Rural labourers lived in six main areas of the country – the grazing counties of the northwest, north-east and southwest, and the arable counties of East Anglia, the Midlands and the southeast. The agricultural depression of the late nineteenth century had ravaged the arable sector. In 1870 arable goods had accounted for half of the national agricultural produce, but by 1914 that figure had fallen below 20 per cent. Improvements in transport and preservation allowed producers as far away as New Zealand to export their goods to England; half of all food consumed in the country was imported.
Wages for those who worked the land were low at the start of Edward’s reign. The average pay for a sixty-five-hour week was around 12 shillings, a sum which the social reformer Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree described as ‘insufficient to maintain a family of average size in a state of merely physical efficiency’. Rural wages would increase by 3 per cent between 1900 and 1912, well behind the general 15 per cent increase in the cost of living over the same period. Where possible, agricultural labourers would rear their own animals for slaughter and cultivate their own allotments.
The English peasantry owned none of the land it cultivated. After the enclosures of the previous centuries, almost every rural acre belonged to private aristocratic landlords. Even in Ireland, where great swathes of the land had been appropriated by the British from the native Catholic population in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the situation was more favourable to agricultural labourers, after the 1903 Wyndham Land (Purchase) Act offered subsidies to tenants who wanted to purchase land from landlords. Agricultural labour in Edwardian England was often characterized as cheerless toil for someone else’s benefit, while living conditions for the peasantry were frequently desperate. It is hardly surprising that so many labourers either joined unions and agitated for an improvement in their lot or left the land for towns and cities. With the country population decreasing, the traditional rural way of life, with its ancient trades, crafts and pastimes, slowly died out. Village festivals became less frequent and public houses shut down, while bread and meat were now bought from the baker’s and butcher’s vans that came from the nearest town.
On their journeys to England’s cities, emigrant rural workers would often meet wealthy townspeople travelling in the opposite direction by motor car. Upper-middle-class Edwardians decided to move to the country in order to return to the ‘simpler’ way of life that had been evoked in the works of such Victorian writers as John Ruskin. The magazine Country Life, founded at the end of the 1890s, exerted an even larger influence, with its promises of ‘peace, plenty and quiet’ for the ‘country-loving businessman’. Nostalgia for a largely imaginary version of traditional rural life would be a prominent feature of the urban middle-class imagination throughout the twentieth century. The more country life was destroyed, the greater influence the ideal of that traditional life exercised on the English psyche.
While rich city folk often claimed to love traditional rural life, they were not prepared to forgo modern comfort. Instead of renovating the dilapidated cottages left vacant by the city-bound peasants, they generally built their own ‘cottagey’ homes replete with modern conveniences. Numerous ‘riverside’ housing developments sprang up along the Thames, with regular railway services allowing their inhabitants to commute to the City. The new houses were in the countryside but not of it. The sounds of a piano or a tennis party would issue from them; city talk now filled the country lanes.
When the rural workers arrived in a city, they found streets upon streets of indistinguishable houses and shops. The majority of the workingclass men who inhabited inner cities were semi-skilled or unskilled labourers employed in factories or in the construction industry for a weekly wage. Others, still lower down the social and economic scale, assumed more precarious occupations, such as scavenger, knife grinder or hawker. According to the 1911 census, the leading occupational category for workingclass men and women in England was domestic service, with some one and a quarter million people employed as servants. The number of people in domestic work reinforced the Conservative idea of England as an ‘organic’ hierarchical society in which everyone had a place and knew it.
Workingclass people who were not live-in domestics often resided in the ‘two-up, two-down’ terraced city houses constructed during Victoria’s reign. These cheaply built ‘workers’ cottages’ were poorly insulated and lacked running water, though many were now lit by gas. Family life centred on the ground-floor room at the back of the house, which served as a kitchen and living room. The front room downstairs displayed the family’s best furniture and was used only on special occasions. There was a small garden at the back with an outdoor toilet; the garden could be used to grow vegetables or as a yard where work tools might be stored.
Just under half of the working classes were officially classified as impoverished. While the national income increased by 20 per cent over Edward’s reign, real wages dropped by around 6 per cent. When working husbands failed to bring in enough money to cover their family’s needs, their wives were forced to pawn the family’s possessions. In the first decade of the new century there were 700 pawn shops within ten miles of the City of London.
The ever-present fear of the working class was the penury that might come as a consequence of unemployment, ill health, a wage cut or injury at work. When the rent on a terraced house could no longer be paid, a once respectable family had to look for accommodation among the crowded and squalid slums of the ‘residuum’. It is thought that 35,000 people were homeless in London in 1910. They tramped the streets during the night and waited by the gates of the public parks until they opened, when they fell asleep on the benches. The workhouses offered little in the way of refuge. Their occupants would earn meagre meals by picking oakum and breaking stones all day, like prisoners – and any negligence could be punished by imprisonment.
The working classes were often described by middle-class observers as a different race – stunted, sickly, violent, exhausted and addicted to stimulants such as tobacco and alcohol. But while drink was condemned by genteel reformers as the ‘curse of the working classes’, drinkers often referred to it as ‘the shortest way out of the slums’. Religion was not one of the preferred stimulants of the ‘masses’ – less than 15 per cent of the urban working class regularly attended religious services. Some clergymen were concerned that the workers were regressing to paganism, while more acute observers believed they had never fully converted to Christianity in the first place. It may be significant that the denominations that retained some of their workingclass allegiance combined an other-worldly ethos with an interest in earthly, political concerns. Keir Hardie, who had become the first ever ‘Labour’ MP in 1892, was an ardent Nonconformist who declared that ‘the only way to serve God is by serving humanity’. The Anglican Church, meanwhile, was regarded with indifference by the workers, hardly surprising given its reputation as ‘the Tory Party at prayer’.
4
Plates in the air
Poor wages, fear of penury and conspicuous social and economic inequality made the workers anxious and angry. In a country where there was segregation at public baths between working people and the ‘higher classes’, class hostility was inevitable. In 1900 the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) was established by socialist bodies including the Fabians and the Independent Labour Party (ILP), along with various trade unionists who were determined to secure their legal status and right to strike. The general aim of the union-backed LRC (or the Labour party, as it would be called from 1906) was to further workingclass interests in the Commons, by sponsoring parliamentary representatives who would, in Keir Hardie’s words, form ‘a distinct Labour group … and cooperate with any party promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour’. It conceived a programme of ‘gradualist’ socialism, designed to improve Britain’s existing economic, social and political system. Reform, rather than revolution, was its purpose.