The press spread fears about the effects of prolonged cycling. Overenthusiastic cyclists might develop ‘bicycle hump’ by leaning too long over the handlebars; acute cases of ‘bicycle foot’ and even ‘bicycle face’ were reported. Since some of the cheaper bicycles were difficult to steer and had only rudimentary brakes, falling off was a more tangible danger, yet this did not stop intrepid cyclists from speeding around, regardless of safety.
In 1901 bicycles were the fastest means of transport on the roads, but they enjoyed supremacy for only the shortest of spells. Both bikes and horses were soon surpassed by motor cars, which could travel over 20 miles per hour by 1903. These petrol-driven automobiles had replaced the slow and unreliable steam-powered vehicles of the late nineteenth century. The driver of the early Edwardian motor car sat on a high box, just like a coachman, behind a windscreen if that optional extra had been purchased. If there was no windscreen, he or she ran the risk of being propelled forward over the front of the car whenever they braked too abruptly. Sometimes mischievous children would try to provoke an accident by throwing their caps into the path of oncoming vehicles. The motor car travelled on the left side of the road and overtook bicycles by pulling out to the right, a manoeuvre often accompanied by accidents and arguments. As only the wealthiest could afford automobiles – which cost hundreds of pounds to buy and hundreds per year to run – early drivers often looked down on cyclists, referring to them as ‘cads on casters’.
Some aristocratic motorists had an equally condescending attitude to the law. When Lord Portsmouth was stopped for exceeding the speed limit, he was belligerent: ‘I have been one of the chief magistrates of the county for some years,’ he told the constable, ‘and I have never heard of such an absurd thing as speeding. If I were you I should not take this any further.’ Other members of the old caste declined to pay the steep fines on the grounds that restricted speed limits were ‘un-English’. Drivers stopped by the police usually claimed to have been travelling under the speed limit; others tried to bribe the representatives of the law. When these tactics failed, the motorist would be hauled before the local magistrate. Among those charged with speeding in the period was the prime minister, Arthur Balfour. Such was Balfour’s notoriety on the roads that, when the Motor Car Act of 1903 was discussed in parliament, one humorous MP proposed that the 20-mile-per-hour speed limit in the legislation should not apply to him.
Motor cars became a symbol of the threat the urban world posed to the countryside. At weekends, the automobiles of affluent city dwellers piled up beside wayside inns. To local villagers, motorists looked like people from another world. They wore heavy leather or fur-lined suits and coats, cloth caps with ear flaps and rubber ‘ponchos’ in inclement weather. They were startling manifestations of the new spirit of the age.
In a country where class antagonism was increasing, it is not surprising that cars were seen as an emblem of England’s ‘idle rich’. During the debates over the 1903 Motor Car Act, one MP described driving as ‘an amusement which is indulged in principally by wealthy people’ and urged the Balfour administration to prove that it was not ‘a government of the rich, for the rich and by the rich’ by punishing aristocratic lawbreakers. Wealthy drivers ought to be taxed and made to contribute to the maintenance of country roads, and they should be forced to pass a test.
Such drivers may have been an unpopular minority but they were a formidable one. Lord Northcliffe, a fanatical early motorist, furthered the drivers’ cause in his newspapers. The Times described motor cars as ‘no mere article of luxury or amusement for a small minority’; they were instead a means of transport with potential to ‘serve the public’ and to become a ‘key English industry’ in the future. As part of its pro-motorist initiative, the newspaper attempted to distinguish blue-blooded drivers from the nouveau riche whose behaviour was blamed for the public outcry. ‘The number of owners and drivers of motor cars who are not gentlemen,’ the paper commented, ‘would seem to be unduly large. There is no turning a cad into a gentleman.’ The debate surrounding motorists was informed by contemporary anxieties concerning the ‘dilution’ of the gentry. The irony was that Northcliffe, the man responsible for this anti-plutocrat propaganda, had himself only recently been ennobled.
Those who supported the motorists claimed that reports concerning the number of accidents caused by vehicles were wildly exaggerated. They were part of a nationwide ‘motor car panic’, which was in part an attack on wealth and privilege. Yet the criticisms of dangerous drivers continued, largely because the facts supported the critics. In 1909 motor cars caused 373 accidents in Britain, but in 1914 there were 1,329 – though the rise was largely owing to the increasing use of the vehicles.
As they became an increasingly familiar sight on English roads, the ‘motor car panic’ died down. The press no longer exaggerated the incidence of minor accidents, and the government welcomed automobiles as a new source of revenue. Motor cars gradually became accepted in the same way that bicycles had been. Private cars were joined on the streets of London by taxis or ‘hackney carriages’, and jostled for space with hansoms, bicycles, electric and horse-drawn trams, and open-topped omnibuses. It is hard to think of another period of English history when so many different types of vehicle sped along the capital’s roads, or when London’s streets witnessed such mayhem.
The absence of transport management was partially remedied when the Liberal government introduced its Town Planning Act in 1909. Yet the pandemonium on the streets could no more be restrained by legislation than could suburban sprawl. The proliferation of motor cars and the sudden expansion of the suburbs were both expressions of the spirit of a speed-obsessed and restless age. The same spirit informed the numerous social reforms passed in quick succession by the Liberal government, as well as England’s breathless participation in an international arms race. Everything seemed faster following the death of Victoria and the decline of Victorianism, including thought and perhaps even time itself. The culture of the period might be compared to a new motor car, uncertain of its destination but intent on arriving in record time.
10
Little hammers in their muffs
King Edward VII had died unexpectedly, in the middle of the constitutional crisis and after a mere nine years on the throne. The apparently hearty sixty-eight-year-old had been ill for months, and a life of overindulgence had weakened his constitution. Yet as his ailments had not been widely reported, his death in May 1910 seemed sudden.
Asquith spoke for many of his countrymen when he described himself as ‘stunned’ by the news of Edward’s death. Outside Buckingham Palace the crowds stood silent, and 400,000 people visited the king’s coffin in Westminster Hall in two days. The organizers of the funeral wanted the proceedings to be as democratic as possible, so the wealthier classes were forced to queue along with everyone else to pay their last respects. Here was testimony to how England had changed since Victoria’s funeral less than a decade before; the tolerant and relaxed Edward had seemed far more accessible to his subjects than his mother had been. The newspapers celebrated the late king as ‘a very average typical Englishman in his tastes and habits’, while omitting to mention that he was not at all average in his indulgence of those tastes. Edward was the first English monarch to be presented to his subjects as ‘ordinary’. He was also one of the first stars of an emerging personality culture, created by the increasingly influential popular press. This may explain why, in the words of one cabinet member, ‘the feeling of grief and sense of personal loss’ in the country were ‘deeper and keener than when the Queen died’. Yet the public outpouring of emotion was an expression of fear for the future as well as of sadness. ‘At home things seemed to be going from bad to worse,’ remarked one Tory MP.