Britain in 1900

Asa Briggs completes the Portrait of Britain series with a survey of the islands at the beginning of the 20th century

There was considerable doubt on January 1st, 1900, as to whether the country was beginning a new century or whether there was still another year to go. More time-conscious than their ancestors, many of the last of the Victorians were not impressed by the German Kaiser's decree that they were now living in the twentieth century. The first leader in The Times began with the words 'The New Year, the last of the nineteenth century'. Nonetheless, readers' opinions in the correspondence columns were divided, while the Queen herself, near her eighty-first birthday, did not note the change of century in her journal or her letters either in 1900 or in 1901. Years before she had given her name to an age and later, unlike most monarchs, to an 'ism', and for most of her subjects it was to be the end of her long reign in January 1901 that was to stand out as the important date. 'The Victorian age is over', the Daily Telegraph wrote, then, 'the supreme woman in the world is gone … Never, never was there loss like this.' The Annual Register, looking for precedents, had to go back to King Alfred.

When Victoria died the Boer War was still not over. As at the beginning of the nineteenth century Britain was at war. This time, however, it was a distant war, a war of empire, with the British fighting it by themselves. The prime minister, the third Marquess of Salisbury, did not believe that the British constitution as it then worked was a 'good fighting machine', and a 'Black Week' in December 1899 had seemed to prove him right, but there was soon to be cause for celebration, and he was to win a landslide majority at what was thought of as a khaki election in September 1900.

The first opportunity for celebration came on March 1st, when news arrived of the relief of Ladysmith in Natal, where most of the British troops in South Africa were based. This was followed on May 17th, with news of the end of the seven-month siege of Mafeking, where Colonel Baden Powell - and one of Salisbury's sons - had been among those surrounded. Mafeking Night passed into history, though the verb 'mafekking' did not. Jubilation turned into abandon. 'I thought these Britishers were a soul-less people', an American visitor observed when he watched the scene at Piccadilly Circus: it 'beat anything in New York'. Baden Powell was the popular hero of the hour. Eight years later he was to found the Boy Scout movement, but the word 'scout' had been used in action at Mafeking. Baden Powell was to be seen on film at the end of the year in Brighton, meeting Field Marshall Lord Roberts.

Film-watching was a new experience, although as the Brighton Herald pointed out, it was 'astonishing how soon one grows accustomed to new wonders'. There was much that was new, a favourite adjective in 1900 as it had been throughout the previous fin-de-siècle decade. Many of these were associated with technology, although it was a word used relatively little then, far less than the word 'invention'. 'There is no slackening in that onward march of scientific discovery and invention', which had been 'the chief characteristic' of the nineteenth century, a writer put it in the Popular Science Magazine, one of several of its kind, as the century drew to its close. At its beginning 'the telegraph was as yet undreamed of and the telephone and the dynamo utterly unimaginable developments. Had anyone dared to conceive that signals could be made to pass in a second of time between Europe and America he would have been considered a fit candidate for Bedlam.' Before the end of 1901 Guglielmo Marconi, who had arrived in Britain with a bundle of radio devices in 1896, was to transmit a short wireless message to Newfoundland, consisting of the Morse letter 'S'. At that time Marconi did not contemplate sending messages in words rather than in Morse code, and more inventions were necessary before this became possible. It was the press, using the telegraph, that was the main mode of public communication in 1900, with patriotic music hall songs coming second.

Among the newspapers the newest of them, the Daily Express, launched that year, first hit the headlines when it described the 'cheering, flag-waving, singing multitude' celebrating the relief of Ladysmith. 'Students of art at the Royal Academy', it reported, 'on hearing the news instantly searched for a Union Jack', and not finding one 'painted one on the spot'. For four years Alfred Harmsworth's Daily Mail, a huge financial success, had been capturing news in headlines and in snippets, but dabbling also in history, summing up the century and the reign. At the end of 1900 it appeared in gold print, complete with a Max Beerbohm cartoon depicting the century as a leather clad, heavily goggled creature, rushing at headlong speed.

