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Peter Ackroyd
THE HISTORY OF ENGLAND
VOLUME VI
INNOVATION
Contents
List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
1. The sun never rises
2. Home sweet home
3. The lie of the land
4. Plates in the air
5. The most powerful thing
6. Demands for reform
7. The Terrible Twins
8. What happened to the gentry?
9. Car crazy
10. Little hammers in their muffs
11. The Orange card
12. The black sun
13. Forced to fight
14. The regiment of women
15. The clock stops
16. England’s Irish question
17. Gay as you like
18. Labour at the summit
19. Where is the match?
20. Get on, or get out
21. Crash
22. The rituals of suburbia
23. Now we can have some fun
24. The country of the dole
25. The Fasci
26. The bigger picture
27. The Spanish tragedy
28. This is absolutely terrible
29. The alteration
30. The march of the ants
31. Would you like an onion?
32. The pangs of austerity
33. The cruel real world
34. An old world
35. The washing machine
36. Plays and players
37. Riots of passage
38. North and south
39. Elvis on a budget
40. This sporting life
41. Old lace and arsenic
42. The new brutalism
43. The soothing dark
44. In place of peace
45. Bugger them all
46. The first shot
47. The fall of Heath
48. The slot machine
49. Let us bring harmony
50. Here she comes
51. The Falklands flare-up
52. The Big Bang
53. The Brighton blast
54. Was she always right?
55. Money, money, money
56. The curtain falls
57. The fall of sterling
58. One’s bum year
59. Put up or shut up
60. The moral abyss
61. A chapter of accidents
62. The unhappy year
63. The princess leaves the fairy tale
Bibliography
Index
List of illustrations
1. Edward VII (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)
2. King George at the opening of the Festival of Empire in 1911 (World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)
3. A tram in Yarmouth (Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo)
4. The Boy Scouts in 1909 (Hulton Archive / Stringer)
5. Emmeline Pankhurst in 1914 (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)
6. Herbert Henry Asquith (Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo)
7. David Lloyd George (Bettmann / Contributor)
8. The British Empire Exhibition, 1924 (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo)
9. Flappers in 1925 (General Photographic Agency / Stringer)
10. The General Strike of 1926 (Vintage_Space / Alamy Stock Photo)
11. A Butlin’s poster from the 1930s (Retro AdArchives / Alamy Stock Photo)
12. Members of the Bloomsbury Group in 1928 (© Tate)
13. Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator (Masheter Movie Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)
14. George VI on the day of his coronation (Hilary Morgan / Alamy Stock Photo)
15. Winston Churchill in 1940 (Keystone-France / Contributor)
16. The Empire Windrush arriving in Tilbury (PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo)
17. The birth of the National Health Service (World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo)
18. Rationing in 1949 (Popperfoto / Contributor)
19. The coronation of Elizabeth II (Shawshots / Alamy Stock Photo)
20. The Suez Canal in October 1956 (John Frost Newspapers / Alamy Stock Photo)
21. Harold Wilson (Popperfoto / Contributor)
22. The premiere of John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger (Frank Pocklington / Stringer)
23. Mary Quant (Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo)
24. The 1966 World Cup final (Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo)
25. The Beatles (Keystone Press / Alamy Stock Photo)
26. The queen watching television in 1969 (Joan Williams / Shutterstock)
27. A British family watching television in the 1970s (Homer Sykes / Alamy Stock Photo)
28. The three-day week (J. Wilds / Stringer)
29. The miners’ strike of 1984 (Manchester Daily Express / Contributor)
30. Margaret Thatcher (peter jordan / Alamy Stock Photo)
31. Princess Diana (Tim Graham / Contributor)
32. Tony Blair (Dan White / Alamy Stock Photo)
33. The Millennium Dome (Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo)
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my research assistants, Murrough O”Brien and Thomas Wright, for their invaluable assistance in the preparation of this volume.
1
The sun never rises
The greatest shock of the Second Boer War was not the protracted and bloody guerrilla warfare, but the wretched condition of the British troops.* The conscripts were malnourished and sickly, their morale low. After the war was over in 1902, an inquiry revealed that 16,000 servicemen had died of disease, due to poor rations and constitutional weakness. Many of the English soldiers had been press-ganged by penury, but around 60 per cent of the volunteers had been rejected as unfit for service. This finding prompted further investigations into the ‘deterioration of certain classes of the population’, though they came at least fifty years too late.
Investigations into the military conduct of the war were equally disturbing. It had taken almost half a million British troops to subdue a Boer population similar to that of Brighton, at a cost of £250 million. The publication of these inquiries prompted the government to create a Committee of Imperial Defence to coordinate the armed forces, and stemmed the tide of English jingoism. In 1900, during the triumphant opening phase of the war, a wave of imperialist enthusiasm had carried the Conservative and Liberal Unionist coalition to power at the so-called ‘khaki election’. The Tory-dominated coalition secured a large majority over the Liberals, defying the ‘swing of the pendulum’ law of British politics.
As the war continued, those who had previously felt imperial pride expressed disappointment and shame. The working classes even declared their admiration for the Boer rebels. ‘What’s the good of talking about the Empire on which the sun never sets,’ one Londoner put it, ‘when the sun never rises on our court?’ By the end of the decade, patriotic platitudes concerning the ‘Great Empire’ provoked laughter.
Were the British army’s deficiencies symptomatic of a wider national degeneration? In the nineteenth century, many people had believed that English enterprise and integrity had helped to bring order to the distant territories and diverse cultures of the British Empire; at the beginning of the new century, they no longer believed these boasts. After the Boer War, it was customary for politicians to speak of the ‘consolidation’ or ‘integration’ of existing colonies, dominions and ‘spheres of economic influence’. It was thought that strengthening political and economic ties within the empire was crucial if England were to survive as a great power, at a time when Germany, Japan and the United States of America were flourishing.