WORK IN PROGRESS ..Part Two
Created | Updated Oct 13, 2010
WORK IN PROGRESS. Part 2
DEBUNKING ENGLISH CIVILIZATION
In September 1914 Roland Leighton wrote to Vera Brittain - “I feel, however, that I am meant to take some active part in this war. It is to me a very fascinating thing- something, if often horrible, yet very ennobling and very beautiful, something whose elemental reality raises it above the reach of all cold theorising”.
To which Vera Brittain replied on I October- “I don’t know whether your feelings about war are those of a militarist or not; I always call myself a non-militarist, yet the raging of these elemental forces fascinates me, horribly but powerfully, as it does you. You find beauty in it too; certainly war seems to bring out all that is noble in human nature, but against that you can say that it brings out all the barbarous too. But whether it is noble or barbarous I am quite sure that had I been a boy I should have gone off to take part in it long ago.” (pages 30-31)
In view of the glorification of the Roman model such sentiments were not unusual. The adventure of war had been part of the formal education of a couple of generations, and the family education of G.M. Trevelyan in the mansion house in Phoenix Park, Dublin, where he joined with his father in reacting great historic battles with lead soldiers. The First World War, however, changed all that for most British people. As Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge say in their edition of the “Letters From A Lost Generation”, Vera Brittain became a leading proponent of the thesis “that the post-war decline of Britain could be blamed on the fact that the best men, the noblest, strongest, and most cultivated, had been killed between 1914 and 1918” (page 7). And the waste of young lives during the war was compounded by the waste of the opportunity to make a peace.
In her book dedicated to the memory of Winifred Holtby, her best friend, Vera Brittian concludes a chapter on Winifred’s passionate concern as early as 1916 that any victory must be worthy of Christian Civilization with Winifred's favourite quote from T.E. Lawrence:- “When we achieved and the new world dawned, the old men came out again and took from us our victory, and re-made it in the likeness of the former world they knew. Youth could win, but had not learned to keep, and was pitiable against age. We stammered that we had worked for a new heaven and a new earth, and they thanked us kindly and made their peace.”
From the first the basis of that peace was vehemently criticised by J.M. Keynes in a best-selling book: and before that, in May 1918, another “Apostle”, Lytton Strachey, had published his seminal work "debunking" the "Eminent Victorians" that became equally successful and had its fifteenth printing in 1926.
Prefacing his work Strachey asserted that “The history of the Victorian Age will never be written”, explaining that the challenge of mastering the amount of material would be too great. So he fell back on the English 'Armada' approach. The “explorer of the past”, he explained, should avoid attempting a full-scale assault on the whole story of an age about which people have written so voluminously. “If he is wise he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack his subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden revealing searchlight into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths to be examined with a careful curiosity”. (page vii) The reader could not avoid the implied criticism of the confidence placed by politicians and the military leadership in a doctrine of overwhelming force and entrenched forward positions, in violation of English traditions of warfare.
Guided “by these considerations” Strachey went on to expose the Victorian image of four 'people of power' - Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr.Arnold and General Gordon. By the time that Strachey followed up this volume with his study of Queen Victoria herself a new word- “debunking”- had been coined to describe this new approach to revered figures from the recent past. And by then the Apostles had morphed into the Bloomsbury Circle- a challenging think tank for challenging times.
In fact, Strachey’s second duty as a biographer, which is “to maintain his own freedom of spirit”, could be taken as the core mission statement of the Bloomsbury Group that looked back to an earlier period of artistic greatness: and it was not English. So Strachey mentioned the great French biographical tradition:- “we have no Fontenelles and Condorcets, with their incomparable eloges, compressing into a few shining pages the manifold existences of men.” (pages viii-ix) But there was, perhaps, some special poignacy in 1918 in Strachey applying his "freedom of spirit" at the end of The Great War to the one person to emerge as a national heroine from the Crimean War.
“The name of Florence Nightingale lives in the memory of the world by virtue of the lurid and heroic adventure of the Crimea...Yet, as a matter of fact, she lived for more than half a century after the Crimean War; and during the greater part of that long period all the energy and all the devotion of her extraordinary nature were working at their highest pitch. What she accomplished in those years of unknown labour could indeed, hardly have been more glorious than her Crimean triumphs; but it was certainly more important. In Miss Nightingale’s own eyes the adventure of the Crimea was a mere incident- scarcely more than a useful stepping stone in her career. It was the fulcrum with which she hoped to move the world; but it was only the fulcrum. For more than a generation she was to sit in secret, working her lever: and her real life began at the very moment when, in the popular imagination, it had ended.” (page 141)
During the war journalists had seized upon her and described her in terms very familiar to lovers of Victorian melodrama. She was portrayed in terms of “classic” womanhood- “the Angel of Mercy”, the “Lady with the Lamp”, who kept the night watch over her charges. The young woman so dedicated to “good works” that she had fought her parents for years for the right to pursue her vocation. They could not prevent her “fashionable amusement” as she read exhaustively on all medical and public health issues: and they had finally consented to her receiving at least the relevant education and training- amongst a nursing order of nuns in Germany. It was only the crisis conditions in the Crimea that had resulted in her being given her opportunity to start on her mission to “move the world”- and it was above all a civilizing mission in the light of the emerging European Civilization.
