Dilke (23 page)

“The Queen has been much distressed by all that she has heard and read lately of the deplorable condition of the houses of the poor in our great towns,” she wrote to the Prime Minister on October 30th, 1883. “The Queen will be glad to hear Mr. Gladstone's opinion . . . and to learn whether the Government contemplate the introduction of any measures, or propose to take any steps to obtain more precise information as to the
true
state of affairs in these overcrowded, unhealthy and squalid bodies.”
¹⁹

Gladstone passed the letter on to Dilke, who was both delighted and surprised to receive a spur to action from Balmoral. He devoted much of the autumn to a personal investigation of the worst areas in London—some of them owned by Lord Salisbury—and gave as much publicity as he could to his findings. In this way opinion was prepared for the announcement of the Royal Commission.

The decision was made by the Cabinet on February 8th, and Gladstone immediately asked Dilke to accept the chairmanship himself. The membership was distinguished, but this did nothing to lessen the difficulties of appointment. The Prince of Wales was anxious to serve—there was even a most unsuitable suggestion that he should be chairman, but this was quickly withdrawn—and Gladstone and Dilke were both delighted to have him as an ordinary member. He was not perhaps the most assiduous of the participants,
*
but his membership underlined both the importance of the Commission and its non-party inspiration. Cardinal Manning was Dilke's first nomination for membership. He accepted with alacrity, but considerable difficulty arose over his precedence. Was he to come before or after Lord Salisbury, who was also to be a member? The Queen ruled that he was entitled to precedence not as Archbishop but as a Cardinal, i.e. a foreign prince. Harcourt, who as Home Secretary was nominally responsible for the Commission, reacted with radical horror to this suggestion. “This will never do,” he wrote. “The situation is very awkward. . . . Whether as Archbishop or Cardinal he would rank first after the Prince of Wales and before Lord Salisbury.”
²⁰
Dilke therefore consulted Salisbury himself, who replied at the time that he did not in the least mind, although six years later, when it was suggested that his complacency had betrayed the rights of every marquess in the kingdom he wrote to a newspaper indignantly but falsely denying that he had ever been consulted.

For the moment, however, the difficulties were out of the
way. Manning became the Commission's second princely member, and proved a good deal more assiduous than the first. But Dilke was not impressed with the wisdom of his suggestions. “Manning is our only revolutionary,” he wrote on one occasion. But he was soon adding to this judgment, which was not in itself intended to be unfavourable:

“On Friday the 16th May at the Commission the Cardinal handed me his list of suggestions, which were not only revolutionary but ill-considered, and I have to note how curiously impracticable a schemer, given to the wildest plans, this great ecclesiastic showed himself. He suggested the removal out of London, not only of prisons and infirmaries (which no doubt are under the control of public authorities), but also of breweries, ironworks, and all factories not needed for daily or home work, as a means of giving us areas for housing the working class; suggestions the value or practicability of which I need hardly discuss.”
²¹

The next difficulty arose from Dilke's desire to break precedent and have a woman member of the Commission. He nominated Miss Octavia Hill, but Harcourt refused to sign the warrant if there were a woman's name upon it. The matter accordingly went to the Cabinet. “Mr. G. sided with me, but Hartington siding with Harcourt, and Lord G. saying that he was with me on the principle, but against me on the person. Mr. G. went round, and said the decision of the Cabinet was against me. . .”
²²
The best that Dilke could do was to appoint Lyulph Stanley (who turned out to be a great time-waster) as a fraternal representative for Miss Maude Stanley, who would have been his second choice as a woman member. Dilke always had the strongest views in favour of the political rights of women. A few months after the appointment of the Commission he almost forced himself out of the Government by abstaining on a suffragist amendment to the Franchise Bill, supported for tactical reasons by many Tories. Hartington wanted Dilke turned out for this offence, but Chamberlain, although not with his ally on the merits, made common cause,
and the offence was passed over. A year later, in June, 1885, Dilke returned to the issue with Chamberlain and wrote with singular lack of prescience: “I had a curious talk about women's suffrage with Chamberlain to-day, as that is the only question of importance on which we differ and the only question which seems likely ever to divide us.”
*
Sometimes Dilke was able to strike more practical blows for the cause. With doubtful but unchallenged legality he appointed several women members to the Metropolitan Asylums Board; and, although Harcourt frustrated him in the case of factory inspectors, he obtained the appointment of several female Local Government Board inspectors.

