THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
( 1901 – 1990 )
The King who came to the throne in 1901
and who gave his name to the Edwardian era, is remembered for none of the staid
Victorian virtues which might have been expected from a man born in 1841 but
rather for his self-indulgence and extravagance, his enormous girth and gruff bonhomie,
his fondness for good and expensive food, fast horses, pretty women, huge
cigars, France and shooting on his Norfolk estate at Sandringham. His short
reign, to quote R. J.White, ‘lingers on the edge of subsequent darkness like a
long summer afternoon, quietly punctuated by the popping of champagne corks,
flavoured with cigar smoke, and accompanied by the distant strains of Elgar’s Pomp
and Circumstance march from the Guards’ Band in the Park.’
For many English people life in the years before the First World War was
far from that associated with visions of Ia belle époque. Beneath the
glittering surface of society there was widespread poverty, bitterness and
unrest. Yet year by year, by slow degrees, reforms continued to come and the
quality of life for the mass of the people gradually improved, with advances
undreamed of a century before in medicine and housing, in technology and
conditions of work. Farming emerged from the agricultural depression of the
1870s and 1880s; and in the towns successful strikes were organized by the
poorly paid and the exploited. Striking dockers, for example, were promised the
modest wage of sixpence an hour which they had demanded; and when the
match-girls at Bryant and May’s factory went on strike in 1888 against the
dangerous, ill-paid and squalid conditions of their work they won their case.
In that year a Local Government Act established county councils; in subsequent
years factory acts made further improvements in conditions of work, housing
acts eliminated some of the worst slums, and education acts brought free
schools and free school meals within the reach of thousands of poor children.
For the better-off scores of independent schools were founded to instil in
their pupils those ‘religious and moral principles’ and ‘manly conduct’ which
Dr Arnold had required of his boys at Rugby, one of those numerous so-called
public schools, many of them founded in the previous century, whose role in
turning boys into gentlemen was seen by their critics as one of the main
foundations upon which the indestructible English class system was based.
There were still those who agreed with the physician, Sir Almroth
Wright, that ‘there are no good women, but only women who have lived under the
influence of good men’; but there were far more who recognized that women had
lived for far too long with as few rights and as little freedom as the ‘doll in
the doll’s house’ which Bella Rokesmith complains of being in Our Mutual Friend
or as Sally Brass’s downtrodden maid in The Old Curiosity Shop who
is ‘ignorant of the taste of beer, unacquainted with her own name (which is
less remarkable) and ttakesl a limited view of life through the keyhole of
doors’. In the field of medicine, for example, after the admittance of
Elizabeth Garrett Anderson to the Medical Register in 1865, and the
establishment of the London School of Medicine for Women in 1876, the
infiltration of women into what had previously been regarded as a male preserve
was generally accepted. In 1882 a Women’s Property Act at last enabled married
women to own their own property; and while the militant feminist movement of
the Suffragettes, the demonstrations and strikes of Mrs Pankhurst’s Women’s
Social and Political Union, and such desperate protests as that of Emily
Davison who threw herself beneath the King’s horse at the Derby in 1913, were
brought to an end by the War, votes were granted to women over thirty as soon
as the fighting was over and to all women on the same terms as men ten years
later.
In 1905 a general election brought the
Liberals back to power under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman whose Cabinet
included H. H. Asquith, the son of a Nonconformist wool-spinner from
Lancashire, David Lloyd George, whose mother was the poor widow of a Welsh
schoolmaster, and Winston Churchill, grandson of the 7th Duke of Marlborough,
all three of whom were to be
prime ministers in their turn.
Campbell-Bannerman’s government occupied themselves earnestly with reform, as
did that of his successor, Asquith. More slums were cleared and towns
replanned; labour exchanges were established and minimum wages fixed in certain
industries; pensions were paid to the old; and, by the Trade Disputes Act of
1906, unions were granted protection from liability for losses caused by
strikes. The Lords had looked askance at several of these Liberal measures
without actually blocking them. But when Lloyd George, as Chancellor of the
Exchequer — in an attempt to raise money for his government’s reforms, as well
as for rearmament against Germany — brought in his budget in 1909 proposing
higher death duties as well as a land tax and a supertax on incomes over £3,000
a year, they rebelled. And it was not until after two general elections had
been fought, and Edward Vii’s son, King George V, had been prevailed upon to
agree to the creation if necessary of over 200 Liberal peers to outvote the
Conservatives that the crisis was resolved. In 1911 the Parliament Act was
passed, severely curtailing the powers of the Lords and establishing the
Commons as the supreme legislative body. In that same year a National Insurance
Act provided relief for the sick and the unemployed; and a salary of £400 was
introduced for Members of Parliament who, soon afterwards, included men
supported as candidates by trade unions. Already James Keir Hardie, a former
miner and Secretary of the Scottish Miners’ Federation, had become leader of
the Independent Labour Party, forerunner of a Labour Party dedicated to a
socialist policy of ‘common ownership of the means of production’; and Ramsay
MacDonald, also Scottish, the illegitimate child of a maidservant and a
ploughman, and one day to be the first Labour Prime Minister, had been elected
to Parliament as Member for Leicester.
