NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY

In Trade: Wealthy Business Families in and , 1870-1930

A DISSERTATION

SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

for the degree

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Field of History

By

Emma Goldsmith

EVANSTON, ILLINOIS

December 2017

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Abstract

This dissertation provides an account of the richest people in Glasgow and Liverpool at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. It focuses on those in shipping, trade, and shipbuilding, who had global interests and amassed large fortunes. It examines the transition away from family business as managers took over, family successions altered, office spaces changed, and new business trips took hold. At the same time, the family itself underwent a shift away from endogamy as young people, particularly women, rebelled against the old way of arranging marriages. This dissertation addresses questions about gentrification, suburbanization, and the decline of civic leadership. It challenges the notion that businessmen aspired to become aristocrats. It follows family businessmen through the First

World War, which upset their notions of efficiency, businesslike behaviour, and free trade, to the painful interwar years. This group, once proud leaders of Liverpool and Glasgow, assimilated into the national upper-middle class. This dissertation is rooted in the family papers left behind by these families, and follows their experiences of these turbulent and eventful years.

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Acknowledgements

This work would not have been possible without the advising of Deborah Cohen. Her inexhaustible willingness to comment on my writing and improve my ideas has shaped every part of this dissertation, and I owe her many thanks. The other members of my committee, Joel

Mokyr and Scott Sowerby, have also improved this work and my thinking overall. Other faculty members including Chris Lane, Alex Owen, and Tracy Davis have helped me along the way, and

I am thankful for their support.

The funding for this work came from the History department at Northwestern, the

Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, and the Buffett Institute for Global Studies.

This research would not have possible without the help of the archivists and searchroom assistants at the Glasgow Mitchell Library, the Glasgow University Archives, the Liverpool

Record Office, the Liverpool Maritime Museum (and Special Collections), and the Liverpool

University Archives. I encountered great enthusiasm and helpfulness at all these archives and am grateful to them. I would like to particularly acknowledge Helena Smart for her help with the

Jewish archives at the Liverpool Record Office.

Much of this work has been through workshops organized by the Long Nineteenth

Century Colloquium and the British Studies Cluster at Northwestern. To everyone who took the time to read and comment on my work, thank you. The fresh eyes of those outside the discipline of history have improved my work immensely.

My colleagues and friends at Northwestern have done a great deal of editing, and over the years we have also discussed historical theories and debated all kinds of problems. Alex 4

Lindgren-Gibson, Beth Healey, Emilie Takayama Mouchel, Marlous van Waijenburg, Sam

Kling, Ashley Johnson, Emily Hoyler, and Ariel Schwartz are all due a special mention. Other friends outside the university have helped me along the way, including Sara Jatcko, Rob

Winkeler, Jin Kim, Eleanor Matthews, Reema Mehta, and Katie Sanderson.

My grandparents, John and Angela Goldsmith and Jim and Audrey Beal, have helped throughout my education. My love of history began with their stories of their lives and their ancestors. My final debt is to my parents, whose work on multiple drafts of this dissertation has been invaluable. Without their support this could not have been completed.

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Dedication

For mum and dad

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Table of Contents

Abstract ...... 2 Acknowledgements ...... 3 Dedication ...... 5 Table of Contents ...... 6 List of Illustrations and Maps ...... 8 Introduction ...... 9 Chapter One Business ...... 23 Historiography ...... 25 Technology ...... 34 Legal change ...... 35 Geopolitics ...... 38 Business premises and culture ...... 40 Business succession...... 46 Business travel ...... 52 Cosmopolitanism ...... 65 End of family business ...... 68 Chapter Two Kinship ...... 70 Endogamy and kinship in the mid-nineteenth century ...... 72 Kinship socializing in the mid-nineteenth century ...... 76 ‘Society’...... 80 Pride in kinship ...... 84 Unsuitable marriage ...... 89 Decline of the Kinship Marriage System ...... 94 Decline in fertility ...... 99 Decline in married population ...... 102 Unmarried rich women ...... 106 7

Work and women ...... 110 Effects of the decline of kinship marriage system ...... 112 Sect and the kinship marriage system ...... 114 International marriage ...... 117 Chapter Three Home and Leisure ...... 127 Religion and suburbanization ...... 137 Personal quirks and suburbanization ...... 144 Gender and property ...... 148 Living outside the city ...... 156 Shooting ...... 159 Golf...... 165 Decline in civic leadership...... 170 Assessing the gentrification thesis ...... 180 Chapter Four War ...... 182 Volunteer Soldiers ...... 185 Boer War...... 189 The First World War ...... 194 Bureaucracy ...... 201 Unbusinesslike War...... 205 Government and business in wartime ...... 209 Chapter Five Disappearance ...... 228 Joining the upper-middle class...... 232 Education ...... 235 Mobility and fitting in ...... 245 Honours ...... 250 The next generations ...... 261 Conclusion ...... 271 Pedigrees...... 278 Bibliography ...... 284

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List of Illustrations and Maps

Figure 1 Addresses of those with surnames starting with M, who were never deleted from the Wellington Club Address Book. Business addresses marked in green and home addresses marked in blue...... 132 Figure 2 Addresses of Male Shareholders in the Garston Tanning Company represented as a heat map...... 133 Figure 3 Map of company headquarters in the city centre at India Buildings, family home at Rake Lane where Alfred grew up, his first home after marriage at Holly road and his second at Crofton ...... 135 Figure 4 Map of the house at 90 Chatham Street, marked as Willy Melly, and the homes of two of Willy’s married brothers...... 137 Figure 5 Map of the three Unitarian churches of Liverpool ...... 140 Figure 6 Map of 74 Parliament Street and 5 Princes Avenue ...... 143 Figure 7 Map showing the company headquarters at Garston in relation to Halton Grange ...... 152 Figure 8 Map showing the remoteness of Auchterarder, between Stirling and Perth ...... 157 Figure 9 George Melly in his library at home ...... 177 Figure 10 Page from George Melly, “A Week at the North Fort by a Gunner of the Fourth Artillery Volunteers” in Stray Leaves vol 1. (1861?) ...... 187 Figure 11 Photograph captioned “Father Arthur and Ted 1916” of Francis Boston and his sons Arthur Shakerley Boston (1891-1965) and Edward Lansdowne Boston (1895-1982) ...... 220

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Introduction

In the early 1980s the musician and writer George Melly published the final third of his autobiography, dealing with his earliest years. Born in 1926, he was descended from generations of Liverpool businessmen dating back to his great-great-grandfather André Melly, who had arrived in Liverpool from Geneva in 1822 to trade in cotton.1 Over a hundred years later the young George worried about his future in a family and social world defined by business:

“I worried sometimes that when I grew up I would have to make a living, presumably by

going into business. The only thing was that I couldn’t understand what ‘business’ meant. I

knew it was how my father and uncles ‘made money’ and that it took place in offices in the

city, but even after visiting them I was none the wiser. … Would I really have to be a

business man when I grew up? I’d rather have been a shopkeeper because I could understand

what they did, but then all the shopkeepers had Liverpool accents. … all my relations,

except for Uncle Percy and George Rawdon Smith who was a doctor, seemed to be in

business and so did all of my father’s friends.”2

For George the Navy and jazz music broadened his horizons and made him his living, and he moved away from Liverpool. But even if he had stayed, the Liverpool business world itself was no longer that of his father’s generation. These early memories described the early 1930s, the last years in which the family business model still just about worked, when a network of family and friends would “all” be in business organized along those personal lines rather than

1 LRO 920 MEL 40 Edward Ferdinand Melly, Memoirs of Charles Pierre Melly (Coventry1889), 2. 2 George Melly, Owning Up: The Trilogy, (Penguin, 2000). 68-9. This point about the Liverpool accents of the shopkeepers is a child’s explanation rather than a true causation, although as I discuss in chapter five most businessmen had a Received Pronunciation accent by the 1930s. 10 that of the large corporation. The family business was smaller than its successors — it was limited by the size of a family, where the modern firm is more like the size of a tribe. It was reliant on personal reputation and focused on honour.3 It was hierarchical but also intimate, with work relationships based on family dynamics such as that of father and son.

This dissertation examines rich family businessmen in the port cities of Glasgow and

Liverpool through sixty years between 1870 and 1930. It traces a decline, as the family firm disappeared as a way of organizing trade and the two cities fell from being globally important cities to provincial ones. My focus is the people rather than the cities or particular trades, and I follow what happened to them after the heyday. I consider how these port city businessmen became integrated into a national middle class and in some cases, into an international elite. This is therefore not just a story of things falling apart, but also an examination of how the wealthiest responded.

My aim is not a history of businesses but of a business class: a group whose lives, habits and culture were dictated by the business cycle and also created a version of business that suited their particular social activities. This dissertation draws out common strands across this group: an attitude other elites (such as aristocrats or professionals) called philistine, levels of wealth that would seem extraordinary to professionals, a complex paternalism that came from the fact that business and family were entwined.

3 While family business might no longer be particularly honourable —it can be more nepotistic and corrupt — in the nineteenth century family was a shortcut to trust. Preserving the honour of the family was an important concern for businessmen before the advent of limited liability and joint-stock partnerships. 11

The behaviour of these capitalists has been a source of intense interest in several historiographies. Histories of British decline, class, urbanization, and globalization have used these people’s words and actions in support of particular arguments, often to criticize their business sense or their exploitation of others. In my exploration of these people’s letters and personal papers, I found people who are unrecognizable from historiographical debates. Instead of proving a point using selective quotations or actions, I seek to understand how these people considered themselves and their enterprises. I look at the way they organized socially and befriended each other, how they considered their families within a changing Britain, and how they imagined the future of their business. I examine businessmen within their families and their society, fitting the social and the economic together. Business was not conducted in an abstract marketplace for these men. It was rooted in the family and in local leadership, even as their influence reshaped far away parts of the empire, moved thousands of people across the world, and brought new goods around the globe. Seeing beyond the businessman’s purely economic role to the place he occupied in his family, locality and social network brings new light to the debates in which he has been invoked.

There is a long litany of complaints against my subjects. They have been described variously as insufficiently businesslike, therefore encouraging decline; obsessed with the aristocracy, therefore acting as a conservative force on the rest of the middle class; deserters of their local area, therefore dooming the provincial city to destruction; and exploitative. The last accusation is certainly true and has been the latest blemish on their reputation. Recent work on capitalism has been more interested in the people most ground down by it — the dock workers, indentured labourers, factory workers and others whose suffering was so profitable to the rich businessmen 12 of Glasgow and Liverpool — rather than those who benefitted. As a consequence it has tended to see the winners in rather caricatured terms. Sven Beckert’s take on the cotton merchants of

Liverpool, for example, would have them as smug and self-satisfied, as blind to the future failings of their profitable trade.4 I see a very different view from inside family papers and personal diaries. These rich and powerful people were bombastic in public, and their superiority rested on all kinds of cruelty, but they were well aware of both how precarious the future was and what their success cost to others, including the poor all around them.5 Philanthropy and investigations into poverty were widespread among these families, and were often felt as a religious duty. In their writings, and also their personal financial organization, they showed an acute understanding of the business busts that could occur in the future. My dissertation revises our picture of these sometimes-caricatured figures by examining when they were humble and when swaggering, and when they were intelligent and when short-sighted. It is not enough to look at the appropriate words and public actions of these businessmen, to quote selectively from them and use them as stand-ins for the business system they headed. I am interested in the moments when they lacked agency as much as when they seemed to be kings of the world. Profit was not their only motive, so if scholars view them only through a simple economic lens then they ignore the other forces that shaped their decisions and behaviour — behaviour which then affected many others around the world.

This dissertation speaks to the growing literature on the history of capitalism, which has thus far been most avidly pursued in the context of US history. There have been two main trends:

4 Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (2014), x. 5 The literature for philanthropy for Glasgow and Liverpool is exemplified well by Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (Yale University Press, 2004) 13 debates on the determinants of modern economic growth have been expanded to a global level, and historians have explored the cultures of capitalist economies, from fraud to risk to debt.

Starting in 1870 and ending in 1930, my work looks at economic growth in the first industrialized nation while it was in the process of being overtaken by a new set of competitors, especially the United States and Germany. I begin right after the triumph of sail over steam and follow until the . The capitalism literature shows us globalization: I try to understand when the family-business model began to be obsolete, stressing how late and slow the change away from it was. My work therefore suggests how those people who were the originators of globalization could also act as a brake on its growth, because their own preferences and practices were not aimed at producing globalization. When personal or familial concerns ran against business goals, it often was the personal that won out.

If the new literature on capitalism tends to see the rich middle class of Glasgow and

Liverpool as ruthlessly profit-driven (and blind to the suffering they produced), an earlier historiography, emblemized by the debates over Martin Wiener’s English Culture and the

Decline of the Industrial Spirit, instead found them at fault for being insufficiently ruthless and canny. The claim is that the British industrial advantage, so absolute in the early-nineteenth century, was damaged by the attempts of the rich middle class to become aristocrats, by investing in country mansions and unprofitable leisure pursuits. From the 1880s the aristocracy was under economic pressure as land prices dropped, and also faced the erosion of their political, social, and cultural pre-eminence, leaving a gap for the wealthy middle class to exploit.6 The argument goes that they did not push aside these weakened aristocrats, but instead propped the

6 David Cannadine, The of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 14 aristocracy up by buying into their economically irrational culture. As a result, family businesses went from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations, and early British gains from industrialization were squandered.

The controversy over Wiener’s book has been settled, but the description of British businessmen preceded and outlasted it. 7 In the 1950s Asa Briggs described the failure of

England to “become a business society” as due to “businessmen themselves show[ing] only a limited interest in the values by which they had risen.”8 And Briggs was only drawing on what people had said at the time: in 1868 the Editor of the Fortnightly Review was writing that in

Lancashire “[t]he sons of weavers are hunting up genealogies and spreading their wings for sublime apotheosis among the families.”9 What this vein of criticism ignored was the lack of correlation between certain leisure practices and business failure. My work sets changes in leisure against the backdrop of a profound reordering of British society across the period from

1870 to 1930. Instead of a class passively attempting to become aristocrats, I find people who had a very particular vision of society and attempted to remake Britain in their own image. Their culture was technical, centred on money, and valued experience above abstract knowledge: they

7 The Wiener thesis was undermined by economic historians who argued that the failure of British businessmen to latch onto new technologies was rational at the time. The debates are laid out in Deidre McCloskey, Enterprise and Trade in Victorian Britain: Essays in Historical Economics (Routledge, 2003). General support and opposition for the idea of a gentrified middle class comes in J. M. Crook, The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches: Style and Status in Victorian and Edwardian Architecture, (John Murray, 1999) and F.M.L. Thompson, Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture: Britain 1780-1980 ( University Press, 2001). These debates are described and critiqued in David Edgerton, “The Decline of Declinism” The Business History Review, Vol. 71, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 201-206. Peter Mandler’s “Against ‘Englishness’: English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850-1940” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society Vol. 7 (1997), pp. 155-175 and The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (Yale University Press, 1999) are also damaging criticisms of this literature. 8 Asa Briggs, Victorian People: A Reassessment of Persons and Themes, 1851-1867 (1955), 11. 9 John Morley, "The Chamber of Mediocrity," Fortnightly Review 1868, 690. The paragraph concludes “The man who began life as a beggar and a Chartist softens down into the Radical when he has got credit enough for a spinning-shed; a factory of his own mollifies him into what is called a sound Liberal; and by the time he owns a mansion and a piece of land he has a feeling as of blue blood tingling in his veins, and thinks of a pedigree and a motto in old French.” 15 considered that this was the ideal pattern for the rest of the nation. Yet it was not without its contradictions: the paternalism required for family capitalism, and the social inequalities created by the specific economic conditions in Glasgow and Liverpool, made their culture insular, formal, and strikingly old-fashioned. My dissertation explores this culture and how they tried to imprint it on the rest of society, arguing that whatever else it was, it was not aristocratic.

The image of failed businessmen has spilled over into other historiographies, such as the history of suburbanization and of provincial Society.10 Businessmen have been accused of leaving the cities for the countryside, thus hollowing out urban social networks. I instead look at the businessmen and their families on their own terms: where they moved from and to, and what they hoped to achieve by this move. Attention to the details of moving show that this was an entirely normal process: almost all classes were suburbanizing, partially because both cities were growing so fast. Urban Society was hollowed out by various factors, including the end of the elite monopoly over local political power. The erosion of their monopoly was in some respects a great achievement of the upper-middle class, as they managed to incorporate working-class politicians without devastating political strife. What in a history of a city looks like failure — suburbanization and the loss of urban Society — can be reinterpreted from the perspective of the businessmen as a far more ambivalent and multifaceted experience. Society and suburbanization affected how families interacted and behaved, and in chapters two and three I look particularly at how women influenced the decline of Society and the expansion of suburbanization.

10 “Society” (rather than “society”) refers to the structure that organized how respectable people (particularly women) interacted with each other. It encompassed a series of behaviours such as calling cards, balls, introductions, and presentations, which were highly ritualized. 16

My subjects had enormous wealth and therefore great power. Some were millionaires, some half-millionaires — what would be in the hundreds of millions of pounds . At the start of the period they ruled the cities with very little interference from or the city’s workers.

They also shaped the through their commercial decisions, by building railways, running services, and carrying goods. The shipbuilders of Glasgow built some of the gunboats that were used for gunboat diplomacy.11 The owners of shipbuilding yards or shipping lines stood out among the rest of Liverpool and Glasgow — employers of hundreds of men, prominent philanthropists, in control of the town councils, monopolists of political leadership, and top of the local social hierarchy. The terminology of businessman tends to dilute this wealth and power, but it is the most neutral yet descriptive term. Capitalists suggests class struggle (not a topic of this dissertation), plutocrat is derogatory and tied to the City, and elite overplays the political. At other times I have used rich and wealthy as a shorthand.

