The Last Lion Box Set: Winston Spencer Churchill, 1874 - 1965 (12 page)

It was an exotic, colorful life, and at a time when masculinity was valued, its greatest appeal was to men. The mems established their own conventions, their weekly At Homes and dances, their solemn talks with the C of E vicar, and, during the lawn tennis craze of the 1870s, a little exercise. But it was their husbands and the bachelors who thrived in India. They could retreat to their club, where women were of course forbidden, and they had polo, tiger hunting, golf, and all the glory, fireworks, and bunting that were manifestations of virile patriotism. If they were lucky and industrious, one day their names would appear on an Honours List. They were absolutely incorrupt, and the best of them were devoted to the natives in their charge. They adored their Queen, they knew that God was an Anglican, they believed in courage, in honor, in heroes. They could no more have identified with an antihero than with the Antichrist. In retrospect they all appear to have been gallant figures in one of history’s greatest Last Stands. Of course, they didn’t think of it that way. It never occurred to them that they, and all they represented, would one day be disowned, as the result of a national
défaillance,
within the lifetime of young Lieutenant Churchill, the polo star in Bangalore.

I
f you were passed back through a time warp and set down in Victorian London, your first impressions would depend upon where in the city you were, and under what circumstances. Henry James saw it at its most inhospitable, while riding in a “greasy four-wheeler to which my luggage had compelled me to commit myself” from the Euston train station to Morley’s Hotel in Trafalgar Square. Night had fallen. It was a cold, damp March Sunday. Recalling the scene in 1888, James wrote: “The weather had turned wet…. The low black houses were as inanimate as so many rows of coal-scuttles, save where at frequent corners, from a gin-shop, there was a flare of light more brutal still than the darkness.” He felt “a sudden horror of the whole place… like a tiger-pounce of homesickness which had been watching its moment. London was hideous, vicious, cruel, and above all overwhelming.”
¹⁶

The city itself was also overwhelmed, engulfed by changes with which it had not learned to cope, and which were scarcely understood. Some were inherent in the trebling of the population, some consequences of the Industrial Revolution. Particles of grime from factory smokestacks, blending with the cold fogs that crept down from the North Sea channel, produced impenetrable pea-soupers which could reduce visibility to a few feet—“London particulars,” Dickens called them in
Bleak House
. They could be dangerous; it was in one of them that Soames Forsyte’s wife’s lover was run down by horses and killed. Much of London stank. The city’s sewage system was at best inadequate and in the poorer of neighborhoods nonexistent. Buildings elsewhere had often been constructed over cesspools which, however, had grown so vast that they formed ponds, surrounding homes with moats of effluvia. Thoroughfares were littered with animal excrement. Gaslight was not yet the clear piped white light which arrived with the invention of the incandescent mantle in the 1890s. It was smokier, smellier, and yellower; some smudged lanterns dating from the reigns of George IV and William IV may still be found in Regent’s Park. And the narrow, twisted streets were neither sealed nor asphalted. Victorians are often mocked for locking their windows, even in summer, but they had a lot to keep out: odors; dust; gusts of wind that could turn the open flames of candles or kerosene lamps into disastrous conflagrations.

In affluent neighborhoods windows were barred during most of the Queen’s reign, for no policemen pounded beats until late in the century. James recoiled from the gin shops, but he didn’t see the worst of it. The worst was in the blackened, brooding slums of Bluegate Fields, Cheapside, Wapping Docks, Bleeding Heart Yard, Mile-End Road, Maiden Lane, Paddington; St. Giles’s, along Saffron Hill; Westminster (“the Devil’s Acre”); Granby Street, beneath what is now Waterloo Station, with its bolt-holes for criminals; and Whitechapel, where the heaviest concentration of London’s eighty thousand prostitutes lived and Jack the Ripper stalked his prey. At night the East End was eerie. Here the bricks which built the rising city were hardened in kilns like those in
Bleak House
and in Trollope’s
Last Chronicle of Barset,
where fugitives found warmth at night. Workingmen were no longer paid in pubs, but that was where many headed when they had their money. There cheap gin, the curse of their class, fueled murderous fights and, by blurring judgment, converted men into easy recruits for criminal schemes—burglaries, typically, or pocket picking in Piccadilly. London’s vast slums terrified respectable Londoners. Even the huskiest gentlemen refused to enter them without a heavy police escort.

The center of London was a hive of hyperactivity. If, like Henry James, you were an American who had spent his first night beneath Nelson’s column and rose in the morning for a stroll along the Embankment, you might first become aware of a familiar quickness in the air.
“Mon Dieu, ces anglais, comme ils travaillent!”
wrote a French tourist.
¹⁷
London then had the push and bustle foreign visitors began to note in New York in the 1920s. You could hear it; Londoners called it “the Hum.” This was the busiest metropolis in the world; men were all in a hurry, doing the world’s work. And in this part of the city they
were
men. If you wanted to see women you would have to stroll toward the shopping district and its center, Piccadilly Circus, then named Regent Circus, with its beguiling statue, now called
Eros
but then, more primly,
Charity
. Wealthy ladies would be accompanied by servants carrying their parcels and followed, at a respectful distance, by their carriages (hence “the carriage trade”), which, if they were upper class, bore heraldic crests on the doors and were driven by coachmen wearing livery. Middle-class women hired their “Parcels Men” by the hour and usually shopped in pairs. An extraordinary number of them were pregnant, though propriety forbade them from venturing out in public after their third month. Whatever their condition, they would be tightly corseted in armor of whalebone and steel, a cruel fashion which was responsible for internal injuries even among women not carrying children. The point was to show the world that your husband had a comfortable income, that you didn’t have to work. So styles were wildly impractical: great loops of ribbon, hoopskirts, lacy caps, silken parasols, dangling ringlets, blunt bustles, frills, petticoats, and layers of silk and satin heavily trimmed with bugles and beads.

