The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (13 page)

S
ocial mobility, as we understand it today, was not only unpursued by the vast majority; it had never existed. For centuries an Englishman’s fate had been determined at birth. The caste system was almost as rigid as India’s. Obedience to the master had been bred in childhood, and those who left the land for the mills as the agricultural class seeped into the cities were kept in line by custom and the example of all around them. Successful merchants were an exception, and a significant one. They built mansions, bought coaches, and hired servants, yet they were never fully accepted by the patriciate. As late as the spring of 1981 a
New Yorker
writer attributed Britain’s sagging economy to the fact that a stigma was still attached to men “in trade.” Similarly, the British trade unions’ twentieth-century truculence may arise from the lower classes’ inability to transfer their allegiance from aristocrats to merchants. In Victorian England, the chimney sweeps, ragpickers, chip sellers, dustmen, coachmen, and sandwich-board men who hired out at one-and-six a day were no more rebellious than the serfs from whom they were descended. They did what they did well, and that was enough for them. Richard Harding Davis wrote from England: “In America we hate uniforms because they have been twisted into meaning badges of servitude; our housemaids will not wear caps, nor will our coachmen shave their mustaches. This tends to make every class of citizen look more or less alike. But in London you can always tell a ’bus-driver from the driver of a four-wheeler, whether he is on his box or not. The Englishman recognizes that if he is in a certain social grade he is likely to remain there, and so, instead of trying to dress like some one else in a class to which he will never reach, he ‘makes up’ for the part in life he is meant to play, and the ’bus-driver buys a high white hat, and the barmaid is content to wear a turned-down collar and turned-back cuffs, and the private coachman would as soon think of wearing a false nose as a mustache. He accepts his position and is proud of it, and the butcher’s boy sits up in his cart just as smartly, and squares his elbows and straightens his legs and balances his whip with just as much pride, as any driver of a mail-cart in the Park.”
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London’s massed horsepower made a lively spectacle, bewildering and even frightening to visitors. Each morning some twenty thousand vehicles drawn by steeds lumbered and surged over the toll-free London Bridge—Tower Bridge would not be ready until 1894—and fanned out into the wakening city. The rigs varied. At this hour, in this tumult, you would see few private carriages. They sat parked in the West End and could be seen in large numbers only when they assembled for such liturgical upper-class ceremonies as the annual Eton-Harrow cricket match at Lord’s, in St. John’s Wood, where over six hundred of them were counted in 1871. Much of the bridge traffic carried essentials. There were convoys of carts bearing galvanized tanks, headed for neighborhoods which still had no running water. Produce and livestock accompanied them, including, once a year, sheep on their way to an enclosure near Kensington Palace. A contemporary account tells of the annual sheepshearing: “Thousands of sheep are brought from Scotland and distributed over London wherever grazing can be obtained. After the shearing, the sheep are kept awhile in the park for fattening, and thence gradually find their way to the butchers’ shops.”
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In the city these wagons mingled with public transport and cabs. The first electric tramcar was built in 1883—electric lights had made their appearance two years earlier, for the Savoy Theatre’s premiere of Gilbert and Sullivan’s
Patience
—but London wasn’t introduced to trolleys until 1900. Before that, horse-drawn streetcars crawled along tracked paths in the center of the streets, maddening obstacles to the faster hansoms, growlers, and flys. Flys were usually rented. The Coupé and Dunlop Brougham Company in Regent Street would hire one out at seven shillings and sixpence for the first two hours. But the smartest and fastest way to travel was in the two-wheeled hansom cabs, “the gondolas of London,” as Disraeli called them. Harnesses jingling, horses trotting briskly, and lamps and brass work polished to a blazing finish, there were over three thousand hansoms in London, charging a shilling for two miles and sixpence a mile over that, though the driver could charge more if he traveled beyond the “Four Mile Radius” from Charing Cross, which was (and still is) the geographic center of the city. The cabman sat high in the back, holding reins which passed through a support on the front of the roof, and the front of the cab was open except for two folding doors which came halfway up and protected the passenger from dust and mud. This feature was important. Trains had been so successful that other forms of transportation had hardly changed since Victoria’s coronation. Country roads were surfaced with grass, earth, and stones. Downtown London’s streets were cobbled, but unless you were in an enclosed coach you were lucky to arrive at your destination unstained.

