The Edwardians

Paul R Thompson, Mr Paul R Thompson, Paul Thompson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134926763
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Everyone who lived during the reign of Edward VII was an Edwardian, not merely the rich, the literary or the scandalous. In this classic work, Paul Thompson records the life stories of some five hundred Edwardians born between 1872 and 1906 in a pioneering use of oral history, which captures a unique record of their times. Domestics, labourers, skilled and semi-skilled workers, professionals and high society men and women describe their work, their families, their politics and their leisure. The Edwardians establishes and describes the most important dimensions of social change in the early twentieth century: class structure, gender distinctions, age distinctions - urban and rural - and regional differences. It also evaluates the forces for social change in the period: economic pressures, religious and political conviction, feminism and socialism, patriotism and the war, to reveal how near and how far Edwardian society was to revolution in this time of critical social change. By giving a voice to the contribution and experience of ordinary people, Paul Thompson brings the Edwardian era vividly to life. This new edition, is substantially revised and includes a new chapter on Identity and Power, to take into account major historiographical and social changes since its publication in 1975. It has new photographs and an up-to-date bibliography.

Part I

DIMENSIONS OF INEQUALITY

1
MONEY

In the early twentieth century the open display of wealth was an essential element in the upper-class style of life. Wealth, birth and manners constituted the three prime qualifications for commanding obedience and respect from others. Although many of the rich already wintered abroad, most of their money was spent in Britain on highly visible comforts such as country houses, personal servants and lavish entertaining. And although death duties existed, they were not severe enough for tax evasion on a massive scale to have developed. Consequently we know more about the distribution of wealth in the Edwardian population than in contemporary Britain.

If we look at the raw statistics, the death duty figures for the 1900s, it appears that the richest 1 per cent of Edwardians dying owned over 40 per cent of the entire capital value left. But we can hardly rest satisfied with these figures. They underestimate the inequality for a number of reasons. To start with, they leave out nearly half of those who died, for only those who left sufficient property to make it worth while going through the process of swearing an affidavit were entered in the official returns. Chiozza Money, an Edwardian Liberal MP, made an allowance for this in his book Riches and Poverty, published in 1905, and drew his own estimate as a diagram (Figure 1.1).

But even this is an underestimate, for it fails to allow for the fact that most middle- and upper-class men did not reach their full wealth until their fifties, but younger men were less likely to die. Similarly women in general died later than men but were poorer. A later calculation based on the whole population over the age of twenty-five concludes that the top 1 per cent of Edwardians in 1911–13 owned 69 per cent of the national capital (Table 1.1).

This concentration of wealth was the highest in modern British history and probably then the highest in the western world.

It may seem that we have made too heavy weather in reaching this calculation. A few of the difficulties in making an estimate of this kind have been mentioned, because although the basic facts are stark enough it is also important to see that any attempt to make comparisons with the distribution of wealth in other countries, or with Britain today, is a hazardous business. And even if we knew that the calculations had all been made on the same age groups with the same mortality allowances, we could never be sure how many estates have succeeded in evading the tax inspectors altogether. But we shall come back to this later.

Table 1.1 Distribution of the national capital 1911–13²

Figure 1.1 Estates of rich and poor who die in an average year¹

In the Edwardian period this concentration of capital also represented a concentration of personal economic power. It was mostly held by male heads of families, and it consisted in the ownership of houses, land, railways, mines and businesses. Nine-tenths of the land was landlord-owned before 1914, rather than owner-occupied, and most of these landlords took a personal part in the administration of their property. Similarly the typical business organization was still the family firm. Employers and the self-employed made up one-eighth of the Edwardian work-force. Capital wealth thus gave direct power to employ and to sack, to protect and to evict. If the Edwardians were disturbed by the growing power of anonymous state bureaucracy and the corporate capitalism of trusts and amalgamations, which they rightly saw as portents of the future, their own world remained dominated by the individual businessman or landlord. Indeed in the countryside, even within fifty miles of London, there were estate workers whose attitude to their employers was so personal as to be almost feudal in character:

We used to live under people you know, those days…You were glad to go, to be under somebody, to feel you got somebody to cover you. You know, I couldn’t tell you what …poverty there was, really there was a terrible lot of poverty in villages…They were glad enough to go to the soup kitchen and fetch soup. They used to give out soup three days a week to the poor…I wouldn’t want to live the life over again, not those young days.³

