Black Diamonds (15 page)

The Bag Muck Strike became the first test of the Taff Vale decision. During its last months, the Denaby and Cadeby Main Collieries Company, jumping on the Taff Vale bandwagon, initiated legal proceedings against the Yorkshire Miners’ Association claiming damages of more than £160,000 for the loss of coal production from the day the miners downed tools. If successful, the proceedings would bankrupt the union, enabling the company to achieve its ultimate goal – a non-unionized workforce, ‘a labourfree pit’.

The case would take four years to work its way through the courts. As the historian George Dangerfield wrote in his book
The Strange Death of Liberal England
, ‘At the heart of that legal web which their law lordships had spun, with such intricate cunning, to entrap the Unions, there lurked the greedy spider of organized capital. The combination was formidable and sinister. When Wealth and Law go hand in hand, where shall a man turn?’

11

On the evening of 30 July 1909, the royal yacht, the
Victoria and Albert
, dropped anchor off the south railway jetty at Portsmouth harbour.
It carried
a crew of 300 officers and ratings, and a staff of thirty personal servants. It was a floating palace: the state rooms and bedrooms had fluted ceilings and carved ornamental fireplaces; the corridors on the ship were as wide as the passages in any grand country house. The King, Edward VII, was on board. He travelled comfortably, as always, with his fox terrier, Caesar, and a cherished crocodile dressing-case which contained his diary, personal jewellery, a few photographs and a miniature of the Queen. He liked his favourite servants to travel with him: an Austrian first valet, Meidinger, who woke his master with a glass of warm milk and a biscuit at seven o’clock, and an English second valet, Hawkins, who made the King’s bed and was forbidden to turn the mattress on Fridays.

30 July was a Friday. Out at sea, a few miles off Portsmouth, the entire Northern Fleet of the British Navy was assembled. There were 150 ships in total: 24 battleships, 16 armoured cruisers, 8 other cruisers, 4 scouts, 48 destroyers, 42 submarines and 8 auxiliaries: eighteen nautical miles of boats, massed in parallel lines, led by the flagships
Dreadnought, Indomitable, Inflexible
and
Invincible
.

The King had come to Portsmouth for the Spithead Review, the ‘Sovereign’s Pageant’, as the London
Times
called it, a spectacular display of Britain’s sea power, and a symbol of her power across the globe.

Gathered in the dark in readiness for the ‘final scene’, the battleships glowed, lineaments of gold stretching to the far horizon. Countless electric lamps illuminated the contours of gun turrets, bridges and decks. A strong wind ruffled the surface of the sea. There was no danger of the Fleet being blown off course. Coalfired engines powered through the night holding each ship rigidly to its station in the eighteen-mile line.

The Fleet had dominated the headlines in recent months. Germany had inched ahead in the race to build faster and bigger battleships, raising fears that Britain’s Navy was vulnerable to attack. As the King settled in on the royal yacht for a quiet night, eighty miles away, at Limehouse docks in the East End of London, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, rose to his feet to deliver a speech at a missionary hall. By the following morning, the eyes of the King and Britain’s aristocracy, far from being focused on the threat to the Empire from an external aggressor, had turned anxiously, uncomprehendingly, to the enemy within.

It was a stiflingly hot night in London. There were no gentle sea breezes to cool the air. At the Edinburgh Castle, the missionary hall in Limehouse, the atmosphere was charged from the outset. Four thousand people had come to hear Lloyd George speak. All the windows in the hall were open. Outside, groups of suffragettes, who had packed the houses overlooking the hall, jeered and shouted abuse.
At moments
, the noise drowned the Chancellor’s words. But they were intended to carry far beyond his immediate audience:

I went down a coalmine the other day. We sank into a pit half a mile deep. We then walked underneath the mountain, and we did about three quarters of a mile with rock and shale above us. The earth seemed to be straining – around us and above us – to crush us in. You could see the pit props bent and twisted and sundered until you saw their fibres split in resisting the pressure. Sometimes they give way and then there is mutilation and death. Often a spark ignites, the whole pit is deluged in fire, and the breath of life is scorched out of hundreds of breasts by the consuming flame. And yet when the Prime Minister and I knock at the door of these great landlords and say to them – ‘Here, you know these poor fellows who have been digging up royalties at the risk of their lives, some of them are old, they have survived the perils of their trade, they are broken, they can earn no more. Won’t you give them something towards keeping them out of the workhouse?’ – they scowl at us and we say – ‘Only a ha’penny, just a copper.’ They say, ‘You thieves!’ And they turn their dogs on to us, and you can hear their bark every morning.

