The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (86 page)

Apart from Radical Liberals like the rising Welsh solicitor MP David Lloyd George and the socialists, British public opinion and press were still in the grip of military frenzy. Young men, particularly well-to-do ones, were mustard keen for the war, believing in a vague way that it would test them, that it would be good for them. Everybody imagined that the war would be short and sweet. In fact it was prolonged, very expensive and far from the walkover that Britons expected.

The Boers turned out to be superb marksmen armed with state-of-the-art European weaponry. Most of their soldiers were really just Dutch farmers, but a hard life on the veldt had left them in superb physical condition. Britain’s popularity with other nations, repelled by what appeared to be bullying of the two small Boer republics by the mighty British Empire, dwindled to a dangerous low. And the Orange Free State and the Transvaal were almost a match for her. It took two and a half years, £200 million and 450,000 British soldiers to defeat 50,000 Boers. More and more volunteers were sent out by the boatload from Britain 4,000 miles away in their brand-new ‘khaki’ combat uniform, invented to blend into the African bush.

The Boers’ fatal mistake was to attack the colony of Natal, which contained only British settlers, instead of making for the Cape where there were 30,000 Dutch. Nevertheless for much of 1899 and 1900 British troops were completely unable to relieve the siege of Ladysmith in Natal, and Mafeking in Bechuanaland on the border of the Transvaal. Under Colonel Robert Baden Powell, Mafeking held out for 217 days. (Baden Powell would later become famous as the founder of the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides movement, which trained young people in disciplined and self-reliant behaviour.) So badly did the British fare against the Boers, despite their superior numbers, that after ‘black week’ in December 1899, a series of massive defeats, the commander-in-chief Sir Redvers Buller was replaced by Lord Roberts. It was not until May 1900 that Mafeking was relieved by Roberts.

Ultimately the Boers were let down by their lack of military training and coherent strategy. Roberts and his second-in-command Kitchener of Khartoum managed to outflank the Boers’ commander Piet Cronje. By August 1900 Roberts had seized the capitals of the Boer republics Bloemfontein and Johannesburg, the main Boer armies had given up and Ladysmith had been relieved. Later that year the Transvaal and the Orange Free State were formally annexed as colonies to the British crown. A khaki election–that is, a war election, because many of the voters were still in khaki uniform–was called that year by the Conservatives, who hoped to cash in on the war’s popularity.

They duly won the election, but their hold over the nation was drawing to a close. The Labour Representation Committee, prototype of the Labour party, had been created six months before in February 1900. Its candidates won only two seats in the general election, with Keir Hardie gaining one of them, and the Conservative majority was 134. But the Labour party was the rising sun, though its breakthrough would not come until the 1906 election. The long years under the Conservatives had achieved very little for many workers, as was dramatically highlighted at the beginning of the Boer War by the poor physical shape of the recruits. Shockingly, one in three of the British men who volunteered for service was found unfit for duty by the army doctors. The Tory government simply could not pay for social reforms when Chamberlain was sending British armies all over Africa, nor was there the political will.

The Boer War was continued by little groups of Boers carrying on guerrilla warfare from the hills. Lord Kitchener had taken over as commander-in-chief and in the end the Boers were defeated by his ruthless use of total war. He built blockhouses or garrison huts to guard the railways and prevent the Boers blowing them up. Much more controversially, to thwart the guerrilla tactics which made every home a potential shelter, Kitchener forced the evacuation of the Boer farms. Civilian Boers were placed in enormous concentration camps, in huts surrounded by barbed wire, a concept which was to be used with such evil effect some thirty years later in Germany.

Though it was extremely effective, such an inhumane way of proceeding created an uproar in Britain, especially when it became known that a fifth of the inmates were dying in the camps. Of the 100,000 Boers confined in them, 20,000 died. The figures were even worse for one camp, where disease and insanitary conditions killed half the Boer children interned there. It was then that the quiet new leader of the Liberals, a Glaswegian MP from a wealthy family named Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, forever endeared himself to the Boers and the Radical wing of his party. At a time when the national mood was blindly patriotic he dared to criticize the British army publicly by calling the concentration camps ‘methods of barbarism’. A strong-minded British spinster, the fearless Miss Emily Hobhouse, led an expedition out to South Africa to find out what was going on. When she was stonewalled by the army, she took the story to the press to create more of an outcry. Chamberlain was forced to send out proper administrators for the camps to take over from the army, which had enough problems feeding itself let alone the enemy. The anti-militaristic and humanitarian spirit of England had started to reassert itself after a period of quiescence. The mushroom growth of imperialism was starting to shrivel and die as rapidly as it had sprung up.

