Edwardian Britain

I

Introduction

Edwardian Britain, historical period covering the years from the accession of Edward VII in 1901 to the start of World War I—the Great War—in August 1914.

II

Edward VII and his Court

Edward VII became king in January 1901 and died in May 1910, but the term 'Edwardian Age' is generally applied not only to Edward's reign but also to the following four years when the throne was occupied by his son, George V. For it was the outbreak of the Great War, not the change of monarchs, which brought this era to a decisive end.

Edward's personality in many ways mirrored the age in which he lived. Indeed, one reason why the pleasure-loving king enjoyed such widespread popularity was that, with his luxurious tastes and with his fondness for travelling, gambling, and the company of pretty women, he brought a new 'smartness' to social life, which many welcomed as a departure from the 'stuffiness' of Victorian Britain. Edward also encouraged a show of greater toleration towards social outsiders and the new rich, which included some of his closest friends like the German-born financier Ernest Cassel. However, the king's influence may also have contributed to a loosening of the moral code and a coarsening of manners: Edwardian Britain was marked by a succession of political and financial scandals, as well as becoming a by-word for vulgar ostentation.

III

Fears of Decline

Edward became king at a time when the advent of a new century suggested the necessity for breaking with the past. The administrative muddles and military setbacks of the South African War, in which Britain sustained casualties of about 34,000 men and expended over £200 million, shook complacent confidence in British superiority, and fostered an awareness of her precarious position as a Great Power.

Intensified economic competition contributed to the feeling of insecurity. In the 1890s Germany and the United States had each overtaken Britain in steel production—a development that had serious implications for Britain's international status and 'national efficiency'. One response to perceptions of decline was an attempted retreat into 'Fortress Empire', and this imperialist consciousness was heightened by the South African conflict, during which more than 30,000 volunteers from Canada, Australia, and New Zealand fought alongside the troops of the 'mother country' in an impressive display of solidarity.

In May 1903 the Colonial Secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, sought to exploit the imperialist mood by propounding a scheme of 'tariff reform', under which Britain and her self-governing colonies were to offer one another preferential access to their home markets. However, this programme would have necessitated the abandonment of free trade and the imposition of duties on a range of imported raw materials, including corn and meat, that would have raised the cost of living. This controversial proposal split the governing Conservative Party and contributed to the collapse in late 1905 of the accident-prone government led by Arthur Balfour, who had been prime minister since the retirement of Lord Salisbury in 1902. It also tarnished the imperial idea itself.

True, imperial fervour was kept alive by the verses of Rudyard Kipling, the country's unofficial poet laureate, and by the music of Edward Elgar, whose Pomp and Circumstance March (1901), when later matched with the words, 'Land of Hope and Glory', quickly became an alternative national anthem. The zenith of imperial spectacle came in December 1911 when George V was crowned as Emperor of India at a Grand Durbar in Delhi. But, as a practical project, imperialism was already in decisive retreat.

Policy-makers turned instead to other ways of shoring up British power in the world. In 1902 the government signed an alliance with Japan; two years later it reached an understanding ('entente') with France. Though not initially intended as an anti-German move, the Anglo-French Entente rapidly took on such a character, especially after the anxieties stirred up by Germany's naval expansion. Then, in the winter of 1905, the newly formed Liberal government opened talks with the French General Staff that envisaged the dispatch of a British Expeditionary Force to the Continent in response to possible German aggression. Finally, in 1907 the 'diplomatic revolution' was completed when Britain made a second entente, this time with Germany's other enemy, Russia.

The prospect of an Anglo-German war provoked powerful protests from the Peace Movement, which had many adherents, both in the Liberal Party and within the Trade Union Movement . But others reacted with patriotic alarm, and the period after 1906 was punctuated by a series of 'German invasion scares', whipped up by the popular press. The fragility of the international order was further exposed during the Agadir Crisis in 1911 (see Morocco Crises), and it came as no real surprise when Britain declared war against Germany and Austro-Hungary in August 1914, ostensibly over the former's violation of Belgian neutrality.

IV

Social Unrest

Instability abroad was paralleled at home by a range of domestic anxieties. The population was continuing to expand, from nearly 42 million in 1901 to over 45 million in 1911, but at a lower growth rate of 8.1 per cent than in earlier decades and also at a lower rate than was being registered in other countries, including Germany—another development with worrying implications for national security. Limitation of births within marriage, a practice more prevalent among the well-to-do rather than among the poor, also raised alarm about the “quality” of the population. Members of the newly established eugenics movement, who had a distorted and limited understanding of the principles of the infant science of heredity, drew the false deduction that the 'racial stock' would deteriorate unless the healthy middle classes produced more children and steps were taken to prevent the 'multiplication of the unfit'.

However, most advocates of greater 'national efficiency' blamed poverty and destitution on the bad environment, not on genetic defect, and urged the case for social reform. The surveys of Charles Booth and Seebohm Rowntree had already dramatized the plight of the urban poor, but the revelation that in Manchester three quarters of all South African War volunteers in 1899 had had to be rejected as physically unfit added a new dimension to the discussion about what needed to be done to assist destitute people at the bottom of the social pile—the 'submerged tenth', as they were often called.

