THE NOT SO GOLDEN AGE YSENDA MAXTONE GRAHAM

Beneath the opulence, Edwardian Britain had a dark underbelly — riven with strikes, class war, sex scandals and political unrest, it stood on the brink of anarchy

THE AGE OF DECADENCE by Simon Heffer (Random House £30)

First, a warning: this book weighs 1.6 kg, so it feels as heavy as Edward Vii’s breakfast and as fat as Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s protruding stomach (our first Liberal prime minister is the only premier ever to have been allowed to die in 10 Downing street; he was so huge he couldn’t be moved).

it covers as much ground as the miles of Edwardian housing spreading out along the new tube lines of London, and is as packed with pompous politicians as the House of Commons was on a busy day in the debate about irish Home rule.

the fact that i now know about all those things shows how rewarding the book is, if you put the hours in. But if you’re hoping to be taken back to a golden age of cricketing tea parties, prepare for a shock.

‘One of the towering misconceptions about the years preceding the Great War,’ simon Heffer tells us, ‘ is that they formed an extended Edwardian summer of calm and serenity that was shattered in August 1914. in fact they witnessed the most socially divisive and disruptive period since the rise of Chartism in the 1830s.’

Political unrest ‘brought parts of the country to the brink of anarchy’; the suffragettes resorted to ‘militancy that verged on terrorism’, the House of Lords picked a fight ‘that brought about the worst constitutional crisis since 1688’, and Unionist agitation ‘brought ireland close to civil war’.

so, one more rose-tinted illusion shattered. those poor men who died in the trenches had not been having a lovely time up till then.

THE boiling- hot summers before World War i were rife with strikes: dockers, steelworkers, miners, railway workers, sewing machinists, brought to their wits’ ends by low pay and brutal working conditions, took to the streets in ‘the Great Unrest’.

‘the atmosphere,’ Heffer writes, ‘was as far from the myth of the perpetual tea party on the country house lawn as it was possible to imagine.’

the overwhelming sense this book gives is of two forces pulling in different directions. the Old Guard (Empire, royal Family, aristocracy, House of Lords) determined to keep things as they were — rich man in his castle, poor man at his gate — and the new post-Victorian generation determined to force those factions to wake up and smell the 20th century.

these were the years when wonderful ‘firsts’ were happening in Britain: first electric street lighting (Godalming, 1881), first motor car, first garden city and roundabout (Letchworth, 1909), first university for non-posh people ( LsE, 1895), first cremation (Woking, 1885), first rambling club, first woodland saved for the nation (Epping Forest, 1885), first Old Age Pension (1908).

But in terms of the great political questions, everything was a struggle. Even what now seems like a small thing — allowing the first atheist MP — caused a row in the House of Commons that went on for three years.

‘the atheist is a morally unsafe man,’ went the counter-argument. ‘there is no possibility of binding him to his obligation.’

But thanks to Charles Bradlaugh (the politician in question) not giving up, the Commons did become secularised and the right of freedom of thought was established. it was thanks to the stubbornness of those strikers that the Minimum Wage Act was eventually passed in 1912. it was thanks to the suffragettes’ ‘terrorist tactics’ that they finally got the vote. Heffer does not spare us a graphic description of the force-feeding of suffragettes on hunger strike in prison. they had to be held down by a doctor and six wardresses while a tube was forced up their nostril. such brutal actions were the desperate forces of the Old Guard, resisting change at all costs. it took the exposing of dreadful things, Heffer shows us, to force change. William stead (‘the father of tabloid journalism’, who was to die on the titanic) revealed the trafficking and prostitution of children, which the Jack the ripper Case had also exposed. the Cleveland street scandal exposed the exploiting of lowerclass boys for the homosexual gratification of aristocrats. the Baccarat scandal exposed the Prince of Wales’s gambling habits and the louche, decadent behaviour of his fawning Marlborough House set.

the weakness of the Army recruited to fight the Boer War exposed the epidemic of rickets and stunted growth caused by malnourishment. this was a time when the lid was lifted on all kinds of dark goings- on under the surface of success and swagger.

Britain, Heffer suggests, needed to be knocked down a peg or two, and he shows us how, little by little, it was. the old certainties were chipped away.

Prepare for some uncomfortable truths about our great nation. ‘there is still no evidence that Kitchener intended to kill half the population of Boer children, a couple of thousand of their mothers and grandmothers and 15,000 black labourers,’ Heffer writes — but kill them he did, through the disastrous scorched-earth policy of burning their villages and ‘interning’ their women and children in vast tented ‘concentration camps’ to which it proved impossible to get adequate provisions.

Another uncomfortable truth: we were pretty keen on eugenics, and our first eugenicists, such as Francis Galton (who coined the term), Marie stopes, and even Winston Churchill, were keen on the compulsory sterilisation of the feeble- minded and weak. sir James Crichton-Browne, the Lord Chancellor’s Visitor in Lunacy (a horribly hilarious title) branded such unwanted specimens ‘social rubbish’.

CHURCHILL himself said: ‘the multiplication of the unfit is a terrible danger to the race.’ such theories provided some of the vocabulary for later Nazi thinking.

if we’re looking for glamorous glimpses of What Aristocrats Were Up to while all this social upheaval was going on, Heffer does occasionally gratify us — although he never lets us put our feet up in any kind of hammock of a Go-Between Edwardian summer. What he does, from time to time, is shine a light on what certain grand people were doing at vital moments.

During the summer strikes and riots of 1912, George V was in scotland grouse shooting; and when Asquith needed to go and kiss Edward Vii’s hand on becoming prime minister in 1908, he had to take the train to Biarritz: King Edward was there with his mistress Mrs Keppel, and saw no reason to break off his holiday.

We read this book knowing what none of those people knew: that the cataclysm of World War i was just round the corner.