Florence had been named after the great city of the Italian Renaissance, where she was born. Her sister Parthenon was born in Athens, for the Nightingales spent years doing The Grand Tour. Perhaps it was such an early exposure to the mainstream of European Civilization that made it difficult for Florence to settle for the life of a young Victorian Englishwoman of her social class: and a life in German nursing order in the 1840’s would have exposed Florence to the German fascination in the age of Ranke with ancient Rome and the complex relationship of Roman and Teuton.
Perhaps Florence, like Dr. Thomas Arnold, another of Lytton Strachey’s ‘Eminent Victorians’, had come to her own Romanesque view of life from other sources; but what is undeniable is that her exploits in the Crimea launched her into power rather like some modern day Caesar, except of course that she was a woman. When the heroine of the Crimea had sufficiently recovered she was received by the Queen and Prince Albert and so impressed both that Her Majesty commented afterwards “If only we had her at the War Office”. But perhaps Victoria and Albert had already worked out just how it was possible for someone to be a power behind the throne.
The solution for Miss Nightingale, however Victoria and Albert managed affairs, was almost total exclusion. Her medical condition demanded it, but :- “Lying on her sofa in the little upper room in South Street, she combined the intense vitality of a dominating woman of the world with the mysterious and romantic quality of a myth. She was a legend in her own lifetime, and she knew it. She tasted the joys of power, like those Eastern Emperors whose autocratic rule was based upon invisibility, with the mingled satisfactions of obscurity and fame...Great statesmen and renowned generals were obliged to beg for audiences; admiring princesses from foreign countries found that they must see her at her own time, or not at all”. (page 164)
Up to 1872 her work was largely focussed on the War Office:- “After that, her direct energies began to turn more completely towards more general objects. Her work on hospital reform assumed enormous proportions; she was able to improve the conditions in infirmaries and workhouses; and one of her most remarkable papers forestalls the recommendations of the Poor Law Commission of 1909. Her training school for nurses, with all that it involved in iniative, control, responsibility, and combat, would have been enough in itself to have absorbed the whole efforts of at least two lives of ordinary vigour. And at the same time her work in connection with India, which had begun with the Sanitary Commission on the Indian Army, spread and ramified in a multitude of directions. Her tentacles reached the India Office and succeeded in establishing a hold even upon those slippery high places. For many tears it was de rigueur for the newly appointed Viceroy, before he left England, to pay a visit to Miss Nightingale”. (page 163)
By the 1870’s Miss Nightingale’s work was being mirrored in an educational revolution that finally tackled England’s ramshackle educational non-system. It established new schools, and new curricula, and an almost universal adoption of the concept of the written examination for progress through “the system”, whether in education or the “professions”, including the great Civil Service bureaucracies, British and Indian.
But :- “With statesmen and governors at her beck and call, with her hands on a hundred strings, with mighty provinces at her feet, with foreign governments agog for her counsel, building hospitals, training nurses- she still felt that she had not enough to do. She sighed for more worlds to conquer- more, and yet more...She had noticed- with regret-the growing tendency towards free-thinking among artisans. With regret but not altogether with surprise: the current teaching of Christianity was sadly to seek: nay, Christianity itself was not without defects. She would rectify those errors. She would correct the mistakes of the Churches: she would point out just where Christianity was wrong: and she would explain to the artisans what the facts of the case really were...Her “Suggestions for Thought to the Searchers after Truth among the Artisans of England’ (1860), unravels, in the course of three portly volumes, the difficulties- hitherto, curiously enough, unsolved- connected with such matters as Belief in God, the Plan of Creation, the Origin of Evil, the Future of Life, Necessity and Free Will, Law, and the Nature of Morality. The Origin of Evil, in particular, held no perplexities for Miss Nightingale.” (page 166)
Only a few copies of the book were printed for private circulation. “One copy was sent to Mr.Mill, who acknowledged it in an extremely polite letter. He felt obliged, however, to confess that he had not been altogether convinced by Miss Nightingale’s proof of the existence of God.. “A law,” she had pointed out,” implies a lawgiver. "Now the Universe is full of laws- the law of gravitation, the law of the excluded middle, and many others: hence it follows that the Universe has a lawgiver- and what would Mr.Mill be satisfied with, if he was not satisfied with that?” (pages 166-7)
But in the mood of 1918, and in the light of his background as an “Apostle” and his future as part of the Bloomsbury Circle, Strachey could suggest that “Mr. Mill might have asked why the argument had not been pushed to its logical conclusion. Clearly, if we are to trust the analogy of human institutions, we must remember that laws are, as a matter of fact, not dispensed by lawgivers, but passed by Act of Parliament. Miss Nightingale, however, with all her experience of life, never stopped to consider the question whether God might not be a Limited Monarchy” (page 167) And perhaps this is a close as Strachey gets to highlighting the common theme linking his four characters, for he ended his Preface:- "To quote the words of a Master - 'Je n'impose rien; je ne propose rien: j'expose.'"
Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Manning, Dr.Thomas Arnold, and General Gordon were all imposing and commanding figures: and in the aftermath of the First World War Henry Williamson was not alone in wishing to escape from the demands and disciplines of the industrial age. The Apostle-Bloomsbury set had mostlly been conscientious objectors. And in 1933 a new generation of students at Oxford voted that they would not fight for King and Country.
Perhaps too some of that free spirit contributed to the popularity of Stephen King-Hall’s “Our Own Times”, first published in 1935. Commander King-Hall came from the English tradition of the sea. He had been educated and trained by the Royal Navy, and had been given a command during the Battle of Jutland. Spared the long agony of being bogged down in the Western Front, his wartime experience was a more traditional English/British one. And English seamen had learned, as had the ancient Greeks long before, that the power and ways of the sea need to be treated with respect, and that any thoughts of man’s mastery over the elements were merely illusory. Britannia might rule ON the waves, but could not rule THE waves themselves. So King-Hall treated his survey of political and economic world events 1913-1938 as a kind of voyage of discovery for the reader. And even by 1938, when no-one could ignore the gathering storm clouds, King-Hall could reflect on the positive side of living in “interesting times”.
To the modern reader King-Hall supplies the answer as to just how it was possible for people to live through the inter-war period, for he brings out quite clearly the “tides in the affairs of men” that swung in positive and negative directions during those twenty years: and he draws upon an English tradition of exploiting the freedom of manoeuvre and the opportunities offered by Britain’s island status. When the terrible storm finally broke in 1940, it was through the continuity of their seafaring tradition that the English people rediscovered themselves.
THE RENAISSANCE OF THE ENGLISH SPIRIT
Field Marshall Montgomery wrote in his Memoirs: “The real trouble in England in the early days after the fall of France was that the people did not understand the full significance of what had happened and what could happen in the future. The fact that the B.E.F had escaped through Dunkirk was considered by many to be a great victory for British arms. I remember the disgust of many like myself when we saw British soldiers walking about in London and elsewhere with a coloured embroidered flash on their sleeve with the title ‘Dunkirk’. They thought they were heroes, and the civilian public thought so too. It was not understood that the British Army had suffered a crushing defeat at Dunkirk and that our island home was now in grave danger. There was no sense of urgency”. (page 67-8)
But neither had there been, when Francis Drake decided that he had time to finish his game of bowls when the Spanish Armada was first sighted. The English people knew the challenge of the hour and the fact that the hopeful invader would need time to prepare, just as they did. The stop-watch had only just started, and, as Corporal Jones would say in "Dad's Army"- 'Don't panic!'.
Montgomery, the son of the Bishop of Tasmania, who had only come to England to board at St. Paul’s School at 13, may not have grasped the full significance of the way that the nation had responded to the crisis with the spontaneity of Tarka in a moment of extreme danger and therefore hyper-alert state. For the nation rediscovered its moral fibre and self-belief so badly damaged during the First World War and so disturbed and uncertain during the inter-war period.
Perhaps as a career soldier Montgomery was appalled that the "professionals" had needed crucial help from "the common people". But for the English/British this was a welcome return to "old ways". The British Army had been stranded on beeches with water too shallow for the Royal Navy to get close enough to take the men off. The answer was obvious to Englishmen, though perhaps improbable to others. Find small ships just about capable of getting across the Channel and either bring the men back, or ferry them to the larger ships. The subsequent ‘Flotilla of Small Ships’ became a powerful image of national unity in the kind intelligent and improvised creativity for which England/Britain had become famous.
It had been a difficult national odyssey from the start of the Age of Improvement with that fissiparous tendency inherent within the process of industrialization. But the English people, now part of a British nation, found themselves reconnected with their roots. So on the first of June Montgomery found Jack Dill at the War Office who said “Do you realise that for the first time for a thousand years this country is now in danger of invasion”- (page 66). But during that thousand years, the English had known that at such crisis moments the people owed it to England’s freedom of spirit to stand shoulder to shoulder prepared to make the kind of "last-ditch" stand that was possible in England: but practically impossible in France.
The French had tried a “last-ditch stand” at Verdun during the First World War. National pride made that fortress into a potent symbol to be defended at all costs. But the Germans realised that Verdun could be turned into the anvil on which they could break the whole French Army. And they did. In 1917 the unity of the French Army collapsed in a spate of mutinies. Marshall Petain managed to save the day and mollify the troops: and in 1940 he was hailed as the saviour of France as he became the head of the Vichy Regime set up to run France during the period of Armistice with Germany.