I argue that their workplace habits and attitudes — a business culture — carried over into their everyday lives. This business culture was characteristic of their leisure as well as their working lives, and inflected their attitudes to government and social hierarchy. It was practical and technical, professional rather than amateur, and accountable to the bottom line. Businessmen assumed that the problems of the world could be solved by the application of business logic: this separated them from the aristocracy, who tried to rule without trying to reproduce their culture for everyone else. It was also steeped in the culture of the family business, which ran to a logic contrary to male-preference primogeniture. Instead of the man with the right bloodline becoming

11 For example, the HMS Thrush, which took part in the British defeat of Zanzibar in 1896, was built by Scott’s at . 17 heir, the family business functioned by having many related men working together in relative equality. Careers started at the bottom of the white-collar end of the business, and bloodlines were a fast-track to – rather than a guarantee of – top positions. Furthermore business drew from the related middle-class phenomenon of voluntary associations. A friendship made through a club or in city politics might influence business dealings, while at the same time money was taken from business for personal use.12 This associational culture, so critical in the formation of the middle class, was hierarchical and yet not organized by birth.13

Scope and Methodology I engage with scholarship that covers a broad range of topics and locations, which I have chosen to narrow down to the cities of Liverpool and Glasgow and the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Liverpool was the hub of Atlantic trade and had an economy built on service to the manufacturing hubs of northern . Glasgow was Scotland’s largest urban centre, and combined an important Atlantic port with industrial production, particularly shipbuilding. It was the shipbuilding capital of the world, and by 1913 produced a fifth of the world’s new tonnage per year. The wealth of trade and industry was heavily concentrated in both cities.

Rubinstein’s figures on millionaires who died between 1809 and 1914, puts and

Clydeside as the two areas thickest with the super-rich outside of London.14

12 J. Forbes Munro, Maritime Enterprise and Empire : Sir William Mackinnon and His Business Network, 1823-93 (Boydell Press, 2003), 213. describes the push and pull of business and “personal whims, hobbies or ambitions”, arguing that profits were far from the only goal of business networks such as the Mackinnon group. 13 R. J. Morris, Class, Sect, and Party : The Making of the British Middle Class : Leeds, 1820-1850 (, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990). 14 William D. Rubinstein, "The Victorian Middle Classes: Wealth, Occupation, and Geography," The Economic History Review 30, no. 4 (Nov 1977): 609. The picture is cloudier for half-millionaires but still shows a similar concentration of wealth in Liverpool and Glasgow. 18

While Liverpool was far more a service economy and Glasgow an industrial one, they were both provincial cities with huge wealth and influence. They were the largest and most cosmopolitan ports outside of London, and faced west out towards the Atlantic and America.

Their economies created a very unequal social hierarchy, with a more extreme divide between rich and poor than in most British cities.15 A very small and very rich middle class faced a vast mass of unskilled labour. The working-class histories of these cities are rich and important, and have tended to dominate the popular imagination of the cities.

The starting point of 1870 marks the first point at which the tide began to turn against the family business system. It took decades before the family firm was actually a disadvantage, but the conditions for its demise were first set in the 1870s. It was becoming too expensive for a single family to support a business, even a very wealthy one, and easier to bring in outside investors. In the 1870s too, steam’s victory over sail was assured and global competition began to truly threaten British hegemony. Both of these made economies of scale ever more attractive, encouraging firms to expand beyond the size of a family business. Within Britain, family structure changed dramatically from the 1870s. Another pinpoint for the starting point of this dissertation is the decline of the aristocracy, which began in the 1880s with falling land prices.

The end point of 1930 brings the family business system to its eventual death, and the family structure that underwrote it to a full evolution. The Victorian family firm and the Victorian patriarchal family had disappeared by the 1930s. The Great Depression did great damage to the

15 The large Irish populations of both cities lived in particular poverty. There were fewer skilled working-class jobs than in manufacturing cities, and more need for unskilled labour. At the other end, too, there were more millionaires. Irene Maver, Glasgow (Edinburgh University Press, 2000) and John Belchem, ed. Liverpool 800: Culture, Character & History (Liverpool University Press, 2006) cover this well. 19 economies of both Liverpool and Glasgow, along with the whole of northern England and

Scotland. In the 1930s both cities sunk into a decline that would become pronounced after the

Second World War, so much so that these cities remain “problem cities” notable even within postindustrial Britain for their delinquency.

My methodology has been to read deeply into family archives. The rich leave papers much more often than do the poor, but they also come under less critical scrutiny, as historians have tended to treat them either as individuals or as archetypes. From the mid-nineteenth century social investigators began to extensively document poverty, bequeathing historians with a wealth of information about the poor. But the investigation always focused downwards, and the behaviour of the wealthy was not a topic for serious study. One of the most famous social investigators, Charles Booth, was a Liverpool shipowner who came from exactly the rich business class I am exploring in this dissertation — but his studies were always of urban poverty rather than urban wealth. So to understand the ecology of these port-city elites, I have dug into the family papers and personal letters written by these businessmen, and tried to find, in public records and newspapers, the places where the family papers are silent. These private papers are underused: even in histories of family businesses, historians have generally explored family capitalism through the strictly business papers rather than delving into the personal relationships which, as I argue, were also business ones.

Chapter outline Chapter one begins with the world of the office, exploring the decline of the family business.

It argues that this decline began later than has been described in some of the historiography, and investigates various places where decline can be seen, from office furniture to succession plans. 20

The chapter then explores how family business became less reliant on the family using the specific example of the business trip, a new kind of travel in the late-nineteenth century. This section concentrates on Richard Holt of the , whose family’s story figures in every chapter. Born in 1868 and dying in 1941, his lifespan barely stretches beyond the dissertation’s period of 1870 to 1930, and his well-documented life gives a very useful template for what being a very wealthy shipowner in Liverpool was like.

Chapter two considers the transformations in family structure that ran alongside changes in family businesses. I argue that families changed earlier and more quickly than business, and the place of women in the family changed most of all. It examines the discontents and quarrels that arose out of the breakdown of the Victorian family system, focusing on an estrangement between

Richard Holt’s siblings. The key institution of this chapter is marriage, and so I explore how people made choices about whom — or if — to marry, and focus especially on Society. Society organized social behaviour through rituals including introductions, presentations, and balls, to give young people marriage choices but also limit their unsuitable options. As the family system changed, so too did Society. As well as suitable marriages, this chapter examines the ramifications of unsuitable marriages and social behaviour through the shipbuilding millionaire

William Pearce (1833-1888).

Chapter three takes on the built environment, and using GIS mapping tools provides an account of suburbanization: who stayed and who went, whether to the countryside or London, and how they explained their behaviour. It connects the story of suburbanization with that of women and property, and leisure, taking on questions around gentrification. I follow two family disputes over property, including the siblings of Richard Holt, to investigate what the various 21 claims of daughters and sons were. The chapter then argues that suburbanization did not necessarily lead to gentrification by looking at leisure practices which inspired criticism.

Shooting was of course adopted from aristocrats, but rich men in Glasgow and Liverpool did not shoot because they hoped to be accepted; instead they went shooting together to cement the bonds among themselves. The chapter then examines a suburban sport which businessmen popularized and spread for themselves: golf.

Chapter four follows the businessmen onto the battlefield, arguing that there was an uneasy relationship between business and the military which was especially strained in the First World

War. From the mid-nineteenth century the Volunteer movement put forward a different vision of military power from the traditional aristocratic one, and the rich businessmen of Liverpool and

Glasgow enthusiastically took part in Volunteerism. They hoped for a citizen-army rather than an aristocrat-army, one run along efficient and business-like lines. But in the Boer War and then even more in the First World War, businessmen soldiers found that the army was still in dire need of efficiencies. In the letters and diaries of businessmen soldiers including Philip Holt,

Maurice Crum, and James Lithgow I find concern with bringing business practice to the trenches

— instead of the despair and existential disillusionment we might expect from front-line accounts. Back home the war refocused businessmen, especially those in shipping and trade, onto a new opponent: bureaucracy and red tape.

Chapter five assesses how the rich businessmen of Glasgow and Liverpool lost their distinctiveness, the particular business culture that defined them, disappearing into the middle and upper classes of Britain. Their local particularity was lost as they accepted national honours, adopted Received Pronunciation, and attended public schools and Oxbridge. In the interwar the 22

British middle class drew together as an increasingly homogenous group, and the wealthy people of Liverpool and Glasgow found a place within a powerful national . 16

In recent years it has become clear that Britain, like other Western countries, is becoming more unequal. The social structure of Liverpool and Glasgow between 1870 and 1930 — a very small and very rich upper-middle business class against a large mostly unskilled

— is looking more and more recognizable today. After the financial crash the bankers, modern- day equivalents of my subjects, have been the focus of intense dispute. We know so little about the super-rich as a group — about how they make their money, where they keep their money, and how they try to use their money — but these questions loom large for governments planning taxes and ordinary citizens trying to leverage political power against economic power. I do not pretend I can answer these questions for today, but I believe that studying the very wealthy of the past provides comparisons that can be at least interesting in our current moment.

16 Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951 (Oxford University Press, 2000), 102. 23

Chapter One Business

Business changed between 1870 and 1930, especially for those on the forefront of global capitalism living in major British port cities. New technology propelled a shipping boom that gave opportunities to make fortunes, but technology also changed the very nature of the business.

Communications and travel became far faster and easier with the advent of and telegraphs.

The buccaneering days from the establishment of British naval supremacy in the

Napoleonic wars to the end of the 1850s were boom-and-bust, as British sail spread across the world and exploited new markets in the Americas and Far East.17 Some years might see record profits, in others there would be widespread woe: 1815, 1825, 1836-9, 1847, and 1857 all saw major bankruptcies and bank failures.18 The invention of the screw-propelled changed everything, although over the course of decades rather than years.19 Instead of many small firms fighting in an expanding market, a few big businesses competed with the safeguard of monopolies. Trade could move faster and in larger quantities on steamships. The invention and expansion of the telegraph linked markets together, further speeding up and enlarging business transactions. Ship space could be used more efficiently once ports could communicate quickly.

Merchants could sell large quantities without ever holding a large inventory, by communicating

17 Graeme J. Milne, Trade and Traders in Mid-Victorian Liverpool: Mercantile Business and the Making of a World Port (Liverpool University Press, 2000). titles his introduction ‘Boom, Bust, Crisis and Opportunity’ 18 H.M. Hyndman, Commercial Crises of the Nineteenth Century (1892). After the 1850s, the years 1866, 1873, 1882, and 1890 were particularly painful. What changed was that firms began to expect for bust to follow boom, and therefore plan for and guard against it. 19 The shipowning community in Liverpool only began to switch in the mid-1850s and clung to sailing until 1870s according to P. L. Cottrell, "The Steamship on the Mersey, 1815-80," in Shipping, Trade and Commerce: Essays in Memory of Ralph Davis, ed. D. H. Aldcroft and P. L Cottrell (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1981), 141 24 customer demand to suppliers in hours and shipping in days. Together the steamship and the telegraph had revolutionary potential for business.

In the earlier — pre-steamship and pre-telegraph — period businesses were more transient and opportunities were always open to outsiders. Small partnerships with little capital could persuade others to give credit, trade, and trust.20 In the new era of the steamship and telegraph, business needed more capital. These new technologies were expensive to invest in even though the payoff was larger. Instead of partnerships there were limited companies, which prevented personal ruin in the case of business failure. Companies needed to find a larger pool of investors, beyond the investments of friends and family members. Bigger was advantageous for several reasons: economies of scale, the possibility of monopolies, government contracts and protection. More capital and larger companies required delegation, departments, and management.21

The change to bigger companies with more capital therefore transformed — in a far from complete and total way — the world of small transient partnerships into that of behemoth companies protected by cartels. This transformation happened slowly and often remained incomplete. But change happened in one direction, away from family business practices. Most firms retained aspects of the old family firm model, but all had to adapt some new practices to survive. These adaptations resulted from technological change, new legal opportunities, and geopolitical shifts, and can be observed in office culture and business travel.

20 Milne in John Belchem, ed. Liverpool 800: Culture, Character & History (Liverpool University Press, 2006), 290. 21 I am drawing here among others on Charles A. Jones, International Business in the Nineteenth Century: The Rise and Fall of a Cosmopolitan Bourgeoisie (Wheatsheaf, 1987). 25

We understand much about these changes at a macro level, particularly what they meant in new deals and opportunities. What is not as well understood are the personal and local effects.

These changes in business meant shifts on the ground in offices and firms in Glasgow and

Liverpool, which radiated out into social and family life. The limits and utility of the family, the reach of local elite power, and the relationship between provincial cities and London were all changed by the knock-on effects of business transformation. In this first chapter I will consider when and to what degree the transition away from the family firm took place. I argue that it happened after 1900, slowly but inexorably, and examine the transition’s effects in office life, business succession, and business travel.

Historiography

The extent and timing of change in the family firm is hotly disputed. Just to understand how business was transacted in Liverpool and Glasgow is a complicated question. Some scholars focus on a single merchant house or shipping fleet, while others take a wider perspective. There are four broad categories of scholarship. The first is the ‘Liverpool School’ of business historians who undertook detailed studies of individual firms, published mostly in the 1960s and 1970s.22

The second includes those scholars concerned with larger trends, such as Cain and Hopkins, and

Charles Jones, who were particularly influenced by new imperial histories. Their approach was much broader, taking in businesses across the country and connecting business trends to changes in politics, war, and imperialism. The third category comprises more recent experts on shipping who have refocused down to the level of particular places, reworking some of the conclusions of

22 Sheila Marriner published her first work The Rathbones of Liverpool in 1961. Her work and that of Francis Hyde was published over the next two decades. 26 the Liverpool School. Graeme Milne, for example, has incorporated ordinary sailors into his analysis of business in Liverpool. The fourth are sociological economists who use the business history of Glasgow and Liverpool to test out theories, most recently network theory.

The shift away from family business is generally understood across all these literatures as having several markers.

1) An increase in capital investment. This may occur either through a widening investment base, or more investment per investor, or both.

2a) An increase in fleet tonnage per shipping firm. This allowed economies of scale, which in turn tended shipping towards cartels and monopolies. More tonnage allowed government contracts, and government protection.

2b) An increase in the volume of trade per merchant house. With faster communication and travel, this could be achieved without merchants holding a larger inventory.

3) New legal status allowed by changes to legislation. The 1844 Joint Stock Companies

Act made unincorporated companies legally secure.23 The 1855 Limited Liability Act established limited liability for joint-stock companies, and the two were consolidated in the 1856 Joint Stock

Companies Act. The 1862 Companies Act further elaborated and solidified this system. Limited liability was extended to partnerships in the 1867 Companies Act.24 The time lag between the introduction of limited liability and its extension to partnerships tended to make joint-stock synonymous with limited liability, and partnerships.

23 Cottrell, 146. 24 Geoffrey Todd, "Some Aspects of Joint Stock Companies, 1844-1900," The Economic History Review 4, no. 1 (1932): 48-9. 27

4) An increase in personnel. This tended to then require new skills of delegation, organization, and management, possibly with a broader base of leadership. Office buildings might gain new technologies and amenities.

Scholars agree that some of these changes were responses to changes in global opportunities and competition, and others were organic responses to business growth. These changes all happened to various degrees across maritime industries in Liverpool and Glasgow.

But how to account for stop-and-start and uneven change is still controversial. Scholars also dispute the extent to which businessmen as a group were transformed by the economic changes going on around them.

There is a disjunction between those working on larger trends and those working on individual firms, with the former tending to emphasize change and the latter continuity and contingency. At the large scale, the most theoretically provocative is Charles Jones’

International Business in the Nineteenth Century: The Rise and Fall of a Cosmopolitan

Bourgeoisie, which hypothesizes the existence of a ‘cosmopolitan bourgeoisie’ built during the inventive years of family firms.25 Family firms flourished in the early- and mid-nineteenth century, but from the 1870s their predominance was threatened by economic change. The shift away from family firms, starting in the 1870s, totally transformed the ‘cosmopolitan bourgeoisie’ in Jones’ telling. Business change made the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie into their polar opposites, from free-trading liberals to monopolist nationalists. This loss of self-belief and promise then had profound effects on the nations they were part of, contributing to the rise of new imperialism and

25 Jones. 28 jingoism. The shift away from the family firm, according to Jones, happened as early as the

1870s, and totally transformed the lives of businessmen and their families.

Another historian working at a macro scale, Stanley Chapman, picks up many of Jones’ ideas in his study of British merchants, especially Jones’ vision of a cosmopolitan and international business elite that was drawn to Britain but not necessarily straightforwardly

‘British’.26 Chapman also follows Jones’ timeline, where the 1870s and 1880s are the end of of family business. Tellingly, though, he refuses to focus on the personalities of the merchants and shipping men of his study: his work “resisted the attempts made by some historians and theorists to identify a particular dominant characteristic of the mercantile group, preferring to profile the rich diversity of enterprise and show something of its consequences for the unprecedented growth of trade in the period.”27 He explores many varied trades without saying much about the personal behaviour of the traders: personality traits are mere diversity rather than useful historical information. And despite this focus on diversity, Chapman sees change already in the 1870s and 1880s.

Histories of individual firms, as exemplified particularly by the Liverpool School, have tended to see contingencies and continuities. Personal quirks, sudden deaths, or other random human factors might affect a business’s trajectory. For example, the tramp shipping line Burrell and Son sold their entire fleet between 1898 and 1900, entering a five-year hiatus in which the firm worked as insurance brokers and shipping agents, before buying thirty new ships over the

26 Stanley Chapman, Merchant Enterprise in Britain: From the Industrial Revolution to (Cambridge University Press, 1992). 27 Ibid., xiii-xiv. 29 next six years. The historian of Burrell and Son, R. A. Cage, calls this episode a “mystery”. 28

Such moments do not fit neatly into schemes like Jones’. A focus on individuals and the ups and downs of business encourages historians of individual firms to see the impact of personality as more crucial than global trends. For example, Sheila Marriner claims of the Rathbones’ Far

Eastern trade that the steamship, telegraph, and Suez all “accelerated trends already evident rather than fundamentally altering the organization of the tea and silk trades.”29 Graeme

Milne, taking a broader view by looking at trade across mid-Victorian Liverpool, is conservative on the impact of the Canal but does stress that especially for Far East trade, Suez was a “major new factor”.30

This is not to imply that historians with the macro perspective have seen broader trends, and historians focusing on individual firms have not been able to see the woods for the trees. The histories of individual firms can be used to dispute that the broader trends occurred at all, or at least in the way offered by the macro histories. Gordon Boyce uses a study of thirteen entrepreneurs to theorize a timeline for business that began with entry (buying a ship or a share in a ship), proceeded to consolidation (consolidating ships into a multivessel enterprise), through to groups (many vessels and many routes).31 He argues that between 1840 and 1890 conditions were most favourable for entry and consolidation. It was not until after 1900 that the group stage became more common, “by which time steam services covered the globe and slower technological progress, more extensively subsidized foreign competitors, and the spread of

28 R. A. Cage, A Tramp Shipping Dynasty--Burrell & Son of Glasgow, 1850-1939: A History of Ownership, Finance, and Profit (Greenwood Press, 1997), 11. 29 Sheila Marriner, Rathbones of Liverpool, 1845-73 (Liverpool University Press, 1961), 113. 30 Milne, 62. 31 Gordon Boyce, "64thers, Syndicates, and Stock Promotions: Information Flows and Fund-Raising Techniques of British Shipowners before 1914," The Journal of Economic History 52, no. 1 (1992): 183. 30 conferences meant fewer opportunities to develop new lines.”32 Small family enterprise was then favourable for longer than Jones and others claim, at least up until steam was totally dominant.