The Chancellor brought his speech to a close with a threat. ‘If this is an indication of the view taken by these great landlords of their responsibility to the people who, at the risk of life, create their wealth, then I say their day of reckoning is at hand.’

It was one of the most explosive, most radical speeches in British political history, a vicious and unprecedented attack by a Minister of the Crown on the aristocratic oligarchy that in Edwardian Britain still governed the country, and whose quasi-feudal estates still stretched across the shires. Driving the speech were the inflammatory notions of unfairness and social injustice, of the unequal distribution of wealth and power, of a parasitical class which held the reins of the country in its hands and which alone could dictate whether the social welfare of the masses advanced.

For more than an hour Lloyd George held his audience in thrall, moving them to howls of rage and laughter. ‘A fully equipped Duke costs as much to keep up as two dreadnoughts, and Dukes are just as great a terror, and they last longer,’ he quipped. He attacked three Dukes – Westminster, Norfolk and Northumberland – by name. Speaking to an overflow meeting in an adjacent hall immediately afterwards, he issued a challenge: ‘I say to you, without you we can do nothing; with your help we can brush the Lords like chaff before us.’

At 11.30 on the morning after the Chancellor’s speech, the
Victoria and Albert
sailed out of Portsmouth harbour in hazy sunshine.
As she entered
the Solent, a flotilla of thousands of boats spread before her as far as the eye could see. Bobbing between the formidable massed lines of the Northern Fleet, yachts, sloops, barges, ‘hurrah boats’ and ‘steam pinnaces’, brilliant with bunting, crowded the water, waiting to greet the King. Martial music from the brass bands on the destroyers and the cheers of tens of thousands of officers and ratings that ringed the ships’ decks, forming necklaces of crisp white and navy blue, carried on the wind. A gun salute signalled the start of the set piece of the review. The King watched as the battleships and destroyers broke their lines, sweeping round, torpedoes blazing, to mount a simulated attack on HMS
Dreadnought
, the flagship of the Fleet.

The awesome display of firepower did nothing to lift his mood. It was a black day for the King: news of Lloyd George’s speech at Limehouse had reached him earlier that morning. Knollys, his Private Secretary, communicated his fury in a letter to Lord Crewe, the Leader of the Tories in the House of Lords:

The King thinks
he ought to protest in the most vigorous terms against one of his Ministers making such a speech – one full of false statements, of Socialism in its most insidious form and of virulent abuse against one particular class, which can only have the effect of setting ‘class’ against ‘class’ and of stirring up the worst passions of its audience. It is hardly necessary, perhaps, to allude to its gross vulgarity. The King cannot understand how Asquith can tacitly allow certain of his colleagues to make speeches that would not have been tolerated by any Prime Minister until within the last few years, which H.M. regards as being in the highest degree improper, and which he almost looks upon as being an insult to the Sovereign when delivered by one of his confidential servants.

At Limehouse, Lloyd George had been fighting his corner. Three months earlier, in the House of Commons, the Chancellor had outlined his plans for a ‘People’s Budget’. ‘This is a war Budget,’ he said. ‘It is for raising money to wage implacable war against poverty and squalidness. I cannot help hoping and believing that before this generation has passed away we shall have advanced a great step towards that good time when poverty, and the wretchedness and human degradation which always follow in its camp, will be as remote to the people of this country as the wolves which once infested its forests.’

The Chancellor proposed to introduce old age pensions, and a range of measures to provide for widows, orphans, the sick and infirm. But in putting his ambitious proposals together – Britain’s first steps towards a Welfare State – he faced an enormous deficit. The Army and most notably the Navy, in the race to build a fleet of battleships to match Germany’s, had placed a great strain on the national purse. Land, and implicitly the aristocracy, was the source he intended to milk for income. He proposed a super-tax on all incomes above £5,000 a year, an increase in death duties, and a duty on coal royalties and undeveloped land.