But the Queen of England was also declining rapidly. The consummate Victorian, Gladstone, had died three years before and had been buried in Westminster Abbey after a magnificent state funeral. The old queen lived to see the first year of the twentieth century; after that her health began to falter. On 22 January 1901 she died in her eighty-second year at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. Despite her fondness for a forthright and elderly Scots ghillie named John Brown, Victoria had never ceased mourning Prince Albert. She was buried beside him in the mausoleum at Frogmore, inside Windsor Home Park.

The Victorian age and the nineteenth century had come to an end together. When Victoria died there was not only great sorrow among her subjects but also a sense of disbelief. She had been on the throne since 1837, so that even people in their sixties had known no other monarch. She had been a fixture that seemed as permanent as the Tower of London.

The next thirteen years of life in Britain display a curious mixture of the ultra-modern existing side by side with the traditions of the past. Fifteen per cent of Britons were still employed as servants, making possible the grand lifestyle enjoyed by the well-to-do in the wake of the example set by the new monarch Edward VII. The long dresses and formal outfits we see in photographs of the Edwardians speak of an age still very different to ours. On the other hand, after the first election of Edward VII’s reign, over fifty British constituencies had Labour MPs. More women had jobs than ever before as teachers and nurses and in the new profession of typist. Although they did not have the vote, a suffragette movement was beginning.

With the extraordinary Liberal landslide at the 1906 election the battles for hearts and minds waged by social reformers over the past twenty years seemed to have resulted in a great victory for humanitarianism. Ploughshares had truly become more important than swords. It was accepted that the state had a duty to care for the people in sickness and old age. By 1911 the harsh old Poor Laws had been thrown out and old age pensions and national insurance had been brought in. War went out of fashion and seemed uncivilized; it belonged to a less advanced age. Yet the period was overshadowed by an awareness of the increasing German arsenal. To defence chiefs the disarmament conferences and peace movements of the time could leave Britain disastrously vulnerable. When the period ended in the immolation of the First World War, ten million dead worldwide made a belief in progress seem like vanity.

But at the beginning of the twentieth century the omens were favourable. Telecommunications continued to shrink the globe. In 1901, after experiments conducted with the backing of the British government, the Anglo-Italian Guglielmo Marconi sent the first electro-magnetic signal across the Atlantic, from the Lizard peninsula in Cornwall to Newfoundland–Britain was linked to the North American continent by radio wave. By 1912, some 700,000 British people had telephones. Even the most distant regions of the earth, its North and South Poles, yielded up their secrets. The Briton Captain Robert Scott led his first expedition to the Antarctic in 1900–4 and discovered what he called King Edward VII’s Land, while the American Admiral Robert Peary got within a hundred miles of the North Pole in 1902. London became full of motor buses. The Bakerloo and Piccadilly lines were sunk deep underground, making travel round London much faster.

Around 1905 arose the starry constellation of left-leaning intellectuals known as the Bloomsbury Group. A handful of gifted publishers, writers, artists and art historians did more to end Victorian attitudes than the death of the queen herself. Champions of the avant-garde with their art exhibitions, Roger Fry and Clive Bell introduced Britain to the conceptual revolutions taking place on the continent. Often the children of eminent Victorians–like the writer Virginia Woolf, whose father, Sir Leslie Stephen, was the founder of
The Dictionary of National Biography
–the Bloomsbury circle mercilessly deconstructed the Victorian assumptions they had grown up with. Just as the Cubists refused to go on representing the world literally, writers like Woolf challenged literary form with their fractured, allusive technique. They were mesmerized by the new science of psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the subconscious. Pioneered by Sigmund Freud it began casting its spell at the turn of the century. The importance of the instinct versus the intellect made a huge number of converts, of whom the most famous was D. H. Lawrence, a coalminer’s son from Nottingham whose novel
Sons and Lovers
came out in 1913.

