13 February 2024
An authoritative and entertaining history of the Edwardian age, told through its politics and popular culture.
‘The Edwardians have long been the lost decade of British history, yet they are that history at its climax. Alwyn Turner sets the record straight, bringing its characters, strains and stresses brilliantly to life’ Simon Jenkins
‘Britain’s most electrifying contemporary social historian conjures the forgotten country of more than a century ago … fiercely recommended’ Alan Moore
‘Alwyn Turner is a wonderful raconteur of historical eras … this is history written from below, and above, and all milieus in between’ Simon Kuper
‘Every page grips and delights … a deeply researched yet gorgeously entertaining double vision of a United Kingdom in full Imperial glory – yet unnervingly familiar’ James Hawes
In Little Englanders, Alwyn Turner reconsiders the Edwardian era as a time of profound social change, with the rise of women’s suffrage and the labour movement, unrest in Ireland and the Boer republics, scandals in parliament and culture wars at home. He tells the story of the Edwardians through music halls and male beauty contests, the real Peaky Blinders and the 1908 Summer Olympics. In this colourful, detailed and hugely entertaining social history, Turner shows that, though the golden Victorian age was in the past, the birth of modern Britain was only just beginning.
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The Real Peaky Blinders: extract taken from the chapter Children and Youths
At the beginning of the 1880s a new phenomenon had been observed on Sunday evenings in east London: youths promenading in the streets, swaggering around in their best clothes. ‘Well-dressed roughs were pushing people about in the Bow Road and throwing stones and gravel at each other, and anyone else who happened to be passing,’ it was reported. ‘They also caught hold of one or two young girls who were passing quietly along, hugged them round the waist, and behaved towards them in a scandalous manner.’
This weekly ritual became known locally as the monkey parade, and the name – as well as the practice – caught on across the city and beyond.
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There was no real harm in the masher or the monkey parader. A couple of steps further down the social ladder, though, the feral youths said to infest large parts of the towns and cities caused real concern. They went by different names in different places: Hooligans in London, Scuttlers in Manchester, High Rippers in Liverpool, Peaky Blinders in Birmingham. Whatever they were called, they were all of a piece: wild, uncontrollable street gangs, whose members attacked the police, each other and sometimes members of the public. They didn’t care much about the names they were given; territorial identity was the important thing. For a working-class youth in Chelsea it mattered only whether you belonged to the Oakum Bay Faction or their fierce rivals the Sandsend Faction. Glasgow gangs included the Hi Hi’s, the Tim Molloys, the San Toys, the Village Boys and the Wellingtonia, and the differences between them were more important than the similarities.
There were established fashions that amounted to a uniform – cap worn forwards over the eyes, no collar, a muffler or neckerchief instead of a tie, bell-bottom trousers, hobnailed boots – but there were also identifying marks to signal allegiance: the Silver Hatchet Gang in London, for example, wore a badge on their lapel, showing an axe with the motto ‘Tried, Tested and True.’ In some quarters there was a fashion for the Newgate fringe: a shaved face with a beard running below the jawline, in imitation of where the hangman’s noose would be placed. ‘The most characteristic part of their uniform,’ read one report, ‘is the substantial leather belt heavily mounted with metal. It is not ornamental, but then it is not intended for ornament.’ Other weapons in the arsenal included knuckledusters, sticks, knives and occasionally guns.
This wasn’t an exclusively male preserve. ‘There are girls as well as boys,’ said Liberal MP and educationalist Thomas Macnamara. ‘Dirty, ragged, unwashed, unkempt, foul-mouthed girls, with tempers like tigers and habits like wild beasts, are roaming about the streets, preying on society every day.’ It was reported in 1906 that Glasgow was ‘experiencing a modified reign of terror’, with gangs that included ‘young girls of ages averaging from fourteen to seventeen, with very long draggled skirt and hair in tightly twisted pigtail’.
The rhetoric was sometimes exaggerated, but the violence was real. Even restricting the examples to assaults on the police by Birmingham’s Peaky Blinders, the charge sheet was serious. In 1900 eighteen-year-old Henry Attwood and sixteen-year-old Percy Langridge were convicted of ‘stabbing two policemen who arrested a couple of their friends for disorderly conduct’. The following year PC Charles Gunter died after being struck on the head with a brick, and three men were given fifteen years’ penal servitude for manslaughter. And the year after that, two brothers, aged twenty-eight and nineteen, were convicted of the attempted murder of PC Blinko and sentenced to penal servitude for life; the policeman had served a summons on the older brother, and in retaliation they ‘smashed in his skull with a chopper. This was in open daylight and in a crowded street.’
Not even the football pitch provided protection. During one match in Birmingham a gang of Peaky Blinders attacked and robbed a goalkeeper, while the rest of his team was in the opponents’ half. Passing sentences of hard labour, ‘Mr Justice Lawrence said he thought the football field was safe for all except the referee, but in Birmingham it was not so for either a player or goalkeeper, if his comrades were away from him.’
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It seemed to some that violence had become endemic among the young, whatever their class. Even the pastoral idyll of Olde England was not exempt. The Berkshire village of Cookham was located on a delightful part of the Thames – ‘perhaps the sweetest stretch of all the river’, wrote Jerome K. Jerome in Three Men in a Boat (1889) – but outside the pubs in the village there were signs telling the customers ‘All fighting to be over by 10 o’clock.’
Continue reading in Little Englanders: Britain in the Edwardian Era by Alwyn Turner