The Great Turning Points of British History (21 page)

Thanks to the railway, visiting the Crystal Palace was not only a national but an international phenomenon. Rail connections between Paris and London had been completed just prior to 1851 and in the year of the exhibition the numbers of travellers between France and England nearly doubled to 260,000. The international nature of the exhibits gave visitors a powerful sense of a newly wide world – and, with steam facilitating travel both by land and by sea, a shrinking world.

The British Empire was literally at the centre of the Crystal Palace, with an Indian Court filled with fine materials and finished goods meant explicitly to strengthen trade between metropole and empire. These were hardly trophies of bloodless wars. But there was a strong streak of idealism present, an idealism that did see free trade between equals as the civilized substitute for war. Exhibits from America drew special attention to an emerging power, now seen less as rebellious offspring, more as a potential trading partner. Sensationally, the Americans’ McCormick reaping machine beat its British rivals in a competition, harvesting twenty acres of corn in a day.

Visitors of 1851 got a glimpse of what we call globalization. The telegraph was on display – used to communicate from one end of the giant structure to the other – and contemporaries were well aware of its potential use for global communications, talking of a forthcoming ‘network of wires’ and a ‘never-ceasing interchange of news’. In about twenty years, that network would span continents; in about fifty it would span the world.

We are now also better aware that the Crystal Palace had an afterlife, reconstructed on a new site in south London – and serving for another eighty years as the ‘Palace of the People’, responsible among other things for inaugurating the dinosaur craze (the life-size models are among the few fragments of the Victorian period to survive on the site) and for pioneering a dizzying range of commercial entertainments, from high-wire acts to aeronautical displays. Even if we confine ourselves to the year 1851, the Crystal Palace can be seen as a pivot on which swings a door that opens on to the modernity we enjoy today.

What we can see more clearly now than people could then was that the generally optimistic hopes of projectors and visitors, while realized to an extraordinary extent, also cast darker shadows – the 100,000 exhibits have multiplied a hundred thousand-fold in our consumer society, for ill as well as for good; the number of police have multiplied too; internationalism and the shrinking globe did not betoken world peace; and just imagine the carbon footprint left by all those machines . . .

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The country in which the Crystal Palace was built in 1851 was the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland – as it had been since 1801, when the Union with Ireland was inaugurated, and would be until the partition of Ireland after the First World War. The great social and economic changes of the Industrial Revolution had bonded Wales, Scotland and England more firmly together; South Wales, Lowland Scotland and the north of England, in particular, had all become more urban and industrial in character, more liberal in politics, and more nonconformist in religion.

Nationalism was not a potent force in any of these areas. But Ireland had been an exception in all these respects earlier in the century, and by 1851 had become even more so. Hit by the holocaust of the Irish famine in the late 1840s, Ireland’s population would dwindle over the rest of the century as emigrants poured out of the country. Between 1841 and 1901 Britain’s population grew from 26.7 million to 41.5 million; Ireland’s dropped from 8.2 million to 4.5 million.

While living standards were rising in the second half of the nineteenth century for most of the population, these rises were distributed unequally – probably more unequally than at any other point in British history. The top 0.5 per cent of the population accounted for 25 per cent of the nation’s income. In comparison, the same share is earned by the top 10 per cent today. Wealth was distributed still more unequally. There was a class of super-rich, known as the ‘upper ten thousand’, comprised mainly of landowners and bankers. Three-quarters of the population would have been employed in manual working-class occupations, most of the rest as shopkeepers and clerks.

Opportunities for social mobility were severely limited, and living conditions for most remained cramped and unhealthy. As a result, it was not only the Irish who emigrated – emigration from all parts of the British Isles escalated steeply over this half-century, especially to the United States, Canada and Australia.

However, Britain was very far from a nation in decline in this period. Its share of world manufacturing output held up remarkably well, at just under a fifth of the total in 1900, practically where it had been in 1860. The advent of universal, free and compulsory education in the 1870s and 1880s meant that literacy became nearly total by the end of the century.

Despite extensions of the franchise in 1867 and 1884, however, not even all adult males were entitled to vote, and some adult males had more votes than others. The United Kingdom in this period was in many respects ‘free’ but still unequal.

1854
The Crimean War begins
. Despite the high hopes expressed at the Crystal Palace, the second half of the century was not a period of unbroken peace. The Crimean War pitted Britain and France against Russian expansion into the Ottoman Empire. It lasted two years, left contemporaries with a big bill and an inquest into military disorganization, and bequeathed to posterity Florence Nightingale, the Charge of the Light Brigade (at the battle of Balaclava) and, indeed, the balaclava (the headwarmers knitted for British troops to guard against cold Russian nights).

1857
Indian Mutiny
. Only a mutiny, of course, from the British point of view – now more frequently called a ‘rebellion’. Sepoys – locally recruited soldiers – protested against conditions in the East India Company’s army. A direct result was the end of East India Company rule and the incorporation of India into the formal empire.

1867
Second Reform Act
. Although this Act gave the vote to only about a third of adult males in England and Wales, it marked the point at which the United Kingdom began to think of itself as a democracy. But it also underscored the inequitable treatment of Ireland, where fewer than a sixth of adult males got the vote in a separate Act.

1869
Origins of women’s suffrage
. Often overlooked in the shadow of the Second Reform Act, a reform of the municipal franchise in 1869 gave the vote in local elections to unmarried women who were heads of households. This betokened a growing role for women in social and political affairs below the parliamentary level.

1884
Third Reform Act
. A further extension of the franchise to adult males, it was followed by a Redistribution Act that created equal electoral districts, more or less the electoral system as we know it today.

