A History of Britain, Volume 3 (53 page)

In South Africa fame and fortune went together. Randolph had invested in Rand mining shares, which had appreciated by at least 50 times their original face value – a small fortune that, unhappily for Jennie and Winston, was largely consumed by the late Lord’s equally substantial debts. But Churchill also shared the indignation of the colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, and the empire builder Cecil Rhodes that the might of the British Empire was being held to ransom by the obstinacy of a bunch of Dutch farmers who dictated what political rights British settlers might and might not enjoy in the Transvaal. Mostly, however, the Boer War was another opportunity for the kind of military-literary adventure that Winston had made his trademark. Through more of his mother’s shameless finagling he resigned his commission in the Hussars and was made chief war correspondent for the
Morning Post
. He sailed with the commander-in-chief of the expedition, Sir Redvers Buller; managed to be taken prisoner while defending an armoured train against Boer attack; escaped from a military gaol at Pretoria (leaving behind two comrades
who
were supposed to escape with him), hid in a coal wagon and then walked hundreds of miles to freedom; and finally returned to active duty with the South African Light Horse in time to be at the relief of Ladysmith. The escapades were almost too fabulous to be true, and they turned Churchill from a purveyor of ripping yarns on the frontier into a genuine, nationally known war hero. Writing about his Boer War and lecturing about it with lantern slides in Britain, Canada and America (where in New York he was introduced, thrillingly, by Mark Twain) put £10,000 into his bank account. Just as important, it gave the patrician practical experience of what it meant to hold a crowd in the palm of his hand. And he was still in his mid-20s.

In 1900 Churchill translated all this busily, boldly earned fortune into political success, embarking on the career for which his father had assumed he was hopelessly disqualified by standing as Tory Unionist candidate at Oldham and winning the seat. It was his second attempt. In 1899 he had been handed a by-election opportunity in the same industrial constituency, which had two Tory MPs – a practical instance of what his father had meant by working-class conservatism – but had been defeated. During the campaign Winston discovered that his Churchillian lisp and even his occasional stammer, on which speech tutors had laboured to not much avail, was far from being a liability. It could actually be managed, theatrically, to brilliant effect – the pregnant pause followed by the mischievous witticism. He was all the better for earning his debating spurs, not in the mock-Commons chambers of the Oxbridge Unions but the hard way, on the tops of omnibuses, in theatres and town halls.

But did parading through Oldham in a landau during the post-war ‘Khaki Election’, surrounded by mill girls, mean that Churchill really understood Britain any better than, say, Colonel Bwabazon or Sir Bindon Blood? During the Second World War, his wife Clementine was to say – kindly but accurately – that to understand Winston you had to know that he had never ridden on a bus in his life. It is possible, however, to overdo Churchill’s patrician remoteness from the life of the British people. Curzon was an example of an aristocrat of temper as well as of birth – someone who had to brace himself for contact with the commonplace. Churchill, on the other hand, marched lustily towards it and revelled in its commotion. His father had invented ‘Tory democracy’ as a vote-getting conceit; the son more or less lived it.

Notwithstanding return trips to Blenheim, Churchill was actually ambivalent towards his own class and, once he was in the Commons as a predictably insubordinate back-bencher, towards his own party. Joseph Chamberlain’s obsession with imperial tariffs and rejection of free trade
left
him cold and, increasingly, the political pragmatist in him scented a movement of power away from the landed dynasts of Victorian England and towards men who combined business, professional or industrial fortunes with maverick talent; men like the Liverpool lawyer F. E. Smith and the Welsh lawyer David Lloyd George.