Presiding over these changes was the old-fashioned figure of the new king. The most abiding image of Edward VII is in the waisted Norfolk jacket he used for his favourite sport, shooting, at his unpretentious house Sandringham. The style of the Marlborough House Set, as his friends were called, harked back to the days of the prince regent. Edward revelled in meals that were not only extremely rich but involved eight to ten courses and port and cigars in profusion. But in his way he was an innovator. He made it his business to get to know people from all walks of life, including union leaders and some of the new Labour MPs. As a young man he had insisted on meeting Italian revolutionary Garibaldi when he visited Britain, to his mother’s consternation. Where Queen Victoria’s court had consisted of the landed aristocracy, Edward VII preferred plutocrats and Jewish financiers.

Edward’s immense girth and genial presence had been a constant feature of ceremonial occasions in Britain and the empire for forty years. But Queen Victoria had prevented him from taking on any real kind of royal responsibilities and jealously guarded her powers. In fact, she disliked her eldest son, and despite protests from ministers, until he reached the age of fifty refused to allow him to read state papers. On his accession he was almost sixty. Deprived of a real role Edward had thrown himself into pleasure and did all he could to live in a way quite different to the Queen. Though the Victorian Sunday was sacred, and for many Victorians began and ended with church services, the Prince of Wales made a point of holding extravagant Sunday-night suppers. Though devoted to his beautiful and elegant wife Queen Alexandra, he had numerous mistresses, the most celebrated of whom were Mrs Alice Keppel and the Jersey actress Mrs Lillie Langtry. The subject of paintings and hundreds of society prints, Mrs Langtry was fondly known as the Jersey Lily. As Prince of Wales, Edward was cited in two divorce cases, but he shocked the manners of the day even more when it emerged that he had played the illegal game of baccarat at a house named Tranby Croft. He was called as a witness in a slander trial when Sir William Gordon Cumming sued some of his fellow gamblers at Tranby Croft for saying he was a cheat.

Once he became king, Edward VII took himself and his role far more seriously. Throughout his reign he was assiduous in maintaining peaceful relations with other European sovereigns, to many of whom he was closely related, gaining the nickname Edward the Peacemaker. His charm and extremely good French made him an important weapon to end the hostility between the two western democracies. After he had made a state visit to Paris, the final thawing out of relations between France and Britain reached a natural conclusion with the diplomatic understanding known as the Entente Cordiale in 1904. In fact ever since Fashoda a series of agreements over territories had started to lessen the hostility between Britain and France, culminating in a historic breakthrough when many old colonial disputes across the globe which went back to the early eighteenth century, including one over fishing rights off Newfoundland, were settled once and for all. France recognized Britain’s occupation of Egypt unconditionally, while the British allowed the French ‘a free hand in Morocco’ which joined up France’s north and west African imperial possessions.

This was a time of anxiety for Britain, for the Boer War had revealed her as having no friends in Europe. The early part of Edward VII’s reign saw a great many attempts to improve Britain’s relations with the rest of the world. Though Britain’s territories had never been more widespread, the last few years had been an inglorious period, and the once magnificent isolation seemed positively irksome. To counter it, in 1902 under the new foreign secretary Lord Lansdowne, Britain made her first alliance with Japan, the rising power in the east.

Like many British politicians the king was disquieted by German intentions. His wife Alexandra, the former Danish princess who had watched with horror as Prussian troops marched into her country, regarded most Germans with suspicion. For all Edward’s desire to be a peacemaker, he greatly disliked his nephew, the rash and often scintillating know-all Kaiser Wilhelm II. The kaiser’s personal diplomacy was unpredictable: he would send messages abroad or make speeches on foreign affairs without consulting ministers. Born with a withered arm, into a militaristic society which detested his mother for being English and therefore a dangerous liberal, the kaiser both admired and resented his English relations. But, though the English laughed at him and found his obsession with uniforms absurd, William was deadly serious about building a navy to rival his uncle’s.

In the face of that fleet-building, Britain’s greatest threat suddenly seemed to come from across the North Sea instead of from across the Channel, as it had done since the late seventeenth century. The king had strongly supported the commander of the Mediterranean fleet and future first sea lord ‘Jacky’ Fisher, when he had insisted that a naval base be built at Rosyth in 1903 on Britain’s east coast to guard against attack from the north coast of Germany. To counter the German menace Fisher invented the huge ironclad battleship called the Dreadnought and the fast and heavily armed battle cruisers. The Dreadnought made every other warship of lower tonnage and smaller guns obsolete against it. By 1907 for the first time Britain had a General Staff; it was felt that she could no longer do without one when all the other major European powers had possessed them for the previous fifteen years.