After steam triumphed, the group stage became more common for businesses, with large fleets and membership in shipping conferences. Shipping conferences were deals struck between firms to pool tonnage rather than competing, collaborating to match supply with demand.33 Merchants were offered discounts if they exclusively used conference vessels. The first was created in 1875, and they were so popular that in 1914 there were over 300.34 Ships had to sail on their timetable, and other costs around labour and port use were also fixed, so it was important for shipowners to maintain shipping rates. Boyce’s argument that conditions were still favourable for entry until

1890, and only became optimal for large-scale companies after 1900, contradicts Jones’ notion of small family businesses beginning to fail or being forced to expand beyond their family base in the 1870s.

The 1870s seems therefore entirely too early to diagnose the end of family business, though things were already shifting, with shipbuilding and shipowning in particular becoming more difficult for new entrants to business. Entering trading or broking was still possible, but with the full switch from steam to sail in the 1870s, anything to do with ships became much more expensive. New communication technologies and legal forms also moved firms away from purely family businesses. But as I’ll argue in this chapter, investment patterns, business culture, and business travel all suggest that the shift away from family firms only decisively happened

32 Ibid., 186. 33 Information, Mediation, and Institutional Development: The Rise of Large-Scale Enterprise in British Shipping, 1870-1919 (Manchester University Press, 1995), 160. 34 Michael B. Miller, Europe and the Maritime World: A Twentieth Century History (Cambridge University Press, 2012), 181. 31 after 1900. The businessmen I have examined were far more conservative in their dealings than the extant scholarship might suggest, and far more likely to see the advantages in continuing with old methods even when new methods came along.

Charles Jones’ prosopographical methodology leaves him particularly vulnerable to criticism. His thesis that businessmen underwent an almost complete u-turn is provocative but difficult to accept totally, as the changes he identifies were far more ambiguous and slower than his scheme suggests. For example, he uses three Liverpool men to illustrate the contrast he posits between the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie and its successors: “[t]he shipowner, Sir Alfred Jones, scarcely a generation younger than Alfred Holt and John Swire, was a world away from them in culture.”35 Alfred Holt’s nephew and successor, Richard Holt, will be discussed in detail in this chapter and was younger still.36 His business style was far more like his uncle than Alfred Jones, the self-made man and life-long bachelor. As we will see, Richard’s business travel was a critical part of the modernization of his uncle’s Blue Funnel shipping line.

A more positive view of family business, as something eminently suited for purpose rather than something antiquated that needed to be jettisoned, is found in several scholarships.

One place in fact is among historians who stress the importance of shipping to the whole of the

British economy and its imperial projects – especially in the literature on “gentlemanly capitalism.” Drawing on the work of W. D. Rubinstein, Cain and Hopkins changed historians’ understanding of the relative importance of merchants and others working in service industries as

35 Jones, 191. 36 Their birth/ death dates are: Alfred Holt (1829-1911) Alfred Jones (1845-1909) Richard Holt (1868-1941). The sixteen-year gap between Alfreds Holt and Jones is more like a half-generation according to the family patterns of wealthy Liverpool families. 32 against industrialists. Rubinstein and Cain and Hopkins emphasize continuity above revolution, downplaying the impact of the Industrial Revolution and instead arguing for the centrality of the southern service-sector economy to Britain’s prosperity and imperialism.37 Their discussion of the gentlemanly culture of the City, and its neat convergence with business organization, influences my view of family business. The kinds of relationship between business partners in the 1870s were similar to those of, say, brothers-in-law. Partners were often held together by informal arrangements rather than extensive contracts, and business dealings with others could be arranged by word rather than by writing.38 The partners would have to trust each other and pool information together, as well as inspire the trust of and gather information from others.

Combining kinship and business made all kinds of sense, as families were already financially interdependent. Who could be more trustworthy than someone who would support you if you were bankrupted? Who would expend more energy to prevent their business partner being bankrupted than a family member that the bankrupt would then rely on? Forbes Munro’s work on Sir William Mackinnon similarly stresses ‘aristocratic capitalism’ and family networks, showing how Mackinnon’s clan of nephews and relations enabled his business interests to spread around the world. Members of the clan did not always pursue profit as the most important goal of business, but cumulatively their efforts made a fortune. Forbes Munro points to Mackinnon’s activities in India and Indonesia in the 1860s, and his expansions into East Africa and the Red

37 Cain and Hopkins point out that the 1890s was a high point of British shipping: 70% of tonnage entering British ports was on British ships in the late-1890s, and 60% of world tonnage was on British ships in 1890. They argue that as British manufacturing income fell such invisible earnings were critical to the continued health of the balance of trade. P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688-2000, 2nd ed. (Pearson, 2002), 158-60. 38 I draw here on Cain and Hopkins’ description of their gentlemanly capitalists: “A gentleman possessed the qualities needed to inspire confidence; and because his word was his bond transactions were both informal and efficient. Shared values, nurtured by a common education and religion, provided a blueprint for social and business behaviour.” Ibid., 49. 33

Sea in the 1870s, as moments when family was particularly critical.39 Personal and family relationships had their weaknesses, but they were critical to British expansion and profit according to Rubinstein, Cain and Hopkins, and Forbes Munro.

Michael Miller’s work on the twentieth century demonstrates how many aspects of what

Jones sees as the culture of the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie in fact persisted until up to the Second

World War. The technological changes of the nineteenth century appear much less transformative when compared with and its results. Beyond the relative revolutionariness of steam versus container, the political transformations of the twentieth century outweigh those of the nineteenth. For Miller the turning point is 1941 and the Japanese invasion of the British Empire in Asia, which destroyed the lucrative British shipping business in Asia.

Business had regenerated from worse, but with decolonization it was impossible and thus 1941 was the end of British hegemony in Asian seas.40 After decolonization British shipping was operating in much more competitive conditions and was forced into new business practices.41

In order to set the stage, this chapter now briefly discusses three elements of change that are well covered in the historiography: technological innovation, legal change, and geopolitical shifts. Then I explore changes in business culture, which is a newer historiography. Finally, I consider business travel, which I argue reflects all of the previously discussed changes, as well as showing how change could beget change. Changes to business travel lessened the reliance of

39 J. Forbes Munro, Maritime Enterprise and Empire : Sir William Mackinnon and His Business Network, 1823-93 (Boydell Press, 2003), 213. 40 Gordon Boyce and Richard Gorski, eds., Resources and Infrastructures in the Maritime Economy, 1500-2000, Research in Maritime History (2002), 15. 41 Miller. 34 business heads on family members and broke down the pipeline that led from family member to apprentice to leader in the next generation.

Technology

Emerging from the morass of historiographical dispute, these scholars share an explanation of change grounded in new technology and contingent opportunities as exploited by entrepreneurs. Change was most acute in businesses that were very capital intensive and had high bars to entry. It did not affect merchants and brokers to the same degree as shipowners or builders. Even merchants with high levels of capital and complex networks could operate in family firms or partnerships, with offices and personnel levels which had changed little since the start of the nineteenth century42.

Technology’s effects were gradual and contingent but transformative. The change from sail to steam happened fairly slowly rather than overnight because ships were expensive items that were not replaced on a whim, and telegraph communications required that expensive cables were laid across the world. But once these changes were made, trade could move faster and more predictably than ever before. Decisions about buying and selling goods had always been a gamble before the telegraph. A ship travelled from port to port, and if the captain over- or underfilled the ship at one port he would have to later turn away lucrative trade or sail half- empty.43 With the telegraph, it was possible to plan more than gamble, and therefore allowing greater capacity without extreme risk. Steam’s speed cut the time of sea journeys and increased their reliability, once waiting for the wind was no longer a problem.

42 Milne in Belchem, 292. 43 Munro, 58. 35

London was ahead of provincial cities in switching to steam. Data is incomplete but P. L.

Cottrell suggests that in Liverpool it was only in the mid-1850s that shipowners decisively turned towards steam, beginning to invest in steam alongside sail.44 It took until the 1870s before they let go of sail.45 Graeme Milne compares Liverpool and Glasgow and finds a similar pattern, although Glasgow’s steam tonnage in 1870 was concentrated in two firms with two distinct tonnages, rather than dispersed around different tonnages.46 In both cities the change was, at first, sudden and limited: “the dramatic rise of steam shipping…[was] concentrated in the hands of a relatively small number of Liverpool and Glasgow firms that managed the expansion within a little more than a decade.”47 By the late-1870s the weight of technological change had begun to favour steam, as machine-tooling improved and mild steel was mass-produced, allowing much better boilers than ever before.48 These allowed for scale economies, but only if firms could attract more capital from outside the family to take part. The age of steam was slow to begin but inexorably changed shipping in Glasgow and Liverpool.

Legal change

Along with technological change there were legal changes. Traditionally ship ownership was divided into 64 equal parts with a maximum of 32 owners. Investors might own only a 64th of a ship, or the whole ship, but all had unlimited liability in case of failure. A typical shipping firm owned most of their fleet outright, with only a few ships within the fleet having 64ths owned by outside investors. Legal change combined with the higher building and running cost of

44 Cottrell, 141. 45 Ibid., 137. 46 Milne, 42. 47 Ibid., 43. 48 Cottrell, 142. 36 steamships to make this older system less attractive. Instead, shipping firms made individual ships into limited liability companies with 50 shareholders. Each limited liability company (ship) had a manager who owned at least half of the shares: this manager was the shipping company.

From 1862, following the Companies Act, there was a gradual but complete shift from 64ths to these single-ship companies because the attraction of limited liability was so great.49

There were other benefits to the new system too. Under the 64ths system, at the end of each voyage, the profits were distributed among the owners, up to 32 of them. When each ship was a limited liability company, it could build up capital reserves rather than continually paying out profits. It was also possible for ships (in their capacity as limited liability companies) to raise mortgages. Because the single-ship company system was superior to the 64ths system, shipping firms stopped owning so many ships outright. Owning a ship outright had been an alternative to the 64ths system, but also left the shipping firm with unlimited liability. But with the single-ship company model, there were few benefits to sole ownership of a firm’s shipping fleet. This allowed shipping companies to find a lot more capital from investors rather than their own pockets.

On the Mersey the shift in ship ownership only began to happen to a significant extent in the late 1870s.50 On the Clyde there was also a lag between new legal forms and their widespread usage. Gordon Boyce argues that shipping firms prized control above a wider investment base, particularly control over information. Their privileged position as holders of information would

49 Ibid., 145-52. Milne, 134-45. 50 Cottrell. 37 be threatened by taking on public capital, so they preferred to stick to private channels.51 Put differently, shipowners could have tapped into public capital, but were able to raise all the private capital they needed. Boyce notes that by 1900, an outsider could only buy ordinary shares in P&O, Cunard, and the Castle Line; all other shipping firms were closed to the ordinary outsider investor.52 The investment base of most firms did not widen significantly even as their capital grew, but became concentrated in the same few hands as before. Boyce argues that after

1900 there was some broadening of shipping firms’ capital base.53 R. A. Cage instead presents evidence that for four Glasgow tramp-shipping companies, investors preferred to invest in only one firm rather than spread their money, and the firms preferred to keep a small pool of investors. Most of these investors were locals and many were merchants. After 1900 three of the four scaled down their operations, rather than opening their investment base, either by staying with sail rather than switching to steam, or shifting to business other than shipping.54

While merchants needed much lower levels of capital than shipping, their capital requirements were on the increase. By the early-twentieth century a major shipping fleet would cost millions whereas merchants held capital of thousands. Cotton brokers had the highest capital among merchants, with active partnerships having capital of more than £150,000, and attracting co-partnerships with American firms.55 Among Glasgow shipbuilders, capital levels were rising too. Scott and Co., a partnership between two brothers, spent around £500,000 modernizing their

51 Boyce, "64thers, Syndicates, and Stock Promotions: Information Flows and Fund-Raising Techniques of British Shipowners before 1914." 52 Ibid., 191. 53 Ibid. 54 R. A. Cage, "The Structure and Profitability of Tramp Shipping, 1850-1920: Some Evidence from Four Glasgow- Based Firms," The Great Circle 17, no. 1 (1995): 4-5. 55 Belchem, 292. 38 between the 1880s and 1912.56 In May 1899 they took the step of becoming a private limited company (Scotts’ Shipbuilding and Engineering Company Limited) to consolidate the company’s position before the retirement of the two brothers (who had formed their partnership in 1868) and the succession of the next generation.57

Geopolitics

As well as technological and funding changes, business was also shaped by geopolitical considerations. How and when change occurred was contingent on a range of other factors, especially war and international competition. Earlier in the nineteenth century wars and political change had allowed British steamships to be used in new places: the opened up more of the Mediterranean to British shipping, the American civil war damaged American shipping and left the Atlantic in British hands, and the opening of Suez created faster travel than ever before.58 But throughout the late-nineteenth century depression and into the twentieth century the easy supremacy of former years turned into commercial competition with up-and- coming foes such as Germany and the United States.

For shipowners and shipbuilders the threat of international competition was especially intense. With Germany there was a naval arms race as German–built ships bested British–built ships in speed, winning the blue riband of the Atlantic. This speed race applied in civilian as well as warships, threatening the business of shipowners in Britain. In 1904 a new German-built liner, the SS Kaiser Wilhelm II, achieved 23.5 knots and solidified the threat that German ships posed

56 Johnston Fraser Robb, "Scotts of Greenock Shipbuilders and Engineers 1820-1920 a Family Enterprise" (University of Glasgow, 1993), 276. 57 Ibid., 277. 58 Milne in Belchem, 260-1. 39 to British shipping.59 British shipping tonnage remained much larger than German,60 but as the

Glasgow Herald described, the SS Kaiser Wilhelm II’s speed was “sad blow to a kingdom which boasts…of its ability to ‘rule the waves’”.61

The German threat was direct and confrontational, but American competition was also fierce. American trusts, made up of many investors combined together, attempted to buy their way into British shipping. A trust was attractive to investors and to individual firms because it could become a monopoly. In the last years of the nineteenth century J P Morgan attempted to create a huge trust comprised of a merger of British shipping companies, bringing many company heads to the discussion table but ultimately failing to create the huge trust he planned.62

For many observers the threat of American trusts was dire. The Glasgow Herald described J P Morgan’s plan as “the almost entire extinction of the British flag on the Atlantic”.

Cunard was approached to be part of the trust, but negotiations fell through: in the Glasgow

Herald’s words Cunard had an “attitude of loyalty and sturdy independence…and told the

Combine to seek their victims elsewhere.”63 Cunard was considered in such peril that it merited the intervention of the British state, who helped finance the construction of the Lusitania and

Mauritania. The Glasgow Herald’s description of events uses the word ‘capitalist’ to describe the American trust, conjuring an aura of cold-heartedness and class struggle. British businessmen were patriots, but American capitalists were predators.

59 Glasgow Herald 7 September 1907, describing first sailing of Lusitania. 60 Glasgow Herald 7 Sept 1907 describing first sailing of 61 The Glasgow Herald wrote that Britain had a “mercantile marine tonnage four or five times as large as that of the Germans and equal to one-half of the whole tonnage of the rest of the world combined”. 62 The International Mercantile Marine Company. 63 Glasgow Herald 7 September 1907. 40

Business premises and culture

The scholarship on trade and investment, with its focus on the details of accounts books and economic history, is all rather older now. More recent scholarship has turned to look at personnel and organization, examining the workings of the office. The questions they have asked have intermingled the personal and professional, exploring what offices were like, how home and business life related to each other, and how family relationships operated in offices. I explore these questions here, and then consider how business succession worked. Family archives give rich evidence for how firm heads chose their protégés, groomed them, and then how the transition from one generation to the next happened. Heirs had to have the correct pedigree and a formal education, but did start at the bottom and work their way up in a quasi-meritocratic fashion.

From the mid-nineteenth century business had become confined mostly to the office space. Both Liverpool and Glasgow developed a business district. But this did not mean that the separation between office and home was totally distinct. In these family businesses, many people worked all day with people they also lived with. Some of the aspects of family culture therefore bled over into family business. By ‘family culture’ I mean features such as those of the patriarchal family in the mid-nineteenth century: conservative, keen on honour, reliant on individual lifespans, and based on kinship relationships that were hierarchical yet close. There was a distinction between business and the rest of life, but the two were not fully separated. The make-up and behaviour of families will be discussed more thoroughly in chapter two, but here I will show how family business carried over parts of family life into business. 41

The familial character of business was apparent in their offices and working environments. Traders in Liverpool had offices with very few employees, in which owners and clerks would occupy space together.64 Among shipowners it was not much different. The managers of the Blue Funnel Line worked alongside their office staff and clerks, with the managers sitting at desks on raised platforms rather than sequestered in separate offices.65 The offices were technologically primitive, with no lifts, typewriters, electricity, or telephone until after 1895.66 Certainly they could have afforded such technology. Their resistance speaks instead to a type of conservatism which led British families to avoid modern domestic design in the early-twentieth century.67 Instead of adding new technologies to their homes, Britons tended to stick with what they knew. Like a family, the offices included women as junior partners, with ten women clerks working for the Blue Funnel Line.68 Malcolm Falkus describes this as pioneering, as most other firms only employed men; the women wrote letters and ships’ manifests. The India

Buildings, a block of office buildings owned by the Holt family, was shared between various family enterprises in a way dictated by family rather than business logic. The first floor was taken up by the George Holt Company, a cotton merchant business, and the second by the Blue

Funnel offices.69

An account of the George Holt Company’s premises can be found in an interview with

Robert Holt. “The office is on the ground floor and has a substantial look, with no show about it,

64 Belchem, 292. 65 Malcolm E. Falkus, The Blue Funnel Legend: A History of the Ocean Steam Ship Company (Palgrave Macmillan, 1990), 18. 66 Ibid. 67 Deborah Cohen, Household Gods: The British and Their Possessions (Yale University Press, 2006), 170-3. 68 Falkus, 18. 69 Ibid. 42 conveying the impression that the firm occupying it is one of the old fashioned sort. The office is roomy, but it does not appear to be as large as it really is, for every corner is utilized to the full; it is comfortable, but there is no attempt at ornate ornamentation, or what may be called fantastic luxury; it seems, in short, a place which is kept for business purposes, and where much business is transacted.”70 This suggests a feeling of opposition between luxury/modernity, and business.

