Anyone for tennis? More kedgeree, Lady Maude? Oh, do let’s go to Henley for the Regatta, it’ll be topping.
The image of Edwardian Britain as Eden, swept away by the bloody deluge of the Great War, is endlessly seductive.
The sun always seemed to shine on women in white dresses twirling parasols and blazered men in straw boaters. Unless it was the evening ball, of course, when the chandeliers sparkled as brightly as the champagne.
It was the era of the long weekend, Saturday to Monday, in country houses at Upton Whatho!, the endless round of meals only interrupted by game shooting. In 1913 at Hall Barn, a Buckinghamshire estate owned by Lord Burnham, the ‘guns’ shot 3,937 pheasants in a day.
An Edwardian Shooting Party.
King George V, who attended, remarked on the ‘bag’, ‘perhaps we overdid it today.’ George had come to the throne on the death of his father, the fun-loving Edward VII, in 1910. No-one really noticed. The age still considered itself Edwardian.
The party went on. It was a bit fast. Gramophones were coming in, so was ‘ragtime’ jazz music and the flapper who, in the words of the song, with ‘her dainty skirt she’d swish up, They say she shocked the bishop’.
For those not fancying the waltz or the ‘Turkey trot’, there was always games such as charades or bridge.
Well, you know how seductive it all is. You probably watched Downton Abbey.
Historians also play parlour games. One is, ‘What If?’ A favourite scenario is that the First World did not happen, leaving Britain to do what precisely? With Senna the soothsayer from Up Pompeii as their model, a chorus of historians queues up to suggest Woe! Woe! Thrice Woe! and sees Britain collapsing from internal troubles which the Edwardian pageant barely hid. The First World War becomes a Union Jack-waving salvationist diversion.
Certainly, out of the sunlight, there were troubled corners in Edwardian Britain. The suffragettes of the Women’s Political and Social Union were turning to desperate methods in their campaign for votes. Declaring ‘The argument of the broken pane is the most valuable in modern politics’ Emmeline Pankhurst led a campaign of window-smashing, the fenestres of Number 10 Downing Street not excluded. Velaquez’s painting Rokeby Venus was slashed in the National Gallery. Some suffragettes embarked on terrorism, setting fire to railway stations, cricket pavilions, golf clubhouses. The orchid gardens at Kew were blown up.
Campaigner Emily Davison threw herself under the king’s horse, at the Derby and died.
In the labour movement, the years before the First World War saw the ‘great unrest.’ There were riots between miners and police at Tonypandy in the Rhondda in 1910. Churchill, who was Home Secretary, threatened to call in the army.
There were 872 separate strikes in 1911 alone.
A road sweepers’ strike in Liverpool left the journalist Philip Gibbs sweeping up dead rats away from the front of his hotel. Bystanders accused him of ‘scabbing’.
The Titanic sunk. Scott and his companions died at the South Pole. Dr Crippen murdered his wife with the bizarre poison hyoscine. Foreign anarchists had a shoot out with police in the ‘Siege of Sidney Street’ in Stepney.
Scots Guards at the Siege of Sidney Street, 1911
There was trouble in parliament too. A Liberal government was pushing through a land tax, along with other progressive measures, that were being resisted by some Tory diehard in the Lords.
The Liberal minister Lloyd George railed it was that was ‘Peers against the People’.
Ireland did look nasty. Tory backwoodsmen in the Lords were also blocking the Irish Home Rule bill. In Ireland itself the plan was being fiercely resisted by the Ulster Unionists. Sir Edward Carson set up a private army, the Ulster Volunteers and challenged the government in London to a fight. The Ulster Volunteers were tooled up, gimlet-eyed and ready to fight to the death for Protestantism and against a free Eire.
Carson was supported by elements of the British Army in Ireland. Fifty seven Army officers based near Dublin indicated they would sooner resign than force through Home Rule in so-called Curragh Mutiny.
All looks pretty dark doesn’t it? The Liberal MP Sir John Jardine, for one, was convinced that Britain was about to slip into the abyss, and decided on the purchase of a revolver to protect his property from the unwashed, the distaffs and the Irish, whether For or Agin Independence. The gun shop had sold out. A hundred other upper class chaps had beaten him to it.
They panicked unnecessarily. The Irish ‘problem’, the WPSU and labour movement were about as dangerous to Britain as flung helpings of Mrs Patmore’s sponge-and-cream Charlotte Russe.
Revolution is something they do abroad.
