For All We Have and Are: Britain in the Great War - (1901 Series)

[BigBadBob]

The british embrace or rarher succumb to the City being at the top who owns the lot. Now begins the race for the estates. Who is going to figure out how to keep them, who is going to lose everything, and is there going to be a mass public freak out and various trusts swooping in to save these properties or not?

Also, this is the death knell of victorian Britain. The landed nobility are on the way out, both economically and in goverment. The financial sector is ascendant and possess a stranglehold on much regarding government policy. And the war looms, threatening the final end of the age of confidence and security.

One needs status, the other money. Unfortunately for the landed nobility, while the City only needs to gain the former once, they will very much continue to need new injections of the latter.

It is very much the end of an era.

Brunel's career seems absolutely fascinating. I really am not sure whose career in OTL might be closest. It's such a strange beast I am not at all surprised his time has been hard for future historians to pin down.

Also, I have to enquire if it was intentional that this passage was written by an Iain Banks - given the Iain Banks of our world was something of a socialist in his politics it is quite fun to see his name here talking about the City and Gentry.

He would also definitely end up as one of those figures that isn't a well-known character amongst the general public (Asquith and Sinclair would almost certainly be the PMs that people might still remember from history class), but is completely inescapable when you delve even a little further into the era.

It was actually unintentional. Using Banks was intentional, as a very simple 'essay dealing with the City written by a man named Banks' joke. I did think 'Iain Banks' sounded familiar when I settled on the first name. Clearly, my subconscious has a much keener sense of irony than I do.

As ever well written @BigBadBob, I feel a tad sympathetic with Brunel, oddly.

It does feel like that, and it feels that it's happening earlier than OTL.

Thank you.

Much of the underlying development is actually the same as IOTL, but the early arrival of the welfare state and the Federation Debate, by poking at the divisions of the new, amalgamated upper class, have made it somewhat clearer to the groups involved ITTL.

I can understand well enough how the landed gentry and aristocracy secured their influence, but the City is a subject on which I am forced to admit total and utter bafflement. Still, having their lot in the ascendant doesn't inspire in me all that much hope about the future course of Britain. (I suppose you might've guessed this…)

I'll also echo the fascination with Brunel, and might perhaps suggest Haussmann as the closest thing to an analogue.

I too was going to ask if you had the writer in mind, @BigBadBob.

C.R.E.A.M! Credit Rules Everything Around Me!

As the spiritual and aristocratic, landed elite lose their power of compulsion (be it through secularisation or urbanisation) in an increasingly industrialised, post-Enlightenment society, power concentrates in the hands of those who have the ability to raise vast sums of money with which to replace spiritual/social reward. Really, the City has been ascendant since the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Financial Revolution that followed it. Arguably, it was the ability to raise debt at far higher levels than France that won Britain the Second Hundred Years' War. As long as the Channel prevented outright invasion, Britain could fund both itself and its allies until the French lost on the field or collapsed under the weight of their own debt burden.

The Brunel family have fallen on dark times if they are reduced to being politicians.

Then again they pretty much vanished from history after Marc in OTL so perhaps that was the price of survival. Still a bit of steep price.

As mentioned a sense of transition, but one that will be catastrophically interrupted by the much threatened Great War.

Fading into obscurity, or becoming a politician? It truly is Sophie's Choice.

I'm very glad to see all the interest in Brunel. He was odd to write in that, since the point of his time in government was to not do much (and in opposition to prevent doing much), there wasn't much to say about him in the context of each issue. Yet, with his tenure at the head of one of the main parties, he would have been completely insecapable to contemporaries. This essay provided a nice way to put him in the context of the time.

Not named by Brunel. Despite the convention.

Hahah!

 

[BigBadBob]

NO SOCIALISTS NEED APPLY
Labour, Organised and Otherwise, in the Wake of National Insurance
Georgia Hynes-Coulson​

The three National Insurance Acts – (Unemployment), (Pensions), and (Health), all 1893 – along with the Working Conditions Act 1894 may have temporarily killed Labour electorally, but they did not kill Labour as an organisation, and organised labour much less so. In many ways, Sinclairism after the victories of the National Insurance Acts 1893 and the Working Conditions Act was an effort to take the battle yet further to Labour as a movement and the trade unions. Arguably, the trade unions themselves had their golden age thanks to Sinclairism’s efficient removal of the challenge that a more powerful parliamentary labour movement would have posed.

The unions themselves certainly saw a golden age in the offing after the Summer of 1892. It was they, not Labour, that had forced the creation of National Insurance through strike action. Many union bosses, in fact, held a grudge over Angus McDonald’s famous speaking tour over the course of that summer. As far as they were concerned, it had taken attention off the real success of the unions and strikers.

Armed with proof that they could change something as big as government policy, the unions became much more likely to call for strike action. In 1891, there were 79 work stoppages recorded by the Statistics Office. In 1893-97, the nation averaged 183 such stoppages a year. Each stoppage tended to play out in the same way.

The workers would make demands for better pay or benefits. The company would argue that National Insurance and the Working Conditions Act were already taking them to the brink. The workers would call for a strike. Previously, this would have resulted in firings, with the union therefore having to have the contributions built up to support the workers through the strike. Now, with National Insurance, employers would keep people on the payroll without pay, so as to keep NI payments from helping the employees with their strike. More often than not, it was the unions who then had to find the middle-ground.

Harry Burns, President of the Textile Workers’ Union, 1896
Burns, dressed in a boater hat, arrives at the ’96 Liverpool Strike. Pre-War, Burns faced the unenviable task of trying to balance the demands of textile workers with the reality of brutal competition from abroad​

If there was any union that had the worst of the strikes under early Sinclairism, it was the Textile Workers’ Union. Textiles tended to be one of the first industries to grow in newly industrialising nations, and Germany, the US, France, and – by the mid-1900s – even Italy and Russia had all developed textile sectors of their own. With this competition, more and more mills failed, and what was left became increasingly consolidated. The man who would have to shoulder the immense task of reconciling genuinely deteriorating conditions for the industry with demands by workers to match the pay and benefits gains their compatriots in other industries were making was Harry Burns.

Elected to the TWU Presidency in 1889, Burns would preside over a period that coincided with the final defeat of the British textiles industry. By the time he retired in 1907, it would have fallen from competing with the Americans and Germans, to, in practice, a specialist industry. No longer would Britain clothe much of the world, but increasingly move into clothing that relied on prestige and craftsmanship for its sales. Its future was with the elite of the world, those who travelled from as far afield as New York to get a suit from Savile Row, and what little of the domestic market was not swamped by cheap German and American imports. Burns himself seems to have realised the way the winds were blowing around the Turn of the Century.

