by A. N. Wilson
With the ease of travel brought about by the railways, there was a growth of hotels; Philip Hardwick’s Great Western Royal Hotel at Paddington Station (1854) was an inseparable part of traveling westwards by rail. Until very recently, you could walk directly from the hotel onto the station platform. This was the era not only of the great station hotels but also of hotels within the metropolis itself. Hitherto, only aristocrats or their imitators would have taken whole houses for a “season,” bringing with them from the country their servants and retinue. Now, anyone prepared to pay could come up and stay in London without “knowing anyone.” The Westminster Palace Hotel in Victoria Street opened in 1860 with three hundred bedrooms, fourteen bathrooms, and the first lifts in London. By the end of the century Richard D’Oyly Carte, flush with the success of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas, which he had managed and produced, built the legendary Savoy Hotel, with electric lights, lifts, and every luxury. In 1899, Cesar Ritz had opened the Carlton Hotel in the Haymarket, and the hotel that bore his name opened in 1906.
The hotel was a deeply Victorian institution. The hotel is the natural refuge of the family on the move, of the commercial traveler, of the surreptitious liaison and the hidden life. As Oscar Wilde says, in John Betjeman’s poem, before his arrest at the Cadogan Hotel in Chelsea—
One astrakhan coat is at Willis’s
Another one’s at the Savoy;
So fetch my morocco portmanteau
And bring them on later, dear boy. . . .
The Victorians made much of the cult of home and for that reason needed refuges from it. The simple chophouses and coffeehouses of a previous age survived. But restaurants became popular, ranging from the very grand, such as the Café Royal in Regent Street (opened in 1865) to the more bohemian, such as Kettner’s in Soho. (Both, at the time of writing, are still extant.)
Some of the restaurants, such as Spiers or Pond’s Criterion at Piccadilly Circus, were huge. It was now possible for women to eat out, alone, or accompanied by other women, or with their husbands. As well as theaters, there was another attraction luring the inhabitants of the suburbs into the centers: department stores. These expanded and grew during the 1880s and 1890s, from William Whiteley’s (founded 1863), the Civil Service Stores (1865), and the Army and Navy Stores (1871). Smallish drapers, such as Swan and Edgar (1812), Dickins and Jones (1837) (they started as Dickins and Smith in 1790), and Marshall and Snelgrove (1837) grew to match their rivals. Harrods, a small grocery shop that had originated in the East End, moved to Knightsbridge and became an institution, providing services such as a lending library, a bank, and an undertaker’s. As the artist Osbert Lancaster observed, “All my female relatives had their own favourites, where some of them had been honoured customers for more than half a century, and their arrival was greeted by frenzied bowing on the part of the frock-coated shopwalkers. . . . For my Great-aunt Bessie the Army and Navy Stores fulfilled all the functions of her husband’s club” (All Done from Memory, p. 35).
The men’s clubs flourished as never before. Social climbing was such a universal form of exercise in the late nineteenth century that there could not be enough establishments priding themselves on being exclusively for gentlemen. Just as the public schools with pretensions to grandeur, such as Eton and Harrow, spawned hundreds of imitators for those lower down the social scale, so White’s and Brooks’s had a host of imitators, some for army officers, some for civil servants, some for the self-consciously raffish or bohemian. They were all ways of defining the persona of those who applied for membership, and they were all ways of escaping home.
Home need no longer be a house in the ever growing suburbs. Just as work could now be in a purpose-built office block (erected in all likelihood on the site of some lovely Georgian terrace or Wren church), home could be in a flat. Francophobia made the English slow to copy the Parisian zest for flat life, but its economic practicality and its offer of privacy were both tempting. In the mid-1850s, three-quarters of Londoners were huddled together cheek by jowl in lodging houses of one description or another. By the end, this number had been much reduced and Londoners were beginning the standoffish existence which is now their norm, with their own multiplicity of dwellings with their own front doors.
