A Brief History of Britain 1851–2010 Read online

  In so far as one party could lay claim to the position, the Conservatives indeed were the national party. They were overwhelmingly the middle-class party, and benefited greatly from the expansion of this sector of society as the economy changed; but the Conservatives also received a large share of the working-class vote. Yet, the new, larger electorate was potentially volatile, and winning its support posed a considerable challenge to politicians, both Conservative and others, repeating, on a larger scale, the problems which had earlier confronted Disraeli and Gladstone.

  A skilled tactician, Baldwin was to play a major role in making the Conservatives appear to much of the electorate to be conservative, but not reactionary, consensual, not divisive, and the natural party of government. Baldwin was also adroit at selling a new politics. The media were harnessed to create a political image for a mass electorate, with frequent radio broadcasts helping to cultivate the folksiness which Baldwin sought to project, while Conservative Party propaganda, often geared towards the new female electorate, emphasized the dangers of socialism to family life and property in general. Radio broadcasts had begun in 1922 and the British Broadcasting Corporation, a monopoly acting in the ‘national interest’ and financed by licence fees paid by radio owners, was established in 1926.

  Baldwin offered in his speeches a vision of England in which Christian and ethical values, an appeal to the need for continuity, pastoral and paternalist themes, and a sense of national exceptionalism, were all fused. This vision was not intended to exclude the Scots, Welsh and people of Ulster, each of whom was presented as possessing a distinctive character and traditions, but also qualities that had been enriched by the English. In the 1920s, Baldwin frequently employed rural imagery as an important way to address the issue of the national character, not least in his stress on the country as representing eternal values and traditions. Such language was especially attractive to the propertied with their concern about left-wing subversion at the behest of international Communism.

  Baldwin spoke of promoting peace between the two sides of industry and of striving to bring masters and men together in one industrial nation. However, his deflationary policy of returning the pound (sterling) to the gold standard (convertibility of sterling to gold at a fixed rate) in 1925, and his remark that ‘Wages had to come down’, did not contribute to industrial calm. The coal industry was the centre of strife. International competition, especially, but not only, from Germany and the US, an overvalued pound (sterling) as a result of the return to the gold standard at the pre-war exchange rate, and inadequate investment, all hit production, a fall which pressed on the living standards of the miners.

  This situation led to a protracted national miners’ strike in 1926, and, in turn, to the TUC calling a national strike in support of the miners: the General Strike of May 1926. Support for the strike varied greatly across the country, but the power of the state was a key element in its failure. The Lloyd George Coalition government of 1918–22 had put in place plans for the use of the Army and the police, and in 1926 these plans were utilized with a careless disregard for the law: both the Common Law and even law under the Emergency Powers Act. In the end, the state won because it was better organized, while the TUC was less committed than Baldwin and the government. The TUC did not wish to press the confrontation, and the General Strike was rapidly called off. Although presented in retrospect as a peaceful episode that indicated the strength in moderation of the British system and way of life, the General Strike was not a soft and gentle event.

  The Conservatives won more votes in the election of 30 May 1929, the first contested on a fully democratic franchise, but Labour was, with 288 MPs, for the first time, the largest party in the Commons. The Conservatives suffered in 1929 because their modest and uninspiring measures and proposals did not inspire much popularity. Indeed, they fought on the platform of ‘Safety First’ (suggested by an advertising agency), but with little else to offer by way of policy. The return of sterling in 1925 to the gold standard had overvalued sterling, hit exports and helped deflate the economy. The reforms of the Poor Law and local government by Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940; son of Joseph), the Minister of Health, had brought scant popularity; and there was a widespread sense that it was time for a change. Labour seemed moderate, and the defeat of the General Strike helped lessen anxiety about socialism. Ramsay MacDonald, still the leader, did not arouse fear or anger.

  In the election, the Conservatives suffered from loss of marginal seats in the industrial parts of Lancashire and the West Midlands, while, although the increase in the Liberal vote was insufficient to win many seats, it sufficiently hit the Conservatives to let Labour win many. MacDonald formed his second minority Labour government; with the Liberals providing support, but, with only fifty-nine MPs, from a far weaker base than in the case of the first government.

  The Crisis of 1929–31

  The Labour government, however, was to be badly hit by the serious world economic crisis that began in October 1929, the slump and the Depression, although the economic situation was already serious when Labour came to power. Baldwin had left an inheritance of unemployment at 1.16 million, a government deficit and high interest rates to protect the gold reserves, rates that hit economic activity. Moreover, the unemployment figures were a less than full account of unemployment and underemployment.

  The impact of the dramatic fall in world trade after the Wall Street Crash of 1929 greatly exacerbated the situation, not least because much of the British economy depended on exports. Although bold solutions were proposed by radicals, the government, in 1930, relied on modest public works schemes to combat unemployment, and on an increase in taxation to fund unemployment benefits. Nevertheless, the Treasury warned that the latter threatened national bankruptcy. Most of the Cabinet, however, was unprepared to accept MacDonald’s pressure for cuts in benefits, while, in the midst of a European banking crisis, he was urged in August 1931 by the Bank of England to act in order to avert an apparently imminent national bankruptcy.

