A Mortal Wound

The myth of the golden years before the First World War, brought to a tragic and unforeseen end by that war’s outbreak, lingers on despite all the evidence produced by subsequent historians to show how dangerously shaky were the foundations of that apparent stability. In 1936 when The Strange Death of Liberal England was published, George Dangerfield’s picture of the years from 1910 to 1914 was startlingly original. It was also astonishingly well written, which was probably one of the reasons why it made very little stir at the time, since so serious a reassessment might not have been expected to find its expression in such apparently genial mockery and in passages of quite such bravura prose.

Here we have the Prime Minister alone on the deck of the Admiralty yacht Enchantress being hastened back from his intended holiday in the Mediterranean because Edward VII has a chill. At three o’clock in the morning he receives by cable the news of the King’s death. He paces the deck, ‘the only visible human being within the ghostly margins of sea and sky’, gazing up at Halley’s Comet ‘which, visiting the European heavens but once in a century, had arrived with appalling promptness to blaze forth the death of a king’. We are immediately drawn into the drama, but we are not allowed to over-romanticize. Mr Asquith is essentially a prosaic character, we are told, as he stands there thinking kindly of the late king, a moderate man, even perhaps extravagantly moderate, but he is going home to face four of the most immoderate years in English history, at the end of which the Liberal Party which he leads with such calm assurance will have been dealt a mortal wound. So we have our plot. The House of Lords now threatens to veto the budget, industrial unrest reaches unprecedented heights, the Suffragettes become increasingly militant and there is the threat of civil war in Ireland. An oddly un-English, excitable, even neurotic atmosphere develops, inducing a cast of highly coloured characters to behave in an increasingly dramatic manner. Here is Lord Halsbury, whose ‘little body, large head and enormous mouth gave him a curious resemblance to Tenniel’s picture of Lewis Carroll’s Duchess’. There is Lord Willoughby de Broke, ‘whose face bore a pleasing resemblance to the horse, an animal which his ancestors had bred and bestridden since the days before Bosworth Field’, who ‘had quite a gift for writing, thought clearly, and was not more than two hundred years behind his time’. His role was to rally the ‘backwoodsmen’, those Tory peers who had seldom if ever visited London, let alone the House of Lords itself, and who must now be marshalled to oppose the Parliament Act which would in effect remove the power of the aristocracy. They are supported in the Commons by F. E. Smith, dazzlingly elegant, brilliantly witty and widely distrusted. In the debate during which Mr Asquith announces that King George has agreed to create enough new peers to ensure the passage of the Bill, the Prime Minister is humiliatingly shouted down. Mrs Asquith, watching from the Ladies’ Gallery, scribbles a note to Sir Edward Grey: ‘For God’s sake save him from the cats and the cads.’ The Government wins its vote but it has needed the support of the Irish members, and the Irish members want something in return. Up comes F. E. Smith again, opposing Home Rule for all Ireland on behalf of the Ulstermen, who are prepared to resist it to the death. There is a tremendous meeting at Blenheim with many wild speeches. Mr Asquith calls the whole thing a ‘reckless rodomontade’ and points out that in ignoring the edicts of a democratically elected government the Ulstermen are advocating anarchy. But the militant spirit has spread. The movement for women’s suffrage brings the Pankhurst family on to the stage, frail Mrs Pankhurst, widow of a Lancashire lawyer of left-wing leanings, her more robust daughter Christabel and her determinedly socialist daughter Sylvia. The West End of London resounds to the smashing of glass, there is even a campaign of arson. Women are imprisoned, go on hunger-strike and are forcibly fed, with inevitable cruelty and dreadful suffering. Christabel becomes more authoritarian, Sylvia increasingly moved by the plight of the poor. The poor themselves are less concerned with the vote than with the fall in real wages. One strike after another expresses a new spirit of aggression on the part of the workers; Liberalism is not responding. It begins to seem that the miners, the railwaymen and the transport workers might combine and call a General Strike. And what if that should coincide with civil war in Ireland? Senior officers in the British Army stationed at the Curragh threaten to refuse to fight against the Ulster Volunteers, whose express purpose is to resist the imposition of Home Rule. This amounts to mutiny, the first since 1688. The Ulster Volunteers meanwhile smuggle a large number of guns and ammunition from Germany into the coastal town of Larne. The Government pronounces this an outrage and promises instant and effective action. Nothing happens. But something else quite unexpected does happen, in Sarajevo, and suddenly we have Sir Edward Grey saying that the lamps are going out all over Europe. With surprising alacrity England becomes one nation again. Describing all this in 1936, George Dangerfield sets out his thesis that the old Liberal establishment, ‘supported by Free Trade, a majority in Parliament, the ten commandments, and the illusion of progress’, had perished – possibly by suicide – in those few years before the outbreak of war. ‘And a good thing too,’ he writes in his foreword. Because he is not nostalgic and his book is not a threnody. Perhaps that is why its tone, even when describing dire events, remains in its ironical way so cheerful. I first read the book at quite an early age, having picked it up by chance. I was immediately seduced by the style, in turn funny, acute and lyrical, and charmed by the idea that if you were dealing with facts you did not necessarily have to dispense with fancy. History, according to George Dangerfield, is a matter of scholarship, judgement and finally imagination. It is as if having built a solid structure of fact and supposition you send in your imagination to ask what it was really like, to give it all what he calls the reality of fiction. I still have the copy I first read; it belonged to my father. He was involved in politics for much of his life (though not always on the same side) and though I know he much admired the book, there are two marginalia, written I suppose seventy years or so ago but with an enviably sharp pencil. By a paragraph about the Liberals’ indecision in negotiations with the trades unions he has written disapprovingly ‘Very Misleading’, and where the middle classes are said to have looked on the workers of England with ‘a jaundiced, a fearful, a vindictive gaze’ he has written firmly ‘Rot!’ Even so, it is still the most exhilarating history book I have ever read; and when, much later, having written some fiction with a contemporary background, I found that I wanted to look backwards, it was to the nervily unstable atmosphere that Dangerfield conveys so brilliantly. His book underlay all that I read elsewhere. It also coloured my recollections of scraps of conversation with my mother whose first husband was killed in 1914 after only a year of marriage. She had died by the time I started to write about that period so I had only echoes to go on. But the imagination feeds well on echoes.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 39 © Isabel Colegate 2013