In the 1890s, no industry went on strike as often as textiles. Burns would almost always be handling a strike somewhere, and three times – in 1892 (along with most industries), 1895, and 1898 – he dealt with a general TWU strike. The abject failure of the last of these, with three more major textiles companies going under, and no concessions from the rest before fear brought the strikers back, seems to have broken Burns. From then, until retirement, TWU leadership would side more consistently with employers in negotiations than strikers, and the TWU’s involvement in buyout negotiations tended to be less about resisting the buyout than resisting the usual, commensurate firings.

Edward Macnaghten, Baron Macnaghten, 1898,
Lord Macnaghten delivered the judgement in the Taff Vale Case that led to the passage of the Trade Disputes and Unions Act 1902​

If Burns still had hope after the third strike though, the Taff Vale decision surely killed it. In that landmark decision, the Law Lords ruled that unions were liable for loss of profits due to strike action. In the leading opinion, Lord Macnaghten held that:

The substantial question, therefore, as [Justice Farwell, first judge to try the Case] put it, is this: Has the Legislature authorized the creation of numerous bodies of men capable of owning great wealth and of acting by agents with absolutely no responsibility for the wrongs they may do to other persons by the use of that wealth and the employment of those agents? In my opinion, Parliament has done nothing of the kind. I cannot find anything in the Act of 1850, from beginning to end, to warrant or suggest such a notion.​

The decision was a nightmare for the unions. A strike would, essentially, cost them twice; once in support for the members, and another time for losses incurred by the company (which, of course, would have little incentive to give in). The case had finally wound its way through the courts to the Lords, after many similar attempts, because the actions of the two largest unions, the National Miners’ and Amalgamated Railway Workers’, had finally driven the government to support the efforts of a plaintiff.

Initially, the miners and railway workers had been some of the less militant of the unions, both being included in the NI system from the get-go and - unlike the textile workers - not facing significant competition from abroad. The NMU, however, became ever more militant under its new leader from 1894, the former Labour MP Iain Hardie. So consistently winning its own disputes, it began to launch sympathy strikes to support others, and so begin to draw the government into them, as the NMU threatened to shut down the country over smaller and smaller industries.

The ARWU meanwhile, was pushed towards action by the process by which the various railway companies merged into what was, by 1897, known as the Big Four. As the railways merged, their bargaining power grew, and strikes risked far more of the nation’s infrastructure. In late 1897, all this reached its natural conclusion when the ARWU’s strike over a pay dispute with the Taff Vale Railway (a subsidiary of Great Western) spread to the entire big four through the union, and was joined by the NMU in a sympathy strike.

Unwilling to reopen the Trade Unions Act 1849 while he needed his political capital to reorient the UK to France and the US, Chamberlain instead, along with the Big Four and numerous mining concerns, backed the Taff Vale Railway’s case against the ARWU. Where previously the government had informally asked the Court of Appeals to let the many cases ruling against companies stand, in order to avoid another fight with the increasingly aggressive unions after 1892, they now said nothing. On August 12th, 1899, the ruling finally came down in favour of the Taff Vale Railway.

Gerald Balfour, 1st Baron Balfour, 1900
As President of the Board of Trade, Balfour pushed through the Trade Disputes and Unions Act 1902​

The ruling caused an immediate backlash. While it hadn’t managed to cut through with less than a year and under the pressure of the debate on Splendid Isolation by the election of 1900, by 1901, it was becoming clear in by-elections that Labour would soon be gaining seats. The unions were making it clear that they could not afford strikes due to the ruling, and for collective bargaining to return in any effective manner, the law would have to allow more than the formation of a union. With both Liberal and Conservative leaderships hoping for Labour’s fortunes to remain limited, the Trade Disputes and Unions Bill entered parliament almost certain to pass in some form or other.

Its main purpose was twofold, to overturn Taff Vale, and to limit the ability of the unions to strike by other means. Crossbench co-operation was made necessary by the hardcore backbenchers of the two parties. The Conservatives’ wished to remove the overruling of Taff Vale, while the Liberals’ wished to maintain far more leeway for strike action. For the latter, the fear was that being tied to these restrictions would see them lose their left flank to Labour, while gaining nothing from the right.

The restrictions that eventually became part of the bill required that a strike be directly tied to an existing process of employer-union bargaining that had failed, and sympathy strikes were made illegal if not accompanied by a poll of all union members in which at least half approved. Having an entire union like the AWSU participate in the strike, rather than just the members involved in a specific dispute, was also classed as a sympathy strike. What was unexpected though, was the restriction on union donations. As what the government called ‘increasingly semi-political’ organisations, trade union donations to political causes or parties would now be limited to 3% of revenue in a financial year, and would have to be fully declared.

Ramsay MacDonald, 1906
Son of Angus MacDonald, Ramsay took over the party leadership in 1905, and would lay the foundations of Labour’s rise to respectability​

Though the strike returned as a weapon after the TD&UA, the unions were chastened. The collusion of the two main parties to give with one hand and slap with the other reaffirmed the need for a parliamentary labour movement. In practice, few trade unions donated the 3% limit, and the real restriction was in the full declarations that allowed government to identify which were donating to more extreme movements, and so government would have to more strongly support the opponents of. Trade unionism would have to rely more and more on the Labour Party, which had too much legitimacy to fall foul of the de facto restrictions on donation. In this way, the TD&UA inadvertently helped the very party it was meant to crush.

At first, the move back towards Labour led to a strongly militant Labour platform that just barely avoided the limitations on donations. Its defeat in by-elections before, and especially its continued failure in the General Election of 1905 however, allowed Ramsay MacDonald to rise to the party leadership. The son of Angus MacDonald, the famous firebrand of 1892, Ramsay believed that Labour would have to take the middle classes with it if it were ever to win. Relying on the working class alone, especially when the working class increasingly felt that they had an investment in the system – thanks to NI and the formalisation of their union bargaining by the TD&UA – would not cut it.

MacDonald himself thought that it would take a quarter-century, at least, to make Labour viable. 1892, 1897, 1905 had made them toxic in the eyes of many. He would first have to convince the party’s internal actors of just how far they would need to go, then the unions, and finally have to prove, through rhetoric and policy proposals that Labour was serious. His targets were the working class, women, and the ‘conscientious middle.’

The People’s Budget, and Lloyd George’s push for women, forced MacDonald to move his estimate farther back. Though he was not quite as despondent as his deputy, and one of only two other Labour MPs, Arthur Henderson, MacDonald did confide in his memoirs that he had experienced some disillusionment in 1910-11. Like Asquith’s despondent letter to H. L. Sykes-Emory on the subject of Imperial Federation in 1898 though, a great foreign policy issue would soon fundamentally change the domestic debate. The greatest foreign policy issue, in fact; the Great War.

 

[DensleyBlair]

As what the government called ‘increasingly semi-political’ organisations, trade union donations to political causes or parties would now be limited to 3% of revenue in a financial year, and would have to be fully declared.

I look forward to the City becoming subject to similar restrictions.