The most important thing in a merchant’s office was good ‘cotton lights’ — lots of window light so that merchandise could be inspected carefully.71 The suspicion of offices with artistic flourishes and comfortable furnishings slowly melted away after the mid-century, but many remained very utilitarian, humble, and non-hierarchical.

New office technologies adopted in the late-nineteenth century did not fundamentally alter the structure of the office. New types of mechanical calculator appeared, and offices adopted typewriters and card indexes (to replace ledgers).72 Telephones were quite widely adopted, but used in ways that were unexpected by their manufacturers. Early on it seemed as if they would be revolutionary: cotton brokers began using this expensive new technology in the

1880s.73 But by the 1890s there is evidence that it was a clerk’s job to use the telephone —

Graeme Milne quotes from an 1898 Glasgow Inquiry into telephones in the city that “Most of the business men in Glasgow give the message to a boy, and don’t go to the telephone” or used it “as

70 LRO 920 DUR 25 Holt Scrapbook pp12-3 The Liberal Review. “Interviews with Great Men. (Imaginary.) II. — Mr. R. D. Holt” March 12, 1881. Despite the interview being imaginary, the office seems to be faithfully described. 71 J. Sharples and J. Stonard, Built on Commerce: Liverpool's Central Business District (Historic England Publishing, 2015), 47. The hunt for light led to some fantastic architecture, such as the and 16 Cook Street, which influenced American skyscrapers and are still startlingly modern. 72 Graeme J Milne, "Business Districts, Office Culture and the First Generation of Telephone Use in Britain," The International Journal for the History of Engineering & Technology 80, no. 2 (2010): 206. 73 Ibid., 203. 43 seldom as possible”.74 This was likely because using the telephone, when it was no longer a novelty, was rather unpleasant — lines were frequently engaged and a lot of time could be wasted trying to get through. It was also possible to mishear voices over the line and so the telephoner had to speak slowly and clearly.75 The impact of telephones and typewriters seems fairly muted, at least before 1930.

Business life penetrated into home life too, increasing the family dimension of business.

The archives proliferate with personal letters written in the office, and business letters written at home. Many of the 187 letters that Robert Holt wrote to his son, mostly to him at school, were written from his offices at the India Buildings.76 (He often wrote the address on blank paper, which suggests he was not just using office letterhead elsewhere). In 1891 George Holt, brother of Robert, wrote a letter pondering the question of the future of the Blue Funnel Line from his home at Sudley.77 There were also deals made at home. It was at Gustavus Schwabe’s home,

Broughton Hall, that the genesis of the White Star Line began. Thomas Henry Ismay and

Schwabe were playing billiards together when Schwabe suggested that he would invest in a new steamship line headed by Ismay if Ismay agreed to buy his ships from , Wolff being Schwabe’s nephew.78 Some house names even had allusions to business, such as the fruit

74 Ibid., 208.This inquiry found severe jamming on the lines: “local NTC officials identified four firms that could ‘very seldom’ be contacted without a lengthy wait. These were P. & W. MacLellan, who owned the Clutha Iron Works, the Caledonian Railway Company, the Allan Line of steamship operators and the Clyde Shipping Company. The Caledonian Railway Company, which had just one telephone line, made 112 calls between 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. on what was claimed to be a typical day, at a time when even fifty calls was considered heavy use.” 75 Telephones were also placed in public areas of the office, so conversations were public rather than private. As soon as telephones became easier and more comfortable to use this was corrected and telephones appeared inside the private offices of businessmen, but before 1930 it was not particularly appealing to have a private telephone. 76 LRO 920 DUR/14/1 1873-1907 Robert Holt to Richard Holt (his son) 77 LRO 920 MEL 33/6345 5 May [1891] George Holt to George Melly 78 J. Sharples, Merchant Palaces: Liverpool and Wirral Mansions Photographed by Bedford Lemere and Co (Bluecoat Press, 2007), 16. 44 broker Richard Dart, who named his home Terceira after an Azorean island which grew the fruit that made Dart rich.79

The degree to which businessmen worked at home is unclear. Libraries, billiard rooms, and smoking rooms were all male-dominated spaces which could be used for business, but evidence for whether this happened in practice is lacking. There is evidence that rich people in

Glasgow and Liverpool had phones at home, but not much on how they used them. Graeme

Milne argues that “many ‘domestic’ customers were businessmen who wanted connections between their homes and their offices.”80 John Laird, iron and shipping entrepreneur, installed a line from his home in Birkenhead to his works.81 But Milne shows others who thought of home connections as a “perfect curse” as the commissioner of a 1898 Parliamentary Enquiry into telephones in Glasgow had it.82 The evidence from family papers and diaries shows personal use of phones but little business use.83 Joseph Sharples writes that “Despite the spread of the telephone from the 1880s, there is not much evidence that Liverpool’s Victorian businessmen worked from home.” He does however provide a counter-example to this claim in the smoking room of Bidston Court, owned by Robert Hudson, which photographs from 1894 show to have been a place of work.84 The telephone was an exciting and expensive addition to a home. Sir

William Forwood described his home “Ramleh” in Blundellsands being connected to the

79 Ibid., 28. 80 Milne, 202. 81 David Stenhouse, "The Locational Behaviour of Liverpool Offices, 1875–1970 (Phd Thesis)" (University of Liverpool, 1981), 267. Cited in Milne, 204. 82 208. 83 LRO 920 DUR 11/17/19 1 October 1901 (or perhaps 1902) Eliza Holt writes to her mother-in-law Lallie “I have been hoping for a letter from you, as no one at Ullet Rd has so much as spoken on the telephone to us.” This proves that both homes, Eliza's at Field House, and Lallie's at 54 Ullet Road, had telephones installed. It also suggests that telephones were a low-level form of social communication between women, less onerous than letter-writing. 84 Sharples, 50-1. 45 telephone in 1893 with “special direct wires from [his] house to the trunk wires from Liverpool, so that the telephonic communications were very clear and distinct.”85 The installation was done especially for a dinner when Forwood was hosting Lord Salisbury, and each dinner guest was provided a receiver where he or she could be connected to theatre performances in London and

Manchester, or the House of Commons. The 1897 inventory of Dreghorn Castle, owned by

Robert Macfie, even shows a “Business Room” with furniture including a “Business chair in leather…on revolving stand”, multiple tables and chairs, and a basinstand.86 The name of the room suggests it really was used for business, most likely Macfie’s sugar refining business rather than his estate business. Almost thirty years later, a 1926 inventory of the shipbuilder Patrick

Caird’s home ‘Belleaire’ in Greenock shows a similar “Business Room”. The furnishings were very similar: a “double consulting table”, writing desk, deed box, paper weight, and over 400 books. Only the addition of a typewriter showed that technology had changed, there was still no telephone.87

Even if businessmen rarely worked at home, the interpenetration of domestic and public life was clear in friendships and socializing. Alfred Holt and John Scott, a Liverpool shipowner and a Greenock shipbuilder, did so much business together that Alfred called it “one of the happiest and most satisfactory friendships I have ever made or probably ever shall make.” Alfred was John’s best man, attended John’s father’s funeral, and felt more ‘at home’ at John’s house than anyone else’s except his family’s. Alfred considered that this showed “what pleasant possibilities there are in a business life”, and also noted that when he wrote this account in 1880

85 William Bower Forwood, Recollections of a Busy Life: Being the Reminiscences of a Liverpool Merchant 1840- 1910 (Liverpool: Henry Young, 1910), 174. 86 GUA DC 120/1/22 Inventory of furnishings at Dreghorn Castle 1897, 87-9. 87 GML T-BK 174/4 Inventory of Bellaire 1926, 25-7. 46 they had built 25 ships together costing over £800,000.88 Their ability to do business together was based on their personal connections, on being at home in each other’s houses, and taking part in family events such as weddings and funerals together: familial activities that created a semi-familial bond between them.

Business succession

The continued succession of family members to a family business was never a foregone conclusion. Businessmen were acutely aware of the limits of family to supply personnel to lead their businesses. A letter (previously mentioned) from George Holt regarding the future of his brothers’ Blue Funnel Line written in 1891 captures some of this fear. George worried that the

Blue Funnel’s complexity was increasing, and questioned “Who is to manage all this?” The company had done well from the foreign agents it employed through Butterfield & Swire, but

George suggested that future “manifold ramifications” (probably meaning competition) would leave the company vulnerable. He saw two paths available: “forward or backward”; “If forward, who is to be its guide? If backward, then of course it is only to sell everything, ships, goodwill, officers +c +c turn all into cash + divide the spoil.” Stiff competition meant that standing still would mean languishing, unless they could get “new blood”. At the time Blue Funnel was headed by three managers (or partners): George’s two brothers Philip and Alfred, and a lawyer cousin named Albert Crompton. Crompton could only be trusted with legal matters, Alfred was full of engineering pet schemes, so Philip was “of course the only one with a business head, he is not over strong…[and] feels the great responsibility.” And so the question then was: “the coming

88 Alfred Holt, "Fragmentary Autobiography of Alfred Holt. Written on Scraps at Various Dates. Collected, Corrected, and Printed August, 1911.," (1911), 28. 47 generation who is teaching or bringing them out?”89 Philip had no children and two of Alfred’s sons were only teenagers, so the coming generation might only have been Alfred’s eldest son

George, then aged 22. Thankfully there was a nephew, Richard Holt, the same age at 22 as his cousin George.

Richard’s career in the Blue Funnel Line shows something of the nature of the family business system, demonstrating how inheritance and apprenticeship were both part of business succession. Richard was eligible for high positions in the Blue Funnel Line because he was a

Holt and also because of his gentlemanly education (he only began his technical education after he joined) — but he was recruited first at a low level and had to learn and prove himself before advancing. He joined the company in 1889 after graduating from Oxford.90 His education had been formal and academic rather than technical and vocational. His father Robert, the youngest

Holt brother of his generation, had gone into cotton trading rather than collaborating with his brothers in shipping. Robert’s passion was for politics, and he rose to be in

1893. He pinned a great deal of hope on Richard’s success and held his son to high standards. In the letters between a teenage Richard, away at school, and his father, they frequently discussed a plan for Richard to go into politics and fulfil his father’s ambitions. But both hoped that Richard could go one step further than Mayor and become a Member of Parliament, perhaps even a

Government Minister.91 In some ways working for the Blue Funnel Line was a detour from

89 LRO 920 MEL 33/6345 George Holt to George Melly 5 May [1891] 90 Falkus, 17. 91 LRO 920 DUR/14/1/55 Robert to Richard Holt 6 May 1884 (sent from the India Buildings) “why should you not make an effort to become one of our future legislators? You saw the great political men of the present day in the H of Commons – they were once school boys and most of them with no better advantages than you but if you want to take a foremost + leading place in your country’s history you must do as Abram Lincoln advised his young friends “You must keep pegging away” with an object in view and a determination to win – You would I am sure enjoy infinitely more a parliamentary life, like that of Mr Courtneys, than buying or selling timber at Barrow or cotton in Liverpool but this career you will have to cut out for yourself + the start is got by a high place at school + – 48

Richard’s dreams, but his uncles recognized that he, better than his cousin George, could bring his brains to the service of the Blue Funnel Line. According to historians of the Blue Funnel line, his career later became an ideal and pattern: “good formal education, youthful appointment and rapid advance to managerial position, sound grasp of the firm’s overseas business acquired through travel, and recruitment alongside others which injected a competitive edge among the newcomers.”92 In 1895 Richard’s recruitment to manager position was alongside his cousin

George, and Philip’s wife’s nephew Maurice Llewellyn Davies. They were the first ‘new blood’ among the managers since the original two partners, Alfred and Philip Holt, had added the lawyer Albert Crompton in 1872.93 The new managers immediately began to initiate changes, including cutting wages by 15%. Richard would lead the Blue Funnel Line through rocky times and was pivotal to its success.

Richard’s story is well documented and his youthful training will be explored further when this chapter turns to business travel. His business life is well covered in several histories of the Blue Funnel line, and the archives contain vast amounts of detail about his domestic life.

When he was made manager, his mother wrote a letter to him which suggests how family business recruitment balanced family loyalty and talent. “I am perfectly astonished + should not have expected such a thing for years…the greatest compliments to the family as well as to yourself. I am so glad your Uncle Alfred has been cordial about it you really will have a splendid

we can help with certain introductions and the means of living while working for your future position – Good bye, old fellow + work away.” And 920 DUR/14/1/103 30 March 1886 (also sent from the India Buildings) “mind you in all this pleasure + enjoyment I never lose sight of the fact that you should secure a New College scholarship. You must go on to Oxford in a distinguished manner and then after three years at College you must study for the Bar – make yourself a name + position on circuit and entering Parliament you must push on for the Woolsack under the Leadership of your Uncle Courtney. there's a career for you.” MP Leonard Courtney was Richard’s uncle, his mother’s sister’s husband. Richard was 15 and 17 at the time of these letters. 92 Falkus, 17. 93 Ibid., 383. 49 position both as to means + influence. It is clear that you must put away childish things completely + become a very serious person indeed.”94 Her astonishment shows that his promotion was not a sure thing, but rather something done partially on his own merit, and requiring new seriousness from him.

Of course not every family had a handy nephew to step in when the pool of family talent dried up. Families were acutely aware that the next generation could sink a business. The Scott shipbuilding family ran into this problem earlier in the nineteenth century when brothers contested the inheritance of the business between them and split it into two. Only one side survived, the other went bankrupt. Proverbs of this problem abounded: Seldom three descents continue good (Dryden), “from clogs to clogs is only three generations” (proverbial late- nineteenth century, possibly Lancashire), and “from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations”. The ideal of the good businessman was one that everyone in the family felt qualified to judge, no matter their age or sex. Emma Holt was disappointed when her eldest son retired from cotton trading in 1870: “William has now retired from the business I think it wd. be a great sorrow to his Father”. Her husband, before his death in 1851, had acknowledged “that he was not naturally a good man of business” but had tried to set up the business so that other family members could help William “continue to carry it on with pleasure to himself”. Instead

William had retired and left all the work to others, including his overworked brother Robert.

Emma’s comments in her diary showed some ambivalence between personal good and dynastic

94 920 DUR 14/2/124 Lallie Holt to Richard Holt 6 May 1896 (the year is written later in pencil and I believe this actually belongs in 1895 when Richard was made manager). 50 good: “It will be well if in one sense he does not regret it He has a son to set an example to but of course I cannot be the judge of other peoples wishes + feelings” [sic].95

Women were included to some extent in these discussions about business, although they were not eligible to be part of the ‘new blood’. For some families, a wife’s connections were the only way to create kinship networks. William Pearce, a shipbuilder, was a self-made man who was an only child with no family to draw on. His wife was also not of a Glasgow family, but she had several sisters. In 1885 Pearce was elected the Member of Parliament for Govan, and would now have to spend more of his time in London. He took on his wife’s sister’s son Harold

Barnwell as junior partner to ease his workload.96

Often these businessmen worked far past a normal age of retirement. This was especially so in cases where there was no obvious heir to succeed. Alfred Jones never married and died suddenly in 1909, his health weakened by experiencing the 1907 Kingston earthquake, working from 7am to midnight, and two chills.97 His heirs sold his shipping interests to a consortium.

Donald Currie had only three daughters, and his Union-Castle Line was sold after his death.98 By contrast, some firms had long unbroken years of passing a family business from generation to generation, such as the Scott’s shipbuilding business, which existed from the early-eighteenth

95 LRO 920 DUR/3/28/4-5 Emma Holt Diary 3 March 1870-2 July 1871 96 (Richard) Harold Barnwell (1879-1917) later became an aircraft inventor. He and his brother Frank Sowter Barnwell (1880-1938) began building aircraft in 1905, after which Harold went to work for Vickers, where he was killed testing an airplane in 1917. Frank worked for the British and Colonial Aeroplane Company and was killed in an airplane crash in 1938; all of Frank’s three sons died in the RAF between June 1940 and October 1941. 97 J. Gordon Read, ‘Jones, Sir Alfred Lewis (1845–1909)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 98 Knott and Holder also sold their shipping companies, but did so before their deaths and during booms when the price was highest. (Boyce) 51 century. Their historian describes a “ready availability of male heirs [as] a feature of the Scott family history.”99

As business became larger and more complex, one or two partners could not entirely direct a firm. More and more firms began to employ managers below family members. From

1905 the Scott family began to bring in professional managers in their shipyards and engine works. These men had a place on the board, as the family firm was transformed into a limited company. They did not merely take on extra work between the ordinary workforce and the partners, they transformed the management system of the company.100 Over time their role became more and more normal: shipowner Sir Aubrey Brocklebank’s funeral in 1929 was attended by not only the major shipping families of Liverpool, but also the managers of their firms.101 Managers could be somewhat brought inside the family business structure and treated as equals, but at the bottom end of the hierarchy there was also a boom. Firms took on more and more clerks, needing more filing and letter-writing done in their offices. Around 1900 across many industries there was a decided shift in the role of the clerk. From being the respected right- hand man of the business head, chosen for personal idiosyncrasies and promoted by patronage, the clerk became a bureaucratic modern figure with new technologies and skills. Clerking also became feminized. It became harder to move out of clerking into business leadership, and what mobility there might be was often in fact that of the “bête noire of every true clerk – the system

99 Robb, 403. 100 Ibid., 330. 101 Book with obituaries of Sir Aubrey Brocklebank, taken from various newspapers. Liverpool Maritime Museum Archives B/BROC/13/11, 27 Apr 1929. 52 of filling an office with numerous apprentices at nominal salaries . . . usually lads of good family and well supplied with pocket money”.102

Michael Miller describes the culture of maritime businesses as at least superficially intimate, non-hierarchical, and courteous. This culture directly replicated the family feel of an earlier period, with employees considered as quasi-familial. Despite the increasing employment of non-family members, the newcomers were meant to have the same company loyalty as any blood relation. For an employee to move to a new company was a delicate matter, and competition over employees (‘head-hunting’) was unacceptable. Companies competed genteelly rather than cutthroatedly. The culture was sometimes a veil over the truth, but reflected enough of the realities of the business that it was widely accepted and shaped how businessmen behaved.