None of them made women attractive to men. That was, or was thought to be, their last objective. Men were “the coarser sex”; women, as Janet Horowitz Murray found in her study of gender attitudes in nineteenth-century England, were thought to be “softer, more moral and pure.” The very existence of sexual desire was denied. It says much about the Victorians that none of them recognized the Ripper murders as sex crimes. This was part of what O. R. MacGregor calls “the Victorian conspiracy of silence about sex.” Occasional male lubricity was grudgingly accepted for the future of the race, though men who lacked it were reassured by William Acton, a distinguished surgeon of the day: “No nervous or feeble young man need… be deterred from marriage by any exaggerated notion of the duties required of him.” For a wife, her husband’s animal drive was a cross to be borne. Dr. Acton wrote: “As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband but only to please him; and, but for the desire for maternity, would far rather be relieved of his attentions.” A Victorian mother prepared her daughter for the marriage bed with the advice: “Lie still, and think of England.” It was in this spirit that Thomas Bowdler, earlier in the century, had published
The Family Shakespeare,
bearing the subtitle: “In which nothing is added to the Text; but those Words and Expressions are omitted which cannot with Propriety be read aloud in a Family.” By contrast, the distributors of a pamphlet which advised couples not ready for children to practice douching were indicted for scheming “to vitiate and corrupt the morals of youth as well as of divers other subjects of the Queen and to incite… to indecent, obscene, unnatural, and immoral practices” by publishing an “indecent, lewd, filthy, bawdy, and obscene book.” During the year before their trial, the pamphlet, which the jury agreed was salacious, had sold 700 copies. In the four months of notoriety, sales leapt to 125,000. The issue, it should be noted, was a middle-class issue. Sex was one of the few pleasures not denied to working-class women, and they hadn’t the slightest intention of abandoning it. (Their word for lustful was
gay
.) As for the patricians—ladies like Winston’s mother—the upper class had, as it had always had, a moral code all its own.
¹⁸

Identifying a stranger’s class has always been a social challenge for Londoners. Today it is a matter of vowels. In those days it was far easier, and would usually be accomplished by a glance. J. M. Bailey, an American visitor to London in the 1870s, wrote that he could find “traces of nobility” in an aristocrat’s “very step and bearing.” He asked mischievously: “Can you conceive of a bowlegged duke? Or is it possible for you to locate a pimple on the nose of a viscount? And no one, however diseased his imagination, ever pictured a baron with an ulcerated leg, or conceived of such a monstrous impossibility as a cross-eyed duchess.”
¹⁹
That was Yankee wit, but the plain fact was that you
could
tell. At least you could tell the difference between a gentleman and a man who was not. Partly it was a matter of genes. The Normans had introduced high cheekbones, Roman noses, an abundance of equine chin, and hooded, sardonic eyes to the Anglo-Saxon nobility. Diet was more important. Generations of malnutrition and, more recently, of stooping in mines or bending over looms had given workmen’s descendants slight stature, poor posture, and coarse complexion. They aged prematurely; they needed the attention of doctors they could seldom afford. The gentry were tall, fair, and erect. Although they may not have been godlike, they were certainly far healthier than their social inferiors, and by today’s standards, even the genteel were sick a great deal. The groaning tables on Victorian Christmas cards groaned beneath platters of food that would be condemned as unfit by modern public-health officials. Preventive medicine was in its infancy. The twentieth-century visitor to the Strand would be startled by the number of pitted faces there. Smallpox was still rife. There were far more pocked features among the workmen, however. They simply lacked the resistance to affliction. They also lacked running water. Cholera hit them harder; so did diphtheria; so did infant mortality. In all of London, more babies died than adults. We cannot even guess at the toll in the slums, but it must have been appalling.

Gentlemen, no less than ladies, could be identified by their clothing. They wore top hats, indoors and out, except in homes or churches. Cuffs and collars were starched, cravats were affixed with jeweled pins, waistcoats were white, wide tubular trousers swept the ground at the heel but rose in front over the instep, black frock coats were somber and exquisitely cut. Swinging their elegant, gold-headed canes, gentlemen swaggered when crossing the street, dispensing coins to fawning men who swept the dung from their paths. (These men were followed by nimble boys with pans and brushes, who collected the ordure and sold it in the West End for fertilizer.) Bowlers were worn by clerks and shopkeepers and caps by those below them. Switching hats wouldn’t have occurred to them, and it wouldn’t have fooled anyone anyway. Despite advances in the mass production of menswear, dry cleaning was unknown in the London of the time. Suits had to be picked apart at the seams, washed, and sewn back together. Patricians wore new clothes or had tailors who could resew the garments they had made in the first place. The men in bowlers and caps couldn’t do it; their wives tried but were unskillful, which accounts for their curiously wrinkled Sabbath-suit appearance in old photographs. Toward the end of Victoria’s reign games and cycling modified gentlemen’s dress. The Prince of Wales introduced the lounge coat. Short loose breeches and Norfolk jackets were worn on bikes, football players and runners and jumpers appeared in shorts, and cricketers and tennis players adopted long pants of white flannel. Except at regattas, none of this was matched in feminine fashions. Not only were bustles worn on the tennis court; a woman had to use her free hand to hold her trailing skirt off the ground. And the lower classes were unaffected because they had neither the money for fashions nor the time for sports.