Among the visitors who strolled through Kipling's rose garden was Alfred, Lord Milner, whom the poet declared he admired more than anyone on earth. The two men took turns spending Queen Victoria's birthday, an occasion for fireworks and bonfires called Empire Day, in each other's houses.
After his return home in 1905, feeling his labors in South Africa underappreciated, Milner shunned politics, a brooding lion in exile. He put his financial skills to work on the boards of a mining company and several banks, all of which brought him a good income, but for a man who had started a war and run a country, the business world was a comedown. At home and abroad he continued to write and speak about the great cause of "imperial unity" among Britain, her many colonies, and her grown-up former colonies, like Australia, which were now called dominions. The future French leader Georges Clemenceau described the British as un peuple planétaire, but what would they do, he joked, if another Lord Milner appeared who wanted to control yet another continent, and there weren't any left?
Sharing Milner's enthusiasm for imperial unity were the former members of his South African Kindergarten of young aides, most of whom had returned to England and were fast rising in the world. His ambitious former private secretary John Buchan, for instance, although failing in attempts to gain a high post in the colonial service in Egypt or a seat in Parliament, began to find considerable success as a journalist and novelist. The empire needed praise-singers as well as civil servants, and the genial Buchan was ideally suited for that role. In his 1906 novel A Lodge in the Wilderness, a celebration of British rule in Africa, one character is modeled on Milner, and another defines imperialism in distinctly Milneresque terms: "It is a spirit, an attitude of mind, an unconquerable hope.... It is a sense of the destiny of England."
England's destiny, however, seemed to many to be under threat from a fast-rising Germany. Milner and Kipling were vigorous advocates of strengthening Britain's volunteer professional army with conscription. No longer, they felt, could the country rely for protection primarily on having the world's mightiest navy. "Do ye wait for the spattered shrapnel ere ye learn how a gun is laid?" Kipling asked in one poem. It chafed at both men that young Britons, unlike their counterparts in France, Germany, and Russia, were not required to undergo army service. They worried particularly about a Germany that could easily mobilize millions of well-trained reservists.
Milner's view of the world changed not at all in these years leading up to 1914, but this was not true of his nemesis from Boer War days, Emily Hobhouse. After that war ended, she returned to South Africa for several years to work helping Boer women rebuild their shattered lives. During the war she had paid scant attention to the territory's black and brown majority, but now her outlook was broadening. She met a young lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi, who was battling for the rights of Indians in South Africa, and was profoundly impressed by his philosophy of nonviolence. When a monument to the concentration camp victims was unveiled, she sent a message to be read at the occasion, gently warning the assembled Boer leadership against "withholding from others in your control, the very liberties and rights which you have valued ... for yourselves." Coming home to Britain in 1908, she developed into an ardent socialist and campaigner for suffrage, both for women and for the millions of British men kept from voting by property qualifications.
A woman who had been in Milner's life in a different way, his mistress Cécile Duval, evidently had had enough of waiting. She married and moved to Canada. Milner showed momentary interest in one or two other women, but in the end no one took the place in his heart of Violet Cecil. With the mores of the time making divorce out of the question, she made one last attempt to breathe life into her marriage, moving to Egypt, where Edward was now stationed. But after the excitement of Milner's orbit in wartime Cape Town, she found colonial society in Cairo dry and constricted. Deeply ambitious, in an age in which a woman's aspirations had to be expressed through her husband, Violet had expected that Edward would leave the army and go into politics. Wasn't that the proper role for a former prime minister's son? In such circumstances, with her charm and gift for conversation, she would certainly have thrived. Yet Edward was determined to remain in Egypt, on what to her was the distant periphery of all that mattered. After some months, she returned to England. Their marriage, Edward's sister-in-law wrote years later, had been "a fatal mistake ... for never were two people more hopelessly unsuited."