Even as businesses shed some of their familial aspects, they perpetuated a familial culture

– or at least some sought to. The emphasis on old-fashioned décor was intended to reassure potential clients and business associates and to demonstrate an unbroken line, of which familial culture was the best evidence. Family businesses were not really family businesses any longer, but still kept a familial style.

Business travel

The development of the business trip shows the personal and local effects of the change away from family business, and provides evidence for how change could beget change. Travel had been a reason for business to be organized along family lines, as a family connection made it much easier to trust someone working at a great distance from you. Technological change

102 Orchard, The Clerks of Liverpool, 32. Cited in Andrew Popp, "The Broken Cotton Speculator," History Workshop Journal 78, no. 1 (2014). 53 opened the way for the business trip to happen, which then made family business less advantageous. Instead of younger junior men taking on the unpleasant job of travelling, more palatable travel conditions meant that company heads travelled more often. This in turn undermined the need to rely on family members. There was nothing programmatic here in the shift from family business; it was slow and organic.

The business trip has not received a great deal of attention in its own right, with the exception of Michael Miller, who has done important work on the business trip focusing on the twentieth century. He places the business trip at the centre of his discussion of business culture.

He says: “Rarely was maritime culture so manifest as during the business trip.”103 But his interest is in maritime culture, rather than family business, and he is therefore not so interested in the generational transition between young men travelling and older men travelling.

The late-nineteenth century was the first age of the business trip. People had long travelled for business purposes, but the technological and business changes of the late-nineteenth century allowed for more business travel and qualitatively changed it into something recognizable as a business trip. The older mechanism for conducting transcontinental business had been based on using family members to run local outposts for the business. A younger and poorer cousin or nephew would embark on a long sail voyage, reach an outpost and stay there for years at a time, and then communicate with the centre through letters which took months to reach

Britain. Within Europe the time at an outpost might be only two or three years, but further away

103 Miller, 201. 54 the timescales expanded.104 On the business trip, the traveller journeyed over large distances, but stayed only weeks rather than years. Instead he moved around from place to place, heading in a particular direction rather than sitting still. The business trip of the jet age is much faster and smoother, but its essential characteristics come from the late-nineteenth century rather than the old notion of setting up one’s nephew in a business outpost.

Technological change has so far been discussed in terms of the new economic opportunities it brought. But there was another more personal dimension for those working in shipping: travel became much faster, easier, and more comfortable. Sir William Forwood crossed the Atlantic in 1861, which took 12 days each way, on Inman Line and steamers.

His recollection in 1910 was that it was “great discomfort”. The oil lamps created “foul and stifling” air, candles “spurted grease and smelt abominably”, and the wine-glasses swung and rolled with the ship. When he wished to smoke he had to sit on coils of rope or get under the lee of the funnel. By 1910 everything had improved: “What a change has taken place, and how greatly the electric light has contributed to the comfort of travellers by sea!”105 Ships were faster with steam, and they could be made bigger (causing less sea-sickness), better lit (a steel vessel was less flammable and therefore could be lit brighter), more connected to the land (with on- board telegraphs), and overall more luxurious. This made it possible for the first time ever to have a recognizable business trip.

104 Chapman, 130. writes of eighteenth-century travellers that “such commercial exploration was typically for periods of up to two or three years, seldom longer, except in the case of Russia, and in no sense implied permanent residence.” 105 Forwood. 55

A business head might have avoided taking a business trip because it was so uncomfortable and would take him out of reach of his office for weeks at a time. Far better to find a younger man, probably a family member, who could travel. But with faster and more comfortable travel, and the telegraph linking everywhere together, it was possible for the business head to travel everywhere himself.

An exemplary early business trip is that of Richard Holt, who in December of 1892 embarked on a ship in Liverpool, England. His family came to wave him off — he was not to see them again for 57 weeks, or almost 400 days. He was off around the world, first on a ship that would take him to and then on various journeys that would take him across to Japan, then crossing the Pacific to Canada and the United States, and finally sailing home from New

York.106

Richard was only twenty-four and had not been in business long, so he represents the transition between the older method of sending out nephews and the new method of business trips. Richard was indeed a nephew, but he was not sent to run an outpost, but to travel and observe. By mid-January 1893 Richard arrived in Singapore. He immediately took up work in the local office, supervizing and learning about how the business worked on the ground. It was an informal process, as he waited for events to happen rather than initiating a system. He wrote

“I frequently see people who drop in + correspondence + shall so I hope inform myself of those things which I should know.” He would be in Singapore for two months, with frequent, mostly social, trips to nearby places, including Thailand and Sumatra. After Singapore, his travels picked up their pace, and he made his way south-west. Richard’s youth meant this was his first

106 LRO 920 DUR 14/40 Richard Holt diary. 56 confrontation with some of the realities of business. One of his concerns was the use of coolie labour, as coolies manned his family’s ships. In Singapore he saw coolies being recruited and recorded on board ship, and he found it uncomfortably close to the slave trade — “This is too near the slave trade to be a very pleasant business.”107

While Richard was discomfited by the way his family business used Asian labour, in the early 1890s the Blue Funnel was just beginning its policy of using Chinese sailors. These men filled up the engine rooms and most deck ratings and were paid less and treated worse than

European seamen. They had their own lower-quality quarters within the ships and had to have interpreters — the Blue Funnel attempted to prevent these men from organizing or unionizing themselves by recruiting from a mix of different Chinese regions.108 This was a major saving for the Blue Funnel, as they simply purchased crews through a Chinese comprador in — it is not possible to find out how much these men were paid because the company simply delivered money to the comprador.109 It was a policy that was controversial in Liverpool, and one of Richard’s significant weaknesses when he tried to be elected as Liverpool’s MP in 1905. 110

Working-class people in Liverpool argued that shipping lines should employ British workers for fair wages rather than Chinese workers at pitiful wages — it was partly an economic issue but

107 LRO 920 DUR 14/40 Monday 23 January 1893. 108 Falkus, 114. 109 But it is very telling that after 1945, when conditions and pay for Chinese workers “improved significantly” they were still paid less than half of European workers — in 1961 £32 a month for Chinese seaman compared to £67 for the same job done by a European. Ibid. Comprador is “in China, the name of the principal native servant, employed in European establishments, and especially in houses of business, both as head of the staff of native employés, and as intermediary between the house and its native customers. (The Chinese name is mâi-pan ‘purveyor’.)” Oxford English Dictionary 110 LRO 920 DUR 25 Family scrapbook 147-9 cutting from and Mercury, Tuesday, April 18, 1905. “Fiscal Debate in Liverpool. Mr. W. W. Rutherford, M.P., v. Mr. Richard D. Holt.” gives this scene “Mr. Holt referred to British shipping. That was his own business (“Oh,” and applause, and cries of “Chinese labour,” and uproar).” 57 also a moral one. Richard, as the man on the ground, could potentially have stopped this not

“very pleasant business” back in the 1890s, but his acquiescence allowed the system to flourish until after his death.

How did Richard square his active Unitarian conscience with this slavery business?

Perhaps it was because philanthropy by Liverpool and Glasgow businessmen tended to focus on the local area. This was both because local poverty was closer to their homes and had more impact on their daily lives, and because they were under more political pressure to solve British poverty. When Richard contested the Liverpool seat in 1905, his speeches included discussions of wages and the influence of tariffs on the working class. His hecklers shouted “How much do you pay the coolies?” and “Chinese labour,” but the intent seems to have been to shame him for how his actions impacted British poverty rather than of inducing guilt about conditions for

Chinese workers.111 Moral indignation on behalf of foreign workers was thin on the ground compared to the problem of British poverty.

After Singapore Richard went on a month-long trip by ship first north and then along the western side of Sumatra, stopping off at various forts and venturing inland at points by railway.

On the 18th April he arrived in Java, and travelled east overland and then by steamer. By the 1st

June he was at the western end of Java and sailed off to explore the islands of the Molucca sea.

All along this voyage he constantly visited plantations and factories to assess the economic conditions. At every place Richard met with local agents, almost all of them European. His experiences were entirely mediated by Europeans, to whom he could speak and at whose homes

111 LRO 920 DUR 25 Family Scrapbook 147-9. Liverpool Daily Post and Mercury, “Fiscal Debate in Liverpool. Mr. W. W. Rutherford, M.P., v. Mr. Richard D. Holt.” Tuesday, April 18, 1905. 58 he stayed. Across Sumatra and Java he sometimes expressed uneasiness at how very few

Europeans there were around him. When he later visited Canton, he noted of quarter, in which he was staying: “This is only protected by moral force.” Elsewhere he noted that anti-foreign feeling in China was manufactured by mandarins who were afraid of their own decline.

Most of his contact was with Europeans because his primary role was to meet and assess the Blue Funnel’s agents. Sometimes they were Butterfield & Swire agents, who helped him throughout his stay in China. The cosy relationship between the Swires and the Holts was critical for both companies so they must have been assessing him as much as he was assessing them. The relationship had begun with John Samuel Swire (1825-1898) and Richard’s uncle Alfred Holt

(1829-1911), both old men by 1893. If trust between the Blue Funnel and Butterfield & Swire was to be maintained, both sides needed to have a look at the new generation, including Richard.

Elsewhere the Blue Funnel had its own agents he met with and assessed. At some points there were notable errors: a Mr Stephens he thought was the agent turned out to in fact be named Mr

Paul. In his travels he could record and correct such mistakes, allowing his uncles back in

Liverpool to run their operations with greater efficiency. He was both learning about the conditions in which the Blue Funnel line worked and bringing the authority of the central office to these far-flung places.

While Europeans made up the majority of Richard’s contacts in the Far East, his only constant companion was his ‘boy’, Jan Lee Yen, whom he picked up in Singapore and took all the way to Japan. While Jan Lee Yen was with Richard throughout most of his travels, Richard clearly thought him of very little importance. His diary makes very little reference to him and 59 only names him when they parted on the 13th October — given that the diary is full of the names of every single person he dined with, or played tennis with, or went hunting with, this is a notable exception. How old was Jan Lee Yen for Richard to see him as a “boy”? Richard was only twenty-four so Jan Lee Yen may have been quite young, or Richard may have been using

“boy” in a derogatory fashion. Richard wrote about himself in a world of older Europeans taking part in various business meetings, but the person with whom he spent the most time was a young

Singaporean.

After his travels in the Molucca islands, Richard headed for China where the networking continued in the more established world of British business in China rather than the islands of the

Dutch Empire. On the 9th July, six months into his travels in Asia, he sailed for Hong Kong, and after 3 weeks there then travelled along the coast of China. At he took 2 trips inland, before setting off north. Then from the 25th September to the 13th October he travelled around

Japan.

This was a very long time to be away from Liverpool, and with absence came the danger that Richard would be forgotten about by other wealthy people in the city outside his immediate business and family. His father was during his time away, and so Richard missed out on a chance to take part in official events which would have cemented his position as an important person in Liverpool. This suggests therefore that the business trip was worth it, that travelling itself boosted his status. That is supported by an analogy to the publicity that Richard’s brother Robert gained when he visited Vancouver in May 1893.112 He and his colleagues were

112 Their father Robert wrote to Richard that the younger Robert (Bob) would benefit from the trip because “he is at that age now when he ought to see more of the world”. LRO 920 DUR 14/1/160 Robert Holt to his son Richard 20 April 1893. 60 described by a local newspaper in an article called ‘Business Men on a Tour.’113 This “party of prominent business men” had just arrived in Vancouver — the others being three members of the

Evans family, two of them based in Liverpool and one in , and also the Mayor of

Carlisle. The bulk of the article described the Holt family, especially his father the Lord Mayor.

It describes his uncle George as “one of the greatest philanthropists in Liverpool,” and “the most popular citizen in Liverpool.” The social prominence of the family is also described: “Mayor

Holt resides in a magnificent mansion in . Here, with his accomplished wife, he has entertained as friends and guests some of the most distinguished statesmen of the age”. The article lauds the Holts’ Liberalism, and declares Vancouver’s support for Irish Home Rule and

Gladstone. It also claims that Liverpool and Vancouver are kin, and have the same economic needs: Robert “deserves recognition from the city of Vancouver, which has a future dependent in many respects upon the same features as those which have made Liverpool great.” The write-up that Robert received made him, a mere twenty-year-old, potentially more respected within the business world of Liverpool. He showed that he could conduct himself well in front of the

Evanses, and that the people of Vancouver would accept him as a serious businessman. He sent this cutting home to his father presumably to demonstrate his success — although his father found the adulation so cringe-making that he wrote to Richard “see what the Vancouver Times says about Bob and his distinguished connections in L-pool – it would fairly make your hair curl.”114

113 LRO 920 DUR 25 Family scrapbook, 64. , Vancouver, B.C., Canada, Tuesday May 23rd 1893. ‘Business Men on a Tour.’ 114 LRO 920 DUR 14/1/164 Robert Holt to his son Richard 15 June 1893 61

Richard may have been in the Far East for business, but leisure activities with other rich men took up a quite large part of his time. His experience is in many ways comparable to modern-day business entertaining, although junior management might not merit such treatment today. In late July Richard was in Canton and went to visit the flower boats: “a gentleman present described them as the equivalent of the Café Royal:- at all events Chinese gentleman can obtain refreshments & play accompanied by the society of dancing + singsong girls. I was rather favorably impressed with Chinese beauty, it was less hideous than I had expected. We picked up a Frisco Chinamen + another who spoke mandarin, drank sam-chi, the rice spirit which tastes like bad gin, + generally amused ourselves.” This might have been the kind of experience his father warned him against in a letter from January ordering him: “Take care of your health and dont [sic] do foolish things under the impression that you can act as in England.”115 He seems always to have eaten in European style, given his reaction to a Chinese dinner he experienced in

Shanghai in late August. “This feed was exceedingly beastly, I will never again eat Chinese chow unless I am otherwise bound to fast. To add to the entertainment singsong girls + actors were performing below + made a most fearful + incessant noise. Altogether it was a very interesting experience; not exactly pleasure, but still an experience. I should have been sorry to have missed.” At one point he saw an amateur performance of The Mikado by local British expats. He also saw Chinese dramatics: he “could not understand a thing.” This broadening of his experience by novel situations was part of the training process for business leadership.

The process of written recommendations also suggests how closely travel and status were linked. It was an intricate process. The aim was to find a letter-writer with some connection to

115 LRO 920 DUR 14/1/150 Robert Holt to Richard Holt 12th January 1893 (written from the India Buildings). 62 the destination country, whose letter would smooth the process of meeting and networking. The writer did not need to know the traveller personally, but did need to have some connection to the traveller’s family or friends. The writer might also know a specific recipient for the letter, or it might be multipurpose. The letter was usually taken as a physical object by the traveller, although on occasion it was sent from writer to recipient. Very few seem to survive, which suggests how these letters, once presented, were mere scrap paper. The contents of the letter were a formality and therefore not worth keeping. The lengths one might go for a recommendation could seem absurd. When in 1886 27-year-old Hardman Earle travelled to Russia on business,116 his father Sir Thomas was intent on providing him with letters of introduction. His letters obsess on no other facet of his travels so much: not his clothes, or means of transportation, or accommodation.

The people one could get introduced to varied based on one’s own status, so it could be more profitable for business heads to travel themselves. Someone like Richard, a junior member of a shipping company, was far less likely to get access to really important people. When his uncle Alfred Holt was on his way to Brazil in 1863, he encountered the exiled King Louis-

Phillipe’s grandson, on his way to Lisbon. Alfred recorded in his autobiography: “He could not go through France while Napoleon III. was on the throne. We had many a talk. He said one day to me, “There is nothing in being a King.” I suppose Louis Philippe told him so; he ought to know.”117 More politically useful was a current head of state. Sir William Forwood conducted business dealings with President Diaz of Mexico in 1892,118 and later wrote “For some years

116 For Mather & Platt, Electrical Dept. The History of Mather & Platt Ltd. Jubilee Book 1958 117 Holt, 43-4., in ref to Duke of Penthièvre 118 Forwood, 228-34. 63 after I returned President Diaz occasionally corresponded with me, and I kept him informed of the condition of things in Europe, and in particular of the position of Mexican finance in

London.”119 In 1905, on a visit to the United States, he met with President Roosevelt, who took the opportunity to try out some of his ju-jitsu120 moves on Sir William. Sir William reflected later: “I think this was a proof of the extreme human character of the President. He will live as one of America's greatest Presidents, and I suppose there are not many men who can say they have wrestled with this great uncrowned king of America.”121

The benefits of a business head going himself is suggested by the experience of Sir

Edward Evans, who on a visit to the United States in 1912 took a letter of recommendation to the

President written by American Consul John Lewis Griffiths. This was the same Edward Evans who had been reported on in the Canadian newspapers with Robert Holt in 1893, nearly twenty years previously. The letter suggests that President Taft would likely meet with Evans. Griffiths calls Evans “a very dear personal friend and one of the most representative men of Liverpool,” and describes “[Evan’s] admiration for America and the very kindly feeling that he entertains for its people.”122 Evans was recommended for his representativeness — although he was neither an average citizen nor an elected representative — which translated his Liverpool importance into

American importance. Griffiths also stresses Evans’ kindly feelings towards America, which surely was an oversell given Evans’ interest in meeting the American President. A younger man might find it very hard to get an interview with a President. With their travels, these businessmen became well-known abroad in their own right, rather than just for their company’s name. Sir

119 Ibid., 234. 120 President Roosevelt was known for his ju-jitsu. 121 Forwood, 238. 122 LRO 920 EVA 76 J.L. Griffiths, American Consular Service to Sir Edward Evans Junior 64

Arthur Forwood, for example, merited an obituary notice in on his death in

1898.123 Sir William Forwood was granted the same honour in 1916.124

In this new era of business travel, by the 1920s Richard Holt was also taking business trips that looked very similar to his journey in the 1890s with one crucial difference: he was now the head of the Blue Funnel line rather than a junior member. Now these trips were routine among the upper levels of the firm rather than training for younger men, and there was much less need to have business organized on family lines. He took with him his wife and daughter — his wife he had actually first met during the final leg of his 1893 journey, in New York (they married four years later). In 1919-20 the three of them travelled almost the exact same journey through

Asia, again for business, and his wife Eliza recorded her own diary of their travels. 125

The diary shows by comparison how many more casual European and American visitors and tourists were travelling across Asia by the 1920s. travel was now accessible to a much wider group, and Eliza particularly deplored the noisy Americans on their ships (even though Eliza herself was American). That Richard undertook this journey himself, and with his wife and daughter, also shows how business trips had become entrenched in business culture. No need to send a nephew or cousin: the head of the business would go himself and remain in contact with Liverpool through modern communications technology.

