Christ Church, Birkenhead:

A Picture of the Age: 1849 - 1999

Written by Graham Citrine to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Christ Church

Return to History page

Go to period
1849 - 1874
1874 - 1899
1899 - 1924
1924 - 1949
1949 - 1974
1974 - 1999

(1) 1849 - 1874 Top of Page

In 1849, when Christ Church was opened, Britain was the ‘workshop of the world’ - richer than any other two or three countries combined. In happy contrast to the excesses of her Hanoverian uncles, Victoria (still in her twenties and blissfully happy in her marriage to Albert) mirrored the simple pleasures of most of her subjects - and there were still more than 50 years of her reign to come. Guarded by her great navy, equal to any two others combined, surrounded by sea and separated from a continent torn by revolution, Britain seemed prosperous, peaceful and law-abiding. We talk today of a single currency; then, there was a currency acceptable the world over - the English sovereign, or the Bank of England notes which promised to exchange any note for its value in gold. She was the envy of other countries so that Prince Metternich, the Archconservative from Austria, Louis Philippe, the ‘citizen king’ of France, and the revolutionary Karl Marx, could all find a safe haven in Britain. The people, though poor and disadvantaged by modern standards, were generally better fed, clothed and housed than ever before in history. Prices were stable or falling, wages were stable or rising: the British truly believed that they were blessed by God, and parents could teach their children with confidence:

‘I thank the Goodness and the Grace

Which on my birth has smiled,

And made me in these Christian days,

A happy English child.’

The Prime Minister in 1849 was Lord John Russell, younger son of the Duke of Bedford; his Foreign Secretary was Lord Palmerston -’those two dreadful old men’ as Victoria called them. Both born in the 18th Century, they were to dominate politics until the 1860s. They had supported the extension of the vote to the middle classes, but were reluctant to go further, agreeing to change at home only with the greatest misgiving. They were to be followed by Lord Aberdeen, Lord Derby, then again, Lord Palmerston in the 1850s and early 1860s -the House of Lords still provided most of Britain’s leaders. But waiting impatiently for his time was the young Gladstone, son of a Liverpool cotton merchant - the industrial middle classes were about to replace the aristocracy as Britain’s leaders.

Income Tax, introduced in the 1840s by Robert Peel, was 7d (3.5p) in the £ on incomes above £150 p.a. - and this was virtually the only major tax in Britain. It was to fall to 4d in the £ under Gladstone, who had hoped to dispense with it entirely to make Britain the only comparatively tax-free country in the world, but his dream was never realised.

In 1867 the Conservative Benjamin Disraeli gave the vote to the working man in the towns, and these elected Gladstone to office in 1868. "I come to you unmuzzled" he declared. In the following six years he introduced a series of reforms he believed necessary to advance Britain towards the 20th Century. A High Church Anglican, his chief supporters were the non-conformist voters in the industrial towns and in South Wales. His Whig Party was now universally known as the ‘Liberal’ Party because of its support for total freedom of trade with the rest of the world. Gladstone truly believed that if all countries traded freely and openly then there would be universal trust and inter-dependence so that wars would finish for ever; there would be no need for expensive armies or navies; the money saved could be used to advance the people morally and economically. He believed that this was the Christian way for the modern world, and truly believed that he was doing God’s will. "I do not object to Gladstone’s always having the Ace of Trumps up his sleeve," said a contemporary, "but only to his belief that God has put it there." A shy man who could only relax happily with his beloved wife and family, Gladstone was not a favourite of Victoria. "He speaks to me as if I were a public meeting," she complained, and he was never invited to sit in her presence. Nevertheless, the people loved him for his honesty; he became the ‘Grand Old Man’, the ‘People’s William’. He hoped to remove Irish grievances by reforming the Church of Ireland and the ownership of land, thus bringing Ireland into the forefront of British politics, where it still remains; he opened up he Civil Service and the Army to men of ability rather than birth,; entrance to the Civil Service was by examination as was entry to Sandhurst; the Universities were opened to Non-Conformists; Trade Unions were legalised; married women were allowed to keep their property rather than surrender it to their husband - they were no longer ‘his chattel’; vote by ballot meant that voters need not fear the displeasure of employer or landlord; and perhaps most important of all - compulsory education for all - ‘we must educate our masters’. School Boards were set up in towns to build Council Schools, but until enough were built, churches continued to provide basic education. In our own church hall 760 children were taught under the stern eye of the Headmistress sitting on her platform, until the school on Borough Road was opened in the 1880s. Many non-conformists objected to sending their children to C of E Schools - and having to pay for the privilege; education was not free, only the poorest received free education, others had to pay a small sum weekly, perhaps 2d or 3d a week, or more, depending on the father’s income, paid on the Monday morning. My mother born in 1890 attended St. John’s School in Birkenhead and her stern welsh, non-conformist mother would send her to school on Monday morning without her weekly 3d. Monday was the day for serious religious education – possibly building on the foundation of the previous day – but mother was sent home for her ‘school money’. Once at home, she would be required to help with the family washing and to run errands, returning to school only when her mother was sure that C of E teaching had ended; mother hated the humiliation of it but she was not alone – others (always the girls) were treated similarly – of what use was education to a future wife and mother ? My Grandfather, born in 1863, was one who benefited greatly. He too attended the church school, starting at the age of 7 and leaving at 11! The criteria for leaving was that a pupil had to have the basics of the ‘3 R’s’: this granddad had achieved and he was needed to work in the uncertain industrial climate beginning in 1874. His first job was with the firm of ‘Moorhouses’ – a soft-drinks firm which sold herbal drinks – Nettle Beer, Dandelion and Burdock etc. in brown stone flagons taken round the streets on horse-drawn carts – some may remember the Birkenhead Company. Granddad’s job was to wash the returned flagons under a cold water tap (hygiene at its most basic) and scrape off the label with a blunt knife. For this he was paid 1/6d (7.5 p) for a five and a half day week. That sum would provide three meals for a normal family. Whenever he wrote a letter he would always use the small ‘I’ rather than the capital. When I, with my grammar school education, and with the arrogance of youth, tried to point out his mistake, he demanded, ‘Why ?’ and I could not explain why. ‘Right’, he said, with a look of utter contempt for my lack of education, ‘until you tell me why, I’ll do it my way.’

How did people amuse themselves? Drink was very cheap and there was no restriction on children: mothers took their babies with them and if the infant cried, then a finger dipped in the gin and given to the baby to suck was a sure way of inducing sleep, while the baby was introduced to alcohol at an early age. The Music Hall was at first a Public House, where a singer or comedian would entertain the customers: as a result such entertainment was not for the respectable! But the true theatre was acceptable after the Queen was known to have visited a London theatre.

The great entertainment, however, was reading - although only about 40% of the population could read. The practice was for stories to be read aloud; with the restricted lighting available, only the reader needed sufficient light, the listeners sat in the gloom - which no doubt helped create the atmosphere for many of the stories. The most important book was the Bible of course, followed by Robinson Crusoe and Pilgrim’s Progress. Books of sermons had a wide sale, often to clergymen who simply read one out each Sunday, thus saving themselves the burden of writing a sermon. (There is no evidence of this practice at Christ Church!) Poetry was also widely read and enjoyed. Wordsworth was the Poet Laureate in 1849, but he was no longer the giant of former years, he was long past his earlier greatness so that it could be written:

Two voices are there…one is of the deep…..

And one is of an old half-witted sheep ..........

And Wordsworth, both are thine."

The most popular true poet was Alfred, Lord Tennyson, whose ‘In Memoriam’ was selling three or four editions a year after its publication in 1850. But he was easily outsold by Martin Tupper, a poet never heard of today but whose ‘Proverbial Philosophy, a Book of Thoughts and Arguments Originally Treated’, sold by the million. Many books were of the moralising kind - the Rev. L. Richmond’s "The Dairyman’s Daughter" sold more than 2 million copies: it tells of a girl who on becoming a Christian then converts her mother, father and sister before death carries them all off. Herman Melville’s "Moby Dick" was a book read by men only, it being described as being ‘reprehensible throughout, . . . not the work to be seen by any mother in the hands of her daughter, and as such not suitable to lie on the drawing room table.’ The most popular novelists were Thackeray and Dickens, both of whose work was published in weekly parts before being offered in book form. Thackeray’s "Vanity Fair" sold in its thousands, but Dickens sold his in tens of thousands. "Dombey and Son" sold at the rate of 30,000 a month and "David Copperfield" , after a slow start, at 40,000 a month. In 1848 W.H. Smith opened his station bookstalls, following them in 1849 with his cheap lending library, with books being lent at 1d each, thus offering books to a wider public than ever before. But by far the greatest sales were achieved by the ‘Penny-dreadfuls’ - Gothic Horror novels with intriguing titles: "The Skeleton Clutch or the Goblet of Blood", "Fatherless Fanny or the Mysterious Orphan", both written by Thomas Prest, whose most famous work was "Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street". One of the most notorious of these books "Varney the Vampire or the Feast of Blood" ran for more than 200 chapters, and was a book which made Bram Stoker’s "Dracula" seem like a nursery story. No respectable person bought these - they were bought by servants and young people, no doubt to be confiscated by the stern father or master - and read secretly by them !

Children’s books were equally stern and moralising in their content. Children had to learn that life was hard and to be endured. "I’m five years old today, Father," said the young child. "Five years nearer to your death, my boy," was the reply. "Pilgrim’s Progress" was a favourite story with children, as was "Robinson Crusoe". A book for Christmas in 1849 was "The City Apprentices or Industry and Idleness Exemplified" by the Rev. T. Murray, and written for 5 -8 year olds. It tells of Thomas Idle and Francis Goodchild. The latter becomes Lord Mayor of London, while the former was brought to execution at Tyburn - the young child would be familiar with public executions, even if he had never seen one. But to be fair, in the same year there was also "Popular Rhymes and Nursery Tales" with most of the familiar stories and Hans Andersen’s "Wonderful Stories for Children!

Children also played board games – draughts, chess, backgammon were of course well-established games going back several centuries, but other games were now appearing – Snakes and Ladders was introduced – the child having to experience defeat or disappointment when near to victory – there were more snakes on the top line of the board than anywhere else; this game, like so many others, came from India, now an important trading area for Britain. The British love of horse racing was also featured – and again I am sure that many remember this game played on a board showing an oval track, with various hazards to be overcome – falling into the ditch, being unseated etc. The Victorians could never resist giving a moral or educational purpose to their games and this is well illustrated in the Geography game where players must travel through Europe visiting towns and cities, each of which carried a description of some point of interest – e.g. ‘Lyons, the second city of France – remain for one turn to see its silk manufacture in which more than100,000 people are employed’. ‘Warsaw, the capital of Poland, a large city but very dirty. Go back to Ratisbon and complain to the Imperial Diet’. Finally – ‘London – the capital of Britain and her Empire; the greatest city in the world’.

In 1850, Darwin’s "Origin of the Species" was published, leading to great anger and furore in the Church, as it seemed to deny the truth of the Bible. In time, most Christians were able to reconcile its teaching with their theology and it did cause people to examine their beliefs rather than accept them unquestioningly.

Sport was the province of the wealthy; professional sport was not yet available to attract the ordinary man, who had neither the time nor the money to indulge. Horse racing was popular – Derby Day being one of the great social occasions for both rich and poor in the South while the Grand National played a similar part in the North.. Bare-knuckle fighting also attracted rich and poor - but only the less respectable elements. Fights continued until one fighter was unable to continue. Rounds continued until a man was knocked down, his seconds then having a minute to ‘bring him up to scratch’ - the line drawn in the centre of the ring. Though illegal, Britain produced the world champions at this sport until an Irish-American, John L Sullivan , took the title to become the last bare-knuckle champion of the world. He in turn was to lose it to another Irish-American, ‘Gentleman Jim’ Corbett who later lost the title to Robert Fitzsimmons, ‘Ruby Robert’, a Cornishman and the last native-born Englishman to hold the heavyweight title. These fights were fought under the rules laid down by the Marquis of Queensberry – fighters to wear padded gloves, rounds to last no more than three minutes, and if a fighter was knocked down, he had only 10 seconds to rise to his feet, by his own efforts, no help given by his seconds.

Whether it could be called entertainment is doubtful, but a public execution was still the great draw for crowds. The execution of John Gleeson in Liverpool drew a crowd of more than 100,000, the railways laying on special cheap excursion trains for the event in 1849

Fox hunting was the sport for the wealthy, though the poor enjoyed the spectacle as hunt followers. There is an apocryphal story that the Rector of Woodchurch was accosted by one of his parishioners: "Good Morning, Rector; I am sorry to say that you will not be going to heaven when you die for you are not a Christian."

"I am sorry to hear that. Why not ?"

"Because I heard that you had shot a fox, and no Christian would ever do such a thing. Good day, Sir!"

Religion was important and could raise passions. When the Pope decreed that he was about to establish Roman Catholic Sees with Bishops and Archbishops in Britain, there were cries of ‘No Popery!’ A Liverpool Vicar called for the death penalty for any who accepted a title from the Pope or for any priest who heard Confession. It was suggested that any person accepting such a title from a foreign ruler was a traitor and guilty of High Treason. Lord Russell was forced to introduce an Ecclesiastical Titles Bill refusing the establishment of Popish titles. The Bill was never enforced, the titles came in, Catholics did not become traitors and the Bill was quietly repealed later by Gladstone.

In 1850 British pride was shaken when the Cowes Yacht Race was won by the American yacht "America", defeating the best Britain could produce. Now, 150 years later, the ‘America’s Cup’ has still not been returned to Britain, despite many attempts.

In the same year it was proposed that Britain should stage a ‘Great Exhibition’ to show her achievements to the world. Presided over by Prince Albert, it was to be housed in the Crystal Palace, conceived by Joseph Paxton, who in 1847 had designed Birkenhead Park, the first Municipal Public Park in the world. The Crystal Palace shows Victorian England at its best - nothing was impossible if one had confidence and trust. At a cost of only £79,000, it covered more than 18 acres, was more than a quarter of a mile in length, and over 100 feet high. From the time that the design was accepted to its erection, the building took only 22 weeks! [Compare this with the £750 million and years of construction of the Millennium Dome!] It was a beautiful building, light and airy, graceful and well-proportioned. To try to describe all of its exhibits would require a book to itself, though not all objects were useful - there was a cast-iron pram weighing close to 4 cwt and a knife with more than 100 blades which made the present Swiss Army knife seem simple by comparison. Of interest to us at Christ Church was the great ‘Father Willis’ organ of 4,500 pipes, built especially for the exhibition by the premier organ builder in Britain (and therefore by implication in the world) - a fore-runner of our own magnificent instrument.

Thousands visited the Exhibition, the railways running cheap excursion trains to bring people from all over the country to London: the days when a person was born, lived and died in the same village were ending for ever. The profits from the Exhibition were used to build the Royal Albert Hall as a major concert hall for the capital and also the Victoria & Albert Museum.

The 1840s saw a change in fashions. In the Regency period and after, men had dressed in bright clothing - plum reds, greens, blues, with large brass buttons, and they were usually clean-shaven. Now, in the new, hard-working prosperous Britain, men would dress in sober black with a forbidding top hat squarely on the head; beards lent an air of severity, age and dignity. Look at the stern, unsmiling faces of our 19th Century vicars compared with the gentler appearance of the 20th Century incumbents in the photographs displayed at the back of Church. Indoors, a gentleman would wear a smoking jacket and cap, it being believed that the smell of tobacco on clothes would be too much for the delicate sensitivity of the ladies! The whole effect was soberly rich and solid, but rather dull and not a little pompous.

It was the ladies who showed the brighter side of fashion - the ‘good wife’ was one who stayed at home to manage the house and its servants. Their clothes reflected their husband’s wealth and position, and they appeared over-dressed and fussy. The crinoline had not yet come in, so in the 1850s a lady would dress in at least four petticoats, one of them being of a heavy stiffened material and others starched to give them strength to support a huge dress of 3 to 4 yards of material in the skirt alone. Add to this the fashion for very tight stays of whalebone and it was understandable that women fainted in the heat of summer, giving them the reputation of being the ‘weaker sex’. The narrow waist was the height of fashion, the smallest recorded being a mere 13 inches. It was chiefly the wealthier ladies who followed this fashion – a working woman would find it impossible to work if she were constricted in this way. The price was paid in the health of these young ladies and by their children for many babies were born with deformities - dislocated hips, curved spines etc. By the 1860s the crinoline had been invented, a sort of cage of steel and bone which reduced the need of heavy petticoats. Its disadvantage was its tendency to rise up in a strong wind, or if one sat down suddenly and carelessly, much to the embarrassment of the wearer, for even the showing of an ankle was considered risque at this time. I imagine they would be a major problem in our church with its narrow aisles and very narrow pew seats. Imagine a Victorian family of mother, father and three or four children sitting in one of our pews on a hot summer’s day and one can have real sympathy as well as admiration for the Victorians. Ladies’ dresses also became brighter. The discovery of aniline dyes in the 1850s led to very bright scarlets, greens, yellows, almost any colour imaginable conceived by the scientist in his laboratory. The reserved softer colours produced by vegetable dyes were disappearing in the face of stronger colours. In 1859 the Empress Eugenie of France celebrated her husband’s victory over the Austrians by wearing a huge crinoline dress in a purplish-red colour, called Magenta after the battle. Victoria and Albert’s love of Scotland was reflected in an outburst of colourful tartans, using the new dyes; tartans never known by any clan appeared everywhere. Prince Albert designed his own ‘Balmoral’ tartan, to be worn at the house he had designed as a summer home. Visitors were startled by rooms where the carpet, upholstery and wallpaper were all in various shades of tartan - it was known to give sensitive people a headache simply sitting there. By the 1870s the size of women’s dresses had become ridiculous and with the change to flat fronted dresses with the crinoline reduced to a small cage drawn round the back, known as the bustle, dresses became lighter and easier for movement.

In order to dress as they did, ladies needed a servant. Even modest families had at least one servant. A housemaid/general servant would earn £12 p.a. for a 15 hour day and one afternoon off per month; a cook/general received £30 p.a.; a kitchen maid £5 and a bootboy £6. For less than £100 a year, a moderately wealthy family could have five or six servants to do all the everyday chores, and most families with £2 or £3 a week had at least one servant. Servants had to ‘know their place’ - hence the existence of ‘free’ pews in the balconies at Church - here sat the servants, their entrance being the side doors now seldom used, while their master and mistress used the main doors on Bessborough Road and at the West End.

Few people bought houses, most rented. A good family house with out-buildings and servants quarters would cost £30 a year; a cheaper house with room for one servant would be £15 p.a. First class travel by boat and train to Paris was £1.8s.0d. (£1.40p). First class to New York with all meals was £25-£30.

In the country, ‘Hiring Fairs’ still remained: farm workers would stand in a line to be hired for the year; farmers out-bid each other for the young, fit, skilled man whose reputation would be well-known. He would be offered a cottage for his family and pay could reach £30-£40 a year for a very good man. As a worker grew older, however, his value fell; the most pitiful were the very old who might be hired to do the simplest work, his pay being a simple bed in the barn and his meals. If no work was forthcoming, then the Workhouse awaited - the ultimate disgrace for any poor person. The aim of the workhouse was to make life so unpleasant inside that any work was better than entering one of these places. With Victorian prosperity in the middle of the century, there was full employment for all, so the workhouse would stand empty unless filled with orphans or the very old, people for whom they were not designed. For an old person to enter a workhouse meant permanent separation between husband and wife, except to see each other in the church on Sunday, and also the recognition that they had no-one to care for them, they were at the bottom of the heap. Even life in prison was better, for in prison there were new rules concerning food, the provision of books, some exercise and social mixing with fellow inmates, and even the chance to earn a little money for luxuries by sewing mail bags - and also one could leave prison without having to die to obtain freedom.

In 1840 the ‘Penny Post’ was introduced: this encouraged the use of the mail to send letters and a new phenomenon, the Christmas card. As the first stamp in the world, the British had no need to distinguish their stamps from others, so that the British stamp, unlike others, had no need to state the name of the country - and this continues to the present day. Again, the increase in communication meant that the old barriers between people were breaking down.

Following the Great Exhibition, it seemed as if a change had occurred - life became less secure, doubts and worries began to appear. In 1854 the Crimean War ended 40 years of peace - the longest period of European peace since the Middle Ages. Britain and France united to keep Russia away from the Mediterranean. There was no doubt that the Western Countries would win against the most backward country in Europe, but it was the manner of winning. The war should have been over within six months, instead it lasted for two years. Officers who had been young subalterns in 1815 were now General Officers, without the experience of commanding armies in battle; there was confusion over supplies - an order for 10,000 pairs of boots was carried out, but while 10,000 right boots sailed for the Crimea, 10,000 left boots followed three months later - by which time the right boots had been lost! Men froze in tattered uniforms while greatcoats and blankets rotted in stores three miles away. The Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava showed that courage still remained, but it showed also that ‘someone had blundered’. The news of the suffering of the wounded at the hospital at Scutari reached the British people by the new electric telegraph, so that the day’s news could be read the next morning. It resulted in Florence Nightingale and her devoted band of nurses going to the Crimea and the death rate in the hospital falling from 85% to below 20% simply by the provision of cleanliness and comfort. She returned a heroine, to start her Royal School of Nursing at St.Thomas’s Hospital, to put Britain in the forefront of nursing training. The war saw the introduction of an award for gallantry - the Victoria Cross, the bronze medal made from the guns captured from the Russians at Balaclava. But British self-confidence, so evident in 1851, had been shaken. It was to be shaken even more in 1857 with the Indian Mutiny, which led to the Government’s having to take responsibility for control of the sub-continent from the East India Company.

Further wars followed, both on the continent and overseas. Britain was not directly involved, but the results were to affect her status. In 1859, France helped Italy to defeat Austria, and Italy appeared as a new kingdom. The war is noteworthy for the Battle of Solferino when Henri Dunant saw the suffering of the defeated Austrian wounded left to die on the battlefield, causing him to start the Red Cross, dedicated to helping anybody in need and with its HQ in Geneva.

In 1861 the American Civil War began, in theory over slavery but in fact over world trade - the industrial North of America wanted to erect barriers to British trade to protect its own markets. The cotton-growing South favoured free-trade with Britain, its biggest customer for cotton picked by slaves. The Government, in theory, was neutral, but in fact favoured the South; the workers supported the North, which they saw as fighting slavery. Ill-feeling came from the launch of a Laird’s built ship, "The Alabama", which for nearly two years destroyed Northern shipping. There was no danger of war - the U.S.A. would never risk a war with Britain whilst fighting her own bitter war, but the North’s victory in 1865 meant that Britain lost many of her markets in the U.S.A. On the credit side, the exploits of the ‘Alabama’ won for Laird’s a reputation for excellent ships which served them well in the future. This war was noteworthy in many ways - it saw the first battle at sea between ‘ironclads’, marking the end of the wooden sailing ship on which Britain’s sea domination had rested; it also saw the advent of trench warfare, and attacks on the civilian population as the weakest element in an adversary. The first appearance of machine guns and the breech-loading rifle, the importance of railways for the swift movement of men and materials – all these should have provided lessons for the future, but few military men recognised their importance. The war also led to massive unemployment in Britain, the first sign that industrial prosperity was not guaranteed. With no unemployment pay, suffering in the new industrial towns was widespread and the numbers were so great that the workhouses could not accommodate them all, so that food had to be given outside the system.

In the 1860’s also, Prussia became the new leader of Germany, defeating Denmark, France and Austria to unite all the German States into a new German Empire under the King of Prussia, now to be known as the Kaiser. This new Germany in turn began to industrialise itself and in so doing closed its markets to British goods - again, unemployment began to grow in the manufacturing towns. France became a Republic following this war, her ex-emperor, Napoleon III, coming to Britain where he was kindly received by the Queen. He died shortly afterwards, his son, the Prince Imperial, was killed later serving in the British army in Africa. His widow, the elegant Eugenie, lived on in Britain until the 1920’s and until recently, there was a lady living in Oxton who had been a personal maid to the Empress, keeping her portrait beside her bed. My wife, a District Nurse, had treated her and learned of her history. In this war, the French , worried by the tendency of butter to ‘go off’ in the hot weather, had produced a butter-substitute made from vegetable oil to which they gave the name ‘margeron’ meaning ‘pearl’ – hence our margarine. In each of these wars, the Prussians had won swiftly and spectacularly by careful planning – having their troops in the right place at the right time and destroying the opposition in a single battle. The conviction grew that to win wars, the Prussian pattern was to be followed – guaranteeing a short sharp victorious war.