By the end of the century, blocks of mansion flats dominated Victoria Street, Chelsea Embankment, Cadogan Square, Kensington High Street, and much of Bloomsbury. These substantial and secluded residences are no hermitages. They all have rooms for servants. More than a fifth of Londoners were in domestic service, and servant’s quarters were an obvious way of housing the poor. If you had to choose between a maid’s bedroom in Pont Street, Knightsbridge, and a shared room in some squalid lodging house in Wapping or Hackney, it is not hard to know which option would be more comfortable.
London’s failure to address the problems of the poor, and in particular their need for accommodation, was a Victorian scandal, which generations of philanthropy did very little to change. Cheap housing supplied by individual philanthropists such as the Baroness Burdett-Coutts, or the Peabody Trust (founded by the American George Peabody, who had been impressed by Lord Shaftesbury’s work for the dispossessed) simply could not keep up with the demand and the numbers of people who needed to be housed.
No wonder the poor took refuge when they could in the pub, and no wonder so much of the humor of the music halls, which began life in pubs, is about drunkenness, dispossession, and the sexual humiliations to be found in such circumstances. Marie Lloyd, one of the greatest performers on the English stage, was born Matilda Alice Victoria Wood at 36 Plumber Street, in the slums of Hoxton. She died in 1922. Her cynical, boozy songs were about the world which she and her audiences were forced by economic circumstances to inhabit.
Only in 1889 did London finally have a properly elected local authority of its own, to match the civic authorities that had transformed Birmingham, Bradford, and Leeds into places that had begun to solve some of their worst social problems. In the 1870s in Birmingham, the radical mayor, Joseph Chamberlain, had the power to raise rates, municipalize the utilities, and take out loans for schemes of public works. No such body existed in London until the London County Council, the LCC, was set up.
From the first, the central government viewed the LCC with the deepest suspicion. The Liberals (or Progressives, as they called themselves in the elections) won control of the first LCC over the Moderates (or Conservatives) in January 1889. Conservative central government did its best, under the cynical Lord Salisbury, to make the LCC unworkable by creating twenty-eight metropolitan boroughs whose vestries and boards would have autonomy. Gas, water, and electricity were not in the hands of the LCC, nor initially was any overall authority for sanitation, street cleaning, refuse collection, or local drains. Nevertheless, a start had been made. The LCC presided over 117 square miles; it was composed of 126 councillors elected every three years, and twenty-one aldermen elected by those councillors for periods of six years. It was the first time since the Roman Londinium that there had been one single controlling authority attempting to administer the chaos that called itself London.
As the national capital, London was the obvious place to provide shows and demonstrations of patriotic achievement. In 1851, in the middle of Hyde Park, in Paxton’s great Crystal Palace, the preeminence of British industry was presented to the world in the Great Exhibition. It attracted huge crowds and made so much money that on the strength of it they could build the Albertopolis, the assembly of buildings in South Kensington that includes the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Albert Hall, as well as the Natural History and Science Museums.
At the end of the century, in 1887 and 1897, London staged the Golden and Diamond Jubilees of the Queen, with royal pageantry and military parades, and services in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Yet, when she went to the East End, Queen Victoria was booed. The event that dominated the close of her reign in London was not the Jubilee but the dock strike, when thirty thousand men bravely forwent pay, and risked the hunger of
their families, by striking and showing the world that they could not subsist on the wages offered. They were campaigning for a princely sixpence an hour.
Now, as we survey what is left of Victorian London, we can be sentimental about its architectural remains. The stained or decorated glass and varnished mahogany and pine of the old pubs; the incense-drowned mystery of brick churches; the cavernous cathedral grandeur of St. Pancras Station can take us back to a dream Victorian London, where Sherlock Holmes rides in a hansom cab through the fog and housemaids behind shuttered bedroom windows allow their lecherous employers to unribbon their stays. No doubt such jollities could be found. No doubt we would have enjoyed a club dinner with Trollope or gone out whistling into the night had we attended the first night of the Mikado at the Savoy Theatre. But we should have done so knowing that in arches under the embankment bare-foot children starved to death. In the capital of the richest empire the world had ever seen was poverty that would compare with the most deprived parts of Africa or South America in the twenty-first century.