A photograph from April 1920 shows them in Shanghai at Hazelwood, home to Edward

Mackay, Butterfield & Swire’s Shanghai Manager.126 Included are Mackay and his wife, John

123 28 September 1898 124 22 October 1916 125 LRO 920 DUR 15/4 Diary of Eliza Lawrence Holt (née Wells) 24 November 1919 to 16 June 1920 126 Edward Fairbairn Mackay (1868-1953) 65

Kidston Swire (grandson of John Samuel Swire, whose business relationship with Richard’s uncle Alfred Holt had been crucial for the success of the Blue Funnel), and Richard and Eliza and their eldest daughter Grace.127 The heads of two powerful British firms are meeting not in

Britain but in China, on the steps of a British-style mansion. None of the men are related to each other. The employee Edward Mackay mixes on equal terms with the two men who inherited their positions, John Swire and Richard Holt. The family business system now conferred very little benefit and could be a liability, for example making the line of succession in a business precarious. Richard had no sons; he brought his eldest daughter to Shanghai but she would not inherit a position at Blue Funnel, and the business would again pass sideways to nephews.

Cosmopolitanism

Charles Jones’ idea of the ‘cosmopolitan bourgeoisie’ does capture the ease with which those in Liverpool and Glasgow carried off cosmopolitanism, but while Jones argues that businessmen retreated from cosmopolitanism into a defensive nationalism, this does not appear to be the case in these two cities. A sizeable minority of businessmen, especially in Liverpool, were foreigners. There was a Greek community, a Jewish community, and a German community each with several wealthy members. There were certain limitations, but by and large it was easy to be accepted. Only a few families had been in the cities for many generations, and even those who were ethnically British spent months at a time on business trips around the world, to say nothing of holidays to the Continent or other leisure travel.

127 Falkus, 68. 66

It does not seem to have taken long to become metaphorically naturalized to a British identity, as shown in a nasty divorce dispute between two Jewish families with German backgrounds. Baron Louis Benas (1844-1914, Baron was an Anglicization of Baruch, not a title) was born in London to parents from Posen, and his family moved to Liverpool when he was very young.128 His father was legally naturalized in 1854 after a decade living in London.129 In 1879 he married Amalia Schloss (1858-1890), from a Manchester family originating in Frankfurt. Amalia herself was born in Frankfurt, but around the 1850s her uncle moved to Manchester and then she and her father followed.130 The marriage quickly became a conflict about marriage settlements and then a possible divorce. In letters drafted by Benas and his brother Alfred, they asked the

Schlosses to use “good English Saxon phrases” and dropped into local dialect to further emphasize the Schlosses’ foreignness “there is nothing like acting as we say in Lancashire

JANNOCK”.131 (Jannock means fair, straightforward, genuine).132 As both Manchester and

Liverpool were in Lancashire at the time, the jab was that the Schlosses were not part of “we”

Lancashire men. They frequently harped on the term ‘etiquette’ to describe what the Schlosses were lacking. These etiquette breaches in the minds of the Benases came from the Schlosses’ foreignness; they offered advice as how to use proper etiquette: “Let may me tell you as foreigners and perhaps not conversant with our English ways + manners that you have been

128 1851 Census London 13 Upper East Street. Ancestry.com. 129 National Archives HO/1/55/1819 Naturalisation Papers: Benas, Louis (known as Louis Benas Keiler), from Prussia. 8 June 1854. 130 Bill Williams, The Making of Manchester Jewry: 1740-1875 (Manchester University Press, 1976), 197. “Sigismund Schloss of Frankfurt, who arrived in Manchester in or about 1852, was one of four brothers engaged in trade with , one of whom, Leopold…in 1851 married the daughter of Horatio Montefiore, one of the founders of English Reform. The marriage of Schloss’ sister to Horatio Micholls…brought two of Manchester’s leading commercial families into close touch with the metropolitan Reform circle.” 131 LRO 296 BLB 1/1/1-2 Letters of Baron Louis Benas 132 Oxford English Dictionary 67 badly advised and as a good friend this is the first marriage in the English Schloss family for your peace + comfort dont [sic] repeat such proceedings – Either promise nothing at all or if you do be explicit and give it as our good old fashioned Jewish forefathers did in writing and there can be no dispute afterwards”.133 Assuming Britishness was not then too difficult, as within only one generation the Benases felt comfortable enough to condescend to the Schlosses and to advise them on how to conduct themselves as an English family.

It was not always easy to be fully naturalized, as in moments of strain the cracks might emerge. In 1886 the Liberal Party was in crisis over the question of Irish Home Rule, and in

Liverpool George Melly was a strong Home Ruler. George, whose father came from Switzerland to Liverpool in 1822, was born in England, had an English mother, an English wife, and lived his whole life in Liverpool — but still his travel and foreign connections could make him seem suspect.134 His maternal first cousin Percy Greg criticized him on these grounds: “I have always felt, in your political talk, that you did not regard England as a fatherland: you cd just take the oath to the U.S. or to France or to His Satanic Majesty for an chance – a sure deal in the

Chambers or the like. If you cd. be naturalized in the U.S. with the assurance of a seat in

Congress, wd you have any serious qualms of conscience or feeling?⁠”135 The attack was not so much on his ambition as on his lack of loyalty to England. Only someone so cosmopolitan could be happy to see Irish Home Rule. Most of the time, however, the majority of people were happy to accept the half-Swiss George Melly as a Liverpool man. When he died his obituaries firmly placed him as a local man. The was full of praise: “Few men of the day were

133 LRO 296 BLB 1/1/1-2 undated draft, probably written by Alfred Benas. 134 André Melly’s emigration is described in a Biography of Charles Pierre Melly, 2. 135 LRO 920 MEL 32/ 6049 Percy Greg to George Melly 7 July 1886. 68 better known or more highly respected, and it may be added that few of our merchant princes belonging to an old Liverpool family ever made such a name in the political world.” It stressed his cousinship to the Rathbones and likened his mercantile work to those of “the Rathbones, the

Holts, the Brocklebanks, the Langtons, and other notabilities of “the good old town,””.136 At the time of his death at least, Liverpool newspapers stressed his Swiss connections much less than his Liverpool ones.137

Orchard, the chronicler of late-nineteenth century Liverpool, wrote of some European merchants in the city which “have given us no family of real importance...While with us they were not of us; their hearts (if they had hearts) were elsewhere, and having accumulated enough, they disappeared, most of them to reappear in some more fashionable locality.”138 His xenophobia was common enough. But his list of the “Legion of Honour”, the most important men of the city, included many foreign-born men. Orchard’s schema therefore allowed for many good foreign merchants as well as bad ones.

End of family business

As this chapter has demonstrated, part of the ‘cosmopolitan bourgeoisie’ thesis is borne out by the examples of Liverpool and Glasgow businessmen. They were notably cosmopolitan and foreigners found it easy to take on local identities. But family businesses were far from defunct in the 1870s. Instead of closing themselves off, they were opening up. Businessmen were

136 The Liverpool Mercury Friday September 28 1894 “Death of Mr. George Melly.” 137 Most of his correspondence bears this out, with only letters from his family in Geneva being completely in French. Even his friend Laura, Lady Russell, wrote mostly in English even though she had grown up in France as the daughter of the French Vicomte de Peyronnet and Anglo-West Indian Frances Whitfield. Martin Russell, ‘Peyronnet, (Georgina) Frances de (1815–1895)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. 138 B. Guinness Orchard, Liverpool's Legion of Honour (Birkenhead 1893), 22. 69 travelling more, taking business trips to many places rather than settling down in one. At the same time, technological change was making business less reliant on family members. When a firm’s head could travel more freely and supervise more directly, it was easier to put trust in business associates not related through family. Instead of family business based on centre and periphery, the business trip helped encourage multinational business made up of multiple nodes, each accessible by the chief.

The decisive shift away from family only happened after 1900, and even then change was fairly slow. Office culture was fairly conservative. Business succession balanced commercial needs with family priorities. It is far too easy to exaggerate change. But inexorably family businesses in Glasgow and Liverpool were losing their family nature and the particularity of their location, and transforming into multinational companies with mere headquarters in Liverpool or

Glasgow and with a global reach.

70

Chapter Two Kinship

In July 1881 Mary Crum and her siblings wrote to their aunt Margaret Campbell with congratulations on her engagement. Mary, aged twelve, wrote on behalf of her eight-year-old twin brothers Maury and Cammy, and five-year-old sister Edie:“139We are all very very pleased, although I wanted you all to myself; I know I am very greedy to wish this, but I can’t help it.”140

Mary’s reaction of pleasure and loss summarized how critical this moment was to Margaret’s life. Marriage was the hinge point where she might have the pleasure of forming new family connections, but also the pain of loosening old ones. Marriage changed family relationships, even ones between generations and without cohabitation, such as that between Margaret and

Mary.

For family business to exist and succeed required that people made careful choices around marriage. There was a lot of business potential in a marriage. It could open the family outwards, by consolidating a business partnership between two different families or providing new investors and partners. At other times a marriage might strengthen bonds within a family, knitting distant cousins together by new bonds, or keeping wealth within the family through first cousins marrying each other. Family and business worked well together, the powerful group interest of kinship reinforced by the mutual self-interest of investor groups. Family business, then, did not appear from thin air. It was supported by social norms around marriage, gender, and socializing which shaped how families behaved and thus how they did business together.

139 Ages are based on the 1881 census. They left out 2 year old Jessie. 140 GML TD 1073/10/15 Mary Crum to Margaret Campbell 6 July 1881 71

Therefore when business was decoupled from family, as described in chapter one, there were social as well as economic causes and consequences.

Over the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the family changed faster than family business changed. The family business lost its family aspect only in the twentieth century, but family structures changed on a different timeline. Family size began falling in the 1870s, as couples had fewer children, and hit rock bottom in the 1930s.141 Marriage between close relations, so common in 1870, had become suspect by 1900 and rare by 1930.142

People’s social habits seem to have changed before they reorganized their business relationships along less family-oriented lines. This time lapse hints at the power of kinship structures, which pulled people into strong alliances that could outlast alterations in family shape. For some time after families shrank in size and kinship marriages became rarer, the powerful bonds formed in the heyday of these processes could continue. Social historians have tended to expect family structures to change at the same rate or at a slight delay from economic change — in this case, though, family business started to lose its family aspect after families had already begun to change. Both however were cushioned, for business by the retention of familial aspects as described in chapter one, and for families by the previous generations of endogamy.

Through most of the nineteenth century the elite of the middle class cemented their bonds with marriage between themselves, creating themselves into a cousinhood that held together through various familial relationships. Their relationships have been described as kinship,

141 Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860-1940 (Cambridge University Press, 2002). 142 Adam Kuper, Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England (Harvard University Press, 2009). and Leonore Davidoff, Thicker Than Water: Siblings and Their Relations, 1780-1920 (Oxford University Press, 2012). describe this transition. 72 cousinhood, and clan, all terms suggesting looser bonds than a nuclear family. Marriage was a strong bond among many other forms of bonds within kinship groups, and often overlapped with existing links. At one extreme there were marriages between first cousins, which for this social group (extrapolating from the upper-middle and upper class) can be estimated to around one out of every twenty to twenty-five marriages through most of the nineteenth century.143 At the other there were marriages between entirely unrelated people from different cities or even countries.

Endogamy and exogamy co-existed, but in 1870 endogamy was far more prominent and had already shaped a middle-class elite into a network of related or semi-related people. By the twentieth century endogamy had become much rarer, with marriage patterns moving away from family lines far faster than business arrangements. But just as family businesses retained a familial character after they stopped being mostly funded and run by families, the previous generations of endogamy cushioned the transition away from the kinship marriage system.

Endogamy and kinship in the mid-nineteenth century

Endogamy, or in-group marriage, occurred within many different types of groups.

Religious sect, wealth, business sector, city, and kinship all divided people from each other in

Glasgow and Liverpool; each group tended to be endogamous. In the mid-nineteenth century among the rich middle class of these cities, kinship was the most important criterion for marriage. This was partially because it implied other similarities in common — two members of the same family were more likely than unrelated people to worship the same, work in the same business, live in the same city, and be as rich as each other. In addition, kinship was also the building block of socializing, and therefore of marriage connections and class formation.

143 Kuper, 251. 73

Extended families spent a lot of time socializing with each other, pulling even very distant cousins into close relationships, including marriage, with each other. Even some of the formal institutions of social life, such as Liverpool’s Wellington Club, were created along the lines of the family.

There was a wide variety of configurations of kinship marriage within the rich middle class of Glasgow and Liverpool. The simplest was marriages between first cousins. The 1854

Geneva wedding of Charles Pierre Melly (1829-1888) and Louise Forget (1825-1899), for example, linked together the son of André Melly (1802-1851), who had emigrated from

Switzerland to Liverpool and married into the Greg family, with André’s sister’s family still living in Switzerland.144 André and his brother-in-law Jean-Pierre Forget had done business together, and those links would continue to the next generation, with this marriage and with a cotton-trading relationship between Charles Pierre Melly (and his brother George) and Louise

Forget’s brother Charles Isaac Forget, who lived in Liverpool from the 1850s.145 Straightforward cousin marriage helped hold together this immigrant family, and furthered their trading business.

Other kinship marriages were more convoluted, as kinship extended further than just first cousins. It is hard to capture all these marriages under the label of ‘cousin marriage’. There were marriages between in-laws: a year and half after his wife’s death in 1869, Alfred Holt married her first cousin.146 Siblings married in-laws: the link between Rathbone and Lyle was cemented with two marriages, one in 1862 between widower William Rathbone (1819-1902) and Emily

144 Elizabeth J. Stewart, ‘Melly, George (1830–1894)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, May 2012) 145 He first appears in the 1851 census in Liverpool, married a Swiss woman in 1856, and lived the rest of his life in Liverpool. His children also married into the Liverpool merchant community. 146 He would have been legally unable to marry his late wife’s sister. The Longs were a tanning family. 74

Acheson Lyle, another in 1869 between his brother Rathbone (1823-1903) and her sister Augusta Lyle. More distantly, there were first cousins marrying sisters, or a couple who shared mutual first cousins but had no blood relationship themselves.

Kinship was such an obvious route to marriage that young people hoping for marriage would make use of family connections to find suitable partners. In 1865 and 1866 Lallie Potter left her family home in Gloucestershire for the social Season in Liverpool with her maternal grandparents, and found a husband in local cotton merchant Robert Holt.147 While her father

Richard Potter was a railway entrepreneur and a wealthy man, her maternal grandparents were

Heyworths, part of a prominent mercantile Liverpool family. The balls of the Liverpool Season allowed Lallie to be accepted into Liverpool Society as granddaughter of the Heyworths, and to make an excellent match with Robert Holt. Robert and Lallie’s children, and their experience with the breakdown of the kinship marriage system, will be explored further in this chapter.

As is clear in Lallie’s story, kinship groups extended beyond cities, and business links between Glasgow and Liverpool were complemented with marriage alliances between the two cities. In a characteristic wedding on 17 September 1873, Sara Margaret Tinne and Walter Ewing

Crum, aged 24 and 31 respectively, were married. Walter and his father (also Walter) were both merchants in Glasgow, Sara’s father John Abraham (1807-1884) was named as ‘Esquire’ but his main business was Sandbach, Tinne and Co, a Liverpool-based merchant house. Before John

Abraham’s father Philip Tinne joined the company in 1813, it had been a mostly Glasgow-based firm. Philip Tinne (1772-1844) was Dutch by origin, and under his leadership in the Liverpool

147 Barbara Caine, Destined to Be Wives: The Sisters of Beatrice Webb (Clarendon Press, 1986), 70. 75 office, the firm made a lot of money in coffee, sugar, and slaves.148 This alliance between the

Tinnes and Sandbachs had been cemented by the marriage of Sara’s parents, John Abraham

Tinne and Margaret Sandbach.149 Gilbert Sandbach (Margaret’s brother) was the minister, and the wedding took place at St. Anne’s in the fashionable Liverpool suburb of .150

The Tinnes had helped found the church, along with their business associates the Parker family, who were similarly spread between Glasgow and Liverpool.151

In the mid-century families were large and sprawling, with overlap between generations and extensive socializing between family members. Sara Margaret Tinne’s eldest brother

Frederic Tinne had been born and died almost at the same time as their aunt, Alexine Tinne.152

Alexine was born of Philip Tinne’s (1772-1844) late second marriage. Her older half-brothers were nearly thirty years older than she was, and the elder John Abraham (1807-1884) was already married with a child before she was born. John Abraham’s eldest son Frederic was only

3 months younger than Alexine, and both Frederic and Alexine died in 1869. Alexine was murdered on August 1, 1869 while travelling in Sahara in an unsolved crime widely reported in

Europe; her nephew Frederic travelled to Cairo to close her household there and died more quietly back in Liverpool on October 22 1869.153 The late second marriage of Philip Tinne had made the gap between siblings John Abraham and Alexine nearly thirty years, but John Abraham

148 Pauline Rushton, Mrs Tinne's Wardrobe: A Liverpool Lady’s Clothes 1900-1940 (National Museums Liverpool, 2012), 10. 149 And to add to the connections, John Abraham’s mother was a Scot. 150 John A Sellar and Bertha Eliza Tinne were witnesses: John was a London-based Scottish merchant. 151 LRO 283 AIG Foremost among them Charles Stewart Parker, whose mother was also a Sandbach 152 Philip Frederic Tinne (24 January 1836 - 22 October 1869) and Alexandrina Petronella Francina Tinne (17 October 1835 - 1 August 1869) 153 Penelope Gladstone, Travels of Alexine: Alexine Tinne 1835-1869 (London: John Murray, 1970), 222. 76

Tinne and Margaret Sandbach’s marriage produced ten children across eighteen years, a wide gap enough gap that the eldest were marrying when the youngest were still very young.154

Sprawling and overlapping generations were ideal conditions for endogamy, which was widely practiced through the middle class and among the wealthy of Glasgow and Liverpool.

Belonging to a kinship network was a point of pride for many, and they glorified their kin connections.