For France, the great desire was for revenge; for the newly-united Germany there was the belief that success could be won by war rather than peaceful negotiation: the seeds of the future World War were sown.

The wars divided the Royal Family: Prince Albert had always favoured a united Germany under Prussian rule; his beloved eldest child, Vicky, had married the Crown Prince of Prussia and Albert hoped for a liberal parliamentary Prussia to be a co-equal of Britain, the two to control the world. Albert died in 1861, causing Victoria unimagined grief and despair. She retired almost completely from public life, retiring to Windsor or to Osborne in the Isle of Wight, where portraits, busts and statues of Albert were in every room and Albert’s valet continued to lay out his clothes, prepare his bath and shaving water as always. Victoria continued to sign state papers and place them on Albert’s desk, as always, and when she dined alone or with family, Albert’s place was laid at table. All male children and grandchildren carried the name of Albert and she believed that this would be the name for all future British kings. Because of this she tended to favour the Prussian cause. Her son, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, loved France and the French, and he was married to the beautiful Alexandra (the Princess Di of that time), Princess of Denmark, they tended to be anti-Prussian as a result. Though fond of his sister and brother-in-law, he had no time for his nephew, the young Prince William. Because of Victoria’s retirement from public life, the Prince of Wales set up his own rather raffish court, and for the first time in Victorian Britain murmurs of republicanism began to be heard.

So, at the end of our first 25 years, the prosperity and confidence of the 1840s had been replaced by unease and a growing industrial slump, with widespread unemployment, whispers of republicanism, and a lack of certainty for the future. In 1874, Gladstone was defeated in the election, and was replaced by Benjamin Disraeli and a Conservative Government to try to re-establish that old confidence.

(2) 1874 – 1899: Top of Page

The second twenty-five year period in the life of Christ Church witnessed so many important changes that it becomes difficult to decide what to include and what may be safely left out.

Perhaps the most significant changes relevant to our lives took place in the condition of the people, particularly the women. In the earlier years of the century, indeed throughout history, women from middle-class, fairly prosperous, homes, stayed at home to learn the skills of being a housewife and mother. Poorer women had always worked because they had to - there was no room for a non-wage earner in a working-class family: women as well as children were expected to provide a small amount to the family budget. Indeed, there was a great deal of resentment in many working class households at the introduction of compulsory education, for it stopped young children contributing to the family income. One of the reasons for the extended summer holiday throughout August, which still remains, was not to give children a time of rest in the sun - May and June were better times for that - but to free them for work on the farms to bring in the harvest; without that provision the Act might not have been passed.

The period beginning in 1874 saw a time of unemployment; I have mentioned earlier the need for my Grandfather to leave school to earn his living at the age of 11. It was the aim of all boys at the age of 14 to become apprenticed to a trade which would give some guarantee of employment as a skilled worker. At that age, therefore, my grandfather was fortunate in gaining an apprenticeship on the railway as a plumber, but in order to take up the post, he had to report at Preston in Lancashire at 8 a.m. Accordingly, his mother woke him at 3 a.m. and by 4 o’clock he was on his way - the ferry across the Mersey was 1d, he then walked to Exchange Station in Liverpool, not to catch the train – such luxuries were beyond the family finances – but to walk to Preston, some 25 to 30 miles away, by following the railway line. He arrived in time to be taken on and of course, once he was a railway employee, he was allowed free travel on the railways for the rest of his life, rising to become a master-plumber with the old L.M.S. Railway and taking great pride in his work – I can remember as a child being taken by him to the Gents’ Lavatories on Chester Station and having all the elaborate plumbing work explained – I visited it years later with my own children and as far as I could see it was still working unchanged from when my grandfather had first installed it more than eighty years before. One wonders how many young people of today would be prepared to walk 25 miles to ensure their employment.

However, one of the results of the Education Act was to create a pressing need for educated women with their greater understanding of and patience with young children to become teachers - teachers who would be prepared to work for a lower rate of pay than men. (It was not until the middle of our own century that women teachers were given equal pay with men.) It became a ‘respectable’ job for daughters of the lower middle-class.

Respectable work, also in offices when the typewriter was invented. Before that all letters and their copies were painstakingly written out by hand in ‘copperplate’ handwriting by male copy clerks - every office had two or three such young men. With the coming of the typewriter, one reasonably educated young woman, using carbon papers, could type two or three times more letters, plus copies, than had previously been written by the copy clerks. Add to this the coming of the telephone - by the early 1880’s a telephone exchange was set up in London and by the 1890’s the instrument had spread throughout the country -and the need was for young ladies with the greater dexterity of their sex to carry out this new work. For the first time, women were going out to work not necessarily for economic reasons but because they wanted to, and soon preferred the greater freedom and independence this gave to them. In time, this independence was to lead to their demand for the vote - but not yet!

One of the inevitable results of these changes in employment was a change to a more sensible form of dress. It would be impossible for a crinoline-clad lady to sweep around a schoolroom or office. The crinoline disappeared, remaining for a short time as the bustle, a small cage at the back of the dress, but this too disappeared very quickly in the 1880’s. Dresses now, though long, conformed to the general shape of the figure and therefore became the basis for modern fashion. Dresses were lighter and more comfortable, and this trend was increased further with the growth in sport for young ladies.

Croquet and Archery had long been acceptable out-door pursuits of both men and women, but the more energetic sports were confined to the men. In the 1870’s Lawn Tennis was introduced - known at first as ‘Sphairistike’. In 1877 the Wimbledon championships began for both men and women, and though by no means as energetic as the present day game it did require ladies to move fairly quickly about the court and this in turn demanded a greater freedom of movement in dresses light enough and designed for the purpose. And of course, once women experienced the new freedom there was no going back to the old ways.

Perhaps the greatest boost for the freedom of women was the invention of the ‘Safety Bicycle’. The upper-classes were accustomed to ride horses, but the bicycle - a development of the ‘velocipede’ or hobby-horse of the early century - was to give mobility to the middle-classes. The early bicycles were known as the ‘ordinary’ or ‘Penny-farthing’, dangerous machines ridden only by daring young men - and quite unacceptable for women. But by 1888, the safety bicycle using a chain to drive the wheels, and with Dunlop’s new pneumatic tyres, meant comfortable, easy-to-ride machines for both sexes. The freedom to explore the countryside cheaply and easily again gave a freedom to all, but particularly to young women, never known before in history. Again, this led to lighter, more suitable clothing - there was a move for women to copy the knickerbockers favoured by men, but these were seen as unseemly. Instead, ladies’ cycles had the cross bar lowered so that they could ride in their long skirts.

The 1880’s saw another significant step forward in transport, for in Germany Benz produced a carriage driven by a petrol engine - he named the vehicle ‘Mercedes’ after his daughter. In 1888, Gottfried Daimler, another German, patented the internal combustion engine, and the Motor Age had begun. Britain was not in the forefront here because of a law which demanded that any horseless carriage could travel no faster than 4 miles per hour and must be preceded by a man carrying a red flag.

This dated back to the early century when steam carriages had overturned at speed or had frightened horses. It was not until 1896 that the law was repealed and it was celebrated by car enthusiasts with a rally from London to Brighton in November of that year. In 1897 the Royal Automobile Club was founded to encourage the use of cars, but most cars in Britain came from Europe, particularly from France. It would not be until the next century that British cars began to appear. What the introduction of the car showed was that Britain was no longer in the forefront of new design and technology: she was facing challenges - more of this later.

In the 1870’s, the Bank Holiday Act had decreed that Easter Monday, Whit Monday, the first Monday in August, and Boxing Day were to be universal holidays in addition to Christmas Day and Good Friday. Also, many employers were allowing their workers an annual holiday, often with pay. The working-class man had leisure time unknown in the past. In addition to Bank Holidays, there came the practice of the five and a half day week - Saturday afternoon became a time for relaxation. This was partly to avoid the practice of Monday absenteeism - ‘St. Monday’ as it became known. Saturday afternoon became the time for watching sport, particularly football. Association Football had its roots in the Public Schools, its laws being drawn up by Cambridge students in 1863. In 1871 the F.A. Cup was established, its first winners being amateur teams, and this continued for the next 12 years until 1883 when Blackburn Rovers won. By the 1880’s most large towns and cities had a football team. Where there was a strong Irish element there could be two teams - one supported by the Catholics and one by the Protestants, as happened in Glasgow, Liverpool, Manchester and Edinburgh. Professionalism came in because working-class men could not give up time and money to train and to play. Rugby, named after the School where it was first played, also divided into professional and amateur codes - Rugby Union remaining strictly amateur until this century, Rugby League being the professional version of the game.

Class prejudice was seen in the descriptions of these games, professionalism being seen as something with which no gentleman would involve himself. Association Football, ‘Soccer’, was described as a gentleman’s game played by hooligans; Rugby Union as a hooligan’s game played by gentlemen; Rugby League as a hooligan’s game played by hooligans.

The same prejudices existed in cricket where again there was a strict divide between amateur and professional. Cricket was more of a rich man’s game because of the time needed to play and to watch - sometimes over several days. It may be that one of the causes of England’s decline as a cricketing nation is the present reliance on one-day, limited overs matches which are exciting and draw in the spectators but which do not produce batsmen who can stay at the wicket for several hours, taking the shine of the bowling. In the 1870’s and 80’s, W.G. Grace was the colossus of English cricket. A Gloucestershire doctor, he was as well-known by his initials as W.E. Gladstone himself; many of his records remain to the present day. The Captain of England and every County Captain was an amateur. In reports in the papers, amateurs were always distinguished by the prefix ‘Mr’. Professionals were simply called by their surnames, followed by initials. Many county grounds had two dressing rooms -one for ‘gentlemen’ and one for ‘players’, and separate gates for them to enter or leave the pavilion. It was taken for granted that England would win any match against any opposition, so when a visiting Australian team defeated England by 7 runs in 1882 there appeared an obituary in the ‘Sporting Times’ declaring that English cricket had died, had been cremated, and its ashes taken to Australia - thus starting the famous Test series which still continues. Working-class cricketers played their games in parks and on village greens on Saturday afternoons. [I can remember in the 1930’s a gentleman who insisted on walking across the pitch whenever Birkenhead Park were playing to assert his right to walk in the public park wherever and whenever he wished - the players used to applaud him, then carry on with the game.}

In 1896, Baron de Coubertin began the Modern Olympic Games in Athens, basing his ideal on the English Public School amateurism. Very few countries entered. Indeed an English visitor to Athens attended the Games and was asked to represent Britain in the Long Jump. He agreed, found some suitable clothing which he borrowed from another athlete, went into the arena and won the Olympic title! That is when the Games were truly amateur. These early games included sports such as tug-of-war – again, usually won by the British; it is interesting to remember that until the Montreal games in 1976, Britain led the world in the number of Olympic Medals held. Since then, of course, she has been overtaken by the USA and by Soviet Russia, and at each new series of games, continues to fall further behind.

Another innovation of greater leisure time was the annual seaside holiday. As more people were granted holiday time, so resorts began to grow, dedicated to the holiday-maker. Employers were beginning to realise that workers worked more efficiently, were more contented and loyal, if they were treated properly. In 1871 there had been only 48 seaside towns designated as holiday places: by 1891 there were more than 200. Most followed a pattern - promenade, large hotels or boarding houses, pier (so people could ‘go to sea’ without the discomfort of seasickness), often a fairground or other amusements, small shops selling anything the holiday maker might want – buckets and spades for the children, shrimping nets, beach balls, and that unique English treat – seaside rock with the name of the resort printed through the middle - nowhere else does that particular sweet occur, it takes its place with Humbugs, and Liquorice Allsorts. as typically English sweets. Sea bathing became popular, but for obvious reasons men and women no longer bathed in the nude (on separate beaches or at different times of course). Instead, voluminous costumes were worn and changing took place in the bathing hut, which would then be pulled into the water so that there was no threat to modesty. It also saw the innovation of the seaside postcard - a cheap and easy way to let others know of your good fortune, the card always showing the resort at its best with no clouds or rain visible. It also saw the beginning of the comic postcard, possibly unique to Britain. Most view cards came from Germany and by the turn of the century several hundred million cards were being sent annually, often with the same message - ‘Wish you were here!’ In Lancashire, where the Wakes weeks allowed a week’s holiday to the cotton workers, the resort of Blackpool began to grow, and also the more refined Southport. Indeed, many resorts had their popular areas and their more respectable part, so that Brighton had Hove, Blackpool had St. Anne’s, and New Brighton had Harrison Drive, etc.

There was certainly a need to escape the towns: a description of London in the late 1870’s by a visiting Frenchman will, I am sure, bring back memories of the English Sunday - "Sunday in London in the rain: all the shops are shut, the streets deserted, the aspect is of an immense well-ordered cemetery ...... There is water everywhere, water impregnated with an odour of soot. A yellowish fog fills the air ..... after an hour’s walk in London on a Sunday, one contemplates suicide." To improve on this, public parks were established, and on Sundays there would always be a brass band playing popular tunes while the people walked slowly along, dressed in their Sunday best - again, a picture which must bring back memories to many, for the custom continued until 1939.

The Music Hall was becoming more respectable rather than a mere drinking place. Its performers were also now accepted into society - performers such as Albert Chevalier (‘My Old Dutch’), Vesta Tilley, Tom Costello (‘After the Ball’) and others were invited to perform before Royalty itself (but not Marie Lloyd, the most popular singer, who was considered far too vulgar).

Drinking of alcohol was still an escape for many: most streets in working-class areas had their corner public house. Prices were cheap - mild beer was 4d a quart, best Burton Bitter 3d a pint. Figures show that in the 1870’s spirits consumption was 1.3 gallons per head, and beer 34.4 gallons. When one considers the number of non-drinkers in the many Temperance Societies, then the drinkers must have taken in huge amounts of this liquor. Not surprisingly, William Booth’s Salvation Army took its fight directly into the public houses, where it waged it greatest battles, winning for itself at the same time huge admiration for its courage. No publican ever stopped its members from selling its "War Cry" in the pubs on a Saturday night.

What were people reading at this time? George Eliot was at her height, her greatest novel, ‘Middlemarch’, selling hundreds of thousands in its cheap edition; Dickens, despite the fact that he had died in 1870, continued to sell by the million. His only rival was Mrs Henry Wood, whose ‘East Lynne’ ("Gone, gone, and never called me mother!") also sold more than a million and was turned into a popular play. Ouida, whose ‘Under Two Flags’ gave exaggerated descriptions of other countries, was also popular, though not quite respectable. The new Education Act meant that more people could read, and this led to cheap editions of good books [Shakespeare’s plays could be bought for 1/-each] and the generosity of Andrew Carnegie meant that cheap lending libraries were established in many towns, including Birkenhead. Books were still serialised in magazines, the most famous at this time being George Newne’s ‘Strand Magazine’ with its Sherlock Holmes’ stories by Conan Doyle - who incidentally hated his invented character, wanting to be known for his serious historical novels.

One poet who fails to get the recognition he deserves is the great William McGonagall who produced a series of poems at this time in the most execrable verse ever encountered in the English language. He wrote a poem to celebrate the opening of the Tay railway bridge praising its construction, and when that bridge collapsed in a terrible storm in 1879, he wrote another on the tragedy ending with the memorable lines:

‘I must now conclude my lay

By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay,

That your central girders would not have given way,

At least many sensible men do say,

Had they been supported on each side with buttresses,

At least many sensible men confesses,

For the stronger we our houses do build,

The less chance we have of being killed.

- The Times’ was still the most widely read serious newspaper, but was now being challenged by ‘The Daily Telegraph’. It was the ‘Telegraph’ which in the 1870’s, in conjunction with the New York ‘Herald’, sent Stanley to Africa to seek Livingstone, bringing stories of interior Africa which were to have profound results on that country. The poor tended to buy ‘Police News’ and ‘Police Gazette’, both sensational papers dealing with the more lurid and titillating crimes of passion and murder. The murders by ‘Jack the Ripper’ in the 1880’s gave these papers a huge boost in circulation. Two men stand out in the production of cheap popular papers - George Newnes and Alfred Harmsworth. Both provided what the less educated wanted to read. In 1881 Newnes produced ‘Titbits’, followed in 1888 by Harmsworth’s ‘Answers’. They were full of small items of news and trivia, scraps of simple amusement and basic information (e.g. if all the sausages eaten in Britain were laid end-to-end they would reach Australia). Appealing to the less literate, they had short paragraphs, illustrations and though shallow, they gave no offence and were often very moralising in their answers. Selling at 1d a week, both had sales of more than half a million.

Harmsworth also appealed to children with his ‘Comic Cuts’ and ‘Chips’, weekly half-penny comics which remained popular well into the 20th Century. I’m sure many older readers will remember ‘Weary Willie’ and ‘Tired Tim’ in ‘Chips’, and possibly the ‘Comical Capers of Constable Cuddlecock’! Looking at my copies of these comics now, I am amazed at the amount of reading matter and how they did broaden the vocabulary of children: in one edition there were at least seven words for ‘laughter’ - snigger (usually by an unpleasant character), chortle, chuckle, titter, guffaw, giggle and cackle: each means the same thing but with a subtle difference as to when the word should be used. Apart from the usual ‘bubble’ speeches in the pictures, there was always a short sentence or two beneath to explain the action and inside at least 20 columns of close print of complete stories and serials -e.g. "Tug Wilson, the Schoolboy ‘Tec". A more serious publication was "Boys Own Paper", price 6d, again twenty or more pages of close print. My copy has a serial by Talbot Reed and another by Jules Verne - ‘The Clipper of the Clouds’, about a warship which could fly - stories which appealed to the imagination and spirit of adventure. In 1896 came Harmsworth’s ‘Daily Mail’ - a truly popular paper, again with the strong headlines, short paragraphs, and illustrations which form the pattern for all papers today. Described by Lord Salisbury as "a paper written by office boys for office boys", it became the largest selling paper in Britain.

What of national and world affairs in the period? In 1874 the Prime Minister was Benjamin Disraeli and he faced problems only too familiar to us today: recession and unemployment. There were a number of causes, but the basics were that Britain was no longer the unchallenged industrial power, though she remained the richest and greatest economy. She now faced competition from newly united Germany, an expanding USA and France trying to restore her position after defeat by Germany in 1870. Each of these countries raised trade barriers against British goods while Britain continued with her belief in total freedom of trade. Germany and the USA were able to develop huge sources of coal and iron, using the expertise that Britain had been a century in attaining. More importantly, perhaps, was the massive import of cheap American grain as the Middle West was opened up. Most European countries saw the danger to their farming and stopped American imports. Britain allowed the cheap grain to flood in, so that British farming could no longer compete. The result was a severe depression in the countryside, forcing workers to leave the country for the town, but it also meant much cheaper food, so that though there was unemployment, the workers did not suffer as they might have done in the past. Britain became the only country dependent on imported food: she was always only three months from starvation and therefore, despite her great wealth, the most vulnerable country in Europe. Her Navy was now a vital necessity to keep those trade routes open and she dared not quarrel with her major food supplier, the USA.

What was the answer to these new circumstances? Disraeli conceived the idea of ‘Imperialism’ - the building of a large overseas empire. Britain already had an empire, but it was not seen as vital to our interests: Canada, Australia and New Zealand were self-governing dominions, loyal to Britain but having little real contact with her. Disraeli’s plan was to establish an empire which would be a market for British goods and at the same time supply Britain with the food and raw materials vital for her industry. The key to his plan was to be India. In 1875 Britain bought a half share in the Suez Canal for £4 million, opening a short sea route to India. India was to be a co-equal with Britain , with its own Army, Navy and Civil Service, ruled by the Viceroy with an elected parliament. In 1877, much to her delight, Victoria was created Empress of India, the ruling princes of India swearing allegiance to her. From India Britain would dominate the Far East. In the 1880’s came the ‘Scramble for Africa’. Stanley’s explorations had revealed to Europe the massive untapped wealth of Africa - gold, diamonds, copper, aluminium, zinc. Tales were also told of the backwardness of the natives, tribal wars, slavery, etc. Thus there was a great moral justification to move in to improve the lives of the people, bringing them the benefits of Western civilisation, and at the same time, of course, to develop the untapped wealth waiting there. The drive for colonies took place peacefully and Britain with her Navy obtained the lion’s share occupying huge areas in both East and West, plus much of the South of the continent. Britain now gloried in her empire, covering more than a quarter of the world. It gave great pride to see huge areas of the map coloured red, but it was to lead to great problems in the future.

Inevitably, empire-building led to wars: to go into the causes and results of all these wars would be far too much for this article. Suffice it to say that between 1874 and 1899 Britain found herself at war with African tribes - the Matabele, the Zulus, the Ashanti; with the Dutch Boers of South Africa (twice); with the Dervishes in the Sudan; with Egypt; in Afghanistan; and numerous ‘police actions’ in Abyssinia, Nepal, China. In all of these areas victory was won chiefly because of the ability of the Navy to bring pressure to bear anywhere in the world and at the same time prevent others from interfering. Britain also was in danger of going to war with Russia, France, the USA, and even Germany. The crisis with Russia in 1878 brought a new word into the language - ‘Jingoism’, from a music hall song:

"We don’t want to fight, but by jingo if we do,

We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too."

Germany had always been seen as a friend, Britain’s traditional enemies being France and Russia. In 1880 Victoria’s son-in-law, the Emperor Frederick, died of cancer. He loved Britain and had he lived history might have been different. He was succeeded by his son, Victoria’s eldest grandchild, William II, who became the new Kaiser. A complex, mercurial, man, he had a love-hatred of Britain, wanting always both to emulate and to surpass her. In 1896 he had expressed his support for the Boers in their quarrel with Britain and implied active German help. Britain immediately put a ‘Flying Squadron’ of battleships and cruisers into the Atlantic. These were spare ships, unattached to any of her many fleets scattered about the world - but they were stronger than the Imperial German Navy ! . The Kaiser was humiliated and gave orders to build a comparable Navy for Germany. In 1887 and 1897 Victoria had celebrated her Jubilees, when Britain’s power and wealth were displayed. Her relatives sat on every throne in Europe, her empire was one on which ‘the sun never set’, covering more than a quarter of the world, and in 1897 visitors to Portsmouth saw her review a Home Fleet consisting of more than 30 miles of warships drawn up in lines each of which was more than six miles in length. Britain still revelled in ‘splendid isolation’, but many of her leaders were realising that though strong and rich we did not have a friend in the world, and indeed some countries positively hated us. At that review in 1897 there appeared a small ship moving through the fleet at more than 30 knots: "The Turbinia", using new turbine engines showed the future - all that mighty fleet was, in fact, now effectively out-of-date. Britain’s great Naval lead over her rivals could now be eliminated. Britain faced the new century with some misgivings: the former confidence was weakening - she would not dominate the new century as she had done the 19th.

(3) 1899 -1924 Top of Page

1899 and Christ Church was 50 years old, her longest serving vicar, Rev. (later Canon) W.H.F. Robson, was fully in charge of the largest church in the area. Birkenhead was enjoying a period of great prosperity, with a booming ship-building industry. By now, the lovely pink sandstone with which the church was built was stained black with soot. Each year more than 8 tons of soot fell on the town from the innumerable coal-burning fires, leading to despair among housewives trying to keep clothes clean, and causing those brownish yellow fogs which persisted all day in the winter, but which are seldom seen now. Not for nothing was bronchitis known as the ‘British disease’.

The period we are covering is one of the most dramatic in world history and I beg forgiveness if important topics are only mentioned briefly - no matter how fascinating they would take far too much space to describe them fully. In 1899, Britain and her Empire were at war with the Boers of South Africa. The causes need not concern us here, but in 1899 the Boers declared war on Britain, expecting to be helped by others, particularly Germany. This was not to be: the Royal Navy ensured that while Britain’s armies could move swiftly in strength to Africa, nobody else dared intervene. It was thought that the war would be over quickly: indeed, when the last of the major Boer armies was defeated and Mafeking was relieved in May 1900, there was an outburst of celebrations unprecedented in our history.

