The Edwardian era that characteristically did not begin and end with the reign of Edward VII is generally regarded as Britain’s calm before the storm. I would say that this much lauded brief spell began a few years before Queen Victoria’s death and ended abruptly at the outbreak of the First World War four years into the reign of George V . So in my mind the period attributed to King Edward began about 1897 after his mother’s jubilee and ceased with a disturbing jolt at the start of hostilities during the reign of his son.
This period is portrayed by some commentators and certain historians as one of calm, gentility, invention and innovation. A time when all was supposedly well on the home front and across the British Empire. It was certainly an era where we can see the roots of much of our modern day life in the 21st century being ‘bedded in’. Notably the dynamic race for air travel, gadgets operated by electricity, the motor car for the masses and above all wireless communication that at a spark shrunk the world and brought the far-flung Empire to our drawing room. These were exciting times that filled our ancestors heads with a new brighter, faster and louder world.
History is a cruel beast.
The harsh reality is that whilst the wealthy tiny minority well-to-do, mainly landowners, were basking in the warmth of a fictional British Summer, many at the other end of the social scale were still slum-ridden and struggling in a world built by Victorian industrialists. The poor, the vulnerable who were left to fight a grim life – for them it was business as usual.
Some though in the middle bracket who were fighting for better and a bite of the innovation cherry were living a life of paranoia, fear and fight. They wanted a better, fairer world. Their cause was to open the dreary eyes of decision-makers and politicians, to physically force them to bring Great Britain shouting into the new modern, go-ahead 20th century. They wanted a life evenly spread fairly across gender and class. Where every adult had a say in the running of the nation. And where better to break down these barriers than with women and their then lack of rights..
In the early 1900’s this was literally explosive stuff. The very thought, the mere whisper of equal voting rights was up there with treason. A vile and quite preposterous idea that, according to many, would shake Edwardian, safe, secure Britain to its very foundations with such violence it could wreck the Empire and everything this nation stood for.
Overreaction was the ammunition that the Edwardian establishment used in overdrive. It was a fuel that energised opposition to change. The more fuel the greater the ridiculous drama. Britain’s minority ruling classes steamed head-first into patriotic insanity. Using mass communication (news print) as it’s slave to paint the undesired picture on a canvas of crazed propaganda.
12th July 1913 is a typical immediate pre-war day. The Suffragists and their movement were, by now, at war with the seemingly stodgy British establishment. These rebels in dresses and bonnets wanted everything their mothers never had.
The Grantham Journal is in full flow reporting the varying real life-threatening events. Reading this between the lines we genuinely see that the joke (if ever it was one) is most definitely over.
