The Nastiness Factor

I have ‘worked with’ the Edwardians, so to speak, for a while now. I feel that if I were dropped into London society around 1905 I would know my bearings and could hold my own. There is much that, having come to know them better, I admire: their energy, their enterprise, their versatility, the fact that in their time, as Roy Hattersley has put it, ‘a modern nation was born’. But if there is one thing that mystifies me about them, it’s the streak of nastiness that seems to have run through so many; a nastiness of which they usually seem to have been unaware and for which they did not apologise.

Take George’s close friend Henry Newbolt (1862-1938). Today Newbolt is remembered for his poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’ with its refrain ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’, for the doggerel-wobbles in his immensely popular naval verse, and his propaganda written to encourage boys to join up in World War I. That was his official persona, but both Susan Chitty’s biography Playing the Game (1997) and The Later Life and Letters edited by Newbolt’s wife (1942) show him to have been likeable, civilised, and the author of some almost first-rate private lyrical poetry. Yet this is how Newbolt wanted to look:

Henry Newbolt, c. 1912

Close-shaven, starch-collared, tight-lipped, there is no doubt that this is the perfect image of an Edwardian male. Perhaps I am wrong — perhaps, for instance, there is a hint, just a hint, of humour in those eyes —  but to me it says: ‘I am a bastard, don’t trifle with me.’ There is something Hitlerian about it. And, indeed, Newbolt could be a bastard, apparently without noticing it. For instance, at the age of twenty-two his son Francis was so badly shell-shocked at Ypres that he returned to England demented, shaking and unable to speak. When, after three months, he was granted a two-month extension of leave, Newbolt’s comment was: ‘I’m sorry that he isn’t doing more for his country.’

This photo of Newbolt was used as the frontispiece of his Later Life and Letters and dated by his wife Margaret. The photo of George below is dated by me c. 1912 because that was his most public year, both in the theatre and as a political activist. He spent a lot of time in 1912 rushing all over the country addressing meetings, which would account for the overcoat, whilst the white scarf was part of the uniform of an Edwardian theatre man. He probably needed to have an impressive photograph to present to fans. The portrait was taken by celebrity photographer Frederick Hollyer and has become the ‘iconic’ image of George, used by Kittie as the frontispiece of Percy Lubbock’s Sketch from Memory and the most commonly reproduced image of George since.

To me, at least, the right eye (right as we look at it) seems to suggest a certain vulnerability, even angst, whilst the faraway look in the left is not so much romantic as sadly resigned. But I have to say I think the overall impact when one first sees this photograph is ‘in your face’ like Newbolt’s: to us, surely, the pallor and the tight lips project self-assurance, arrogance, even menace. I well remember thinking when I first saw this image as a twenty-year-old: ‘Another Edwardian bastard’…

That is why I now prefer not to use this image of George! I know from researching his life that he was not a bastard, so I particularly favour the previously unpublished photograph of him laughing and smoking that features second from the left in Calderonia’s banner. But the fact remains that when it came to a posed studio photograph, this is how he wanted to look. I discern some of the same intention as Newbolt’s. In a word, neither of them looks likeable, and some people might say they look positively nasty. Yet both of their wives were content for these images to represent their husbands to the world.

George Calderon, c. 1912

In his love letters to Kittie in 1899, George admits he is ‘brutal’, ‘blunt’ and ‘coarse’ at times — ‘It is no use my trying to keep up any illusion that I am a man of admirable character’ — but at least he is honest and says sorry. His ‘nastiness’ was caused by the stresses of their falling in love so soon after the death of Kittie’s first husband, George’s friend Archie Ripley, and there is not a hint that he was ever like this once they were married. But there are numerous examples of him being publicly nasty (of course, some would say that being anti-suffragist and a ‘strikebreaker’ was nasty by definition). In the case of his public nastiness, it seems all too characteristic of the Edwardians; he does not appear to have regretted it; and unfortunately it was difficult to undo.

In his 1902 bestseller The Adventures of Downy V. Green, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, which made George’s reputation as a humorist/satirist, there is a junior fellow of ‘St Ives College’ (instantly recognisable to Trinity College alumni as their own), who is described by the narrator as ‘thin and sickly-smiled’, with ‘a moist and lifeless hand’, and depicted by George in his illustration as diminutive, weedy and nervous. He is characterised aloud by Downy as ‘a slimsy boy, with a kink in his chest’ and a ‘design’ of a moustache, then sotto voce as ‘the rancourest little sarpent topside dirt’! George’s Trinity contemporaries saw in this figure a portrait of H.E.D. Blakiston, who in 1907 was to become President of Trinity. Doubtless they laughed at some aspects, but there could be no doubt that the portrait was ‘nasty’, even vicious. Understandably, it seems to have complicated George’s relations with his old college after 1907, and perhaps even Kittie’s after George’s death.

Then in 1909 at the Queen’s Gate Hall George took on the suffragette Helen Ogston (who had brandished a dog-whip at a recent gathering) in a public debate of the motion ‘That in the Opinion of this Meeting the Parliamentary Franchise should be extended to duly-qualified Women’. Continuing in Percy Lubbock’s words, for Percy was there:

The lady began it; her fluent, attractive appeal was listened to in a charmed silence, broken occasionally by a few happy sighings and purrings; she was a beautiful figure of a Diana, earnest and free. The audience rose to her eloquence; the thorny quarrel was raised to the level of a large, splendid, wind-swept passion; it was the contest of Milanion and Atalanta […] And then […] George began his reply, and it was as though Mephistopheles had landed upon the shore of a Greek island. With his arguments and his sarcasms, his crude interrogations, his facts and his dates, the atmosphere was chilled and the shining spaces contracted. From fervent souls the listeners were changed to mere pouting and hissing human beings; they turned upon the intruder who so degraded them […] the lofty passion had become a squall of exasperated dissent.

Nasty! That is how George had come across, and one has to assume that is how he wanted to come across. Yet it was all totally unnecessary: if, instead of being determined to project himself as some kind of Juvenalian satirist, he had identified the (glaring) Achilles heel of the motion and employed his irresistible charm and courtesy to attacking it, he might even have swung it by a few votes. But for some people he always remained essentially a ‘nasty’.

I could quote many cases of eminent Edwardians who made no secret of this streak and displayed no shame about it, for instance the imperial consuls Cromer and Curzon (both active in the anti-suffrage movement), Baden-Powell, G.B. Shaw, or Emmeline Pankhurst, and I have given it a lot of thought. What produced it in so many otherwise admirable people? If I say that I feel it was the result of Edwardian chauvinism and imperialism, I risk appearing to suggest that these people personally were all chauvinists who believed that, in Curzon’s words, the British Empire was ‘under Providence, the greatest instrument for good the world has seen’. Manifestly some, for instance George, G.B. Shaw and Pankhurst, were not chauvinists.

However, what I have come to believe is that the unstoppable growth and apparent stability of the Empire under the Edwardians produced an all-pervading national confidence, self-assurance, belief that, in Cecil Rhodes’s words, Englishmen had ‘won the first prize in the lottery of life’, and this rubbed off on everyone (except, perhaps, the King) without their being aware of it. It rubbed off on them as an unselfconscious arrogance. They were ‘right’ and this gave them the right even to be nasty. In fact in their eyes it wasn’t nastiness, it was just…being right.

(In my next post I shall consider a slightly different perspective.)