BRITISH LIFE

• The beginning of the 20th century marked great changes in the society. An example is the formation of local scout groups beginning with 1908. It was a middle-class, non-political movement which lead to a great deal of enjoyment for those who took part in it.

• 50 years earlier such a thing would have been impossible because in those times any movement had been driven by self-interest, while this one was completely selfless

• Scouting was important because of its team spirit which permeated the national attitude and was a voluntary service given by adults in the interest of society as a whole.

• The founding of Women’s Voluntary Service in 1938 showed the same general sense that a person should do “one’s bit” however modest. The organization came to include “Royal” in its title revealing that the monarchic idea could confer distinction and implied that England remained a country committed to the idea of local initiative and to the institution of kingship.

• Ease of transport, quick communication by telegraph, a thriving local and national press encouraged the formation of a host of societies and organisations.

• Cricket which was already popular in the second half of the 19th century, remained popular and it was exported to colonial territories with the expatriate British community.

• Football became more and more popular. Most large towns had their own soccer club

• Since 1854 professional standards were set and maintained across the range of responsible activities. Candidates for most government service were appointed on merit after competitive examination.

• Around the end of the 19th century there was a feeling that behind the brilliant façade of the “top nation” all was not well.

• Lord Rosebery, a former Liberal Prime Minister said: “It is beginning to be hinted that we are a nation of amateurs”

• Though England had pioneered the utilisation of electricity, it was in the US that the electric lighting had been invented, and in Germany that the electric locomotive had first appeared.

• The cutting edge of the industrial progress was no longer to be found in England, the country did not keep pace.

• The education was a classical one based on Greek, Latin and history with few concessions to the sciences and at its best it turned out able scholars and administrators. A manufacturing background and a manufacturing future had little social prestige. This happened because the industrial wealth was transformed into the ownership of a country house and broad acres and a life far from steam, soot and smoke.

• Aversion to industry was also caused by the reluctance to deal with the industrial workers and their representatives.

• However, as the wealth resulting from mining, quarrying, manufacturing, exporting and importing increased, there was also the appreciation that money in large amounts could be made to generate even more money.

• Financial houses (Baring family) played a substantial part

• The invisible earnings of the City served to compensate for the increasing deficit of materials, goods and products.

• Despite being the “workshop of the world” and a major coal exporter, the value of Britain imports had become greater than that of exports by as much as 134m pounds in 1911

The social imbalance

• 1901-1910 during King Edward VII - there was the impression that the country was run by an oligarchy – a government by the few, a combination of the aristocracy with the richest manufacturers or bankers

• Political life revolved around London and country houses of famous hostesses like Lady Londonderry.

• There was a social routine of the seasons that was set by the court and marked by major sporting occasions like Ascot Races

• The political power of the oligarchy was based upon the sufferance of the voters.

• In the first decades of the 20th century Britain was not a democracy - half the adult population had no vote, but almost half had the vote and began to understand the power which it put in their hands

• 1900s trade union membership had passed 3 million• The Liberal government was under pressure to

clarify and reform trade union law

• The most astute member of the 1905 government was David Lloyd George, radical and non-conformist, the first Welshman to become a household name in England.

• Together with Winston Churchill and H. H. Asquith he was behind the Old Age Pensions Act 0f 1908, the National Insurance Act of 1911 and “People’s Budget” of 1909

• A great political storm erupted over these three reforms, the budget was rejected and the crisis between the two houses of Parliament went for 2 years

• Supremacy of the House of Commons was accepted by 2 kings: Edward VII and George V

• The constitutional problems were reinforced by other political events: the concerns about German ambitions had brought about alliances with France and Russia, the demand to enlarge the navy because of the German warship building programme, the renewed Irish question

• The Irish were an essential part of the Liberal government’s majority but they asked for a new Home Rule Bill

• When German forces entered Belgium on 4 August 1914 on the way to invade France, Great Britain was committed to war on the continent

