‘Roy Hattersley,’ said Becky, tilting her head on one side to read the spine of the thick red book I had brought away with me to the house party. ‘The Edwardians. Are there four more depressing words in the language?’
Now, that’s not fair. He may be a bit of a windbag, but he’s our windbag, and he has obviously done a good deal of work on a book about a lively period in our history. His tour d’horizon of the Edwardian age takes in 360 degrees of horizon.
It is largely a work of summary, coloured by its author’s partisanship, and given original flavour by quotes from the unpublished diaries of three different Edward- ians: a Duke of Devonshire; a children’s nanny with a family in Ascot; and young Rowland Evans, ‘schoolboy son of a Bradford Nonconformist minister’.
Hattersley’s contention is that most of us think of the years from 1900 to 1914 as a sunny and inconsequential interlude of cricket jerseys and drawing-room comedies: a ‘long and leisurely afternoon’ leading, unawares, towards the chimps’ tea parties of Passchendaele and the Somme. Do we, in fact, think that? I wonder. But any who do, having read this book, will be left in no doubt they were wrong.
He takes on the Edwardian age issue by issue: technology, professional sport, the extension of suffrage, polar exploration, theatre, architecture, the formation of the Labour movement, the attitudinal roots of the welfare state and so on. You can’t fail to admire the scope of Hattersley’s ambition, or the scale of his research.
He opens with an engaging account of Queen Victoria’s funeral. That was an elaborate affair. A million people came to London to watch the parade pass: massed bands of household cavalry, followed by
It goes on.four battalions of militias, volunteers and yeomanry, representatives of the colonial levées, officers and men of the Pay, Ordnance and Service Corps, six battalions of infantry of the line, four of foot guards, the Royal Regiments of Artillery and the Engineers, Lancers, Dragoons and Hussars…
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