Trade unionism would have to rely more and more on the Labour Party

Oh for christ's sake, that's just what we need…

Considering all of the delightful invented politicians we've had, the fact that we still have to put up with Ramsay MacDonald is highly depressing. Is there not one universe where we might be spared his craven suck-up campaign to the Establishment? Someone fetch Maxton, quick!

Let's see what the Great War does to this unsatisfactory balance of things.

 

[stnylan]

I have to say I have some great sympathy for Ramsay MacDonald. It does seem to be a feature of UK Labour - every so often they need a leader to remind the party faithful that ideological purity is all very well, but winning elections is sort of useful if you wish to enact any policy.

That said it is all very interesting - once can see a very British sense of "fair play" coming up in all the muddled goings on. Oh a fair bit of shouting and disagreement, but sort of eventually arriving at the conclusion both sides need to be balanced.

 

[BigBadBob]

Quiet this week. Combination of CKIII and the late-September return to daily life from summer (which is a thing even without a pandemic), I suppose.

I look forward to the City becoming subject to similar restrictions.

Oh for christ's sake, that's just what we need…

Considering all of the delightful invented politicians we've had, the fact that we still have to put up with Ramsay MacDonald is highly depressing. Is there not one universe where we might be spared his craven suck-up campaign to the Establishment? Someone fetch Maxton, quick!

Let's see what the Great War does to this unsatisfactory balance of things.

The Liberals parking an armoured brigade on Labour's lawn ITTL does give Ramsay more leeway with how much he has to suck up, but yes, it's quite unsatisfactory for the left.

The War, like Jar Jar Binks, is the key to all of this.

I have to say I have some great sympathy for Ramsay MacDonald. It does seem to be a feature of UK Labour - every so often they need a leader to remind the party faithful that ideological purity is all very well, but winning elections is sort of useful if you wish to enact any policy.

That said it is all very interesting - once can see a very British sense of "fair play" coming up in all the muddled goings on. Oh a fair bit of shouting and disagreement, but sort of eventually arriving at the conclusion both sides need to be balanced.

That sense of fair play is what kept the system going so long. In the end, you do have to listen to voters, not just drive for your own pet projects. Otherwise, FPTP punishes you by handing the election, and quite extensive power, to the party seen as more moderate.

It's why both major parties handing pretty much total power to pick leaders to the membership has led to much of the current s**t-show. Memberships are always more extreme and uncompromising than voters or MPs, and have become more so through the slow end of mass participation in parties. Constituency parties used to be more of a social club centred around politics; now it's more a small grouping of political junkies that have about as much understanding of the average person as they do of quantum physics.

 

[BigBadBob]

THE NAVY'S PRIDE AND MISERY
HMS Dreadnought and the Great Naval Race
Robert Jones​

On October 21st, 1805, Horatio Nelson’s fleet defeated a joint Franco-Spanish force just off Cape Trafalgar in the Atlantic. Since then, there had been no challenge to the supremacy of the Royal navy on the world’s seas and oceans. There had been a moment of insecurity during the Crimean War when the Russian Baltic Fleet, trying to make its way from St Petersburg to the Black Sea, had inflicted severe losses on Admiral Reginald Winfield’s Channel Fleet at the Battle of Borhaug. Victory and the follow-up destruction of the Russian Black Sea Fleet though, had obviated the need for self-reflection in the eyes of the Admiralty.

The abandonment of the Three Power Standard forced the Admiralty to rethink for the first time in nearly 90 years. It was Vice-Admiral Henry George-Watson who came up with the initial working model of HMS Dreadnought. A ship whose guns were all 12-inch or wider, the concept had for some years been the subject of idle speculation by the Vice-Admiral and the then leader of the opposition, James Brunel, grandson of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, designer of the SS Great Eastern. In 1895, Brunel sent a sketch to George-Watson, who modified it to reflect existing, classified designs by the Royal Navy, and suddenly Dreadnought was no longer an outlandish thought experiment.

George-Watson was adamant that, once Dreadnought was built, other ships like her would be much cheaper. With a fleet of these new ships, the Royal Navy’s dominance would be guaranteed for another generation, but the cost of Dreadnought was staggering. A full tenth of the Admiralty’s allocated spending, and more than half its budget for new ships, would have to be dedicated to its construction. If it failed, the RN’s rivals would have gained a devastating amount of ground.

Admiral Sir Henry George-Watson, 1908
George-Watson and James Brunel’s brainchild would, at a single stroke, change the balance of naval power​

For five years, George-Watson and Brunel’s dream languished in the Admiralty offices, the subject of legend amongst junior officers and civil servants. Then one of its designers became Prime Minister. Brunel, by then 1st Baron Brunel, insisted on George-Watson’s appointment as First Naval Lord, and told him to come straight to No 10 if either of the Admiralty or Treasury attempted to block its construction. On 3 October 1900, HMS Dreadnought was finally, at long last, laid down at HM Dockyard Portsmouth.

When she steamed out to sea in June 1901, ahead of commissioning that October, the world was changed in an instant. Yes, Britain now possessed a ship that far outstripped the capabilities of anything else on the seas and oceans, but should another power manage to build another all-big gun ship, then the Two Power Standard would be effectively gone. George-Watson’s realisation of this strategic nightmare scenario resulted in an Admiralty bid that dwarfed anything else at the 1902 Spending Review the same way that Dreadnought dwarfed other ships.

George-Watson had informed the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Gosport, that the only way to prevent resetting the naval race that had slowly developed in the last decade of the 19th Century was to lay down so many dreadnoughts (as they were already known) that none of the continental powers, having to also focus on land defence, could ever hope to catch up. Brunel, again, overrode the Treasury to make sure it happened. Over the next two years, seven more dreadnoughts were laid down.

HMS Dreadnought, 1904
Alone on the seas in 1901, by 1911, over 100 dreadnoughts would be built​

Unfortunately for the RN, the genie was well and truly out of the bottle by 1904. The German and Italian navies had, through means both fair and foul, managed to create their own dreadnought designs. By 1906, these designs would have been shared with Spain and Russia. Britain, in turn, would have to share its own with the US and France. The division of responsibilities in the Entente, however, meant that the latter would not be able to contribute much to the Great Naval Race. As Winston Churchill would put it in his history of the Great War, The World Crisis, ‘it was the English-Speaking Peoples who would have to secure the oceans for liberty, as they had done since the days of the Armada.’

In 1904-07, the clear advantage was with Britain. Its 12 functional dreadnoughts in 1906 matched the combined forces of the Kaiser Pact. By 1908, the two sides were roughly at parity. It was this that spurred the Royal Navy’s most aggressive shipbuilding campaign since the Napoleonic Wars. This was matched with the largest the US Navy had ever embarked upon. In the next three years, British and American dockyards would send into commission 32 dreadnoughts.