• 1914 recruiting stations were set up and 3 million volunteers appeared

• 900,000 people were killed and 2 million wounded

• The government had to face 3 major problems: • 1.the actual war in conjunction with France on

the western front and in liaison with other allied powers;

• 2.the supply of armament, munitions and other war materials;

• 3.the need to feed the population

• In order to gain support for the war the government used persuasion by raising wages to an unprecedented height

• They added unskilled, untrained and often female workers to the labour force

• The government was accorded powers by parliament like never before

• The Defence of the Realm Act provided heavy penalties for even casual remarks which seemed to undermine the war effort

• Coal mines, railways and merchant shipping were taken under the state control and managed by government-appointed industrialists with no prior links to parliament

• The war strategy: incompetence, indecision, and personal animosities.

• The generals who fought small battles in the colonies couldn’t cope with the long fronts

• Military disasters lead to a political crisis• Asquith resigned and Lloyd George became prime

minister – compelled the introduction of convoys

• The war accelerated the social reform• Education was reformed• Works and factory conditions were improved:

works canteen, Ministry of Health was introduced

• The spirit of idealism and unity of 1914 had changed by 1919 under the effects of the war and of events elsewhere

• The Russian, German and Austrian Empires had collapsed

• A new Franchise Act in 1917 extended voting rights to all adult men and women over 30

• The corporate state that was created was given back to the owners who announced wage-cuts

• The mine owners, facing a slump in demand and heavy competition from America, Germany, Poland decided to cut down the labour costs

• England is a country with a long history, a strong sense of the past, a feeling in each generation that the previous one was in some way better, more blessed, more distinctively English.

• All these characteristics promote a cautious and considering attitude to the new, thus change, when it occurs, is often disguised by those introducing it and is often unwelcome

• The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, the world’s first steam-powered passenger line, sold 400,000 tickets in the first year; cigarettes and cinema (1908) became immensely popular. Nobody had to buy them, but they did, in huge numbers.

• Choice: other railways opened, people chose which brand of cigarettes they smoked, what kind of film/stars they liked

• By 1920 the English people had become consumers.

• The image of the shops changed from places where flour, grains and sugar were kept in sacks and other commodities in large jars and boxes to shops that labelled, branded good in attractive small packages and the wider the choice, the more customers they had

• The political party which best understood this was the Conservative Party, which with its protectionist and tariff reform views had won the support of much of industry and business.

• In the new democracy it also needed wide popular support and this came from the community best able to exercise its consuming choice: the professional middle class.

• One of the most remarkable features of the political English life, for over 300 years, has been the ability of the “conservative tendency” to regroup and reform itself periodically and to reappear as a force in national life

• Side by side with consumerism the English people retained an element of belief in the involvement of the state in some basic aspects of life. For the great majority of the population, it was the government which provided schooling, and which provided the modest but vital payments of old age and national insurance. It was the government which appointed district medical officers and health boards, secondary education for all, free hospitals, further improvements of working conditions.

• The government most likely to provide would be a Labour one. The Labour-Tory divide which would typify the 20th century politics arose from these two concepts: choice and the ability to choose, and central management by the state. Both could bring social and economic progress and many people saw the way forward as a combination of the two.

• The party which lost out was the Liberals, who lost much of their radical support to Labour when it became clear that the Labour Party was a serious political force, and found themselves squeezed between the forces of consumerism and centralism.

• In the 1920s two arms of technological progress reached far into the creative and receptive aspects of English culture: radio and cinema.

• In 1922 the British Broadcasting Company was established with a single studio in London

• The transmission of “live news” and music and the projection of moving pictures on a big screen were revolutionary changes in the field of entertainment, news-gathering and information

• The BBC revealed much of England to itself, including the way everyone sounded. The new corporation encouraged a certain form of pronunciation that became known as “BBC English”.