10
1900-1939
In 1932 the Lordship Lane Recreation Ground was opened in the northern suburb of Tottenham, a working-class area to the south of the White Hart Estate. Half this land was given over to allotments, little strips of ground where people could grow their own flowers and vegetables, build wooden huts for their garden tools or for amorous adventures, and indulge the sense that, though their living accommodation was restricted, they possessed a garden. The sky was above their heads and the earth beneath their feet. This sensation was—is—especially precious to those who dwell in flats or tenements.
Herbert Morrison (1888–1965) became the leader of the London County Council in 1934, but he had been intimately involved with London politics since early manhood, becoming secretary of the London Labour Party when he was twenty-seven, in April 1915. He was the youngest of seven children of an alcoholic policeman from Brixton and Priscilla Lyon, the daughter of an East End carpet fitter. He was blind in one eye, after an easily treatable eye infection during boyhood received no treatment. (School friends called him Ball of Fat because of the dead appearance of the sightless eye.)
Morrison dominated the Labour Party on a national level and was to become Deputy Prime Minister to Attlee in the government of 1945. He came to his moderate Socialist beliefs neither from the trade union movement, of which he formed no part, nor from the middle-class, university-fed intelligentsia. He was circulation manager on the Daily Citizen and his political education was formed, like that of many Londoners, by reading newspapers and attending political meetings and street-corner speeches. It was hearing such legendary figures as Keir Hardie and George Bernard Shaw speaking that had led to his joining the Independent Labour Party in 1906. He was elected to Parliament as a London MP and he represented Hackney South from 1923 to 1929, having been mayor of Hackney since 1919. As a minister in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government he had responsibility for transport, and brought in the Road Traffic Act of 1930 and the London Transport Act of 1933. When MacDonald horrified his Socialist colleagues by forming a national government in 1933, Morrison, initially tempted to stay in power, resigned and lost his parliamentary seat; as a result, he could concentrate his energies on London politics and the LCC.
The Lordship Lane Recreation Ground is a good place to stand and think about the career of Morrison and his brand of London Socialism. One of Morrison’s dreams, as leader of the LCC, was to establish a green belt around London, a lung for an overcrowded city. A reflection of Morrison’s interest in a publicly coordinated transport system is also reflected in Lordship Lane, for here was constructed, for the children of the White Hart Lane Estate, a fantasy of Socialist order. Around the boating lake and the bandstand and the tennis courts, the superintendent of parks, Mr. G. E. Paris, F. Inst.PA FRHS created a plan of a “model traffic area” laid out like a model village but with real roads, fully operative traffic lights, and pedal cars that could be hired for a halfpenny per half hour. Traffic jams could be engineered by real miniature traffic signs: “Halt at Major Road Ahead.” There was tremendous excitement on the opening day, with local newspapers recording that five hundred children queued from eight A.M. for tickets.
Today, inevitably, the model traffic area barely survives. The road network has been vandalized. Some crudely relandscaped hillocks with sliced-up motor tires cater for an already dead craze for mountain biking. Anyone with the temerity to walk in the park today is more likely to encounter a sex maniac released into the community, or a heroin addict shooting up, than the ghost of the ex–taxi driver who, in a peaked cap, directed the traffic in 1938 and controlled the working Belisha beacons, the pedestrian crossing lights.1
Morrison had stood for election to the leadership of the London County Council (LCC) on a program of optimistic Socialism: “Up with the Houses! Down with the Slums!” In its first three-year term, the Labour-dominated LCC displaced and rehoused 34,036 people, very many more than had been rehoused by previous councils. In 1936–39 it built an average of four thousand flats annually, four times more than had been built annually between 1930 and 1934. Between 1934 and 1939 nearly twenty thousand families from inner East London— Shoreditch, Stepney, Bethnal Green, Poplar, Bermondsey, Southwark—were rehoused, but only 4,500 new LCC dwellings were built in those neighborhoods. The tendency was to move families outwards in the vast sprawl of council flats and ribbon roads that characterized the London of the interwar years. It was not merely the working classes who moved outwards. The transport development that exemplified the social change was the building of two new electric lines by the Metropolitan Railway—to Watford, Amersham, and Uxbridge in 1925; to Stanmore in 1932.