Although, until the Liberals came to power in 1905, the majority of cabinet members were still drawn from the landed classes, their near monopoly of government was on its way out, shaken not so much by the advance of egalitarian democracy as by a long, steep agricultural depression. To all intents and purposes, between 1870 and 1910 Britain ceased to be a serious agricultural producer. Since it was unable to compete with colonial and American imports, 3 million acres were taken out of cultivation. By 1911 just 8 per cent of the 45 million people of Great Britain were earning their living from the land. Agricultural incomes in Britain over the same period fell by a full 25 per cent. Rents followed, to the point where they were often insufficient to service the mortgages taken out to provide for country-house weekends, the season in town, the well-stocked stable and cellar, the fashionable table and wardrobe, and the increasingly expensive daughters. When the pressure of death duties (inheritance tax), introduced in 1894 and then imposed in a much more punitive way in 1907, was added, sales were inevitable. And since – both before and after the First World War – there seemed to be no sign that land values would recover, the sales needed to be sooner rather than later, the process feeding on itself and turning into an avalanche. Almost a quarter of the privately owned land of Britain, David Cannadine has determined, went on the market between the 1870s and 1930. Many of the estates of those whom he calls ‘coroneted casualties’ were bought by the relatively recent rich whose fortunes had been made in industry, shipping, mining, insurance or publishing; often, as with the father of the newspaper baron Lord Beaverbrook, in the Dominions. There were Australian and Canadian accents now at the point-to-points and grouse shoots, and the relics of the old nobility tried not to flinch. Churchill’s cousin, the 9th Duke of Marlborough (who never forgave Winston’s rhetorical onslaught on the aristocracy in the campaign for the ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909), lamented that ‘the old order is doomed’.

This was unnecessarily apocalyptic, especially since Blenheim was not about to go on the rocks. But a certain way of life was indeed going under – subsiding rather than abruptly disappearing, but going under all the same. When the young socialist and active Fabian Society member H.G. ‘Bert’ Wells, the son of a professional cricketer, bowling coach and proprietor of a high-street glass and china shop in the small town of
Bromley,
published his masterpiece
Tono-Bungay
in 1909, he looked back not so very far to the time when ‘Bladesover House’, located in Wells’s Kent, was the apparently unchanging centre of the English social universe. Wells knew what he was talking about because his father’s fall from grace, or rather from a grapevine he was trimming, had resulted in a broken leg that ruined his sporting career, and necessitated the boy’s mother, Sarah, becoming a servant at Uppark, a ‘great house’ in Hampshire. Wells remembered, and felt keenly, the assumption of its infinitely graded hierarchies, and the web of subterranean tunnels beneath the house through which the servants, Morlock-like, scurried to do their masters’ bidding. But the Eloi were still very much on top:

… the unavoidable suggestion of that wide park and that fair large house, dominating church, village and the countryside, was that they represented the thing that mattered supremely in the world and that all other things had significance only in relation to them. They represented the Gentry, the Quality, by and through and for whom the rest of the world, the farming folk and the labouring folk, the trades-peoples of Ashborough, and the upper servants and the lower servants and the servants of the estate, breathed and lived and were permitted.

But even by 1909, that certainty had gone. Although the look of the countryside was the same – ‘The great houses stand in their parks still, the cottages cluster respectfully on their borders, touching their eaves with their creepers. … It is like an early day in a fine October. The hand of change rests on it all, unfelt, unseen. … One frost and the whole face of things will be bare, links snap, patience ends, our fine foliage of pretences lie glowing in the mire.’

Or so Wells hoped, a little prematurely. He, after all, was unequivocal about the dead weight of the past on the British future. And as a scientist – a student of the great Darwinist T. H. Huxley, no less – Wells made it clear many times that it was the future in which he and the rest of us ought to be interested. Nations and national histories were tribal anachronisms. True history was the history of the human species, not some absurdly arbitrary territorial and linguistic micro-division. To save that future needed a planetary view.

That view would come with his great
Outline of History
in 1919, a work about as far removed from Churchill’s island epics as anyone could possibly get. But for the moment Wells’s future, along with his future histories, was still science fiction. The masters of Uppark/Bladesover and their ilk continued to define Britishness, even if the cheque books that
paid
for the gardeners were now drawn on business accounts. (Predictably, Wells has ‘Sir Reuben Lichtenstein’ eventually buying Bladesover.) Social democracy was not just over the Fabian horizon. Those who did survive the shake-out of the estates belonged to an even more exclusive elite: by 1914, half the acreage of England and Wales belonged to just 4500 proprietors.