For in many ways the English tradition and the French were diametrically opposed. History had taught the English that they lived in a place where it sufficed to stand united in a crisis, and the price of that unity was the toleration of individual and group liberty within an "informal English garden". France, on the other hand, occupied one of those regions than can not avoid being periodically overrun, scattering its life to the four winds. So the French tendency is to show freedom and independence of spirit in a crisis when personal survival is the priority, and unity and conformity when the crisis is past. 'Sauve qui peut' is not quite "every man for himself", for the refugees fleeing along the roads of France were usually comprised of family groups. But if France breaks into component elements during a crisis, like old Civilizations that "survived the flood", once the crisis is passed there is an attempt return to strict rules of conduct.
It was Voltaire who credited Louis XIV with creating this kind of France in which everyone knew and accepted their place in society and understood the various applicable forms of etiquette. As the Sun King he made sure, like some great Roman or Egyptian Emperor, that his glittering court would fascinate and impress, so that the whole country would be drawn into the outreach of its glow, with Versailles and Paris setting the standard for the whole nation. This was necessary in order to achieve the French ascendancy in Europe in the seventeenth century; with France pushing out towards its “natural frontiers” and making good their deficiencies through the genius of Vauban, the greatest defensive engineer of his age.
But France could not be a fortress; and three times in seventy years German Armies marched right into France, getting to Paris on two of those occasions. 1940 was the third 'flood' sending flows of refugees fleeing down the roads of France clutching “le sac a sous’. So, while the British people went through “Darkest Hours” that were also “Finest Hours”, the French descended into its own darkest hours that left a bitter legacy of hatred, recrimination, shame and anger that did not much lend itself to the pragmatism, common sense, good naturedness, toleration and solidarity of France's old enemy "Angleterre".
The Anglo-Saxon model could not be grafted on to French history, and surely very few others. In fact, it was not clear that "the Anglo-Saxon model" was applicable to the challenge facing Great Britain in 1940. For, as has already been noted, the price of opting out of the mainstream of European history, and allowing so much difference and diversity, had also meant that the English approach to science and technology had been based on the same haphazard, muddling through and amateur tradition for too long. Figures like Strachey's four "Eminent Victorians" had all in their various ways brought England into the mainstream.
But in the closing phase of the Great War it was possible to see the "tide of history" as a great tidal wave that had finally swept away the Age of Empires along with their cumbrous and repressive powers. For some it offered the hope of completing the march towards "Liberalism" that had got into its stride in the Age of Revolution and that had been promoted by British politicians like Palmerston.
Of course, the Empires had endured so long because, as summed up in the old adage 'divide and rule', the centralising pull of their administrations had brought cohesion to fissiparous tendencies that otherwise might have created chaos. Nevertheless for most people in Britain the "aftershocks" of the Great War like the Amritsar Massacre, the British involvement in the Russian Civil War, the Black and Tan period of Irish history, and the occupation of the Rhur all served to confirm that "war is a terrible thing", and Britain most consciously turned its back on the age of militancy and an obsession with power.
PAYING ANY PRICE FOR LIBERTY
To proponents of a "social Darwinist" view of reality, however, evolution was a natural process and not subject to human will. Nature and science were guided by impersonal forces, and the Revolution that the world was going through in the first half of the twentieth century had the potential to wipe out some societies and while bringing vast gains to others. The crucial “new frontiers” were those of science and technology, which were offering change even more radical than the discovery of the New World.
On a lecture tour in America in 1885 Matthew Arnold quoted the illustrious Dr. Thomas Huxley who quoted Arnold himself at an event in Birmingham:- "The civilised world is to be regarded as now being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation, bound to a joint action and working to a common result; and whose members have for their proper outfit a knowledge of Greek, Roman and Eastern antiquity, and of one another. Special local and temporary advantages being put out of the account, that modern nation will in the intellectual and spiritual sphere make the most progress, which most thoroughly carries out this programme." (page 643)
On this much Matthew Arnold and Thomas Huxley were agreed. But by 1885 Arnold detected "a present movement for ousting letters from their old predominance in education to the natural sciences." Arnold was quite happy that cultured people should read "the great results of the modern scientific study of nature". But Huxley, the great British biologist, who discovered the inter-maxiliary vertebrae, argued that "the processes by which those results are reached, ought ..to be made the staple of education for the bulk of mankind."Arnold went on: "And hence Professor Huxley is moved to lay it down that 'for the purpose of attaining real culture, an exclusively scientific education is at least as effectual as an exclusively literary education." (page 646) In fact "It is proposed to make the training of natural science the main part of education, for the great majority of mankind at any rate." (page 647)
By the Second World War as Thomas Huxley's grandson argued, the economic growth associated with British industrialism, that had been the major driving force of progress for much of the nineteenth century, was being totally outdated by applied science, technology and engineering that were forging a future with no precedent. During the 1860’s the potential of the times had been grasped notably by four States or potential states, two of which- Germany and Japan- were conspicuously successful in taking a short cut to the future through their application to science and technology. And before 1914 Germany, Italy, Russia and Japan had all embarked upon military adventures that drew upon their new-found power to pursue old dreams. In all four cases disappointment and hardship resulted in discontent among the rank and file war veterans and by the Thirties each saw the emergence of an aggressive and militaristic totalitarian regime. This was all part of learning harsh lessons of evolution and, as the global economy generally sank into World Chaos, these totalitarian regimes had shown themselves capable of “great leaps forward”, while other states fell into economic depression. Even, as Dr. Julian Huxley explained in one of his pieces, the USA, land of Liberty, had copied some of the successful new methodologies giving state backing to the application of cutting edge science and technology, as in New Deal schemes like the Tennessee Valley Authority programme.
The lesson of natural history was that those who failed to adapt to new and emerging environments became extinct and the Second World War, Dr. Julian Huxley asserted, was merely a manifestation of a revolutionary episode. In order to win the war Britain needed to embrace the revolution and harness it to its own traditions of Liberalism and democracy. But this would have to reflect the scientific truth that "It is even more certain that nature is the expression of a definite order, with which nothing interferes": and those countries with traditions of just following orders had shown a greater adaptability to the latest phase of what Eric Hobsbawm called “The Age of Catastrophe” in his ‘Short History of the Twentieth Century”.
Dr. Hobsbawm’s chapter headings indicate the monstrous scale of the challenge in Huxley's "Revolution":
1. The Age of Total War
2. The World Revolution
3. Into the Economic Abyss
4. The Fall of Liberalism
5. Against the Common Enemy
6. The Arts 1914-45
7. The End of Empires
The logic of these revolutionary times reinforced that realisation that only the large modern bureaucratic State could cope with the scale of the challenge of the modern world- the lesson that had been learned around 1867-70. But drift into the First World War suggested that such Great Powers were in themselves a destabilising force: and , with great old empires in demise in 1917-18, and the German overseas Empire taken away in 1919, there was a brief period of hope that the international community of small self-determined nations that Britain had promoted in the decades after the Napoleonic War might yet be created.
To some the Liberalism of that Palmerstonian Age was still seen as the representation of what G.G. Coulton called “the progressive mind”, and before 1914 the policies of the Fabian gradualists had influenced the Liberal Party, which had embraced “Lib-Lab” M.P’s. An understanding of Matthew Arnold's Humanities might still suffice. Then the First World War had produced “The Shaking of the Foundations” (Paul Tillich). It activated the fault lines created by industrialization. Now they unleashed forces that Liberalism alone could not manage. As Professor Birnie put it:- “The community of interest which society presupposes did not exist in the economic sphere”: and just four years after the “General Strike” he could write of Britain’s current situation:
“Britain is still what she was before the war, a manufacturing country, producing for foreign markets. But, owing to the alteration in the rate of exchange between food and manufactures, it is no longer profitable to be an industrial country. Relatively, it may be said, Britain’s resources are declining. At the same time, her population is steadily increasing, and the demand for a higher standard of living is being put forward insistently on behalf of her industrial workers. In these conflicting tendencies there are all the elements of an intricate problem, the gravest, perhaps, which the future holds for this country.” (page 13)
By 1945 other states had shown how state planning and intervention could remodel the economy, often by the use of totalitarian powers. But in a Liberal Democracy things had been handled differently.
John Stuart Mill wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century that in England “nine-tenths of the internal business which elsewhere devolves on government is transacted by agencies independent of it.” (page 29). Hence, as Richard Law explained in 1947, the “English way of life” was radically different from most other countries. “Whether it has been a matter of the internal organization of English society, or of the growth of English influence abroad, the impulse of life in England has always come from below : it has never been imposed from above. And it is this impulse, its direction rather than its force, the fact that it derives from the community (and from the individual within the community) rather than from the government, which has given so much flexibility to English political thought, and which has enabled far-reaching social changes to take place without undue disturbance and without any break in the long continuity of English life.” (page 30)
Both John Stuart Mill and Richard Law, however, were writing at moments of hope and expectation; and the inter-war period was more fractious and troubled. Nothing showed more clearly than attitudes to the "General Strike" and Ramsay MacDonald’s “betrayal”, that even the Labour Party itself- let alone the whole electorate- was not, in fact, based upon a firm and clear “Gospel of Socialism” as propounded by G.D.H. Cole.
Concluding “The Intelligent Man’s Guide to World Chaos” in 1932, Dr. Cole had expressed his personal preference for Socialism as the way forward: “The world’s weakness in facing the problems of the past few years has been largely the result of this uncertainty; for men cannot act effectively unless they first make up their minds what they are trying to do. The world has to choose between Capitalism or Socialism, and then to put every ounce of effort at its command into promoting the success of whichever objective it has decided to pursue. My own choice is for Socialism; for I believe that the capitalist system has done its work and outlived its strength and usefulness in developing the forces of production that are at men’s command. Naturally I want other men to think as I do, and to strike out boldly for the introduction of a Socialist system: but I am well aware that half-hearted efforts to achieve Socialism are worse than useless in that they merely weaken Capitalism without putting anything in its place. If we want Socialism rather than Capitalism, we must make up our minds to struggle for it with all our heart and with all the strength of which men are capable when they make up their minds what they want and act in unity for the realisation of their aims.”
