A Brief History of Britain 1851-2010 Read online

  The Early Twentieth Century

  By 1931, Britain, its landscape and its cities were spanned by new transport and power systems. Aircraft and electricity generation represented very different relationships between man and the environment to those of 1851. The former was not dependent on the terrain and thus looked towards a general disjuncture between man and environment that was to be a characteristic of modern life. Moreover, the National Electricity Scheme launched in the 1920s permitted a location of industries that was not as close to the coalfields as the industries of the nineteenth century. Indeed, electricity transmission transformed the power system in Britain. Technology was like a freed genie, bringing ever more changes, and the growth of the genre of ‘scientific romance’ in literature testified to the seemingly inexorable advance of human potential through technology. The potential for a new urban landscape was grasped by architectural development, not least with new buildings built with steel frames which allowed for more flexibility in design. Thus, the style of building began to change from the constrained Victorian background where technical tolerance limits had restricted the design.

  There was also a substantial development of new technology by the 1920s: radio and telegraphic communications and the car transformed everyday life. The emergence of cars, for example, led to problems with new forms of crime and new types of accidents, and the police had to develop flying squads of cars to deal with these problems, which led to the need for control rooms and therefore radio communication. Cars rivalled horse and carts on the road, up to 7,000 people were killed annually on the roads, and the Highway Code had to be developed to establish the rules of the road. The 1920s and 1930s were a period of economic, social and technological transition which fundamentally changed many aspects of social life.

  The new technology that made these changes possible was not uniquely British, and Britain did not play the leading role in the industrialization of the early twentieth century as it had done a century earlier. Instead, first the US, and then Germany, passed Britain in manufacturing output and put British industry under great pressure. Pressing the case for imperial preference in tariffs (customs duties), Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) argued in 1903 that free trade threatened Britain’s economic position: ‘Sugar has gone; silk has gone; iron is threatened; wool is threatened; cotton will go.’ Nevertheless, Britain remained a leading manufacturing power, its relative position enhanced by the extent to which East and South Asia were not yet leading industrial powerhouses, as is the case today. In 1910–14, Britain still built 62 per cent of the world’s ships, although in 1892–4 the percentage had been 82.

  Moreover, although its share of world trade fell prior to the First World War, Britain’s trade was larger than hitherto. Britain was also the largest overseas investor and the greatest merchant shipper in the world, as well as the centre of the world’s financial system: commodity prices, shipping routes and insurance premiums were all set in London. In Dickens’ novel Little Dorrit (1855–7), society worships Merdle, a great but fraudulent financier, ‘a new power in the country’, and, at dinner at Merdle’s, ‘Treasury hoped he might venture to congratulate one of England’s world-famed capitalists and merchant-princes … To extend the triumphs of such men, was to extend the triumphs and resources of the nation.’ Indeed, the expansion of the service sector, focused on the City of London, was fundamental to Britain’s continued economic strength and influence, and became more so as British manufacturing was put under pressure. In 1914, 43 per cent of the world’s foreign investment was British, and Britain was also the sole European state selling more outside the Continent than in European markets.

  These advantages, however, were challenged by international competition, while the cost and disruption of the First World War proved highly damaging, not least leading to the large-scale sale of foreign assets. Thanks largely to the war, London’s financial position was in part overtaken by that of New York in the 1920s.

  In the 1920s, Britain sought to re-create the pre-war liberal international order, but with only limited success. Britain’s economy grew less than that of the US, and, although it compared well with other major Western economies, there was a serious recession in 1920–1. GDP (Gross Domestic Product) rose above 1913 levels only in 1927, and the trade balance with most of the world, which had deteriorated since 1913, was used as a major argument against free trade and in favour of tariffs, an abrupt departure from the liberal, free trade assumptions of the Victorian order, which had already been challenged in the 1900s. For many years after the war, exports remained well below 1913 figures. To many contemporaries, the economy, already in difficulties prior to the worldwide slump of 1929 and the subsequent Depression, appeared to be in the doldrums; and this view was confirmed by subsequent economic analysis. However, there were positive developments, not least the growth of demand-led consumer industries, such as the production of cars, radios and domestic appliances, for example cookers and washing-machines, rather than the more supply-led heavy industrial sector which had been so important to nineteenth-century industrialization, for example shipbuilding and cotton-textiles.

  This contrast between sectors of growth and decline, which was to be taken much further in the 1930s, led to a very different geography of prosperity and economic opportunity to that of the nineteenth century, one that would have been readily apparent to anyone flying over the country. Outside the prosperous cities, suburbia followed the new roads, while new industrial plant could be seen in self-contained estates served largely by roads. In contrast, there was already derelict industrial plant in the heavy industrial zones, such as the north east of England, although not yet on the scale that was to be seen in the 1980s.