Germany would have had trouble keeping up in any case, but the withdrawal of Russia from the Pact in June 1907, and clear alignment with the Entente by the same time next year, forced the money and resources to be redirected to land warfare. Just as the Entente dockyards accomplished a peacetime feat of production for their navies that would not be matched for decades, German arms manufacturers would do for the German Army.

Dreadnoughts in Service for the Naval Powers, 1902-11
At the outbreak of war, there were another eight dreadnoughts being built by the Entente, and only three by the Kaiser Pact​

Of course, for the Kaiser Pact, what they lacked in numbers could partially be made up for by concentration. The RN was scattered all across the globe, and the USN on the other side of the Atlantic. If the Pact could concentrate their forces in the early stages of a war, they would perhaps be able to gain local superiority over the RN before the arrival of the USN. This was the nightmare scenario for the Entente.

The plan to avoid this disaster was known as Operation Wedding Band.* On the first news of war, the 10-dreadnought** US Atlantic Fleet would steam out of port in Boston and New York, and make for the Hebrides, from where it could split into two fleets. The Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow, which, by 1911, 22 of the UK’s 34 dreadnoughts were part of, would set up there to choke the northern escape route of the German High Seas Fleet, with which it had rough parity. Guns at Dover and Calais were meant to prevent the Channel route. The remainder of the British dreadnoughts (save for two in the Far East) were stationed at Gibraltar, ready to block the strait and, if necessary, fight a harassing retreat up the Portuguese Coast, if necessary, all the way to Scilly. By then, the other half of the US Atlantic Fleet should have been deployed, along with the French fleet from La Rochelle, to meet the RN and its pursuing Spanish-Italian fleet.

The delaying action was the crucial component of the plan. The Spanish and Italian Navies’ dreadnoughts would outnumber the ships at Gibraltar 2-to-1. If the Mediterranean Fleet was caught, the worst-case scenario would have the Kaiser Pact above parity in the Atlantic. The US Pacific Fleet and various dreadnought-less forces from around the world could restore the balance of power, but control of the North Sea and Channel would be in doubt for months. Wedding Band was thus kept under the strictest code of secrecy; the only written records were in the ready-orders held by the Entente Powers’ respective naval ministers.

Adm. John Fisher and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, 1911
After his arrival at the Admiralty in May 1911, Churchill set out on a reform of the institution, which had only just got out of the blocks when war broke out in October of that year​

Despite the great changes to its strategic position and relative power in the past decade, however, the RN, and the Admiralty most of all, remained a conservative, old-fashioned institution. The First Lord was expected to be little more than a mouthpiece for the Admirals, and doctrine was rarely, if ever, changed. While technological development had forced some rethinking of ship-to-ship tactics, the average fleet commander’s basic battle plan could have been drawn up by Nelson over a century ago.

Worst of all, as far as the new First Lord of the Admiralty in May 1911, Winston Churchill, was concerned, was the belief that each fleet was the commander’s personal fiefdom. Even as he was briefed on Wedding Band, Churchill could tell that the naval officers in charge would fail to make it work. The whole plan relied on the co-ordination of three navies and at least five fleets, but the idea of that co-ordination extending farther than informing other fleets of their own position once battle actually commenced seemed to have not even crossed the Admirals’ minds.

Appalled by what he had seen so far, Churchill immediately brought in Admiral John Fisher as First Naval Lord. Fisher had been outspoken about these very problems in the RN for years, and the two men quickly embarked upon the most intense bout of Admiralty reform in arguably the entire history of the Senior Service. They created a Naval War Staff, divided into Operations, Mobilisation, and Intelligence. To aid the last of these, they joined with J. E. B. Seely’s War Office to massively increase the funding, and clarify the independence and structure, of the Counter-Intelligence Bureau. When the Admirals on the Naval Board complained, Fisher and Churchill used the opportunity to force them into retirement, and promote men Fisher had identified as reformers like himself.***

SM-U7, 1909
The loss in the Great Naval Race redirected the German Navy to submarine warfare​

Unbeknownst to the Entente, two developments had fundamentally changed the war that would be fought on the seas. The first was that the Kaiser Pact had abandoned the naval race. Late in 1909, they had realised that even the combined Pact could not hope to keep up with the British, much less the entire Entente, and pivoted to the production of submarines. The High Seas Fleet could sally out if it saw an opportunity, but the focus of warfare at sea would be to disrupt transport between Britain and France and, even more importantly, the US and UK.

The second development was even more terrifying, and would never have come to light without the expansion and reorganisation of the CIB. Captain Archie Wyndham, working undercover at the British Embassy in Berlin for the new Secret intelligence Service, had a breakthrough in September 1911. By as much chance as meticulous spy-work, he managed to obtain the brief of a German Naval Officer mere days before war. As the Embassy was evacuated the on October 1st, he hid the papers on his person, translating them on the crossing to England.

On October 4th, he finally managed to cut through the German naval jargon to the terrible truth. He rushed to Admiralty House and demanded to see the First Lord and First Naval Lord. It was pure chance that Churchill was leaving the building at the time and decided to take lunch in his office with Cpt Wyndham instead. There, Wyndham delivered news that had barely entered the Entente’s worst nightmares; somehow, the Germans had found out about Wedding Band.

In this can be found a microcosm of the Admiralty’s troubles throughout the period. An outdated institution, pushed by fear and reformers to make technological and strategic commitments it acquiesced to only reluctantly, and finally saved from the consequences of that reluctance by Churchill and Fisher. However, that salvation would prove to have come so late that, while the worst might have been avoided, a great many of the failures to prepare would bear their bitter fruit.


* Decided upon when, at the first Naval Staff Meeting in 1908, Admiral Smith-Gorton made a joke about how ‘what therefore [UK Foreign Secretary, and PM who had initiated the Liverpool Conference] Chamberlain hath joined together, let not German put asunder.’

** The version of Wedding Band outlined here reflects the one from the final Entente Naval Staff Meeting before the outbreak of war, which took place in June 1911.

*** A measure of the rot that Fisher considered to have set in amongst the top brass was that many of those promoted to Admiral were Rear-Admirals, and two were as far down as Commodores.

 

[DensleyBlair]

Quiet this week. Combination of CKIII and the late-September return to daily life from summer (which is a thing even without a pandemic), I suppose.

yes, I've felt this too. Back to sleep for the Vicky forums, one senses.

The Liberals parking an armoured brigade on Labour's lawn ITTL does give Ramsay more leeway with how much he has to suck up, but yes, it's quite unsatisfactory for the left.

FPTP never really allows it, but I am always intrigued by the prospect of a genuine tri-partite system in the UK – be it at the start of the c20, or further down the line. My hunch is that the key would be for a suitably strong Liberal bloc surviving to mop up the moderate Tory interest, which would broadly settle the question of who held the centre ground and maybe allow the left to be a bit more, well, "leftish" (sinister?). High Tories, Gladstonian Liberals, Lloyd Georgians and then the socialists.