As with the distribution of wealth, so, if a little less drastically, with the distribution of earnings. In 1913–14 the average annual earnings of occupied men and women of all classes were £80. This average was the axis of a wide span. The salary of a High Court judge, for example, was £5,000; a charwoman’s annual wage under £30. It is more illuminating, however, to divide the occupied population as a whole into groups, and compare the earnings of each group with the average, because we can then get a clear outline of the unequal distribution of earned income in terms of social class. As we shall want later on to see how much this has changed, we shall treat the overall average of £80 as 100, and express the average earnings of each group as percentages of this overall average. The result is the following table. For the present, we need only consider the first two columns:

Table 1.2 Occupational class average earnings as percentages of the average for all occupational classes, men and women, 1913–14, 1960 and 1978⁴

There are two gaps in this table. Business employers are left out altogether because their earned incomes cannot be estimated. There is also no figure for higher professional women, because women were effectively barred from most work in this category. Nevertheless a clear pattern emerges. Higher professional men as a group have a striking advantage over all others. At the other extreme, women workers of all kinds are ill rewarded. The overall average wage of occupied women is well below that of an unskilled labouring man. One can see here the economic basis for the social confidence of the Edwardian upper middle classes, and for the general social dominance of men over women. Among manual workers, too, there is a distinct grading which gave force to the superiority claimed by the craftsman over the labourer. On the other hand, it can also be seen how the gap between their incomes could easily be closed by the presence of an additional earner, whether wife or son, in the family. Lastly, there is a significant overlap between manual and non-manual workers. The poor Edwardian clerk had a lower salary than the better paid skilled man.

To make full sense of this class inequality of income we need to attach some more precise names to these broad occupational

Table 1.3 Occupational status of the occupied population, England, Wales and Scotland 1911⁵

groups. Who were they? And how numerous? The numbers can again be set out in a table.

We can see that altogether nearly a third of the Edwardian workforce consisted of women, but the women were clustered in the lower grades. Thus the top group of higher professionals, a mere 1 per cent of the entire workforce, was predictably almost entirely male: characteristically a clergyman, doctor or lawyer. The lower professional, typically a teacher, was by contrast more likely to be female. There was also a rising number of women clerks. Employers and managers were predominantly male: typically shopkeepers, followed by farmers, manufacturers and businessmen. Women in this group were mostly shop or boardinghouse keepers. Employers and managers together made up half of the non-manual workforce. Foremen were a tiny group, almost as small as higher professionals and equally male. Of manual workers, the skilled occupations consisted above all of hewing coal, textile spinning and weaving, dressmaking, engineering, carpentry and painting. There was a large group of women workers here, but still more among the semiskilled, who were typically domestic servants, agricultural labourers, horse drivers and shop assistants. Finally, the unskilled made up a smaller, largely male group of general labourers, builders’ labourers, roadmen, scavengers, and railway labourers and porters. Because it cannot allow for inherited wealth, an occupational class structure is least meaningful with the upper-most and lowest groups. Very rich men, the top 1 per cent in terms of wealth, were formally unoccupied, ‘gentlemen of independent means’. And at the other extreme very roughly 2 per cent of the population lived on the very barest resources, because the breadwinner of the family was too sick to work, or dead.

Here then are the bare economic foundations of inequality in early twentieth-century Britain. But how did such inequality affect Edwardian lives?

2
SUSTENANCE

The Edwardian well-to-do could literally look down on their social inferiors. They not only had the better of life, but they had more of it. They ate more, grew more and lived longer. Expectation of life in middle-class Hampstead was fifty years at birth, but in working-class Southwark only thirty-six years. In Edinburgh, Manchester and many other cities the general death rates for the most prosperous wards were half those of the poorest. You were four times more likely to develop tuberculosis in central Birmingham than in well-to-do suburban Edgbaston. The inequality, moreover, began at birth. In a healthy middle-class suburb, ninety-six of every hundred infants born would survive their first year of life. In a bad slum district, one in every three would be dead.

Some of the most striking facts emerged as a result of new assessments in these years. When conscription was introduced during the First World War, it was found that four out of five recruits had such bad teeth that they could not eat properly, and scarcely a third of all adult men could be classified as having a full normal standard of health and strength. The new school medical services similarly revealed that one in every six children was so undernourished, verminous or suffering from defective teeth, skin or eyes, as to be incapable of benefiting educationally from school attendance. And when they lined up the schoolchildren and measured them, it was found time and again that children from overcrowded homes were likely to be on average as much as ten pounds less in weight and five inches less in height than those from adequate dwellings, and middle-class children taller again.

In the poorest families the children usually went barefoot in summer and relied on police and other charities to find them boots to go to school. Their clothes were either hand-me-downs, or bought secondhand at rag markets and cheap sales. Their parents might have a best suit for weekends, but it was likely to be kept at the pawnbroker’s during the week. The normal working-class family, at least in the towns, would be rather better provided than this. They would be able to buy new shoes and at least one complete set of new clothes each, even if weekday clothes would often be second-hand. The mass production of boot and clothing factories, selling their wares through multiple chain stores, had already found a growing working-class market. The well-paid craftsman, like the clerk, was likely to possess a good hat as well, and a fancy waistcoat on which to display his watch chain. But if this distanced him effectively from the ragged street urchin it was nothing to the equipment of the well-to-do.