Such faith, and sense of mission, however, had always been only one strand of the Labour movement since the “Revolutionary Era”. Writing of the foundation of the Labour Party Professor Birnie wrote: “The Labour Representation Committee was a typical expression of the opportunism which has so often succeeded in English politics. It was admittedly an anomalous body. The elements of which it was composed, chiefly trade union and socialist societies, differed from each other in fundamental respects, and for this reason it was impossible to base the organisation on a clearly defined political programme. The only point in which the different partners in the alliance were agreed was the need for an increased working class representation in the House of Commons, but this common aim was sufficient to hold them together.” (page 137)
That unity had not survived the declaration of war in 1914 though the Party had achieved a reconciliation for the election of 1918. At that time, for the first election in which all working men had the vote, they issued a new doctrine and programme “Labour and the New Social Order” which talked of the end of a civilization and the emergence of a new one.
But the task of spreading the Gospel of Socialism was a difficult one in a country in which "the impulse of life .. has always come from below : it has never been imposed from above": and therefore there had always been a strong tradition of free-thinking. In his 1938 work "Medieval Panorama" G.G. Coulton could still say that politics in England had always been realtively straughtforward , based as it was on "the Eternal Difference between the progressive and the conservative minds". Nevertheless, the process of industrialization had compromised centuries of collectivity, and it had been possible to achieve that "dialectic" reality during the Age of Improvement largely because power was awarded to 'the haves' in a nation increasingly divided between 'the haves' and "the have-nots".
The national effort during the First World War had resulted in the enfranchisement of 'the have-nots'- the mass of working men and as a first phase mature women: and, after the World Chaos that Dr. Cole had written about, there came a widespread acceptance that some form of socialism was essential. With the need to create national solidarity for the war effort, the Government had launched a discussion about the kind of Britain that people were fighting for in 1940: and the landslide victory of the Labour Party in 1945 provided a strong electoral mandate for Clement Attlee, as Prime Minister, to use the power of the state to “win the peace” placing the will of the majority in front of the life impulse that had previously shaped English history. What people wanted others to do replaced what people would do for themselves.
Nevertheless, in 1947, it still seemed appropriate to state: “It is this separate existence of the individual, the community and the State, and the primacy of the individual over the community, and the community over the State, which gives to English society its unique character..To compare England with Germany, for example, is to take two extremes which, however, illustrate vividly enough the contrast between a State which is only one expression of the community's manifold activities, and a community which is centred on the State and subordinate to it. For in modern Germany everything has flowed from the top, and the activities of government have permeated the whole of the life of the community. And this is as true of Bismarck’s Germany as it is of Hitler’s, or of the Prussia of Frederick the Great. The German when he thinks of Germany, speaks of ‘the Reich’; there is a picture in his mind of order, authority, and discipline. When the Englishman thinks of England he thinks of home, not of 10 Downing Street or the Palace of Westminster or County Hall.” (page 31)
But undeniably the revolution in science and technology that impressed both Julian Huxley and H.G. Wells, with whom he had collaborated in writing “The Science of Life” in 1927, and was such a feature of recent German history, had been greatly facilitated by the German approach.
The story of Samuel Crompton and his “Mule” at the dawn of the age of improvement may be used to illustrate the English approach. Crompton realised that fine-Indian ‘muslin’ thread commanded a much higher price than standard cotton thread. So he invented a machine which would enable him to earn a good living. On the basis of his good prospects he bought a gold watch and got married- hoping for a prosperous life. It was other people who discovered the secrets of his invention by putting ladders against the wall of his house and looking through his windows. They adapted his ‘homespun’ machine to the requirements of the developing factory age; and the full potential of Crompton’s Mule was realised as the British cotton industry conquered the world market.
A hundred years later the German scientists and engineers of the late nineteenth century were very much aware of being part of an international brotherhood within which Germans were often to be counted as the leading minds of the age. To some degree the collective approach was similar to that of the sculptor Michaelangelo, who believed that the sculpture already existed potentially within the rock. It merely needed the artist to realise it. In much the same way the German engineer Diesel started from the premise that there had to be a way to create an internal combustion engine in which heavy oil could be injected directly into the cylinder. Perhaps in this approach the whole question of individual ownership of intellectual property becomes much less important than achieving success for the overall progress of the country and beyond that a wider humanity. Certainly there was a very strong sense of collective pride in Germany’s progress, not least because from the foundation of the Second Reich in 1871 there had been active state policies aimed at developing science and technology: and Matthew Arnold was impressed at the discipline of German thought and its ability to think things through to logical conclusions.
Back in the era of German Unification Arnold was so impressed with the Prussian system of state education that his reports resulted in the less ambitious system in England and Wales sharing some of those features. And the quality of German science and technology during the Nazi era underlined this lesson. In 1944 the Butler Education Act, passed even before the end of the war, set out to build a more ambitious British system, with, as in the Prussian system- three grades of school to meet the needs of three grades of future citizens. There would now be secondary education for all in grammar schools for the future elite, technical schools for those whose intelligence was of a practical nature, and Secondary Modern Schools for the British version of the “lumpen proletariat”. Two years compulsory National Service would complete the process. In this way a future Britain would gain the grades of workers and citizens that a modern economy and a modern parliamentary democracy needed.