Kinship socializing in the mid-nineteenth century

Kinship was a point of immense pride for rich families in Liverpool and Glasgow, as well as the foundation of their family businesses and a focus of their social life. Families spent a great deal of time with one another even as they took part in ‘Society’. Davidoff defines society as “a system of quasi-kinship relationships which was used to ‘place’ mobile individuals during the period of structural differentiation fostered by industrialization and urbanization.”155 It was maintained by women whose exile from working life was reinforced by their onerous duties as leaders of Society. Taking part in Society was time-intensive and this made it impossible for women to take part in the world of the office (along with all the other barriers against their participation in business). Society had various forms and venues for rich people to mix and socialize. Unlike the aristocracy, such activities had to be fitted around men’s working days, but there was still plenty of scope for social events. During the daytime at the weekend there could be informal family gatherings, all the way up to formal garden parties. In the evenings there were

154 They were born between 11 October 1834 and 14 May 1853. Two of these, Harriett Wilhelmina and James Capellan, married first cousins. John Abraham also remarried, after Margaret Sandbach died, to a cousin on his mother’s side, Elizabeth Rose Robinson, who was the widow of an Indian judge. 155 Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season (The Trinity Press, 1973), 15. 77 public events such as theatrical performances and musical concerts, private dinner parties and dances, and large public parties. Social activities gave leisure and relaxation, but also informal space for business and family alliances to form.

The source base for how these entertainments were organized and attended is a mixed bag. Private letters show some dimensions of social life, but detailed accounts were mostly confined to letters within families to temporarily absent family members — the kind of people who would have attended the gatherings mentioned but for a temporary absence. Friends and permanently absent family members presumably would have been bored by such details. This makes these accounts rather piecemeal: they exist only when a family was temporarily separated, so it is hard to find long continuous accounts of social activities. Diaries outline social engagements over a longer period, but they are perfunctory about the details. They can show the fluctuations of entertaining, with some months more favoured than others.156 Autobiographies can give an impressionistic broad sweep from many years’ distance.

The autobiographies suggest that in the nineteenth century, wealthy people in Liverpool and Glasgow were very grand in their entertaining. One example comes from the 1913 reminiscences of Mrs Story, wife of a University of Glasgow professor, when reflecting on entertaining back in the 1880s. “Very luxurious dinners were given in these days; some of the old city magnates rivalling one another in the excellence of their banquets, for indeed they could be called nothing else.” By 1913 she was giving thanks for now living “in less luxurious

156 For example, Richard Holt’s 1926 diary records the food and wine consumed by his household and indicates how August was a busy month for his entertainments. His household of four people at times was reduced to one or two, and entertained sparsely. At other times him, his wife, and two daughters were all at home, and entertained a variety of long- and short-term guests. LRO 920 DUR 14/41/1 Richard Holt diary. 78 times.”157 Liverpool also was very formal in its entertaining. In 1970 Gervas Huxley described interwar Liverpool as a “society wholly independent of London, both more exclusive and more formal, where powdered footmen and knee breeches were still employed for grand occasions in the wealthiest mansions”.158

Accounts of everyday social life suggest that family links were the basis of Society. The letters of Sarah Melly née Bright (1832-1909) to her husband George show how her family links were used by their children for socializing and marrying.159 George was the younger brother of

Charles Pierre, whose marriage to his first cousin Louise Forget had tied the Mellys back to their

Genevan family. George’s choice cemented the Mellys to Liverpool, and to the circles of their

English mother Ellen (née Greg) — in 1852 he married Sarah Bright, daughter of a Bristol-born

Liverpool merchant.160 By the 1880s Sarah had seven grown-up children, and the family’s social life was often directed through Sarah’s kin connections, especially her sister Elizabeth ‘Bessie’

Holt (née Bright). Sarah and Bessie saw each other often at least while George was away, and

Sarah was so comfortable at Bessie’s house ‘Sudley’ that she wrote of falling asleep on the sofa there while the rest of her party went to play lawn tennis.161 For some other engagements, without the promise of a sofa to sleep on, she wrote to George “I can’t face it”.162 The familial

157 Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair, Public Lives: Women, Family, and Society in Victorian Britain (Yale University Press, 2003), 119. 158 Gervas Huxley, Both Hands (Chatto & Windus, 1970), 118. Cited in Susan Pedersen, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (Yale University Press, 2004), 83. 159 These were written to him when he was away on business. Her style is a stream-of-consciousness: often written at different times of the same day, inconsistently numbered, and sometimes fragmentary. 160 George and Sarah were both fairly young (22 and 20); and when in 1854 Charles Pierre married his cousin, he was only 25. Their youth might be connected to their father’s recent and sudden death in 1851, with this loss perhaps propelling Charles and George to prop up their own adultness by getting married. 161 LRO 920 MEL 6082 Sarah Melly to George Melly 21 June [1888]. 162 LRO 920 MEL 6061 Sarah Melly to George Melly 12 June [1888]. She seems to have felt some self- consciousness about attending social gatherings: she wrote (presumably about someone her husband had mentioned) “Yes a wife who is frittering her life out to get into society that does not want her, must be rather a trying thing – I 79 nature of most of her social engagements made them easier for her, and formed the basis for her wider social network.

Something of the effect of cousin socializing can be seen in the marriage of Sarah’s son

Hugh Mesnard Melly and Cicely Anne Holt. In 1853, before either of them were born, her uncle

George Holt married his aunt Bessie Bright. Hugh and Cicely were born in 1863 — by then they shared a cousin Emma Holt, born the year before. Emma was an only child, but Cicely was to be one of eight and Hugh one of seven siblings. Within a social world that was structured by kinship, Cicely and Hugh must have socialized together a lot as children and young adults. At

Christmas 1884 Hugh and his family were at Cicely’s family home of Whinmoor, playing at amateur dramatics.163 The mood was light-hearted: the programme ended with the promise “At the conclusion of this play Mr Hugh Melly will take out one of Mr George Melly’s teeth –”

Whether George, Bessie and Emma were present, as the family which linked Hugh and Cicely’s families, is not recorded. But nineteen months later, on August 11 1886, the two families would become permanently linked when Cicely and Hugh married.164 They set up their first home at 83

may be an old frump but I have never pushed”. LRO 920 MEL 32 6061 12 June [1888] Sarah Melly to George Melly 163 Their choice was Creatures of Impulse, a comic play by W S Gilbert, played with the following actors: Sergeant Klooque: H.M.M. (Hugh Mesnard Melly) Boomblehardt: S.H.M ((Samuel) Heywood Melly, brother to Hugh) Peter: W.R.M. (William Rathbone Melly, brother to Hugh) Martha: C.A.H. (Cicely Anne Holt) Pipette: F.E.M. (Florence Elizabeth Melly, sister to Hugh) A Strange Old Lady: C.A.H. (Cicely Anne Holt) Villagens: J.E.H. O.N.H. (Janet Elizabeth Holt and Oliver Needham Holt, siblings of Cicely) LRO 920 DUR 4/32/9 These are my guesses as to the initials. 164 Perhaps the amateur dramatics had promoted romance, or perhaps Hugh’s good looks had encouraged the marriage — his nephew noted that he was “much the best looking member of the family; in fact he was a very handsome man.” (W H Rawdon Smith, The George Mellys (1962)) Additionally in 1884, at the age of 21, Hugh had also come into an inheritance left to him by his maternal uncle and godfather, Hugh Meyler Bright, who had died unmarried in his late twenties in 1866. 80

Bedford Street and Hugh worked as a wool merchant. Kinship provided this job just as it had provided him a wife.

‘Society’

But family, even very extended family, could not be the only vehicle for social life.

Society therefore was a surrogate that provided suitable marriage partners outside the family while limiting contact with unsuitable partners. It built directly on those kinship relations, and even at its most formal, it replicated how kinship networks operated. There were always opportunities for newcomers to incorporate themselves into Society, with balls especially being more open to outsiders than most other forms of entertainment. Balls were often formalized and put on by political parties, local Volunteer regiments, or other organizations. Some of the attraction of joining the Volunteers seems to have been in the chance to parade in uniform at these balls!165 These formally-organized balls co-existed with balls put on by individuals, occurring throughout the winter months; balls were so expensive and time-consuming that they were probably just too costly for individuals to put on with the regularity that young people demanded. And so people organized together to create balls in organizations that were both familial and commercial.

In Liverpool there was the Wellington Club, a private member’s society with its own premises, made especially for balls. There was a Crush Room, Reception Room, Drawing Room,

Refreshment Room, and Cloakrooms as well as a Ball Room. The Rules of the club stated: “The object of the Wellington Club is to secure for a society of ladies and gentlemen, all connected

165 There may have been an opportunity for social advancement in joining the Volunteers, but that does not appear to have been a very powerful effect. 81 with each other by a common bond of social or personal acquaintance, a convenient and agreeable place of meeting for the holding of Balls.”166 It was intended for people who were already connected, rather than for creating social links. In many ways it worked like a business, with 250 ‘proprietors’ who each owned one share in the Club. Like a business, these shareholders were governed by an elected committee (of 21 proprietors) and four trustees.

Much of the Wellington Club’s organization was strictly commercial, reflecting the business minds of its members. New proprietors had to be approved by ballot, with two black balls indicating rejection, similar to other forms of club (Rule 17) — yet shares were also

“transferable as personal property” (Rule 10) with only a 1-guinea fee. Personal bankruptcy was an automatic dismissal from the club (Rule 8).167 Women could own shares as ‘Lady Proprietors’ but they would be ineligible to vote on new members.168 The club was an eminently rational way to organize marriage along business lines.

The organization of the patriarchal family and the needs of the marriage market, are both evident in the organization of the club. There was an age limit for men at the ball: no men under

18 could attend (Rule 18). This took out men who were ineligibly young. While heads of families (mostly married men) would be one of the 250 shareholders (proprietors), whose membership cost 4 guineas a year; women could take part at a lower level, that of annual subscriber. Any proprietor could nominate annual subscribers, providing the person fell under one of three categories:

166 LRO 367 WTN 7 Rules of The Wellington Club 13 November 1919. 167 Ibid. 168 Ibid, 20 October 1903 minutes. 82

“(1) Any lady of their family (or son under 21) permanently resident with them. [Annual cost of 2 guineas]

(2) Unmarried ladies who are not members of their family living within 15 miles of the

Liverpool Town Hall. [Annual cost of 4 guineas]

(3) Unmarried gentlemen under 25 30 years of age living within 15 miles of the

Liverpool Town Hall. [Annual cost of 4 guineas]”169

This set-up expected proprietors to use their tickets mostly to bring the women of their family with them to balls. Elsewhere family was defined as including nephews and nieces, and sisters and mothers who lived permanently with the proprietor. Women of whatever age were acceptable ball attendees under the umbrella of a proprietor. Men between 18 and 21 were treated like women, but the family relations were defined more tightly: son or nephew (not brother). Men over 30 had to become their own household heads and join as proprietors themselves. This generous definition of family suited broad kinship arrangements that were common in the nineteenth century but becoming less so by 1919, when this edition of the rules was recorded. The Wellington Club itself was quickly becoming outdated and would close in another decade, and the 1919 rules were a hangover of the recent past rather than a description of the present.

The Wellington was a somewhat exclusive club: strangers (anyone who did not live within 15 miles of the Liverpool Town Hall) could be invited by a proprietor, but paid £1 per ball — a high price.170 By contrast, a man with a lady of his family could pay 6 guineas for a

169 Ibid, Rule 12 and 20. 170 Ibid, Rule 20. 83 whole season of nine balls, a man with two ladies of his family could pay 8 guineas, and beyond that he could add more ladies of his family without extra cost. This system of course promoted socializing and marriages between the families of the 250 proprietors, who all (at least according to the rules) were already friendly and in fact were often already related.

Each ball was then presided over by a Lady Patroness, a married woman of sufficient status. Every person arriving at the ball had to be ‘received’ by her: their names were announced to her and they bowed to her. The bows could be rather variable: Betty Holt wrote of her mother,

Lallie Holt, receiving at a Masonic Ball in 1893: “some were awfully naughty + did not bow at all to Mama, just strutted past; + some made low curtseys; some nodded in a patronising way.”171

Lallie had met her husband Robert Holt through attending Liverpool balls, so it was a familiar habitat to her; at the time of the Masonic Ball in 1893 her husband was Lord Mayor. The

Wellington Rooms seem to have been a place for coming out into Society, according to the letters of Betty’s sister Catherine. When their brother turned 18 in 1886, Catherine wrote to him about her own hopes for a coming out and teasing him: “I shall soon be eighteen & then what a ball we’ll have to celebrate the event; you shall have one also when you come back this holidays or perhaps a “prefect” wld prefer a course of lectures”.172 The ball when he came back from school was held on Tuesday December 28th; their father recorded: “A dance of about 70 people especially for Kitty and Dick, the cousins muster in full numbers.”173 But this was not his full formal entry into society, as the next winter she wrote to him asking “Will you make your

171 LRO 920 DUR 14/6/16 Betty Holt to Richard Holt 16 January 1893. I suspect Betty is being rather overzealous on her mother’s behalf here as Lallie was considered generally popular in Liverpool. She was also writing to her brother while he was on his tour of the Far East, as discussed in chapter one, and so frequently brought out the humour of various social engagements. 172 LRO 920 DUR 14/3/32 Catherine Holt to Richard Holt 12 November 1886. 173 LRO 920 DUR 1/6 Holt family diary Tuesday 28 December 1886. 84

“entré” in the world this winter, & go to the Wellington Rooms etc.”174 Both men and women formally joined Society as adults in a similar way, although for men it was more an individual process rather than a collective one. Women joined as a set of debutantes — Betty was a debutante in 1893 when she was 17, and her sister Catherine wrote of them at the Wellington

Rooms: “Betty looked her best – the no of débutantes was appalling! someone said 22!”175 These letters always discuss the Wellington Rooms as a collective experience between several family members — the Holts seem to have attended in order to be together as well as to be with those outside their kinship.

Belonging to the Wellington Rooms was a point of pride for rich young people. They were ‘in’ at this important social venue, and could enjoy many exciting balls there. Here they would be socializing with kin, but also with a wider group of wealthy people from across the city. They came not as individuals, but as families, enjoying their time at the Wellington Rooms by connections with each other. They felt pride in their own families, glorying in an illustrious name or notable connections.

Pride in kinship

Marriage choices were not only about kinship to living people, but sometimes also establishing kinship to the dead. There was particular prestige to some families that might make them particularly attractive as spouses. Bessie and Sarah Bright were not only part of the Bright family, a mercantile family which had been active in Bristol and Liverpool from the eighteenth

174 LRO 920 DUR 14/3/39 Catherine Holt to Richard Holt 3 November 1887. 175 LRO 920 DUR 14/3/43 Catherine Holt to Richard Holt 12 January 1893. 85 century, but also descended from the Heywood family, through their two grandmothers.176

Heywood’s Bank was one of the longest-running banks in Liverpool, and the aura conjured by the name Heywood translated well onto the marriage market as well as the money market.177

Samuel Bright and Elizabeth Jones, parents of Bessie and Sarah Bright, both had mothers from the Heywood family. Across their families, children were repeatedly named in memory of the

Heywoods. Elizabeth Jones’s brothers all had the quasi-double-barrelled surname of Heywood

Jones. Samuel and Elizabeth used Heywood as the Christian name for the second son, Heywood

Bright. Even Mary Ellen Jones, sister of Elizabeth, inserted the name Heywood as a middle name for her daughter, even though Mary Ellen had very illustrious connections by marriage: her husband Robert Gladstone was brother to Prime Minister William Gladstone (the Gladstones also being a Liverpool family).178 Even if the connection was matrilineal, Liverpool families were eager to proclaim their connection to kin of particular renown or wealth or stability.

This sensitivity to the Heywood name was shown even after the bank closed. In 1883

Heywoods amalgamated with the Bank of Liverpool, with the last proprietor Arthur Heywood becoming director of the Bank of Liverpool. The next year Henry Bright, the brother of Bessie and Sarah, died aged 54, a talented writer and respected thinker but not a great businessman. He was not “cut out for the shipowning life” in Gibbs, Bright & Co. (his father’s firm), which ran ships to Australia and back.179 But whatever his personal character, his In Memoriam

176 The Heywoods were confusingly a different family from the Heyworths mentioned above as Lallie Potter’s grandparents. 177 Description of items related to Heywood’s Bank held by the archives of Bank (archive.barclays.com/items/show/5317) 178 Robert Gladstone (1805-1875) 179 Adrian Jarvis, ‘Bright, Henry Arthur (1830–1884)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 86 emphasized his descent from two business dynasties. “HENRY BRIGHT belonged on his father’s and mother’s side to that aristocracy of commerce and finance which is generated by individual industry, probity, and enterprise in our great seaboard cities. The Brights of Bristol and the Heywoods of Liverpool are as distinctive in their own class and society as the Percys and

Wentworths in another order.”180 Ignored in this is Henry’s maternal grandfather Hugh Jones (a banker himself) in favour of his paternal grandfather Richard Bright and his two grandmothers, both née Heywood.181 Surprisingly, the Bright connection was still considered illustrious enough to be included — by the 1880s the Bright family’s reputation was suffering from the alcoholism and business ineptitude of Benjamin Bright (1823-1900) — perhaps the author of the In

Memoriam expected the Bright family to rebound, or it would have been too odd to exclude a paternal lineage.182 Henry’s two grandmothers appear in the In Memoriam as important links for kin rather than important for themselves, such as Henry Bright’s wife. “As soon as his circumstances permitted, Mr. H- Bright had taken to himself a most suitable partner for life, literally for sickness and health, in the sister of Mr. Yates Thompson, the colleague of Mr.

Gladstone in his unsuccessful candidature for the county”.183 The thorough biographer has to find other sources to learn that Henry’s most suitable partner’s name was Mary Elizabeth.

