches and pubs. Rooms were separated by function – kitchen, living room, bedrooms and, in the better-off or more socially ambitious houses, a parlour, seldom used except for special occasions and to display domestic treasures such as the piano and sideboard. Like gas for lighting and cooking, water was now supplied municipally and delivered through taps directly into sinks instead of through an outdoor pump. Water closets were fast replacing earth closets, and dungheaps and human waste were removed through town sewers, even if lavatories were almost invariably outdoors. In Exeter, beginning in 1896 the town council spent the enormous sum of £88,000 to construct a local sewerage system, and rightly boasted of the transformation brought to the town, not least by reducing the risk and rate of infectious diseases like typhoid, typhus and cholera. Ruskin had a point when he declared that ‘a good sewer is a far nobler and a far holier thing … than the most admired Madonna ever painted’.
Although plumbed-in bathtubs were still a middle- and upper-class luxury, a municipal bath-house revolution at the turn of the century meant that for the first time British working people, even those who didn’t possess one of the prized tin slipper baths (a must for mining families), could now get their bodies clean on a regular basis. At Bow in the East End of London, 73,000 people used the baths in 1892–3, their first year of operation. By 1897 Lambeth in south London had a spectacular house with three swimming pools and 97 slipper baths. In London in 1912, as Anthony Wohl has chronicled, over 5 million visits were made to public bath-houses, many of them ornately, even exotically designed, their floors and walls dressed in gleaming tile. Together with the use of public laundries, the arrival of mass hygiene (making yet more money for the benevolent autocrat of Port Sunlight) was as great a change in the social body as the arrival of the vote was for the body politic.
Diet, too, was much changed, mostly for the better. A second industrial revolution in the late 19th century had brought processed and cheaply marketed foods like margarine, mustard and commercially produced jam into the diet of the working population. And the agricultural depression that was the countryside’s misfortune was the urban consumer’s opportunity, with prices for staples – tea, bacon, flour, bread, lard and sugar, most of them either colonial or Irish in origin – dropping by a quarter to a third between 1870 and 1914. With the import of refrigerated meat the market among the poor for ‘slink’ (prematurely born calves) or ‘broxy’ (diseased sheep) mercifully contracted, although few families could have forgone tripe (cow’s stomach lining).
None of this meant that British social democracy was round the corner. Imperial wealth had done little to reduce the colossal inequalities of fortune. On the eve of the First World War, according to the social historian José Harris, 10 per cent of Britain’s population owned 92 per cent of its wealth. As many as 90 per cent of the deceased, on the other hand, left no documented assets or property whatsoever. And, although unprecedented numbers of people in the Edwardian era might have thought of themselves as relatively well-off, the economic outlook for Britain in the new century was going to make holding on to those gains harder, not easier. It was exactly in the traditional labour-intensive, export-led industries – coal, metallurgy, textiles – that the pressure was already piling up. Countries that had once imported from Britain – especially the United States and Germany – were now competitors, in some cases protected by their own tariffs. Three-quarters of all Welsh tinplate, for example, had been exported to the United States. But after the imposition in 1890 of the McKinley tariff, designed to nurture the American domestic industry, the value of those exports collapsed by nearly two-thirds in just seven years. And what was true of tinplate would be equally true for coal, pig iron and locomotive rails.
Two not necessarily mutually exclusive options were available to counteract these ominous signs of the beginning of the end of British industrial supremacy. Britain could respond, as Joseph Chamberlain wanted, with its own imperial tariff system, creating an economic Fortress Britannia, behind whose customs walls colonies would be preserved as exclusive reservoirs of raw materials and markets for manufactures. (Quite what the colonies might get out of it in the long term was best left to future discussion.) Even before he had gone public, dragging a reluctant and divided Conservative party behind him, Chamberlain had been excited enough about this prospect to confide to Winston Churchill, whose constituency of Oldham was a town very much invested in the fate of textiles, that this would be the great political issue of the future. In the election of 1905 he would break the Tories by forcing the issue, just as he had broken the Liberals 20 years earlier over Ireland.
The second option, which industrialists themselves were taking without waiting for help in the form of legislated protection, was to reduce the unit costs of their products. This could be achieved by investing in labour-saving machinery, thus reducing the size of the workforce; by cutting the wage costs of the current workforce; by getting more hours and more product for their money; or indeed by all three combined. The result of their concerted attempts to press these changes resulted in some of the bitterest labour disputes, involving lock-outs as well as strikes, seen since the 1840s. For the rationalizing-economizing drive of management ran athwart the trade unions, who were disciplined enough to mobilize their labour and committed not just to a holding position but to fighting for a minimum wage, an eight-hour day (for miners in particular) and special rates of pay for ‘abnormal’ or particularly dangerous work (again in the mines). Although the biggest unions succeeded brilliantly in recruiting the overwhelming majority of workers into their ranks, the results of the confrontations of the 1890s and 1900s were mixed. When the Amalgamated Society of Engineers decided to resist the introduction of new ‘self-acting’ machines in 1897, which inevitably meant the downgrading of the skills and numbers of workers needed and a resultant lowering of wages, they found themselves facing a determined lock-out. After seven months it culminated in a humiliating return to work on the industrialists’ terms. Still worse was the 1901 court decision upholding the right of the TaffVale Railway to sue the railwaymen’s union for damages (in this case the enormous sum of £23,000) for lost revenues incurred during a strike.
Since it seemed unlikely, especially in the years of Tory supremacy, that parliament would ever undo decisions of that kind, the need for the unions to have their own representation became urgent. The veteran of the great London dock strike of 1889, ex-docker John Burns, became an MP, allied with the Liberals but with an agenda to look after workers’ interests. But in the much more polarized climate of the 1890s and 1900s Burns was suspect as an example of the gold-watch-and-waistcoat, shiny shoed, bowler-hatted ‘old’ unionist, as much concerned with working-class respectability as with mobilizing industrial action. The miners in south Wales, for example, who had their own strike in 1893, looked rather for a politician who would not be beholden to either of the major parties. In the previous year the Scottish socialist James Keir Hardie had become the first Independent Labour MP, taking his seat at West Ham South; after losing it in 1895, he was elected MP for Merthyr Tydfil in 1900. ‘Independent’ announced Hardie’s refusal to compromise the cause of union representation in this way. In 1900 a Labour Representation Committee was established, which six years later changed its name to the Labour party. Just 29 Labour MPs were elected to the parliament of 1906, the same year that at the ot
her end of the empire, in Bombay and Calcutta, Indian nationalists repudiated both Liberal promises of self-government and Conservative promises of benevolently firm administration.
From the beginning there was a struggle for the soul (and in fact for the bodies) of the Labour party among three groups, all claiming to be the authentic voice of British socialism: revolutionary Marxists; trade unionists, who with some justification saw the party as their creation; and the non-revolutionary intellectuals of the Fabian Society. Inevitably, for the Marxists of H.M. Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation (SDF), the British component came second to the revolutionary solidarity of the international working class. And the SDF was, in fact, strongest in non-English industrial areas of Britain, on Clydeside and amongst the immigrants and political refugees from Europe, who flocked to London’s East End. Trade unionists could, and did, see themselves as belonging to an old tradition of working-class self-help that went back to the Chartists and perhaps even to the radicals of the Civil War. (Strikers in Scotland would, more than once, rewrite the National Covenant of 1637 as a call to working-class solidarity.) But the Fabians, too, claimed pedigree from Milton, John Lilburne, Tom Paine, Cobbett and Carlyle. What all those patriarchs of the people had in common was their mastery of confrontational rhetoric, and from its foundation in 1883 the Fabian Society saw itself above all as a voice.
