1913 Page 5
Isaacs and Lloyd George survived. Already Britain’s first Jewish Cabinet minister, Isaacs would later become Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary. Lloyd George would become the country’s wartime Prime Minister. Churchill, the stout defender of his Liberal colleagues, would subsequently defect to the Conservatives, and become Prime Minister in a later conflict. But the Marconi scandal left a bitter taste at the heart of London and the heart of empire, implying the corruptibility of both.
The fortunes flowing daily through the City did not make London uniformly rich. And while the City employed a good number of Londoners as clerks, lawyers and stockbrokers, many more laboured in the rest of the city’s sweatshops, docks and factories. These were low-paid workers, with limited certainty of a daily wage, often risking life and limb in the course of their work, sometimes at the mercy of employers who saw their labour force as a stock of human brawn to be drawn upon at will rather than as a set of individual employees. Living conditions had improved since Victorian times. Further improvements were forecast, with the 1910 Town Planning Act aiming at ‘the home healthy, the house beautiful, the town pleasant, the city dignified and the suburb salubrious’.39 Yet inner city conditions remained unenviable. Many buildings were blackened by smoke, flecked white by rain. When Ramunajaswami had taken the bus to East Ham he had remarked it worse than the Indian city of Madras. He could have taken a bus in any other direction – except perhaps to the west – and found similar pockets of deprivation.
Maud Pember Reeves, a member of the left-wing Fabian Society’s Women’s Group, focused her attentions on a nest of streets between Lambeth, Wandsworth and Lansdowne roads in south London, penning Round About a Pound a Week as an investigation of the social conditions of its inhabitants.40 She described the relative illiteracy of many of Lambeth’s women, the mortality of their children, the costs of burial insurance alongside food and rent, the ‘filling, stodgy’ diet which was all that they could afford to eat, the problems of the underemployed (though few were entirely without work), the inevitable rows resulting from houses where everyone was in the way of everyone else all the time, and yet the sense of local community which prevailed.
Whereas London’s well-off might pay a tiny portion of their income for a sumptuous residence in South Kensington, Reeves calculated, the city’s poor would pay a third of their income for a few dark, damp rooms, which they would nevertheless call home, in neighbourhoods where they knew everyone and were known to all. The divergence between the lives and attitudes of the middle classes and the poor was stark. In summer, when a well-meaning Fabian investigator commented on the lovely warm weather, a Lambeth resident grumbled: ‘“Lovely fer you, miss, but it brings out the bugs somethink ’orrible”.’41
Reeves drew a picture of urban poverty that translates depressingly well over a hundred years. She mocked restrictions on family size as the solution to the problem, calling for greater state intervention instead. She voiced a righteous anger at a group of people living in the world’s greatest city, yet seeing less of its prosperity than they should. From these neighbourhoods men, women and families emigrated to all corners of the British Empire, though always with a glance back at ‘their’ neighbourhood, in ‘their’ city.
Another chronicler of London, Thomas Holmes, painted on a broader canvas than a patch of Lambeth, taking as his subject ‘the odds and ends of humanity’ consigned to the city’s extensive underworld: the near-blind sixty-year-old man making artificial flowers by the light of an evil-smelling lamp, and the young widow making cardboard boxes while her children sleep. Holmes estimated at least 50,000 women were in a similar position: ‘working, working day and night, when they have work to do, practically starving when work is scarce’.42 Thames Embankment, not far from the Houses of Parliament, had nightly soup kitchens. In this world, he wrote, ‘the funeral of one child is only a pageant for others’.
Some of Holmes’ solutions were harsh: the permanent confinement of the ‘indisputably feeble-minded’ or the committing of tramps to detention camps. Unplanned emigration, Britain’s traditional safety valve, was no long-term answer, Holmes argued. Rather ‘it increases the evil, for it secures to our country an ever-increasing number of those who are absolutely unfitted to fulfil the duties of citizenship’. It was the ambitious and the self-starters who tended to leave, not the dregs. Still, compulsory emigration for those convicted of a third criminal offence might help.
Most measures proposed by Holmes, however, involved the state as a guardian of welfare, not as a stony-hearted provider of punishment and detention. This was the active state supported by Britain’s many progressive social movements and by the forty MPs of the Independent Labour Party. This was the dream propounded by socialist intellectuals who, at the beginning of 1913, would anxiously pore over the first edition of the New Statesman, a high-minded magazine devoted to the cause of social reform. Germany, though its political system might be roundly condemned, was seen as a model to emulate when it came to welfare policies. Increasingly, reform was not a slogan for the left, it was an expectation.
In the summer of 1913 London was in the grip of ragtime. One older gentleman complained of being massaged in ragtime at his Turkish bath. Another said that he was sure his typists now clattered away to the same rhythm. But the city could still put on more stately airs, turning itself to the formality of a great occasion. Coming hot on the heels of King George’s trip to Berlin, London prepared itself for a state visit from the leader of Britain’s oldest enemy, now become its closest friend: President Raymond Poincaré of France.