The other members of the Housing Royal Commission included Goschen, Cross, Lord Carrington, Lord Brownlow, the Bishop of Bedford, McCullegh Torrens, Chamberlain's henchman Jesse Collings, and the former stonemason Henry Broadhurst. Bodley was secretary. It was generally thought a most distinguished Commission, so much so that even the Queen wrote to congratulate Dilke on the excellence of his choice. Dilke himself thought that he had not done badly, but he expressed his own satisfaction in less rounded terms. “Completed, my Royal Commission with fewer fools on it than is usual on Royal Commissions,”
²³
he wrote on February 16th.

The Commission began work in March, and met twice a week for some months. It occupied much of Dilke's time, because apart from the sittings he found all the witnesses, corresponded with them about the evidence they would give, and prepared for the examinations-in-chief, which he himself conducted. The Commission's labours continued into the session of 1885, and culminated with visits to Edinburgh in April and to Dublin in May. The latter visit gave Dilke his only direct experience of the country for which he had so nearly been
made responsible in the House of Commons.
*
On the whole Dilke found the work unexciting. “But the Commission kept up its character for dullness,” he wrote after a session at which Chamberlain had given evidence and when a memorable clash had been expected between the witness and Lord Salisbury, “and nothing noteworthy occurred.” Its reports led on directly to some minor legislation, and indirectly to a new wave of concern with slum conditions which expressed itself in housing trusts, university missions, a series of private investigations and a generally bad conscience on the part of the more sensitive sections of the upper and middle classes. For Dilke himself the results were a fortification of his reputation for hard, highly competent, painstaking work and the beginning of a cross-party friendship with Lord Salisbury.

This friendship was within a year to become important in connection with the Distribution of Seats Bill, but at the beginning, early in 1884, its chief result was the election of Dilke, on Salisbury's proposal, to Grillion's. Grillion's was (and is) a dining club composed mostly of senior politicians of both parties, which had been founded in 1812 and had since enjoyed an illustrious life.
†
Indeed Dilke wrote sharply that “the Club considers itself such an illustrious body that it elects candidates without telling them they are proposed.” Rather typically—he did the same at the Athenaeum a month or two later—he refused membership. “I was elected on Saturday to Grillion's, which is a mere dining club which dines every Monday,” he scribbled on a note tossed to Chamberlain at a Cabinet meeting. “I had not solicited the honour—most Cabinet ministers and ex-ditto belong to it. I have declined to take up my membership, as I think these things a bore.” Chamberlain replied to this not very tactful note—the President of the Board of Trade had never been asked to
join—by more particularised acerbity: “Yes, it is no great inducement to dine with Hicks Beach or to see Cross drinking himself to death.”
²⁴
But Carlingford remonstrated with Dilke, told him that nobody before had ever rejected membership, and persuaded him to send a letter (albeit a rather ungracious one) withdrawing his previous refusal. Within a year or so he had become a regular attender, and towards the end of his life Grillion's was one of his centres of interest.

At the beginning of 1884 the Egyptian question again became important in British politics. Since 1881 a movement of religious revolt under Mahommed Ahmed, called the Mahdi, had been in progress in the southern Soudan. The Egyptian hold over the area had always been loose and the government was of an appallingly low standard; but these facts did not make the Khedive's ministers in Cairo any more anxious to evacuate. In the autumn of 1883 they sent an Egyptian army under the command of a British officer, Hicks Pasha, to attack the Mahdi in his own territory. The result was a dismal failure. The army was almost annihilated. A new set of problems were thereby created for the British Cabinet. Egypt was in effect a British protectorate, and Sir Evelyn Baring, who two months before the defeat had been appointed agent and consul-general, the real ruler of the country. Responsibility for Egyptian policies had eventually to be taken in London. This applied as much to the Soudan as to Egypt itself, even though there was nominally no British control there.