  Cuts in expenditure seemed necessary, not least because the Conservative and Liberal leaders were opposed to raising taxes, and Labour lacked the necessary majority to push them through. Unwilling to accept cuts, the divided Labour Cabinet resigned on 23 August 1931, leading, next day, to a cross-party National Government headed by MacDonald but largely composed of Conservatives supported by a few Liberal and Labour MPs, who became known as National Liberal and National Labour. A widespread fear of economic collapse and social and political disruption had combined to encourage the formation of such a government, which was designed to tackle the crisis and to push through the necessary changes without destabilizing society. On the left, MacDonald was seen as a traitor, leading to the poem:

  Here Lies the Body of Ramsay Mac

  A friend of all humanity

  Too many pats on the back

  Inflated Ramsay’s vanity

  …

  Having been born a Socialist

  He died a bloody Tory!

  The decade 1922–31 suggested that coalition governments would be weak and unpopular. The Lloyd George Coalition had failed, as had the two Labour governments dependent on Liberal votes. The new government, in contrast, appeared to match the public mood. Indeed, the new National Government went on to win the general election of 27 October 1931 with a convincing victory, the Conservatives gaining 473 seats. Labour lost working-class votes as a result of the economic problems of 1929–31 and won only fifty-two seats, while the Conservatives benefited from the consolidation of propertied and business interests into one anti-socialist bloc.

  This electoral verdict was a democratic process, as was the willingness of the opposition not to resort to action on the streets. This avoidance of extremism in the crisis of 1931 (and subsequently) was to be important to the character of British politics over the following decade; and, moreover, to the extent to which Britain remained a free and liberal society. There was to be no equivalent in Britain to the rise in extremist
power seen with Hitler’s ascent in Germany, which culminated in his becoming Chancellor in 1933. Nor was the economic strain as heavy as in 1930s America, with, as a result, no British New Deal to transform, as well as divide, society. The success of the National Government made it appear likely that Britain would preserve its political and social system. In 1931, the greatest empire in history still seemed stable, strong and with a secure future.

  CHANGING PEOPLE

  ‘Progress is the great animating principle of being. The world, time, our country have advanced and are advancing.’

  The Western Luminary, 2 January 1855

  The War Against Disease

  In the 1850s, there was little doubt that the living circumstances of much of the population were bleak. Population density rose as urban numbers grew, leading to serious overcrowding. The Bradford Sanitary Committee visited over 300 houses in 1845 and found an average of three people sleeping per bed. Indicators such as height, physical well-being and real earnings suggest that living standards, while rising in aggregate, were not increasing as fast as growth in leading industrial sectors might have suggested. The visitations of disease were particularly bleak and in a fashion that today is largely only recaptured in imaginative fiction and newspaper headlines. There were major epidemics of cholera, a bacterial infection largely transmitted by water contaminated by the excreta of victims, in Britain in 1854 and 1866, in part due to inadequate sewerage systems and the impure nature of the water supply. In an outbreak in Newcastle in 1853, 1,500 out of the city’s 90,000 people died in five weeks.

  Typhoid, another water-borne infection, was also serious. Prince Albert was killed by it in 1861, while Edward, Prince of Wales (1841–1910; later Edward VII) nearly died from it a decade later. Dysentery, diarrhoea, diphtheria, whooping cough, scarlet fever, measles and enteric fever were significant problems and frequently fatal. The death or illness of bread-winners wrecked family economies, producing or exacerbating poverty and related social problems.

  Disease was not only the problem of the crowded big cities, 10,000 Londoners dying of cholera in 1854 and 6,000 in 1866. A report on the Sussex town of Battle drawn up in 1850 noted:

  There is no provision for the removal of any offensive or noxious refuse from the houses and gardens of the poorer classes; all the decomposing and putrescent animal and vegetable matter which is brought out of the house is thrown into a pool, around which is engendered an atmosphere favourable to the production of febrile epidemics.

  Yet, there was also substantial change, notably as part of the abandonment of earlier practices of limited and local regulation in favour of a more self-conscious commitment to change. The report above is indicative, as it was written by Edward Cresy (1792–1858), a superintending inspector under the General Board of Health. The latter had been created by the Public Health Act of 1848 which established an administrative structure to improve sanitation and to ensure clean water. This Act was effectively swept on to the statute books as a result of cholera, which does not discriminate between social groups. As a result the middle class pushed for the legislation.

  The new Act was not a matter solely of changes at the centre, nor of what would more recently be called spin. Instead, local boards of health were created, and they took action. For example, the one established in Leicester in 1849 was instrumental in the creation of a sewerage system and in tackling slaughterhouses and smoke pollution. Similarly, Cresy’s critical report on Derby led its Whig councillors to embark on a programme of works, including public baths and wash houses. Yet the powers the Act gave were limited and left much to often reluctant authorities to do. Despite its limitations and the opposition that it encountered, the legislation was a definite advance in awareness of, and organization for, public health, but, once the cholera pandemic fizzled out, interest in the Act fell.