Hearts are light, eyes are brighter, In Metroland, Metroland went the lyric by George R. Simms. “Stake your claim in Edgware,” instructed an Underground booklet:
Omar Khayyám’s recipe for turning the wilderness into Paradise hardly fits an English climate, but provision has been made at Edgware of an alternative recipe which at least will convert pleasant, undulating fields into happy homes. The loaf of bread, the jug of wine and the book of verse may be got there cheaply and easily, and apart from what is said by the illustration, a shelter which comprises all the latest labour-saving and sanitary conveniences. We moderns ask much more before we are content than the ancients, and Edgware is designed to give us that much more.
There are many moving things about this advertisement, not least the level of education which it expects from first-time home buyers. The British had, since the beginning of the eighteenth century, considered that a problem exported is a problem solved. In the nineteenth century, criminals and indigent Celts were exported or transported to Canada, New Zealand, and Australia, and this was one vital ingredient in the fact that there was no English revolution in 1848, no Commune in London as there was in Paris in 1870.
Every London fire station, railway station, post office mail-sorting center, gentlemen’s club, council office, and town hall has its war memorial, testifying to the devastation of losses at the front. But chiefly the First World War was, for Londoners, a nightmare happening elsewhere. It is true that there were bombing raids. The first was on May 31, 1915, when a German airship dropped a ton of bombs. But during the whole of the First World War, the total of Londoners killed by air raids was 670, a dreadful number if you happened to be their friend, husband, parent, but not to be compared with the many thousands of civilians across Europe who were destined to be killed by aerial bombardment during the Second World War.
Those who came back from the fighting had been promised a land fit for heroes to live in. They found that some things had changed forever, most notably in the lives of women. It was an American, Lady Astor, who in 1919 became the first woman MP. She had played no part in the feminist movement. Emmeline Pankhurst, the greatest campaigner for women’s suffrage, failed to win a seat in the election that took Nancy Astor to the House of Commons. She agreed to contest Whitechapel (as a Cons
ervative) in 1926, but died before the election.
The implosion of the Independent Labour Party, the betrayal (as the Socialists saw it) of their cause by Ramsay MacDonald after 1931, happened against a background of economic and political turmoil. After the Wall Street crash of 1929, it seemed perfectly plausible that the prophecies of Karl Marx were about to be fulfilled and that capitalism itself was collapsing. All over the United States and Europe, dreadful hardship was suffered as unemployment soared.
The Independent Labour Party had never been wholly Marxist in outlook, but it shared the underlying Marxist supposition that capital oppressed rather than enriched the working man. It might have been supposed that the Labour government of Ramsay MacDonald, or his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Snowden, would have rejoiced at the consummation of their hopes. With capital in ruins, it was surely now time for the state to intervene, with schemes of public works, unemployment benefits, and housing benefits, to soften the blow of the crisis and to pave the way for a new era in which private enterprise and selfishness were banished and subsumed in a common cause in which all pulled together.
Instead, MacDonald and Snowden, who had learnt their Socialism from the great nineteenth-century legends—Keir Hardie, William Morris, and the rest—pursued no such policy. From 1924, when he became Chancellor, Snowden had in fact abandoned Socialism and had cut taxes. His commitment to free trade and the market “righting itself ” was positively Gladstonian. While MacDonald and Snowden, at the behest of the King, abandoned Socialism and the Socialists, unemployment soared.
It is not surprising that there should have been dismay. During a speech in Trafalgar Square on September 14, 1931, Ramsay MacDonald’s young chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, who had resigned in protest at the government’s failure to address the appalling unemployment crisis, said:
