By the end of July the combined effects of lack of rain and scorching sun had resulted in a dangerous scarcity of grass for herds and flocks. Pastures had turned brown. Farmers were being forced to raise the price of milk. On 28 July the nature correspondent of The Times reported that even in the deepest, most sheltered lanes it was impossible to find green leaves and with a note of despair that ‘the crannies and rifts in walled Sussex hedgerows where one looks for rare ferns and other treasures hold only handfuls of dry dust’. Nor was that all: ‘The most sorrowful sign of all is the silence of the singing birds. July is never a very musical month. This year however all the sylvan music has been mute. The silence of a parched countryside.’

  The Royal family’s tour had come to an end and Queen Alexandra was established for the late summer months in the big house at Sandringham. The London social season had long been over, apart from the odd July wedding (Viscount Anson, son of the Earl of Lichfield, had married in splendour at St Margaret’s, Westminster) and a grand memorial service (for the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire at All Saints, Margaret Street, after she died of a seizure at Sandown races). The social press had been full of announcements: the Begum of Bhopal had left England to travel but would return to India for the Delhi Durbar later in the year; the Duke of Hamilton had left London for Hamilton; the Earl of Minto was on his way to Minto in Roxburghshire; and Sir E.P. Morris, Premier of Newfoundland, had left Liverpool for home by steamer. On 17 July, as the rich were leaving London to enjoy themselves, Canon H.S. Holland sent a letter to The Times reminding readers of the ‘Factory Girls Country Holiday Fund’ and appealing to their charitable instincts: ‘How can we better relieve our hearts of the excess of our thanksgivings’, he asked, ‘than by letting loose into those delicious fields and woods the poor girls who are cooped up in London workshops slaving for our needs.’

  But the increasingly troubling situation both in the docks and on the North African coast demanded that Members of Parliament and George V (who had been looking forward to some racing at Goodwood) defer their holidays. On 21 July Lloyd George as Chancellor made an unexpected speech at The Mansion House in which he stepped out of his domestic role in the Cabinet to comment on the continuing German aggression towards the French in Morocco and – what was perhaps more sig-nificant – on the German expectation that England would leave France to handle her aggressor alone. ‘I say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure,’ he thundered. The speech was received with surprise and dismay in Berlin, and the next day Sir Edward Grey told the Cabinet he had just received ‘a communication from the German ambassador so stiff that the British fleet may be attacked at any moment.’ The Army and Navy were alerted immediately, and the tunnels and bridges of the South Eastern and Chatham Railway lines were guarded day and night.

  Meanwhile the Parliament Bill intended to curtail the powers of the House of Lords, and ease the passage of Asquith’s and Lloyd George’s Liberal reforms, had been causing havoc in both chambers, and the question of Home Rule in Ireland had further divided Conservatives and Liberals. The majority of the Conservative party, the Conservative peers in particular, had long been determined to prevent the granting of Irish Home Rule, seeing it as a threatened erosion of British power. If Ireland were to break away from the control of central Government, from what quarter might the next bid for freedom come? A group of cross-party MPs opposed to Home Rule (the majority of them Conservative) led by the future Prime Minister AndrewBonar Law joined together, calling themselves the Unionist Party. Asquithwas in a difficult position. Not a keen advocate of Irish Home Rule himself, during the last election he had nevertheless promised John Redmond, leader of the Irish Nationalist Party, that he would advance his case for Home Rule in exchange for Redmond’s support for the LiberalGovernment. The passing of the Parliament Act, Asquith told Redmond, and with it the limiting of the Lords’ voting powers, would ensure the passage of the legislation with little objection. On 21 July the Duke of Devonshire noted in his diary that his father-in-law, Lord Lansdowne, had shown him a letter that the Conservative leader Balfour had received from Asquith, warning him that ‘the King had agreed to the tactical move of creating the extra peers. St Albans, Curzon, Harris, Galway and myself for moderation, Selborne, Salisbury, Halsbury, Somerset for extreme steps. Norfolk and Bedford moderate.’

