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 20^th century

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