Granted, it would probably bulldoze any hope of hanging onto the scraps of political stability you're otherwise likely to find during the period, but it's not like the alternative produced brilliant results…

—and I see the update has arrived as I typed! Let's get to it, then.

This is a pretty mess the Admiralty find themselves in, isn't it? Things seem to be going well – only for those dastardly Germans to ruin everything by having a functioning espionage channel. That last note isn't exactly optimistic, either, so I'm left wondering how bad the consequences of this development will prove.

 

[TheButterflyComposer]

Timely update, considering the Queen Elizabeth just launched, again.

Dreadnought. Possibly the single most important ship to ever be built. Effectively invincible, and almighty, it made every warship on the planet obsolete, and effectively (ironically) doomed the Royal Navy to a steady decline as now warships would depend on industrial capacity...which by the 20th century wasn't the uks strength any more.

And, considering the otl naval wars to come, they actually weren't very useful ships for anyone, exception maybe as posters. Carriers were everything they were in term of prestige and design, as well as being useful.

 

[J_Master]

Quiet this week. Combination of CKIII and the late-September return to daily life from summer (which is a thing even without a pandemic), I suppose.

Yeah, I've been having this myself (altough not the CKIII part and I returned to my "regular" duties a bit sooner)

 

[stnylan]

Ahh the Dreadnought. A much-hyped vessel ... my favourite trivia about the Dreadnought in OTL being she is the only capital ship directly (ie, not through aircraft) to have sunk a submarine. I also think it may have been the only time post-Lissa that one of those ram bows that everyone stuck on their ships after that rather strange affair was actually used to ram a hostile vessel (as opposed to the numerous "friendly" collisions). But I might be wrong about that.

Churchill and Fisher ... a more terrifying combination is hard to imagine. Both for what they are likely to get right ... and what they get wrong.

 

[slothinator]

Rather worrying developments coming out of Germany. If the war is to be won, the admiralty will have to learn to operate as a single body

 

[Director]

@stnylan - a lot of the 'extreme' and regular ram bows (such as those employed by Dupuy de Lome) were actually for buoyancy, not ramming. They were needed to counter-act the very narrow bow and forward-placement of armament. Dreadnought was not one of those ships, of course, though her 'plough-bow' was probably hydrodynamic and not really for plunging into other ships. But despite the apparent ram under the waterline, a lot of ships who actually engaged in ramming were seriously damaged by doing so (as was SMS Kaiser at Lissa - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_Kaiser_(1858)#/media/File:Kaiser_(ship,_1859)_-_NH_87011.jpg).

But when 20,000+ tons of steel moving at 16+ knots hits 1,000 or less of steel that is basically stationary... the result is not good for the smaller ship.

It appears that in this time-line the naval race was a product of the rivalry rather than an instigator of it, and that Wilhelm had the sense and self-possession to abandon it when it was proven to not work. That makes him a very different man from his OTL self and perhaps a better one for his country.

Given the untried nature of the technology, adopting a submarine-heavy naval policy in 1900 is equivalent to adopting steam motive power and iron armor for capital warships in 1815. The concept exists and can - barely - be made to work but there are a lot of practical obstacles to overcome before it is useful. Still, if that is what Germany has decided to pursue I have no doubt they can make the Baltic secure. Exercising power outside it, however... with submarines of 1900 vintage... I doubt will succeed.

Dreadnought was of course intended to use her firepower and speed to hold enemies at arms-length, where she could destroy them with accurate fire and they could not accurately reply. Part of the 'selling of the idea' was Fisher's contention that a dreadnought was cheaper to crew and operate than two of her older cousins. It was a cruel irony that the cost-savings were never to materialize: since pre-dreadnoughts and dreadnoughts could not operate effectively together (*), and because the Americans and Japanese were already building all-big-gun ships when Dreadnought was laid down, the result was a series of staggering Admiralty budgets. It may have been un-necessary - the Germans were entirely unprepared for Dreadnought and needed a couple of years to get theirs in the water - but Fisher miscalculated when he thought Britain could dissuade others from building the new capital ships.

And Dreadnought was likely not the instrument the Admiralty press made her out to be. Long-ranged gunfire was vastly less accurate than anyone would admit; the very best gunnery hit-percentages of WW1 were around 5% of shells fired, with 2-3% being more usual, and that with better fire-control than Dreadnought initially had. As with so many technological innovations, Dreadnought was more promise and potential than reality.

I'd say that Mary Rose, Victory, Warrior and the ironclad Dreadnought were all as consequential as the all-big-gun ship... which was an Italian conception borne out of a Russian-Japanese fight and first put into construction by the United States and Japan. Britain did get Dreadnought in the water first, and had the need and means for a lot of Dreadnoughts - but the all-big-gun ship was an internationally-recognized idea. Fisher was one of the driving forces behind that idea, for a long time and with great foresight, but only one.



* Dreadnoughts used - mostly - turbine propulsion and were engineered to steam at relatively high speeds for long periods; pre-dreadnoughts, using piston engines, could not. Dreadnoughts were also intended to fight at what was then considered 'long-range' - IE over 10,000 yards - while pre-dreadnoughts, with fewer main guns and a lot of smaller caliber weapons, were designed to fight at only a few thousand yards.



My apologies for going on. I very much enjoyed the update and look forward to hearing how naval forces are employed in the upcoming war. As Corbett illustrated, the Royal Navy and Entente already have command of the sea and I'll be interested to see how they exploit it.

 

[TheButterflyComposer]

It appears that in this time-line the naval race was a product of the rivalry rather than an instigator of it, and that Wilhelm had the sense and self-possession to abandon it when it was proven to not work. That makes him a very different man from his OTL self and perhaps a better one for his country.

True but he's still picking a fight he cannot win. Even moreso now his rampant ally building has driven away Russia, his one good ally out of the Bunch. If the idea was to become preeminent in Europe and keep France and Russia down, Germany could have found many allies for that purpose, including the British, depending new on now they went about it. But acting like they were planning on not only dominating Europe by land but also challenge the great powers at sea, and expand imperially, really makes enemies of anyone who isn't dependant on you for survival (see Austria sticking by them, and Italy giving it a miss).

Given the untried nature of the technology, adopting a submarine-heavy naval policy in 1900 is equivalent to adopting steam motive power and iron armor for capital warships in 1815. The concept exists and can - barely - be made to work but there are a lot of practical obstacles to overcome before it is useful. Still, if that is what Germany has decided to pursue I have no doubt they can make the Baltic secure. Exercising power outside it, however... with submarines of 1900 vintage... I doubt will succeed.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the result of going all in on subs in 1900 is a lot of dead German sailors and lots of sunken, expensive prototypes. Doesn't help that most of the people who were working on subs in 1901 were...British and French.

 

[stnylan]

@Director

I was not referring to Dupey de Lome's excellent work (mostly falling before Lissa), or even the good SMS Kaiser, but rather in the aftermath of Lissa most capital ships were fighted with strengthened ram bows, given how ramming featured rather notably in that battle. And that is not counting such oddities as HMS Polyphemus. Dreadnought being one of the last. Of course along the way they ended up discovering the improved hydrodynamic effect of having a bulbous bow, so it was not all wasted, despite lives likely lost due to making collisions more severe than they otherwise would have been (ie Camperdown ramming Victoria etc).

 

[Director]

@TheButterflyComposer - 'a fight he cannot win' is going a bit farther than I would. Conquer France, Russia, Britain and the United States - no. Beat up on the French and Russians, seize some territory and wring out a separate peace or three - yes, in Victoria that could perhaps be done, especially so given the time needed to get British soldiers to the front, and the indeterminate nature of an American army. Germany is very strong, at least over the short run, and the various AIs are prone to break ranks and make peace. So I could see Germany fighting a short war with success - but I entirely agree that if it becomes a war 'to the knife' then Germany will be overrun.

You make an excellent point about submarines of the day, but you do leave out the work of the Irish-born American, John Holland. His were the most advanced designs of the day and were widely imitated.

I quite agree that Germany could best benefit from the Status Quo since she is the most rapidly-growing economic power, and that European alliances could have been hers had she pursued them. But overturning that status quo for overt political power and military conquest - that does not attract but rather repels prospective allies.

@stnylan - not trying to lecture you, merely to illustrate a point of naval architecture. The ram bows inspired by Lissa were pretty much abandoned after Admiral Tryon's unfortunate demise, which you note. I wasn't familiar with the steam Polyphemus and thank you for bringing her to my attention.

 

[BigBadBob]

yes, I've felt this too. Back to sleep for the Vicky forums, one senses.

FPTP never really allows it, but I am always intrigued by the prospect of a genuine tri-partite system in the UK – be it at the start of the c20, or further down the line. My hunch is that the key would be for a suitably strong Liberal bloc surviving to mop up the moderate Tory interest, which would broadly settle the question of who held the centre ground and maybe allow the left to be a bit more, well, "leftish" (sinister?). High Tories, Gladstonian Liberals, Lloyd Georgians and then the socialists.

Granted, it would probably bulldoze any hope of hanging onto the scraps of political stability you're otherwise likely to find during the period, but it's not like the alternative produced brilliant results…

—and I see the update has arrived as I typed! Let's get to it, then.

This is a pretty mess the Admiralty find themselves in, isn't it? Things seem to be going well – only for those dastardly Germans to ruin everything by having a functioning espionage channel. That last note isn't exactly optimistic, either, so I'm left wondering how bad the consequences of this development will prove.

Stability is for suckers anyway.

Timely update, considering the Queen Elizabeth just launched, again.

Dreadnought. Possibly the single most important ship to ever be built. Effectively invincible, and almighty, it made every warship on the planet obsolete, and effectively (ironically) doomed the Royal Navy to a steady decline as now warships would depend on industrial capacity...which by the 20th century wasn't the uks strength any more.

And, considering the otl naval wars to come, they actually weren't very useful ships for anyone, exception maybe as posters. Carriers were everything they were in term of prestige and design, as well as being useful.

As discussed further down, someone making an all-big gun ship was always going to happen, but the irony of the RN proudly displaying Dreadnought, only to realise they've effectively reset the board as far as naval power goes, is just funny.

Yeah, I've been having this myself (altough not the CKIII part and I returned to my "regular" duties a bit sooner)

It's certainly played a part in my writing slowing down, as I haven't had quite the same amount of energy in September with there being work beyond the fun stuff.

Ahh the Dreadnought. A much-hyped vessel ... my favourite trivia about the Dreadnought in OTL being she is the only capital ship directly (ie, not through aircraft) to have sunk a submarine. I also think it may have been the only time post-Lissa that one of those ram bows that everyone stuck on their ships after that rather strange affair was actually used to ram a hostile vessel (as opposed to the numerous "friendly" collisions). But I might be wrong about that.

Churchill and Fisher ... a more terrifying combination is hard to imagine. Both for what they are likely to get right ... and what they get wrong.

I had never even heard of the Battle of Lissa (being an infantryman through and through). It was a fun rabbit hole to go down.

Rather worrying developments coming out of Germany. If the war is to be won, the admiralty will have to learn to operate as a single body

I'm sure they will; it's a matter of how much they have to learn it the hard way.

@stnylan - a lot of the 'extreme' and regular ram bows (such as those employed by Dupuy de Lome) were actually for buoyancy, not ramming. They were needed to counter-act the very narrow bow and forward-placement of armament. Dreadnought was not one of those ships, of course, though her 'plough-bow' was probably hydrodynamic and not really for plunging into other ships. But despite the apparent ram under the waterline, a lot of ships who actually engaged in ramming were seriously damaged by doing so (as was SMS Kaiser at Lissa - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SMS_Kaiser_(1858)#/media/File:Kaiser_(ship,_1859)_-_NH_87011.jpg).

But when 20,000+ tons of steel moving at 16+ knots hits 1,000 or less of steel that is basically stationary... the result is not good for the smaller ship.

It appears that in this time-line the naval race was a product of the rivalry rather than an instigator of it, and that Wilhelm had the sense and self-possession to abandon it when it was proven to not work. That makes him a very different man from his OTL self and perhaps a better one for his country.

Given the untried nature of the technology, adopting a submarine-heavy naval policy in 1900 is equivalent to adopting steam motive power and iron armor for capital warships in 1815. The concept exists and can - barely - be made to work but there are a lot of practical obstacles to overcome before it is useful. Still, if that is what Germany has decided to pursue I have no doubt they can make the Baltic secure. Exercising power outside it, however... with submarines of 1900 vintage... I doubt will succeed.

Dreadnought was of course intended to use her firepower and speed to hold enemies at arms-length, where she could destroy them with accurate fire and they could not accurately reply. Part of the 'selling of the idea' was Fisher's contention that a dreadnought was cheaper to crew and operate than two of her older cousins. It was a cruel irony that the cost-savings were never to materialize: since pre-dreadnoughts and dreadnoughts could not operate effectively together (*), and because the Americans and Japanese were already building all-big-gun ships when Dreadnought was laid down, the result was a series of staggering Admiralty budgets. It may have been un-necessary - the Germans were entirely unprepared for Dreadnought and needed a couple of years to get theirs in the water - but Fisher miscalculated when he thought Britain could dissuade others from building the new capital ships.

And Dreadnought was likely not the instrument the Admiralty press made her out to be. Long-ranged gunfire was vastly less accurate than anyone would admit; the very best gunnery hit-percentages of WW1 were around 5% of shells fired, with 2-3% being more usual, and that with better fire-control than Dreadnought initially had. As with so many technological innovations, Dreadnought was more promise and potential than reality.