But not all the plutocracy chose to put their money into parks, stables and grouse moors, aping the old blood. Many of them, like Joseph Chamberlain, the screw manufacturer who had committed the unforgivable solecism of wearing his hat when being sworn in as an MP for Birmingham, were now barons of the new Britain and created their own version of estates in the suburbs. Chamberlain’s mansion, called Highbury after the north London district where he had spent his youth, was originally surrounded by 18 acres rather than the thousands typical of the old aristocratic houses. It had been designed by another Chamberlain (John Henry, whose reputation had been formed as the architect of Birmingham’s schools, civic buildings and municipal fountains) and was built in solid orange industrial brick with stone embellishments, the materials of choice for industrial-Italianate. Inside, everything was dark and very shiny. ‘No books, no work, no music’, sneered the patrician socialist Beatrice Webb, ‘to relieve the oppressive richness of the satin-covered furniture.’ Outside, there was croquet, tennis and late Victorian picturesque complete with rushy bogs, dells, brooks and pre-weathered bridges. Chamberlain himself could often be seen on an inspection tour of his orchids, azaleas and cyclamen – each species, naturally, with its own glasshouse.

Not very far from Highbury, just 4 miles south of the then city limits, the Quaker cocoa-and-chocolate magnate George Cadbury built his house, Woodbrooke, also with the standard tennis, croquet and a newly obligatory feature – the seven-hole golf course. But Cadbury had a much more ambitious social vision for his estate than mere vulgar plutocratic self-celebration. As a response to social critics like John Ruskin and William Morris that factory industrialism represented, by definition, the destruction of community, Cadbury built at Bournville a new-old village in which workers would be housed in half-timbered cottages gathered round a green. The resurrected paternalism of Merrie England would be the antidote to the horrifying slum tenements that Cadbury remembered from the days before Chamberlain’s social reforms in Birmingham, which still persisted in the worst sinks of destitution such as the East End of London, graphically documented in Charles Booth’s
Life and Labour of the People in London
(1892–7). By 1900 there were 140 of Cadbury’s mock-medieval
workers’
dwellings, and to complete the effect he had bought two authentically old houses, the 13th-century Minworth Greaves and the Tudor Selly Manor, which he had had moved to Bournville and lovingly restored. This attempt to re-create the imagined ‘organic’ community that Carlyle, Pugin and Ruskin claimed had existed in the medieval past was the precise opposite of the Hanoverian policy of obliteration, by which awkwardly placed villages were removed from the sight of the newly rich. At Bournville, Cadbury even reinvented the old traditions of manorial feasting, organizing fêtes and theatricals and day trips for other workers in the Birmingham area to see what life might be like under the new industrial baronies.

At Port Sunlight, on the banks of the Mersey near Liverpool, Bolton-born William Hesketh Lever, who had also made his fortune by processing a colonial raw product (in his case palm oil), did the same for his soap-factory workers. Some 30 architects were commissioned to create a complete ‘garden’ village in what was unapologetically called the ‘old English’ style – a lot of Jacobean-Flemish gables, much ornamental plaster pargetting and, of course, ubiquitous exposed timbering and leaded windows. To complete the effect of an old England reborn through the ‘Spirit of Soap’, two cottages were built as ‘exact’ reproductions of Anne Hathaway’s house. Rents for the Port Sunlight cottages – there was a basic ‘kitchen’ type and a fancier ‘parlour’ type, but both, as at Bournville, had their own running water and indoor bathroom – were benevolently pegged at around one fifth of the average weekly wage of 22 shillings. To help sustain the family life that critics of industrial Britain claimed had been destroyed by factory work, schools were built for the 500 children of Port Sunlight and, for girls and working wives and mothers, special classes were offered in cooking, dressmaking and shorthand. By 1909 there were 700 cottages, a concert hall and theatre, a library, a gymnasium and an open-air swimming pool.

Fortunate as the industrial villagers of Bournville and Port Sunlight undoubtedly were, they were hardly typical of the condition of the 40 per cent of Britons who, by the turn of the 20th century, lived in cities of more than 100,000 inhabitants. Surveys of late Victorian slums, like Booth’s of the East End or Seebohm Rowntree’s 1901 study of poverty in York, gave the impression to social critics then and since that life for working people in the larger cities must have been hell on earth. Of these notoriously and persistently squalid concentrations of overcrowded destitution there were perhaps none worse than those in turn-of-the-century Glasgow, where unskilled workers still lived in a single room or at most two in a tenement block. That small space would have to do for a family’s
sleeping,
eating and such ablutions as were possible. Even by 1911, 85 per cent of Glasgow’s accommodation consisted of three rooms or fewer.