Some responded by throwing themselves into the task of 'organizing' youth to rescue adolescents (a new category) from a life of loafing on street corners. In 1907 the South African War hero, Robert Baden-Powell, launched his highly successful Scouting Association, with its telling slogan, 'Be Prepared!'.

Interests of state, as well as humanitarian feeling, also helped inspire the raft of legislative reforms passed by the Liberal government after 1906, many of them promoted by the fiery Welsh radical, David Lloyd George, and by Winston Churchill, a recent convert from Conservatism. (see Liberal Britain) In 1906 local authorities were empowered to raise money to provide school meals for under-fed schoolchildren; the following year saw the establishment of school medical inspections and the start of a new schools' medical service. The most costly of these welfare initiatives was the launching in 1908 of old age pensions, which proved to be immensely popular. The National Insurance Act (1911), which involved compulsory deductions from the workman's pay packet, won the government fewer plaudits, but, as a result of this ambitious state-run scheme, workers hit by ill-health, disability, and (in a few industries) unemployment were provided with a subsistence income.

Nevertheless the majority of British people remained locked in a grim struggle for survival. Well over three quarters of all adults earned less than £160 a year—the threshold for paying income tax—and economic inequalities were, if anything, widening during the Edwardian period. Housing conditions, too, were appalling, not just for the impoverished inhabitants of large cities like Glasgow, where 59 per cent of the population was living more than two to a room, but also for agricultural labourers. In 1909 the government ventured tentatively into the field of town planning, but it was left to a handful of enlightened businessmen, such as the Cadburys at Bournville in Birmingham and the Rowntrees at New Earswick, near York, to take the lead in the supply of model housing. Similarly it was a private company that launched the 'Garden City' of Letchworth in 1903, an ambitious attempt at 'marrying' town and country, which was followed by the construction of Hampstead Garden Suburb from 1906 onwards.

Urban squalor stimulated nostalgic feelings for the countryside. Indeed, some intellectuals sought to emulate the utopian socialist, Edward Carpenter, a pioneer of what would today be called the environmental movement, and turned to the countryside in search of the 'simple life'. A rejection of the heavy opulence and pomposity characteristic of conventional social rituals and fashionable attire particularly affected the arts. For example, 'pastoral' influences pervade the elegiac poetry of Edward Thomas and the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams, who drew inspiration from recently discovered folk songs, and are also found in the 'cottagey' style of vernacular architecture favoured by the likes of C. F. A. Voysey—a style that contrasted with the brash confidence of grandiloquent Edwardian public buildings such as Admiralty Arch and the Victoria Memorial. Sir Edwin Lutyens worked fluently in both of these different idioms.

Creating an idealized landscape was one thing, persuading town dwellers to resettle in rural Britain quite another. There was a movement to 'colonize' the countryside by establishing smallholdings, but this achieved very little, mainly because agriculture was emerging only slowly from its prolonged period of depression.

In fact, population continued to move in the opposite direction, from the countryside into the town. By 1911 nearly one half of England's population lived within six 'conurbations', as they were shortly to be called: Greater London, South-East Lancashire, the West Midlands, West Yorkshire, Merseyside, and Tyneside. Within urban areas, too, there was movement, as improved methods of transportation facilitated the expansion of residential suburbs. True, even in 1914 the streets were still thronged with horse-drawn traffic, mingling with the ubiquitous bicycle—in its modern form, largely an invention of the 1890s—while private cars, numbering about 132,000 on the eve of war, remained very much a rich man's toy. But thanks to the internal-combustion engine, another invention of the 1890s, motorized cabs, or taxis, made their first appearance in 1904, and by the outbreak of the Great War there were 50,000 bus services in operation—rivalling the recently electrified tramway systems.

Immense changes were also taking place in sea-borne transport. By 1900 steam had all but replaced sail, and the installation of turbine engines enabled steam-powered boats to travel at over 21 knots—an unprecedented speed. Great ocean liners, fitted out like luxury hotels, criss-crossed the oceans: among them the Titanic, whose maiden voyage in 1912 ended so tragically. However, even more lives would have been lost in this tragedy but for the existence of radio telegraphy—an important technological advance, pioneered by the Italian immigrant, Guglielmo Marconi. The Edwardian Age also saw the conquest of the depths of the ocean, as submarines extended their cruising range, and, even more excitingly, the conquest of the air. The crossing of the English Channel by Louis Blériot in 1909 in a heavier-than-air machine made a particularly strong impact on the British, who realized that though they inhabited an island, the continent was now very close at hand.

Exhilarated by the spectacle of these wondrous signs of progress, some Edwardians hailed science and technology as the solution to a wide range of social and political problems. In his many fictional tales and polemical books, H. G. Wells, the most famous of these prophets, predicted that engineers would soon establish themselves as a new kind of ruling class.

However, even in Wells's own writings, optimism jostled with fear. For the Edwardians understood that science was not only drawing the peoples of the world closer together for commercial and sociable exchanges, but was also increasing the destructive potential of war. As much became apparent in 1906 when the country's leading naval expert, Admiral John Fisher, launched a new class of battleship, the Dreadnought, whose speed and firepower instantly rendered all existing battleships obsolete. Any future war, conducted with submarines, airships, and aeroplanes, would clearly be unlike any that mankind had yet experienced.