• Radio’s very existence raised the question of how English should be spoken and what was “correct usage”. The growth of a national radio network began to exert a standardising effect on English speech which was also encouraged by the extension of school education to a minimum leaving age of 14

• Local dialects forms were dropped by the young, instead they picked or formed new phrases, many of them coming from the cinema, and therefore from the US – the American culture has arrived.

• The American involvement in the Great War and the American participation in the Versailles peace negotiations had made the British people aware that there was now an English-speaking nation that was more populous, wealthier and stronger than Great Britain

• The following decade showed the Americans to have an industrial, scientific and commercial dynamism greater than that of any other nation and a mix, vibrant, modern culture.

• American movies showed a luxurious lifestyle with domestic accessories which even the better-off English did not possess. American jazz and blues, discordant to conservative ears, attracted the young and began to influence progressive composers. Two expatriate Americans, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, compelled a reassessment of how English poetry should be conceived and written

• British visitors to Europe found new things happening there too – in music, art and drama especially, but also in popular culture: the comedy, wit and satire of club and café.

• In many ways British culture seemed rooted in a pre-war mode, but one major change was highly visible. For the first time in history English women showed their legs, even their knees, in public, as hemlines rose.

• Many women were ousted from their wartime jobs, this was the decade of female emancipation. By the end of it all women had the vote, they were accepted in all professions save the clergy. The first woman to take a seat in parliament, Lady Astor, was elected for Plymouth in 1919.

• Political and economic conditions in 1920s were often precarious.

• The rise of the American economic power, the rapid industrialisation of Japan, the economic ruin of Germany, the sovietisation of Russia, and the running down of war economies created a new set of international conditions which no single government was able to cope with.

• Lloyd George's artificial coalition with the conservatives collapsed in autumn 1922 and was followed by a Conservative administration before its fall opened the way to the first Labour government in 1923.

• It was destroyed by suspicion of communist sympathies

• 1925 the Bank of England backed the sterling and its value rose reducing British exports in an already depressed world trading system.

• High unemployment and falling wages produced a brief General Strike of May 1926

• 1929 the entire capitalist system was shaken by the Wall Street crash in the USA. The drop in share values, the calling on debts, the cancellation of investments, the cutting back in trade and production resulted in the 5 years of the Great Depression Unemployment in Great Britain

• By 1931 the insolubility of the Depression led to a political crisis

• In September 1939 the British government declared war on Hitler’s Germany

• The things went wrong: after the fall of France in June 1940 and the invasion of Soviet Russia in June 1941, the British stood alone

• It was a moment of high national identification with the state and its call for victory at all costs

• In May 1940 Churchill became prime minister – his policy was to fight not to deal and he laid it over cabinet, commons and country

• On 7 September 1940 enemy bombers struck at targets in Woolwich Arsenal, Beckton gasworks, Millwall docks, Limehouse, Tower Bridge, and West Ham power station

• Over the next 12 months 190,000 bombs rained down on British cities injuring 50,000, killing 43,000 including 5,460 children

• The front line was streets and homes• By the end of 1942 the enemy killed more British

soldiers than civilians

• There were a lot of changes:• Civic lessons were mainly on the radio or at the cinema• A leftish church of England, a feministic Women’s Institute• BBC went quite democratic• Film documentary came into its own – it claimed to show the

nation as it really was – Philip Donnellan got the chance to work in the way he wanted to

• Between 1941 and 1944 an estimated 25 million people saw Ministry of Information documentaries in workshops, factories, canteens, welfares, village halls

• These were stories of everyday people and they showed how it was

• The greatest war documentaries were directed by Humphrey Jennings for the Crown Film Unit

• 1941 Listen to Britain – stressed the collective defense of the country, and that the people had paid their dues

• George Orwell – another middle class socialist who found new hope in the war time English people: his trust that the liberal progressive state would be able to meet the people’s needs – through state ownership of basic industries, through abolition of hereditary privilege, and through taxation of grossly unequal incomes

• The Lion and the Unicorn – the only book ever written which saw revolutionary possibilities in the English national character connects the idea of Britishness to socialism, but keeps the monarchy