After Hicks's defeat there were two possible courses for the Cabinet. They could mount a full-scale British offensive to crush the Mahdi and establish effective control as far south as the Equatorial Province—the policy pursued under Kitchener fourteen years later; or they could arrange for the evacuation of Khartoum and the other scattered garrisons and abandon the whole area south of Wadi Haifa. The choice was overwhelmingly for the latter alternative. Hartington and Sel-borne might have preferred the more forward policy, but no one else in the Cabinet was with them. Gladstone saw in the Soudanese, as he had failed to see in the Egyptians, “a people
rightly struggling to be free,” and was violently against incurring either the expense or the moral opprobium of a campaign of conquest. He was strongly supported by Granville and Harcourt; and the majority of the Liberal back-benchers took the same view. The radical imperialists—Dilke and Chamberlain—did not dissent. They were to have their differences with Gladstone on the issue, but about the execution rather than the conception of the policy. Evacuation seemed to them both inevitable and desirable. This was partly because they regarded the Soudan as a useless and burdensome piece of territory, which, at least through the agency of Egypt, we were incapable of administering efficiently; and partly because Dilke, at any rate, was by no means a universal imperialist. “I am as great a jingo in Central Asia,” he was to write in 1885, “as I am a scuttler in South Africa.”
²⁵
What he liked was a decisive, perhaps rather ruthless policy, whether it was backwards or forwards. And a firm resolve to evacuate seemed to fulfil this qualification.

Dilke's views on the issue were more important than Chamberlain's, for he was more directly involved. On December 12th he noted: “Soudan dealt with outside Cabinet by Committee at War Office: Ld. G., Hartington, Northbrook, Carlingford, and self, in order that Mr. G. might avoid writing to the Queen about the matter and get Hartington to tell her verbally.”
²⁶
This was the origin of the Committee which, a month later and without the assistance of Carlingford, was to appoint and brief Gordon. How a Government resolved on retreat came to commission for the purpose such an unlikely agent as Charles Gordon is still shrouded in mystery. He was not asked for by Baring, who, on the contrary, at first resisted his appointment. He was not desired by Gladstone, who gave only a rather sceptical acquiescence from Hawarden. And Gordon himself had made it clear, in an interview given on January 7th to Stead of the
Pall Mall Gazette
, that his views diverged sharply from those of the Government. The probability is that Granville, having rather imperfectly informed himself about Gordon, decided that the appointment would be a good sop to public opinion, and found it easy to
get the support of Hartington, who cared little for public opinion, but who on military matters was much under the influence of Lord Wolseley; and Wolseley favoured Gordon. Dilke, who two days earlier had protested to Granville against the idea of sending any British officer to conduct the retreat from Khartoum, appears to have offered no resistance to Gordon's appointment. Whether this was because he had changed his mind in the course of forty-eight hours, or because he did not understand that Gordon was going to Khartoum, is not clear. In his confidential diary for January 18th he wrote: “Cabal at the War Office as to Khartoum . . . decided to send Colonel Gordon to Suakim to report on the Soudan.”
²⁷
But in his memoir entry for the same day—the memoir, it should be noted, was written up several years later—Dilke wrote: “Meeting at War Office summoned suddenly . . . Gordon stated danger at Khartoum exaggerated, that two Englishmen there had too much whisky. He would be able to bring away garrisons without difficulty. . . .”
²⁸

After another three days, however, Dilke had become more apprehensive that it was Khartoum that Gordon had in view. “I am alarmed at Gordon's hints to the newspapers,” he wrote to Lord Granville on January 21st, “for I fear they must come from him. While I was at the War Office I heard nothing of his going to Khartoum, or anywhere except to Suakim. But if he goes up towards Khartoum, and is carried off and held to ransom—we shall have to send a terrible force after him even though he should go without instructions.”
²⁹
By this time Gordon was already on his way across the Mediterranean. He had left Victoria Station at 8 p.m. on the day of the War Office meeting, and had travelled overland to Brindisi, interspersing his journey with “a series of decrees which he telegraphed to us and we telegraphed to Baring.” The result of them was, first, to make it quite clear that Gordon was intending to go to Khartoum and not merely to Suakim, and secondly, to secure his appointment as Governor-General of the Soudan—a curiously executive post for an officer whose mission was only to report. What they did not make clear, in Dilke's view, was that Gordon had already abandoned
evacuation as a policy, although a subsequent re-reading of the decrees convinced him, with the hindsight which he then possessed, that this was already Gordon's intention.