The Edwardians Read online

  The

  Edwardians

  ROY HATTERSLEY

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  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The persistent myth depicts the Edwardian era as a long and leisurely afternoon. In fact, the years between Queen Victoria’s death and the outbreak of the First World War were a watershed in British history – not an interlude that separated the old and new worlds, but the time when a modern nation was born. The Edwardians witnessed the world changing around them.

  It has been my good fortune to read three unpublished diaries which illustrate life – in very different parts of society – during the turbulent thirteen years. I am deeply grateful to my three benefactors – the late Duke of Devonshire, for the diaries of his grandfather, Victor Cavendish, MP until 1908 and then 9th Duke; Gervald Frykman, for the diaries of his grandmother, Kate Jarvis (née Bedford), a children’s nanny with the Crutchley family in Ascot; and Christine Glossop, for the diaries of Rowland Evans, her father – the schoolboy son of a Bradford Nonconformist minister and then an engineering apprentice in Leicester.

  Will and Alison Parenti – pursuing on my behalf a legend about King Edward’s coronation – found it confirmed in Men, Women and Things, the memoir of the 6th Duke of Portland. It proved to be a fascinating quarry.

  Once again I am indebted to Anthony Howard, who read the manuscript and improved it by giving me his advice as a candid friend. Cynthia Shepherd typed numerous versions of the text – eliminating errors, correcting grammar and identifying contradictions as she did so. The book is better for their help. Its shortcomings are, of course, my sole responsibility.

  INTRODUCTION

  Hope and Glory

  Between the death of Queen Victoria on 22 January 1901, and the outbreak of the Great War on 4 August 1914, a political and social revolution, accompanied and sustained by an explosion of intellectual and artistic energy, swept Britain into the modern world. Yet the Edwardian Age is constantly described as a long and sunlit afternoon, no more than a congenial bridging passage between the glories of the nineteenth century and the horrors of slaughter in France and Flanders. Charm is thought to have replaced energy in a nation, exhausted by the activity and achievement of Victorian Britain, gratefully at rest.

  Much of the blame for the epic mistake lies with the King who gave the age its name. Edward VII personified benevolent self-indulgence. The Entente Cordiale, for which he took only partially deserved credit, came to represent more than a warmer friendship with France. It became the genial symbol of the age. Britain, history came to believe, was cordial in general.

  In truth, Edwardian Britain teemed with the excitement of innovation and change. The King – either indulging his appetites at country house parties or attempting to impose his royal will on ministers – began his reign thinking that the old order would last for ever. Even he came to realise how the old world was disappearing around him. Only the years which followed the Second World War can compare with the speed and extent of Edwardian change.

  The politicians, as politicians will, assumed that the new society would be built in Parliament. The introduction of the National Insurance Bill certainly established a novel principle of government – the State’s responsibility for the welfare of its most vulnerable members. And the battle between Lords and Commons, which that bill precipitated, shifted the balance of power a little nearer to democracy. The House of Commons itself was becoming a professional legislature which no longer relied on noblesse oblige to motivate its Members. Class interests and rival ideologies were rippling the smooth surface of what had been a gentleman’s Parliament. But those reforms were the direct result of changes in society outside Westminster and Whitehall.

  A new political party talking of mass membership and demanding manhood suffrage had emerged from the factories and mines, the mills and docks of industrial Britain. The result was not the death of Liberal England but the evolution of progressive opinion within the Liberal Party (most strongly represented in Scotland and Wales) into the Labour Party. The radical spirit of the time was typified by two militant campaigns – Votes for Women and Home Rule for Ireland. Both of those demands were met because Edwardian militants battled for their causes in the streets. By 1914 there was no turning back. The war, so often said to have made Irish Home Rule and Votes for Women irresistible, postponed, not promoted, both reforms. The arguments were won in Edwardian Britain.

  The new willingness to challenge authority – without which women would not have achieved even an extension to their franchise and Ireland would not have obtained its blemished freedom – was not confined to politics. The right of the Lord Chamberlain’s office to censor plays was contested by the greatest playwrights of the day – men who were determined to redeem late-Victorian drama by demonstrating that thought and entertainment were not incompatible. Fiction enjoyed a decade of eclectic brilliance. A masterpiece – covering a spectrum that stretched from Henry James to D. H. Lawrence – was published in every Edwardian year. The Grafton Gallery in London’s Dover Street, uncertain how to describe a new school of painting which it believed possessed the mark of genius, decided to call it Post-Impressionism.

  The Church – at least the Church of England – would have welcomed a period of calm, but it had to defend its immutable beliefs against a tide of unprecedented intellectual and scientific advances. Rutherford, in the dawn of nuclear physics, redefined the nature of matter. Moore promised a moral philosophy which both suited the mores of the age and stood much Christian teaching on its head. Russell even questioned the way in which the old world thought. They were the real spirit of the age, not Edward’s ‘Marlborough House Set’ at the Henley Regatta, Ascot and the Eton versus Harrow match at Lord’s.