For most Edwardians outside Westminster and the chimneyed industrial heartlands the protests of the disenchanted were muffled noises beyond distant hills. It was perfectly possible in Edwardian Britain, before mass instant communications, to be taking the spa waters in Llandrindod Wells utterly unaware of the fact that miners in valleys ten miles away were on strike.
But here is the real reason Great Britain was not threatened to its core: It is not just those of us who sprawled on the Sunday evening sofa watching Downton who were lured and ravished by the Edwardian Golden Age. The Edwardians themselves bought into it.
Workers were on strike because of the check on wages after 1900. They didn’t want the party to stop. They wanted more tickets.
Neither the Labour Party nor the trade unions sought wholesale change. It was the proud boast of the Fabians, the intellectual wing, that they had seen off Marxism.
Some point to the phenomenal growth of the trade unions between 1900 and 1914, up in membership from 2 to 4.1 million, as ‘proof’ of working class militancy.
It is no such thing. Trade unions organized workers within the system, led them into negotiations with employers not factory takeovers.
There was money about, and luxury was cheap. Whereas now you have to be a Russian businessman to stay at Claridges, back in 1910 it cost 7s 6d per night. About £80 in today’s money. A Morris Oxford cost £175, and did ‘50 miles an hour, 50 miles a gallon’. Private schooling in the confusingly labelled ‘public schools’ was within the financial reach of the middle classes, be they grocers, journalists, doctors or farmers. It was the age of technology. In 1906 London had one cinema, owned by Colonel Bromhead. On the eve of war it had 308. Louis Bleriot flew the channel in 1909. Aeroplanes transfixed everyone. The writer GK Chesterton thought them ‘clockwork angels’ as they scrawled across the blue sky.
Louis Bleriot.
The skies really were azure in antediluvian Britain. The summer of 1911 was the hottest for forty years.
Everyone aped the nobs. Every chap in a counting house who made a few bob sent his son to Charterhouse and bought himself a country house.
The expanding middle class set themselves up and lords and ladies in miniature. Mr and Mrs Pooter had a servant in their suburban villa or ‘semi’, where the lawn, if one squinted, could pass for a broad rolling acre.
One reason idealistic youth rushed to war in 1914 was, when looking around, Britain did not seem such a bad place. And it was getting better. There was social progress.
The Education Act of 1902 had laid the basis for a national system of secondary education. There were more universities. Birmingham, Liverpool, Leeds, Bristol, Sheffield all opened their doors.
The Liberal governments of the Edwardian Age birthed the Welfare State with landmark legislation on old age pensions, labour exchanges and national insurance against sickness and unemployment.
We were even good at sports then. Britain topped the points table at the 1908 Olympics. It was an era of optimism. Not by accident was Edward Elgar’s ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ the unofficial anthem. He might though have added ‘and Order’.
One of my grandfathers managed a country estate (picture Branson from Downton with a West Country burr); part of his job involved wheeling aged Lady Whatever to church on Sunday morning. In 2024 I would perhaps find that humiliating. He, in 1914, considered it ‘the natural order’. Britain was still a structured society where everyone had a place. You were an employer or a worker, you were Upstairs or you were Downstairs.
The catechism of the Church of England, then a power in the land, obliged one: ‘To order myself lowly and reverently to all my betters’.
Even parish church seating was regimented. As the principal ‘non noble’ my grandfather sat in row two, behind ‘The Family’.
The hallmark of Edwardian Britain was order not disorder. Philip Larkin’s extraordinary poem MCMXIV (1914) is oft quoted because of it lines capturing the naivety of the Edwardians before war, ‘Never such innocence/Never before or since’. His first image is true too: Of the long line of men standing patiently to sign up.
One reason that the arrival of war in August 1914 seemed so shocking was that it arrived in a civilised and orderly world.
With war declared, the WPSU and the trades unions declared a truce for the duration, as did most of the Irish. How civilised and quintessentially British is that.
Among the very first to fight in France were the very officers from the 3rd Cavalry Brigade who has ‘mutinied’ at Curragh. Patriotism trumped all, as it has so frequently in these isles whenever things get important, and the going gets rough.
The solid structure of Edwardian society helps explain Britain’s victory in the First World War. Lord Grantham is a fictional model of a real phenomenon: The countryside’s Benevolent Aristocrat. He was on the wane, but he had modelled the Army on himself. Just as Grantham looked after his Downton tenants an officer was expected to look after his men. Dutifully. So was morale maintained in the trenches, 1914-8.
All that game shooting came in useful too when the Edwardian party transferred to Flanders.
Only one problem. There the game shot back.