1889
London Dock Strike
. Although the Trades Union Congress can be dated back to 1868, the London Dock Strike brought trade unionism into the centre of public life for the first time, largely because it demonstrated that ‘ordinary’ workers could strike as well – not only skilled workers seeking to protect their trade privileges.

1896
Origins of the tabloid press
. The Harmsworth brothers (later lords Northcliffe and Rothermere) founded the
Daily Mail
, the first of a new breed of cheap and cheerful newspapers. It cost a halfpenny – half the cost of the standard cheap newspaper – and specialized in shorter human-interest stories and a vigorously populist editorial tone.

1899
The Boer War breaks out
. The decades of ‘peace’ since the Crimean War had been marred by repeated colonial wars; however, these had required little British manpower. This colonial war – against Dutch settlers in southern Africa– required a serious mobilization and, like the Crimean War, it left behind a bitter taste in human and financial costs, as well as concerns about Britain’s war-fighting capacity.

The British, it is often said, went to war with Rupert Brooke and came home with Siegfried Sassoon. While the aphorism seems to encapsulate the evolution of national consciousness from the naive patriotism of 1914 to the bitterness of 1918, it is too simplistic to explain the change that came over Britain as a result of the First World War. That change manifested itself most profoundly in 1916 – a pivotal year that neatly divides old Britain from the modern nation of today.

Poets are seldom accurate barometers of national temper. The average British soldier did not romanticize, like Brooke, the idea of dying in some foreign field that would be forever England. The millions who volunteered in the first two years of the war did so for various reasons, many of them more mundane then we might think. Patriotism was undoubtedly a big factor, with most displaying a dispassionate willingness to serve their country in its hour of need. Others volunteered for less sublime reasons like pressure from employers or girlfriends, the lure of masculine adventure or simply the need for a job.

Most soldiers did not mirror Brooke’s romanticism, so they didn’t suffer Sassoon’s bitterness. That feeling arose because of the deep chasm between expectation and experience – what Sassoon’s friend Wilfred Owen called ‘the old lie’. The war poets discovered that it was not ‘sweet’ to die for one’s country and their poems reflect the sense of betrayal that came with that discovery. The common soldier, in contrast, discovered something different, namely that service implied citizenship. War experience was for them an entry in the balance sheet of life, to be compensated by peacetime recognition.

The millions who volunteered in the first year of the war were ready for battle in 1916. They were the soldiers of the Somme who walked into German machine-gun fire on 1 July. On that day, the British army experienced the worst losses in its history – 57,000 casualties, of whom 19,000 were dead. The scale of death inspired a long, bitter post-mortem.

For the past ninety years, the British have argued over alternatives and desperately sought scapegoats. In truth, however, long casualty lists were the inevitable result of the conjunction of industrialized war with democratized service. By 1916, Europe had millions willing to fight and the industrial capacity to kill them. War became a machine of death for which human beings were the fuel.

The scale of death forced Britain to become a nation at war. The millions who took up arms had left factories, fields, docks and offices. Their place was taken by the old, the young, the infirm and, notably, by women. Much has been made of the influx of women in the workplace, and the emancipation that supposedly led from it. In truth, however, the idea of women working was nothing new, though never before had British women performed work so important. Its importance lies not so much in the effect it had upon the women themselves, but rather in the implications it had for the nation as a whole. In ways seldom recognized, Britain was rescued by her women.

By 1916, it was clear that victory would be achieved not on the battlefield but in the factories and farms. Success would go to the nation best able to mobilize its population for the single purpose of sustaining the war effort. The army congregated in France and Belgium was Britain’s largest city, bar London. Like any city, it needed food, clothing, transport, a legal system and medical and pastoral care. Unlike any other city, it consumed a prodigious supply of munitions and produced nothing except death. All of its needs had to be provided by those back at home, from a workforce diminishing in numbers and skill.

Mobilization demanded organization and a heretofore unthinkable degree of government intervention. Britain began the war under the misguided assumption that it would be short and profitable, and that those at home would not feel its pain. Indeed, the phrase ‘home front’ was seldom used before 1914. It was invented to describe a peculiar implication of industrialized war that became blindingly evident in 1916. ‘Business as usual’ gave way to a comprehensive system of government control. Regulations affected nearly every aspect of life, including where a person lived and worked, what he or she earned and bought, the food they ate and the beer they drank.

These controls spelled the death of liberalism. That philosophy was based on the sanctity of individual freedom, yet it was clear that the rights of the individual could not withstand the demands of war. The most important symbol of sacrifice came in January 1916 with the passage of the Military Service Act, which imposed conscription on all men aged between 18 and 41. The right to choose whether to fight for one’s country, arguably the most sacred individual freedom, was cast aside with surprisingly little dissent. Conscription, it should be noted, was not just a way to supply soldiers for the army; it was also a way to control the workforce at home.

The assault upon liberalism had dire consequences for the Liberal Party. The party’s demise was apparent virtually from the start of the war, but was dramatically confirmed by the formation, on 6 December 1916, of a new coalition led by David Lloyd George. The previous coalition, formed by Herbert Asquith in 1915, had brought the Tories and (significantly) Labour into the government, but was essentially a desperate attempt to preserve liberalism by other means.

Asquith had sought to improvise his way to victory, intervening in the economy only when disaster threatened. The futility of that was revealed by the Somme offensive, which lasted for three months and resulted in 400,000 British casualties, in the process putting huge pressure on the British economy. Lloyd George used the issue of war management to shove Asquith aside. The party was cleaved by the coup, the purists following Asquith, the realists Lloyd George.