‘
I claim that the tax
we impose on land is fair, is just, and is moderate,’ he said at Limehouse. ‘They go on threatening that if we proceed they will cut down their benefactions and discharge labour. What kind of labour? … Are they going to devastate rural England by feeding and dressing themselves? Are they going to reduce their gamekeepers? Ah, that would be sad!’ The ownership of land, he argued, was ‘not merely an enjoyment’, but a ‘stewardship’ which carried a fiscal responsibility. If the landowners and coal owners would not ‘discharge their functions in seeing to the security and defence of the country, in looking after the broken in the villages and in their neighbourhoods’, the time would come to ‘reconsider the conditions’ under which land was held. No country, however rich, could ‘afford to have quartered upon its revenue’ a class which declined to do its duty and which possessed a formidable powerbase in the House of Lords.

The Chancellor had set a snare to trap the Lords. In 1909, the second chamber had the right of veto: the peers decided which bills did or did not pass through Parliament. If they chose to, the Lords could block the ‘People’s Budget’. Historically, they had left finance bills alone: the last time the House of Lords had rejected a finance bill – in Charles I’s reign – the result had been a civil war. If the peers were to break with tradition and throw out the People’s Budget, as there was every indication they would, the King would be forced to dissolve Parliament. The Liberal Government would then go to the country, not simply on the question of the budget, but on their Lordships’ power of veto. The constitution of Britain and the power and prestige of its ruling class were at stake.

Three days later, the Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, arrived at Cowes to find Edward VII still furious. On 2 August he dined with the King at a banquet held in honour of Tsar Nicholas II. Writing to Lloyd George from the Admiralty yacht, the
Enchantress
, Asquith noted:

On my arrival here
yesterday, I found the King in a state of great agitation and annoyance in consequence of your Limehouse speech. I have never known him more irritated, or more difficult to appease, though I did my best. He sees in the general tone and especially in the concluding parts, of your speech, a menace to property and a Socialistic spirit, which he thinks peculiarly inappropriate and unsettling in a holder of your office.

The Prime Minister went on to reprimand his Chancellor for upsetting the King.

The King, of course, lives in an atmosphere which is full of hostility to us and to our proposals; but he is not himself unfriendly, and, so far, he has ‘stood’ the Budget very well – far better than I expected. It is important, therefore, to avoid raising his apprehensions and alienating his goodwill … I have, as you know, heartily and loyally backed the Budget from the first, and at every stage; and I have done, and shall continue to do, all I can to commend it to the country. But I feel very strongly that at this moment what is needed is reasoned appeal to moderate & reasonable men. There is great and growing popular enthusiasm, but this will not carry us through – if we rouse the suspicions and fears of the middle class, and particularly if we give countenance to the notion that the Budget is conceived in any spirit of vindictiveness.

I am sure you will take what I have written in good part. My sole object is to bring our ship safely into port.

Political expedience was Asquith’s excuse. Closer to the truth, however, was the fact that he and his Chancellor inhabited different social worlds. Like the King, Asquith balked at the sentiments of class hatred that Lloyd George had expressed. Half his Cabinet came from the landed establishment and six of them were peers. The Prime Minister, a self-made lawyer, was from a relatively modest background. The aristocratic Establishment was the world to which he aspired; he had no particular desire to turn it upside down. The ties of birth, marriage and friendship that bound the class Lloyd George attacked also bound the Prime Minister. He was married to Margot Tennant, the daughter of Sir Charles Tennant, a wealthy Glasgow chemical manufacturer. Margot’s childhood had been spent in London’s Mayfair. At the close of the nineteenth century, no other stretch of the capital could boast more Dukes, Marquesses or Earls.

Crystal chandeliers, polished floors and footmen were not of Lloyd George’s world. A schoolteacher’s son from a small town in North Wales, he had no ties of birth, marriage or friendship to aristocratic society, which he regarded as alien to his principles, and which he loathed. Two years after his Limehouse speech, in the autumn of 1911, staying with King George V, Edward VII’s son, at Balmoral, he told his wife, ‘
I am not cut out
for Court life. I can see some of them revel in it. I detest it … The whole atmosphere reeks with Toryism … Everybody very civil to me as they would be to a dangerous wild animal.’