Clerks in city offices were more secure in their social position; so too were civil servants, bookkeepers and assistant managers, who earned between £300 and £700 a year. Such people kept two or more servants and could afford to buy houses in inner suburbs, such as Chorlton and Withington just outside Manchester. Yet more leafy outer suburban areas were beyond their means, though not their aspirations. The most attractive and genteel suburbs were colonized by the upper middle classes – manufacturers and wholesalers, along with the accountants, architects, solicitors, barristers, doctors, vets, bankers, actuaries and surveyors who comprised the professional classes. As the nineteenth century had progressed, they had become increasingly powerful and well-organized, with the creation of associations for each occupation. They could afford to keep several servants and privately educate their children. After schooling, boys would often take up the same professions as their fathers; girls were encouraged to become shorthand writers or governesses while they awaited marriage.
Suburbanites could commute to work in the city along the recently established transport links, which included electric trams and omnibuses, as well as overground and underground trains. Balham, for example, was connected to the City of London via underground stations at Kennington and Stockwell, and Didsbury was connected to Manchester Central Station by an overland train. Trams were the cheapest way to travel, with special ‘workman’s fares’ for early-morning journeys allowing passengers to travel up to ten miles for a penny. Yet precisely because trams were popular with workers, the middle class tended to shun them and instead take the train.
Whenever a new train station was built just outside a city, estate agents’ offices would emerge nearby, offering land to speculators, construction firms and private buyers. In 1907, Golders Green in north London was connected to the City by the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway; immediately afterwards, the armies of builders arrived. ‘All day long’, remarked a local paper in 1910, ‘there is a continuous hammering which reminds one of distant thunder’, as the tiled, gabled and half-timbered ‘semis’ grew up around the station, the railway line and the roads. There was no development plan and local authority control was virtually nonexistent, so the houses were built close together to maximize profits. It was a sprawl that failed to take into consideration either the quality of life of the new inhabitants or the preservation of the countryside. By 1914 it was impossible to believe that Golders Green had been full of trees and hedges only a decade before.
The unrelenting development of these outer cities gave the impression that the English population was also expanding. Yet the low-density housing of the suburbs, in contrast with the high blocks of flats on the Continent and the older terraces in English cities, revealed a different demographic trend. The new houses suited England’s relatively ageing population. For the first time on record, the increase in England’s population slowed during the Edwardian period. Between 1900 and 1910 the birth rate decreased from thirty-six to twenty-four per 1,000 population; it was only the declining death rate and increasing immigration into the country that kept the population growing.
Declining birth and death rates meant that England was no longer the young, vigorous country it had been at the beginning of Victoria’s reign. In 1841 half of the population had been under twenty, but by 1914 the figure was less than a third. This development provoked further concerns about the robustness of the nation, while increasing immigration prompted xenophobia, with many complaining that England was ‘falling to the Irish and the Jews’. Popular anxiety over the racial ‘deterioration’ and ‘adulteration’ of the supposedly Anglo-Saxon English would inform the 1905 Aliens Act, which was introduced by the Tories to reduce immigration into Britain from outside the empire.
The keynotes of suburban life were privacy, domesticity and respectability. The privet hedge at the front of the semi-detached houses and their fenced back gardens ensured that the suburban family’s ‘home sweet home’ became their castle. Suburbanites could live undisturbed by their neighbours, with whom they might exchange no more than a few words. And yet everyone was aware of their social and economic status – the size of one’s house and its presentation proclaimed one’s ranking. The most affluent families set the standards to which all denizens of a suburb aspired: ‘keeping up with the Joneses’, a phrase coined in 1913, was the aim of suburban life. Everyone in a suburb was also aware of a neighbour’s transgressions from genteel standards of morality, such as an unwanted pregnancy. A group-monitored respectability pervaded these outer cities, and the word ‘respectable’ became synonymous with the suburban middle class.
The aspirational character of middle-class suburbanites offered an obvious subject for literary caricature. ‘We live our unreal, stupid little lives,’ a suburban character comments in a story by the upper-middle-class author Saki, ‘and persuade ourselves that we really are untrammelled men and women leading a reasonable existence.’ Other authors mocked the supposedly unsophisticated cultural societies such as drama, singing, art and flower arranging that proliferated in the new neighbourhoods, together with the tennis, bowls and golf clubs that monopolized so much of the suburbanite’s leisure time. The suburbs themselves were also denigrated and denounced. In his 1910 novel Howards End, E. M. Forster described a stain of ‘red rust’ spreading out into the countryside around London.
Some intellectuals championed suburbia. The radical Liberal MP Charles Masterman predicted that the suburbs would become the major urban form of the twentieth century, replacing the countryside as the breeding ground of a new ‘English yeomanry’. Animated by the Victorian values of self-help, laissez-faire and individualism, it was believed that suburbanites were distinguished by their drive, ambition, worldliness and agnosticism. The suburban middle class was also on the rise as a political force. Partially enfranchised by the reform acts of the 1860s and 1880s and then fully enfranchised in 1918, their electoral choices would determine who governed England throughout the twentieth century. In acknowledgement of the growing power of that class, the 1911 census made the occupation of the male head of the household, rather than the land he owned or his family connections, the main criterion of social position.
Yet the new population had its limitations. Neither political consciousness nor a sense of solidarity could flourish in the suburbs, where private interests took precedence over public concerns. In the absence of a strong community spirit and a compelling code of public ethics, religious observance also declined. It was not that atheism was spreading among suburbanites; it was just that they dedicated their time to their families, to leisure activities and to spending money. Sundays in the suburbs were spent playing golf, tennis and bowls rather than going to church. Most members of the middle class remained Christian in their outlook, but they increasingly did not feel the need to affirm this by attending church. Their indifference to the established Church of England set the tone for the entire nation, and for the coming century. While the Anglican Church would continue to influence English culture in the decades ahead, its popular appeal and political power would be severely diminished.
3
The lie of the land
Beyond the suburbs lay the old villages of rural England, whose decay was constantly lamented. Over 1 million English people still worked the land, but they represented a dwindling percentage of the workforce. In 1851 a quarter of English males were agricultural labourers, but by 1911 the figure fell below 5 per cent. England was now an overwhelmingly urban nation, with over three-quarters of the population living in towns and cities – a development that alarmed those who believed that the health of the English people was threatened by urban living.