It is hardly surprising that in an age which favoured conspicuous consumption by the rich, wealthy ladies were dressed with extraordinary expense, elaboration and variety. Their personal dressmakers and tailors supplied them with different clothes for morning, afternoon and evening; for teas, garden parties and balls; for being in the house, or going out shopping; for the sea, for motoring, for cycling or walking; for marriage and for mourning. With her abundant fur and lace trimmings and real or artificial flowers, and her giant hats, resting on hair constructions so ingeniously built up upon pads and wire frames that she was helpless in dressing without the personal assistance of a servant, the Edwardian lady was a triumph of artificiality and concealment. Conversely, rustling in her petticoats, tightly laced to throw out a grand, mature bosom, or, as fashion changed, helpless in a hobble skirt, she was clearly in a full sense an object of conspicuous consumption.

The Edwardian gentleman, too, needed a full wardrobe: a tweed suit for the country, frock coat for business, dinner jacket for the evening at home, tail coat for going out, and a series of boots, shirts, cuffs and waistcoats of different styles to match. Gentlemen required special clothes for motoring, bicycling, yachting and other pastimes. They had to take notice of remarkably fine distinctions as to what dress was, or was not, appropriate for a particular moment. Brown boots, for example, could be worn at Ascot, but no nearer town. Like blue spotted ties, they were for country wear. In London itself one had to be careful in case one’s dress was right for the place but wrong for the moment. In the park of a summer morning lounge suits and straw hats, Homburgs or bowlers, are very popular, and in summer quite as common as the regular silk hat and frock-coat.’ advised the author of Etiquette for Men. ‘But this is all changed with the luncheon hour. After that a frock, or morning coat, and silk hat should be worn, or the grey frock-coat suit.’¹

All this elaborate concern with clothing required not only spare time and cash on the part of the Edwardian lady and gentleman, but also sustained luxury trades, such as West End hatters and bespoke tailors, more in the style of personal service than manufacture. A London hatter, Fred Willis, remembers the difficult art of selling his wares to an aristocrat. The process began with a session trying on the newest hat fashions:

‘You can take it! You just leave it to me, m’Lord, I’ll work out a specification and we can consider it together. I’ll let you know what I suggest when you are next in the shop.’ My lord removes the new hat thankfully…Several solemn conferences followed in which it was decided that there would be russia leather and moiré silk lining, grease-proof band, reinforced brim, half-an-inch gauze vent in the crown, half-and-half binding, two-inch mourning band, and swansdown forehead pad. A new cast was taken and the order, which looked like a specification for a jet aeroplane on the secret list, was dispatched to the factory. In a week it materialized and was delivered to us, swinging in a hammock of superfine white paper, slung in a virgin white box bearing our name in small, modest black lettering, the coat of arms, and the magic words ‘By Appointment to the King’. Then followed the really tricky part of the business, which made even the strongest hatters turn pale—the ‘trying-on’…²

As with clothing, so with food: the contrasts again run from luxurious personal service to less than the bare essentials. In his study of poverty in York, Seebohm Rowntree found 28 per cent of the city’s population living below the nutritional standard which he calculated as necessary to maintain mere physical health. The proportion of school children in this situation was higher still, perhaps 40 per cent, because a single manual worker’s wage was simply not sufficient to maintain a large family. Among the working classes a majority could in fact expect to experience poverty at three points in their lives. The first was in childhood, until they themselves or their brothers or sisters began to earn. A period of relative comfort would then follow, lasting into the first years of marriage. They would then sink back into poverty again as their family of young children grew. Once the children were old enough to work, the situation would again improve. Finally, as they grew old and sick in later years, poverty would strike again. Rowntree expressed these alternating periods of want and comparative plenty in a diagram (Figure 2.1):

The worst effects of this cycle could in theory be escaped by the exercise of uncommon restraint. On a typical manual worker’s wage, provided that the number of children did not rise above four (the national average for couples married in the 1890s) and that almost nothing was spent on drink or other pleasures, it

Figure 2.1 The poverty cycle³

was just possible to feed the whole family adequately. An a...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• DEDICATION
• PLATES
• PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
• PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: DIMENSIONS OF INEQUALITY
• PART II: EDWARDIANS
• PART III: INSTRUMENTS OF CHANGE
• PART IV: THE OUTCOME
• NOTES
• NOTE ON FURTHER READING