  Indeed sport – real sport, the true opiate of the Edwardian masses – changed as quickly as every other aspect of early twentieth-century life. The hard edge of professionalism began to alter the character of football and cricket, making the spectator who paid at the turnstile essential to a team’s success. Boxing moved out of public-house yards into the big halls. But the Olympic Games in London maintained the British tradition of admiration for good losers. Queen Alexandra presented a trophy to the Italian athlete who collapsed just before he won the marathon.

  The evidence of material progress was all around. The motor car – neither reliable nor accepted in 1900 – became so common that a new tax had to be levied to pay for the tarmacadam which was needed on the roads. The aeroplane – after a series of breathtaking trials and competitions – was accepted as the transport of the future. The turbine engine transformed merchant shipping and naval warfare – just in time. The Edwardians discovered that Britain’s real enemy was not France but Germany.

  Because of the Great War, progress was suspended and, in the slaughter which followed, the achievements of the century’s early years were underrated and overlooked. But one irrefutable fact remains. The Land of Hope and Glory which was celebrated in Edward
VII’s ‘Coronation Ode’ was moving irresistibly into the modern world.

  When the long day of Queen Victoria’s funeral was over, Viscount Esher stood in the falling snow outside the Frogmore Mausoleum and, much to his own surprise, thought about the future rather than the past. He had, at royal request, supervised the Golden Jubilee Celebrations, so he felt part of the fifty-year imperial glory which those festivities symbolised. He believed, as did most of his contemporaries, that the victorious reign was an age of unsurpassed achievement. He also feared, like many of the mourners on that cold February day, that imperial greatness had died with the Queen.

  Edward VII had never hidden his dissolute habits or disguised his louche ways. Victoria was the epitome of imperial greatness. Her son seemed to be the personification of the decadence which guarantees decline. The superstition was reinforced by statistics. The British economy, though still strong, was not expanding at the rate of its competitors. The British Army, which little boys were told had never lost a war, was losing its battle with the Boers.

  It is unlikely that Esher thought much about the real state of the nation – the standard of living of the urban poor, the wages of agricultural labourers, the status of women and the quality of elementary education. But all over Britain working men and women had begun first to argue and then to agitate for a greater share of the wealth which was, they believed, the bequest of history. The Edwardian age became a social and economic revolution. Esher, the quintessential courtier with vested interests in the established order, was right to fear that a ‘new regime, full of anxieties for England, had begun’.

  PART ONE

  ‘Anxieties for England’

  CHAPTER 1

  A Cloud Across the Sun

  The King and the cortège were ready exactly as planned, at half past eleven. But it took more than two minutes for the Earl Marshal’s message – relayed by twelve Hussar signallers along Buckingham Palace Road, down the Mall, up St James’s and into Piccadilly – to reach the head of the column. To the officers of the headquarters’ staff, who waited to give the order ‘Slow March’, the delay seemed much longer. They had fought in battles from Majuba Hill to Spion Kopje, but, on the morning of 2 February 1901, they were more nervous than raw recruits under fire for the first time. The procession which it was their duty to move off was part of the biggest parade of the armed forces that Britain had ever seen. Twenty thousand men were ready to march and another thirty thousand lined the route. But it was the occasion, not its size, which intimidated them. In the words of The Times, ‘the day had come for the Army to pay its last tribute of devotion’ to Queen Victoria.

  The slow march across London was only one part of the royal obsequies. They had begun on the previous day The Queen had died in Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. The first stage of her journey home – for the funeral service at Windsor and then to the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore for the brief lying-in-state – provided an ideal opportunity to offer an appropriate tribute to the monarch ‘who had been Ruler of a Worldwide Empire and Mistress of the Sea’.1 Thirty British battleships and cruisers lined the route of the royal yacht Alberta, followed by the Hohenzollern bearing Victoria’s grandson, the Kaiser of Germany Three German ‘ironclads’, anchored alongside the cruisers which had been sent to pay the respects of France, Japan and Portugal, joined in the tribute. A Spanish frigate, hurrying across the Bay of Biscay to join the armada, lost steam and was replaced by a yacht which belonged to the Prince of Monaco. The memorial fleet stood in line for two days waiting to fire a valedictory salute as the cortège of the dead queen sailed by.

  The railway companies, which had been the economic glory of Victorian Britain, accepted the task of bearing the body of the Queen from Portsmouth to London with appropriate solemnity. All advertisements on or about Victoria Station, where the coffin was to arrive, were removed or obscured. The platform along which it was to be carried was covered in blue cloth and a pavilion, to provide a moment’s respite for the royal mourners, was built exactly opposite the place at which Edward VII would alight. The engine and most of the carriages – including the coach that carried the new king – were the property of the Brighton Company, but the body of the old Queen in its lead-lined coffin made the journey in a carriage which belonged to the Great Western Railway It was provided at the special request of her son in tribute to the many happy journeys his mother had made in what had become the royal coach.