  On Monday 24 July Asquith went to the House to announce that to force the Bill through he had been promised the King’s cooperation in creating four hundred extra Liberal peers. New members of the House of Lords would include the writer J.M. Barrie, the playwright Bernard Shaw and the novelist Thomas Hardy. Cries of ‘traitor’and ‘divide’ drowned the Prime Minister’s speech and he flung down his notes, declaring as loudly as he could, ‘I am not going to degrade myself by addressing an Opposition which is obviously determined not to listen to me.’As he tried to return to his seat, therewas ‘a fearful uproar’. The Duke of Devonshire thought the behaviour of the ‘Ditchers’ of the Bill a ‘great mistakemorally and strategically’. Writing to his wife Evie at Chatsworth he concluded: ‘People are nearly off their heads. Really Hugh Cecil and Co. ought to be ashamed of themselves and what a scorn for the government. This sort of conduct must do untold harm in the country.’On 26 July The Times published a letter from Mr Lockwood, Conservative MP for West Essex, in which he disassociated himself from those of his party members who had in his view behaved in an ‘unseemly and indecent way to the PM’.

  The proposed National Insurance Act was also being debated in both Houses almost daily during those July weeks, the most important of a series of reforms for the disadvantaged put forward by Lloyd George. Under the terms of the proposed Act, which would provide medical treatment and sickness benefit to millions, the Government would contribute 2d. a week, employees 4d. a week, and employers 3d. The Act was a favourite topic of discussion in the servants’ hall that summer. Eric considered the whole thing ‘a farce as far as servants are concerned’, and detected ‘a false sense of security being offered. If a servant does not feel well, can he or she join up in the queue to see the doctor at 9 a.m. or at 6 p.m., the surgery hours?’ he asked sceptically, and provided the answer: ‘they may do it once, but will soon get the order of the “Boot” as the gentry will not have unhealthy servants in their houses.’ At no level of society could sympathy in another person’s ailments be guaranteed, and Eric knew of one cook who had ordered a girl with a sprained ankle to come downstairs. ‘You’ll come down to your meals, my girl,’ she cried, ‘if not on your feet, on your bottom.’

  Objections to the compulsory contribution by anyone earning under £160 sometimes had the unintended effect of narrowing the gulf between employee and his mistress. For all his cynicism Eric was prepared to admit, albeit reluctantly, that the necessary familiarity of the servant/master relationship sometimes created a beneficial dependency of servant on master. Servants expected to be taken care of when they fell ill, as part of their employment perks, and the resentment felt by employers at the prospect of the enforced contributions was often subtly disguised by encouraging staff to believe they might be worse off if responsibility for their welfare was taken out of employers’ hands and transferred to the state. The leading society hostess Lady Desart was planning a demonstration in November in the Albert Hall, at which she hoped to gather up to 20,000 servants and employers to protest against the impending destruction of ‘that beautiful intimacy which had hitherto so often existed between mistress and servants.’

  The Daily Mail, a newspaper with no sympathies for the German way of thinking, frequently reproduced in its pages the German version of the national insurance card, to demonstrate how low England would sink. Futhermore, the paper argued, the exchange of cards containing stamps licked by employees or employers suffering from consumption, diphtheria, smallpox or scarlet fever might result in a series of terrible epidemics. Eric well knew that ‘gentry didn’t like servants being ill or dying in their houses’, but there was some truth in the argument that loyal staff were treated well. Lord Willoughby de Broke at Compton Verney guaranteed his staff ‘a certainty of employment for as long as they chose to work’, and they were to be ‘looked after when sick and pensioned when they could work no longer.’ He explained his belief that ‘There was a mutual bond of affection that has existed between their families and the families of their employer, a bond that cannot be valued in terms of money.’ Since the middle of the nineteenth century each outgoing headmaster at the village school of Edensor, attended by the children of Chatsworth estate workers, had been guaranteed an annual pension of a third of his salary. The cook of a house was frequently a dispenser to ailing fellow-servants of home-made medicines, including rosemary paste for eczema, an infusion of honeysuckle for asthma, elderflower tea for throat infections, a poultice made from the flowers of golden rod for arthritis, and sage for menstrual pains and nervous anxiety. At Longleat, medicinal drinks and beef tea were provided especially if the wage earner was indisposed. And Eric’s hard-hearted cook was probably the exception: mutual compassion in the servant community was not uncommon. The butler at Cliveden was appalled by the demands imposed on the scullery maids, whom he thought ‘poor little devils washing up and scrubbing away, their hands red raw with the soda.’

  On 22 July Mr Henry Rundle from Southsea pointed out in a letter to The Times that servants working in a doctor’s family would be attended by their employer, so he and his staff should be exempted from paying the tax. Diana Manners knew that her father the Duke of Rutland believed making employers responsible for servants paying their contributions would ‘disrupt the harmony between servant and employer’. He and many others felt the collection of the tax should be administered directly by the State. Mrs Havelock Ellis suggested the setting-up of a central Domestic Service, by means of which the supply of servants could be regulated by the State. Not that employers were universally benevolent. Eric’s own father had also been in service, and had been killed when a heavy load from a crane fell on top of him, driving his ribs into his lungs and killing him instantly. There was no insurance policy to cover accidental death, and Eric considered the family lucky that The Foresters Club paid the £12 to cover the funeral expenses.

  By the end of the month The Times was thinking of discontinuing their ‘Deaths from Heat’ column – not because such deaths were no longer occurring, but rather because their frequency meant they were no longer particularly newsworthy. On Thursday 27 July hailstones fell in London. Balls of ice weighing up to a pound hurtled from a blue sky towards the earth at ninety miles an hour. The stones fell so thickly and the subsequent rain storm was so dense that all traffic was halted at The Mansion House, London’s (and the country’s) largest and busiest traffic interchange. On the last day of July a great wind accompanied by a huge dust cloud swept along the Welsh coast, and clothes left on the seashore by bathers were blown away.

  The dockers’ dispute which had begun in June in Southampton and spread to other docks in the North of England had been temporarily settled at the end of that month, but now the threat of strike action erupted again. On Friday 28 July the London dockers had a meeting with the dock owners in Mile End Road and a rally in Trafalgar Square, and were persuaded to call a temporary halt to their action. The dockers in Cardiff and Tilbury were also back at work, and it seemed to the dock owners that the angry mood of the men was being gradually defused. With cautious relief the King finally left London for Cowes, and Balfour went off to the Continent, but Lloyd George and Winston Churchill did not yet feel the political situation was stable enough to allow them to leave the city. Churchill was disappointed not to be joining his children and Clemmie in building sandcastles on the beach in Kent, but took comfort in the knowledge that the new swimming pool and beautiful Turkish steam room at the RAC Club would provide the three perspiring MPs of Eccleston Square with some relief from the heat.

  8

  Early August

  There is an imminent danger of famine and the whole thing is as insanely foolish as it is wicked.

  The Times, 9 August 1911

  AT THE BEGINNING of August the constitutional health of England was beginning to falter badly in the continuing heat. Only at the London Zoo in Regent’s Park were there any signs of enjoyment of the oppressive temperatures. Although the keepers’ thick uniforms had been replaced with special lightweight jackets their charges were thriving in the heat wave. The lion cubs, cheetahs, leopards and jackals in the King’s Collection had become unusually active and the lordly ungulates, the rhinoceros and giraffe, strode round their enclosures happier than they had been since leaving the large sunny plains of their homelands.

  The Royal party had arrived at Cowes for the Regatta, ‘an enchanting picture of gleaming sails and gently swaying masts’, and the King and the Prince of Wales had taken to cooling themselves with a pre-breakfast swim in Osborne Bay. But the press had quickly discovered this secluded place, and as cameramen jostled to get their shots of the sovereign and his heir in bathing dress, a statement was issued by Buckingham Palace: ‘If less objectionable behaviour is not observed by the photographers they are warned that steps will be taken to stop the nuisance.’