So-called 'new journalism' was no longer new in 1900, but Harmsworth, 'the Napoleon of the Press', was interested in all new things. The first periodical he had edited was called Youth, the second Bicycling News, and he had bought his first motor car in 1899. He was to write a book Motors and Motoring, and he was to claim in the first number of the weekly The Car Illustrated that the motor car would 'revolutionise the life of England to a degree not yet properly foreseen by any leader of thought'. The new weekly had a sub-title, 'A Journal of Travel by Land, Sea and Air'. Everything connected. In 1903, when the speed limit on road travel was raised to twenty miles an hour, the Aero Club was founded. Queen Victoria, like most of her subjects, had never travelled by car and had never seen an aeroplane. There were around 10,000 cars in Britain in 1900, luxury vehicles, most of them made abroad. It was considered 'a really great and picturesque idea', the language of Autocar, when a thousand-mile trial run to Edinburgh and back was planned for May 1900. Harmsworth went as far as Manchester in one of the eighty-five motor cars that started the trial. Their drivers were more interested in their cars, still thought of as 'horseless carriages', than they were in the countryside lanes, which had never before been explored in this way.

Traffic outside towns and cities was small, lanes were unsuited to cars, and there were very few petrol 'stockists'. Punch depicted one of its stock characters, Mr Jenkins, driving his wife to Epsom, but in order to be sure of arriving there safely, taking his horses with him too. A coachman sat at the back of the car leading the horses on a rein. This was still the age of the horse, and the Aero Club was to be known as 'the Jockey Club of Flying'. Cars were judged by their horse power more than by their appearance. It was still possible to travel by horse coach from London to Brighton, which became a favourite car journey too, having long been a favourite railway journey not only for aristocrats but for 'the people'. Railways had long been the main carriers of people and there were almost 22,000 miles of railway in 1900, with towns and villages not on the track isolated and judged to be 'remote'. In London, there was often serious horse traffic congestion. There were horse trams as well as horse buses and licensed hansom cabs and clarences, but there was also a new electric underground, the Central London Railway, opened in June 1900 by the Prince of Wales, and known from the start as 'the twopenny tube'. It linked Shepherd's Bush and the Bank of England with eleven stops between. The Prince of Wales was making a very special first journey, not as special perhaps as his drive from London to Windsor en automobile in July 1901. 'Society', wrote the Observer, 'is certain to follow the Royal example in due course, and it is a source of no small satisfaction to the community of automobilists [a word that was not to stick] that His Majesty should have had the foresight to appreciate the advantages of mechanical over animal progression'.

Society was most often spelt with a capital 'S' in 1900, but it was society with a small 's' that was to make the most of the Tube. Much too was made of the fact, the subject of controversy, that Society with a capital 'S' now incorporated plutocrats, men of wealth, as well as aristocrats, traditionally, though often not exclusively, men of land. Indeed, men of new wealth, derived from property speculation, and from the retail trade as well as from industry, were among the Prince of Wales's friends. Social lines were always blurred, but property was property, and one tenth of the population owned nine-tenths of the country's accumulated wealth.

There was ample blurring 'lower down the social scale', where the ranks of the middle classes included factory owners, factory managers, bankers, civil servants and professional people, engineers, doctors, lawyers and the well-placed professional group of the future, accountants. And there was a more or less clear divide between such salarial people and the great majority of people 'below them'. Three out of four people in the country, including clerks, were wage-earners paid in cash. The minority had domestic servants, sometimes a great array of them, as the aristocracy had, and where there was an array there was always a hierarchy. When there was not, there was usually drudgery. Yet girls in service - and their numbers were to fall between 1901 and 1910 - while lacking 'freedom' could be considered 'superior' to factory girls and girls working in shops, an increasing group.

About three workers in every ten were women in a labour force, sub-divided by class and status distinctions, in which a sharp division between man's work and woman's work was usually assumed to be natural. So, too, was the existence of 'casual labour' both in town and country, in the dockyards and in the fields.

What differentiated the sense of social contrast at the end of the nineteenth century from that at the beginning was that it had now become a matter not only of argument but of research. The ways of life as well as the standards of life both of rich and poor were increasingly being subjected to scrutiny and to publicity. Conspicuous expenditure, reflecting opulence, was as evident at the breakfast table as at the dinner table and in furniture and dress as much as in food. Poverty needed to be surveyed. Charles Booth had led the way with his Life and Labour of the People of London, and he gave his blessing to Seebohm Rowntree who in 1900 was completing his survey of York, Poverty, A Study of Town Life, which was to appear in 1901.