  The inside of the carriage was no longer decorated in the famous chocolate and cream livery of ‘God’s Wonderful Railway’. Everything was white. The notion that a white funeral would proclaim a life of purity was put into Victoria’s mind by Lord Tennyson during a reverential visit to Prince Albert’s tomb in the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore. The insistence that she should not be shrouded in black had been included in her detailed instructions about how her funeral should be conducted.

  Queen Victoria had always taken funerals seriously, and she had left few details of her own last rites to the vagaries of her family and court. Her dresser had been given details of the contents of her coffin – the Prince Consort’s dressing gown, her wedding veil, numerous bracelets and lockets, a cloth which had been embroidered by her dead daughter and a photograph of John Brown to be held, together with a lock of his hair, in her left hand. The funeral itself had to be entirely military, with her coffin drawn through London on a gun carriage by eight horses which she instructed should be white or bay, not the usual sable.

  Providence did not quite provide the weather that the Queen would have chosen. Snow was falling on the Isle of Wight when the royal yacht set sail for Portsmouth. Next day in London the early morning was bitterly cold, so the troops who lined the route were in greatcoat order. There were gusts of rain as the train, bearing Victoria’s coffin, approached Victoria Station. By the time that the procession was ready to move off, the sky was a clear blue. It was, therefore, a good morning for marching soldiers who hate the heat. It was less congenial to the crowds of mourners who stood for hours along the route. But London was not in a mood to be prevented from saying farewell to the old Queen.

  Almost two weeks had passed between the Queen’s death on 22 January and the return to London in preparation for the funeral and lying-in-state. During those days, the Earl Marshal, the Lord Great Chamberlain, the Master of Horse, the Commander-in-Chief, Lord Esher (a family friend and Secretary to the Office of Works), numerous private secretaries, sundry bishops and assorted courtiers had contributed to making certain that nothing went wrong during two days of unique ceremony which began with a naval regatta and continued with a whole Army corps – more men than went to France in the British expeditionary forces in 1914 – marching through London. In general the arrangements were brilliantly successful. The careful planning, not to mention the presence of the Kaiser, the Kings of Greece and Portugal, five crown princes, fourteen princes, two grand dukes, one archduke, five dukes and most of their consorts, did not make for a spontaneous outpouring of emotion. However, there is no doubt that the whole nation was engulfed in genuine grief. Britain had lost a queen who had reigned for so long that nobody under the age of seventy – far beyond the average lifespan of the age – could remember the time before she occupied the throne. The mourning was almost universal.

  In London, Victor Cavendish, MP – nephew of the 8th Duke of Devonshire and heir presumptive to the title and to Chatsworth — wrote in his diary, ‘Everybody most depressed.’ Cavendish had just been appointed government whip in the House of Commons and was therefore technically a member of the Court with the title of Treasurer of the Royal Household. His grief had to be publicly and properly expressed. ‘When I woke this morning, found a note saying that there was to be a Privy Council Meeting at St James’ Palace and that I was to attend. My uniform was not finished. So I hurried off to Sir F Ponsonby [the Queen’s assistant private secretary] and asked him what I ought to do. He lent me a suit but it was much too big.’

  Two hundred miles north in the town of B
radford, the Reverend Rowland Evans, minister of the Galington Baptist Church, spoke to the local newspaper about the rewards of sacrifice and service and prayed for the soul of the departed queen. His twelve-year-old son, also Rowland, seemed enthusiastic only about cricket and fretwork, a particularly Victorian form of handicraft. Perhaps the Reverend Evans thought that a new reign in a new century was an ideal time for his son to start a diary. The initial response was encouraging. Rowland wrote on the first page:

  Rowland Evans is my name

  England is my nation

  Bradford is my dwelling place

  The Lord is my salvation

  All over Britain, curtains were drawn, in the traditional sign of shared mourning. Services were held in cathedrals and parish churches at or about the same time as the last rites were performed in the Chapel Royal at Windsor. The symbols of grief and the expressions of sorrow were, of course, at their greatest – and their most ingenious – in the capital. Mayfair families made, or arranged for their servants to make, wreaths of cypress and laurel which they hung from lampposts. Crossing sweepers in the Strand tied wisps of black rag to their brooms. Cabmen fastened ribbons to their whips.

  As the funeral train steamed towards London, men and women from the farms of Hampshire and Surrey rushed to the side of the track. The platforms of the suburban stations through which it passed were crowded from the early morning. The Commissioner of Metropolitan Police had insisted that the procession from Victoria to Paddington must be diverted past Buckingham Palace, up Constitution Hill and through Hyde Park rather than travel by the easiest and quickest route along Grosvenor Place. Unless the crowds could be spread over a longer distance some mourners would, he feared, be killed in the crush. It proved to be a wise precaution. Almost a million men and women travelled into London late on the night before or early on the morning of the funeral procession. A few had paid for vantage points in the shop windows or on the balconies of houses along the way The rest hoped to find a spot where they could stand and see. Most of them were disappointed.