I'd say that Mary Rose, Victory, Warrior and the ironclad Dreadnought were all as consequential as the all-big-gun ship... which was an Italian conception borne out of a Russian-Japanese fight and first put into construction by the United States and Japan. Britain did get Dreadnought in the water first, and had the need and means for a lot of Dreadnoughts - but the all-big-gun ship was an internationally-recognized idea. Fisher was one of the driving forces behind that idea, for a long time and with great foresight, but only one.

* Dreadnoughts used - mostly - turbine propulsion and were engineered to steam at relatively high speeds for long periods; pre-dreadnoughts, using piston engines, could not. Dreadnoughts were also intended to fight at what was then considered 'long-range' - IE over 10,000 yards - while pre-dreadnoughts, with fewer main guns and a lot of smaller caliber weapons, were designed to fight at only a few thousand yards.

My apologies for going on. I very much enjoyed the update and look forward to hearing how naval forces are employed in the upcoming war. As Corbett illustrated, the Royal Navy and Entente already have command of the sea and I'll be interested to see how they exploit it.

True but he's still picking a fight he cannot win. Even moreso now his rampant ally building has driven away Russia, his one good ally out of the Bunch. If the idea was to become preeminent in Europe and keep France and Russia down, Germany could have found many allies for that purpose, including the British, depending new on now they went about it. But acting like they were planning on not only dominating Europe by land but also challenge the great powers at sea, and expand imperially, really makes enemies of anyone who isn't dependant on you for survival (see Austria sticking by them, and Italy giving it a miss).

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the result of going all in on subs in 1900 is a lot of dead German sailors and lots of sunken, expensive prototypes. Doesn't help that most of the people who were working on subs in 1901 were...British and French.

@Director

I was not referring to Dupey de Lome's excellent work (mostly falling before Lissa), or even the good SMS Kaiser, but rather in the aftermath of Lissa most capital ships were fighted with strengthened ram bows, given how ramming featured rather notably in that battle. And that is not counting such oddities as HMS Polyphemus. Dreadnought being one of the last. Of course along the way they ended up discovering the improved hydrodynamic effect of having a bulbous bow, so it was not all wasted, despite lives likely lost due to making collisions more severe than they otherwise would have been (ie Camperdown ramming Victoria etc).

@TheButterflyComposer - 'a fight he cannot win' is going a bit farther than I would. Conquer France, Russia, Britain and the United States - no. Beat up on the French and Russians, seize some territory and wring out a separate peace or three - yes, in Victoria that could perhaps be done, especially so given the time needed to get British soldiers to the front, and the indeterminate nature of an American army. Germany is very strong, at least over the short run, and the various AIs are prone to break ranks and make peace. So I could see Germany fighting a short war with success - but I entirely agree that if it becomes a war 'to the knife' then Germany will be overrun.

You make an excellent point about submarines of the day, but you do leave out the work of the Irish-born American, John Holland. His were the most advanced designs of the day and were widely imitated.

I quite agree that Germany could best benefit from the Status Quo since she is the most rapidly-growing economic power, and that European alliances could have been hers had she pursued them. But overturning that status quo for overt political power and military conquest - that does not attract but rather repels prospective allies.

@stnylan - not trying to lecture you, merely to illustrate a point of naval architecture. The ram bows inspired by Lissa were pretty much abandoned after Admiral Tryon's unfortunate demise, which you note. I wasn't familiar with the steam Polyphemus and thank you for bringing her to my attention.

I haven't actually got to the combat part of the naval war, despite it being literally the first combat UK troops see, so this is all very useful for once this slight 'back-to-work' block resolves itself.

On Germany's possibilities for victory, I agree. It's all about whether Germany and her allies can win the initial clash on the continent convincingly enough to present a German Europe to France/Russia's Anglo-Saxon would-be-helpers as fait accompli.

 

[BigBadBob]

THE DIAMOND JUBILEE
Culture and Memory of the Late Victorians
Alexandra J. Wilson-Colthurst​

Much is made of how we see the Late Victorians today, here meaning those people that peopled the United Kingdom and its empire in the decade before and after the eponymous Queen’s funeral, but how did they see themselves? Most of the works that we hold up as emblematic and typical of their works, by icons like E. M. Forster, Oscar Wilde, and Rudyard Kipling, reflect more our own understanding of the pre-war decades and their culture than their own understanding of themselves. What follows therefore is a more kaleidoscopic view, taking in these works, of course, but attempting to find what the Late Victorians themselves consumed and thought of what they consumed.

The first thing that must be addressed is the Diamond Jubilee. There is a reason it looms so large in the popular imagination, and that is because it was designed to loom large. Its planners knew this was likely the last Jubilee celebration for Queen Victoria, who had just surpassed her grandfather, George III as longest-reigning British monarch, and so they hoped to make it as much a celebration of Britain’s progress during her reign as possible. The Jubilee Planning Committee, headed by Her Majesty’s Private Secretary Sir Walter Fiennes and the Prime Minister Sir William A. Sinclair, decided at the first meeting that no expense would be spared.

All the most famous artists of the day, and many a lesser-known friend of the Committee, were commissioned for works. A member of the latter group was Edward Elgar, whose Enigma Variations and Pomp and Circumstance can both trace their genesis to the early drafts of England’s Progress, which he composed for the Jubilee. While the last of these has faded somewhat, a little too of a piece with the other triumphal pieces produced for the Jubilee, the former two have embedded themselves in the cultural firmament.

Edward Elgar, 1900
Elgar’s Jubilee composition, England’s Progress, put him on the map, and his best-known work owes its genesis to early work on Progress​

The decision to focus on empire was another early choice, made for the Committee by the election, which was to happen a month before the Jubilee. Sinclair had initially floated making the new National Insurance system a centrepiece of the celebrations, but the potential for a Conservative victory forcing a total overhaul of any ceremonies based on the NI system made this untenable, as Fiennes pointed out. Empire, on the other hand, provided a common ground for the political establishment; the Conservatives could point to the power of Britannia, and the Liberals to her civilising mission.

The decision to make it a purely imperial celebration, rather than invite foreign dignitaries, was as much an aesthetic choice as it was to avoid the potential of the Queen’s nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm II, potentially causing a scene. This also dovetailed nicely with Sinclair’s own instinct for isolationism, and allowed for the iconic images of representatives from every colony, flags waving under the massive Union Flags at the top of the stand. The supreme achievement of the Jubilee is that it, for a moment, created unalloyed celebration. Almost as soon as it was over, even as it was ending, the basic feeling of Victorian culture reasserted itself.

Kipling’s Recessional began as an entirely different poem; it was supposed to be triumphal, but ended up a solemn reflection on the transient nature of imperial power.

Far-called our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!​

The transition from Jubilee Triumphal to Recessional reflects the ever-present undercurrent in the Late Victorian psyche of declinism. At what is commonly seen to be the height of their power, the British became obsessed with their decline. Part of this is, of course, that, viewed from across the yawning gulf of history – and the veritable Mariana Trench of the Great War most of all – it is easy to lose sight of the agricultural depression, industrial unrest, and imperial insecurity that marked Late Victorian politics.