It was a remarkable turn of events for two countries more practised in denigrating each other’s achievements than in celebrating them, more used to killing than embracing each other. English kings had contested the crown of France for centuries. In the seventeenth century the two countries’ armies had clashed on European battlefields, and their ships on the high seas. In the eighteenth century, as dynastic conflict evolved into an imperial rivalry, Britain and France fought the first global war, crossing swords and exchanging bullets in the Americas, in Asia and in Africa. The French had sought revenge in supporting America’s war for independence. At the time of the French Revolution, Paris had become the source of the dangerous heresies of Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité. In the Napoleonic Wars the countries had been at each other’s throat for a generation, deepening mutual animosities. For the British, the French language was proverbially considered equivalent to swearing.
The passage of time and a short war fought jointly against the Russians in Crimea in the 1850s tempered the feelings of the time of Napoleon. But if France’s existential threat to Britain receded, and the enemies became mere rivals, there were still plenty of opportunities for the two to collide. Though forever dislodged from North America and from India, France made up for serial defeat at the hands of the British by creating an empire in the Far East and in Africa. Even here, the two powers clashed. In the Fashoda Incident of 1898, a small French force marched halfway across central Africa to assert claims to the area around Fashoda, in southern Sudan. But British pressure brought about a French diplomatic capitulation, and an agreement on spheres of influence in Africa was reached. As recently as the turn of the century French intelligence agents were in Ireland considering how to help the nationalists, and what the ground might be like for the introduction of French military forces.43 After France’s last Emperor, Napoleon III, was overthrown some forty years before, he had sought refuge in the English countryside. His widow still lived there.
Yet now, in June 1913, the President of the French Republic was received with genuine warmth. First, in Portsmouth, where his yacht arrived, by the booming guns of the Royal Navy and a rendition of the ‘Marseillaise’. Then that afternoon in London, where King George awaited President Poincaré in a Victoria station that was bedecked with tricoloured banners, and shields bearing the letters R. F., République française. ‘Nous sommes camarades’ – ‘We are friends’ – ran a banner hanging high above
the road from the station to Buckingham Palace. After jointly inspecting a detachment of Irish Guards, King George and President Poincaré toured around central London in an open-topped landau carriage, escorted by the Household Cavalry. ‘The crowd broke into loud cheers’, wrote a newspaperman from the Daily Graphic. The ovations at Hyde Park, where Sergey Prokofiev caught sight of King and President, were reported as being particularly rousing.44 That evening, at a state banquet, the English King addressed the republican President in French.
The trip was mostly ceremonial, mood music for the work of others behind the scene. Poincaré travelled to Windsor to lay wreaths on the tombs of King Edward VII and Queen Victoria. He visited London’s French colony, conferring the Légion d’honneur on the London correspondent of Le Figaro. He paid homage to the City, visited a horse show and inspected a display of motor cars at Marble Arch. But the visit was not, for all that, simply a round of meetings, without a wider message. Indeed that message was made explicit by President Poincaré, and it was addressed to the British people:
Not only in Europe but throughout the world the restless billows on the ocean draw together and unite the shores of the two great colonial Powers in a constant exchange of ideas and interests. Does not the very nature of things will it that the two peoples of Great Britain and France should ever be associated for the progress of civilisation and the maintenance of peace in the world. Never, perhaps, have the necessity and benefits of that solidarity in good made themselves more strongly felt than in the course of recent events.45
The recent events that Poincaré referred to concerned the status of the European Great Powers in north Africa. In 1905 and 1911 Germany had forcefully protested creeping French colonisation of Morocco which, it argued, ran counter to France’s diplomatic undertakings not to upset the regional status quo. In 1905 Kaiser Wilhelm II had landed in Tangiers on a white horse to make the point; in the summer of 1911 the German gunboat Panther was sent to Agadir on the flimsy pretext of protecting German citizens, sparking a war scare in Europe. Berlin hoped that Britain would maintain a position of studied neutrality, giving free rein to German intimidation. In the event, Britain supported France, demonstrating that the Entente Cordiale established between the two countries a few years earlier was here to stay. It was to cement this sense of Franco-British solidarity, and of common challenges presented by rising powers around the world, that Poincaré travelled to London.
Not everyone was willing to have Britain tied so closely to France. What if France took British support as an invitation to challenge Germany in Europe? ‘If they think they [the French] can stand upon their bonds like Shylock for so many tons of English flesh’, said an English guest at a private dinner at the German embassy that February, ‘we shall be appreciably nearer to a general war’.46 ‘They can wait a long time if they’re waiting for that’, added Lady Randolph Churchill, American-born mother of Winston. (In fact, British and French army officers had already discussed the eventuality of British military support in the event of a European war – though this remained a plan for a possible contingency, not a blank cheque.)
The Economist agreed with Poincaré that it was in the nature of things for France and Britain to be friends – indeed it was ‘the expression of tendencies which are slowly but surely making war between the civilised communities of the world an impossibility’.47 But, the magazine continued, ‘a man who is a chum of Jones may also be a friend to Robinson, and, indeed, if Jones and Robinson should happen to have a difference of opinion they will be fortunate in being able to confide in a mutual friend’. After all, Britain’s commercial ties with Germany were progressively removing that country from the list of potential foes, The Economist contended, on the basis that it would be ‘the highest folly to fall out with one’s best customer’. Better to remain a little bit aloof, therefore, in order to be more useful to the cause of peace.
