A History of Britain, Volume 3 (54 page)

But true slum-dwellers constituted perhaps no more than 10 per cent of the total urban working population. Insecure and unpredictable as employment might be in a trading world now less favourable to industries traditionally dominated by British exports such as coal, textiles and heavy engineering, for the vast majority of people the physical conditions of their lives – diet, health, housing, crime rates – had been transformed since the Great Exhibition of 1851 or even the queen’s Golden Jubilee of 1887. Cities like Cardiff, with 128,000 inhabitants riding the crest of the south Wales coal export boom, had grown by seven times since the mid-19th century. In older cities like Manchester or Sheffield, the most noisome tenements had been taken down and replaced with two-up, two-down, four- or even five-room terraced houses (six in the Midlands and southeast), built in brick, sometimes faced with a little stone or stucco, of the kind that gave the industrial towns of England and Wales their classic look. To guard against overcrowding local by-laws, enlightened for their time, laid down regulations about the width of streets or the heights of ceilings. Today, of course, those streets look like some of the more depressing relics of the vanished industrial empire (although, arguably, they have weathered Britain’s 20th-century history better than the post-Second World War tower blocks that replaced many of them).

Unlike the housing of virtually the rest of the industrial world in Europe and America, British terraced houses were based on the nuclear family unit, perhaps with extended family such as uncles, aunts and grannies, as well as neighbours, congregating in back gardens and sometimes on the street and in local shops, churches and pubs. Rooms were separated by function – kitchen, living room, bedrooms and, in the better-off or more socially ambitious houses, a parlour, seldom used except for special occasions and to display domestic treasures such as the piano and sideboard. Like gas for lighting and cooking, water was now supplied municipally and delivered through taps directly into sinks instead of through an outdoor pump. Water closets were fast replacing earth closets, and dungheaps and human waste were removed through town sewers, even if lavatories were almost invariably outdoors. In Exeter, beginning in 1896 the town council spent the enormous sum of £88,000 to construct a local sewerage system, and rightly boasted of the transformation brought to the town, not least by reducing the risk and rate of infectious diseases like typhoid, typhus and cholera. Ruskin had a point when he declared that ‘a good sewer is a far nobler and a far holier thing … than the most admired Madonna ever painted’.

Although plumbed-in bathtubs were still a middle- and upper-class luxury, a municipal bath-house revolution at the turn of the century meant that for the first time British working people, even those who didn’t possess one of the prized tin slipper baths (a must for mining families), could now get their bodies clean on a regular basis. At Bow in the East End of London, 73,000 people used the baths in 1892–3, their first year of operation. By 1897 Lambeth in south London had a spectacular house with three swimming pools and 97 slipper baths. In London in 1912, as Anthony Wohl has chronicled, over 5 million visits were made to public bath-houses, many of them ornately, even exotically designed, their floors and walls dressed in gleaming tile. Together with the use of public laundries, the arrival of mass hygiene (making yet more money for the benevolent autocrat of Port Sunlight) was as great a change in the social body as the arrival of the vote was for the body politic.

Diet, too, was much changed, mostly for the better. A second industrial revolution in the late 19th century had brought processed and cheaply marketed foods like margarine, mustard and commercially produced jam into the diet of the working population. And the agricultural depression that was the countryside’s misfortune was the urban consumer’s opportunity, with prices for staples – tea, bacon, flour, bread, lard and sugar, most of them either colonial or Irish in origin – dropping by a quarter to a third between 1870 and 1914. With the import of refrigerated meat the market among the poor for ‘slink’ (prematurely born calves) or ‘broxy’ (diseased sheep) mercifully contracted, although few families could have forgone tripe (cow’s stomach lining).