John Galsworthy, 1909
Author and playwright, Galsworthy’s Strife is the premier theatrical examination of the strikes that gripped the nation at the Turn of the Century​

The formalisation of class warfare by the unions brought a less satirical form of analysis to the West End. While the most popular plays remained more humorous examinations of social class, such as George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion and the works of Oscar Wilde, more realist works pushed the boundaries of traditionally genteel West End fare. Foremost amongst these were the plays of Shaw and John Galsworthy. In keeping with Pygmalion’s woman protagonist, Shaw’s most provocative plays were on the subject of women; Mrs Warren’s Profession was about women forced to choose prostitution, and Getting Married a shot at restrictive divorce laws.

Galsworthy was the more influenced of the two by the trade union movement. His best-known play, Strife, depicts a strike at the same coal works in 1891 and 1896, depicting the push and pull between union, workers, and employers. Throughout, it contends that National Insurance had not solved the basic problems of the mismatch in power and demands between the three actors. Memorably, the play repeats its ending, with both the 1891 and 1896 storylines concluding with the exact same lines and stage movements.

As a whole though, the West End remained relatively static throughout the era. The Mikado and H. M. S. Pinafore were each performed more often from 1904 to 1909 than Shaw and Galsworthy’s entire output combined. Poetry too, experienced a type of stagnation. With the passing of Tennyson in 1892, Kipling was left as the towering figure on the scene. Even the young poets who would later embody the renaissance for British poetry of modernism showed little inclination to experiment; D. H. Lawrence’s early work, for example, shows little of the later continental influences and innovation of his wartime and post-war poetry, this despite his literature showing much of it.

In architecture too, innovations in architecture, such as steel frames, did not extend to innovations in design. Whereas they were used to erect ever-higher skyscrapers across the Atlantic in New York, these advances in Britain went into an endless series of revival architectural styles, from renaissance to baroque and classical. When Josef Hoffman, one of the early pioneers of Art Deco, tried to enter his designs into competition for a proposed new building on 55 Broadway, the Royal Institute of British Architects sent him, what for architects constitutes, a threatening letter.

E. M. Forster, 1910
Of all the young novelists who would come to dominate the literary scene post-war, Forster made the biggest impact on the popular consciousness before it​

If there was one area in which British culture was unequivocally not stagnating, it was literature. Least dependent of all of the artforms on patronage, the novel became the avenue through which young creatives could most freely express themselves, mostly free from the constraints of deeply conservative money men. Though the 1890s were dependent on an old guard making pushes in middle and old age, such as Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad, the first years of the 20th Century saw the rise of the ‘Georgian’ writers.

D. H. Lawrence, as previously noted, reserved his innovations for the novel. Sons and Lovers, published in 1907, drew criticism and even allegations of obscenity, but is today considered a masterpiece. In its use of the Nottinghamshire dialect in written form, it would heavily influence James Joyce, whose own first published work, Dubliners, would make frequent use of the technique to transliterate Irish accents and dialects.

Ford Madox Ford, in his debut trilogy The Fifth Queen (1903-07),* about the arrival in the Tudor court and struggles of Katharine Howard, showed a willingness to experiment with impressionism. The books are, by his own admission, far from historically accurate, and, in a portent of much modernist literature, were more about evoking a feeling of time and place than getting the facts right. His third novel, The Good Soldier, a title he had sarcastically suggested to the publisher in the face of war in September 1911, chronicles the tragedy of Edward Ashburnham, - the soldier to whom the title refers - and his seemingly perfect marriage, plus that of his two American friends’, and is often considered among the best books of the century.

The biggest splash pre-war, however, was undoubtedly made by E. M. Forster. With A Room with a View and Howards End, he had by 1910 written two novels that have not only stood the test of time, but were bestsellers in their own. The latter, taking in much of the class structure of England, has indeed become the defining portrayal of the 1900s, upon which all subsequent works seem to rest. The existence of the pedestal afforded to Howards End though, is also an excellent show of the way war changed the image people had of the era. Upon publication, the novel was about a divided society. Today, it is seen as a book about simpler times of relatively genteel class conflict and property inheritance.

James H. Ashley, 1907
One of the leading lights of Federation Literature, Ashley’s debut novel, The Outback, explored the tensions between the Australian frontier culture and accession to full political status​

The other great literary trend, beyond the early modernism of the Georgians, was the evolution of Joseph Conrad’s explorations of imperialism into the Federation Literature of the late 1900s. Prompted by the accession of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa to a higher political status, and the change in perceptions of these places it wrought, Federation Literature sought to understand the implications. Of these early works, the best known is certainly The Outback, by James H Ashley.

His family having immigrated to Australia from London in 1900, when he was 14, Ashley was in a prime position to see the reaction of Australian identity to the Federation debate. Returning to London in 1906, he wrote The Outback in just under a year. Published in 1908, it deals with the election of the first MP for a rural (i.e. non-Sydney) constituency, and the tensions caused by the arrival of a man from Sydney - and his recently immigrated English and Scottish compatriots - to set up the electoral infrastructure in the region’s main town. For a frontier culture, the process represents the arrival of civilisation, and ultimately ends in the death of the Englishman and the protagonist, a local hunter who despises the idea of becoming ‘a London gentleman.’

Ultimately though, the conservatism evident elsewhere can be seen in literature as well; the bestsellers, according to the records of major booksellers, were still Dickens and Austen. In this, we can find an answer, perhaps, to the reason posterity remembers even the more daring work of the era with nostalgia; the British are an inherently nostalgic people. At the absolute height of power, when the political sphere was racked by questions about the very nature of Britain and the role of the state that reveal a staggering vitality, they still considered themselves in an inherently inferior time, retreating into a wistful conservatism. As the writers, playwrights, and poets of the post-Great War world took over the cultural zeitgeist, it is no wonder the era before became seen as a stagnant, conservative Eden; theirs was the one area of life that truly seemed so.


* Ford had previously collaborated on two works with Joseph Conrad, but The Fifth Queen was his first solo work.

 

[TheButterflyComposer]

They could all sense a Fall coming, and were quite aware they probably wouldn't be able to stop it without compeltly changing the world as they knew it. Hence, melancholy and nostalgia at minimum and full-blown depression and defeatist thinking at worst.

 

[stnylan]

Reminds of some lines from Evita

"When you're ontop to the world, the view is not precisely clear"
"Don't Look down - it's a long long way to fall"

Both from the same song.


One has to wonder though how much of this is with hindsight: knowledge of the decline magnifyning hints or concernrs of it, or even seeing thigns where none is there?

 

[TheButterflyComposer]

seeing thigns where none is there

Seeing mysterious thighs is quite distracting for late victorians...