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- #themakingofmodernbritain
Documentary, Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain 1 - A New Dawn (2009)
#TheMakingofModernBritain
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00:00On the morning of the 23rd of January 1901, Britain woke up to hear that the old Queen,
00:17the Queen Empress, Queen Victoria, was dead.
00:23Victoria had reigned for nearly 64 years.
00:26She was the most famous woman in the world, and it felt like the world was over.
00:39Victoria died in bed, surrounded by her family.
00:43She was clasping a crucifix.
00:45If it was there to ward off evil spirits, it didn't work,
00:49because she died in the arms of her grandson, the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II.
00:56A man who would do his bit to ensure that the new century was the bloodiest in human history,
01:03with Victoria's British in the thick of it.
01:06From the death of Queen Victoria to the end of the Second World War is a paltry space of time, just 44 years.
01:26And yet, during it, this country was shaken from top to toe.
01:32The empire tottered.
01:36Women won the vote.
01:40Democracy came of age.
01:42And we fought two apocalyptic world wars to defend it.
01:58Dark, funny, surprising.
02:02And not so long ago, these are the years when modern Britain was born.
02:08That's the story.
02:26Yeah!
02:27Yeah!
02:29That's all.
02:29That's straight from a point.
02:31Yeah!
02:32That's all.
02:32That's right.
02:33The one thing, however, can I ruin another?
02:33The one thing.
02:35These people were our grandparents and great-grandparents.
02:53But if we could travel through time to meet them, would we feel at home in their Britain?
02:59Fabulous wealth was spilling from roaring, belching cities.
03:05But millions went hungry, really hungry, gaunt hungry.
03:11Shoeless children could be seen on the streets of every town.
03:17We weren't a democracy. Only a quarter of the adult population had the right to vote, all of them men.
03:29Government brimmed with aristocrats.
03:34The Tory Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, was a very clever but darkly pessimistic reactionary
03:41who privately referred to voters as vermin.
03:45Like Queen Victoria, he was, above all, a figure of empire.
03:50Britain still ruled a quarter of the world's people, after all.
03:54But for how long?
03:57In 1901, British troops were fighting a brutal war over the gold-rich territories of South Africa.
04:16The Boer War was fought between the largest empire in the history of the world
04:24and a small force of untrained Dutch farmers, Boers.
04:32The British army arrived here supremely convinced they were going to give the Boers a damned good thrashing.
04:39They were dressed in their latest cunning uniform, coloured dust, or, to use the Indian word, khaki.
04:48They had their sabres and their lances and rather old-fashioned rifles.
04:52The Boers, on the other hand, had the latest German rifles.
04:57They knew how to dig trenches and they understood the terrain intimately.
05:0319th century cavalry warfare was about to meet 20th century guerrilla fighters.
05:12And somebody was about to get a thrashing.
05:20Running the show was Joseph Chamberlain, the man bestriding British politics,
05:26a master rabble-rouser and the most fervent imperialist in the high noon of empire.
05:32Chamberlain had built his political power base in Birmingham as a radical liberal before moving sharply to the right.
05:44He'd split his own party and joined the Tories.
05:49Joe Chamberlain was a self-made man.
05:52He'd made his millions manufacturing screws in Birmingham.
05:55But he was also self-made for the new media age.
05:59With his swish velvet coat, a white orchid in the lapel, and his monocle.
06:06As famous in its day as Margaret Thatcher's handbag or Winston Churchill's cigar.
06:15Chamberlain believed that the new century could be British.
06:19With the empire expanding and dominating the whole world.
06:23In 1901, for most British people, this seemed perfectly possible.
06:28And they looked to Joe to lead them.
06:32Chamberlain was a political whirlwind.
06:36In Churchill's phrase, the man who made the weather.
06:39And now he was conjuring up a storm, meant to expand empire abroad and overturn the old politics at home.
06:51The Boer War was known as Joe's War.
06:55Chamberlain was confident of victory.
06:57But the Boers were outmanoeuvring the British,
07:02ambushing the army and then disappearing into the hills.
07:09The conflict was turning into Imperial Britain's very own Vietnam.
07:16Joe called for drastic measures,
07:18and Commander-in-Chief Lord Kitchener was the man to take them.
07:27In order to flush out the guerrillas,
07:36Kitchener created a vast barbed wire net spreading right across the country
07:43with 8,000 defensive block houses like this one at every corner.
07:48British forces swept through the countryside, killing cattle and sheep, burning crops.
07:57There were 30,000 undefended Boer farmhouses.
08:04Every single one of them was burned to the ground.
08:11This destruction left thousands of Boer civilians,
08:14mostly women and children, homeless.
08:16But Lord Kitchener had a plan for them as well.
08:27The British army rounded up around 160,000 women and children,
08:32crammed them into wagons or railway trucks
08:35and transported them to hastily improvised refugee camps,
08:39which, guarded by the army, quickly became outdoor prisons,
08:46and then, thanks to military incompetence, not by design,
08:51they became places of horror.
08:54Kitchener's policy gave the world a new phrase.
08:58Concentration camps.
09:00In December 1900, a young Cornish woman, called Emily Hobhouse, came to South Africa to deliver food and clothing to the camps.
09:20She found women and children living in tents under the relentless sun,
09:26starvation rations, terrible sanitation, swarms of flies everywhere.
09:31Stepping into one tent,
09:35Hobhouse came across an eight-year-old girl called Lizzie Van Zill.
09:41On the verge of starvation, she was dying of typhoid.
09:45Emily Hobhouse decided it was her duty to tell the people of Britain exactly what was being done out here in their name.
10:04And she spoke plainly.
10:05She talked of wholesale cruelty, murder to the children, and a war of extermination.
10:14Emily Hobhouse was proved horribly right.
10:1826,000 Boer women and children died in British concentration camps.
10:2580% of them under the age of 16.
10:35Disney Civil War
10:40Back in Britain, a powerful anti-war movement was mobilising.
10:59was mobilising.
11:01It was led by the Liberal Party's rising star, David Lloyd George,
11:07the first British politician to be the subject of a biopic.
11:13In December 1901, he was invited to address an anti-war meeting
11:18in Birmingham's Town Hall.
11:20This was the heart of Joe Chamberlain's political power,
11:24and Lloyd George had the Liberal turncoat in his sights.
11:29This was too good an opportunity to miss,
11:35but the police told Lloyd George on no account to go to Birmingham.
11:40His appearance here would cause a riot.
11:43There were people in Birmingham who wanted to kill him.
11:46Joe Chamberlain was rubbing his hands with glee.
11:50If Lloyd George wants his life, he'd better stay away, he said.
11:56And then he twisted the political knife.
11:59If he doesn't come, I'll see that everyone knows he's afraid.
12:05If he does, he deserves all he gets.
12:09But Lloyd George didn't flinch.
12:15On December the 18th, 1901, he boldly stepped onto the stage
12:20of the Birmingham Town Hall.
12:22But before he could open his mouth, an angry pro-war mob,
12:2730,000 strong, smashed all the Town Hall windows,
12:31broke down the door and stormed in.
12:35Two men were killed and the crush, many more were injured.
12:45Lloyd George only managed to escape the mob by disguising himself
12:48as a policeman, helmet and all, and sneaking out of a side entrance.
12:53Back down in London, a vengeful Joe Chamberlain was lurking in his club,
12:57waiting for news.
12:59When he heard that Lloyd George had escaped,
13:01he was bitterly disappointed.
13:03The Boers finally surrendered in May 1902.
13:13It had taken two and a half years,
13:16the equivalent of 20 billion pounds
13:19and an army of a quarter of a million British soldiers
13:22to defeat 60,000 Boer farmers.
13:26And so David had given Goliath one heck of a kicking
13:31and there was a massive national crisis of confidence.
13:35Then it was revealed that almost half of the men
13:38who'd volunteered for South Africa were unfit to fight.
13:42They were sick or too weak.
13:45Pamphlets began to appear asking,
13:47can England survive the century
13:50or what should England do to be saved?
13:53The British Empire still stood as tall,
13:56but perhaps now wobbling a bit on feet of clay.
14:02Perhaps to save ourselves, we'd have to go back to nature.
14:07The scientist Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin's,
14:11believed we could breed better Britons.
14:14Galton found his inspiration
14:16in the Basset Hound Club Rules and Stud Book.
14:21He read that each individual puppy inherited its unique set
14:26of splodges and colours from its parents.
14:29Galton came to the conclusion
14:33that our genetic inheritance also dictated our fate
14:38and that nothing could alter it.
14:40Not upbringing, not education.
14:44According to Galton, the poorest classes had little or no civic worth or value
14:54and no chance of getting better,
14:56so they should be discouraged from breeding.
14:59Criminals should be segregated and forbidden from reproducing,
15:05but the upper and middle classes brimming with vigour and intelligence
15:10and virtue should be encouraged to have as many children as possible.
15:14For Galton, human equality was meaningless.
15:20The ravings of a lone eccentric.
15:25Absolutely not.
15:27This was an age of science and Galton was a scientific superstar.
15:33Cabinet ministers, bishops and influential writers,
15:37many of them on the left thought he was the man who could save Britain
15:41with his new science of human advancement, eugenics.
15:48George Bernard Shaw, the playwright and Britain's leading public intellectual
15:52of the time, said that nothing short of a eugenic religion
15:56would save Britain from moral decline.
15:59We must never hesitate, he went on, to carry out the negative aspect of eugenics
16:06with considerable zest both on the scaffold and on the battlefield.
16:11And these ideas went international.
16:15Scandinavians and Americans carried Galton's ideas back with them.
16:19So did Germans, who formed the Racial Hygiene Society.
16:25From the Bassett Hound stud book to Auschwitz in not many bounds.
16:31Francis Galton's eugenics was among modern Britain's more doubtful exports.
16:42Thankfully, at just the same moment, there were other thinkers at work.
16:47Saturday 7th July 1900 was a hot, sticky day in the narrow back streets of York.
16:54At first light, a shadowy figure stood holding a notebook,
16:58watching the door of a small, dirty pub.
17:08By 6am, people were already rattling the door of the public house.
17:13Everybody who went in, everyone who came out,
17:16was duly noted down in the little book.
17:19In all, 550 people went in.
17:22113 of them children.
17:25Children simply abound here, the investigator wrote.
17:30I count no less than 13 sitting on the public house steps and the pavement.
17:37The observer was one of a team of private inspectors in an investigation into the living conditions of the poor.
17:47The project was the brainchild of a wealthy Quaker called Seaboam Rowntree, a member of the sweets and chocolate family.
17:55As the inspectors delved deeper and deeper into the back streets of York,
18:02their anger and nausea began to smoke from the statistics and the dry notes.
18:08Dirty flock bedding in living room placed on box and two chairs smell of room from dirt and bad air unbearable.
18:19Nearby, 16 families were sharing one water tap.
18:24The grating under the water tap is used for the disposal of human excreta and was partially blocked with it when inspected.
18:36The rich had always blamed the poor for bringing poverty upon themselves by being idle or feckless.
18:48But Rowntree's study demonstrated in cold statistical fact that people slipped into poverty for many different reasons.
18:56The poor were victims. They weren't genetic failures. They were women without an income who'd been widowed or deserted.
19:09They were people broken by ill health or old age, unable to work, or they were in work but simply weren't being paid enough to keep themselves and their families decently.
19:20Rowntree's book published in 1901 and called simply poverty is among the most important things written by a British person in the 20th century.
19:30It set thinking Britain alight.
19:33It convinced a generation of liberal politicians they needed to deliver welfare and social reform,
19:39which is perhaps why we've never had a successful revolutionary movement in this country.
19:45So Seabome Rowntree didn't only trump Galton, he trumped the Communist Manifesto as well.
20:01But it wasn't all pubs and poverty for the Edwardian poor.
20:05Any old iron, any, any, any old iron.
20:09You look neat, talk about a tree. You look a-depper from your nepper to your feet.
20:15At just this moment, a raucous form of working-class entertainment was forcing its way into the heart of Britain's cities.
20:23Old iron, old iron.
20:25It's hard to imagine the sights and sounds and smells of the old music hall.
20:35The stench of unwashed bodies and dirty clothes.
20:39The air thick with tobacco smoke from the pipes and the cigars that all the men would be smoking.
20:45The lot of the audience would be drinking quite heavily and eating during the act.
20:49So the performers had only a few seconds to grab the attention of the audience.
20:55And for those who failed, every town had a different tradition.
20:59At Glasgow and Newcastle, for instance, they threw steel rivets.
21:03At the East End of London, it was vegetables and trotter bones.
21:07You'd get dead cats and even dead dogs flying onto the stage.
21:11So it kind of paid to hold a note and tell a good joke.
21:23But Britain had talent.
21:25Music Hall was the popular telly of its day.
21:29Its songs, the chart toppers.
21:31Its acts, the pop stars.
21:33And the biggest star of all was Mari Lloyd.
21:39I never was the one to go and seek me help.
21:43If I like the thing, I like it.
21:45And that's enough.
21:46But there's lots of people saying...
21:48Born in poverty in London's East End,
21:51Mari Lloyd was loved for her working class cheek and wit.
22:00Her act was mostly sentimental songs,
22:03but her bawdy delivery was her trademark.
22:06When the London County Council launched a major investigation into smut in the Variety Theatre,
22:18Mari Lloyd was summoned to explain herself.
22:21And she stood in front of the committee and sang three of her most notorious songs,
22:27but with a completely straight, butter-wouldn't-melt innocence that had them totally confused.
22:32Didn't say anything wrong there at all.
22:33And then she chose a song their daughters would have known.
22:37Tennyson's come into the garden moored, about as proper as you could get.
22:41But she sung it with such filthy suggestiveness that they were soon pink and squirming with embarrassment.
22:49And it said she just looked them in the eye, and laughed, and walked off.
22:56Come into the garden moored, for the flag that night has flown...
23:04But this rip-roaring, working-class entertainment was now finding a new upmarket audience.
23:14Lavish new music halls were being built all over Britain.
23:18And on Christmas Eve 1904, the grandest music hall of all was opened.
23:25This was the most magnificent theatre in London, complete with restaurants, writing rooms, lounges, free telephones,
23:33and the first lifts to appear in any European theatre.
23:39A train ran from the lobby to the Royal Box.
23:44And an electric globe topped the building, spinning in the night sky.
23:54The Coliseum was the brainchild of a showman called Oswald Stoll,
23:59who'd been managing music halls from the age of 14.
24:02From humble beginnings in Liverpool, Stoll had built up a music hall empire.
24:10The Coliseum was his crowning glory.
24:15Oswald Stoll was a shrewd businessman,
24:18who wanted the middle classes to visit the Coliseum without fear of offence.
24:24So he decided to tame music hall, censoring the songs and the patter of the performers
24:30before they got on stage.
24:32He put up signs in the Coliseum dressing room saying,
24:35please do not use any strong language here.
24:40One disgruntled artist said to him,
24:42Mr Stoll, you shouldn't be manager of a music hall, you should be a bishop.
24:51Stuffy old Stoll was invited to stage the first ever Royal Command performance.
25:00This would be his finest hour.
25:06Stoll flooded the auditorium with three million roses,
25:12and a flock of royals, aristocrats and starchy hangers-on
25:16descended on the theatre for the social event of the season,
25:19the performance of the century.
25:21And yet, when it came to it, the whole evening was curiously flat.
25:29Something to do, perhaps, with the non-appearance of the only real superstar of music hall,
25:35Murray Lloyd.
25:37Stoll had decided that she was a bit vulgar for monarchy,
25:41and he'd kept her off the bill.
25:44Murray Lloyd was livid.
25:46Did she get her revenge?
25:48Ladies and gentlemen, she got her revenge.
25:51She hired another theatre just down the road,
25:54and filled it all for herself,
25:57and belted out and sashayed her way through one hit after another,
26:02until the audience was roaring and stomping for more.
26:05And on the placards outside her theatre, it read,
26:10every performance by Murray Lloyd is a command performance,
26:14by order of the British public.
26:18Now, that was the spirit of music hall.
26:22All over Britain, salty little waves of democracy were beginning to wash around the old order.
26:45But the aristocracy carried on regardless at its most expansively self-indulgent.
26:53At the centre of the party was the most decadent monarch of the 20th century,
26:58Edward VII, a sleepy-eyed, avocado-shaped man known as Bertie.
27:02His mother had believed in a life of duty and propriety.
27:11Edward was more interested in indulgence of all kinds.
27:16For the king and his court, the Edwardian menu involved an astonishing amount of food.
27:22Breakfast, a light meal. Bacon, eggs, sausage, kippers, kedgeri, porridge.
27:31And then for Edward, an lobster salad.
27:35Or a cold chicken would be a mere snack to prepare him for lunch.
27:41Never fewer than eight courses.
27:44Welcome respite, then, until tea.
27:49Cold meat, sandwiches, macaroons, scones, cakes of all kinds.
27:56A welcome respite, then, before the main event, a dinner.
28:01Even without any guests, the court would expect twelve courses
28:07before a final manful waddle to supper.
28:12Cold meat, sandwiches, more cakes and cheese.
28:20And another day of remarkable achievement.
28:35Despite their excesses, royalty and the aristocracy
28:38were still treated with automatic deference and respect.
28:43And the power of heredity still ruled in government.
28:49When Robert Lord Salisbury retired as Prime Minister in 1902,
28:54his fellow aristocrats in government selected his nephew, Arthur Balfour,
28:59as the new leader of the Tory party and Prime Minister.
29:05Even then, there was serious muttering about an act of such gross patronage.
29:11It's said that's where we get the phrase,
29:13Bob's your uncle from, and certainly Arthur Balfour wasn't an obvious national leader.
29:20He was known for his high intellect, his delicate appearance,
29:25his love of velvet and blue china.
29:28From university days, he'd been nicknamed Miss Balfour, Tiger Lily or Pretty Fanny.
29:37And there were plenty who thought him simply too delicate for the hurly-burly of imperial politics.
29:43This was the great age of country house politics.
29:53There were a grand total of two working-class MPs in the House of Commons
29:59and Arthur Balfour is said to have remarked once that he had no idea what a trade union actually was.
30:06Probably a joke, but by then, no longer a very funny one.
30:11At the turn of the century, trade unions weren't a significant political force.
30:35Industrial unrest was rare, but in the summer of 1900,
30:39events in South Wales were about to change this.
30:46In the second week of August, a signalman by the name of John Ewington,
30:51who worked for the Taff Vale Railway Company,
30:54was told that he was going to be moved away from his village of Abercunnan
30:58to a district 16 miles away.
31:01Now, he had a sick wife and ten children, and he didn't want to go.
31:05But when he protested, he was told that this was really a punishment for his repeated requests for higher pay.
31:14Now, this is one man's story, nothing much, but just sometimes a pebble can begin an avalanche.
31:22The union retaliated by calling an all-out strike.
31:29Train services in South Wales came to a standstill.
31:35Coal was left in heaps at the pit heads.
31:40The strike entered its second week.
31:4516,000 miners were laid off.
31:48Now, the railway's general manager, Amon Beasley, was a rabid anti-trade unionist,
31:57and he brought in Blackleg, outside labour, to keep the line running.
32:02So, how did the strikers respond?
32:05Sabotage!
32:06They greased the railway lines, so that when the carriages came along, the wheels started to spin and the trains stopped.
32:15And at that point, the strikers leapt out from these bushes and uncoupled the carriages.
32:21This was extremely irresponsible and dangerous, and it worked brilliantly.
32:27Beasley decided that he was going to discuss wages after all, and the strike was called off.
32:40But the battle was far from over.
32:46Beasley took the railway workers' union to court, where the judge ruled that the union was accountable for the strike
32:53and should pay all damages and costs, £23,000 over £2 million today.
33:01Overnight, the unions were crippled.
33:08Striking was now financially impossible.
33:12The Taft Vale ruling would transform the trade union movement and British politics.
33:18The union leaders began to realise that if they wanted to change the law, if they wanted to protect themselves,
33:25they had to get their people inside the aristocrat, barnacled club called Parliament.
33:33They needed MPs.
33:35Didn't happen overnight.
33:37But slowly, awkwardly, in ill-fitting suits, sometimes even in cloth caps,
33:43former railwomen, former miners, boilermakers and lowly clerks would start to win their place in the great Gothic Palace of Westminster.
33:57Funny the place is, a small local railway can take you.
34:01But for now, the biggest challenge facing Imperial Britain wasn't coming from the Socialists,
34:21but from the growing industrial competition from Germany and the United States.
34:25Now, Joe Chamberlain, the great imperialist, had found a new magic potion to build a stronger, greater British Empire for the new century.
34:42He returned to his old stomping ground to make the speech of his life.
34:46On May the 15th, 1903, Joseph Chamberlain stood on this platform in Birmingham Town Hall
34:55and fired the first shot in an extraordinary guerrilla campaign to change the course of British politics.
35:02Everything the government thought was important would be swept to one side, he announced for one issue.
35:09It was about the future of the British Empire. It was about where we stood in the world.
35:18It was about who would do well and who would go hungry.
35:21It had a very boring name, tariff reform.
35:25But it would tear this country in two.
35:28Victorian Britain had been built on international free trade.
35:44It was almost a national religion.
35:47But now both Germany and America were using import taxes or tariffs as a defensive wall
35:53to protect their increasingly mighty markets from British competition.
36:02Chamberlain's response was beautifully simple.
36:06We should throw a similar wall around the British Empire.
36:10We'd tax all foreign manufacturers and food coming from outside, free trade inside.
36:17British industry would supply British colonies, the British colonies would feed the British people and the clincher.
36:26The taxes on the foreign stuff would be spent at home on old age pensions.
36:33Everybody wins.
36:34Brilliant. Except for this.
36:48Chamberlain's wall of taxes would have meant British industry becoming flabbier, less competitive compared to the Germans and the Americans.
36:57At the start of a new century, Britain would have been turning her back, flinching from the rest of the world.
37:06And most important, those taxes on foreign goods would make food at home more expensive, particularly harsh on the urban poor.
37:16Very soon, Chamberlain's critics were calling his tariffs stomach taxes.
37:24All the members that once in the House of Parliament
37:28Offering trade and protection, they were having an argument
37:32Oh, what an argument
37:37Chamberlain had already torn the Liberal Party apart
37:40and now he was working his dark magic on the Tories.
37:45A podgy young Conservative MP called Winston Churchill
37:49was so appalled by Chamberlain's protectionist campaign
37:52that he crossed the floor of the House of Commons himself and joined the Liberals.
37:57Scenting blood, the Liberal Shadow Chancellor, Henry Herbert Asquith, went on the attack.
38:07Free trade or fortress empire?
38:11The argument raged for three whole years on platforms, in Parliament, and on music hall stages.
38:21If protection you desire, protect what you require
38:25But let's have free trade among the doves
38:28Every week millions followed the twists and turns of Joe's campaign
38:39By picking up copies of a recent invention
38:43Newspapers people actually wanted to read
38:47Literacy had been on the rise in England and Wales
38:50Ever since the Victorian education reforms
38:55The Scots were able to read already, of course
38:58The result was a revolution on Fleet Street
39:08The man leading the way was one of the new men of the more democratic 20th century
39:15His name was Alfred Harmsworth
39:19Alfred Harmsworth knew what poverty meant
39:21At times when he was young, his mother had to keep him warm by wrapping him in newspapers
39:28And the family next door went bankrupt
39:31And all of them killed themselves
39:34But Alfred grew up to be a golden haired, strikingly handsome young man
39:38Almost unable to contain his energy and ambition
39:41He was one of those determined not to know his place
39:51Harmsworth had an uncanny instinct for what the man and woman in the street was interested in
39:57Did they really want tens of thousands of words of parliamentary reports?
40:04Long letters from bishops?
40:07Boring reporting with no pictures?
40:10Nooo, they wanted sensation, gossip, laughter
40:20Among the phrases coined by Harmsworth is tabloid newspaper
40:25He also said, when a dog bites a man, it isn't news
40:28When man bites dog, it is
40:32And he told his journalists
40:34The three things which are always news things
40:38Are health things, sex things and money things
40:42Which, broadly speaking, remains true
40:49Harmsworth built up a powerful publishing empire crowned by the Daily Mail
40:54For the Edwardians, the Daily Mail was a really big new thing
41:04All the old ways of journalism
41:06Endless reporting of dull speeches junked
41:10In its place, first person
41:13I was there reporting short, dramatic stories
41:17Big and early use of pictures
41:19And above all, controversy
41:21Get people angry
41:22Get them talking
41:23Get them stirred up today
41:25And they'll be back for more tomorrow
41:29Harmsworth followed the Mail with the Mirror
41:36And in 1907 bought the Times
41:39By then he was known as the Napoleon of Fleet Street
41:43Alfred Harmsworth represented a new force in Britain
41:48Crude, unpredictable, but brimming with energy
41:54H.G. Wells accused him of plastering the nation with rubbish
41:59And Lord Salisbury huffly dismissed the Daily Mail as a paper by office boys for office boys
42:07But they were both completely missing the point
42:10Harmsworth's readers were the rising force in Britain
42:16Dismiss them at your peril
42:18This was the voice of Britain's new democracy
42:21But not all the change makers were targeting the masses
42:40In March 1904, two men were about to bring new flash and swagger onto the roads of Britain
42:46They were an odd couple
42:49One, the wealthy son and heir of a titled landowner and a speed freak
42:54The other, a self-made man he'd left school at nine
42:59And was now the proud owner of a tiny electrical engineering works in Manchester
43:03Their names were Charles Rolls and Henry Royce
43:19Unimpressed by foreign cars, Royce had taken one to pieces
43:24And rebuilt it from top to bottom
43:26Creating a vastly improved new model
43:29When Charles Rolls heard about the new car he was instantly intrigued
43:38Perhaps Mr. Royce might care to join him in London
43:41No go, Mr. Royce was far too busy
43:45He wasn't budging
43:50And so Rolls the aristocrat had to get in the train
43:53And come north to Manchester to meet Royce, the self-made working class engineer
44:00And that's part of the point
44:02Power was shifting
44:04Rolls had to go to see Royce, not Royce to Rolls
44:08At any rate, they met for lunch here in the dining room of the city's newly built Midland Hotel
44:13And perhaps surprisingly, the meal was a great success and after it they went for a spin in Royce's new car
44:22And when he got back home to London, Rolls dragged his business partner out of bed and told him
44:28I've just met the greatest motor engineer in the world
44:32Rolls-Royce was born
44:34Before Rolls-Royce, cars were derided as entirely unreliable foreign toys
44:46I was waiting to stop today
44:48My husband will be in a lovely way
44:51The poor town was driving for a month's day
44:54So we travelled on a motor car
44:56There were noisy, dirty, clunking machines
45:00Charles Rolls-Royce's marketing skills, combined with Henry Royce's engineering genius, would change this
45:19But what really made Rolls-Royce's reputation was this glittering cracker
45:27This is not a Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost
45:31This is THE Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost
45:34Unique
45:36It's one of the most valuable cars on the planet
45:39Worth at least 25 million pounds
45:43But in 1907, what flabbergasted even the most hardened car fanatics was its performance
45:51Fast, powerful, reliable and remarkably quiet
45:55Not one of the best, the best in the world
46:00Charles Rolls was soon moving on to conquer the next speed frontier, flight
46:15He was eager to leave the road behind
46:19No dust, police traps or taxis, he explained
46:23He became a national hero when he completed the first 90 minute flight to France and back
46:32Then on July 12th 1910, Rolls came to Bournemouth to take part in an air show
46:41It was a dusty day, bad weather for flying something made out of canvas and sticks
46:47A French pilot had already been up and crashed
46:50But he was unhurt
46:53And he came up to Rolls and said
46:55Look, don't do this
46:58Rolls, celebrity daredevil, ignored him
47:01Took off, made a perfect circuit of the airfield
47:04And then came in to land at a spot just opposite the judge's tent
47:08People watching thought he was coming in a bit too fast
47:10Then there was a sickening crack
47:13Part of the aircraft fell off
47:15Followed by the rest of the aircraft
47:17And the Honourable Charles Rolls
47:27Rolls was killed instantly
47:30The first British casualty of the new age of flight
47:34The photographer rushed forward to get a picture
47:38But he was set upon and his camera smashed
47:43And so ended one of the most successful marriages between marketing and industry in our history
47:51Had aristocratic flair and elan worked a little more often hand in hand with northern engineering grit and genius
48:03Then our industrial history would have been a great deal more successful
48:16In the north of England, another challenge to the old order was gaining momentum
48:23In October 1903, a small group of women met in this terraced house in the centre of Manchester
48:29The home of the widow and political activist, Emmeline Pankhurst
48:34And her three daughters, Christabel, Sylvia and Adela
48:39And at that meeting, in this parlour, they set up the Women's Social and Political Union
48:46Now this was an age of do-goodery and busybodies
48:50Organisations of all kinds politely, deferentially lobbying politicians for reforms including votes for women
48:59But the WSPU was going to be very different
49:03Little did the women gathered here know that before long, one of them wouldn't be sitting in the parlour
49:09But in a prison cell
49:11In 1903, more women than ever before were in work, but the limits were suffocating
49:21There were only six women architects, three vets, two accountants
49:30Women were allowed to study, but at Oxford and Cambridge they weren't allowed to graduate
49:36And women still weren't allowed to vote
49:39On the morning of the 13th of October 1905, Christabel Pankhurst was still respectable
49:51She was a well-dressed, middle-class law student
49:55But she was on her way to break just about every taboo she could think of
49:59She was walking along here with her new friend, Annie Kenny, a working-class mill girl known as the Blue-Eyed Beggar
50:09But what they were planning was truly shocking
50:13Because they were on their way to a huge political meeting at Manchester's Free Trade Hall
50:18And they were determined, at all costs, to be arrested
50:22The meeting was a Liberal rally, attended by the MPs Sir Edward Grey and Winston Churchill
50:37Christabel and Annie jumped up onto their seats and yelled
50:42Will the Liberals give women the vote?
50:44They refused to answer, so the women unfurled a banner
50:48Emblazoned with the words, votes for women
50:52Some people in the hall told them to shut up
50:55Others cried, let the women speak
50:58The police ordered them to act like ladies
51:02In response, Christabel spat at the policemen and started to hit them
51:07Exasperated, the police bundled both of them outside onto the street
51:11It was proving a little harder to get arrested than Christabel had imagined
51:15So, again, she spat at the officers and hit them
51:20And this time, they were arrested
51:23Never mind, said Annie Kenny, we've got what we wanted
51:27Yes, said Christabel, I wanted to assault a policeman
51:31They were convicted and offered the choice of prison or a fine
51:35And they chose prison
51:36Shout, shout, out with your song
51:43Cry with the wind, for the dawn is breaking
51:48Annie Kenny went to Manchester's Strangeways Prison for three days
51:53Christabel Pankhurst for six
51:55And hope is waking
51:58And their short imprisonment was an inspiration to women all over Britain
52:02All over Britain
52:04When Annie and Christabel emerged from Strangeways
52:08There was a great crowd cheering them
52:11And then, on the 19th of October, thousands of people went back to the scene of the crime
52:16The Free Trade Hall
52:18To welcome the women on their return from prison
52:21Here in Manchester, the suffragette movement had taken a decisive step
52:26And there would be no going back
52:28Going back
52:45But at the end of 1905, Joe Chamberlain was still making the political weather
52:51Still dominating the headlines
52:53For two and a half years, he'd been campaigning for a fortress empire
52:58Defended by protectionist tariffs
53:01In the process, he'd split his own party, the Conservatives, in two
53:07The Prime Minister, poor pretty Fanny, sat uneasily on the fence
53:14While his government descended into civil war
53:17And the Free Trade Liberals were winning ground
53:19Because Britain was never going to accept a policy that would increase the price of food
53:26Quite simply, Joe Chamberlain, the man who'd offered the British an alternative 20th century
53:34Had lost the argument
53:35But he was going to draw blood and bring the Prime Minister down with him
53:40And publicly, he attacked Arthur Balfour
53:43As the lamest man ever to govern the march of an army
53:48Last straw
53:50In December 1905, Balfour called a general election
53:55For one thing was certain
53:57The Liberals couldn't win it
53:59Could they not?
54:01Balfour couldn't have been more wrong
54:04The Liberals successfully positioned themselves as the party of the people
54:09They campaigned on a manifesto of social welfare, free trade and reform
54:14And they won a landslide victory
54:16The Tories were annihilated
54:19Even Arthur Balfour lost his seat
54:21The Tories were annihilated
54:23Even Arthur Balfour lost his seat
54:32What a smash! declared Chamberlain
54:35Who seemed rather chuffed that he'd now managed to destroy
54:38Two political parties in the course of his extraordinary career
54:43But his political failure over tariff reform
54:47Was soon followed by personal disaster
54:49Six months after the general election
54:53Chamberlain failed to turn up for a dinner appointment
54:57And his wife found him lying helpless on the bathroom floor
55:03Struck down by a devastating stroke
55:11Joe Chamberlain never fully regained his extraordinary powers of speech
55:15But through a miraculous effort of iron Victorian will
55:19He did return to the Commons benches
55:22And a man who'd set out to transform Britain in so many different ways
55:28Now found Parliament radically changed
55:31And more change, much greater change, was on the way
55:36Twenty-nine new MPs dedicated to defending the interests of the working class
55:43Were now sitting in Parliament
55:47They'd soon take on a new name
55:50The Labour Party
55:54That 1906 election was a big blow for country house government
55:58A new generation was coming in
56:01Asquith, Lloyd George, Winston Churchill
56:05And as for Joe Chamberlain, who'd done so much to shake the old order
56:11He was condemned to a pitiful parliamentary afterlife
56:14Left lolling, voiceless on the benches he had once commanded
56:20The last great Victorian radical could only watch
56:25As the young century's first great age of reform
56:29Flared into life all around him
56:32A new door, was it not?
56:35In the next programme, a German invasion
56:58Magnificent men
57:01Fighting women
57:02Fighting women
57:04And Charlie Chaplin
57:32In their children
57:35In the next programme, a German invasion
57:36Bye-bye
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