Both men reached a similar conclusion about the extent of poverty in two very different places, and both together stimulated a debate. According to Booth, about a third of London's population lived in poverty on about £1 a week or less. According to Rowntree, the York figure was almost 28 per cent. The approaches of the two men were different, however, as were their motivations and preoccupations. Rowntree, a Quaker, concentrated on poverty, distinguishing between what he called primary and secondary poverty, and identified a cycle of family poverty: Booth dealt with much else besides poverty in a series of volumes which brought London's East End to life for his readers as well as for himself. The word 'picturesque' had entered his vocabulary as it had done the vocabulary of journalists: No one can go, as I have done, over the description of the inhabitants of street after street, taken house by house and family by family - full as it is of picturesque details … and doubt the genuine character of the information and its truth. Quotations from individuals being surveyed are often as memorable as Booth and Rowntree's own conclusions. So are the comments of their helpers. 'If there's anything extra to buy', one woman in York said, 'such as a pair of boots for one of the children, me and the children goes without dinner.' Booth's own feelings came through. He liked the colour of the East End and deemed the 'simple, natural lives of working-class people' in some ways preferable to 'the artificial complicated existence of the rich'. The rich existed: the poor lived. Rowntree tried to avoid all sentimentality. He excluded fresh meat from his carefully calculated subsistence diet: 'I didn't want people to say that Rowntree's crying for the moon'. He noted, however, that as far as nutritive value was concerned - and nutrition fascinated him - the diet of labourers in York compared unfavourably with the diet given to Her Majesty's prisoners and inhabitants of workhouses.

Rowntree was to interest himself later in the rural poor, the poorest of whom, one clergyman had written, 'did not live in the proper sense of the word, they merely didn't die'. It was cereal-growing agriculture that was dying, and books were appearing in the new century which bewailed 'the ruin of rural England'. Villages were being depopulated, towns were being overcrowded, five-sixths of Britain's food supplies were coming from abroad as the country was reduced to dependency on foreign countries:

A declaration of war with a great European power or combination of powers under present conditions would probably be followed immediately by national starvation, a revolution at home, and the dissolution of Empire.

Such pictures were over-drawn. There had been a substantial migration from the countryside to the towns and cities during the last decades of the nineteenth century, recorded in official statistics, culminating in the Census of 1901, but those workers who were left behind, more than there had been at the time of the repeal of the Corn Laws, were better off than they had been when the migration was at its height. Their family budgets now included fresh meat, not only pork but beef and mutton. Taking the country as a whole, tea consumption per head, which had been 1.6lb at the time of the repeal of the Corn Laws, had reached 5.7lb in 1900, and sugar consumption had risen from 24lb a year to 80lb. The standard of life of all employed workers had greatly improved in a society where it was obvious both from statistical and 'impressionistic' evidence that there was 'poverty in the midst of plenty'. There were striking variations, however, in the range of food consumed in different parts of the country despite the growth of chain stores selling the same products everywhere. Of the major chain stores only one, Home and Colonial, sprang up in London. Liptons began in Scotland, Maypole in Manchester and Birmingham. Imported foods, including canned or refrigerated foods, were attractive to consumers, and the quantities imported were thought of usually as an indication not of ruin but of progress.

Newspaper advertising of branded goods focused on benefits, not losses, and it was related to activities too as well as to products - sporting contests, increasingly professionalised; trips to the seaside; musical concerts, including performances of choral societies and great brass band festivals. In 1900 the Crystal Palace brass band festival attracted twenty-nine bands, a figure that rose to 117 three years later.

With 'leisure' now beginning to be 'commercialised', the Britain of 1900 was looking to a new future. Expectations and aspirations were changing. But the past carried with it a legacy of social problems that were to be re-examined before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, a great war that only a few commentators foresaw in 1900. The problems centred on housing, education and 'welfare', not least the Poor Law which in 1834 had been called 'new'.

The first of these, to become one of Rowntree's deep concerns, had been a concern of Lord Salisbury himself, and although it did not figure in the 1900 election campaign he was to refer to it specifically when he made his first major political speech after the election was won. 'If you observe that the villas outside London are the principal seedplots of Conservatism', he told a large Conservative audience, the principle seedplots of radicalism were to be found in the bad houses of the working classes. This was a 'scandal to our civilisation'.