The problem of Ireland remained
unresolved and apparently insoluble. After the failure of a second Home Rule
Bill, relations between the Irish nationalists and the Protestants of Ulster,
who were determined not to lose their identity in a Roman Catholic Ireland,
went from bad to worse until the Government of Ireland Act proposed partition
with separate parliaments for north-east and south. This solution provoked such
resistance in the south that its 26 counties had eventually to be granted
virtual independence from Britain, with the six counties of the north-east
remaining part of the United Kingdom. This proved unacceptable to the Irish
Republican Army and its supporters who demanded, and still demand, the
withdrawal of British troops from Ulster and the establishment of a republic of
the whole of Ireland.
Despite the quarrels, thousands of Irishmen
joined the British Army when Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914
after the Kaiser’s troops had invaded Belgium; and by November 1918, when the
dreadful struggle was over, there were many Irish corpses among the million
British dead. Lloyd George, who had replaced Asquith as Prime Minister at the
height of the conflict, promised the survivors that he would undertake ‘to make
Britain a fit country for heroes to live in’. For a time it appeared that this
promise might be fulfilled. But the post-war boom was over within two years and
was followed by a long period of depression, strikes and hunger marches. By
1921 there were over two million unemployed. The next year Lloyd George was
obliged to resign, never to return to office, and to witness the eclipse of the
Liberals by the Labour Party as the main opposition to the Conservatives. He
was succeeded by the Conservatives under Bonar Law, followed by Stanley
Baldwin, a square-faced, pipe-smoking, seemingly lethargic man, then by a
Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald, then in 1924 by Baldwin again.
In 1926 a General Strike was called in support of the miners who, after
its failure, were forced by hunger to return to work with longer hours and
lower wages even than before. Yet, outside the mining districts, the strike
seemed to have improved rather than worsened relations between the poor workers
and the well-to--do, the ‘two nations into which Disraeli had described the
country as being divided in the previous century. The middle classes who had
volunteered to take the place of strikers to keep essential services running
had, for the first time, come to understand the nature of manual work and to
respect those who undertook it, while the workers, brought into contact
with people whose backgrounds were so different from their own, were surprised
to discover how much in common they shared.
It was an opportunity for the ‘lasting peace’ for which the King called.
But, although Baldwin, too, was a moderate man, pressing always for
conciliation rather than confrontation, the opportunity was lost. Legislation
was imposed upon the unions that much reduced their powers; and largely as a
result of their repressive measures, the Conservatives lost their majority and
had to give way in 1929 to another Labour government which, after the American
slump, was faced with an economy close to collapse and three million
unemployed. After disagreements in the Cabinet over cuts in unemployment
benefit, this beleaguered Labour government felt obliged to form a coalition
government with the Conservatives and Liberals in 1931.
Unless they happened to come across some such ‘hunger march’ as that of
the unemployed shipyard workers who came down to London in 1936 from Jarrow in
Durham —where two-thirds of the population was out of work —visitors to the
south of England found it hard to believe that the country was faced
with any kind of crisis, financial or otherwise. For this was the world of the
cocktail and the slow fox trot, of Noel Coward’s Hay Fever, of Somerset
Maugham’s The Constant Wife, of Sapper’s Bull-Dog Drummond and
Michael Arlen’s The Green Hat, as well as that of the economist, John
Maynard Keynes, and of the socialist, Harold Laski, of Kingsley Martin’s New
Statesman, of G. B. Shaw’s Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism
and Capitalism, and of T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden. It was the day of the
motor car — there were already two million of them on the roads by 1939 — and the
age of the seaside holiday: Blackpool alone had seven million visitors a year.
The architecture of the period reflected its
mood. Scores of hotels were being built like the Park Lane and the Mayfair,
both completed in 1927, the Strand Palace of 1930 and the Dorchester of 1931.