  In the inter-war years, the availability of jobs in expanding industrial centres in the south-east and the Midlands, such as Birmingham, Coventry, Letchworth, Luton, Slough, Watford and Welwyn, led to substantial levels of migration within Britain. Oxford as a major centre of population, and the new towns and expansion in Letchworth, Luton, Slough, Watford and Welwyn, were all indicators of a country whose geography had changed substantially since 1851, in large part due to economic growth in the south. Thanks to the Morris car works at Cowley, Oxford had only 5 per cent unemployment in 1934, and the car factories there employed 10,000 workers in 1939, producing on the American model that Morris sought to copy from Henry Ford.

  These changes in Britain’s geography were linked to those of the people, their circumstances and opportunities, and were understood by contemporaries in that light. This gives readers a choice, a choice that reflects the extent to which any division of the national history for purposes of description and analysis is of limited value if it neglects the extent to which experience was not readily fractured between different categories. It is possible to turn to Chapter 3 to consider the changing condition of the people but it is best to follow the order in this book as the next chapter includes a narrative intended to guide the reader as well as to show the importance of political developments, not least for the condition of the people covered in Chapter 3. For both, however, there are two key contexts – the economic growth which has been discussed in this chapter and the imperial primacy considered in Chapter 4.

  2

  THE CULTURE OF POWER

  ‘The latest is best … not to believe in the nineteenth century, one might as well disbelieve that a child grows into a man … without that Faith in Time what anchor have we in any secular speculation.’

  This remark, in 1857, by the painter William Bell Scott (1811–90), was exemplified in his painting The Nineteenth Century, Iron and Coal (1861), which was set in the vibrant industrial city of Newcastle. His canvas sought to capture, as Scott stated, ‘everything of the common labour, life and applied science of the day’. Scott depicted workers at Robert Stephenson’s engineering works, one of the largest manufacturers of railway engines in the world, as well as an Armstrong artillery piece which was made on the Tyne, the steam of modern communications and telegraph
wires. This was culture depicting power, the power of the world’s leading economy. Yet, the politics that this society was to follow were unclear, as was the culture that it would celebrate.

  Triumphant Market

  In the event, the triumph of the market is the major theme in nineteenth-century British cultural history. This triumph parallels the rise of the (male) democratic electorate as the franchise, or right to vote, was extended, the course and consequences of which is a key theme in the second part of this chapter. By the ‘market’, we mean that the role of consumers, not government, determined the success of particular art forms and artists. This cultural marketplace had come to the fore in Britain in the eighteenth century, as patronage by individual wealthy patrons was largely replaced by the anonymous patronage of the market. The latter entailed producing works for sale to individuals the artist had not met and also led to the cultural meeting points so important to Victorian and early-twentieth-century society: choral festivals, concert halls and art galleries.

  The crucial links were provided by the entrepreneurs who flourished in this period, notably concert organizers, art auctioneers and publishers, men who treated culture as a commodity, a commodity whose value was set by the market. Many politicians were not all that dissimilar in their methods, notably Benjamin Disraeli (1804–81), David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill (1874–1965), all of whom made their personality a key popular commodity. Even the more dour William Gladstone (1809–98) became a master of public meetings and of addressing a far larger audience through the penny press. For, in politics, as in culture, there was a fluid market, in which style and novelty were important in enhancing value and attracting recognition and support.

  In both culture and politics, the market greatly changed during the nineteenth century, largely owing to the movement of the bulk of the population into markets hitherto defined essentially (though not exclusively) in terms of the elite and the middling orders. In the Victorian period, the bulk of the male working class, especially the skilled artisans, gained not only the vote, but also time and money for leisure. Much of this time and money was spent on sport, and football, in particular, emerged as a very popular spectator sport. This was a national game and one that benefited from the Victorian zeal for organization alongside entrepreneurship, indeed for enterprising organization. The Football Association, formed in 1863, sought to codify the rules of the game. The scale of an industrial economy also played a growing role. Increasingly popular, football was organized on a large scale from the 1880s, and attendances increased markedly. An astonishing 111,000 spectators, most standing, were at Crystal Palace in 1901 to see Tottenham beat Sheffield Wednesday.

  Other sports, such as horse-racing, also attracted a large working-class following, as did pigeon-racing. Greyhound-racing, however, which was to have such a following, was not introduced until 1926, although there had been a previous experiment. It rose quickly to well over 30 million attendances per year. To the authorities, these numbers presented a threat since on-course betting was legal under British law, and so gave a chance for the working classes to bet legally much as the middle classes did on horse racecourses. The resultant betting provoked an attempt by Winston Churchill and others to control greyhound-racing, though they failed. Churchill referred to the greyhound tracks as being ‘animated roulette wheels’.

  In the late nineteenth century, sporting activities, like other branches of leisure, became increasingly highly organized, competitive and commercialized, and with a much more distinct division between participant and observer. There was also a boom in middle-class sports, such as golf and lawn tennis, whose rules were systematized in 1874. Sporting institutions and facilities were created across Britain. Northumberland Cricket Club had a ground in Newcastle by the 1850s, while Newcastle Golf Club expanded its activities in the 1890s.

  Sport, leisure, culture and politics all followed society in becoming more urban, although with significant enclaves of upper-class activity. Certain types of leisure facilities needed urban populations to finance and sustain them, for example libraries, reading rooms and bath-houses – the public baths helpful for cleanliness and hygiene in towns where most people lacked bathing facilities at home.