There was to be no new legislation - and it was then limited - until 1909. Nor had the first housing act to be passed, the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890, produced results. It had empowered local authorities to build houses and bear the net annual cost out of the rates, but few local authorities outside London had chosen to do so. Overcrowding remained a serious problem in some parts of the country, rural and urban - there were as many local variations as there were in standards of living - and there were few signs that it was being reduced.

In education and health too there were wide variations, statistical and qualitative, between different sections of the community as well as between different towns and regions. Infant mortality was high not only when compared with later figures but when compared with adult mortality. The most telling health statistics were national, not local. It was to be revealed officially in 1903 how many would-be recruits for the Boer War had had to be turned down for health reasons. Physical unfitness went with malnutrition and often with ignorance. Education, one of the keys to national efficiency, was to be approached controversially - because of old divisions, largely religious, not new - in 1902 at the level of secondary education. Just as serious, however, were the problems, sometimes acknowledged, both of primary and of higher education. There were only 20,000 university students at the beginning of the century, far too small a figure for a country which still, if uneasily, claimed a special place in the making of the world's future.

'Welfare' issues tended to be separated from issues of enterprise, but there were signs in 1900 that the industrial future of the country was as insecure as the agricultural. The Times took up comparisons between 'then' and 'now' and 'here' and 'there', which were to be assembled years later in M.J. Wiener's still controversial thesis, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1950 (1981).

In 1900 American steel production was twice that of Britain, where even the textile industry was beginning to look out of date. During the 1890s the 'condition of the British economy' had become as complex as the changing situation of British culture. There was resistance in Britain to the 'scientific management' propounded across the Atlantic by Frederick Winslow Taylor, 'father of scientific management', and problems with both labour and management were apparent both in the coal and iron industries in 1901, when it was announced too that the number of workers in the textiles industry had declined over the previous ten years. Given the role of trade unionism in analysis of 'industrial decline', it is revealing to discover that one news item of long-term historic importance scarcely figured in the newspapers of 1900. On February 27th, Shrove Tuesday, a day of 'dreary dripping rain', what became the Labour Party was voted into existence in London at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street.

Trade-union officials were in the large majority, and the only item on the agenda was labour representation in Parliament. There was little consensus, although the Independent Labour Party, founded in 1894 and then led by Keir Hardie, was successful in carrying amendment after amendment which culminated in an agreement to form 'a distinct Labour Group in Parliament, who shall have their own Whips'. Ramsay MacDonald, who was elected Secretary of the new Labour Representation Committee, believed that some delegates had attended in order to 'bury the attempt in good humoured tolerance'.

At the general election of 1900 only two LRC candidates won seats, one of them, Hardie, a true socialist. There were other candidates, nonetheless, who attracted attention, like Philip Snowden, who fought the election at Blackburn in Lancashire, where his addresses were compared by A.G. Gardiner, a great Liberal journalist, with 'the tides of spiritual revivalism which periodically sweep over the land'. In a time of increasing secularisation, socialism could have the power of a gospel. At the next general election in 1906 no fewer than twenty-nine LRC candidates were elected. Yet the politics of the new Labour group in Parliament reflected interest rather than ideology. It was interest too, trade unionist fear in 1901 of the consequences for trade unionism of the Taff Vale judgement in the courts, which limited the right to strike, that gave the biggest boost to the Labour Representation Committee.

All these problems were British. The world, however, was changing more than the nation, and as the year 1900 ended Harmsworth chose to visit New York where at the invitation of Joseph Pulitzer, the great American journalist and newspaper owner, he took charge of Pulitzer's The World for one day to edit the issue for January 1st, 1901, described as the first number of the new century. Harmsworth produced what he called a tabloid, demanding from his journalists, who for the occasion had to work in evening dress, that no story should be longer than 250 words. Having completed their task they toasted in the new century in champagne. There was one transatlantic story to report. Hiram S. Maxim, the American-born inventor of 'the swiftest death-dealing machines', had been knighted by Queen Victoria in her New Year's honours list.

It was an American tribute that Harmsworth received on this occasion. He was hailed as 'the most pre-possessing and picturesque figure in journalism on either side of the Atlantic'. He spent most of the following day with Thomas Edison and also met Mark Twain. His edition of The World had sold out by nine o'clock in the morning and another 100,000 were to be printed. One was to be kept on permanent exhibition in the New York Public Library.

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