  Many miles from the seashore, an infinitely more newsworthy if less obviously photogenic sequence of events was taking place. In London on the first day of the month the temperature maintained a steady 81 degrees, and just as the dock owners were hoping that the strike action of earlier in the summer was a thing of the past, between four and five thousand men employed in the Victoria and Albert Docks stopped work, and the place was at a standstill. For a day or two the Government seemed not to notice, all its attention concentrated on the Parliament Bill scheduled to pass through the House of Lords on 10 August. The King, away at the seaside, was also oblivious of the true seriousness of the developments at the docks.

  Among the seven hundred families that owned a quarter of the country there was a colossal ignorance of the problems facing the poor, who were ubiquitous but required to be invisible. In the words of E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End, they had become ‘unthinkable and only to be approached by the statistician or the poet.’ The anger felt by the under-classes was not directed solely at those men whose names were synonymous with whole counties and were attempting to hold on to the lands and privileges enjoyed by their families for several centuries – it was aimed equally at the new breed of millionaire, the industrialists of the great English towns who ran the pits, the docks and the railways and amassed great wealth and power, but were indifferent to the fortunes of those individuals whose hard work had built their empires. Increasingly the vocal and physical activities of the trade unions seemed to be the only way of improving wages and conditions. Ben Tillett, co-founder in 1910 of the weighty and powerful National Transport Workers’ Federation (which included the dock workers) and one of the most powerful union men alive, was an advocate of the effectiveness of strike action.

  Poor pay and lack of job security, the two main grievances in the docks, meant that groups of able-bodied men standing listless on street corners for several hours a day, waiting for the chance of employment, had long been a familiar sight in London, Liverpool, Hull and all the other main British ports. If a man was lucky enough to find a week’s work, at sixpence an hour, his take home pay might amount to as little as £1 5s. – often only enough to rent one room for an entire family. It no longer seemed tolerable to live in this way. The acute anguish felt in being poor, of a working life spent either under-employed or without any prospect of work at all, had been gathering momentum, and in the overwhelming heat of an unnaturally warm English summer it swelled into a tidal wave of anger and resolve. A guaranteed job with a minimum wage of eightpence an hour, plus overtime rates of up to a shilling, became the common goal.

  The banks of the Thames, usually a scurrying, seething ant-hill of activity with men coming and going about the business of the dockyard, suddenly fell still, and the immense black doors at the entrance to the docks were swung shut. Cranes and jibs and loads stood motionless; as Ben Tillett observed, ‘the coughings and hoarse mumblings of machinery ceased.’

  The largest mechanical sign in Europe, the electrically-wired metal figure of a Brobdingnagian Scotsman in kilt and criss-crossed patterned socks that towered above the London Wharf, a huge glass of Dewar’s whisky in his hand, seemed a cruel taunt, reminding the thousands of men below that even had they been able to afford a drink, there was nothing in their lives worth celebrating. Persistently over that summer of 1911 the DailyMail, priced at only half a penny and with a circulation of three-quarters of a million readers, many of them among the poorerworkers, had emphasised the chasm between the champagne-drinkers and the thirsty have-nots of London. Ben Tillett later recognised this as a summer in which ‘the dispossessed and the disinherited class in various parts of the country were all simultaneously moved to assert their claims upon society.’

  The working man’s weekly budget, precariously balanced even in a full working week, was dangerously threatened by the slightest unforeseen event; injury, the birth of another child and redundancy were its severest enemies. A voluntary strike backed by an uncertain and paltry strike fund meant no money at all. A striker in 1911 might with some justification be accused of foolhardiness, but never of lacking courage. For the first few days of August the men of the docks relied on their wives and daughters to earn enough money for rent and food. But as Emmeline Pankhurst, who with her daughter Christabel was leading the struggle to win voting rights for women, was so emphatically demonstrating, female tolerance of unfairness would not endure indefinitely.