In 1906, she settled in a stone manor house southeast of London that dated from 1635, named Great Wigsell, and the following year Milner found an elegant country home not far away. She helped him decorate his house, and they exchanged many visits, sometimes with others, often alone. Friends surely understood, and with Milner no longer in government and Violet's father-in-law now dead, they were out of the public eye and there was no more danger of scandal.
Whatever the frustrations of not being able to marry the man she loved, Violet had her children—her son George now had a younger sister. They lived only a short carriage ride from the Kiplings, which meant that George often played with John Kipling. And when "Uncle Alfred" Milner came to visit Great Wigsell, or they drove to his house, the talk would often be of the farther reaches of empire. Perhaps Violet felt badly about having left George behind for so long when she went to South Africa; in any event she was now closely attached to him, and when he went off to boarding school at age 14, she wrote to him as often as twice a day. Her time in South Africa remained so vivid to her that on the anniversaries of Boer War battles, she headed her letters with their names.
Growing up on the stories of that victorious war, George decided early on an army career, entering the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, the British West Point, where "gentleman cadets" whose families could pay their tuition were trained to become infantry or cavalry officers. After visiting Sandhurst and taking George out to dinner, Kipling reported to Violet, as one parent to another, that her son "looks well, a bit thinner, but more in possession of his body.... Of course one must always trouble about them but as far as one can see he is happy and all is well." Many of the army's top generals—Douglas Haig among them—had graduated from Sandhurst, and it would be a fine item for a new army officer to have on his résumé as he awaited the next war.
The war at home was the one Charlotte Despard saw herself fighting, and when she emerged in 1907 from her 21 days in Holloway Prison, an imposing stone structure with turrets and crenelated ramparts, there was no doubt in the public's mind that this venerable figure, now in her sixties, was on the front line of the struggle for women's suffrage. Her alliance with the Pankhurst family, however, would prove short-lived.
Suffragettes had already begun to disagree vociferously over how much they should consider themselves part of a larger left-wing movement. Despard was a supporter of the Independent Labour Party, or ILP, the leading party on the British left and an ancestor of today's Labour Party, which she saw as socialism's best hope. Sylvia Pankhurst privately agreed, but in public remained loyal to her mother and older sister—who no longer had any use for a party that did not put votes for women at the top of its agenda in the manner they demanded. Emmeline Pankhurst and Despard clashed in public at an ILP meeting, after which Emmeline and her daughter Christabel resigned from the party, and declared that the Women's Social and Political Union would not support parliamentary candidates—all male, of course—of any party.
Despard was not about to let someone else decide such matters for her, and she and other WSPU members angrily protested that the Pankhursts' sudden change of policy violated the WSPU constitution. To this Emmeline replied, "I shall tear up the constitution." A revolutionary movement, she added, had no time for formal niceties; decisions had to be made on the spot.
The WSPU promptly split, Sylvia staying, however uneasily, with her mother and sister, while Despard in September 1907 gathered dissidents at her house to form a rival group, the Women's Freedom League. By the following year, it would have 53 branches across the country. Although som
ewhat more democratically run, the organization's telegraph address was simply "Despard, London."
Meanwhile, the Pankhursts went their own way. The same boldness and intransigence that made them willing to endure arrest and prison also meant that Emmeline and Christabel brooked no opposition. Charlotte Despard would be only the first of the people they would leave scattered behind them in what they saw as a life and death struggle for the vote. Of their allies in this first rift, they would lose many in the years ahead. And eventually, under the pressure of war, the most bitter and permanent rupture of all would take place within the Pankhurst family.
5. BOY MINER
LONG AFTER THE BOY became a man, the day remained seared into his memory.
Young Jamie's stepfather was out of work. A younger brother lay ill at home, with a fever that would soon prove fatal. His mother was nine months pregnant. The entire family, with four children, lived in a single room in a packed Glasgow slum. Christmas, just passed, had been spare and grim, for ten-year-old Jamie was the family's sole source of income, working twelve and a half hours a day, seven days a week, delivering bread for a baker. Twice during the week after Christmas, helping care for his sick brother while his stepfather was away job hunting, he had been fifteen minutes late for work. On a rainy weekend, he arrived at the bakery to start another workday.
"When I reached the shop I was drenched to the skin, barefooted and hungry. There had not been a crust of bread in the house that morning. But [it] was pay-day." He was told that his employer wanted to see him in his flat above the bakery. A servant then asked him to wait while the baker's family finished their morning prayers. "At length the girl opened the door.... Round a great mahogany table sat members of the family, with the father at the top.... The table was loaded with dainties. My master looked at me over his glasses... 'Boy ... my customers leave me if they are kept waiting for their hot breakfast rolls. I therefore dismiss you, and, to make you more careful in the future, I have decided to fine you a week's wages." Jamie wandered the Glasgow streets for hours before he could bring himself to go home and give his mother the news. "That night the baby was born, and the sun rose ... over a home in which there was neither fire nor food."
The next job he found was in a coal mine.
For James Keir Hardie—who stopped using his first name as he grew older—the imprint of those early experiences would be stamped upon his life as if with a red-hot brand. Hardie's intensely Christian rage against the dirt-floor poverty he knew firsthand would never flag. When elected to the House of Commons, he would be the only member who spent nights helping dole out food at a soup kitchen to those who had none. Even as an MP, he rushed to the scene of a Scottish mining disaster, down the shaft, into the tunnel, to see what could be done for the trapped men, for he knew what it was like to see fellow miners killed. In portraits, his thick beard is dark red when he is young, white as a shroud when, in his fifties, he saw the war he had long feared shatter his dreams. His hauntingly sad, heavy-browed eyes seem to stare out at you so piercingly from any photo that they might as well be staring beyond Hardie's own life, into an entire century of world wars and crushed hopes.
Hardie had been born out of wedlock, as had his mother, a farm servant near Glasgow; several years after his birth she moved into the grimy industrial city, notorious for its slums crowded up against shipyards, locomotive works, and factories. There she married a ship's carpenter. Hardie had no formal schooling and the family could not afford books, so he read discarded newspapers he picked up off the street or the pages of books propped open in bookstore windows. At eight he went to work as a messenger boy. After that came a job as a riveter's assistant in a shipyard, where he worked on a narrow platform slung over a ship's side; once a boy working next to him slipped off and fell to his death.
After losing his bakery job, he labored in a coal mine for eleven and a half hours, six days a week—which meant that in winter he saw no daylight except on Sunday, when the workday was four hours. Before long he was driving one of the "pit ponies," which hauled coal on rails underground. "We were great friends, and drank cold tea from the same flask." One day, he and the pony had to be rescued after part of the mineshaft caved in; Hardie always remembered the splintering creak of the wooden supports collapsing, the thunder of falling earth, the sobs of panicked miners. When he was older he became a hewer, digging and shoveling coal from the advancing end of a mine tunnel in the dim light of a lamp on his helmet, often standing ankle-deep in water. By 21, he had spent more than half his life in the mines.
When he became an organizer for the miners' union, the role seemed to him fully of a piece with his work as a lay preacher in the Evangelical Union, a working-class Protestant sect that was one of the "dissenting," or non-Anglican, churches from which so many English and Scottish radicals sprang. "The rich and comfortable classes have annexed Jesus and perverted His Gospel," Hardie declared. "And yet He belongs to us." Hardie rallied miners to press for better pay and safer conditions, and for this he and two of his brothers were fired. An elevator in which they were descending underground was recalled to the surface by the mine manager, who told them, "We'll hae nae damned Hardies in this pit."
Soon he became secretary of the Scottish Miners' Federation, began to think of himself a socialist, and found that he was as persuasive with his pen as with his voice. Although he turned 30 before he left Scotland for the first time, his horizons rapidly broadened beyond the mines and the Glasgow slums. A founder of the Independent Labour Party in 1893, he became the editor of its paper, the Labour Leader, whose office windows were smashed by an angry crowd when Hardie denounced the Boer War as an imperialist land grab. More jeering mobs dogged his steps as he toured the country speaking against the war, sometimes from a lecture platform, sometimes from the back of a wagon in a muddy field.
For congresses of the Second International, Hardie began crossing the English Channel. For him, as for many other delegates, socialism was less a matter of workers owning the means of production—although he firmly believed in that—than a moral crusade for a society that put workers before profits, public good before private wealth, and, above all, peace before war. Like the spirit of the times, it was an optimistic creed. Sylvia Pankhurst once wrote of "a longing, profound and constant, for a Golden Age when plenty and joy should be the gift of all." And at this point in history, before the bloody battlefields of 1914–1918, the Golden Age seemed within reach. If journeys that once took weeks had shrunk to hours through the miracle of steam power, why could not all injustice be eradicated by the miracle of socialism? If determined campaigners a half century earlier had managed to abolish British Empire slavery, why not abolish poverty too? Socialism, said Jean Jaurès of France, should allow people, however they chose, to "walk and sing and meditate under the sky." Hardie became fast friends with the plump, unkempt Jaurès, leader of the French socialist party, with whom he shared a dread of a future war in Europe that could set working people against each other.
The final goals of the socialist revolution to come might be hazy, but the world's wrongs were pressingly real, and Hardie's passion for justice knew no national boundaries. He barnstormed the United States for two months in one of the presidential campaigns of his socialist friend Eugene V. Debs, speaking at 44 rallies and meetings, including one at a mining camp in Colorado. Visiting India, he spoke out forcefully for self-government and refused to enter any building if Indian friends with him were barred. After the Boer War, he traveled to South Africa to demand political rights and decent farmland for the territory's voteless majority, declaring that to allow no Africans to sit in the new country's legislature was like inscribing, above the portals of the British Empire, "Abandon hope all ye who enter here." His hotel was stoned, and a meeting he addressed in Johannesburg was broken up by a white mob.
When Hardie arrived to take a seat in Parliament for the first time, a hired trumpeter played the tune of the socialist anthem, "The Internationale":
Arise ye worker
s from your slumbers,
Arise ye prisoners of want...
Instead of the usual ceremonial garb of parliamentarians—starched wing collar, black tailcoat, and black silk top hat—he wore Scottish tweed and a Sherlock Holmes—style deerstalker cap. Once, entering the House of Commons, he was stopped by a policeman who did not recognize him but knew the building's roof was under repair. "Are you working here, mate?" he asked.
"Yes," Hardie replied.
"On the roof?" asked the policeman.
"No," said Hardie. "On the floor."
On that floor, Hardie voted against the usual extravagant appropriations for the royal family. He rose, outraged, to protest when MPs spent hours making speeches celebrating a royal birth while ignoring the 251 Welsh miners killed in an accident the same day. After fiercely criticizing an exchange of visits between King Edward VII and Tsar Nicholas II—whose absolute rule was the epitome of tyranny for the European left—he was not asked to the King's annual summer garden party, to which the entire House of Commons was routinely invited.
Hardie's wife, Lillie, cared for and made all the clothes for their four children—one of whom died in childhood—remaining in Scotland when for parliamentary sessions he went to London. In the capital he lived frugally in a one-room apartment, decorated with busts of Walt Whitman and Robert Burns and a photograph of Karl Marx. At one point he was forced to auction off his beloved library to keep the Labour Leader publishing. When he was stricken with appendicitis, family and friends had to raise funds for his operation and convalescence. He used the same pocket watch he had had as a boy in the mines, which bore the teeth marks of his pit pony, and he often stopped in the street to talk to horses. In Parliament, Hardie never ceased demanding support for those who had little, whether this meant free meals for schoolchildren, help for the poor who were suffering through a winter so bitter that the Thames froze over, or better pay and conditions for the waiters and messengers at the House of Commons itself. He worked hard to ensure that the beneficiaries of workmen's compensation insurance included illegitimate children.