  Scientific advances were also important. Dr John Snow (1813–58) carried out research in London that led him to conclude, in his On the Mode and Communication of Cholera (1849), that the disease was transmitted not via ‘miasma’ or bad air, as was generally believed, but through drinking water contaminated by sewage, a problem that highlighted the state of the Thames. This research was supplemented, in a second edition published in 1855, by an analysis of the 1853–4 epidemic, and led to the closure of the public water pump in Broad Street (south of Oxford Street, in the West End), where a sewer was leaking into the well. After this closure, the number of new cases of cholera fell. Snow also showed that the majority of the victims had drunk water provided by the Southwark and Vauxhall company which extracted water from near sewer outflows.

  A vivid comment was provided by the Punch cartoon, Father Thames Introducing His Offspring To The Fair City Of London, of 3 July 1858, a response to the ‘Great Stink’ of that summer. In this facetious design for a fresco for the new Houses of Parliament, to replace those burned down in 1834, a filthy Thames, polluted by factories, sewage and steamships, presents figures representing diphtheria, scrofula and cholera to London. In The Times in 1855, Michael Faraday, a prominent scientist, had already described the river between London and Hungerford bridges as a ‘fermenting sewer’, a description that was accurate in both parts, and that contrasts with the return of fish to the modern Thames. The Houses of Parliament were also affected by smoke from the many factories in Lambeth on the other side of the river.

  With its population rising from just over 1 million in 1810 to over 7 million by 1911, London presented the most serious problem of public health in Britain but, from 1859, under the direction of the determined and effective Joseph Bazalgette (1819–91), Chief Engineer to the Metropolitan Commission of Sewers (a body established in 1847), a drainage system was constructed. As a result of the ‘Great Stink’, Parliament, in August 1858, extended the powers of the Metropolitan Board of Works at the expense of the Office of Works and permitted the Board to raise £3 million.

  Fully completed in 1875, albeit at a sum greater than the original estimate but one financed by borrowing, the drainage system contained 82 miles (132 kilometres) of intercepting sewers. These took sewage from earlier pipes that had drained into the Thames, and transported it, instead, to new downstream works and storage tanks from which the effluent could be pumped into the river when the tide was flowing into the North Sea. A large number of pumping stations provided the power. The big one at Abbey Mills, built in 1865–8, was an astonishing instance of the determination to disguise function, with the station’s role concealed under Moorish towers and a Slavic dome. Storm-relief sewers followed in the 1880s. In part, the storm-relief system used London’s rivers other than the Thames, completing the process by which they had been directed underground; the concealment of the rivers made their use for the sewerage system acceptable. Water provision also altered. The 1852 Metropolitan Water Act obliged the London water companies to move their supply sources to above the tidal reach of the Thames.

  The improvement in the water supply produced a large fall in mortality figures. By 1874, the death rate per 1,000 had fallen, from a mid-eighteenth-century figure of 48 for London, to 18, compared to 29 for Leeds and 32 for Liverpool and Newcastle. As a sign of gradual but patchy improvement, the impact of the 1866 cholera epidemic was moderate in the western areas, where the drainage and sewerage system had already been improved, but was still deadly further east. The growing population also posed a serious problem for water supplies. Early in the century the emphasis had been on shallow surface waters, but by mid-century there was a major use of boreholes sunk into the chalk aquifers under the London clay. From the 1860s, the Geological Survey produced information on falling water levels in these aquifers.

  Across Britain, major attempts to provide clean drinking water for all brought together engineering skill, organizational ability and public action. Thus, on Tyneside, a key centre of urbanization and industrialization, reservoir storage capacity rose to 215 million gallons (977 million litres) in 1848, 530 million (2,409 million litres) in 1854, over 1,200 million (5,4
55 million litres) in 1871, and over 3,000 million (13,638 million litres) by the end of the 1880s; increases that greatly exceeded the rise in population. There were two developments at work – more people and more hygiene, and the latter won. Filter beds were installed in Tyneside in 1863, and stricter filtering controls were imposed in 1870.

  Water supply was also a key aspect of new relationships of power and influence between and within regions. Thus, distant upland areas were tapped by reservoirs for Newcastle, including from 1905 the Catcleugh Reservoir in Redesdale, with pipelines providing the links. The River Tyne, itself the site of shipbuilding and other industries, and a focus of trade, was dredged from 1863 by the typical combination of a reforming body – the Tyne Improvement Commissioners, an able engineer – J.F. Ure (1820–83), and new technology – the world’s most powerful bucket dredgers. To help navigation, the Souter Lighthouse was opened nearby in 1871; it was the first in the world to be powered by alternating electric current.

  The process of improvement was widespread: Manchester began to get water from Longdendale in the early 1850s, and gained parliamentary approval in 1877 for the drowning of the Thirlmere Valley; Brighton obtained adequate water in the 1860s, and an intercepting sewer in 1874; and Carlisle a reservoir at Castle Carrock in 1909. Moreover, the new infrastructure had an impact on health. For example, the average annual death rate per 1,000 people from typhoid in the Welsh slate-mining centre of Ffestiniog fell from 12.9 in 1865–74 to 1.3 in 1880–90, thanks to piped water and a better sewerage system.