Attlee and his team had seen what State action could achieve during the war, and within a few years the post-war Labour Government had seized the opportunity to carry through its vision for a new civilization that had been forged in 1918. It was a “revolution” putting Britain back on track to a better future better equipped to face the challenge of the Future as One Nation. But the Labour Party split asunder over current political issues, notably the Korean War and prescription charges, and it fell to Conservatism to consolidate the situation and make the new order work when it came to power in 1951. Nevertheless ten years later Professor Samuel Beer of Harvard University could postulate that Britain could now show the world an example of “Democratic One-Party Government” for, since the “progressive agenda” championed by the Labour Party had all been rushed through, Britain’s political problems were now, he argued, largely minor ones of good management. The Progressives, as opposed to the revolutionaries, had “no further demands”: and the Conservative Party, statistically the “normal” party of government in Beer's eyes, was well-adapted to the management role that now devolved on government.
But the English have never been much good at “just following orders”, and had been instinctively hostile to the logic of “final solutions” and genocide. And the Labour “revolution” did mean the abandonment of much of the freedom of manoeuvre that had produced England/Britain’s past greatness; and along with that the acceptance of a style of government much closer to continental models and alien to the traditions of England. English Parliamentary Democracy was perhaps not the best rootstock on which to graft a heavily bureaucratised State machine.
THE ENGLISHMAN , THE TEUTON AND THE ROMAN
For a start not everyone was convinced by Darwinian arguments about evolution and revolution, or the overwhelming importance of science, technology, economic planning and personal psychology- all of which Dr. Huxley argued signalled a new phase in the history of mankind.
When Dr. Thomas Huxley in the 1880's could say "the notions of the beginning and the end of the world entertained by our forefathers are no longer credible" English common sense argued that such speculation about things that "passeth all human understanding" are very natural, but that current notions too would only have a "natural life-span" and eventually outlive their usefulness. They drew their strength not from laws tested in laboratories, but from generations of real life experience.
Froude in his “History of England” quoted an English historian who wrote in 1585: “The English had always been, and at present were, a free people, such as in few or no other realms were to be found the like, by which freedom was maintained so valiant a courage in that people”. This was repeated by Richard Law in his contribution to a 1947 volume on “The Character of England”; and, Law added, - “ so he could have written at any time in the last 400 years. Philip of Spain, Louis of France, Bonaparte, William II, and Adolf Hitler- each made the same challenge, and each evoked the same response. This valiant courage, masked sometimes by laziness or by tolerance, has never been far beneath the surface of the English mind, and the soil which nourished it has never been exhausted.” (page 33)
Each of these struggles had been associated with great continental powers who intended to launch a new epoch of history that would further increase their own power. But again to quote Law :- “The history of England ...is the record of an endless campaign which the Englishman has waged to preserve or assert his liberties against a succession of tyrannies which threatened to overwhelm them!”( page 34) And those tyrannies could be from within or without. Hence “the Englishman” had made common cause with the Crown against the barons, and then against the overweening pretensions of the Church. Later- “He made common cause with Parliament, or with the great Lords of the Revolution to regulate and set limits to the authority of the Crown. In their turn he clipped the wings of the oligarchs themselves, and 1832 is a landmark on the road to freedom as clear and definite as 1688. And the day will come, no doubt, when he turns upon the bureaucracy.” (page 34)
Sir Ernest Barker, who edited this work, saw ‘The Character of England’ as part of an historical tradition. There had, he said, been many “periods of introspection in the long and continuous process of English history. They have come in the course of , or immediately after, great periods of war and national tension.” Because only at such moments when unity of purpose is so crucial is there a need to restate it in terms relevant to the present.
Professor Barker referred to efforts by Shakespeare, who bade England ‘to herself be true’ and Wordsworth, who summoned his country on to ‘manners, virtue, freedom and power.’ And he went on:- “On the lower plane of prose- but prose may be an even better guide than poetry to the feelings of ordinary men- there was a publishing enterprise of the eighteenth century which deserves to be mentioned. This was the British Plutarch, of which a new and enlarged edition appeared in 1776, at the beginning of one of the many wars which vexed the century. It contained the lives, in some six volumes, of ‘the most eminent statesmen, patriots, divines, warriors, philosophers, poets and artists...from the accession of Henry VIII to the present time’.
The overall purpose of the British Plutarch is explained in the introduction:- ‘We should be in danger of forgetting our national character..if one check on the licentiousness of the times was not to be found, even among its fashionable amusements.’ The “fashionable amusement” in this case being reading. Books were becoming an increasingly important source of entertainment and self-improvement, eminently suitable for a tradition of English individualism. It was hoped, the publishers wrote that : “By having before our eyes the principles of men of honour and probity, enforced by example, we shall be animated to fix upon some great model to be the rule of our conduct.” And it was in times of crisis like 1776 or 1914 that people would have the opportunity to prove themselves worthy of their heritage.
