0311B

....Three out of four people in the country, including clerks, were wage-earners paid in cash. The minority had domestic servants, sometimes a great array of them, as the aristocracy had, and where there was an array there was always a hierarchy. When there was not, there was usually drudgery. Yet girls in service - and their numbers were to fall between 1901 and 1910 while lacking 'freedom' could be considered 'superior' to factory girls and girls working in shops, an increasing group.
About three workers in every ten were women in a labour force, subdivided by class and status distinctions, in which a sharp division between man's work and woman's work was usually assumed to be natural. So, too, was the existence of �casual labour� both in town and country, in the dockyards and in the fields.
What differentiated the sense of social contrast at the end of the 19th century from that at the beginning was that it had now become a matter not only of argument but of research. The ways of life as well as the standards of life both of rich and poor were increasingly being subjected to scrutiny and to publicity. Conspicuous expenditure, reflecting opulence, was as evident at the breakfast table as at the dinner table and in furniture and dress as much as in food. Poverty needed to be surveyed. Charles Booth had led the way with his Life and Labour of the People of London, and he gave his blessing to Beerbohm Rowntree who in 1900 was completing his survey of York, Poverty, A Study of Town Life, which was to appear in 1901.
Both men reached a similar conclusion about the extent of poverty in two very different places, and both together stimulated a debate. According to Booth, about a third of London's population lived in poverty on about �1 a week or less. According to Rowntree, the York figure was almost 28%. The approaches of the two men were different, however, as were their motivations and preoccupations. Rowntree, a Quaker, concentrated on poverty, distinguishing between what he called primary and secondary poverty, and identified a cycle of family poverty: Booth dealt with much else besides poverty in a series of volumes which brought London's East End to life for his readers as well as for himself. The word 'picturesque' had entered his vocabulary as it had done the vocabulary of journalists:
�No one can go, as I have done, over the description of the inhabitants of street after street, taken house by house and family by family - full as it is of picturesque details ... and doubt the genuine character of the information and its truth�.
Quotations from individuals being surveyed are often as memorable as Booth and Rowntree's own conclusions. So are the comments of their helpers. �If there's anything extra to buy', one woman in York said, 'such as a pair of boots for one of the children, me and the children goes without dinner.'
Booth's own feelings came through. He liked the colour of the East End and deemed the 'simple, natural lives of working-class people' in some ways preferable to 'the artificial complicated existence of the rich'. The rich existed: the poor lived. Rowntree tried to avoid all sentimentality. He excluded fresh meat from his carefully calculated subsistence diet: 'I didn't want people to say that Rowntree's crying for the moon'. He noted, however, that as far as nutritive value was concerned - and nutrition fascinated him - the diet of labourers in York compared unfavourably with the diet given to Her Majesty's prisoners and inhabitants of workhouses.
Rowntree was to interest himself later in the rural poor, the poorest of whom, one clergyman had written 'did not live in the proper sense of the word, they merely didn't die'. It was cereal-growing agriculture that was dying, and books were appearing in the new century which bewailed �the ruin of rural England'. Villages were being depopulated, towns were being overcrowded, five-sixths of Britain's food supplies were coming from abroad as the country was reduced to dependency on foreign countries:
�A declaration of war with a great European power or combination of powers under present conditions would probably be followed immediately by national starvation, a revolution at home, and the dissolution of Empire�.
Such pictures were over-drawn. There had been a substantial migration from the countryside to the towns and cities during the last decades of the 19th century, recorded in official statistics, culminating in the Census of 1901, but those workers who were left behind, more than there had been at the time of the repeal of the Corn Laws, were better off than they had been when the migration was at its height. Their family budgets now included fresh meat, not only pork but beef and mutton. Taking the country as a whole, tea consumption per head, which had been 1.6lb at the time of the repeal of the Corn Laws, had reached 5.7lb in 1900, and sugar consumption had risen from 24lb a year to 80lb.
The standard of life of all employed workers had greatly improved in a society where it was obvious both from statistical and 'impressionistic' evidence that there was 'poverty in the midst of plenty'. There were striking variations, however, in the range of food consumed in different parts of the country despite the growth of chain stores selling the same products everywhere. Of the major chain stores only one, Home and Colonial, sprang up in London. Liptons began in Scotland, Maypole in Manchester and Birmingham. Imported foods, including canned or refrigerated foods, were attractive to consumers, and the quantities imported were thought of usually as an indication not of ruin but of progress.
Newspaper advertising of branded goods focused on benefits, not losses, and it was related to activities too as well as to products - sporting contests, increasingly professionalised; trips to the seaside; musical concerts, including performances of choral societies and great brass band festivals. In 1900 the Crystal Palace brass band festival attracted 29 bands, a figure that rose to 117 three years later.
With 'leisure' now beginning to be 'commercialised', the Britain of 1900 was looking to a new future. Expectations and aspirations were changing. But the past carried with it a legacy of social problems that were to be re-examined before the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, a great war that only a few commentators foresaw in 1900. The problems centred on housing, education and 'welfare', not least the Poor Law which in 1834 had been called 'new'.
The first of these, to become one of Rowntree's deep concerns, had been a concern of Lord Salisbury himself, and although it did not figure in the 1900 election campaign he was to refer to it specifically when he made his first major political speech after the election was won. 'If you observe that the villas outside London are the principal seedplots of Conservatism', he told a large Conservative audience, the principle seedplots of radicalism were to be found in the bad houses of the working classes. This was a 'scandal to our civilisation'.
There was to be no new legislation - and it was then limited - until 1909. Nor had the first housing act to be passed, the Housing of the Working Classes Act of 1890, produced results. It had empowered local authorities to build houses and bear the net annual cost out of the rates, but few local authorities outside London had chosen to do so. Overcrowding remained a serious problem in some parts of the country, rural and urban - there were as many local variations as there were in standards of living - and there were few signs that it was being reduced.

In education and health too there were wide variations, statistical and qualitative, between different sections of the community as well as between different towns and regions. Infant mortality was high not only when compared with later figures but when compared with adult mortality. The most telling health statistics were national, not local. It was to be revealed officially in 1903 how many would-be recruits for the Boer War had had to be turned down for health reasons. Physical unfitness went with malnutrition and often with ignorance. More in Part C....