‘Edwardian bastards’ — a personal note

Periodically I have to remind myself that in the 1950s I met plenty of Edwardians, in the sense of people whose character and values were formed in the longer Edwardian period of 1897-1916 and who were thought of as being from that era. My grandmother and grandfather, for instance, born in 1892 and 1888 respectively, spoke affectionately of only one monarch, ‘Teddy’, and in retrospect I can see that (perhaps rather unusually) the furnishings of their home were essentially still late Edwardian.

My grandfather signed up in September 1914 and went through the whole war as a private and an artillery man, from the home front to Gallipoli, then Mesopotamia, finally Ypres. It is clear to us all now that he returned suffering from PTSD and this affected his civilian life ever after. No-one acknowledged the fact, however; it seems certain that they did not understand it and he repressed it. He seemed to me quiet, somehow crushed, and very gentle. But he could still inform me that ‘the only good German is a dead one’ and assure me that the Muslims he had lived amongst as a soldier had the best punishment for thieves — cutting their hand off. At the age of eight, I was stunned and frightened when he said such things. He had been a Scout from the start and gave me Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys to read. I found the book a bit bizarre and simply could not understand what the Chief Scout was referring to when he kept going on about male ‘purity’ that one had to preserve at all costs.

It so happened that there were also quite a few retired army officers in the area where I grew up, who had been in the First World War. They struck me as cheery, but strangely one-dimensional: they never seemed to relax and just chat like normal people. Their style of dress was also very buttoned up. To me as a small boy there always seemed something potentially dangerous about them: they usually had rather cold eyes and bristly moustaches and I felt you could never be sure that they might not turn nasty. I was sure that, for all their bluffness, they believed (like the numerous retired schoolmasters of the same vintage) that a ‘sound beating’ was good for a boy.

And under it all, even in the 1950s, was a residual belief in class. I myself rarely saw that turn nasty, but everywhere there was awareness of people’s social and financial position, and a tacit deference towards it. When it came to studying the Great War in depth at secondary school, one knew instinctively that class had bedevilled officer-men relations and perhaps been a factor in the military bungling that we spent a considerable part of our time analysing and excoriating. I would go so far as to say that in 1966 I would not have been half so shocked to read this account by a private in World War I as I was when I came upon it last year:

The eyes of the man [on the stretcher] next to me were large with pain. I smiled at him, but instead of smiling back at me, his lip curled resentfully, and he turned over on his side so that he could face away from me. As he did, the blanket slipped from his shoulder, and I saw on his shoulder strap the star of a Second Lieutenant. I had committed the unpardonable sin: I had smiled at an officer as if I had been an equal, forgetting that he was not made of common clay. Once after that, when he turned his head, his eyes met mine disdainfully. That time I did not smile. […] I cursed him and the system that produced him.

(Quoted by Peter Hart in his Gallipoli (London, Profile Books, 2013), pp. 392-93.)

I imagine that some followers have been surprised by my choice of the words ‘nasty’ and ‘bastard’ in discussing the Edwardian mindset. Unfortunately, I can think of none more appropriate and I feel it is important to acknowledge that the Edwardians felt empowered to be those things.