And at such times of real crisis the “elemental reality” of war fused into one the three levels of the Englishman’s active being- the State, the community and the individual- and raised each to its “finest hour” with God’s grace. Thus Montgomery could write of the action before Dunkirk:- “My division did everything that was demanded of it; it was like a ship with all the sails set in a rough sea, which rides the storm easily and answers to the slightest touch on the helm..There were no weak links; all the doubtful commanders had been eliminated during the previous six months of training. The division was like a piece of fine steel. I was intensely proud of it”. (page 61) Referring to “the most difficult operation” of those last days of the B.E.F, he commented “If this move had been suggested by a student at the Staff College in a scheme, he would have been considered mad. But curious things have to be done in a crisis in war. The movement was carried out without a hitch..”
Later Montgomery goes on to elaborate his principles of command. They included:- (a) recognising that all men and units are different, and must be used in the knowledge of their individual and collective strengths and weaknesses; and (b) placing total emphasis on the supreme need for every man to be fully fit physically and mentally. Each man must be capable of acting and thinking, and adapting thought and action to the circumstances on the ground. But it was in the air not on land or sea that, a few months after Dunkirk, “The Few” famously showed that outstanding individuals would still determine the course of history. Of course it was a team effort. The Spitfire builders and the ground crew played their part. But it was the exploits beyond the call of duty of these remarkable young men that saved the community, the state and the free world, for their efforts in the Battle of Britain prevented the Nazis from successfully doing “their worst”.
Some of the Few won another battle in the long years afterwards and challenged and changed the whole concept of disability-and showed how medicine with a human touch could outperform a sterile scientific approach. For many, who survived the Battle of Britain with horrendous injuries, rebuilt their lives as patients in the remarkable unit at Stoke Mandeville Hospital, remarkable not least because of the special regime that treated them as human beings and not “vegetables” or mere clinical cases, as patients were treated in the new National Health Service under the severe eye of “matron”, who had the duty to uphold the Nightingale tradition of nursing and hospital administration.
Standard medical science and clinical practice could not save these men. Their wards were humanised. They were permitted to wear normal clothes, and not kept bedridden in pyjamas and dressing gowns. They were permitted to smoke and to have a steady supply of alcohol accessible within the wards. There were record players, sing-songs and entertainments: and nurses were specifically chosen who would arouse a man’s desire to be regarded as treated as a man once more. It is now recognised that all this was “ahead of its time”. Miss Nightingale would not have been amused: and yet the whole manner of State-management in the new Post-War Britain was based upon the kind of changes with which Miss Nightingale was intimately involved.
In a post-war period of “introspection and reappraisal” Sir Ernest Barker pointed out of the 'British Plutarch' that - “The publishers went to Greece for their model...There is, after all, some inner affinity between the spirit of England and the spirit of Athens. The idea may be largely a vision of the student, nurtured on the history and philosophy of the Greeks in the cloisters of an old university. It may even be a dream of the few, of a little clique, of the handful of Englishmen who have gone to old schools and followed an old curriculum.” (page 551)
But at the time of Florence Nightingale, when English dreams of Cobden and Bright’s peace were being shaken by fighting from the USA to the Indian sub-continent, and even China, Roman ideals and ideals of government had seemed more immediately relevant. In all of these conflict zones the conflict concerned the relationship between the overarching structure and regional components. In 1947, when “Imperialism” was to be consigned to the “dustbin of History, Professor Barker went on: “Nor must Rome be forgotten- least of all in a country which for more than three centuries was ruled by Rome. The scholar himself may reflect that more than half of the English words which he uses are of Latin origin; and if Virgil celebrated the Roman arts of bearing dominion over peoples and imposing the habit of peace, English statesmen (not always applauded either by others or even by their own countrymen) have followed similar arts- just as lawyers have also built a body of law which has spread over the world like the law of Rome.” (page 552)
But Professor Barker shows here the same idea of a ruling elite based upon the Roman model as Lytton Strachey fell back on , in saying "we must remember that laws are, as a matter of fact, not dispensed by lawgivers, but passed by Act of Parliament". Strachey here showed himself, perhaps, an heir to that T.B. Macaulay tradition that anticipated that the political empowerment of the owners of intellectual and material capital through the Great Reform Act of 1832 would result in a new and successful phase of history.
Richard Law MP might have reminded him that : “Our legal system ,with its insistence upon the equality of all men before the law, is based upon no code but is the result, rather, of the steady development of case-law. The great body of English law was framed, it might almost be said, not by any government action but by the initiative and enterprise of the malefactors or litigants who induced the judgements which afterwards became part of the law of the land.” (page 29-30)
To this it might be added that, whatever instructions and interpretations were placed upon the case by learned counsel and judges, it was juries of their peers- the common people of England- who decided whether or not an Englishman was "guilty as charged".