Hundreds of cinemas at the same time, from grand picture palaces such as the
Odeon in Kensington Church Street to the little cinemas of country towns, few
of which now survive as cinemas, though many were converted into halls for playing
bingo, a gambling game of eighteenth-century origin, which become extremely
popular in the second half of the twentieth. Scores of theatres were going up
too: the Saville Theatre in London, for example, in 1931; the huge New Theatre,
now the Apollo, in Oxford in 1933. So were larger and larger shops. London’s
first Woolworth’s was being built in Oxford Street in 1924, soon to be followed
by numerous other stores of which D. H. Evans (1937) was a characteristic
example.
To take shoppers and office workers home to their houses in the suburbs
ever expanding around London — as they were round all other large towns — the
lines of the underground railway were constantly being extended and new
stations, such as those by Charles Holden on the Piccadilly Line to Hounslow,
were being built in a style that evokes a vivid image of those days of the
1930s when Stuart Hibberd wore a dinner jacket to read the news at the recently
built Broadcasting House, when George V’s son, the future, unfortunate, King
Edward VIII, could have been seen dancing with Mrs Dudley Ward at the Embassy
Club, when Ivor Novello’s Glamorous Night was delighting audiences at
the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, and there were long queues outside cinemas
showing Shirley Temple in Curly Top.
To most of these pleasure-seekers of the 1930s the economic problems of
the country seemed far away. Indeed, by the middle of the decade politicians
were informing them, in the words of Neville Chamberlain, Baldwin’s Chancellor
of the Exchequer and soon to become Prime Minister, ‘that we have recovered in
this country 80 per cent of our prosperity’. The story of Bleak House was
over, he announced, and the people could now sit down to enjoy the first
chapter of Great Expectations.
Soon afterwards the Italian Fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, invaded
Abyssinia and the German Chancellor, Adolf Hitler, reoccupied the Rhineland of
which Germany had been deprived by the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, whose harsh
terms had made a future European war almost inevitable. In 1938 German troops
entered Austria; in 1939 they seized Czechoslovakia; then Hitler turned upon
Poland; and Chamberlain, who had done all he could to avoid fighting by a
policy of appeasement, was obliged to declare war on Germany, whose
well-trained army crossed the Polish frontier on 1 September after Hitler had
signed a non-aggression pact with Russia.
Chamberlain was not the man to lead his country in such a crisis; and
Churchill, his First Lord of the Admiralty, took over as Prime Minister,
directed the fortunes of his country with erratic brilliance for five years,
and at the general election of 1945 was heavily defeated at the polls by
voters anxious that Britain should not return to the politics of the 1920s and
1930s when Churchill, as Home Secretary at the time of the General Strike, had
misguidedly referred to the workers as ‘the enemy’. The leader of the Labour
Party which now came to power — with an absolute majority in the House of
Commons for the first time in its history — was Clement Atlee, a restrained,
laconic man who might well have been mistaken for the manager of a small bank
and whose great gifts were so well concealed by a veneer of imperturbable
diffidence that Churchill is supposed, in a characteristic judgement not
intended to be taken seriously, to have described him as ‘a sheep in sheep’s
clothing’.
His government — in which the reassuringly bulky figure of Ernest Bevin
was Foreign Secretary, the ascetic Sir Stafford Cripps President of the Board
of Trade, and the fiery Welsh orator, Aneurin Bevan, Minister of Health — set
about their task with invigorating energy, introducing a series of Bills in
fulfilment of promises to nationalize essential industries and the means of
supply, to lay the foundations of what became known as the Welfare State and
to bring back some measure of prosperity to a country where rationing was as
severe as it had been during the war. The government also began to restore the
havoc caused by air raids which had damaged or destroyed no fewer than
3,500,000 houses in London alone as well as laid waste such national treasures
as Coventry Cathedral, which was rebuilt to the designs of Sir Basil Spence.
By 1951, the centenary of the Great Exhibition and the year in which the
Conservatives under Winston Churchill were returned to power, so much had been
done that the government decided to hold a Festival Exhibition on derelict land
on the south bank of the Thames in Lambeth ‘to demonstrate to the World the
recovery of the United Kingdom from the effects of War in the moral, cultural,
spiritual and material fields’. The Press derided the pretension of this
claim, but the Festival was visited by nearly ten million people; and the Royal
Festival Hall — ‘the first major public building in inner London designed in
the contemporary style of architecture’ — remains a fitting memorial to the
enterprise. Subsequent public buildings on the South Bank, notably the Hayward
Gallery and Denys Lasdun’s National Theatre, have not been so well received.
For thirteen years after their re-election in 1951, the
Conservatives were in power. They were years of growing prosperity; wages were
far higher than they had been before the war though prices had risen very
little; more and more people were buying cars and going on holidays. ‘Let’s be
frank about it,’ the Prime Minister declared in 1957, ‘most of our
people have never had it so good.’ By the 1960s Britain was one of the world’s
leading industrial as well as nuclear powers.