Alighting at Charing Cross, a visitor from the 1980s would quickly become aware of a gamy tang in the air—blended aromas of saddle soap, leather, brass polish, and strong tobacco; scents of wood fires; the fragrance of baking bread and roasting meat manipulated by street chefs. All sorts of entrepreneurs were active on the pavements, and they fascinated Gustave Doré, who executed a series of engravings of them in the early 1870s: dog sellers, flower girls, flypaper merchants (who wore fly-studded samples on their dilapidated top hats), hardware dealers, tinkers, ragmen, knife grinders, ginger-beer men, apple sellers, oyster men, match vendors, “lemonade” men who mixed their chemicals on the spot in portable tubs, and some four thousand hawkers of oranges. The popularity of oranges was due less to their taste than to their smell. Even where sanitation existed, not all street odors were pleasant. Deodorants were unknown. The poor reeked, which was why they were unwelcome in Victorian churches. Nell Gwyn had carried oranges to cut the stench of sweat, vermin, and manure. Before that, the Elizabethans had used pomanders, small balls of pierced metal packed with fragrant herbs. To this day, London judges mount their benches bearing nosegays—hence the name—and once a year herbs are scattered in courtrooms.

Among the other peddlers were salesmen exhibiting great bolts of black broadcloth. The Victorians were very open about death. Today people die in hospitals, where children are “shielded” or “protected” from them; graveyards are landscaped like parks, and mourning is seldom worn. In those days a demise was an important, fascinating event. Typically it occurred in the home, in bed, with the whole family in attendance and little ones held up for a final embrace from the departing parent or grandparent. The pavement chapmen made garments of deep mourning available to the lower classes. Patricians bought their black, gray, and deep purple clothes and black ostrich feathers in Oxford Street shops devoted solely to that trade. Men draped sashed crepe “weepers” around their hats. Even cousins sewed black armbands on their sleeves. Englishmen were more preoccupied with death then than we are, partly because there was much more of it. In 1842 a royal commission had found that the average professional man lived thirty years; the average laborer, seventeen. By the year of Churchill’s birth about fifteen years had been added to these, but it was still not unusual for a middle-class man to die at thirty-nine, as Arthur Sullivan’s brother Fred did in 1877, inspiring Sullivan to write “The Lost Chord.” Another reason for bereavement had nothing to do with delicacy of feeling. The loss of a father was disastrous. There was seldom any financial net beneath the survivors of a wage earner. Jobs were at a premium; artisans provided or rented their own tools, and one mill outdid Scrooge, issuing the notice: “A stove is provided for the clerical staff. It is recommended that each member of the clerical staff bring four pounds of coal each day during cold weather.”
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Except for the thriftiest of savers, however, no class was immune to the catastrophe which followed the passing of a head of household. If a man had been a successful physician, say, or a respectable barrister, his family might have belonged to the upper middle class as long as he was alive, living in the Wordsworthian tranquillity of a leafy Georgian square, with a coach in the mews and a boy at Winchester. All that vanished with his last breath. The family was evicted from the house; the son took a job as a clerk; his mother made what she could as a seamstress, or, in that bitterest refuge of shabby gentility, as a governess in a bourgeois home.

Prosperous homes could be identified by their bay windows, as much a status symbol as the eight-paned window had been a century earlier. The skyline was dominated by St. Paul’s, Wren’s fifty other baroque churches, Big Ben, and the Gothic Houses of Parliament. In Pall Mall were the Athenaeum and the Reform Club, the home of the Liberal party; the Conservatives’ Carlton Club; and the great imperial clubs: the Oriental, the East India, and the Omar Khayyam. The city was a mass of poles and crossbars that bore telegraph wires and the boisterous excesses of Victorian advertising. Napoleon had scorned England as
“un pays de marchands
.” Actually, it was more a nation of hucksters. Billboards, or “sky-signs,” celebrated the virtues of Salada Tea, Waltham Watches, Cook’s Tours, Thurston’s Billiard Tables, Brinstead Pianos, and Good-dall’s Yorkshire Relish. Bumping down London’s streets came remarkable vehicles shaped like Egyptian obelisks, cabbages, and huge top hats, each of them bearing a brand name. The front of opticians’ shops looked like the lenses of gigantic spectacles. Of all the forms of ads, the cheapest and wildest was the “fly-poster,” which could be plastered on any “dead wall” in public view. Gangs pasted these up at night, so that early risers would be greeted, typically, with: “Good morning! Have you used Pears’ Soap?” Sometimes householders would find their windows, even their doors, papered over. Other times gangs from different agencies would clash in the dark, tearing down the others’ posters or obliterating them with buckets of black tar.