But the war continued for another two years; the Boers formed small armed groups or ‘commandos’ which raided British supply lines then disappeared into the country, living off the farms in the area. Only by clearing the countryside of all people and destroying the farms was Sir Herbert Kitchener able to force their eventual surrender. The displaced people were put into hastily established ‘concentration camps’, where poor water supplies and sanitation led to the deaths of thousands of old people and children, blackening Britain’s name throughout the world. It is to the credit of Britain that when the facts became known she tried to make amends in the peace treaty -the Boers were given full self-government within the Empire and Britain paid compensation for the damage to their farms caused by the war - the first time that victors had given the defeated all they desired, and paid them for their losses. The result was that the Boer leaders, Botha and Smuts, both became loyal servants of the Empire, giving staunch support to Britain in two world wars.

Another effect of the war was that the campaigns were carried out chiefly by the cavalry, so that cavalry officers won promotion - Generals French, Haig, Allenby and others were to be Britain’s leaders in the Great War, which was entirely an artillery and infantry war. Another aspect of the war was that Germany felt humiliated by her inability to help and began the building of a High Seas Fleet as a direct challenge to the Royal Navy. Britain realised that not only did she have few friends in the world, but also that some were undoubted enemies. For the first time in her history she began to seek friends and allies in peacetime.

There was little danger from the German Kaiser so long as his Grandmother, Queen Victoria, reigned. For more than 60 years the ‘Grandmother of Europe’ had controlled her numerous relations, ensuring that no matter what their quarrels they would live in peace. The Kaiser genuinely adored his grandmother and respected her; for her part, she understood him and knew how to control his mercurial character. By 1900, though, she was an old lady. In the Spring she visited Ireland and insisted on driving without escort through Dublin, cheered by loyal crowds. It is one of the tragedies of Ireland that had Home Rule been granted the very real love and loyalty of the Irish would surely have been preserved. By forcing them to fight for their freedom the stage was set for the tragedies with which we are all too familiar. To underline their loyalty, Victoria created a new Guards’ Regiment, the 4th or Irish Guards, drawing a major part of their numbers from the South, and I know from personal experience that most of that Regiment was from the Catholic South rather than the Protestant North, and they are among the most loyal to the British Crown.

In the Summer of 1900, Victoria heard that her eldest daughter, the Dowager Empress of Germany, was dying of cancer, as was her son, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, and she seemed to lose the will to live. She continued to do her duty, but her ministers could see her decline. On January 13th 1901 she made her last entry in her diary: "Had a fair night but was a little wakeful. Rested, signed some papers, dictated some letters." There were no more entries. Her children were summoned to Osborne and the Kaiser hurried over from Germany. The great Queen was dying. Telegrams came from every world leader, including her enemy, Boer leader Paul Kruger. On Sunday, 22nd January, at 6.30 in the evening, Victoria died in the arms of her grandson, the Emperor of Germany.

The longest reign in British history had ended: she had seen power pass from the great landowners to the votes of the people, her country was the richest and most powerful in the world, her Empire was the greatest in history and its like will never be seen again. The adjective ‘Victorian’ is used in every country to imply genteel, perhaps somewhat ‘stuffy’, gentility, but on which many look back with some nostalgia for being a more dignified and peaceful time. At the end, Victoria was revered by her people, her birthday, 24th May, being remembered as ‘Empire Day’ - a holiday to be celebrated and enjoyed by children up until 1939. (Do any of my older readers ever remember rain on Empire Day?)

The new King, Edward VII, (‘Teddy’ to his subjects), was popular with the people, but not with his Imperial nephew. Britain’s attempts to reach an understanding with Germany to control the Navy Race which was developing, failed. Bismarck, had he lived, would have welcomed any agreement with Britain. He did not fear her army ("If it lands in Europe, I shall send a policeman to arrest it."), but he did fear her navy, her Empire, and the fact that she had the same language, customs and democratic government as the USA, and therefore the two were potential allies. He also saw that to antagonise Britain must bring her closer to Germany’s enemy, France. In 1904, his warnings ignored, his fears were realised when Britain signed an ‘Entente Cordiale’ - a ‘Friendly Understanding’ with her former enemy, France. It was not an alliance, but over the years, owing to the Kaiser’s clumsy diplomacy, the friendship strengthened to become an unspoken alliance. In 1907, a similar agreement was made with Germany’s other enemy, Russia, once Britain’s greatest enemy. The Kaiser blamed his Uncle Edward for this, claiming that Britain was surrounding Germany with naval and military alliances, and this caused him to exert even greater efforts to out-build Britain’s fleet.

The ‘Navy Race’ which developed cost both countries millions - it certainly brought prosperity to the workers in shipyards and steelworks, but it also meant less spent on social reform, which was the great aim of Asquith, Lloyd George and Churchill in the Liberal Government of the day. In 1906, Britain launched a new battleship, the ‘Dreadnought’, faster, heavier and more heavily armed than any other warship in the world. On its own, it could out-shoot and out-run all of the German navy; Germany was forced to accept that every ship she had built over the past seven years was out-of-date. But so too was the mighty Royal Navy. Both countries were now starting again! It led, in 1909, to the great naval scare that Germany might out-build Britain and would dominate at sea as she did on land. As Churchill later described it: "The Admiralty asked for six ships, the Government offered four, so they compromised on eight." By now, Britain was building twice as many ships each year as Germany, and by now, too, the ‘Super-Dreadnought’ was being built - ships with massive armament, which would still be in formidable use in the Korean War in the 1950s. Germany had effectively lost the Navy Race, but in competing, the two countries became bitter enemies.

This enmity was exacerbated by the Northcliffe press: Harmsworth (now Lord Northcliffe) owned the Daily Mail, The Sketch, the newly launched Daily Mirror, TheTimes, and The Observer. He was the Rupert Murdoch of his day, stirring up anti-German feeling among his readers. His warning was that there were thousands of trained German soldiers in Britain, with hidden arms, ready to act when the German army, guarded by its fleet, fell on British shores. This secret army, he declared, was employed as waiters, tailors, etc, in every town and city. "Refuse to be served by a German waiter!" he thundered, "and if he claims to be Swiss, demand to see his passport." The prospect of demanding to see a waiter’s passport is ludicrous in the extreme, but the insidious message was put across - there would be a war and Germany would be the enemy. Patriotism, which is love for one’s own country, was being replaced by Nationalism, which is hatred of other countries. National pride showed itself in other areas, particularly in the new Atlantic liners. The ship which crossed the Atlantic in the shortest time would hold the coveted ‘Blue Riband’’. Both Britain and Germany were in competition. Companies aimed to have two or three great ships doing weekly crossings, following a regular timetable. The Germans built the ‘Kaiser Wilhelm II’ to wrest the Blue Riband from Cunard, which had held it for many years. With its sister ship, ‘Kronprinz Wilhelm’, they had two floating palaces, unrivalled for luxury until Cunard replied with the ‘Mauritania’ and its sister the ‘Lusitania’. ‘Mauritania’ won back the record and was to hold it until the 1920’s, when the race began again. It is possible that the great White Star liners ‘Titanic’ and ‘Olympic’ might have won the race, but the tragedy of the ‘Titanic’ in 1912, when the suspicion is that she was trying to break the record, put an end to their challenge.

So often, in history books or social histories of these time, the Edwardian Age is shown as a time of peace, harmony and glorious summers. This is far from the truth, there was tension in the air and as always this was reflected by artists, poets and composers – these people seemed to connect with the underlying fears and worries of the age. Paintings showed scenes of chaos, Picasso and Braque were overturning the ‘chocolate-box’ image favoured by so many artists; listen to Holst’s ‘Planet’ Suite and hear the sheer menace in ‘Mars - Bringer of War’; in 1913, Diaghilev’s Ballet Russe premiered a ballet by a young Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky, ‘The Rite of Spring’ – where the beauty and hope of Spring is sacrificed, in the guise of a beautiful virgin, to the old. This was not the classical ballet of ‘Swan Lake’ or ‘Sleeping Beauty’ with their wonderful melodies; here, there were discordant rhythms, full of violence and dissonance, this was not ballet, it was revolution. The audience erupted in howls of derision, patrons were ejected but the performance carried on – the death of one young maiden seemed to foretell the death of youth and beauty, and many did not want to face such a prospect. The painter, Ludwig Meidner in Germany painted a Berlin being destroyed by huge guns fired by German soldiers, the people seemingly helpless before their inevitable fate. For young people, too, there was a new music – from America came ‘Ragtime’ with its syncopated rhythms – very different from the traditional music of Europe.

This fever was most apparent in Germany, the country which was now the leading Industrial power in Europe – Germany led the world in steel production, in chemistry, in engineering, but all the great wealth was given to an almost feudal state where all power was concentrated in the hands of one man – the erratic and unstable Kaiser – the people who created the wealth had no say in how it was to be spent. In 1912, the largest and most revolutionary Social and Democratic Party in Europe won the greatest number of seats in the Reichstag, the German parliament but it had no power to assert its authority; at the same time, the Kaiser’s birthday was celebrated with a massive parade of the most powerful and reactionary military caste in the world. Such an unstable mixture was certain to produce an explosion, and when Germany, at the heart of Europe, is unstable, then all of Europe begins to feel uneasy.

In the years before 1914, there were many crises, each one of which could have led to war. In 1905, Germany challenged France over Morocco, but Britain supported France; in 1911, another quarrel over Morocco saw a strong warning to Germany from Britain and once again Germany was forced to retreat. In 1909, troubles in the Balkans saw Germany, Austria and Russia at odds. Bismarck had always seen this area as the chief cause of trouble - a weakened Turkey was losing control of her Balkan empire, and the Slavs of the area took advantage to take their freedom. The problem was that though they hated the Turks they hated each other more - the Catholic Croats were at odds with their Orthodox Serb neighbours and with Moslems from Bosnia; equally, Serbia, the most warlike of the countries, had ambitions to unite all the Slavs of the area under her rule and to reach the sea via Bosnia or through Albania, and form the state of Yugoslavia, the ‘Southern Slavs’! This would mean that she would include the hated and despisd Moslems in her country. Russia supported Serbia’s ambitions, Austria wanted to keep Serbia under control, and as Turkey retreated Austria had ambitions to advance into her territories. Germany was the close ally of Austria, France was the close ally of Russia - each was bound to help its ally in the event of war. Because of the Navy Race, Britain was reluctantly being drawn in to the system. In 1909, in 1912, and again in 1913, Balkan problems led Europe to the brink. Each time, war was avoided as diplomats worked out a face-saving agreement, and it was confidently expected that this would always be the case. Nevertheless, when 1914 came there seemed greater harmony among the powers than at any time in the past five years.

What of life in Britain at this time? Cars were beginning to appear in greater numbers. By 1910, more than 100,000 licences were issued (cost £1 from any post office, no driving test needed). The Rolls-Royce ‘Silver Ghost’ had appeared in 1908, setting a new standard of engineering excellence, but the market was dominated by Henry Ford’s Model ‘T’ - a quarter of all cars built in Britain by his company. The only British challenge to his cheap car came from William Morris, whose ‘bull-nosed’ Morris Oxford was coming into production as war broke out. Most British cars were for the richer market - Armstrong-Siddely, Daimler, Vauxhall, Napier - famous names, many now long gone.

It is interesting to learn that in these years it was possible to buy an aeroplane (in DIY kit form) at a cheaper price than a car. When the Wright Brothers flew for the first time in 1903, enthusiasts world-wide experimented with their own aeroplane designs. The ‘Daily Mail’ encouraged this by offering cash prizes for pioneer flights. In 1909, the prize of £1,000 for the first crossing of the Channel was won by Louis Bleriot of France. The ‘Daily Graphic’ of the time noted with foreboding: "A machine which can fly from Calais to Dover is not a toy but an instrument of warfare of which soldiers and statesmen must take account." Britain’s Navy was no longer the guaranteed defence against attack. The writer H.G. Wells wrote a novel which told of a ‘plane dropping what he called an ‘Atom Bomb’, where the potential energy of the atom was released to destroy a city from the air and against which there was no defence. The book was not one of his best sellers! The early fliers were true pioneers: an account from 1914 tells of a young man sitting on the wing of a bi-plane with a rolled-up parachute on his lap. His theory was that it would open and he would drift down to earth in safety, but the only way to test it was to leap into space - which he duly did and proved his theory to be correct.

Other events during these pre-war years: in 1910 came the arrest, trial and execution of Dr. Crippen. It is remarkable inasmuch that had it occurred a few years earlier he would probably have escaped. He was caught because of the new invention of wireless telegraphy. The Captain of the ‘Montrose’ on which Crippen and his lover, Ethel Le Neve, were travelling was able to receive messages and send them, confirming that the wanted pair were aboard his ship, hoping to reach USA under assumed names. Once there, they could have disappeared on the continent of America. Instead, they were arrested before they landed and were returned to Britain. Ethel Le Neve was found not guilty and lived the rest of her life quietly in London, dying in 1967. Radio was also a factor in the loss of the ‘Titanic’ when, for the first time, the new international distress call of SOS was used; but help came too late for most on board. In 1912, also, came the failure of Scott’s expedition to be the first to reach the South Pole. Lauded as a hero, in fact he foolishly ignored advice to use dogs to pull his sledges, preferring horses which needed considerable amounts of food and were in no way suitable for Antarctic travel. It seemed that Britain was becoming the home of glorious failures.

The theatre flourished, though most people preferred the light comedies of Barrie and others to the more serious plays. Nevertheless, plays by Shaw, Galsworthy and Conrad drew the crowds - Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ causing outrage and scandal by the use of the word ‘bloody’. Thousands flocked to enjoy being scandalised by that one word! More popular still was the Music Hall and Birkenhead’s Argyle Theatre was one of the most influential. Its owner, Tom Clarke, recognised the talent of a young Scottish singer and contracted him to appear each year during Grand National week for £5 a week. The singer was Harry Lauder and within two years he was commanding fees of more than £200 a week. Clarke kept him to his contract despite Lauder’s attempts to escape. My father, a teenager at this time, told of a good night out for 6d (2.5p) - 2d for a cheap seat in the ‘gods’, 1d for four oranges (no ice creams in those days), 1d for five ‘Woodbines’, and on the way home 1d for chips and 1d for fish. The cinema was increasingly becoming the new entertainment - early films were simple one or two reels of madcap comedy - Chaplin and Stan Laurel had already taken their genius to the U.S.A., but films such as ‘The Great Train Robbery’ and ‘Birth of a Nation’ showed that more serious stories of high drama could be attempted. Birkenhead’s first cinema was a converted music hall, ‘The Claughton’, later the ‘Astor’, at the corner of Exmouth Street and Claughton Road. For young people, particularly boys, in 1908 appeared an anti-hero who came to dominate the magazine he appeared in - Frank Richard’s ‘Magnet’ and the stories of Greyfriars School. The heroes, Harry Wharton, Frank Nugent and others paled before the lazy, greedy, stupid William George Bunter. Billy Bunter, with his ‘Crikey’, ‘I say you fellows, I’m expecting a postal order’, etc., passed into English literature.

In 1908, the Olympic Games were held at the White City in London, and in those truly amateur days Britain could more than hold her own - she won 56 Gold medals, plus a great many silver and bronze; the U.S.A. came second with a mere 22! The Games were noteworthy for the marathon, which was extended from 26 miles to 26 miles 385 yards, so that the finish would be at the Royal Box - the distance has remained unchanged. Britain no longer seemed to produce heavyweight champions of the world. Our last home-grown world heavy-weight champion was Bob Fitzsimmons, a Cornishman who also held the world Middle-weight and light-heavyweight titles – he had taken the championship from ‘Gentleman Jim’ Corbet at the end of the 19th Century. The British champion in 1914 was a handsome but rather muscle-bound boxer, Bombardier Billy Wells, better known to many, perhaps, as the muscular athlete beating the gong for so many J. Arthur Rank films in the 1940’s and 50’s - his hobby was knitting! In 1905, there was a sensation when a footballer was transferred from Middlesborough to Sunderland for £1,000 - football was now the most popular spectator sport in the country, drawing crowds of thousands.

Perhaps the most outstanding phenomenon before the Great War was the beginning of the militant Suffragettes. Women were increasingly employed in industry, teaching, offices, and even in medicine. They were still seen, though, as totally dependent on men; no woman was allowed to continue working once she was married - her task then was to manage the home and raise the children. But they were now increasingly becoming taxpayers and therefore demanded the vote. Peaceful petitions were simply ignored, so Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Sylvia and Christabel formed the Women’s Social and Political Union - the WSPU, with its colours of purple, green and grey. In 1908 they began a period of militant action, demanding the right to be heard and respected. Many people were outraged at their behaviour, for these were mainly educated upper-middle class ladies, seen always as law-abiding and submissive. Pillar boxes were burnt, windows smashed in Downing Street (leading to the posting of a policeman permanently on guard outside No.10 - still in operation today), and protests in Parliament, causing the fixing of a grille over the Ladies’ Gallery in the Lords. It culminated in the death of Emily Davidson, who threw herself under the King’s horse at the 1913 Derby. Imprisoned, the suffragettes endured hunger-strikes, forcible feeding, and the cruelty of the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’, where they were freed from custody to rebuild their strength, then re-arrested to complete their sentence. All failed to break the women’s spirit and their courage won the admiration of the people, helping to lead to the growing unpopularity of the Liberal Government before the war. The outbreak of war caused Mrs Pankhurst to call off the campaign, urging women to devote their energy to the country. In 1918, their reward came when women of 30 plus were given the vote: this was extended in 1928 to all women over the age of 21.

In 1906, the Liberals, under Henry Campbell-Bannerman, took office and began a period of reform which established the foundations of the welfare state. With the help of Asquith, Lloyd George, and Churchill, a series of Acts designed to help the less fortunate was passed: free or cheap school meals, medical examination, and free hospital and dental treatment for all school children (though we remember with horror the ministrations of the school dentist, preferring instead to ‘go private’); peaceful strikes and picketing were made legal, a Workmen’s Compensation Act for injury or ill-health caused by work; an eight hour working day in coal mines; the 1908 Children’s Act to protect children from ill-treatment, drink, smoking, overwork, etc.; Labour Exchanges to provide guidance for finding work; the National Insurance Act to provide unemployment pay and health care for workers; a Minimum Wages Act; and perhaps most important of all, the Old Age Pensions Act offering 5/-d (25p) a week at the age of 70, later rising to 10/-d a week at 65. In addition, of course, the Government had to find the money to pay for the increased Navy and to modernise the Army. This led to a dispute with the House of Lords and in the Elections which followed the Liberals lost heavily, becoming dependent on support from the growing Labour Party and the Irish Home Rule Party. The Liberals were never again to hold a majority in the House of Commons.

In the Summer of 1914, the Government was struggling with the Irish problem - Home Rule had been promised to the Catholic population, but this was unacceptable to the Protestant North. Their leader, Sir Edward Carson, proclaimed ‘Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’. Civil War seemed certain, when news came of the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne at Sarajevo in Bosnia. Austria demanded assurances from Serbia for future conduct, and events now moved swiftly. It has been said that the Great Powers in 1914 were like climbers roped together - if one fell, all the others would be pulled down. Within one week in July and the beginning of August, Austria declared war on Serbia, Russia mobilised her army, whereupon Germany declared war on Russia to defend her Austrian ally. Germany then declared war on France, Russia’s ally, and attacked France via Belgium. Britain had no treaty to help France, but was pledged to defend Belgium. On August 4th 1914, Britain declared war on Germany. With their respective empires, this European war was now a World War. As war was declared, Sir Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, who had worked ceaselessly to bring peace, said "The lights are going out all over Europe; we will not see them lit again in our lifetime." Winston Churchill at the Admiralty ordered the Navy to begin its blockade of Germany’s trade routes - as the Germans rose on 5th August they could see the faint smoke from the blockading ships - these would stay until the German defeat more than four years later.

There is no space here to describe the horrors of the Great War in detail, therefore only the basic facts can be given:

1914: All believed it would be a short war - no country could afford the losses and expense of a modern war; remembering the success of Prussia in 1870, therefore, all had plans to finish it quickly. Germany was unworried by General French’s ‘Contemptible British Army’ (hence, the ‘Old Contemptibles’), nor was she worried by the blockade; it would ‘all be over by Christmas’. However, this time, all had their armies in the ‘ right place at the right time’ and within weeks, the elaborate war plans had all collapsed. By November, the Russian ‘steam roller’ had ground to a halt, the French were defeated and back in their great frontier fortresses, the Germans had not destroyed the professional British Army or the French, and both sides had dug great defensive trenches stretching from the Channel to Switzerland, guarded by barbed wire and machine guns. This presented an obstacle never met with before and was outside the experience of any General from either side.

1915: Britain began recruiting a huge volunteer army - Kitchener’s accusing finger demanded action from thousands of posters. The Germans used gas to try to break through the lines at Ypres, but failed. British attacks equally failed to break through despite the loss of thousands of lives. The execution of Nurse Edith Cavell and the torpedoing of the liner ‘Lusitania’ showed that the Germans might be clever but they were not very intelligent, for these acts turned the U.S.A. against Germany and American supplies now began to flow into Britain - the Germans began to realise that the blockade was leading them to starvation

Bitterness against Germany had risen to such a degree, often because of attacks in the Northcliffe Press and by an M.P. , Horatio Bottomley (later imprisoned for fraud in mismanaging a saving scheme involving millions), the Royal family was forced to abandon its German family name of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha and adopt instead the more British name of Windsor, Prince Louis of Battenberg, the First Sea Lord, had to anglicize his name to Mountbatten..

1916: The year of the great battles: Verdun, when the Germans tried to destroy the French - more than one million casualties to gain a mere five miles; The Somme, when for the first time Britain fielded a continental-sized army and suffered continental-sized casualties - 20,000 dead on the first day - the same losses had been recorded at Waterloo, but that had been a single battle ending in complete victory: the Somme produced slim gains for more than half-a-million casualties; Jutland, when the German High Seas Fleet tried to break the blockade. After two days of confused fighting, Britain had lost 14 great ships to Germany’s 11, but the German Fleet returned to port, the Royal Navy remained at sea, the blockade continued, and Germany starved.

1917: In an effort to defeat Britain, Germany began unrestricted submarine warfare - the sinking of all ships (including American) approaching Britain. Britain was brought to the brink of defeat, but was saved by introducing rationing of food, ensuring that all received a basic allowance, and by the convoy system whereby the Navy guarded ships travelling together; some were sunk, but most got through. Russia collapsed under the strains of war and the Tsar abdicated. It is an interesting sidelight on the character of the last Tsar, Nicholas II – on the day of his removal from the throne he recorded in his diary the single word ‘Rien’ – ‘nothing’, his removal from the throne was of no importance to him. The French army, slaughtered in yet another bloodbath, mutinied and refused temporarily to fight. The British Army, under Haig, alone, was able to continue the battle . In July, the third Battle of Ypres began - usually known as ‘Paschendaele’. Described as ‘the most terrible battle ever fought by the British Army’, Paschendaele was fought in a sea of mud over ground churned up by years of shelling. When it ended in November, there were 400,000 casualties - to gain a tiny village, Paschendaele, which had been the object of the first day of battle. My father who had served since 1914 had been slightly wounded on the Somme and was more seriously wounded at Pashendaele – in a bayonet charge his left arm was ripped open from wrist to armpit and he was shot in the leg: he used to tell me that he could not remember any pain until the attack was halted. His leg wound became so infected by the mud that it never healed satisfactorily, and it was possible to se the bullet hole there until the day he died. As a child I would sit on his knee and ‘walk’ my fingers up the long white scar up his arm. Two of my uncles were gassed in this battle, one of them becoming temporarily blind; I am sure that many of my readers will remember George Williams - a more kindly Christian gentleman it would be hard to imagine, yet he served throughout the war and was awarded the Military Medal for gallantry; again, one cannot imagine him demanding counselling for any trauma. One can only guess at the mental anguish these men had to suffer and still remain kindly civilised men. A Staff Officer viewing the battlefield burst into tears as he realised what the men had suffered. There has been much criticism of the Generals, particularly Haig, but no critic has ever suggested what should or could have been done instead. In 1917, though, the U.S.A. declared war because of the losses of her ships, and the introduction of the tank showed that the trench could be beaten.

In 1918, the German believed they had the chance to win the war -the Americans had not yet arrived and the Russians were out of the war. The Germans brought their army from the Eastern to the Western Front. In March and April they attacked and drove the Allies back, almost to Paris itself, but failed to break through. By May they were exhausted; in August, Haig struck, using tanks, and pushed the German army back; by November the Germans knew they could not face another winter of the blockade - the people were starving, Spanish ‘flu had come to Europe and was to kill more in six months than had died in four years of war. The starving people of Germany were particularly vulnerable , the navy mutinied and revolution broke out in the cities. Finally, at 11 a.m. on 11th November, the Germans agreed to an Armistice -the Great War was over. The German Fleet, ordered to surrender, passed between two lines of British battleships and cruisers more than 40 miles in length, including one French and one U.S. ship: the Royal Navy was proclaiming itself the master of the seas! Possibly for the last time in history.

The War had ended, or should we say that the fighting had ended, the war and its memories would continue for ever, for many life would never be the same again - too many had died, old beliefs and certainties were gone forever. The young were disillusioned with their elders, they no longer saw them as the natural founts of wisdom and experience.

The idealism of Rupert Brooke in 1914, who could write

"Now God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour,

And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping"

as he welcomed the coming of war, was replaced by Wilfred Owen (who was a regular member of our congregation here at our church) with

"What passing bells for these who die as cattle ?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns,

Only the stuttering rifles rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.".

It had been the war which had turned Owen into a poet – at school, where I was fortunate to be a pupil in the 1940’s, I was told by those masters who had taught him that he had been a quiet unassuming boy showing no signs of the genius within him: the war had awakened that anger.

The War had broken down old barriers - young people were freer in their morals, ladies smoked openly in company, drinking became more widespread. It was reflected also in the dress - shorter skirts, short hair, tiny hats - all the opposite of what had been the fashion before the war. Music too had been transformed, the world was entering the ‘Jazz Age’, with strange harmonies and rhythms, scandalous to the older people, but welcomed by the young. Young girls who would once have been servants in a large house for a few pounds a year now sought work in the factories where they worked shorter hours to earn as much in a month as they had previously earned in a year. Greater freedom and independence plus increased income gave women a confidence they had never had before. Also, of course, the heavy loss of life among young men meant that there was a surplus of girls who would possibly never marry: these would seek to establish their own careers and care for themselves - no longer would women see themselves as dependent on men.

At the end of the war, because so many people had earned recognition for their services to the country, a new Order of Chivalry was created – the Order of the British Empire with its grades of awards – M.B.E., O.B.E., C.B.E. AND K.B.E.

In the world, three great empires had been destroyed - Russia, Austria and Germany had lost their Emperors.

The Kaiser, as he went into exile in Holland, was heard to say "Now for a nice cup of English tea!" He was probably relieved that the burden of government was lifted at last from his shoulders and he could relax to become a kindly country gentleman, happy in his garden. His country, in 1919, was forced to sign a hard treaty, effectively destroying its ability to fight - France was determined that never again would Germany be a threat to her; the German army was cut to 100,000 and she lost her air force and her navy. Germany was forced to repay reparations of more than £6 billion, causing bankruptcy and hyper-inflation - the Mark, which had been worth 20 to the £ in 1914, slumped to 16,000,000,000,000 in 1923, ruining the savings of the middle classes and those on fixed incomes, making them open to promises of restitution from the new National Socialist Party which had appeared under the leadership of on ex-corporal - Adolf Hitler. Some have criticized this treaty as being hard on the Germans but one should remember that in1870, Germany had treated France even more harshly and had treated Russia in a similar fashion in 1917.

The Austrian Empire had divided into a number of landlocked states - Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia;, the new country of Yugoslavia took in the Catholics of Croatia, the Moslems of Bosnia and Kosovo, joining them to the Orthodox Christians of Serbia, all hating each other, and looking for help to escape from their forced union. Where there had been a great empire, there was now a group of weak states with huge neighbours, Germany and Russia, on their borders.

The Russian empire was torn by communist revolution, leading to untold misery and famine among its people.

The 1919 Treaty was described as "The war to end all wars has resulted in a peace to end all peace." The great hope was that the League of Nations, proposed by the President of America, would act as a world council for peace. Unfortunately the U.S.A. refused to join, handing responsibility once again to Britain and France, both of whom were exhausted by war. Britain, after spending more that £5 million every day on the war for herself and her allies, was virtually bankrupt and heavily in debt to the U.S.A., which insisted on full repayment. By 1924, the farcical situation had arisen where the U.S.A. made loans to Germany to restore her to some sort of prosperity, Germany paid much of this money to Britain and France in war reparations, and Britain paid it to the U.S.A. as war debt. Money was moving about, but no country was any richer as a result: if US loans halted, then the whole edifice would collapse.

But this was in the future: for the moment, Britain was trying to return to peace and it was not easy. The 1918 Election, won by Lloyd George with Conservative help, thus splitting the Liberal Party irrevocably (they would never hold office again), had promised "homes fit for heroes to live in". This was a dream, not a reality. The end of the war saw unemployment in the heavy industries of steel and ship-building as war demand ceased and return to peace was not yet settled. Also, the large number of women employed in factories meant that returning ‘heroes’ often found their old jobs were no longer available. For a few years there was wide-spread unemployment, until things began to settle down by 1923. All over the country, war memorials in towns and cities, schools and churches, were appearing. It was confidently believed that there would be no more war, therefore this war would be remembered as no other war had been. Our own memorial at Christ Church was dedicated in November 1920, the same year that the unknown soldier was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey.

The war had produced profound changes - the motor car, a rich man’s toy in 1914, was now mass-produced; the ‘Baby Austin’, selling for less than £100, appeared at this time. Aeroplanes, which in 1914 had been flimsy constructions of wood and canvas, used only for observation, had by 1918 become a major weapon of war, carrying guns and bombs which were used not only against the frontline soldier but also against civilian targets many miles away - never again would war be just a battle between armies, now it would be ‘total’ war involving everybody, the helpless civilian being a softer target than the armies which could fight back. In 1919, a British plane flew the Atlantic to win the ‘Daily Mail’ £10,000 prize, and winning knighthoods for Alcock and Brown. In the same year, an air mail service between London and Paris began, and was swiftly extended world wide. Communication was now faster and this was seen also in the spread of radio - in 1922 the British Broadcasting Company (later Corporation) began transmitting from Savoy Hill and John Logie Baird began experimenting with television.

In 1924 Wembley Stadium became the centre for the Empire Exhibition and was used also for the Cup Tie in 1923. That Cup Final was noteworthy in that more than 200,000 people turned up. This was the first time that Wembley had been used. The previous year only 55,000 had turned up at Stamford Bridge, so the organisers, looking at Wembley’s capacity of 127,000, decided it was not necessary to make it an all-ticket affair. The crowds poured in, climbing over walls, turnstiles, anything to enter. The crowds spilled onto the pitch and only the presence of mounted police riding around the actual touchline to keep the spectators off the playing area allowed the game to take place. It is agreed that many a time the ball was kept in play by a spectator’s boot. Despite the huge crush there was no hooliganism, the crowd cheered the King and sang the National Anthem lustily and with due respect. The game between Bolton and West Ham was won by Bolton 2 - 0, but both sides agreed that they had not been able to play freely because of the solid wall of people standing on the touchline, so that corners and throw-ins were almost impossible.

By 1924 there began a period of relative prosperity, a short-lived Labour government under Ramsay Macdonald had given way to a Conservative administration under Baldwin - the great ‘unflappable’ Prime Minister who, it was thought, often dozed off during Cabinet meetings. American loans had stabilised Germany, and the countries of Europe had agreed not to go to war ‘except in self-defence’. The League of Nations was the great hope for future settlement of problems: there did seem hope for the future - and every 11th November, ‘Armistice Day’, the country came to a standstill for two minutes to remember the price which might have to be paid if war came again. There was a truly optimistic dream that perhaps, at last, mankind had learned to live in peace. But in Italy, the Fascist leader, Mussolini, had taken power, and in the Far East, Japan was beginning to seek out an empire to supply her needs of materials and a market for her goods. With America, the richest and most powerful country hiding herself in ‘splendid isolation’, the dream was to be short-lived. But we can leave 1924 in a spirit of optimism . .

(4) 1924 - 1949 Top of Page

. We are now entering an age which will be within the experience of a great many of us - a time of our childhood and our youth, and therefore a time, perhaps, of real nostalgia, for these were our ‘Good Old Days’. Again, my apologies if some fondly remembered event is only mentioned briefly or not at all.

The 1920’s were a time of real optimism: people really believed that the Great War was a ‘War to end all Wars’. The great powers seemed to have settled their age-old problems and differences. At Locarno in 1924 the western powers agreed to respect their frontiers (though, significantly, Germany did not accept her eastern frontiers). In 1927, the Kellogg-Briand Pact saw an agreement by all signatories never to use war as an instrument of policy. Germany was accepted into the League of Nations as an equal, and the League was seen as a real hope for a peaceful settlement of all quarrels - old enemies seemed to be making a valiant effort to understand other points of view. In the same vein, nearer at home, in 1929 the coming-of-age of the Boy Scout Movement was celebrated with a Jamboree in Arrowe Park, Birkenhead having seen the first Scout Troop in the world being formed at the YMCA in Grange Road. [(My Scout Master, John Dudleston, had been a Patrol Leader in that first troop!] Boys from every country in the world came together and it was believed that if the nations’ youth buried their differences then peace and understanding on an international scale was possible. Britain was spending less on armaments than at any time over the past 60 years.

It was a time for young people: the war had robbed the elders of all respect and authority - they had been the ones who had been the statesmen or generals who had led them to war, it had been the young who had died! Whereas the old might wish for a return to pre-war conditions, the young disagreed. The restrictions of the Victorian age were swept away: the ‘bright young things’, having survived the slaughter, were determined to enjoy life and they reacted against all the restrictions of the past. Ladies’ dresses, which throughout history (no matter how outrageous the top half) had always been long enough to cover the ankles, now rose to above the knee, achieving a shortness not to be seen again until the 1960’s. Stockings, which had been black or grey, were now daringly ‘nude’ or ‘flesh-coloured’. Many young girls accepted the new fashion for the boyish look -figures were flattened, the waist disappeared, tight corsetting was a thing of the past. The Edwardian hair style of elaborate curls disappeared, to be replaced with the ‘bob’ - or even the ‘Eton crop’, when girls had their hair cut very short, plastered with Brilliantine to keep it flat to the head. Hats, from being huge creations of feathers and ribbons requiring careful adjustment before a mirror, were replaced by simple pull-on felt hats needing no adjustment. Make-up was now used, often in garish colours - plum reds, purples, even greens and blues - girls were determined to be noticed as being in revolt. Smoking too became a symbol of revolt, often using long holders so they had to be noticed. Young men too were in revolt: in place of the tight, figure-hugging suits, high starched collars, heavy pocket watch, etc. of the past, there came the soft cotton shirt with turned down collar, the sports jacket, and the new ‘Oxford’ bags - wide-legged trousers with each leg up to 48 inches in circumference, followed later by ‘plus-fours’, worn with brightly coloured stockings and a large soft cap, and wearing a wrist watch! The full evening dress of tails, white tie and starched shirt was replaced by the short dinner jacket with black tie and soft shirt - the Prince of Wales being in the forefront of fashion made this acceptable. Both sexes enjoyed the new frenetic dances imported from the U.S.A. - the Foxtrot, Charleston, Black Bottom, Bunny Hug - all danced to the music of the American South, the negro-based music of jazz. Older people looked on horrified but helpless, they no longer had the authority to impose their standards.

Another effect of the war was that domestic servants were fewer in number. Young girls who had entered the factories during the war enjoyed the higher wages and greater freedom this afforded them; new industries in electronics, etc., offered opportunities for women rather than men. Indeed, what unemployment there was usually suffered by men rather than women. Middle class ladies increasingly found that they had to do their own housework, or perhaps have a cleaning lady in for two or three hours a week. This led to a demand to make housework easier, and in the 1920’s we see the growing use of vacuum cleaners, washing machines, gas or electric fires replacing the difficult-to-light coal fires, convenience foods (ready-made cake mixtures, etc.). Domestic service, of course, did not end completely, and I can remember walking along Shrewsbury Road in the 1930’s and seeing the housemaids busily cleaning the huge houses along that road – when war came in 1939, most of these wealthy families left Birkenhead and did not return, the houses were turned into flats with a shifting population, and Christ Church lost a large proportion of its older congregation.

In general, the 1920’s were a time of relative prosperity as the world recovered from the War and changed from a war-time to a peace-time economy. The techniques of mass- production used in the war now produced the cars, radios, household goods demanded by the people, and at a lower price. There was some unemployment in the old ‘heavy’ industries - shipbuilding, iron and steel, and there was also a surplus of coal as Europe tried to export its coal into Britain. To offset this threat, the coal owners believed that huge amounts of cheap British coal would guard their market. They proposed therefore to force miners to work longer hours for less pay and this led to the major industrial problem of the decade - the General Strike.

Neither the Government nor the Trades Union Congress wanted this to happen - both sides tried to negotiate. All attempts failed before the intransigent attitudes of both sides. The Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, said he had never met anybody so obstinate and so stupid as the miners’ leaders - until he met the coal owners! To any offer to the miners, their president, a dour Yorkshireman, Herbert Smith, said simply "Nowt doin’": their secretary, A.J. Cook said, "Not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day." The miners and the owners both wanted total victory, not a settlement; the miners expected the rest of the British workforce to support them. In May 1926, with huge stocks of coal in hand and the coming of summer, the miners were locked out. Reluctantly the TUC brought out the Railway workers in support - and soon all workers affiliated to the Trade Union movement. To some, this was a direct challenge by six million workers to a democratically elected government. Winston Churchill wanted to send in the Army (his solution to any problem was to fight - which made him a great war leader but a disaster in peacetime). Baldwin, a much wiser man who had a great deal of sympathy for the miners, refused, giving Churchill the task of editing the "British Gazette", the Government newspaper of the strike. The strikers were restricted because their printers were on strike and therefore they had no papers to put their point of view. Most workers gave only reluctant support; they could see that if the strike were prolonged then their own employers might be forced into closure, leading to widespread unemployment. Also, the strike had little impact at first - miners should not strike in summer to win their case (they were to make the same error in 1984!): a great deal of supplies, both of food and of fuel, were now able to be sent by road - there were plenty of volunteers willing to drive lorries, trains and buses - there was almost a holiday atmosphere. Talk of revolution on the Russian scale quickly disappeared when it was learnt that strikers were helping to unload food supplies for the poor in the North East, while on the Saturday of the strike football matches between strikers and police took place - Plymouth Argyle offered the use of its ground and people came in free of charge; on the Sunday, all took their traditional day off. A face-saving compromise was arranged between Owners and TUC leaders, the miners refused to accept and continued on strike for a further six months, until hunger and poverty forced them to return. The General Strike itself was over after nine days. The Strike brought in men such as Ernest Bevin and Walter Citrine, who urged working with employers, conciliation rather than confrontation. As a result, even during the worst of the 1930’s depression British workers who kept their jobs did not see cuts in pay as happened elsewhere in Europe and the USA. Employers too preferred to compromise rather than risk closure. By 1929 wages were stable, but the cost of living had fallen by more than 15 points: the British working man was buying the radios, even the cheap cars now coming onto the market, and throughout the Thirties prices generally were lower than before 1914.

At the end of 1929, however, the Great Depression began. Its causes are complicated, but put very simply, Europe, since the War, had relied on American loans. America refused to accept goods as payments for these loans, demanding instead repayment in gold. The result was that though Europe seemed to have full employment, countries were not becoming richer - any surplus wealth was sent to the USA. In 1929, America saw her stock market collapse; people were buying stock, seeing it rise in value, selling to make a profit, then buying more stock, assuming it would always continue to rise. In October 1929, prices of shares plummeted, people who had taken out loans could not repay, banks became bankrupt, loans to Europe ceased, so that by 1930 massive unemployment developed in Germany, Italy, France, and, to a lesser degree, Britain. On Merseyside, the 1930’s slump is remembered because there was a fall in demand for shipping - on the Mersey, Clyde, Tyne, wherever ships were built, there were huge numbers of unemployed. Often the only people working in a home were the women, who might have poorly paid work in department stores, or as cleaning ladies. Men, from being the wage-earner and home provider, became dependent on the wife or daughter for weekly ‘spends’ or pocket money - a most humiliating situation. In the Midlands and the South, where the new industries in car manufacture and electronics were growing, there was almost full employment. Fortunately, Neville Chamberlain had closed the workhouses, so that ‘dole’ money and Public Assistance was paid, albeit in very small amounts and then only after the dreaded humiliation of the Means Test. This was the age of the Jarrow March and other hunger marches, until finally the Government realised that help had to be given.

The opportunity came with the new outburst of nationalism in Europe: the Depression had led to the dictatorships in Italy, and later in Germany, claiming their superiority over others by ‘victories’ in every sphere. This was shown in the new transatlantic liners being built. Up to 1929 the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing had been held by the venerable Cunarder ‘Mauretania’, built before the Great War. Now, the Italian ‘Rex’ took the title, only to lose it shortly after to the German ‘Bremen’. The French replied with the ‘Normandie’, possibly the most luxurious liner ever to sail the Atlantic. Britain seemed out of the race. Here was the government’s chance: the huge ‘534’ building on the Clyde was given government aid for its completion. There is an interesting story regarding its name, which I am assured is true: Cunard had always used names ending in ’...ia’ for their ships - hence ‘Lusitania’, ‘Scythia’, etc, and they decided to call this ship ‘Victoria’. They approached the King and asked if they could name their ship after ‘the most gracious and beloved Queen of this country’. The King, George V, replied that he was delighted and that his wife would feel flattered at the honour, so it became the ‘Queen Mary’, which on its first voyage took the record and held it until the end of the 1960’s when the record became irrelevant as air liners took over the Atlantic crossing. In Birkenhead, a government grant led to the building and completion of the huge battlecruiser ‘Renown’ a sister to ‘Repulse’, beautiful ships, but lacking the armour to fight against a major battleship. This was followed by an order for the largest liner built in an English shipyard, the ‘Mauretania, the first purpose-built aircraft carrier, the ‘Ark Royal’. and later the great battleship, ‘Prince of Wales’. I was privileged to see all of these ships launched. To all intents, these orders meant that the slump in Birkenhead was over.

To live in the 1930’s, if one had work, was a good time to live. Prices were in general much lower than in 1914, while wages had certainly risen. A new house in the London suburbs with three bedrooms, gardens, garage, etc, would cost £550, or £5 deposit and payments of 12/6d a week (I will no longer translate into decimal coinage - that is an exercise for those interested). An oak bedroom suite would cost £15/15/- or 9/- a month. Cigarettes were 6d for ten, beer 4d a pint. Clothing was cheap - ‘Weaver to Wearer’ and the ‘50/- Tailor’ had shops in Grange Road supplying good cheap clothing to the people. For a ‘best’ suit, one went to Burton’s, where a tailor-made suit with two pairs of trousers and waistcoat might cost as much as £6/10/-). Ladies’ clothing was equally cheap - coats for winter at 39/11d, shoes 5/6d, silk stockings 1/6d (rather expensive and therefore a tragedy if they ‘laddered’ - for everyday wear, lisle stockings at 6d or 9d a pair were preferred). A week’s holiday in a boarding house in North Wales, full board for a family of four, was £4. Even the longest bus journey seldom cost more than 3d, and most people travelled by bus. There were cars and they were cheap - Austin and Morris both selling cars for the family at £100. Larger saloon cars built by Vauxhall, Riley, Wolsey and others might cost as much as £235 - but they were for the rich. In the whole country there were only about 2 million motor vehicles, and more than 80% of these were in the affluent South.

The side roads in Birkenhead seldom if ever saw a motor car, unless the doctor came to call. As a result, the streets were the children’s playground, and I am sure this will bring back fond memories. Games and pastimes seldom seen now filled our playtime hours:- bowling a hoop through deserted side-streets, learning to roller skate in total safety, skipping (two mums would have a washing-line stretched across the street, they would turn the rope and six or more children would skip in it together - the skill, which I never achieved, was to run in as the rope was turning and get into the rhythm of skipping immediately), marbles (‘alleys’ in Birkenhead) played along the gutter; and playing two (or ever three) balls against the wall - chiefly for girls, who could master this skill much better than boys. With these were a whole series of rhymes and songs to be used whilst one was skipping or playing ball. I was tempted to include some here, but space does not allow it; but I do feel that these should be written down before they become forgotten - a series for a future magazine perhaps! Street cricket with its own very strict rules - one hand off the wall when catching was out; over a wall was ‘6 and out’ - the batsman having the task of retrieving the ball. Knocking and asking if one knew the householder, more daringly climbing the wall if one was unsure of reception; any unpleasant person would be punished by the ritual of ‘ringing the bell and running away’. A corner house was the traditional meeting place where games would be planned, sides picked (again, more rhymes for choosing who would be ‘it’). There were ‘seasons’ for games or activities - how they started nobody knew, but start they did - a time for top-and-whip, for hopscotch, marbles, bowling of hoops -all were cheap, all required considerable amounts of energy.

There was reading - the library was free - and there were the comics. For young children, ‘Tiger Tim’s Weekly’, Enid Blyton’s ‘Sunny Stories’, the famous 1d comics of the previous century - ‘Chips’, ‘Comic Cuts’, ‘Funny Wonder’, but now joined by the 2d comics ‘Film Fun’, ‘Radio Fun’, and a whole series of D.C. Thompson comics - ‘Hotspur’, ‘Rover’, ‘Skipper’, ‘Adventure’, ‘Wizard’. Looking again at my copies I marvel at the amount of reading matter - at least 26 pages of close print, three columns to the page, with the most wonderful stories - ‘Buffalo Bill’s Schooldays’, ‘The Traitor of the Team’, etc. For girls there was ‘Peg’s Paper’, ‘The Girl’s Crystal’, again 5 or 6 stories, very few pictures. In 1937 came ‘The Dandy’ and in 1938 ‘The Beano’ -both still in print, but not as they were. Each had at least six small-print stories, plus the cartoon characters who have entered our culture - ‘Keyhole Kate’, ‘Desperate Dan’, ‘Hungry Horace’, ‘Lord Snooty’. Nobody was rich enough to buy all these comics; instead, all of one’s gang bought one of them, read it, then began the system of ‘swaps’ - by the time all comics had been circulated the next editions were on the market. American comics could also be bought at the Birkenhead Market and I was fortunate in having an aunt in America who regularly sent me the garish comic books - ‘Batman’, ‘Superman’, ‘Captain Marvel’ - these gave me an awesome status in the swapping trade!

Newspapers as always had their circulation wars; in the 1930’s there were about a dozen daily papers and on Sunday, 10 papers. Apart from the ‘Daily Mirror and the ‘Daily Sketch’, all the papers were broad sheets; on Sunday, the ‘Sunday Pictorial’ was the only tabloid, the rest were broad sheets. In addition, there were magazines – ‘Everybody’s Weekly’, ‘John Bull’, ‘Picture Post’, ‘Illustrated’. Inorder to sell, they all had offers at different times – my bookshelf has the complete works of Dickens, My Father-in-law has the Waverley Novels of Sir Walter Scott; I also have the ‘News Chronicle’ music book of ‘Old Tyme Variety Songs’ , and the ‘Daily Express’ edition of ‘Songs that won the War’ – and I know all of them for it was my father’s practice every Sunday afternoon to have my sister and I on his knee and together we would sing through the books while Mum made the tea. I’m sure also that many older readers will remember ‘Lobby Lud’ – the character created I seem to remember by the ‘News Chronicle’ – he would visit a different seaside resort each day, his silhouette would be in the paper, and if recognised, one would have to have a copy of the newspaper in one’s hand and approach him and say ‘You are Lobby Lud and I claim my £10’ (it might have been more or less, I can’t remember exactly). I know that we were holidaying in North Wales when it was reported that he would be in Llandudno; accordingly, the whole family went to Llandudno for the day, armed with the Chronicle – needless to say we saw nobody we could swear to be Lobby Lud, though I am sure many innocent and bemused holidaymakers were accosted.

Radio was a major home entertainment, licence fee, 10/- (50p) - the BBC, under the genius of John Reid, a dour Scots Presbyterian - became the most respected radio corporation in the world, chiefly because Reid ignored any government attempt to control his empire. Unlike radio anywhere in Europe, the BBC could be guaranteed to speak the truth, no matter how unpopular this might make it with the politicians. It also had dignity - when George V was dying in January 1936, Reid’s beautifully phrased "The King’s life is drawing peacefully to its close" was a sentence of sheer poetry. ( Compare it with the 19th century Poet Laureate A. Austin’s offering on the illness of the Prince of Wales: "Across the wire the electric message came, He is no better, he is much the same." and one can appreciate the contribution to our heritage of John Reid. He disdained to give people what they might want (this was the problem in the USA where commercial radio catered only for what was popular), instead, he gave them what he thought they should have. A study of BBC programmes shows a mix of light variety (early broadcasts were from the Argyle Theatre, Birkenhead), symphony concerts, serious talks such as ‘The Brains Trust’, regular news bulletins at set hours: suitable programmes for a Sunday were cello quartets, symphony concerts, at least two church services and for light relief, and I am sure many will remember this, Palm Court Hotel with Albert Sandler playing the violin - but this was after 8 p.m. so that there was no excuse to miss Evening Service. On every weekday, there was Children’s Hour from 5 o’clock with its ‘uncles and aunties’. I still have my Uncle Mac’s Children’s Hour Annual with stories about Larry the Lamb and articles by ‘Nomad’ concerning the English countryside. We looked forward eagerly to ‘Monday Night at Eight’ which included ‘Inspector Hornby Investigates’ - the clue to solving the mystery was given at the end; one preened oneself if the solution had been worked out beforehand.

Outside entertainment was provided by the cinema: the movies had been replaced by the ‘talkies’ in 1927 and film stars became the new aristocracy. To go to the cinema was sheer escapism - for 6d one was admitted to a sort of palace, uniformed servants opened the door for you, another servant showed you to your seat, in the interval yet another servant brought a tray of sweets or ices for you to choose, and for two and a half hours you could sit back in a plush velvet seat and be entertained. Films were usually escapist - light comedies, musicals with a rags-to-riches story, pleasant foot-tapping songs, and one could be sure that good always triumphed, nobody ever profited from crime, the ‘baddies’ were obviously bad, the ‘goodies’ obviously good. In cowboy films the hero never shot a man in the back, never hit below the belt or kicked, and always gave his opponent the chance to draw first. To us today, they might appear naive or unreal, but they were simple morality tales for most young people and they did give us a standard to measure ourselves by, and therefore should be admired. For children, there were the Saturday afternoon matinees - usually a broad comedy, a cowboy film and always a serial – Flash Gordon was a favourite and after the show it was the custom to fasten one’s blue gaberdine ‘mac at the throat as a sort of cloak and swagger along the street as Buster Crabbe had done in the role of Flash Gordon. The cowboys were our heroes – Buck Jones and his horse,‘ Silver,’ Tom Mix and his horse, ‘Tony’., the handsome and much admired Ken Maynard – but we had less admiration for Gene Autrey because he would insist on singing to the detriment of the action we demanded. Autrey died in 1998, the last of the 1930’s cowboys. At one time, there were 17 cinemas in Birkenhead, each often showing two different films every week, and all playing to packed houses, particularly at weekends

Sport, as always, provided entertainment. In 1926 England won the Ashes, with Jack Hobbs, possibly the finest batsman ever, scoring a century. In the 1930’s the appearance of Don Bradman, ‘a run machine’, won them back for Australia. England regained the Ashes in the notorious ‘body-line’ tour, when Larwood was told to bowl ‘bouncers’ at the Australians, who could not deal with them. Such was the anger, Australia threatened to leave the Empire. Ordered to halt the onslaught, Larwood still defeated the Australians and the Ashes were won. At the Oval in 1938 came Hutton’s magnificent 364 in an England total of 903 for 7 to defeat Australia by an innings and 579 runs - I doubt if we shall ever see the like again. Ironically, ten years later Hutton was again England’s highest scorer at the Oval when he scored 30 in an England total of 52! This was Bradman’s last match and he was cheered all the way to the wicket only to be bowled for 0 - it was said that he could not see the ball for tears.

In the thirties, Jules Rimet organised the World Cup in Association Football – England disdained to enter, preferring to wait until the competition was over, then playing the winners (and defeating tem ).

1934 was a great year for English tennis - England won both the Ladies’ and the Men’s’ Championships at Wimbledon when Fred Perry and Dorothy Round both won. Perry was to win again in 1935 and 1936. It appears unlikely that England will ever produce such players again!

The 1920’s and 1930’s were also the age when aeroplanes began to make the headlines with intrepid flyers undertaking hazardous trips to far-flung parts of the world – to South Africa, India and Australia. Britain won the Schneider Trophy outright in 1930 when a plane designed by R.J. Mitchell won the trophy for seaplanes for the third time – Mitchell used the experience he gained to design the Spitfire in the 1930’s. I’m sure many will remember how we used to run outside if we heard an aeroplane flying overhead, and this led to the practice of ‘sky-writing’ – a small bi-plane would write a slogan across the sky, usually a well-known article being advertised, it was most effective for hundreds would watch trying to guess the product as it was written, and we would stand afterwards waiting to see how long it took before it disappeared; sky-writing, I’m afraid, is now almost a lost art. But the one who won the public’s attention was a heroine – Amy Johnson – who in 1928 had learned to fly tiny De Havilland ‘Moths’, paying £2 an hour for her first lessons, she also learned to become an aitr-mechanic, maintaining the planes she flew. Her longest flight after obtaining her licence in 1929 was from London to her home town of Hull, but she had her dreams. In 1930, she bought a second-hand single-engined Gipsy Moth which she christened ‘Jason’, she taught herself map-reading and basic meteorology. On Monday, 5th May 1930, she took off from Croydon Aerodrome early on the morning, arriving in Vienna in time for tea, and to huge acclaim; the next day she headed for Constantinople, sustained by a packet of sandwiches and a thermos of tea. Crossing the middle eastern desert, she ran into a sand storm and had to put down in the desert until the danger passed, she then flew on to Baghdad and from there to Karachi, beating the previous record for the flight to India by two days. She now flew to Calcutta, to Singapore, to Java, where she had to make an emergency landing on a sugar estate, and where bamboo made holes in the fabric of the plane's wings, to be patched up with sticking plaster from her First Aid kit. Two days later, she was in Australia, to the plaudits of the whole world, particularly from the British. She returned to Britain a heroine, and to a cheque for £10,000. We have to remember that in those days, few air fields existed, and even fewer had qualified mechanics – Amy Johnson had to do all her own repairs. Also, of course, there were none of the modern navigational aids – no radio, no satellite links – flyers literally ‘flew by the seat of their pants’. Throughout the 1930’s, she continued to make solo flights to Cape Town and back again, she married another flyer, Jim Mollinson, though the marriage did not last. When war came she ferried planes for the RAF and in January 1941, was lost over the Thames Estuary, an ironic end for a woman who had flown over the uncharted, shark-infested waters of the Coral Sea to die flying over possibly the best charted waters of the British Isles and well within the sight of land, a fitting end to a genuine heroine: her plane, ‘Jason’, can still be seen in the Kensington Science Museum.

In 1936 the Olympic Games were held in Berlin and for the first time Nationalist politics intruded. Until then, the Games had been, in De Coubertin’s words, "for the glory of sport". Now, on Adolf Hitler’s orders, they were for the glory of Germany. Superbly organised, they were spoilt for Hitler when an American Negro, Jesse Owen, won four Gold medals, overshadowing all the achievements of the German athletes who led the medals table. Hitler was to be equally furious when the German Heavyweight champion, Max Schmelling, was knocked out in the first round by the American Negro, Joe Louis. The ‘Master Race’ theory was shown to be nonsense.

Other stories in the news in the 30’s were the crash of the huge airship ‘R 101’, which burst into flames on its maiden flight, killing most on board and ending for ever Britain’s interest in airships. They had been seen as the easiest way of transporting large numbers of passengers quickly over long distances and indeed Germany persevered with the huge ‘Hindenberg’ until that too was destroyed by fire in 1938. In 1936, the Crystal Palace was destroyed by fire (I can never understand how a building of iron and glass could burn), removing one of the great 19th century marvels.

In that same year, 1936, Britain was rocked by problems with the Royal Family. In January, George V, who had celebrated his Silver Jubilee the year before with great rejoicing, street parties, etc., died. He was a much loved Monarch, the first to make the now traditional Christmas radio broadcast. He was succeeded by the very popular Edward, Prince of Wales, who became Edward VIII. Edward was the most travelled prince in history, loved throughout the Empire. However, unknown to the people, he had formed a liaison with an American divorcee, Mrs Wallis Simpson. The friendship was known throughout the world, but the British Press remained silent. Therefore the shock to the people was immense when, at the beginning of December, it finally reached the papers after the Bishop of Bradford, in a sermon, criticised the King’s conduct. Edward believed that his popularity with the people would see him through, but his Prime Minister, Baldwin, knew that though the people might accept a mistress hiding behind the euphemism of ‘friend’, they would never accept a Queen Wallis, nor would the Empire. Edward had a choice - give up Mrs Simpson or give up the Throne! It is remarkable how quickly children react to these situations -the news broke on December 4th and within two or three days there was a street rhyme:

"Who’s this coming down the street?

Mrs Simpson, sweaty feet,

She’s been married twice before,

Now she’s knocking at Edward’s door."

On Friday 11th December, having signed away the throne the day before, the new Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor, broadcast to the nation and to the Empire stating that he found it "impossible to carry out the heavy burden of responsibility . . . without the help and support of the woman I love." His successor would be his brother George, Duke of York, who became George VI. Many saw the Abdication as the beginning of the end of the monarchy; instead, it probably saved it, for the new shy king and his delightful wife were possibly the most beloved royals ever to occupy the throne.

The Abdication seemed to have another effect - Edward had been the leader of the ‘Bright Young Things’. In 1936, he showed that he was a middle-aged man who could not accept responsibility - he had, in effect, ‘run away’. The young generation saw the danger into which they were heading, they needed to face facts, accept responsibility, for the international scene was becoming alarming.

Throughout the 1930’s there were growing signs of future problems: the dictators of Germany and Italy were becoming increasingly active, and in Britain Sir Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists was making itself noticed - though never to the degree where one was ever elected to Parliament. Britain and France, leaders of the Free World, tried to ignore the dangers, their peoples did not want war, which they saw as being more terrible than the previous slaughter. In 1935 Hitler’s Germany began to re-arm after leaving the League of Nations; in 1936 Germany invaded the Rhineland; in 1938 Austria was forced into union with Germany. In all these matters Britain and France did nothing. The new policy was ‘Appeasement’ – avoid war no matter what the price. In 1936, the Spanish Civil War seemed to herald what might happen to us should we become involved the bombing of Guernica seemed to underline the possible dangers if our own cities were heavily bombed from the air. I well remember Christmas 1937 when a large number of Spanish children came here to escape, temporarily, the horrors of civil war in their own country. They came to accept and to enjoy whatever their friendly hosts provided – unfortunately they had never experienced the full horror of an English children’s party. Quickly they realised, as they politely ate the sandwiches provided, that English children saw these not as food but as ammunition to throw at all and sundry; jellies in those small paper cases we used to have were an especially effective weapon and perfect missiles as they splattered most satisfactorily into faces and hair. Add to this one of my uncles who had never grown up and who took great delight in sticking jam tarts on any unprotected nose and one can understand why, after the meal, all were covered with crumbs, jelly, jam cake etc. and looking somewhat shell-shocked. But of course, there was worse to come – organised games! Whatever game was played, it always degenerated into complete mayhem: one I remember was ‘Oranges and Lemons’ where, as we all know, when ‘caught’ one chose to be an ‘orange’ or a ‘lemon’ . It ended with most of the Spanish children on one side, and the English on the other, but with a significant difference – the English knew what to do, the Spaniards didn’t!. The two lines began the traditional tug-of-war, except of course that the English knew exactly when to release the hold and stop pulling - immediately, all of the Spanish children were left sprawlng on the floor where once again they were attacked with any missiles available. I am quite certain that they were glad to return to the relative peace and normality of their civil war. Equally, I often wonder if any of these - they will be in the late 60’s or 70’s now - remember that party – possibly it will help them to understand the excesses of the English holidaymaker in Spain today. In September 1938 Hitler turned his attention to Czechoslovakia, demanding the province of Sudetenland. France had an alliance to defend the Czechs if attacked, Britain was France’s ally. At Munich, in September 1938, Britain and France agreed to give Germany what she asked on condition that she would make no further demands. The policy of ‘Appeasement’ was in full flow – but politicians too often fail to realise that appeasement can only work from a position of strength – show the potential trouble-maker that you are the master, then agree to concessions, stressing to the other side that these are concessions which can be withheld if there is any dispute. When agreeing to concessions from a position of weakness, there is always the probability that the aggressor will continue to demand more. Chamberlain came home to a hero’s welcome - he has since been condemned, but we have to remember that both Labour and Conservatives had refused to arm Britain in the 1930’s and in 1938 Britain was in no condition to fight a major European war. Also, Chamberlain was doing what the people manifestly wanted - he gave them peace. He also gained an extra year for Britain to re-arm, and Britain did at last modernise her forces. Unemployment in the ship yards fell away as Admiralty orders were received - I’m sure that many will remember the tragedy of the ‘Thetis’ in June 1939 when a Laird’s built submarine was lost in Liverpool Bay because of a careless oversight with the painting, which had blocked a tiny inspection hole. More than 40 Laird’s workers were lost with the crew. I can remember the lights burning late in a neighbour’s house that first Saturday in June as a wife and daughter waited for news of a father and son both aboard the submarine, and the awful announcement on the radio - "The Admiralty regrets . . ."

In March 1939 Hitler had broken the Munich Agreement and most realised that war was now probably certain. Cigarette cards advised how to make a room gas proof, how to dig a trench against aerial attack, taught basic first aid. We speak glibly about Britain ‘muddling through’, but in 1939 plans were made to issue everybody with gas masks, to evacuate all schoolchildren to places of safety, to construct suitable shelters for those who wanted them - all of these were successfully put into operation as soon as war came. The great fears were of attack from the air - ‘the bomber will always get through’ was accepted belief, and Germany had a huge bomber fleet. Gas was the other great fear. It had been used devastatingly in the Great War in the trenches; how much worse it would be in Britain’s over-crowded cities! In the event, neither side used gas as a weapon - but the fear was there! Gas was a very real fear and it says much to the credit of the government that there were sufficient gas masks for all the population; I well remember an auntie with a young baby who had been issued with a baby respirator – a large rubber contrivance into which the baby had to be inserted and fastened in, then air was filtered in via a hand-bellows. Understandably, the struggling child was unwilling to be put into a smelly, hot container and she fought violently: my poor auntie was in tears as she contemplated the prospect of trying to put the baby into its respirator, ensuring it was airtight by restricting the violently kicking limbs which kept forcing open the fastenings, putting on her own mask and pumping filtered air to keep the baby alive – and all of this during a terrifying gas-attack. Fortunately, the danger never manifested itself – gas was never used !

In August 1939 Hitler made an agreement with his arch-enemy, Communist Russia: Poland was helpless between them. On 1st September Poland was invaded and Britain sent an ultimatum, which ran out at 11 a.m. on the 3rd September. I’m sure many will remember that sad voice of Neville Chamberlain as he announced at 11.15 a.m. ". . . no such undertaking has been received and consequently this country is at war with Germany."

On that weekend at the beginning of September, more than one and a half million children, many with their mothers, were evacuated: again, the organisation was incredible – inevitably, there were moments of confusion, but in general these ‘evacuees’ were moved hundreds of miles from the industrial towns to places of safety and accommodation found for them: and all of this in a matter of a few days. Again, for the most part, the new homes found provided kindness and shelter, though again there were stories of cruelty and insensitivity – these are the stories which are heard, the millions of those who found welcome and kindness do not make good stories in the popular press. Evacuation was not compulsory – it was left to the parents to decide. My parents had decided that my sister and I should go to a place of safety and on the evening of September 2 , knowing that we were going away the next day, we were somewhat subdued. My closest school friend and his parents came over to wish us well, and in talking with my parents they said how they intended to keep their son at home – whereupon the lad had a satisfied smirk on his face, until they added, " if we’re going to die, we’ll all die together", whereupon the smile vanished and a look of real dismay replaced it – he was not too keen on dying with or without parents.

The first months of the war became known as the ‘phoney war’ because of the lack of fighting – indeed, I would suggest that there was more fighting between the English and the Welsh children in the village where I was evacuated than there was on the Western Front. I remember a report in the newspaper that the Minister for Air, Sir Kingsley Wood, forbade the bombing of German forests with incendiary bombs as this might damage private property !

We all took the war very seriously: I remember in the town where we were evacuated that there would be a practice Air Raid alert at midday – at the appointed time, most of the people were gathered outside the Market Hall where the Air Raid siren was installed. We were told that when the alarm sounded, we were to return to our homes and take shelter under the table, none of the houses in this part of Wales having shelters. The chairman of the Parish Council, accompanied by the local policemen marched up to the Hall to press the alarm. Then came that undulating wailing with which we were all to become so familiar later in the war; we duly clapped this evidence of efficiency then returned home to our shelter – and this I find now as completely bizarre – my sister and I, with our landlady proceeded, in all seriousness, to sit under the table to eat our lunch, seeing nothing ridiculous in our situation.

The war gave new opportunities to those who revelled in officiousness – the Air Raid warden in ‘Dad’s Army’ was a fair picture of many at this time. Again, in our small welsh town, there was one warden only and to him the black-out was a heaven –sent chance to underline his power . he would be seen prowling the streets after dark, peering closely at the windows. Any sign of a glimmer of light, probably totally invisible beyond three feet, and only visible if one crouched down to spot it under the thick curtains which most people had, and he would hammer on the door and demand that a member of the household come out to view the offence, with threats of official action if such an occurrence happened again. As the light could not even be seen from the edge of the pavement, the chances of its being seen by a German plane flying at several thousand feet were remote, nevertheless we had to comply – it was his moment of glory.

To attempt to give the history of the war would be impossible: suffice to say that both Britain and France tried to re-run the Great War, whereas Germany used new tactics. France had built the Maginot Line, a magnificent system of trenches and heavy guns. "Like a battleship on land", said one British general, "and just as useless". They refused to believe that nobody wins a war by sitting still and waiting for the enemy to attack. In 1940 the Germans simply went round and over it, the British were forced to retreat at Dunkirk, and France was forced to accept an armistice. Apart from a wonderful victory over the Italians, Britain suffered a series of defeats until August 1942. By then it was truly a World War - involving Russia, the USA, Japan, as well as the European powers. Britain was near defeat on the Nile, on the borders of India, and at sea where the German U-Boats were sinking up to 600,000 tons of shipping each month - Britain was close to starvation. So often we would hear the high-pitched sirens of destroyers or corvettes announcing that another convoy had come into the Mersey and if we went down to the river we would often see the merchant ships damaged by gun-fire, or even by torpedoes, but still afloat. Yet we survived, indeed were healthier on our rations than before - 4oz of butter, 4oz margarine, 1/-d worth of meat (a small piece of expensive meat, or more of the cheaper cuts), 1 egg a fortnight, 2oz tea, 12oz sugar. Bread and vegetables were unrationed throughout the war and many other goods (sweets, tinned fruits, tinned meats, etc.) were on ‘points’ - if you bought a tin of ‘Spam’ you would be unable to buy a tin of pineapple. Children and expectant mothers were given more milk, eggs and orange juice containing cod liver oil. Clothing was also rationed and was ‘utility’, i.e. it followed strictly standard patterns to save cloth, buttons, everything. Fish was not rationed, but was in short supply, and many will remember the custom of ‘queuing’ - a very British way of ensuring a sort of fairness - one of the great crimes was to ‘jump the queue’. Nobody starved and certainly the eating of less meat and more vegetables meant a healthier population generally.

Air raids brought their own impact - many houses had their own air-raid shelter, either an ‘Anderson’ (a metal shelter sunk into the ground), a ‘Morrison’ (a metal shelter inside the house which could serve as a table), or a brick shelter in the street. Others went to the underground stations - Hamilton Square had its regular nightly visitors. We learned to live, even enjoy, the camaraderie of the shelters, and we had the practice - for Merseyside, after London, was the most important port in Britain and was therefore, after London, the most heavily bombed. Christ Church School was destroyed in March 1941, and sustained bombing continued until it culminated in the great ‘May Blitz’. When the school was bombed, for a time we had nowhere to go, but in the April we moved into the church hall, always known then as the ‘schoolroom’ attending school on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings only: we had no books, no blackboards, no chalk , literally nothing – we sat in circles around the teacher who had to contrive oral lessons with several classes all in the same room together;; it was then that I began to admire teachers for their kindness and adaptability. At that time I was living in Tranmere, our house having been one of the casualties in April , and I remember standing in Mersey Park looking across at Liverpool, seeing the whole length of the Liverpool Docks blazing from end to end, with similar infernos on the Birkenhead and Wallasey side. I suppose that everybody has his or her personal memory of the ‘blitz’ but there are a few I can certainly remember – an Aunt, of somewhat corpulent size, used to return to her home in Rock ferry at the height of the air raid. My father asked her if she felt nervous with the bombs falling. "Oh no", she replied, " I shelter under the trees in the park". Because of her size, she refused to use her Andersen shelter in the garden, claiming she could not get through the door. Indeed, many of us preferred to take our chances in the warmth and safety of the house rather than the discomfort of a cold, damp shelter – the story spread that if you could hear the bomb coming down, then it would not hit you – it was the bomb which you could not hear which was the danger ! I can remember Christmas 1940, sitting beside the fire reading a comic, with an air raid in progress outside. Mum and dad were listening to the wireless, Granddad was smoking his pipe. Suddenly there was the sound of breaking glass, the bricks fell down the chimney, we heard slates falling from the roof to crash outside, soot swept into the room; my father grabbed me with one hand, my sister with the other, and my mother with another (I still don’t know how he managed it) and threw us all under the table, my granddad continued to smoke his pipe, confining himself to saying "Scissors" – the most extreme oath he would ever allow himself. "That’s our house gone ", said dad – he went to investigate and found instead that it was a house across the street. There lived a young mother with her baby and mother, while her husband was away in the forces. They had been sheltering in a street shelter when the baby began to cry for a feed; too embarrassed to feed the child before strangers the three had gone back into the house where all were killed, my father helped to bring the baby’s body out. He then insisted that in future, no matter what the discomfort, we should all go to the shelter when there was a raid in progress. We would sit there during the very heavy bombing of 1941, and every so often, granddad would say, "There goes our house", whereupon he would glance out of the door and say, "the back wall is still standing". Once he went in for some tea when the raid seemed to be slackening off, and when we came in he was sitting in his chair with his tea, with the remains of the hearth rug smouldering at his feet – he had come in to find the house ablaze, had put out the fire and made his tea – he had his priorities right.! It was about this time that he gave up the drinking of beer – not because he became teetotal but because of the price. Always, on Friday, when he drew his pension, he and his friend would go to the Argyle pub and buy each other a pint. Asking for two pints, he put down 1/-; "Another 2d please Tom, " said the barmaid, "It’s 7d (3p) a pint now". "7d a pint for beer", said granddad, "then that’s the last pint I’ll ever buy ". He was true to his word, he never entered a public house again.

A story concerning the Queen Mother may be inserted here: as Queen, she was living at Windsor during the worst of the blitz. A cousin in the Coldstream Guards (a traitor, for both my father and I had been Grenadiers) was on sentry duty when her Majesty came up to him and asked about his family – he replied that he came from Merseyside where his mother and sister still lived. A few weeks later, Merseyside suffered its May Blitz and when the Queen next saw him, she came to him to ask if his family were safe – she had remembered an ordinary soldier and his family several weeks after she had first spoken to him. From that time onward, he was devoted to her and remains so to this day.

We were finally forced to leave our house in April 1941, when there was no roof, no windows, and a large hole in the wall – fortunately we had our relatives to give us accommodation, others were not so lucky. Our furniture had to be put in storage and unfortunately almost all of our more precious belongings were stolen – mother at this time was more concerned with our safety and the fact that dad had collapsed and was shortly to die – material possessions seemed to be of little importance.

Morale generally was very high during the war, I cannot remember any feeling that we might lose; a cousin who worked on the railways was a member of the Home Guard in 1941, before he was drafted into the army proper. He was detailed to guard the railway line near the Hooton signal box armed with a .303 rifle and 5 rounds of ammunition; when his guard duty ended, he would solemnly hand over the rifle to the next man on duty, with the clip of bullets intact. They knew how to load the rifle – the only one the platoon owned, but they had never fired it – the 5 bullets were the sum total of their defence and could only be fired on the direct orders of an officer.

Radio was a great morale booster – ‘Bandwagon’ at the beginning of the war was the first regular comedy show on BBC radio; it was followed by a series of shows, all of which had their own popular catch-phrases – Jack Warner in ‘Garrison Theatre’ with his ‘mind my bike’, and talking of his ‘little gel’; ‘Happidrome’ broadcast every Sunday evening with ‘Mr. Lovejoy, Ramsbottom and Enoch’ - their phrase was ‘Let me tell you…’ The most famous, of course, was ITMA with the Liverpool comedian, Tommy Handley. Every character had his or her catchphrase – ‘can I do you now sir ?’ ‘I don’t mind if I do’, ‘After you Claude, no after you Cecil’, and as they were introduced and the phrase was spoken, so the audience erupted into applause and laughter. There was never any bad language or innuendo, no smutty jokes: the most outrageous comedian, Max Miller won his laughs by not voicing the punch line, he allowed the audience to supply that while he viewed them with puzzled innocence, or a knowing grin and raised eyebrows. The 9 p.m. news was listened to by all, and the BBC won a reputation for truthfulness which was respected the world over. The government also played its part by not hiding any disasters from the people. In May 1941 I can remember the radio programme being interrupted by an announcement that "the Admiralty regrets the loss of ‘HMS Hood ‘ " – the ‘Mighty Hood’ was seen as the embodiment of British sea power – we did not realise its basic weaknesses as a war ship – but this truthfulness and honesty in reporting bad news meant that when therer was good news to be reported, we knew it to be true. In Germany, on the other hand, where unpleasant truths were often hidden, and the war seemed to be a constant stream of victories, when the defeats began they were kept from the people who were therefore all the more shocked when the truth began to appear – they were not prepared for it, whereas in Britain we became so accustomed to defeat in the early years of the war, we could accept any setback and simply carry on.

In 1942 the Americans began to arrive and Arrowe Park became a huge U.S. transit camp. To many these might have borne out the saying, "Overpaid, over-sexed, and over here", but to children they were the most friendly and generous of allies. A new phrase entered our language - "Any gum, chum?" and invariably the sticks of gum would be produced. I tried the question on a G.I. and he, having no gum, offered me a chew of his chewing tobacco. Needless to say, it was not an experience I repeated - chewing tobacco is an acquired taste!

Once America was our ally victory was certain, for once America sets its mind to a task it is unbeatable - they still have the initiative and self-confidence that Britain had in the 19th century, but which we seem now to have largely lost. I can remember the excitement at school when we saw a huge fleet of more than 100 ‘Liberator’ bombers flying over. There was no way that Germany could match this output. Christmas 1944 saw the beginning of the end of the blackout when restricted lighting was allowed in the streets and shops. At the same time, church bells were once again allowed to ring out, it being felt that the

danger of invasion was past - my mother was in tears as she heard them that Christmas morning.

As the war neared its end, the civilised world was profoundly horrified by the pictures which began to emerge of the German concentration camps – I’m sure many who saw these images on the news reels at the cinema will remember how the whole audience became silent, punctuated now and again by gasps of sheer horror. I feel that it was not the Germans who were being condemned though many did imply that only in Germany (i.e. ‘the baddies’) could such cruelty exist, rather it was mankind generally – these acts had been committed by men and women who, according to many reports, were normal, kindly people once they were off duty: they were simply ‘obeying orders’. John Donne had said in the 17th century, ‘No man is an island’ – what had happened in Germany could happen anywhere – and this in a country which had produced Beethoven, Brahms, Goethe, Schiller – a country which had been a Christian country for more than a thousand years ; Belsen, Ravensbruck, Auschwitz , Dachau were blots on humanity not only on Germany – never again could Europeans hold themselves up as the models of civilisation. It did reinforce the belief that the 2nd World War was a ‘just’ war - we were fighting against a very real evil in Naziism – but what had happened in Germany could happen anywhere, and this must give us food for thought nad also that extra vigilance that we never surrender our hard-won liberties of freedom of speech and thought to demagogues, no matter how plausible their speeches may be – always must we be ready to question, to argue, to criticize.

In May 1945 the European war was over. In June, to the astonishment of many, Churchill’s government was defeated and Labour swept to power with a massive majority. In August two atomic bombs on Japan meant the end of the Pacific War - after nearly six years, the world was at peace. Britain alone had fought from the first day to the last - and she was exhausted and virtually bankrupt.

The years 1945 to 1949 are usually called the ‘Years of Austerity’ . Labour had a huge programme of social reform, including the introduction of the National Health Service and the need to rebuild after the bombing. There were still world problems which demand our forces’ intervention, for it quickly became obvious that whilst the USA was eager to withdraw from Europe and was rapidly demobilising its forces, the Soviet Union was expanding into Eastern Europe. Britain stopped them taking over Greece, but in 1948 Churchill warned the world that an ‘Iron Curtain’ had fallen across Europe and the ‘Cold War’ began. Our Empire, too, was disintegrating - noting Britain’s financial weakness, African colonies and our Far Eastern Empire, led by India, were demanding freedom from British rule. The greatest Empire in history was breaking up - India and Pakistan leading the way.

Life after the War was, to many, harder than the War itself - the people felt they had earned an easier life, but rationing continued for another eight years - the government would buy nothing which was not absolutely essential. Even bread was rationed after the War, something which had never been considered during it. 1947 saw the hardest winter for years, not helped by a dock strike which forced the Labour government to send in the army. Newsreels showed the Guards marching into the docks, but this was only for the cameras: the Pioneer Corps had been unloading hours before we arrived , but we looked good on camera! Britain and Europe were saved by the generosity of the USA - Marshall Aid poured millions of dollars into Europe to rebuild the shattered economies so that the countries would have the strength to face the Communist regime of Russia. Britain did have some advantages - after America she was the world’s greatest car producer and was the world leader in the production of motor bikes. She had a television industry, transmitting having begun in 1936 and restarted after the War - indeed, after America Britain was the only producer of radios, and we exported television sets to the USA. One can speculate where we have gone wrong to lose that ascendancy, but space here does not allow it.

In sport, though Britain could hold her own at golf (Henry Cotton became the Open Champion for the third time) she was out of her depth in athletics (only 4 silver medals at the 1948 London Olympics), tennis, where the Americans carried all before them, and even football was showing weaknesses, only able to draw against Moscow Dynamo even though the English team had Mathews, Mortensen, Finney and Lawton in its forward line and the great Frank Swift in goal. We had high hopes in cricket when the ‘Middlesex twins’, Compton and Edrich, both scored more than 3,000 runs in 1947, but the 1948 Australian team, with Bradman and bowlers Lindwall and Miller, went the whole tour unbeaten, soundly defeating England in four Test matches, with one drawn. The heavyweight champion was a Yorkshire man, Bruce Woodcock and we had high hopes that he could challenge for the world championship – until he met the Americans ! He was destroyed by a giant of a man, Joe Baksi, who himself was swiftly despatched by the great Joe Louis, the ‘Brown Bomber’. Years later, I met Woodcock in Doncaster where he ran a public house, his battered face told its own story of the difference between a brave ‘no-hoper’ and the superbly fit Americans.

In one area, however, there was revolt against austerity - in 1947 Christian Dior brought in the ‘New Look’ - longer feminine dresses, ‘wasp’ waists, rounded shoulders rather than the square military look of the war years. As one fashion writer noted, "the swish of petticoats was heard again". The New Look and the immensely popular wedding of Princess Elizabeth in 1947 and the birth of her son in 1948 seemed to herald the possibility that life was going to improve, that there was a cheerful future to look forward to.

In one custom where the war made a profound difference which I had not fully realised until recently - when my sister and I went to church in the 1930’s and 1940’s, it was a firm rule that all ladies wore both hat and gloves, all boys and gentlemen wore their ‘best’ suits; I keep to that tradition still, though I have no objection to other modes of dress; it is the ladies who have changed - in church recently, there was nobody wearing either hat or gloves ! Only for weddings do ladies now seem to wear a hat for church, and after the ceremony it is put away until found by the grandchildren to be used for ‘dressing up’. Such was the price paid for clothes’ rationing when the rules were relaxed. Once a change has taken place, very seldom is there a return to former ways.

In 1949 Christ Church was 100 years old. It had seen the change of Britain from the richest and most powerful country to being a debtor nation. Two World Wars had robbed Britain of her wealth and power, but she still had her pride. Her great empire might be disintegrating, India and Pakistan had won independence in 1948, but unlike the empires of other countries, there was no hatred of Britain’s rule, indeed most colonies which won their freedom continued to accept the monarch as their head of state, and all wanted to be members of the new Commonwealth.

Britain was still a leading member of the United Nations and had respect throughout the world, so that at the end of our fourth period we can say that there was a real hope that perhaps things would improve in the 1950’s, we would earn the rewards of our past endeavours. There was an air of optimism as we approached the half century mark of the 20th Century.

(5) 1949 - 1974 Top of Page

I find that as I approach the present day, the writing of this short series becomes harder - not because more is happening (the need to select what should be included or ignored remains as frustrating as ever), but because I feel that I am too close to events and I cannot put them into perspective. Consequently, my own likes and dislikes, my prejudices if you like, keep intruding. If I upset anybody, I beg forgiveness - you are free to disagree and to replace them with your own judgements.

The period after the 2nd World War was a strange time in Britain: there was, for a time, real hope and optimism that the new Labour Government, elected with a massive majority in 1945, would make life fairer and easier for all. Indeed, the National Health Service, introduced in 1948, is one of the great social reforms of the 20th Century. Governments, however, no matter what their political complexion, never have the power to make men equal, because human frailty means that some will always be losers, others will be winners, and the great majority will continue to face their lives dealing with setbacks and opportunities as they occur. Only in ‘Alice in Wonderland’ is there a race where everybody wins a prize, for in that Caucus Race all run in a circle - there is no beginning and no end, and runners can stop or start whenever they wish. By 1949 it was obvious that the hoped-for Golden Age had not come - the Cold War was now an unpleasant reality - the Russian blockade of Berlin showed that our former ally was a bitter enemy. The Berlin Airlift ended, but there was still a need for armed guards to patrol the trains as they passed through East Germany to West Berlin. (I had the doubtful privilege of serving as one of these train guards, travelling each night from Hanover to Berlin, stopping at Magdeburg to be inspected by armed Russian soldiers. We stood with our .303 rifles and 50 rounds of ammunition to face whatever the 60 divisions of the Russian Army could throw at us: the western world could sleep easily in its beds knowing its defence was in safe hands.) I have to say that I was not impressed by the Russian soldiers, they seemed to be without initiative, possibly it was fear if they showed any friendliness towards a western soldier – any offer of a cigarette or chocolate on our part was swiftly refused; their uniforms were extremely dirty, with a line of grease along the collar, but their heavy automatic weapons looked very businesslike. I remember, however, as we waited at the station, two small German boys crawling from under the wheels of the train asking for cigarettes. Cigarettes for the British soldier cost 1/- (5p) for 20, and I threw them 20 Capstan – with a swift ‘Danke’, they disappeared into the night. In Berlin itself the difference between East and West was most marked – in the West, bomb-damaged buildings were being cleared and new buildings put up; in the East there was little attempt to remove the scars of war.

Rationing continued and was to do so until 1953, eight years after the war ended - longer even than in defeated Germany, and long after the liberated countries of Europe had returned to normal. People had money but could not spend it - even if one travelled abroad, there was a limit of £50 in currency which could be taken out of the country. Luxury goods such as radios, televisions (which were now appearing in the shops), cars, etc. were largely for export. Massive U.S. Aid given to Europe in the Marshall Plan was used by Germany to rebuild its shattered economy, to replace worn-out machinery. In Britain it was largely used to fund the social policies of the Government - British industry continued to use machinery which had come to the end of its useful life. It is ironic to reflect that Britain was offered the Volkswagen Car Factory in Germany after the war, but refused it because it would require huge investment. Volkswagen now owns huge swathes of the British car industry which in 1949 was second only to America in production.

There was a great demand for housing as newly-returned servicemen married and had families, but unless one was lucky enough to acquire a ‘prefab’ (hastily erected factory-produced houses, some of which are still occupied more than 50 years later) young married couples either paid inflated rents for a couple of rooms, or shared their parents’ home. Some became ‘squatters’, taking over empty houses or even former army camps, forcing authorities to take notice and deal with their plight.

The new estates which were planned and built were designed to take the poor from the mean over-crowded streets of the inner towns and give them proper homes. But the planners were concerned with building ‘housing units’, not homes and communities. The Woodchurch Estate, offered as a paradise of open spaces, gardens, modern houses, at the beginning had no shops, no schools, no church and no public house. There was an excellent bus service to enable people to escape to their old familiar areas, but nothing for them where they lived. To the great majority of the people who moved there, it was a dream come true at first - people who had never had a garden now took a pride in their lawns, flower beds, hedges. While the children were small, they enjoyed the open freedom of the grassed areas, but as they grew older, so boredom set in - with no focal point, the estate had nowhere to take pride in, there was no community spirit such as had existed in the tiny streets they had left: at the same time, town centres became dead areas with no life after 6 p.m. Add to this the growing number of cars for which no garages were available (it was never considered likely that working men would ever own cars in significant numbers) and which were thus parked in the road and car crime became a major problem on many estates.

One major way in which this post-war period differed from the earlier one was, at first, the absence of revolt among the young. Decades have their labels - the ‘naughty nineties’, the ‘roaring twenties’, the ‘swinging sixties’ - these might be called the ‘conforming fifties’. Young people did not resent their elders, knowing that they too had suffered in the war as much as the young. They listened to similar music - Bing Crosby, in his 50s, was as popular with the young as with their parents. One of the ‘heart-throbs’ of these years was a short, tubby, middle-aged singer who had sung at the Argyle Theatre in the 1920’s - Donald Peers sang syrupy ballads in a pleasant tenor and was rewarded with a screaming army of fans, while the mothers of those girls smiled as they remembered doing the same a quarter of a century before. Clothes rationing meant that the young wore similar clothing to their parents, indeed most clothing conformed to the wartime ‘utility’ fashions which allowed no extra frills.

Another reason for conformity was possibly fear - the world had entered the ‘atomic age’, every newsreel seemed to show pictures of that menacing mushroom cloud overshadowing our lives - there was the fear that the cold war could become a ‘hot’ war, and this could mean the end of civilisation as we knew it. All young men had to serve in the armed forces, and in 1950 many of them found themselves involved in war in Korea. Fighting took place also in Malaya, Palestine, Kenya, Cyprus, as Britain’s world-wide empire began to shrink. In 1952, Britain joined the nuclear club when she exploded an atomic bomb at Montebello, joined shortly after by Russia and France. The world nuclear powers believed that having the bomb gave them a voice in world affairs, though the world recognised only two ‘super powers’ - the USA and Soviet Russia. In America, ‘McCarthyism’ saw communism in every sphere of government and entertainment. Men and women suspected of socialist leanings were dismissed from their work if they refused to testify - the ideals of free speech and freedom from arrest were ignored. Even the President, Truman, was accused because he refused to drop the atomic bomb on China at the height of the Korean War. When fear is in the air people forget their differences and draw closer together - the young people were not inspired to revolt.

In 1951, Britain organised the Festival of Britain on the South Bank of the Thames. A huge ‘Dome of Discovery’ was built showing a plethora of new designs for the 50’s - some may remember the ‘Skater’s Trails’ carpet patterns, bright wall papers, often orange contrasted with any other colour, contemporary furniture with spindly splayed legs. We saw the new ‘action’ painting - pure colour rather than stylised objects. To most people it was a case of "I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like", and these welcomed Annigoni’s ‘modern old master’ of the Queen in her Garter robes.

The 1950’s saw the beginnings of new architecture - Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Sir Hugh Casson being the new designers. The Shell Building in London, a great slab of concrete and glass, was purely functional - to produce as much office space as regulations would allow. The new Coventry Cathedral was in complete contrast to the mediaeval marvel it replaced; in Liverpool, Scott’s grandiose dream for the new catholic cathedral was replaced by the present concrete structure – ‘The Mersey Wigwam’ or ‘the Mersey Funnel.’ As it became known. When I took parties of boys to the two Liverpool Cathedrals, they were mildly interested in the Metropolitan Cathedral but were awe struck by the grandeur of the Anglican cathedral. It seemed that architects no longer needed to train in their skills - the ownership of a pencil, a ruler, and a box of Lego would be sufficient! Every city suddenly found its wonderful legacy of 18th and 19th Century buildings dwarfed by huge grey concrete blocks dominating its skyline.

The disease spread to housing - the curse of the planners hit our towns - huge blocks of flats rising to 15 or more storeys won awards for their designers, who steadfastly refused to live in them, and caused untold misery for their occupiers. Often cynically named ‘Gardens’ (remember Oak and Eldon Gardens in Birkenhead?), they were devoid of greenery, parents dared not let their children play out - they were too far away for safety, their lifts broke down, their unlit stairwells became places of danger - the small back-to-back houses built in the 19th Century where the housewife could talk over the garden wall, and watch her children playing in the street as she gossiped, and where every street had its small general store on the corner, were replaced by a new slum where families felt that they were imprisoned. Within twenty years these new slums were being demolished before the huge loans raised to build them had been repaid.

Changes began to come to the lives of the people in the early 50’s, slowly at first, then with increasing and, to many, worrying speed. In 1951 the Conservatives, under Winston Churchill, came to government. The great war leader was now an old tired man in his seventies -he often fell asleep during cabinet meetings, but Britain was able to benefit from the restraint of the past six years. Gradually, controls were removed, goods became more plentiful, there was full employment, so that the call went out to the Empire to send workers to take on the jobs that the English did not want - West Indians, Indians, Pakistanis, came to Britain to work on the railways, the buses, to clean the hospitals, etc.

In 1952 the King, George VI, died in his sleep, A much loved monarch because of his courage and devotion to duty shown at his accession and during the war, he had been a sick man for a long time: I remember at the 1951 Trooping of the Colour he had been forced to attend riding in a barouche rather than on his horse, heavily made up to hide the signs of suffering on his face. He was succeeded by the young Princess Elizabeth, which brought forward dreams of a ‘new Elizabethan age’. In 1953 Joseph Stalin died and there was a feeling that perhaps the new Russian leaders, vying with each other for power, would be more amenable than Stalin. The 1953 Coronation was heralded with news of the conquest of Everest by a British Expedition led by John Hunt: there was a real air of optimism that things were changing. The rationing of food, clothing, petrol, all ended: suddenly people could buy what they wanted at reasonable prices, and they had the money to do it.

In 1955, a film, ‘The Blackboard Jungle’, came to Britain, and with it came a new music - ‘rock and roll’, played by a portly band leader, Bill Haley. In 1956, an American singer, Elvis Presley, was forbidden to sing and dance on television, accused of being immoral. Suddenly, the young had their music and they had their hero. Young people also had their fashion - the ‘Edwardian look’, with narrow ‘drainpipe’ trousers, long jackets with velvet collars, and brightly coloured fluorescent socks in greens, yellows or pink. Girls had ‘pencil’ skirts, ‘winkle-picker’ shoes and ‘bee-hive’ hair styles. A new word entered the language - ‘teenager’. The old (and that meant those in their mid-twenties and onward) were separated from the rising generation by new customs, music, language, and dress.

Even the dear old BBC was affected. Radio still dominated, but even here the young and old listened to different programmes: the old continued to enjoy the traditional BBC programmes, but the young listened to ‘pop’ music to find out which tune was ‘in the charts’. The ‘Goon Show’ introduced a new form of manic humour almost incomprehensible to the elders as their children answered them in the language of Eccles or Bluebottle. Young people were becoming independent in ways never seen before, not even in the heady days of the 20’s. Then, those in revolt had been the ones who had fought and suffered in the Great War; from 1955, it was those who had been born in the war but had little memory of the fighting who had become exasperated at the restrictions of the late 1940’s and early 1950’s and now began to throw off those restraints.

In 1955, Churchill resigned as Prime Minister, to be succeeded by Anthony Eden, who immediately called an election, won by the Conservatives with an increased majority. It did seem that prosperity was going to continue and Britain could face the future with confidence. However, in 1956 this complacency was to be rudely shattered. In Russia, the new leader, Kruschev, denounced Stalin, shaking the communist world to its foundations and causing the people of East Germany and Hungary to attempt to throw off communist rule. Very quickly the world saw that the new Russian leaders were the equal in brutality to Stalin - Russian tanks moved in to Hungary, crushed the people and the leaders were executed. The pitiful pleas for help from Hungarian radio were not answered by the West, for we had our own problems. In the summer of 1956, President Nasser of Egypt took over the Suez Canal from its French and British owners, intending to use its revenues to build the Aswan Dam - the USA, having promised the money, had held back when Nasser had refused to join the American anti-Russian camp. Anthony Eden, supported by France and Israel, determined to put Nasser in his place. By agreement, Israel invaded Egypt, whereupon Britain and France sent their forces to ‘protect’ the canal. Nasser immediately blocked the canal with ships, and the British action was roundly condemned throughout the world - not only by the communists, but also by the USA - it seemed that Eden had acted without asking American permission ! More worrying was the condemnation by our known friends - Canada, Australia and New Zealand - they would not support the mother country in this action. Britain made a humiliating withdrawal, a very sick Eden resigned, and the British were forced to accept that their country was no longer the major world power able to act alone in defiance of world opinion. It was a sobering experience for all who had known her supremacy in the past and which I have mentioned so often in these articles.

One of the results of the Suez Crisis was the formation of the Organisation for Nuclear Disarmament. Young people believed that the world was in danger from the continuing enmity between the super powers. In Britain, now that her weakness had been revealed, there was a feeling that she no longer needed the luxury of atomic weapons, or indeed of any substantial forces if she could not use them unilaterally. They took as their symbol a design based on the semaphore signs for ‘N D’ - the D shows the flag raised vertically, and N has the two flags in an inverted V. Many thousands marched on the nuclear laboratories at Aldermaston, and it is ironic that at Christmas 1958 young people were imprisoned for protesting about war at a time when conventional Britain sang carols about ‘peace on earth and goodwill towards men’. In reality Nuclear Disarmers were idealists living in an unreal world: most people realised that the bomb could not be uninvented, it was a fact of life. In 1956, the Americans exploded the Hydrogen bomb, followed swiftly by Russia, then by Britain in 1957, and France in 1960. New language entered the vocabulary - ‘overkill’, ‘take out’ a city; ‘strategic weapons’ were massive bombs designed to wipe out whole areas, ‘tactical weapons’ were smaller devices, equal to the Hiroshima bomb, to kill only a limited number - provided, as one General remarked, the wind was in the right direction and did not blow the fall-out over one’s own forces. Neville Shute’s novel, "On the Beach", was a horrifying tale of total nuclear destruction caused by the action of a small country over a relatively trivial matter. The leader of the Disarmament cause, Bertrand Russell, used his mathematics to show that with two countries with the bomb there could be the danger of one quarrel; with 4 owners, there could be a possible 6 quarrels; and as more joined the ‘nuclear club’, so the danger would grow. He reminded the world that only a few years before, a great power had been led by an insane dictator. The historian, A.J.P. Taylor, listed the probable effects of a nuclear explosion with regard to casualties, long-term suffering, destruction of habitat, etc. and asked his audience, "Would any of you do that to your fellow man?" After total silence, he demanded "Then why are we making the damned thing then?" The old certainties of trust and obedience to our political masters was ending for ever; people, even whey they did not agree with the protesters, could sympathise with their actions and distrusted the honeyed words of their leaders: a new cynicism, particularly among the young, began to appear.

This cynicism took the form of satire in revues such as ‘Beyond the Fringe’, starring Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, Alan Bennett and Dudley Moore, when Britain’s courage and unflappability in the war, the ‘stiff upper lip’ tradition, all became targets for the new university-educated breed of comedian. On the television, ‘That Was The Week That Was’ each week mocked the Establishment and drew huge audiences. The Government, under the leadership of Harold Macmillan, possibly the most astute politician ever to hold office, easily rode the mocking criticism. Macmillan had pulled the Conservative Party back from the Suez disaster and in 1959 had won an unprecedented third period of office for the Tories. His secret was his air of good-humoured calm in the face of criticism - when at the United Nation Kruschev had roared and ranted and had beaten his desk with his shoe, leaving most of the delegates ashen-faced, Macmillan was heard to ask in his upper-class drawl, "Does anybody have a translation of that?" The roar of laughter which followed deflated the Russian leader and won for Macmillan the admiration of the Americans. In the 1959 election he made the statement "Some of our people have never had it so good" (later used by his critics as "You’ve never had it so good"). Most failed to remember his next remark: "Is it too good to last?"

Basking in the prosperity of the time, Britain ignored the fact that while our productivity had grown by 40% in the 1950’s, Germany ‘s had grown by 150% and Japan’s by 400%. Wages had risen, but productivity remained low, we were paying ourselves more to produce less; Britain had ignored the chance to join the European Union and establish favourable terms, she was no longer the premium trading nation, in fact was rapidly slipping into the second league. Gambling became a growing obsession - betting shops became legal, Premium Bonds were introduced offering the modest chance of winning £1,000 for £1, with odds of its happening at several millions to one. Football Pools grew in popularity, with the offer of a £75,000 prize - most winners saying that it would not change their lives, which makes one wonder why they bothered to do it in the first place. Two films, ‘I’m Alright Jack’ and ‘Heaven’s Above’, catch the mood of the times: in the first, the greed and stupidity of both workers and management lead to near collapse of industry and consequent unemployment; in the second, the problems of a C of E Vicar trying to put Christianity into action by giving to the poor and trusting in the goodness of his fellow-men leads to chaos, near riot by greedy demands, and his subsequent dismissal by the Church hierarchy for his foolishness.

What was needed was some idealism and this seemed to come in 1960 with the election of John Kennedy as President of the USA. Here was a leader born in this century, who it was felt understood the needs of the young and its latent unselfishness. "Ask not, what can my country do for me, but what can I do for my country?’ His words struck a chord with the young - again there was a feeling of hope in the air. In 1962, he had the courage to outface Krushchev in the Cuban missile crisis, when the world came to the brink of war. Following that episode, relations between Russia and the USA improved, the ‘hotline’ was established to avoid the danger of a nuclear strike, disarmament talks began. Russia’s weak position was revealed when East Germany was forced to erect a wall in Berlin to stop people escaping from the Socialist Paradise of Eastern Europe - never before had any country been forced to take such measures to preserve its regime. When Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, it was felt by many that the world had lost its innocence. Subsequent revelations show that Kennedy had his faults - the huge build-up of American troops in Vietnam, his private life, his links with organised crime; but at the time he was a symbol of hope and it is said with some truth that everybody remembers where they were when they heard of his death, such was his impact.

In Britain, the Conservative Government was coming to its end after 13 years of rule: the Profumo Affair when a Minister lied to the House, Macmillan’s illness and retirement, the vicious in-fighting among those who hoped to succeed him, led, in 1964, to the election of Harold Wilson’s Labour Government and the dawn, it was believed, of the ‘White Heat of Technology’ plus the campaign by many of "I’m backing Britain", which unfortunately took the form of the Union Flag on carrier bags and even on underwear. The wish was there, but the drive and leadership were conspicuously lacking.

This was the beginning of the ‘Swinging Sixties’: Britain seemed to become the focus of world fashion and music . . . the phenomenon of the Beatles (Liverpool lads) introduced a new style of music which swept the world. In London, Mary Quant’s fashion designs brought in the mini-skirt. Suddenly, to be young was the most exciting time of life: young girls in particular gained a new self-confidence as they allowed their skirts to rise higher than ever before in history and the introduction of the contraceptive pill gave them a freedom never experienced before. Unfortunately, far from giving young girls control over their lives, The Pill seemed to take away their freedom to resist promiscuous behaviour - they no longer had the excuse of fear of pregnancy to resist a boy’s attentions. It became the accepted belief that if a girl had a baby outside marriage then it was her fault, for she now could control conception: boys seemed to disregard any responsibility. The result was a growth in unmarried pregnancy, single mothers and irresponsible fathers - hardly the brave new world hoped for.

1966 saw England win the World Cup in football for the first time - it produced a great feeling of euphoria. Footballers became the new sporting heroes, earning huge salaries. In 1960, following the end of a set wage for footballers (about £20 a week and tied to the club by contract), a victory won by Jimmy Hill on behalf of his fellow professionals, Johnny Haynes of Fulham and the then England captain was paid £100 a week - a huge sum for those days. " We pay it because he is worth it", said the Fulham chairman, comedian, Tommy Trinder. By the mid-sixties, most First Division players were being paid very high wages, football ceased to be a sport and became big business, with players being bought and sold at huge transfer fees - only the richest clubs could pay, and then only if they could enjoy long runs and, hopefully, victories, in the many cup competitions which now began. The FA Cup was joined with the League Cup, the European Cup, the Cup Winners Cup, and probably more that I have forgotten. Britain needed her sporting heroes, for she no longer led the world in sport. To win one or two Gold Medals in the Olympics was seen as a triumph: the Games were dominated by athletes from USA, the USSR, and Eastern Europe. Mary Rand, a most feminine English athlete, was downcast at winning a Silver Medal in the long jump - she was comforted by the Russian Shot Putt champion, Irina Press, who kissed her, Mary felt the harsh bristles on the Russian girl’s face as she had forgotten to shave that morning ! When random drug testing came in 1972, many East European athletes were never seen competing again. Against this, Britain’s very amateur approach stood very little chance.

By 1968, the Beatles had almost become respectable - awarded the MBE by Harold Wilson, only their long hair aroused mixed feelings: their music was recognised as being special and their cheerful irreverence earned them an appearance on the Royal Command Performance. The young therefore turned to a more controversial group - the Rolling Stones, who were not approved of by their parents and who sang raucous, dangerous songs, openly flaunting their drug-taking and generally frightening the disapproving parents of their many fans. By 1970 there were many groups copying The Stones, the Beatles came under the influence of the Maharishi in India, there was revolt in the air. 1968 had seen a young revolution in France and the fall of De Gaulle. The Vietnam War was pulling in more and more US troops and this led to widespread and sometimes violent demonstrations against US policy. At times it seemed that young people were in open revolt in their dress, their behaviour and in their beliefs. ‘Flower Power’, ‘make love not war’, ‘drop out’, became the new slogans of the young. One of my favourite memories was the sight of the grim State Troopers guarding the White House as a peace march took place, and young girls in flowing dresses, with flower patterns on their faces, gently putting flowers into the rifles of the soldiers. The new anthem was John Lennon’s song, ‘Give Peace a Chance’. Added to the Peace Protests were the Civil Rights marches as thousands of coloured people made their peaceful demands for equality. Unfortunately all turned sour - State Troopers opened fire on students at Kent University, Ohio; the peace-loving Martin Luther King was assassinated; Robert Kennedy was assassinated; race riots broke out in the Watts district of Los Angeles; Russia crushed the Czech bid for freedom with its tanks; Charles Manson’s Flower Power followers committed the most obscene murders in the USA; in Vietnam, more bombs were dropped than on Germany in the 2nd World War, and the use of napalm against helpless peasants horrified the world as it became obvious that the mighty USA could not prevail over simple peasants. The end of the 1960’s was a time of unrest, of protest, idols of the young (like Jimmy Hendrix, Jim Morrison and others) were dying of drug overdoses; people talked glibly about ‘rights’, very few talked about responsibilities - the debt one owed to others or to society.

In 1970, the voting age was lowered to 18; it was cynically suggested that Harold Wilson had done this believing that the young would therefore automatically support the Left rather than the Right in politics: all the indicators of the time seemed to show that young people were wholly disenchanted with the Establishment and those who seemed to represent it in Parliament, but in the election called in June the Tories were elected and Edward Heath became Prime Minister. He faced many problems - British industry was in decline; strikes in the car industry; the collapse of motor cycle production; the collapse in ship building leading to the closure of the mighty John Brown Shipyard which had built the great Cunard ‘Queens’. Indeed, the fate of these proud ships is symbolic of Britain’s rapid decline - the ‘Queen Mary’ was sold to become a tourist attraction in California (many Americans assumed she was an American ship - they could not envisage Britain ever having the skill or initiative to build such a liner!); the ‘Queen Elizabeth’ suffered a sadder fate - sold to a business man in Hong Kong, she was totally destroyed by fire in 1972. The phrase ‘Lame Duck’ appeared to describe so many areas of British industry which were demanding that taxpayers help to face foreign competition. People were dispirited, knowing that leaders in all parties seemed not to have the courage or the vision to make changes which were so obviously needed. Union demands for rises were invariably met, with no corresponding request for improved production; inflation began to rise as the wages tried to catch up with ever rising prices, leaving those who did not have the industrial strength (pensioners, teachers, nurses, etc.) to fall behind. Northern Ireland was a nightmare of civil unrest, with daily bombings, shootings, and generalised hatred between two terrified communities. Internment without trial, trial by judges rather than by jury, intimidation, hunger strikes - the list was growing and most people were wholly pessimistic about the future.

The decision to enter the European Common Market in 1973 was not greeted with any enthusiasm, indeed many feared the loss of freedom, but it was hoped that possibly Europe could pull us out of our difficulties, it being obvious that we could not do it ourselves. At the end of 1973 a Miners’ Strike led to the Three-Day Week, with power cuts and the early end to evening television. It has to be said that in a perverse way the people enjoyed the crisis - my children cheered when the lights went out and we had our meals by candlelight! To many older people it brought back memories of the war which brought out the best in people: my auntie, armed with her bus and rail pass was able to travel freely around Merseyside seeking for candles and anything else in short supply - she loved it when she came home triumphant with her finds. We still have a large supply of the candles she bought then! Also, production actually rose in the three-day week - there was no problem with the people, all that was missing was strong leadership and courage.

In America, another leader was facing problems - Richard Nixon, leader of the Western World, was embroiled in the Watergate scandal. Members of the Committee to Re-Elect the President (bizarrely given the acronym CREEP) had been caught burgling Democratic Headquarters in the Watergate Hotel. In the subsequent investigation, many members of the President’s staff, including his Attorney General, were imprisoned. His Vice-President, Spiro Agnew, resigned over tax evasion, and in 1974 Nixon himself resigned rather than face a trial by the Senate. Leadership of the West fell to the well-meaning but hopelessly inexperienced Gerald Ford, a man described by Lyndon Johnson as being unable "to do two things at once - like walk and chew". (A description my wife cruelly applies to me). In Vietnam, the USA realised its helplessness and was preparing the most humiliating retreat by a great power - flying its personnel out by helicopter and simply throwing the machines into the sea, such was the panic to escape, and abandoning all those Vietnamese who had trusted and depended on them.

In 1974 Labour returned to power with a minority government, dependent on Liberal support to remain in office, to face the myriad problems facing Britain in Northern Ireland, in industry, with rampant inflation and a dispirited people.

There is so much I have had to omit from this period - the growth of television after the Coronation (do you remember an advert for Gibbs S.R. Toothpaste showing a tube embedded in ice? you should do, for it was the first advert ever shown on British TV, in 1954). Television saw the temporary collapse of the film industry - Birkenhead had 17 cinemas in 1949, but only two in 1974. In the 1960’s we saw the first episodes of ‘Coronation Street’, now the longest –lived ‘soap’ on television. The Arab Israeli Wars of 1967 and 1973 with the west forced to take sides and leading once again to an oil crisis and a sharp rise in petrol prices – I can remember warning my pupils that one day they might see petrol rise to £1 a gallon but I could see the looks of disbelief on their faces, within a few months it had become reality; the conquest of space and the first man on the moon in 1969 and the feeling afterwards of ‘so what ?’ as future landings failed to stir the people; the many hi-jackings of airliners; terrorist attacks not only by the Irish but by so many others who saw violence and terror as a means of winning - the Munich Olympics spring to mind when Arab terrorists murdered several Israeli athletes; racial tension and often racial hatred in the Inner Cities; Idi Amin and the expulsion of Ugandan Asians; the ending of the death penalty; OPEC and the huge rise in oil prices - petrol rising from under 5/-(25p) a gallon to £1 and higher in 1974; the huge rise in the number of cars and the need to build motorways to accommodate them but the increase always outstripping the available road space; the obsession with planned shopping centres and huge super-markets which made every town and city centre identical and destroyed the individuality of the little shops.

I shall end this with a note of nostalgia - we shall never smell again that scent of smoked bacon, rich fruit cake and cheese in shops with sawdust covered floors, and little overhead trolleys carrying our money along wires to a central point, or via a vacuum tube when a cylinder was mysteriously sucked up to an unknown destination, to be returned shortly with change and receipt, making shopping a time of interest and excitement for the young rather than the boring chore it has become. I regret the disappearance of Irwins, Woodsons, The Maypole. I miss Robb’s Grange Road Store and its bentwood chairs for customers as they waited to be served. I do not enjoy the long aisles in ASDA, Sainsbury’s, Tesco, with their plastic foods in plastic wrappers. I miss the atmosphere of the old Birkenhead Market, destroyed by fire in the 1970’s – the market ‘patter’ of the outside salesmen was a source of real entertainment – today we see only glum stall-holders waiting for people to buy, rather than selling their wares by raucous advertising. But there, I’m revealing my own prejudices and living in the past - a sure sign of approaching old age.

(6) 1974 - 1999. Top of Page

... We now come to the last of this short series, bringing us to the present day. Again, the same problems confront us - what is important, what can be safely omitted? As I write, we have heard of the death of King Hussein of Jordan - will this be a significant historical event in the history of the Near East (why do people persist in calling the area the ‘Middle East’, which logically is the Indian sub-continent and Pakistan?), or will it be a mere footnote of history? An argument is raging concerning Genetically Modified foods - will they prove to be a blessing or a scourge for mankind? I am not a scientist and therefore can give no opinion on the matter, but more worrying is the fact that the scientists themselves do not know the answers, though this has not stopped them from voicing opinions as facts, and being supported by some political leaders who themselves know nothing, but who must take the ultimate responsibility. Thomas Jefferson said of political leaders, ‘When a man assumes a public trust, he should assume himself as public property’ - no political leader has the right to ignore the wishes of the people who have given him power, and at the moment, in general, with the memory of the BSE Scandal (more of this later) fresh in their minds, the people want more concrete evidence that GM foods are safe. No minister, no matter how strong his popularity, has the right to ignore the wishes of the people - this is the essence of democracy. It will be the task of another chronicler in 2049 or 2099 to evaluate these events - I can only record them. Similar fears are raised by the possibility of gene manipulation – it is as if mankind is saying that it can improve on God’s creation: alternatively, it may be that God has given us knowledge and skills which can benefit mankind – again, I cannot know the answers but I do feel that extreme caution is needed.

There are other events in our period which give cause for concern - how easily we forget what was headline news only a short time ago! In 1974, an explosion at the chemical complex at Flixborough killed 28 and injured several hundred as clouds of poisonous gases escaped into the atmosphere; a similar explosion took place at Seveso in Italy in 1976, and another in Switzerland in 1986, poisoning the River Rhine and the surrounding area. In 1984, at Bhopal in India, more than 2,000 died and close to 200,000 suffered major breathing problems when a chemical factory exploded in the night. How many more similar time-bombs are waiting to explode? Add to these the disaster at Three-Mile Island in the USA, when there was a potential nuclear meltdown, threatening the lives of many. Fortunately the USA is relatively efficient in handling potential disasters and there was no loss of life. Not so Russia, where the Chernobyl meltdown contaminated much of Northern Europe and caused an unknown number of deaths: we are unsure of the final consequences of this incident in 1986. We hear of frequent leaks from our own Sellafield reactor and their effects on the Irish Sea. We know that many Nuclear Plants, seen as the brave new future when they were built in the 1950’s and 1960’s, are now potential hazards for centuries in the future. We also know that the bankrupt Soviet Union has neither the skill nor the finances to deal with their ageing reactors and nuclear submarines. This is our legacy for future generations, requiring huge sums of money to put right, but for which few politicians of any party will accept the responsibility for swift and immediate action - the threat of higher taxes with no immediate political benefit does not win votes at elections.

Not surprisingly, there is a general distrust of politicians and this perhaps was reflected in the years 1974 - 1979 by the young people, who seemed to embrace anarchy and to revolt against all authority and government. This was the period of ‘Punk’ music and dress - I use the word ‘music’ in a very broad sense, for here was no rhythm or melody, it was anarchic sound, literally spitting defiance at good taste, at authority. The gap between young and old became most marked in the dress. The older generations (those over 25) dressed fairly soberly, but the young indulged in the most bizarre fashion imaginable. Denim jeans had long been the uniform of the young, but now it was adopted by their elders, making it less acceptable to their children. I remember a friendly discussion with some of my 6th Formers who criticized my conventional sports coat and flannels, or subfusc suit always worn with shirt and tie, which they saw as far too conventional. They were very upset when I pointed out that they too were the essence of convention, even more than I was, for they had to wear their uniforms of denim jeans with long hair if they were to be accepted by their fellows. When older people tried to copy them - and how ridiculous some looked with their greying balding heads with wispy hair reaching to their shoulders and a growing middle-age paunch in tight flared trousers - the young went a step further, wearing jeans which were deliberately ripped at the knee or across the seat, shaving their heads, bald apart from a spiky arrangement in weird colours - green, orange, purple, blue, red, and stiffened with some form of glue. Add to this body piercing using studs, rings and even safety pins, chalk-white faces, black-framed eyes and very often chains linking their bodies to their clothes, and we have perhaps the strangest fashions the western world has ever seen - though what might scandalise us in the future I have no idea, but am sure it will happen for the young will always try to shock their elders, it is a part of growing up. It is a mistake on the part of the elders to try to ‘understand’ and to copy them to show how ‘with it’ they are: the whole point of being young is to disagree with one’s elders. How frustrating it must be to find the ‘enemy’ joining with them in their revolt, the only answer is to go even further, to achieve a distinct difference between the generations, one which the elders dare not copy!

In 1974, Harold Wilson’s Labour Government won office and held it in a second election in the Autumn. The problems were those of the past years - notably Ireland. Sadly, the frequent bombings in that unhappy country no longer made headline news - it was the ‘Irish problem’, nobody had a solution, therefore it was enough simply to contain it - it was something which happened ‘over there’. This attitude was rudely shattered in 1974 when bombs exploded on the English Mainland - at Guildford and at Birmingham. The ‘Guildford 4’ and the ‘Birmingham 6’ were arrested and duly imprisoned for long periods. In the 1990’s we were both horrified and alarmed to discover hat these convictions were unsafe, there seemed evidence of police malpractice, a distorting of the evidence in order to obtain a conviction. In 1975, Edward Heath, having lost two elections was replaced by Margaret Thatcher as Conservative Leader, the first woman in the western world to lead a political party (if one ignores Golda Meir of Israel). Perhaps the major event of that year was the first Referendum ever held in the United Kingdom, to decide whether we should remain a member of the European Community. Because this was a unique occasion (though now referenda seem to be rapidly replacing Parliamentary Government -a worrying trend in a democracy) I kept the leaflets issued for our guidance. They make interesting reading now after almost a quarter of a century. The ‘No’ leaflet says that the fundamental question is whether we remain free to rule ourselves in our own way; the fear would be the merging of Britain into a single state with France, Germany, etc., we would lose the right to decide policies on food, fishing rights, trade, employment; we would be ruled by un-elected commissioners appointed by governments. The chief fear, among others, was that Britain would be a mere province of a united Europe. The ‘Yes’ leaflet asserts that our traditions are safe, our Law Courts will remain unaffected; Community Law will apply only to commercial and industrial matters, we would also have secure food at fair prices. The Government recommended that we should stay a member - its leaflet declares that the threat of Economic and Monetary union which would force us to accept fixed exchange rates for the pound and put jobs at risk had been removed; VAT on foodstuffs would not be imposed; there was no fear of having to obey laws passed by un-elected ‘faceless bureaucrats’in Brussels. The result was an overwhelming vote in favour of remaining in Europe. One wonders whether the vote would be equally overwhelming if taken today, and whether the arguments would have changed.

In that same year the Khmer Rouge was slaughtering the people of Cambodia, there was a terrible famine in Ethiopia and General Franco died in Spain - the last European dictator, generally condemned as a friend of Hitler and Mussolini, had kept Spain out of the war, had made the country both peaceful and prosperous by encouraging holiday makers and investment in industry, and at his death arranged the transition to a stable parliamentary democracy and constitutional monarchy based on the British pattern. The Olympic Games in Montreal pointed the way for the future - their growing cost was so horrendous that no city could stage them without massive support from Big Business, which of course would require to make a profit on its outlay. On a lighter note, the phenomenon of ‘streaking’ appeared at sporting fixtures - few, I feel, were shocked; most laughed and anything which cheers people up is to be welcomed so long as it is not taken to extremes or becomes stale with repetition.

In 1976, Harold Wilson suddenly announced his retirement - the cause was almost certainly the onset of Alzheimer’s Disease which was eventually to cause his death. He was succeeded by James Callaghan, one of the few men to have held each of the great offices of state - he had been Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Chancellor, and now Prime Minister. Unfortunately his period in office coincided with continuing decline in British industry, strikes, high inflation.

The year saw the break-up of the marriage of Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowdon - the first royal divorce since Henry VIII, unfortunately not to be the last. In 1977 the Queen celebrated her Silver Jubilee to widespread rejoicing: the monarchy still held a very special place in the hearts of the people.

While the Queen was receiving overwhelming love from her subjects, the ‘King’ died at ‘Gracelands’,. Elvis Presley, the Icon of the young, had degenerated into a bloated, drug-addicted wreck, and died at the early age of 42. The legend began - sales of his songs continue to earn a fortune for some, and the belief among some of his worshippers that he was not dead has led to the continuing joke that he had been spotted in the most unlikely venues - stacking shelves at Tesco being the most bizarre I can recall. 1978 is remembered as the year of the three Popes - Paul VI, John Paul I, followed very swiftly by John Paul II, the first non-Italian Pope since the Middle Ages. It also saw the ‘Winter of Discontent’, with widespread strikes in public services, so that in 1979 the Labour Government was turned out of office and Margaret Thatcher became the first woman Prime Minister of this country.

The new Prime Minister quickly made her mark on the country: in one of her early speeches she used the words, "There Is No Alternative", giving her the soubriquet ‘TINA’. She also averred in reply to criticism of her policies, "You turn if you want to, but the lady’s not for turning". Margaret Thatcher was admired rather than loved, for most people realised that the country needed strong leadership; Britain had become the ‘Sick Man of Europe’ and strong, often unpleasant, medicine was needed for the cure. Unemployment rose inexorably as businesses which could not survive were allowed to crumble; there was no government help forthcoming. Inflation was slowly brought under control, falling from more than 20% to single figures; Unions which over the past few years had expected to be consulted over the economy were now side-lined; the Government governed. There were strikes, but few of them were successful. New legislation meant that Unions now had to ballot their members before a strike could be called, and generally the members, at a time of rising unemployment, preferred to avoid confrontation where their jobs might be at risk. Perhaps the confrontation which more than any other gives a picture of these years is the Miners’ Strike of 1984-5. In 1973, the Miners had won considerable public support when they had forced a three-day week on the Heath government. In the subsequent election, Edward Heath had failed to win a majority and Arthur Scargill, the newly elected leader of the miners, had declared that he (Heath) had been beaten by NUM. This was a nonsense; it was the British electorate who had defeated Heath, not the miners. Nevertheless, Scargill continued to declare his victory until he began to believe in its truth. In 1984, with proposals to close uneconomic pits, he called his union out on strike without calling the necessary ballot. His action split the union - the moderate Midland pits, which were till relatively economically viable, continued to work. The older pit areas in Scotland, Durham, Yorkshire and south Wales came out, though many, particularly in Lancashire, were reluctant. The strike began in March 1984 with the approach of Summer and with massive coal stocks at the power stations. The rail unions and the transport workers did not support the strike so coal stocks continued to move, the summer was warm and the winter which followed, and on which Scargill had pinned his hopes, was one of the mildest on record. There was no short-time working, no power cuts: there was violence, intimidation, even deaths, but at the end the strikers failed completely. The NUM, once the powerhouse of British Trade Unionism, was emasculated, no Union would ever challenge the Government in that way again. Even the Labour Party, under its new leader Neil Kinnock, a South Wales M.P., had failed to give support. The message was clear - the heady days of Union power and influence in government were over; there is little sign that they will return. This is not to say that Unions are wrong or outdated, they are a vital link between workers and management, but their primary task must be to protect and to advance the welfare of their members - that is what they were originally intended to do; they have no part in the day-to-day government of the country; they must eschew politics and be ready to work with whatever party is elected. Hopefully, most modern management sees the need to co-operate with its workforce rather than risk confrontation - but it has to be added that there are still old-style bosses as well as old-style Union leaders - all the faults are certainly not on the Union side.

Mrs Thatcher was given the nickname ‘Iron Lady’ by the Russians and by her colleagues in Europe. Stories were told of her ‘handbagging’ any of her Cabinet who disagreed with her. Her government seemed to be composed of old ‘one’nation’ Tories, known as the ‘Wets’, and a new, harsher breed, supporting Mrs Thatcher devotedly, known obviously as the ‘Dry’s’. She had a close and friendly working relationship with the kindly, though occasionally confused, President of the U.S.A., Ronald Reagan, and was both feared and respected by her European colleagues. In 1982, she was perhaps at the height of her powers. In that year, at Easter, news began to filter in of Argentine movement towards South Georgia in the Antarctic. This was followed by an invasion of the Falkland Islands - long claimed by Argentina. A debate on the situation on the Saturday showed the House Of Commons at its best - its Members listening quietly, speeches were considered and not party-biased. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, resigned, having accepted full responsibility for the situation - possibly the last Minister to offer voluntary resignation without having to be forced out of office. There were many who believed that Britain should surrender the Islands; others believed that it should be dealt with totally by the United Nations; there were doubts that Britain could effectively fight a war 12,000 miles away. Mrs Thatcher, knowing that she had the support of the U.S.A., which gave its full co-operation with its satellite surveillance, and the general support of many countries in South America, offered to talk to Argentina only on condition that they pull out from the Islands - she refused to talk as long as they persisted in what she deemed an illegal act of aggression. It is interested to note that our companions in Europe took the Argentinian side against Britain -Spain, Italy and France in particular condemning British action. A task force of ships, planes and soldiers was assembled and sailed for the South Atlantic. Many will remember the feeling of despair as news came of the losses of British ships, but I can remember also a feeling of some pity for the Argentinian soldiers - mere conscripts - facing the hardened professionals of the Marines and the Guards. Once the task force was in position, the result was seldom in doubt. A new word entered the language - ‘yomping’ - to describe the advance across the Island to Port Stanley. Within two months of the conflict’s starting it was all over, with the total surrender of the occupying army. It was a strange war in many ways - there was a BBC reporter and a sizeable British populace living freely and reporting from Argentina. In Britain, Ossie Ardiles, an Argentine footballer, was allowed to play for Tottenham with no apparent ill-will shown - the war did seem to be detached from normal everyday life, it did not impinge on us in any way. The victory and its completeness gave Britain an enormous restoration of pride, and a winning of real respect in the world .One of the effects was that in the 1983 Election the ‘Falkland Factor’ played a great part in Mrs Thatcher’s second Election victory . She was to win again in 1987, the first Prime Minister in history to win three consecutive terms of office.

Her final years in office were marred by struggles within her party for the best way forward - tight monetary controls, or a slackening of the reins; closer ties with Europe or a holding back and ‘trying to go it alone’; join the increasing drive to monetary union with Europe, or keep control of our finances? In 1989 she made one of her real mistakes as a politician when she introduced the ‘Poll Tax’ -the first attempt to impose a uniform tax on all, regardless of income or wealth, since the reign of Richard II in the 14th Century. Then, it had led to the Peasant’s Revolt and the virtual end of the Feudal System. This time it led to widespread Poll Tax riots, the worst coming in 1990 when London was invaded by thousands of demonstrators fighting pitched battles with the police. At the same time, there was some unease at Mrs Thatcher’s determination to privatise state-owned industries: British Telecom, Water, Gas, Electricity, British Rail - what the aged ex-PM Harold Macmillan called ‘the family jewels’ - were sold on the Stock Exchange at what many thought were far below their true value. By the end of 1990, with former ministerial colleagues like Nigel Lawson and Geoffrey Howe in open opposition to her, with her former strong allies Norman Tebbitt and Cecil Parkinson in semi-retirement, she appeared isolated. At the end of the year, Michael Heseltine opposed her for the leadership. She won on the first ballot, but without the overwhelming majority needed. She was warned that she would probably lose the second ballot and therefore, with her own Cabinet colleagues distancing themselves, she resigned as leader in November 1990, the most remarkable premiership of this century had ended. The Leader of one of the newspapers supporting her summed her up in these words: "She led this country out of the slough of despond. She shook up a nation in decline. She nagged and bullied and inspired its recovery . . . Margaret Thatcher kicked the sick man of Europe out of bed and made him walk." She was succeeded by John Major, the youngest Prime Minister, at the age of 47, this century. His rise had been meteoric - elected in 1979, with no family connections within the Conservative Party, he had become Senior Whip in 1985, Minister of State at the Department of Health and Social Security in 1986, Foreign Secretary in 1989 and Chancellor in October of that year - just over one year before becoming Prime Minister. His task was to unite the party after the major splits and differences of the past years. This was not to be - for a brief time there was unity during the ‘honeymoon’ period and particularly during the Gulf War which came in 1991 when Britain and the USA fought to drive Iraq out of Kuwait, but the attempt to tie Britain’s currency to a fixed rate with the German Mark as a step towards possible common currency led to a run on sterling and the near collapse of the pound. Britain’s economy was able to withstand the pressure, but was forced to leave the European Monetary System. Immediately the party splits re-emerged as the pro- and anti-Europeans waged bitter battles. Despite these setbacks, Major led the Conservatives to a record 4th Election victory in 1993 - no Party had ever won four elections in succession since the 18th Century, when voting was very different.

Troubles now came thick and fast - a new word enters the language; ‘sleaze’. MPs, including Ministers, were involved in inappropriate dealings with extra-marital affairs, ‘cash-for-questions’, Parliamentary lobbying for favours, each marked by a refusal to accept the guilt of their actions and refusing to resign until forced by public opinion. In 1997, the conservatives, after 18 years in power, were swept from office by the greatest Labour landslide this century, the greatest Tory defeat for almost two centuries. Major resigned, to be succeeded by William Hague, who had been a boy at school when the Tories were last in opposition and whose inexperience was to be obvious to all - the old leaders of the party were either out of Parliament, or too old or unwilling to serve with him. At the present time, there seems little organised opposition to a revived labour Party, whose leader Tony Blair now holds the record as the youngest Prime Minister since William Pitt the Younger.

The Royal Family was also too often in the news during these years. Following the triumph of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, the spotlight turned on her children. Princess Anne had married in 1973, her husband, Captain Mark Phillips, refusing to take a title. In 1981,Prince Charles became engaged to Lady Diana Spencer and the marriage took place in July of that year to universal rejoicing. It seemed that everybody fell in love with the beautiful Princess who became a crowd favourite wherever she went because of her obvious enjoyment at being close to people. I can remember some of my 6th Formers being hopelessly in love with her, to the disadvantage of her husband who seemed a gloomy crank in the background. In 1982 their son, William, was born, followed in 1983 by a second son, Harry: in theory, their happiness should have been complete. Unhappily all was not well: what we had were two very kind and caring people who were totally unsuited to each other. Charles had been brought up in a stiff and formalised court, he loved the countryside, he played the cello, he enjoyed the solitary hobby of painting. Diana was a young girl who had grown up in a more relaxed family, fond of pop music, one who loved children and people and who enjoyed a ‘hands-on’ approach. There should be no condemnation of either, instead we should sympathise with their obvious unhappiness as the relationship deteriorated. The marriage of Andrew, Duke of York, to Sarah Ferguson was not seen as something serious - the two were so obviously children living for the moment. The very fact that the Duchess was almost always referred to as ‘Fergie’ showed that there was little real respect for her. The birth of two daughters did not strengthen the marriage. By the end of the decade it was obvious to all that both marriages were in trouble. Princess Anne had already separated from her husband and divorced, now both of the Queen’s sons went through the same sad process. Unfortunately, it was a most hurtful and undignified time for both. ‘Friends’ persisted in leaking the most damaging and embarrassing information about both marriages - particularly that of Charles and Diana, and both made the supreme mistake of talking to reporters on television. The end, when it came, was sad and dispiriting - Diana was stripped of her title of ‘Royal Highness’, but continued to claim her position of ‘Queen of Hearts’. Prince Charles who had done more for the poor and disadvantaged than she had, but in a much less public way, was cast as the heartless villain, which he most certainly was not. The only redeeming feature was that the old hurts and anger were fading and I am sure that in time a mutual friendship would have returned between the two, for both adored their children. This was not to be - at the end of August 1997 Diana was killed in a car crash - to the utter horror of the British people, who had lost an icon. The public hysteria over her death took all by surprise. What I found more upsetting was the demand by the tabloid press for the Royal Family to appear in public to show its grief. The dignity and composure of the two young princes with their father when they came to meet the people, forced by a rabid press to appear in public when their hearts must have been breaking, and their conduct at the funeral itself, when they had to walk for over a mile behind their mother’s coffin through the streets, augers well for their future and for the future of the Royal Family - they both seem to have a well-balanced strength of character to help them through difficult times. The divorce of the Yorks does not concern us in the same way - it seemed an irrelevant marriage, and as the two continue to share the same house, an irrelevant divorce – redeemed again by their love for their children.

The conduct of the Press, of the ‘Papparazi’, and their hounding of the younger members of the Royal Family, reveals a worrying trend in 20th Century life - what might be called ‘yobbishness’ on the part of society generally. Language which might have been commonplace in the barrack-room is now featured regularly in BBC and ITV drama and in the headlines of newspapers, so that swearing and insulting gestures have now become an everyday factor for the younger element, even young children still at school. How often do we see the public standing in silence when a funeral cortege passes? People view me with surprise when I hold a swing door of a shop open for others - it seldom lasts for more than 5 seconds and I can afford that amount of time for others, and the reward is generally a smile of thanks, particularly from older people who remember it as the custom in the past. The same bad attitude is seen in the behaviour of ‘lager-louts’, usually young men who cannot hold their drink, determined to be as offensive as possible in language and behaviour in order to be considered ‘tough’. This was seen very clearly in the behaviour of football crowds in the 1970’s and 1980’s. I have my own theory of this – those who have to prove their ‘toughness’ are those who are not sure in their own minds that they have that manly quality; a truly strong person never needs to prove it, he knows it already !

As England’s domination of world football faltered so that we struggled even to qualify for world tournaments (we did not expect to win them), so the behaviour of the fans deteriorated. Home games were frequently disrupted by armies of ‘fans’ invading a pitch to fight battles with the police and their opponents. Match days between major teams were times of terror for local shopkeepers as armies of police tried to keep the two armies apart. In general, if a team was winning, the fans behaved; if there was a possibility of losing, then trouble could begin. We had the humiliating sight of football pitches fenced off, as if the crowds were wild animals - as in fact many were. The nadir for English football came on 29th May 1985 when a Liverpool crowd attacked their Italian opponents at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels, causing the death of nearly 50 people and injuring hundreds. England was banned from competition, English clubs were kept out of Europe. To this day, there is still apprehension when it is known that an English team is due to play, and all police leave is stopped. In 1989, there came the tragedy of Hillsborough, when almost 100 fans were crushed behind the protective fencing at Sheffield. The police have received most of the blame for lack of control or understanding, but again, there was the element of drinking by fans before the match, and then forcing their way into an overcrowded ground.

In cricket, where once there was good sportsmanship, the clapping of a good stroke, no matter who made it, now there is a continuous cacophony of shouting, jeering, horns blowing, whistling - the pleasure of enjoyment of sport for its own sake has gone, even worse, is the practice of ‘sledging’ when players openly verbally abuse their opponents. In the 1940’s, Denis Compton could play against Keith Miller and Ray Lindwall and go out with them at night to celebrate as best of friends. In 1953, when it was obvious that England were about to regain the ‘Ashes’, the Australian captain, Lindsay Hasset put himself on to bowl so that the winning runs were scored from a boundary off his bowling – and afterwards he led the applause for England’s victory. Ian Botham seems to have been the last player to enjoy his cricket, playing with a swashbuckling style and able afterwards to share friendship with his Australian opponents, but walking out of a bar in protest when some Australians began to insult the Queen. Rugby Union has become a professional game with the top players selling themselves to the highest bidder, and we see a growing number of dirty tricks on the field as a result - it has become more important to win than to play well in the true spirit of the game. The Olympic Games, started by Baron de Coubertin for the ’glory of sport’, have now become corrupted by the buying of the Olympic Committee, those appointed to watch over the purity of the Games - expensive bribes are not only offered but expected by those who make the final choice. Britain’s representative, Princess Anne, who refuses to accept any gift, is almost a lone voice in her condemnation of the practice; for the rest, it is the richest country the one with the greatest commercial backing, which will win the Games - so that the U.S.A. has staged them twice in the past few years, and their commercial sponsors have insisted on the events taking place when the greatest TV advertising coverage is available - and as world or Olympic records draw greater viewers and earn athletes greater rewards, so the use of drugs has become more prevalent - those caught not now being banned for life as in the past, but simply for one or two years, after which they can resume their careers as before. It is reaching the stage where the only valid, corruption-free competition is the BBC’s ‘One Man and his Dog’ - and even that is now being taken off our screens while the pseudo-violence of the ‘Gladiators’ continues - sport has lost its innocence.

I spoke earlier of the lack of trust in our leaders, which is a phenomenon which did not apply in the days of Gladstone, Disraeli, Lord Salisbury, Asquith, Churchill, Atlee. One of the drives of the 1980’s was the getting of wealth - self-interest was seen as the great driving force to pull the country out of its slump. Undoubtedly, to some degree it did work, but we must remember that everything has its price: people were encouraged to invest in the market, a new breed of finance trader appeared where massive fortunes could be made and lost in hours. Those successful became millionaires, often whilst still in their twenties - the secret seemed not to be knowledge and experience but the ability to gamble. There was a setback in 1987 when over-speculation in the stock market caused it to crash, but it has since risen again. We read of young men who have lost billions (in my youth a billion was hardly ever mentioned, now it is in every day use) and this is almost accepted as justifiable risk - he has been ‘unlucky’. In the 1990’s the National Lottery began, promising to make people into millionaires. The success (if that is the right word) has been phenomenal: the Pools, once seen as the possible if remote road to riches, are now unpopular, offering prizes of only £1,000,000. I heard to my horror, after a number of winners shared the weekly prize, "Oh, they’ve only won about £900,00 each". A man earning a salary of £20,000 a year would take 45 years to earn that sum - a lifetime of work. Many win several millions and as the majority have never had more than a few hundreds to spend they have no idea what to do with it. Once the house and the car have been bought, their millions increase faster than they can possibly spend it, but few are prepared to share their good fortune with those in real need..

When people become more affluent, they spend their money on luxury goods, they seldom spend more on food. So how could the farmer tap into this new-found affluence? The answer seemed to be to produce more food at lower prices. In the 1980’s this led to the feeding of animal proteins to cattle - no longer would the cattle feed on grass and hay. The appearance of ‘mad cow disease’ began to alarm experts - it seemed so similar to the disease ‘scrapie’ which had infected sheep for centuries. It was revealed that the cattle were in fact being fed with the chemically treated, laboratory-produced protein from animals. "Diseases cannot jump species" claimed the experts, "there is no danger to human life", they said....., and the Government supported the claims. When people began to die of a human form of the disease, then proper inspection and tests were made. British beef, once the choice of the world, was banned from sale; the farmers who had gladly welcomed the new feed stuffs now screamed for compensation. The true tragedy was for those farmers who had foresworn profits and had continued to raise beef in the traditional way, using grass and hay. Needless to say, nobody accepted responsibility or offered their resignation. Trust in our leaders fell to a new low. It is for this reason that most people are wary of new ideas, particularly if they are endorsed by experts - who seem invariably always to be wrong in their forecasts. Fears and doubts occur also in medicine - there is unease at the high incidence of abortion, which has become simply another form of birth-control; the widespread use of antibiotics by farmers to produce bigger animals has led to resistant strains of infections once routinely cured by these wonder drugs; the demand by people that happiness is a right has led to the creation of drugs to enhance well-being - Valium, Prozac and others, all of which may have unfortunate side-effects not understood when they were first prescribed; the onset of AIDS seen in the 1980’s as a world scourge threatening the lives of everybody is now viewed in a less hysterical light, being largely confined to those whose life-styles are rather more extreme than the majority of the population, but the danger is still there., and it will remain a danger so long as people refuse to change their life style. Current ideas concerning the possible cloning of human life raises new fears that man’s knowledge may be growing beyond what is morally acceptable. We have also, unfortunately, begun to copy the American practice of seeking compensation whenever events clash with our wishes: nobody needs to take responsibility for his or her mistake, nobody should experience anything but sweetness and light – the result is that we have soldiers who object if they are required to fight; we have ladies who having been warned that pregnancy is incompatible with service in the armed forces demand and receive thousands when they are required to resign. In 1966, at Aberfan, the local police led the heart-breaking task of searching for the broken children’s bodies buried in the mud slide, they saw it as their duty, it was why they had become policemen; following the Hillsborough disaster of 1989, for which it was agreed that the police were partly responsible, millions have been paid in compensation to the police who had to deal with the casualties. The difference in attitudes in such a short time is both startling and worrying.

Values that we older people accepted are now questioned, but are those values so out-dated ? Has the use of the contraceptive pill increased the happiness and freedom of the female when we see the widespread ignoring of what were basic moral values ? Is a 12 year old mother happier than a child skipping with her friends and giggling over their own private secrets ? Today, some young girls seem to have no secrets to share – they have become young women before they have enjoyed childhood. When men now expect women to surrender their bodies where once we were content merely to hold hands and perhaps daringly plant a chaste kiss, the ‘fun’ has gone out of courtship . So many now live together before marriage it has almost become the norm – yet these ‘trial marriages’ have not produced settled happy homes, instead, the divorce rate has risen to frightening figures – the number of single-parent families is now a major factor for social concern. As a teacher of adolescent boys, I know of the importance of a male figure to give direction and stability to these youngsters – they need a man to set standards, even if often they try to reject those standards. I do worry that so many children do not have that ‘father figure’ – a person of some authority who will be respected, to be both admired and as a standard of rectitude to rebel against when an adolescent, but to return to as one’s friend, guardian and rock of stability later in life: those young men who abandon their children lose so much pleasure in life - their children lose so much more

Another area where I feel some concern is in the apparent decline in educational standards of many boys, in comparison with the girls who now regularly top the exam league tables, so many boys seem to have given up. My own theory for this is the growth of co-educational schools - when boys competed against each other, they did have a real competitiveness and it was no disgrace to be overtaken by another boy. However, no matter what sociologists may say, boys do not welcome competition with girls – to be beaten by a girl is the depth of failure; how much easier then for a boy to say, ‘I didn’t really try, if I had done so I would have won’. Also, again obvious to my old-fashioned views, teen-age boys and girls by their nature are trying to attract the opposite sex, and for a boy this involves a sort of ‘macho’ image; he puts on an air of indifference to the opinions of others, he is the ‘tough loner’; the boy who tries to work with the system is derided as a ‘crawler’, a ‘swot’. I do notice that where there is a boys’ only school the results, generally, are better than for mixed schools. It is significant, I feel, that what are sometimes decreed as ‘primitive’ societies (i.e. they do not conform to our ways) make it a practice that when boys reach adolescence, it is the custom to separate them from their mothers, from other children, and certainly from the young girls, and they are instructed into the responsibilities of manhood by tribal elders, ready to take their place as future leaders; I find it both arrogant and insulting on the part of our ‘experts’ that they feel they can dismiss centuries of practical experience which has served people well, to replace it with a new idea of very doubtful provenance. This is my theory, but to prove its truth must mean that those who decreed the changes must accept that they might have made a mistake and this is an almost impossible admission for any person to make.

I began this series with a picture of Britain in a gentler age, when people seemed more certain that progress could only be good. It moved on to where Britain became the centre of a world empire with a strength and wealth unequalled in history. At the beginning of the 20th Century, though there were some fears about our European partners, there was still real confidence and some pride in Britain and people did feel hopeful for the future. Two World Wars destroyed our world dominance, and this, coupled with a hesitant and unsure leadership from both politicians and industrialists who seem to have lost that self-confidence which was such a factor in Victorian Britain, has led to our becoming a small off-shore island, dependent on others for our industrial base - it would seem that the only British car firm now is the Robin Reliant - the rest are owned by Germany, Japan, or U.S.A. Major changes have taken place - women have achieved a freedom undreamed of 150 years ago; life-expectancy has increased; we are generally healthier, though too often, now, our ailments are those of affluence (heart disease, obesity, etc.) rather than poverty. It is so easy to see only the negative aspects of our lives, taking the good things for granted, but there are still more good and happy people in the world than villains, our young people are still as idealistic and have both the courage and the initiative to see what needs changing and to set about doing it

There is a tendency, when getting older, to see the past through rose-tinted spectacles, as if everything in the old days was part of a golden age which can never return. Nostalgia is one of the great pleasures of increasing years – we all long to return to that age when we were fitter, when worries and problems seemed so much less important than now. This is understandable, one of the saving graces of memory is that we remember the good, we forget the bad. Throughout our 150 years there have always been criminals, crime may have increased slightly but the incidence of attacks on people has not significantly increased since Victorian times – indeed the number of murders has remained fairly constant - the difference now being that whereas in the past the criminal was almost certainly a local man with limited opportunities to escape unseen, now a criminal in a car can target an area far away from his home and be several hundred miles away before the police are alerted. There was disease in the past, when I was at University, I would work at the local hospital in the long vacation: the biggest ward, always full, was the tuberculosis ward – by the time that I left University, that ward had been closed along with so many of the huge sanatoriums which dotted the country to minister to those with the disease; not for nothing was TB known as the ‘captain of death’. As a young lad, when approaching St. James’ Hospital – the ‘Fever Hospital’ – I would take a deep breath 20 yards from the gate and sprint past, not drawing breath until I was 20 yards past the gate, rather than breathe polluted air. How many children, or for that matter, their parents, know the fears of Scarlet Fever or Diptheria ? Diseases such as Polio, or Infantile Paralysis as we knew it has been eliminated; small pox is no longer a scourge – all of these were fears and worries for our parents, they are worries no longer. There was unemployment in the past and for the poor it was a time of real hardship – I was fortunate, my father was never unemployed, but I knew many who were – those mothers who bought the cheapest vegetables at the market before closing time on the Saturday evening – for a few coppers, a large bag of cabbage leaves, old carrots, onions etc. which would not keep until Monday, were sold to the needy; at the butchers they would buy ‘six pennorth’ of scrag end ‘– usually the scraps of meat and fat trimmed from the choicer cuts. At home all of this would be put into the pot to boil into a thick, rich stew – ‘Scouse’ – each day after the first rich helping, the pot would be filled with water so that the stew became progressively thinner, until by the end of the week, it would be mere greasy water, called soup eaten with large thick slices of bread, until the ‘dole’ money enabled the process to start again. These children never knew a Summer holiday which I took for granted. One of the wealthiest doctors in the town in the 1890’s was the ‘Twopenny Doctor ‘ who had his rooms in Grange Road, where Beatties now has its huge store – he was the poor people’s doctor, every patient was charged 2d, plus extra for any medicine which he concocted himself – he had more patients than all the more fashionable doctors combined. Other doctors charged 5/- for a consultation, 7/6 for a home visit. The school dentist was the one who won the contract to treat children at the lowest possible price – and his treatment reflected this. School milk cost a halfpenny in the 1930’s and I can remember teachers buying several bottles for those children they knew had come to school without breakfast – there was no food in the house. We accepted soot floating down onto clean clothes, limited bathing facilities, cold houses with a covering of ice on the bedroom window in the winter, even the rich did not have central heating. "Ah, we were hardier in those days", it is often said. Undoubtedly the strong did survive, but so many of the weak succumbed,; today, they live. Perhaps today is the ‘Golden Age’ – certainly it will be seen to be so by our own children and grandchildren. I am an optimist by nature, and believe that in general the future will be better than today, but I have to say also that I regret the passing of so much I held dear.

It is no bad thing to be ready to question those who claim they know best, to be suspicious of ‘experts’ in whom you might have guessed I have little faith. We still have a Parliament which has the power to question our leaders, rather than have them expounding policy on the ‘Richard and Judy Show’ - though I do fear the possible loss of power to a European system which tends not to question bureaucrats. I cannot know what the future holds, certainly, I am not a good example for progress - had I lived in the Stone Age, we would not have advanced from using stone axes – ‘If it was good enough for my father, it’s good enough for me’ – I am too conservative (with a small ‘c’ ). Progress comes from those who are dissatisfied, those who believe that things can be better so I must believe that the future it will be good - I shall close with this advice from Francis Bacon: "Men must pursue things which are just in present, and leave the future to the Divine Providence".

My apologies for the many omissions, but this has not been a history - it has simply been an attempt to give a picture - the general trends -of the past 150 years. I have enjoyed writing it - I hope you have enjoyed reading it..

The End

Return to History page