After the Victorians Read online

  AFTER THE VICTORIANS

  THE DECLINE OF BRITAIN IN THE WORLD

  A. N. WILSON

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  Table of Contents

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

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  List of Illustrations

  First section

  A British soldier sets up a light Maxim gun (© Getty Images)

  George Nathaniel Curzon (The Illustrated London News Picture Library, London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

  Rudyard Kipling (© Getty Images)

  Winston Churchill arriving by air at Portsmouth (© Getty Images)

  Churchill defending Lloyd George’s Budget of 1909 (© Getty Images)

  Churchill at a siege in Sidney Street, Stepney (© Getty Images)

  Sir Edward Elgar (From Spirit of England: Edward Elgar in his World by Jerrold Northrop Moore, Heinemann, 1984)

  Model ‘T’ Fords at the factory in Trafford Park, Manchester (Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library)

  Gertrude Jekyll (© Getty Images)

  Overcrowded London buses during a tube strike (© Getty Images)

  George V with his wife (© Getty Images)

  Kaiser Wilhelm II and President Theodore Roosevelt (© Corbis)

  King Edward VII and Kaiser Wilhelm II (© Getty Images)

  Henry James (© Getty Images)

  Gaudier-Brzeska

  Percy Wyndham-Lewis (© Getty Images)

  Front cover of an issue of Blast by Percy Wyndham-Lewis (Stapleton Collection, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

  H. G. Wells with Rebecca West (Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library)

  Dr Hawley Crippen in the dock with Ethel le Neve (© Corbis)

  London policemen arresting a Suffragist (© Corbis)

  W. B. Yeats with his wife Georgie Hyde Lees (© Getty Images)

  Sir Roger Casement (The Illustrated London News Picture Library, London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

  Eamon de Valera (© Getty Images)

  ‘Les Trois Grands Ouvriers du Monde Nouveau’ (Collection Kharbine-Tapabor, Paris, France/Bridgeman Art Library)

  Arthur Balfour and Chaim Weizmann (© Corbis)

  Second section

  Radclyffe Hall with Una Lady Troubridge (© Getty Images)

  Margaret Wintringham and Nancy Astor (© Getty Images)

  Marie Stopes (Science & Society Picture Library)

  Lawrence of Arabia (© Getty Images)

  Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (© Getty Images)

  Gandhi fasting as a protest against British rule in India (© Getty Images)

  Max Aitken (© Getty Images)

  Alfred Charles William Harmsworth (© Getty Images)

  Agatha Christie (© Getty Images)

  Edith and Osbert Sitwell (© Getty Images)

  Noël Coward with Gertrude Stein (Science & Society Picture Library)

  David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill (© Getty Images)

  James Ramsay MacDonald (© Getty Images)

  Stanley Baldwin (© Getty Images)

  Neville Chamberlain (Science & Society Picture Library)

  London slums (Science & Society Picture Library)

  Basil Jellicoe (© Popperfoto)

  Beatrice and Sidney Webb (© Getty Images)

  Albert Einstein (© Getty Images)

  Ernest Walton, Ernest Rutherford and John Cockcroft (© Getty Images)

  John Maynard Keynes (Private Collection, Roger-Viollet, Paris/Bridgeman Art Library)

  Poster for Ramsey MacDonald’s Government of National Unity (© Getty Images)

  Welwyn Garden City (© Getty Images)

  Third section

  Men queuing outside a London Labour Exchange (Science & Society Picture Library)

  Jarrow Hunger March (Science & Society Picture Library)

  Adolf Hitler (© Getty Images)

  Ezra Pound (© Getty Images)

  Sir Oswald Mosley (Science & Society Picture Library)

  John Cowper Powys (© Corbis)

  Stanley Spencer (© Getty Images)

  Cosmo Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury (© Getty Images)

  The Rector of Stiffkey (From The Prostitute’s Padre: The Story of the Notorious Rector of Stiffkey by Tom Cullen, Bodley Head, 1975)

  King Edward VIII with Wallis Simpson (© Getty Images)

  Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill at the Teheran Conference (The Illustrated London News Picture Library, London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

  Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (© Corbis)

  Lord Louis Mountbatten with his wife and Nehru (© Getty Images)

  Riots in Calcutta (© Getty Images)

  Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret (Science & Society Picture Library)

  The Coronation (© Getty Images)

  James Watson and Francis Crick (Photograph by Barrington Brown, Camera Press, London)

  Post-war family (© Getty Images)

  Fourth section

  ‘Forward! Forward to Victory, Enlist now’ (Private Collection, Bonhams, London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

  ‘Come Lad, Slip Across and Help’ (Topham Picture Source, Edenbridge, Kent, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

  ‘Will they Never Come?’ (Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library)

  A Battery Shelled (1919) by Percy Wyndham Lewis (© Imperial War Museum, London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

  Travoys arriving with Wounded at a Dressing Station at Smol (1916) by Stanley Spencer (© Imperial War Museum, London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

  We are making a New World (1918) by Paul Nash (© Imperial War Museum, London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

  The Betrayal (1922) by Stanley Spencer (Collection Ulster Museum, Belfast, Northern Ireland/Bridgeman Art Library/© Estate of Stanley Spencer 2005. All Rights Reserved, DACS)

  The Gold Jug (1937) by William Nicholson (The Royal Collection © HM Queen Elizabeth II/Reproduced by permission of Elizabeth Banks)

  Domestic appliances (Science & Society Picture Library)

  Poster advertising the British Empire Exhibition, 1924, No. P30 from the ‘Scenes of Empire’ series, by Gerald Spenser Pryse (© Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, USA, Gift of Henry S. Hacker, 1965/Bridgeman Art Library)

  Poster advertising the Pageant of Empire, Wembley, 1924, by Gerald Spencer Pryse (Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

  Guernica (1937) by Pablo Picasso (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain/Bridgeman Art Library/© Succession Picasso/DACS 2005)

  Recruiting poster for the Spanish Civil War (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France, Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Art Library)

  Poster advertising the Festival of Britain (© Museum of London, UK/Bridgeman Art Library)

  Poster advertising the Exhibition of Science, part of the Festival of Britain, by Robin Day (Private Collection, The Stapleton Collection/Bridgeman Art Library)

  Festival of Britain weather vane (Private Collection/Bridgeman Art Library)

  Mushroom cloud from Ivy Mike (© Corbis)

  Foreword and Acknowledgements


  Like its predecessor, The Victorians, this book is a portrait of an age, rather than a formal history. It takes the story of Britain, and her place in the world, from 1901 to the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953. Though it is as long a book as the last one, I am even more conscious as I finish it of the omissions. Yet, enough is enough, and a volume must be light enough to hold without the aid of a lectern.

  As I wrote, it became more and more clear to me that what I was painting was a portrait of my parents’ generation. It is the story of Britain in the five decades preceding my own birth. I grew up with this history as an oral tradition, as we all did. ‘Before the war’ … How many sentences on their lips began with that phrase. In this oral history different family members were associated, however private their lives, and however insignificant in terms of great public events, with those events themselves. Both grandfathers were said to have been ruined by the Slump. My father was just too young, by a few months, to have served in the Great War, but his elder sister, my beloved and favourite aunt Elizabeth, had served as a nurse in France during that war. Every Christmas, as some of us in the family went to church, we waited for the moment (no churchgoer she) for her to light her cigarette and say: ‘The last time I attended a Midnight Mass was at Amiens Cathedral in 1917.’

  There was the General Strike, in which my father had enjoyed himself as a mounted policeman. There was the extraordinary story of Germany, deeply linked to my mother’s destiny as she recalled her two happy years in Koblenz from 1929 to 1931, and the clouds which fell over the household there when the father denounced his teenaged sons for enjoying a book called Mein Kampf. And of course there was the war itself, during which my brother and sister were born, and in which my father served as a colonel in the Royal Artillery. All these things went on before my arrival in the family, but they were constantly rehearsed and discussed, as were the subsequent excitements of the Great Winter of 1947. I suspect that the picture of the twentieth century in the following pages would not be the story that any of the rest of the family would have told. But it could not have been written without them.

  Then again, as on previous occasions, I owe much to the libraries which I have visited. In the Bodleian Library, I have been guided skilfully to manuscript sources. In the British Library, I have also had kind help in the Manuscript Room, though I have chiefly worked from printed sources in the Humanities One Reading Room, where, as always, the staff have been exemplary for their courtesy and friendly helpfulness during a period of the library’s history which has not been easy. I have also consulted the London Library, and am grateful to the staff who have always noticed, but not always objected, when I have borrowed more books than my ticket allowed. The Marylebone Public Library is also an excellent reference library and its staff are always helpful.

  I have been extraordinarily lucky in my publishers. Sue Freestone is as good an editor as she is a friend. James Nightingale, an ever-reassuring presence, has been an unflappable co-midwife and has done hard work with picture research. Steve Cox has edited a long and difficult typescript with welcome rigour. On the other side of the Atlantic, the enthusiasm of Jonathan Galassi and Eric Chinski has been inspiring. Grateful thanks to Douglas Matthews who made the index.

  None of my books would get written without the patient support, friendship and advice of Gillon Aitken, king among agents, who encouraged me at the beginning and helped me to the end. In initial stages he used to refer to the book as Edward, George, Edward, George, and in some ways I wish that I had kept this title, even though it suggests too exclusive an interest in the Royal Family – and this book is supposed to be about Britain in its politics, its changing social mores, its art and literature, its scientific achievements, its wars, its victories, its losses.

  When I had written the book, Amy Boyle typed it, and then when I had scribbled on her typescript, she typed it again. My professional life would be impossible without her. Her speed and skill are phenomenal. Since she is always the first person to read what I write, her merry voice on the telephone reporting the completion of another chapter is always a tonic.

  I feel very fortunate that five writers whose work I esteem much more highly than I do my own have found time to read this book in typescript and to make countless, often very detailed sugestions: Richard Aldous, Hugh Cecil, A. D. Harvey, Lawrence James and Hugh Massingberd. The oft-repeated formula is true, that any mistakes remaining are my own; but these friends have done their best to make this a better book.

  1

  Oedipus Rex, Oedipus Kaiser

  In 1900 there was published in Vienna one of the most extraordinary and revolutionary texts ever to come from a human brain. Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) expounded the theory on which all subsequent psychoanalysis was based, even or especially those psychoanalytical theories which reacted most violently against it: namely, that the human mind consists of what might be described as two layers. With the outer layer, of our conscious mind, we reason and form judgements. In reasonable, well-balanced individuals, the pains and sorrows of childhood have been worked through, put behind them. With the unhealthy, however, neurotic or hysterical individuals, there is beneath the surface of life a swirling cauldron of suppressed memories in which lurk the traumas (the Greek word for wounds) of early experiences. Under hypnosis, or in dreams, we re-enter the world of the subconscious and with the care of a helpful analyst we can sometimes revisit the scenes of our early miseries and locate the origins of our psychological difficulties. The author of this world-changing book, Dr Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), was a happily married neurologist, born in the Moravian town of Freiberg, but for most of his life resident in Vienna, hub of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, where his consulting room in Berggasse 19, Vienna IX (from 1931), and his celebrated couch, on which patients lay to recite their sorrows, became a totemic emblem of the century which was to unfold. The need to return to some forgotten, irrational, dark place of our lost past became compelling, personal and collective, as the hysteria of the twentieth century reached its crescendo-point and as Dr Freud, a Jew, though a non-believing one, packed his belongings and took his family to live in London for the last year of his life, following the Anschluss, the joining together of Germany and Austria into a Great Germany, Grossdeutschland. He had already had the honour of having his books burned in Berlin in 1933, and in 1938 they were burned in Vienna.

  On the publication of Die Traumdeutung, there were many people who, if not actually tempted to burn the book, must have found its contents shocking.