Optical illusions, red puzzle signs, posters gummed to public monuments or the hulls of ships anchored in the Thames—anything went. A young advertising man said: “Any fool can make soap. It takes a clever man to sell it.” One innovation, still with us, was the endorsement of a product by a celebrity, which in those days meant such notables as Eugene Sandow, the German strong man, and Captain Webb, the Channel swimmer. Ambitious copywriters aimed even higher than that. We think of the Victorians as deferential toward the royal family. So they were, but some admen, who weren’t, exploited that deference. The Queen was depicted holding a cup of Mazawatta Tea or presiding over the legend: “ ‘The Subject’s Best Friend’—
HUDSON’S DRY SOAP
—Home and Clothes as Sweet as a Rose.” The Prince of Wales was shown handing a glass of Bushmills Whiskey to the shah of Persia at the Paris Exhibition in 1889, and saying: “
This, your Majesty, is the celebrated Bushmills Whiskey which you tasted in England and liked so much
. I feel sure it will win the Gold Medal.” A florist, pushing corsages, quoted the Duchess of York—without her approval; none of the luminaries were consulted—“She thinks the Flower Shield a most ingenious invention and wishes it success.” Even the pontiff was identified as an admirer of a popular drink: “Two Infallible Powers. The Pope and Bovril.” The soap manufacturers knew no shame. Sir John Millais, a successful artist, painted a portrait of a boy making soap bubbles with a clay pipe. The boy’s bar of soap lay on the ground. To Sir John’s astonishment, the picture was reproduced all over the country with “Pears” painted on the bar. In Berlin, Heinrich von Treitschke told a class: “The English think soap is civilization.”
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One device the advertisers missed was the jingle, and this is puzzling, because Victorians loved melodies. Garibaldian organ-grinders stood on every downtown London street corner, bawling ballads. Gilbert and Sullivan were national figures. Not counting the Salvation Army and the military, there were over five thousand bands in the country, and on holidays Londoners crowded around the bandstands in their parks. This was the golden age of the music halls. Between 1850 and 1880 about five hundred new ones were built—with the city’s fifty theaters, this meant that 350,000 Londoners were entertained every night—of which the most famous were the Alhambra, the London Pavilion, the Empire, and the Tivoli. Each hall had its portentous chairman, with his candle, his gavel, and his vast expanse of shirtfront; each encouraged its audiences to join the choruses. The stars were famous enough to endorse soap and whiskey, though unlike the eminent they expected their cut and got it. (Lillie Langtry got it and lost it; her signature was reproduced in an ad, and a forger copied it and cleaned her out.) High on the lists of sightseers arriving from the far reaches of the Empire were evenings hearing the “lion comiques”: Harry Clifton singing “Knees Up, Mother Brown,” George Layborne leading “Champagne Charlie Is My Name,” Jenny Valmore whispering “So Her Sister Says,” and Marie Lloyd:

Henry du Pré Labouchère was an advocate of Home Rule for Ireland. And “Randy pandy” was Lord Randolph Churchill. Music hall performers were keenly aware of politicians and public events, of England’s power around the world, of London’s role as an imperial capital. Britain was hardly a democracy, at least as we understand it; only 16.4 percent of the people could vote. But Britain’s people counted because they, like the distant races toiling beneath the same flag, consented to be ruled as they were. Not the Queen, not peers, not the Commons, and not public-school men wrote the ditties that celebrated the nation’s glory and defied those who sought to curb the growth of an Empire which they believed belonged to them. It was G. H. “the Great” Macdermott, the most celebrated of the music hall performers, who, singing the lyrics of George William Hunt, gave voice to their determination in the 1878 crisis which arose during the Russo-Turkish War: