"The Strange Death of Liberal England"

Sydney M. Williams

30 Bokum Road – Apartment 314

Essex, CT  06426

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Burrowing into Books

Reviews of Selective Readings

                                                                                                                                 December 8, 2018

“The Strange Death of Liberal England”

George Dangerfield

“English biography adroitly stops in 1910 and starts again in 1914.”

“But the death of liberal England…was a brief but

complete phase in the spiritual life of the nation.”

                                                                                                George Dangerfield (1904-1986)

                                                                                                The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1935

World War I was only seventeen years in the past, and World War II four years in the future, when George Dangerfield, English born and Oxford educated, wrote this book, which is still in print.The result is an informative, literate and witty history of the four years preceding the Great War. It is a record, as Mr. Dangerfield writes, “not of great events but of little ones, which…slowly undermined England’s Parliamentary structure, until, but for the providential intervention of a world war, it would certainly have collapsed.” Whether that is correct or not will never be known; nevertheless,it is a lesson we, today, would be wise to heed,

During forty-nine of the sixty-three years between 1859 and 1922 Liberal Prime Ministers held office. These were men of high moral character who had been influenced by the Enlightenment. They were globalists and favored free trade. They had witnessed, encouraged and benefitted from the expansion of the British Empire, which they saw as destiny. They had seen the landed aristocracy gradually replaced by wealth from the Industrial Revolution and the concomitant rise of a merchant class. Yet they were British to the core, consumed with a sense of superiority.

Dangerfield sets the stage of late Edwardian England when Herbert Henry Asquith, 1^stEarl of Oxford and Asquith served as Prime Minister, which he did until 1916 when he was replaced by fellow Liberal David Lloyd George, 1^stEarl Lloyd-George of Dwyfor: “…the House of Lords…was filled with a horde of hereditary nobodies, possessed with a gentlemanly anxiety to do the wrong thing…” Edward VII,“just comfortably disreputable.” The new King George V (who had replaced Edward VII who died in May 1910) “…was not going to be fashionable. It now appeared he was going to be dull.” 

It was a focus on protecting the Empire that caused political leaders to underestimate the effect of “little events” percolating at home: the suffrage movement, the growth of unions and the Irish question. The suffrage movement had been a long-time brewing. It had begun in Yorkshire in 1832 and thirty-fours later promoted by John Stuart Mill, among others. Like suffrage, trade unions had been on a long boil, with the first trade unions created in the 1820s. Similarly, Catholic Ireland, which had been advocating for independence, found a willing listener in Lord Asquith’s Liberal Party, in an exchange for electoral support. These three forces merged, with meaningful consequences, in the years 1910-1914. 

As well, England’s leaders failed to understand the complex alliances that tied different countries together, and they underestimated the empirical desires of a recently unified Germany.

George Dangerfield wrote: “It was in these years [1910-1914]that that highly moral, that generous, that dyspeptic, that utterly indefinable organism known as the Liberal Party died the death. It died from poison administered by its Conservative foes, and from disillusion over the inefficacy of the word ‘Reform.’ And the last breath which fluttered in this historical flesh was extinguished by War.” 

The War did come. On the evening of August 4^th, 1914, Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey looked out the window of the Foreign Office and said to a friend, “The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit in our lifetime.” He did see them re-lit, for he died in 1933, but not before 20 million people died, including more than 700,000 from the British Empire.

Problems that plagued pre-War England began to be addressed in the post-War period. The Representation of the People Act of 1918 enfranchised women over 30 who met minimum property qualifications. But it was not until 1928 that Parliament passed the Representation of the People (Equal Franchise) Act that gave the vote to all women over twenty-one. In 1922, Ireland became a free state, excluding six north eastern, predominantly Protestant counties. Union problems persisted, with the rail strike of 1919 and a general strike in 1926. It was not until after World War II – in the 1950s and ‘60s – that wages truly gained traction.

The book ends with a poignant reminder that the liberal England that went extinct in those pre-War years was a time of “Beauty and Certainty and Grace, and where nothing was real.” He quotes Rupert Brooke on leaving Rugby around 1903: “As I looked back upon five years, I seemed to see almost every hour golden and radiant, and always increasing in beauty…” It was a world captured by P.G. Wodehouse. Dangerfield concludes his book: “Today we know it(those pre-War years) for what it was; but there are moments, very human moments, when we could almost find it in our hearts to envy those who saw it, and never lived to see the new world.”