None of this meant that British social democracy was round the corner. Imperial wealth had done little to reduce the colossal inequalities of fortune. On the eve of the First World War, according to the social historian José Harris, 10 per cent of Britain’s population owned 92 per cent of its wealth. As many as 90 per cent of the deceased, on the other hand, left no documented assets or property whatsoever. And, although unprecedented numbers of people in the Edwardian era might have thought of themselves as relatively well-off, the economic outlook for Britain in the new century was going to make holding on to those gains harder, not easier. It was exactly in the traditional labour-intensive, export-led industries – coal, metallurgy, textiles – that the pressure was already piling up. Countries that had once imported from Britain – especially the United States and Germany – were now competitors, in some cases protected by their own tariffs. Three-quarters of all Welsh tinplate, for example, had been exported to the United States. But after the imposition in 1890 of the McKinley tariff, designed to nurture the American
domestic
industry, the value of those exports collapsed by nearly two-thirds in just seven years. And what was true of tinplate would be equally true for coal, pig iron and locomotive rails.

Two not necessarily mutually exclusive options were available to counteract these ominous signs of the beginning of the end of British industrial supremacy. Britain could respond, as Joseph Chamberlain wanted, with its own imperial tariff system, creating an economic Fortress Britannia, behind whose customs walls colonies would be preserved as exclusive reservoirs of raw materials and markets for manufactures. (Quite what the colonies might get out of it in the long term was best left to future discussion.) Even before he had gone public, dragging a reluctant and divided Conservative party behind him, Chamberlain had been excited enough about this prospect to confide to Winston Churchill, whose constituency of Oldham was a town very much invested in the fate of textiles, that this would be the great political issue of the future. In the election of 1905 he would break the Tories by forcing the issue, just as he had broken the Liberals 20 years earlier over Ireland.

The second option, which industrialists themselves were taking without waiting for help in the form of legislated protection, was to reduce the unit costs of their products. This could be achieved by investing in labour-saving machinery, thus reducing the size of the workforce; by cutting the wage costs of the current workforce; by getting more hours and more product for their money; or indeed by all three combined. The result of their concerted attempts to press these changes resulted in some of the bitterest labour disputes, involving lock-outs as well as strikes, seen since the 1840s. For the rationalizing-economizing drive of management ran athwart the trade unions, who were disciplined enough to mobilize their labour and committed not just to a holding position but to fighting for a minimum wage, an eight-hour day (for miners in particular) and special rates of pay for ‘abnormal’ or particularly dangerous work (again in the mines). Although the biggest unions succeeded brilliantly in recruiting the overwhelming majority of workers into their ranks, the results of the confrontations of the 1890s and 1900s were mixed. When the Amalgamated Society of Engineers decided to resist the introduction of new ‘self-acting’ machines in 1897, which inevitably meant the downgrading of the skills and numbers of workers needed and a resultant lowering of wages, they found themselves facing a determined lock-out. After seven months it culminated in a humiliating return to work on the industrialists’ terms. Still worse was the 1901 court decision upholding the right of the TaffVale Railway to sue the railwaymen’s union for damages (in this case the enormous sum of £23,000) for lost revenues incurred during a strike.

Since it seemed unlikely, especially in the years of Tory supremacy, that parliament would ever undo decisions of that kind, the need for the unions to have their own representation became urgent. The veteran of the great London dock strike of 1889, ex-docker John Burns, became an MP, allied with the Liberals but with an agenda to look after workers’ interests. But in the much more polarized climate of the 1890s and 1900s Burns was suspect as an example of the gold-watch-and-waistcoat, shiny shoed, bowler-hatted ‘old’ unionist, as much concerned with working-class respectability as with mobilizing industrial action. The miners in south Wales, for example, who had their own strike in 1893, looked rather for a politician who would not be beholden to either of the major parties. In the previous year the Scottish socialist James Keir Hardie had become the first Independent Labour MP, taking his seat at West Ham South; after losing it in 1895, he was elected MP for Merthyr Tydfil in 1900. ‘Independent’ announced Hardie’s refusal to compromise the cause of union representation in this way. In 1900 a Labour Representation Committee was established, which six years later changed its name to the Labour party. Just 29 Labour MPs were elected to the parliament of 1906, the same year that at the other end of the empire, in Bombay and Calcutta, Indian nationalists repudiated both Liberal promises of self-government and Conservative promises of benevolently firm administration.

From the beginning there was a struggle for the soul (and in fact for the bodies) of the Labour party among three groups, all claiming to be the authentic voice of British socialism: revolutionary Marxists; trade unionists, who with some justification saw the party as their creation; and the non-revolutionary intellectuals of the Fabian Society. Inevitably, for the Marxists of H.M. Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation (SDF), the British component came second to the revolutionary solidarity of the international working class. And the SDF was, in fact, strongest in non-English industrial areas of Britain, on Clydeside and amongst the immigrants and political refugees from Europe, who flocked to London’s East End. Trade unionists could, and did, see themselves as belonging to an old tradition of working-class self-help that went back to the Chartists and perhaps even to the radicals of the Civil War. (Strikers in Scotland would, more than once, rewrite the National Covenant of 1637 as a call to working-class solidarity.) But the Fabians, too, claimed pedigree from Milton, John Lilburne, Tom Paine, Cobbett and Carlyle. What all those patriarchs of the people had in common was their mastery of confrontational rhetoric, and from its foundation in 1883 the Fabian Society saw itself above all as a voice.

Its original charismatic founder, Thomas Davidson, the illegitimate son of a Scottish shepherd, was an itinerant lecturer, mystic and socialist who had taken radical London by storm in 1881 with lectures on the woes of industrial society. Two years later the starry-eyed and the socialists split (naturally), the latter forming a club named, obscurely but tellingly, after Quintus Fabius Maximus, the Roman General who ‘waited patiently’, to the exasperation of the impetuous, before choosing his moment to strike hard at Hannibal. Fabianism committed itself to eschewing the half-baked, half-thought revolution in favour of a long campaign of re-educating both the political elite and the working class – the first to a new sense of their social responsibilities, the latter to a new sense of their legitimate social rights. Between them they were to make a modern, just and compassionate industrial society, without violence and without the sacrifice of freedom. There have been worse ideologies in the modern age.

But seldom have there been more dazzling propagandists. As early as 1884 the young Irish journalist George Bernard Shaw was writing regular, spectacularly vituperative Fabian essays denouncing the heedlessness of the landed and monied classes. Shaw was also an inexhaustible public speaker, giving 67 lectures in 1887 alone, talking, through the flame-red beard, almost always off-the-cuff in working men’s clubs, parks, town halls, pubs and on street corners. The message was the same. Unless the politicos and the plutocrats woke up to the serfdom that their infamous system perpetuated, the serfs would one day come and get them and then only two alternatives would remain – a police state or a bloody uprising against the propertied classes. When Shaw finally tired of oratory, describing it as ‘a vice’, his essay-writing for William Stead’s
Pall Mall Gazette
left no sacred Victorian cow unslaughtered, including the biggest, most sacred cow of all. Of a hagiographic jubilee history of the queen’s reign, Shaw wrote:

We know that she has been of all wives the best, of all mothers the fondest, of all widows the most faithful. We have often seen her, despite her lofty station, moved by famines, colliery explosions, shipwrecks, and railway accidents…. We all remember how she repealed the corn laws, invented the steam locomotive … devised the penny post … and, in short, went through such a programme as no previous potentate ever dreamed of. What we need now is a book entitled ‘Queen Victoria: by a Personal Acquaintance who dislikes her’.

It was when Shaw met Sidney Webb and his wife Beatrice that Fabian essay-writing really took fire. Beatrice had come from a family of businessmen and Liberal politicians. Her father, Richard Potter, had been
director
of the Great Western Railway and had made money from the development of the Barry docks, the principal outlet for the export of south Welsh coal. But her grandfather, also Richard Potter, had been a Benthamite reformer and campaigner for the Reform Act and Wigan’s first MP. Beatrice had carried on the radical family tradition, finding work as a researcher for Charles Booth, disguising herself, somewhat improbably, as an East End Jewish girl looking for work so that she could report on the sweatshops. On the rebound from a heated but doomed passion for Joseph Chamberlain she met his diametric opposite, the short, rotund ex-tradesman and civil servant Sidney Webb, whose head was colossally out of proportion to his body. He wooed her with excitable talk of social justice, but when he made the mistake of sending Beatrice a full-length photo she recoiled in horror, reminding Sidney that it was his head alone that she had agreed to marry.