  The same need for urban populations was true for music halls where the entertainment epitomized the culture of urban workers. The music hall was escapist on one level, yet it was also central to working-class life. Large music halls, such as the Alhambra in Bradford, providing song, music, acrobatics and dance, offered both spectator entertainment and an opportunity to participate by singing along or engaging in repartee with the performers, with stars such as Marie Lloyd (1870–1922) becoming national figures.

  Yet, the impact of technology and entrepreneurship was such that, with the advent of ‘moving pictures’, many music halls were converted into cinemas which, by 1914, numbered some 4,000. That year, Manchester alone had 111 premises licensed to show films, while even the more rural, and far less affluent, county of Lincolnshire had fourteen cinemas in 1913.

  Organized middle-class cultural activity also greatly expanded in the Victorian age and early twentieth century, an expansion that owed much to the growth of the middle class in the cities and also to its pursuit of culture not only for pleasure, but in addition, as a way of defining its purpose and leadership. Cities such as Birmingham, Glasgow, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Newcastle founded major art collections and musical institutions, for example the Hallé Orchestra in Manchester in 1857 and the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle. Such patronage helped support popular art movements, for example that of the Pre-Raphaelite painters, who enjoyed considerable popularity from the early 1850s.

  Although much of the expansion of cultural expression was the product of commercial, urban, middle-class wealth, its purpose was more broad-ranging. Labouring men and women queued for hours to file past Ford Madox Brown’s (1821–93) classic painting Work when it was finally finished in 1863, and many hung up cheap reproductions of paintings and bought sheet music. For these people, viewing art was like viewing a film première today. Thus, art informed the public as well as the elite.

  Fiction

  Moreover, fiction became a major prism through which the country was viewed, and consciously so on the part of both writers and readers. Novels such as Charles Dickens’ Hard Times (1854) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s (1810–65) North and South (1855) depicted the problems of industrial life, particularly labour disputes and worker misery. Social issues attracted other prominent writers such as Wilkie Collins (1824–89) and George Eliot (1819–80), the latter the pseudonym of Mary Anne Evans, who depicted the decadent mores of society in Daniel Deronda (1878). They were not alone. George Gissing (1857–1903) presented urban poverty and the harsh binds of heredity in Workers in the Dawn (1880), while Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) dealt with exclusion from education as a result of class.

  The writers of the age sought a wide readership, not only for personal profit but also because they thought it important to write for the unprecedented mass readership being created by increased education. Such a goal was not seen as incompatible with literary excellence, and these attitudes reflected the distance between the literary world of the nineteenth century and that of two centuries earlier which had displayed a self-conscious elitism. William Wordsworth’s successor as Poet Laureate in 1850 was Alfred Tennyson (1809–92), who held the post until 1892 and helped reconcile poetry and the Establishment. A favourite of Queen Victoria, who raised him to the peerage in 1883, Tennyson was no bluff rhymester, but, like many prominent Victorians, a neurotic and withdrawn figure who understood sadness. As a protagonist of morality and empire, Tennyson was also safe as well as a master of poetry as understood in the period. The self-sacrifice endorsed in poems such as his ‘Enoch Arden’ (1864) was very popular. It was self-sacrifice, not of the Byronic outcast, but of the servant of a social morality. Despite the importance of the prolific and talented Robert Browning (1812–89), Tennyson dominated the poetic w
orld even more than Dickens did that of fiction.

  The current theatrical repertoire includes very few works from the first four decades of the period of this book, and it is not until Oscar Wilde in the 1890s that one finds such works still frequently acted. Among the now forgotten plays that lacked the dexterity and style of Wilde’s well-written works but that were successes for contemporaries, Thomas Robertson’s (1829–71) comedies, for example Society (1865), Ours (1866), Caste (1867), Play (1868), School (1869), and M.P. (1870), plays described as ‘cup-and-saucer drama’, have been seen as offering a detailed account of domestic life that laid the basis for the latter revival of serious drama by Shaw. Opulent Shakespeare revivals, melodrama, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, and farces, such as Charles Hawtrey’s (1858–1923) The Private Secretary (1884) and Arthur Wing Pinero’s (1855–1934) The Magistrate (1885), dominated the stage.

  Theatre managers preferred long runs of single plays which could best be secured by prominent stars, such as Ellen Terry (1847–1928), uncontentious plots and spectacular productions with an emphasis on scenery and music. Augustus Harris (1852–96), manager of the Theatre Royal at Drury Lane, London, from 1879 until 1896, set the tone with spectaculars featuring avalanches, earthquakes, horse-races and snow-storms. The success of the run could be increased either by sending the company on a rail-borne tour round Britain or by using second and third companies at the same time as the main company coined the London market and ensured continued favourable publicity. This system scarcely encouraged adventurous drama but it brought profits, encouraging investment in new theatres which congregated in London’s West End, increasing its importance as a focus for commercial glamour.