0311A

There was considerable doubt on January 1st 1900, as to whether the country was beginning a new century or whether there was still another year to go. More time-conscious than their ancestors, many of the last of the Victorians were not impressed by the German Kaiser's decree that they were now living in the 20th century. The first leader in the English 'Times' newspaper began with the words �The New Year, the last of the 19th century�. Nonetheless, readers� opinions in the correspondence columns were divided, while the Queen herself, near her 81st birthday, did not note the change of century in her journal or her letters either in 1900 or 1901. Years before she had given her name to an age and later, unlike most monarchs, to an �ism�, and for most of her subjects it was to be the end of her long reign in Jan 1901 that was to stand out as the important date. �The Victorian age is over� the Daily Telegraph wrote, then, �the supreme woman in the world is gone�Never, never was there loss like this�. The Annual Register, looking for precedents, had to go back to King Alfred.
When Victoria died the Boer War was still not over. As at the beginning of the 19th century Britain was at war. This time, however, it was a distant war, a war of empire, with the British fighting it by themselves. The prime minister, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, did not believe that the British constitution as it then worked was a �good fighting machine�, and a �Black Week� in Dec 1899 had seemed to prove him right, but there was soon to be cause for celebration, and he was to win a landslide majority at what was thought of as a khaki election in September 1900.
The first opportunity for celebration came on March 1st, when news arrived of the relief of Ladysmith in Natal, where most of the British troops in South Africa were based. This was followed on May 17th, with news of the end of the seven-month siege of Mafeking, where Colonel Baden Powell - and one of Salisbury's sons - had been among those surrounded. Mafeking Night passed into history, though the verb 'mafekking' did not. Jubilation turned into abandon. 'I thought these Britishers were a soul-less people', an American visitor observed when he watched the scene at Piccadilly Circus: it 'beat anything in New York'. Baden Powell was the popular hero of the hour. Eight years later he was to found the Boy Scout movement, but the word 'scout' had been used in action at Mafeking. Baden Powell was to be seen on film at the end of the year in Brighton meeting Field Marshall Lori Roberts.
Film-watching was a new experience, although as the Brighton Herald newspaper pointed out, it was 'astonishing how soon one grows accustomed to new wonders'. There was much that was new, a favourite adjective in 1900 as it had been throughout the previous fin-de-siecle decade. Many of these were associated with technology, although it was a word used relatively little then, far less than the word 'invention'. 'There is no slackening in that onward march of scientific discovery and invention', which had been 'the chief characteristic' of the 19th century, a writer put it in the Popular Science Magazine, one of several of its kind, as the century drew to its close. At its beginning 'the telegraph was as yet undreamed of and the telephone and the dynamo utterly unimaginable developments. Had anyone dared to conceive that signals could be made to pass in a second of time between Europe and America he would have been considered a fit candidate for Bedlam.'
Before the end of 1901 Guglielmo Marconi, who had arrived in Britain with a bundle of radio devices in 1896, was to transmit a short wireless message to Newfoundland, consisting of the Morse letter 'S'. At that time Marconi did not contemplate sending messages in words rather than in Morse code, and more inventions were necessary before this became possible. It was the press, using the telegraph, that was the main mode of public communication in 1900, with patriotic music hall songs coming second.
Among the newspapers the newest of them, the Daily Express, launched that year, first hit the headlines when it described the 'cheering, flagwaving, singing multitude' celebrating the relief of Ladysmith. 'Students of art at the Royal Academy', it reported, 'on hearing the news instantly searched for a Union Jack', and not finding one 'painted one on the spot'. For four years Alfred Harmsworth's Daily Mail, a huge financial success, had been capturing news in headlines and in snippets, but dabbling also in history, summing up the century and the reign. At the end of 1900 it appeared in gold print, complete with a Max Beerbohm cartoon depicting the century as a leather clad, heavily goggled creature, rushing at headlong speed.
So-called 'new journalism' was no longer new in 1900, but Harmsworth, 'the Napoleon of the Press', was interested in all new things. The first periodical he had edited was called Youth, the second Bicycling News, and he had bought his first motor car in 1899. He was to write a book Motors and Motoring, and he was to claim in the first number of the weekly The Car Illustrated that the motor car would 'revolutionise the life of England to a degree not yet properly foreseen by any leader of thought'. The new weekly had a subtitle, 'A journal of Travel by Land, Sea and Air�. Everything connected. In 1903, when the speed limit on road travel was raised to twenty miles an hour, the Aero Club was founded.
Queen Victoria, like most of her subjects, had never travelled by car and had never seen an aeroplane. There were around 10,000 cars in Britain in 1900, luxury vehicles, most of them made abroad. It was considered 'a really great and picturesque idea', the language of Autocar, when a thousand-mile trial run to Edinburgh and back was planned for May 1900. Harmsworth went as far as Manchester in one of the eighty-five motor cars that started the trial. Their drivers were more interested in their cars, still thought of as 'horseless carriages', than they were in the countryside lanes, which had never before been explored in this way.
Traffic outside towns and cities was small, lanes were unsuited to cars, and there were very few petrol 'stockists'. Punch depicted one of its stock characters, Mr Jenkins, driving his wife to Epsom, but in order to be sure of arriving there safely, taking his horses with him too. A coachman sat at the back of the car leading the horses on a rein. This was still the age of the horse, and the Aero Club was to be known as 'the jockey Club of Flying'. Cars were judged by their horse power more than by their appearance. It was still possible to travel by, horse coach from London to Brighton, which became a favourite car journey too, having long been a favourite railway journey not only for aristocrats but for 'the people'.
Railways had long been the main carriers of people and there were almost 22,000 miles of railway in 1900, with towns and villages not on the track isolated and judged to be remote'.
In London, there was often serious horse traffic congestion. There were horse trams as well as horse buses and licensed hansom cabs and clarences, but there was also a new electric underground, the Central London Railway, opened in June 1900 by the Prince of Wales, and known from the start as 'the twopenny tube'. It linked Shepherd's Bush and the Bank of England with eleven stops between. The Prince of Wales was making a very special first journey, not as special perhaps as his drive from London to Windsor en automobile in July 1901. 'Society', wrote the Observer, 'is certain to follow the Royal example in due course, and it is a source of no small satisfaction to the community of automobilists [a word that was not to stick] that His Majesty should have had the foresight to appreciate the advantages of mechanical over animal progression'.
Society was most often spelt with a capital 'S' in 1900, but it was society with a small 's' that was to make the most of the Tube. Much too was made of the fact, the subject of controversy, that Society with a capital 'S' now incorporated plutocrats, men of wealth, as well as aristocrats, traditionally, though often not exclusively, men of land. Indeed, men of new wealth, derived from property speculation, and from the retail trade as well as from industry, were among the Prince of Wales's friends. Social lines were always blurred, but property was property, and one tenth of the population owned nine-tenths of the country's accumulated wealth.
There was ample blurring 'lower down the social scale', where the ranks of the middle classes included factory owners, factory managers, bankers, civil servants and professional people, engineers, doctors, lawyers and the well-placed professional group of the future, accountants. And there was a more or less clear divide between such salarial people and the great majority of people 'below them'.
More in Part B