This world was now divided between a communist east and a capitalist
west, with various uncommitted nations hovering uneasily between the two and an
international body with headquarters at New York, the United Nations,
endeavouring to settle the differences between them. When in 1950 the communist
North Korea invaded the South, which was supported by the United States,
sixteen members of the United Nations, including Britain, sent troops to defend
the South and helped to bring the war to an inconclusive end. In 1956 another
war was brought to an end when — under pressure from the United States —
British troops were obliged to withdraw from Egypt where, in alliance with
France and in collusion with Israel, they had landed in an effort to bring
about the fall of the Egyptian President, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who had recently
nationalized the Suez Canal.
The Suez adventure, which brought about the fall of Anthony Eden,
Churchill’s successor as leader of the Conservative Party, was an
anachronistic display of imperialism. Churchill had declared in 1942 that he
had ‘not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the
liquidation of the British Empire.’ Yet during the intervening years the
Empire had dissolved all the same. India and Pakistan gained their independence
in 1947, Burma in 1948; Newfoundland joined the Dominion of Canada in
1949; several former African colonies emerged
into state hood. Soon few of Britain’s old colonial possessions were left, and
most of these were being claimed by other countries. Gibraltar, captured from
them in 1704, was being claimed by the Spanish; Hong Kong, ceded by them in
1842, by the Chinese; the Falkland Islands, a crown colony since 1892, by the
Argentinians whose army launched an attack upon them in 1982, an attack
vigorously resisted by the Conservative Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, who
—calling an election after the immensely expensive British victory — won
another victory for the Conservatives, their most decisive for forty years.
Margaret Thatcher was the sixth Prime
Minister the country had had since Eden had resigned in 1957 in favour of
Harold Macmillan, an almost theatrically patrician figure who, like his
successor, the kind, modest and old-fashioned Sir Alec Douglas-Home, seemed
peculiarly out of place in a country becoming known for its ‘permissive
society’. The governments of none of Mrs Thatcher’s predecessors, neither those
of the Labour leaders, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan, nor that of the
Conservative Edward Heath, had succeeded in finding a satisfactory answer to
the economic and industrial problems of the country or to the celebrated
complaint of the American Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, that Britain had
lost an Empire but not yet found a new role. It was an observation voiced also
by the French President, General de Gaulle, who believed that Britain was too
closely involved with the United States to make a satisfactory member of the
European Economic Community established by the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Twice de Gaulle vetoed Britain’s
application for membership of the Community which she had declined to join upon
its foundation; and it was not until January 1973, during the premiership of
that zealous advocate of European co-operation, Edward Heath, that she was
admitted to membership at last. Yet the British people remain equivocal about
the Community.
Mrs Thatcher, single-minded and
didactic, unswerving in her belief in self-reliance and what has come to be
known as privatization, was determined that Britain should lose as little as
possible of her sovereignty, and that, to use her own words, she should
‘recover her self-confidence and her self-respect’. Much was achieved under her
leadership, which was brought to a sudden end by her own party in 1990. She was
succeeded by the comparatively little-known John Major, who won an unexpected
victory in the general election of April 1992. However, his administration was
dogged by misfortunes and by increasingly bitter divisions in his own party
over Europe, and in May 1997 a newly confident Labour Party, under the
leadership of the youthful modernizer Tony Blair, was swept into power with a
huge majority.
By the beginning of the 1980s the
English were falling behind in the world race. In 1964 they had produced more
per head of population than any of the countries in the European Community
except West Germany. In 1977 they produced less than any other except Italy.
Had it not been for the discovery of oil in the North Sea the economic decline
would have been even sharper. While those in work continued to prosper,
unemployment was high and there were social as well as economic problems that
seemed intractable, problems posed by increasing pollution, by crime and
violence, by unassimilated immigrant communities, racial and class prejudice
and the decay of the, inner cities, problems soon to be compounded by rising
inflation. As always, much remains to be done by future governments, while
Britain’s role in Europe remains a question to be resolved.
It is fortunately not required of
historians that they should be prophets, only that by explaining the past they
may provide lessons for the future, since history takes its revenge upon those
who ignore it. At least some knowledge of the outlines of England’s history and
achievements may lead us to hope that, for all the afflictions of modern
society, the English are even now, as Milton suggested they were over 300 years
ago, ‘not beneath the reach of any point that human capacity can soar to’.
NATIVES
ROMAN BRITAIN
ANGLO-SAXON HOUSE OF PLANTAGENET
Crown and People Twilight of Middle Ages Tudor
England Early Stuart England
EMPIRE
AND INDUSTRY THE AGE OF REFORM 20th century