The new-found friendship between Britain and France should not be seen as placing those two countries (and Russia) in mutual antagonism with Germany and Austria-Hungary. Rather, intoned the sweet voice of liberal reason, shaped by a century of ever-increasing global integration, ‘our common interest with France is the maintenance of European peace – and that is an aim which we share equally with Germany’.
Just as the City of London both provided and received money from all around the world, regulating global finance as a result, so Britain could be a friend to all, with London as the world’s great aggregator, above the fray, in a world at fractious peace.
PARIS
The Eternal, The Universal
Already in 1913, plans were on the table for a tunnel linking Britain to France under the Channel, tying the two countries together with bands of steel. Until such a tunnel was built, however, a traveller from London to Paris, even a President, ran the risk of a choppy sea crossing from Newhaven to Dieppe, London to Boulogne, or Dover to Calais. Taking this last route it would take only six or seven hours to travel from London, capital of the world, to Paris, a city which aspired to be something both grander and more nebulous: capital of the twentieth century, just as it had been capital of the nineteenth.
Sweeping through northern France, trains from London would cross the Somme river at Amiens, deep in the heartland of Picardy. Here, if not too pressed for time, a tourist might pause to be inspired by the city’s thirteenth-century cathedral, amongst the finest examples of Gothic style in Europe, famed for its stained glass, a symbol of Europe’s ancient common Christian heritage. The American writer Theodore Dreiser stopped here on his way to Paris. Paying a guide two francs, he went up into the roof of the cathedral and, peering down at the play of candlelight on the statues of the saints, found a ‘splendid confirmation of the majesty of man, the power of his ideals, the richness and extent of his imagination’.1
In the early summer of 1913 a visitor might catch some of the excitement of the French Grand Prix to be held around the city in July, heavy with expectations of victory by Frenchman Georges Boillot driving a French-made Peugeot EX3. If the hour was late, one could do worse than spend a quiet night in Amiens at the Hôtel de France et de l’Angleterre, a reminder of the distant age of Joan of Arc – burned at the stake in Rouen in 1431, a statue of whom stood in Amiens cathedral – when England and France had been hereditary enemies. The story of Joan, a Catholic saviour of a French king against foreign invasion, still had resonance in France in 1913. Both royalist Catholics and French republicans could rally around her as a symbol of national defiance. The previous year Poincaré and other republican nationalists, men who wished no return to an age of Catholic kings, had proposed a national holiday be established in her honour. But the object of French nationalist defiance had changed since the age of Joan. After all, it was not the troops of perfidious Albion who had occupied Amiens within living memory in 1870, it was, briefly, the Germans.
For many French, Poincaré included, such facts were not easy to forget in 1913. Poincaré’s own corner of Lorraine, in eastern France, had been trampled over by Prussian troops forty-odd years before. Initially, his family had fled from the Germans, spending several weeks moving from hotel to hotel in northern France and southern Belgium, through the very same fields and orchards now cut across by the train from Calais to the French capital. Later, they returned to Bar-le-Duc to find their home occupied. ‘Disgusting soldiers are in the house’, wrote the young teenage Poincaré afterwards, ‘one paints a skull and crossbones on our sideboard, the other spits, like a Cossack, in our stew’.2 Then, in 1871, France’s humiliation had been doubly sealed by the proclamation of the new German Empire from the old French royal palace of Versailles, and by the incorporation of the French provinces of Alsace and Lorraine into the new German Reich.
The loss of land and people rankled. Poincaré was himself a senator for that part of Lorraine which remained in France. On the Place de la Concorde in Paris a statue representing the city of Strasbourg, now in the German Reich, was regularly draped in black. In French newspapers the
‘Lost Provinces’ were depicted as a young orphan girl, exemplar of virginal French womanhood, in the evil clutches of male militarist German thugs.3 (In Germany, of course, the provinces were presented as the daughters of Mutter Germania.4) The loss of Alsace and Lorraine was seared into the consciousness of French nationalists as a daily affront to national honour. More extreme rabble-rousing nationalists called for ‘la revanche’, revenge. But for most, and indeed for Poincaré, that was a step too far: revenge would be sweet, and the provinces should of course return to France, but a war to achieve that aim alone was neither likely nor desirable. French writer Remy de Gourmont was reported to have said that the provinces were not worth the little finger of his right hand, which he needed for writing, nor the little finger of his left hand, which was needed to flick cigar ash.5 More importantly, though often missed in the French nationalist press, it was unclear whether the people of Alsace and Lorraine actually wanted to be part of a French revanche: in early 1913 a leading French Alsatian, Henri Kessler, wrote to a French newspaper saying his people would rather seek autonomous status within Germany than be the cause of broader Franco-German tensions.6 (A few months later, after the actions of the German army in the Zabern [Saverne] affair, he might have felt differently.7)