Britain began to tie her naval security arrangements together with those of France. The Mediterranean fleet based on Malta was reduced as part of an exercise to bring more of the Royal Navy into home waters. Britain would rely on the French navy to help her patrol the Mediterranean. The two nations were to let one another in on their military secrets. There was no quicker way to draw an Entente closer together, although for fear of angering the ever touchy Germany British diplomats perpetually avoided a final commitment to France.

The last years of the Conservative government have an air of played-out exhaustion about them. Lord Salisbury resigned in July 1902 on grounds of ill-health, and was succeeded as prime minister by his nephew the gifted intellectual A. J. Balfour, formerly the chief secretary to Ireland. The Irish Land Purchase Act of the following year was the most successful attempt made by Britain to solve the Irish land problem. It put loans of £5 million a year at the disposal of tenant farmers wishing to buy out their landlords. By an annual redemption payment or mortgage, tenants would become owners of their farms after sixty-eight years. Two hundred and fifty thousand people had taken up the scheme by 1909. But, with belief in a separate Irish state gathering momentum again, the fact remained that a separate nation for the Irish was going to be a far more powerful idea than mortgages.

Balfour addressed Britain’s industrial decline with a new Education Bill in 1902 which brought secondary education under control of the state and caused the building of hundreds of local grammar schools. But the problems of the poor in Britain were too immediate to be dealt with by the education of the future. An incontrovertible shock had been given to the empirically minded and practical British by the youthful science of statistics. The solid evidence of Charles Booth’s figures showing the almost inevitable link between poverty and old age, published in his exhaustive
Life and Labour of the People in London
in 1903, combined with the equally influential B. Seebohm Rowntree’s groundbreaking 1901
Poverty: A Study of Town Life
in York, could not be denied. It appeared that around a third of the British people were living below what Seebohm called the poverty line.

Joe Chamberlain’s faith in an ingenious new form of imperialism, an Imperial Customs Union which would have preference over the rest of the world, did not fit the mood of urgency. The Tariff Reform League–which he formed after resigning from the Colonial Office–and the import duties that would fund social programmes at home were denounced as a threat to food prices. It was Chamberlain’s fate to split parties: this time it was the Conservatives’ turn. Free trade was a shibboleth on which Britain had built her immense prosperity. Conservative free traders like Winston Churchill believed that an Imperial Customs Union would drastically increase the cost of living because other countries would slap on their own retaliatory import duties. The Tory free traders accordingly went over to the Liberals to campaign for the forthcoming general election under the slogan of the Big Loaf (free trade and the Liberals) against the Little Loaf (tariff reform and the Conservatives). In December 1905 the Conservative government had to resign and the Liberals under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman–whose moral bravery in attacking the conduct of the Boer War at the height of war fever united a party split into imperialists and anti-imperialists–returned to power. Chamberlain himself suffered a stroke the year after and had to retire from politics. The Tories had come to represent a sort of callousness. It became known that, with the high commissioner Lord Milner’s acquiescence, Chinese labourers were being imported to work in the Rand goldmines on contracts that were little short of slavery. Much was made of their treatment at a time when the Labour movement was starting to feel its strength.

At the general election in June 1906 the Liberals won a landslide victory, 377 Liberal seats against only 157 Conservatives and Liberal Unionists, which gave the new government a convincing mandate from the nation to implement real social reforms. But it contained a great surprise. The number of Labour MPs had leaped from two in 1900 to fifty-three (twenty-nine for the Labour Representation Committee and twenty-four others who counted themselves Labour). The Liberals’ passive acceptance of the landmark 1901 Taff Vale legal decision, which allowed a trade union to be sued for damage caused by its members during a strike, had driven the unions towards Labour. The large number of MPs fielded by the Labour Representation Committee pointed to the desire for radical change in the way that the working man was treated. After the 1906 election the twenty-nine LRC members called themselves the Labour Parliamentary party and Keir Hardie became its chairman. In fact the mood of many Liberals was very close to the new Labour party; after all, until recently the Liberals had been the party representing the working class, and in many constituencies they still were. The Liberal MP John Burns, who became minister for the Local Government Board, was the first working man to be a member of the Cabinet. A socialist engineer and trade unionist, he had been one of the chief instigators of the great strikes of the late 1880s.