  If Oedipus the King is able to move modern man no less deeply than the Greeks who were Sophocles’ contemporaries, the solution can only be that the effect of Greek tragedy does not depend on the contrast between fate and human will, but is to be sought in the distinctive nature of the subject-matter exemplifying this contrast. There must be a voice within us that is ready to acknowledge the compelling force of fate in Oedipus … His fate moves us only because it could have been our own as well, because at our birth the oracle pronounced the same curse upon us as it did on him. It was perhaps ordained that we should all of us turn our first sexual impulses towards our mother, our first hatred and violent wishes against our father. Our dreams convince us of it. King Oedipus, who killed his father Laius and married his mother Jocasta, is only the fulfilment of our childhood wish. But, more fortunate than he, we have since succeeded, at least insofar as we have not become psychoneurotics, in detaching our sexual impulses from our mothers, and forgetting our jealousy of our fathers.1

  Dr Freud, further, told his Vienna lecture audiences: ‘The dream of having sexual intercourse with the mother is dreamed by many today as it was then, and they recount it with the same indignation and amazement [as Oedipus].’2

  Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, succeeded his mother Queen Victoria upon her death at half-past six in the evening on 22 January 1901, and became King Edward VII. He had waited a long time. ‘Most people pray to the Eternal Father,’ he had quipped, �
�but I am the only one afflicted with an Eternal Mother.’ If he ever had dreams about his mother of the kind believed by Dr Freud to be so usual, he did not record them for posterity. Queen Victoria did, however, believe that Bertie, as he was always known in his own family, in effect achieved half of the Oedipal destiny by killing his father, Prince Albert.

  An indiscretion with an actress, Nellie Clifden, at the Curragh Camp near Dublin had brought Bertie’s name into the newspapers, and his serious German father, embarrassed, angry and distressed, had gone to Cambridge, where Bertie was an undergraduate, to remonstrate with him during a wet evening in November 1861. A bad cold had turned to fever, and within a few weeks the doctors had diagnosed typhoid, almost certainly caused by the drains at Windsor Castle, one of the Prince Consort’s obsessions, and hardly to be blamed on poor Bertie. Nevertheless, it was, from the very first moment of her widow’s grief, one of the Queen’s obsessions that Bertie’s ‘fall’ had caused ‘beloved Papa’s demise’, aged forty-two.

  ‘Poor unhappy Bertie,’ wrote the distraught mother a few weeks after Albert died, to Bertie’s elder sister, the Crown Princess of Prussia, ‘much as I pity I never can or shall look at him without a shudder as you may imagine’.3 And again: ‘If you had seen [your husband] struck down, day by day get worse and finally die, I doubt whether you could bear the sight of the one who was the cause.’4

  By the time he inherited his kingdom, Edward VII was fifty-nine years old; at 67 inches high, he weighed 225 pounds. In some outward terms, he was not an obvious case of a man who bore any resentment of his upbringing by parents who had clearly deplored in equal measure his limitations of intellect and his lack of morals. For example, at a public dinner, when mentioning his father, he had burst into tears.

  The speed with which he dismantled any physical reminders of his parents, however, tells its own story. In Windsor Castle, and in Buckingham Palace, the new monarch walked about cheerfully with a cigar stuck between his lips, Caesar, his long-haired white fox terrier,5 trotting at his heels, his hat still on his head as he cleared out and destroyed his father’s and mother’s memory. In these rooms, where smoking had always been forbidden, the obese, bronchitic king coughed, puffed smoke and gave orders that hundreds of ‘rubbishy old coloured photographs’ be destroyed. Busts and statues of John Brown, his mother’s faithful Highlander, were smashed; the papers of the Munshi, Queen Victoria’s beloved Indian servant, were burned. The huge collection of relics of the Prince Consort, undisturbed since his untimely death forty years earlier, was sent to the muniment room in Windsor’s Round Tower. While getting rid of his parents’ old rubbish, he also took the opportunity to extend the telephone networks, install new bathrooms and lavatories, and to convert coach houses into garages for the cars of his nouveaux riches friends. ‘Alas!’ Queen Alexandra wrote to Edward VII’s sister, now the Empress Frederick, in Berlin. ‘During my absence, Bertie has had all your beloved Mother’s rooms dismantled and all her precious things removed.’