Another Heywood link was established with Henry Bright and Mary Elizabeth Thompson’s eldest son, whom they named Allan Heywood Bright (1862-1941), later a Liberal politician.184

180 "Henry Bright. In Memoriam," Philobiblon Society's Miscellanies XV: 53. 181 Rawdon Smith, 16. 182 Benjamin Bright had “inept business sense and disastrous financial position, his alcoholism resulting in poor health”. Samuel Bright, Henry Bright V and Robert Bright VI collaborated to keep him and his wife, Frances, (Fanny), afloat. The Bristol branch of the Brights ended up emigrating to Australia. (Notes accompanying Bright archives at the Univesity of Melbourne). 183 "Henry Bright. In Memoriam," 60-1. 184 Allan Heywood Bright was also a book-lover: his collection (partially from Henry Yates Thompson) sold for about £3m in 2014. Anita Singh, “For sale: the £3m library that time forgot” 6 July 2014 87

In Scotland the system was even more sensitive to matrilineal ancestry, almost to the point of absurdity. Scottish women had a better legal position than English women after marriage, and so in official documents women preserved their maiden names. Miss XY marrying

Mr Z became Mrs XYZ. Children might also acquire double surnames or have a mother’s maiden name as a middle name: Humphrey Ewing Crum Ewing (1836-1878) acquired Ewing as both a middle name and a surname! 185 In England women’s legal names did not tend to preserve their maiden names, but among the rich middle class of Liverpool it was common to give children a mother’s maiden name as a middle name or part of a double surname. This does not appear to have been an aristocratic pretension, as they were very inconsistent in using double surnames both in public and private. There are several families, too, where people were not called by their first name, which can only be detected by comparing official documents with family letters. Sisters Alice Norah Graves and Frances Marjorie Graves, for example, appear in others’ correspondence as Norah and Marjorie, and there are many other examples of both men and women who used their middle rather than their first names throughout their lives.

Adopting double surnames was particularly prevalent among families which died out in the male line, when daughters were the only way to pass on the surname. But among the middle class, unlike among the aristocracy, this was not dictated by wills or requested by heiresses, as proved by the unevenness of the practice. William Durning had only two daughters, Emma

(1802-1871) and Jemima (1804-1875). Jemima married into a Manchester family and had two daughters, while Emma stayed in Liverpool and married George Holt, a business associate of their father, producing five sons and a daughter. Of these five, only the eldest William and

185 Gordon and Nair, 52. 88 youngest Robert used Durning Holt as their surname. In the next generation only some of the sons of William and Robert used Durning Holt. It is impossible to understand why William and

Robert chose different surnames from their brothers, but it might be that they followed their father George Holt into the cotton business, whereas the other three brothers George, Alfred, and

Philip moved into steamship business. The Durning name might have had more resonance among cotton merchants than steamship owners because William Durning had also been a merchant, albeit in wine and spirits.186 William Durning Holt, as the namesake of his grandfather, might have felt closer to his grandfather’s legacy than his other brothers.

Movement may also have affected surname use, as shown in the Smith family. Within

Glasgow, Smith might have been a clear link to a family of West India merchants, but when the sons of Archibald Smith (1813-1872) began to build their careers outside of Glasgow, they were probably indistinguishable from all the other Smiths in Britain. Even within Glasgow the name might have been tarnished by the sensational 1857 trial of Madeleine Hamilton Smith for poisoning her lover.187 The eldest son James Parker Smith took on their mother’s maiden name of

Parker as a surname rather than just a middle name, and all his children were surnamed Parker

Smith. The Parker family were a merchant family well-known in both Glasgow and Liverpool, so added prestige to the Smith name. A younger son Henry Babington Smith used his middle name Babington as part of his surname as he rose in the Indian government. Babington was given to him for his maternal grandmother, Mary Babington, a daughter of Thomas Babington and Jean Macaulay. This link to the Clapham sect, and famous men in the Indian Government

186 LRO 920 DUR 4/31 “Some memorials of Our Mother, Emma Holt, by Anne Holt”. This includes both a manuscript copy written in 1871, and typewritten copy. William Durning’s business is discussed on pp12-13 of the typewritten version. 187 Gordon and Nair, 77-91. 89 such as Thomas Babington Macaulay, can only have helped Henry Babington Smith’s political career.

Unsuitable marriage

The importance of this system of kinship marriage is perhaps best illustrated by a case from outside it. William Pearce was an example of a self-made man whose choice of bride and sexual behaviour actively militated against being accepted within the social world of rich families of Glasgow. It is difficult to know what kind of business disadvantage this put him at.

He was phenomenally successful at bringing the shipbuilding company he headed, Fairfields, to the peak of productivity and innovativeness, but he seems to have been personally unpopular among his peers. He already worked at a disadvantage because he was an outsider: he made his own fortune, rather than having been born into the wealthy middle class like so many others around him. His work would dissipate into nothing a few years after his death, and his family did not even manage ‘shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations’ because there was no third generation. His marriage did not solidify kinship relations or business links in Glasgow, and so was a missed opportunity for him. On January 22 1861, aged 28, he married Dinah Sowter (also written Socoter) in Brompton, Kent.188 She was already pregnant: their only child was born six months later on July 23.189 Presumably this fact had weighed against her lack of suitability in other ways. Her father was the innkeeper at the Queens Head Inn in Gillingham, very close to the docks where William was in charge of building HMS Achilles, the first naval-built iron-clad

188 Old Parish Church Brompton parish records, Ancestry.com. 189 H. M. Innes, ‘Pearce, Sir William George, second baronet (1861–1907)’, rev. Ian St John, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 90 ship.190 In 1863 they moved to Clydeside and he began working for shipbuilding companies there, working his way up to partner at Fairfields. There was nothing in her family background that was useful to William’s rise to the heights of wealth in Glasgow.

William Pearce’s success in business success made him a millionaire, and allowed him to achieve political power and a baronetcy in 1887. But his family’s social status was insecure and he became a figure of social maladaptation both in a scandal in 1885 and after his death. His lack of integration with the Glasgow elite, due to the separateness of his kinship from those of his peers, made him an outsider. In 1885 he became a scandalous enough figure to appear in print as a seducer and a victim of violence. Miss Adelaide Francis was considerably younger than

William, 24 to his 52, about the same age as his son, and of the solidly middle class rather than the wealthiest elite.191 Gossip began to spread about their behaviour. It was rumoured that they had gone together to the Riviera, and her parents became more and more angry with Pearce. She received snubs at social events and people in Glasgow talked about her behind her back. The matter came to a head when her father and Pearce met in London on August 12. Mr Francis attacked Pearce in the staircase of some offices on East-India Avenue: “soundly flogged” him and “publicly accused [Pearce] of having seduced [Francis’] daughter. The flogging was preceded by a violent assault on [Pearce], who is said to have been shaken by the angry father as a terrier shakes a rat. He was then flogged until the stick broke”.192 It was a public attack and was

190 Anthony Slaven, ‘Pearce, Sir William, first baronet (1833–1888)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; 1861 Census, Ancestry.com. 191 Details come from a book of letters and newspaper cuttings kept by Isabella Elder, who was dragged into this scandal by the Francises (GUA DC 122/6). Adelaide’s age is given in her letter to Pall Mall Gazette on 12 August 1885. Her father, William Francis, worked at the Clyde Customs as the acting surveyor. 192 GUA DC 122/6 “Copy correspondence between Mrs Isabella Elder and others” cutting from Pall Mall Gazette 12 August 1885. 91 immediately reported without names in . The next edition contained interviews with both parties, including a denial by Pearce: “it is merely a case of blackmailing of a peculiarly bad kind. It is absolutely and entirely false that I seduced his daughter.” The next day they named Pearce and Francis as the two parties involved.

Francis’s actions were extreme but also programmatic. By publically attacking Pearce and calling him a seducer, he invited legal action from Pearce. Without beginning legal action,

Pearce began to look guiltier and guiltier. The timing was somewhat unfortunate for Pearce. He had just been given the honour of joining the Royal Commission on the Depression of Trade and

Industry — hence his presence in London — and the publicity around the Commission became opportunities for the Pall Mall Gazette to insist he resign, as Sir Charles Dilke had just done from his own Royal Commission work. He was also about to stand to be a Conservative

Parliamentary candidate. W. T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, was in the midst of a crusade all about sexual immorality, in the ‘Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’. The series had run in July of that year, making the Pall Mall Gazette into the moral voice of the nation, well qualified to judge William Pearce. Adelaide Francis herself made the scandal considerably worse. She was apparently estranged from her father and perhaps mentally unstable.193 She wrote to the Pall Mall Gazette with her version of events, calling upon the Gazette to give her voice (to deny that she had been seduced by Pearce) by invoking the teenage prostitutes written about in the ‘Maiden Tribute’: “It is so well known to every one that for some time lately you have been exposing all the wrongs done to young girls, that I feel sure from what has been said about me,

193 GUA DC 122/6 “Copy correspondence between Mrs Isabella Elder and others” gives a brief hint of a rumour that Adelaide had been in a mental asylum. There is also a peculiar letter supposed to be written by her in February 1886 claiming that she was married to a Major Finch. 92 that every one would class me with those unhappy girls”. She claimed however that her similarity with them was not in her seduction, but rather in the lies spread about her. Her denial was too public and merely continued the newspaper coverage of her possible seduction.194

For someone who left over a million pounds at his death in 1888, Sir William Pearce left remarkably little impact on his adopted home of Glasgow. Isabella Elder, who was dragged into the public scandal around Adelaide Francis, provides a notable contrast. Her husband John had been a shipbuilder on the Clyde who died an early and childless death in 1869. She outlived him by thirty-six years. It was this sudden blow to his company which had led Isabella and her partners to appoint Pearce as a new partner and manager, a role which he expanded and held until his death (renaming & Co to the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering

Company in 1886).195 The contrast between Isabella’s legacy and William’s shows the effects of his more precarious social position. Theoretically the millionaire baronet should have had an advantage, particularly as he had a son to carry on his name and a wife who outlived him by thirty years. But his widow and son found London a more congenial home after his death.196

Dinah Pearce was the daughter of a Kentish innkeeper, while Isabella, née Ure, was the daughter of a Glasgow lawyer with extensive connections among the wealthy of Glasgow. While Isabella

Elder powerfully shaped philanthropy in Glasgow, and particularly in the Govan area near her husband’s shipyards, Dinah Pearce was unable to develop a legacy for her husband. William’s

194 Adelaide could not attend social functions in Glasgow without talk and gossip following her. She married a Frederick Wheeler at the end of October and seems not to have returned to Glasgow. Her refusal to hew to the rules around relationships with men, by befriending a wealthy older man rather than cultivating young marriageable men, made her an outcast. 195 Anthony Slaven, ‘Pearce, Sir William, first baronet (1833–1888)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. 196 1891 Census, 1 Hyde Park Gardens London, Ancestry.com. 93 son, also Sir William Pearce, died childless at only 45 in 1907. Dinah Pearce followed her husband’s will in setting up a Pearce Institute in Govan; but it was outshone by Isabella Elder’s nearby Elder Park, which features a glorious statue of Isabella. Dinah’s social connections were dependent on her husband, and after his death she had little effect on Glasgow.

Not long after his death Sir William Pearce became an object lesson in the failings of so- called “new men.” In 1890 his son, also William (1861-1907), bought a shooting estate of 2,300 acres called Chilton Lodge, near Hungerford, for £80,000. The Pall Mall Gazette covered the story under an ongoing story called ‘New Men and Old Acres’, describing the Pearce family as emblematic of “the natural tendency of men who have made money in business to become landowners.”197 Other newspapers reproduced and enlarged on this theme, with the Sheffield

Daily Telegraph linking Pearce in particular with “a steady passing out of the older families, and the coming in of people who, having borne the burden and heat of the day in the large towns, hoped to pass the evening in the quietude of country life. It is pathetic to note in how many instances the men have waited too long, or the wealth has come too late. They have heaped up riches for others to spend.”198

The younger Sir William Pearce was chairman of Fairfield for his lifetime, but his tenure continued his father’s path rather than changing the company. He spent much of his time elsewhere, in both London and Chilton Lodge. In the 1891 census he was with his mother at 1

Hyde Park Gardens, and gave his profession as Barrister at Law; in 1901 he was at Chilton

Lodge with the author Frederick Wicks as a visitor, and gave his profession as Retired Barrister.

197 “New Men and Old Acres” Pall Mall Gazette Monday 22 December 1890, Issue 8037. 198 The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, Friday 26 December 1890, 10977, 4. 94

He did not marry until 1905, when he was forty-three, and his bride was an actress, Carrie Coote; they had no children.199 The riches heaped up by the elder William Pearce were not even mostly spent by his descendants, and his son’s will left most of the money to Trinity College

Cambridge, where he had been educated.200 college thus acquired probably the most valuable of the many accessions which have been made to its endowments since its foundation by Henry

VIII in 1546.

The elder Sir William had failed to integrate himself into Glasgow’s kinship networks, had provoked scandal, and therefore left little very legacy. Instead he was lumped in with other

‘new men’ and pitied for his failure to live long enough to enjoy success.

Decline of the Kinship Marriage System

In the 1880s, when William Pearce was causing a scandal in Glasgow Society, the family structures that undergirded Society were however in the early stages of breakdown. The kinship marriage system, which had created an elite group of families within Glasgow and Liverpool, was losing its hold. From the 1870s a fertility decline, a rise in the unmarried population, and a new group of working women would shake up the kinship system in place in Liverpool and

Glasgow. Lines of religion and nationality also took on a new meaninglessness, as endogamy overall collapsed. Kinship did not disappear. It remained important in the lives of women who

199 Caroline Eva Coote (1870-1907). In the 1891 census, she lived at 3 Riverside , Portsmouth Villas, Long Ditton, Surrey with her widowed mother, sister-in-law, and a general servant, and listed her profession as ‘Actress’. In 1901 she was living at 2 Deanery Street, Mayfair, around the corner from 1 Hyde Park Gardens; as head of the household ‘living on her own means’ with a cook and house parlourmaid. 200 This £400,000 was probably the biggest accession that Trinity received since its foundation in 1546. The rest of Sir William Pearce’s million went to his wife Dinah Pearce, who outlived her son. H. M. Innes, ‘Pearce, Sir William George, second baronet (1861–1907)’, rev. Ian St John, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 95 otherwise led the lifestyle of ‘New Women’. It shaped marriages between people of different nationalities. But as a system, a way of life, it could not be sustained and its demise eroded the familial basis of the family business.

Marriage’s legal status and cultural meaning faced multiple challenges across the late- nineteenth century, and it also changed as a social practice. The quest to improve marriage for women led to new legislation giving married women more power over their property (Married

Women’s Property Acts 1870 and 1882), more custodial power over their children (Infant

Custody Acts 1873 and 1886), and new abilities to exit marriage (Matrimonial Causes Acts 1857 and 1878). These new laws sprang from and then extended discussions about the relationship between husband and wife. Should a man’s power within marriage be limited because a few bad men beat and abused their wives? Would giving women more power within marriage strengthen the institution or destroy it? These debates and legal changes happened while the social practice of marriage also shifted, as people began to marry later life and a growing portion never married.

Marital fertility fell continuously until the Second World War, reshaping the size and age hierarchy of families. Absent any change in business practice between 1870 and 1930, family business would still have changed because the nature of the family had transformed.

Family business in the middle of the nineteenth century took place in big sprawling patriarchal families which had large overlaps between generations and in which a reasonable minority of adults would die before middle age. Kinship relations had to knit together, say, orphaned nephews with their living uncles, or a youngest brother with another brother perhaps fifteen or twenty years older than him. But from the 1870s middle-class people’s reproductive patterns changed. The average age at marriage crept up, more people never married, and within 96 marriage couples had fewer children with a narrower age spread.201 These were national trends which affected the rich of Liverpool and Glasgow as much as anywhere else.

Marriage between close kin fell out of favour. Among the upper and upper-middle classes, around four to five percent of marriages were between first cousins through most of the nineteenth century. That fell dramatically: by the 1930s, only one marriage in 6000 was between first cousins.202 Perhaps cousin marriages were unusually precipitous in their decline, because they were the kinship marriages most affected by eugenic concerns about heredity. Yet the decline in kin endogamy was real: even marriages between in-laws (such as two brothers to two sisters) became peculiar and suspicious.203

As Adam Kuper has argued, the prevalence of cousin-marriage declined sharply as a consequence of concerns raised by eugenicists. The debate began temperately — as compared to the American hysteria over cousin-marriage — but quickly spread concern about the genetic risks of intermarriage. Kuper shows how doubt escalated over time in literature: Jude and Sue in

Jude the Obscure (1896) are concerned about multiplying their family’s tendency towards tragedy by allying but ignore those doubts to tragic results, whereas Holly and Val in To Let

(1921, the third volume of the Forsyte Saga) marry but choose not to have children.204 Earlier in the nineteenth century such matches had been so unproblematic that in Mansfield Park (1814)

Sir Thomas Bertram is worried about bringing his impoverished niece Fanny to live with the family because of the danger that one of his sons will make an disadvantageous marriage with

201 This section draws on Szreter. as well as Kuper. Davidoff. and Michael Anderson, ed. British Population History: From the Black Death to the Present Day (Cambridge University Press, 1996). 202 Kuper, 251. 203 Davidoff, 244. 204 Kuper, 250. 97 her, worrying “of cousins in love, etc.” 205 The rise of eugenics redefined cousin marriages as dangerous, when previously the degree of banned consanguinity included a deceased wife’s sister. The illegality of a marriage to a dead wife’s sister was finally decriminalized in 1907, only a year before incest was criminalized. This dual decriminalization and criminizalition show a shift from understanding families as made up of genetically unrelated people to seeing families as defined by blood relationships. 206 Close socializing with cousins of cousins or in-laws became less common as families defined themselves by blood instead of marriage. And even without the genetic concerns, the sheer likelihood of marrying a first cousin was diminishing as family size fell. An average person’s collection of first cousins fell from something around forty to closer to twelve. 207

In Liverpool and Glasgow business families, the cousin marriage model was coming under strain from the 1880s and 1890s. Cicely Holt’s 1886 marriage to Hugh Melly was one between cousins of cousins, as described above. Catherine Holt, first cousin to Cicely, seems to have been less than impressed. In November she wrote to her brother that Cicely was not yet

“entirely a “Melly” I saw “him” at the Concert & wondered for the thousandth time how she could marry him; however, there’s no accounting etc:”.208 In 1900 Sara Crum’s (1878-1947) marriage similarly disappointed her cousins the Smiths. (Sara was the daughter of Sara Margaret

Tinne and Walter Ewing Crum, whose wedding was described above as a model of kinship

205 Mary Jean Corbett, Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf (Cornell University Press, 2010). 206 Ginger Frost, "Incest and Influence: The Private Life of Bourgeois England, by Adam Kuper (Review)," Victorian Studies 52, no. 3 (2010). 207 Zhongwei Zhao, "The Demographic Transition in Victorian England and Changes in English Kinship Networks," Continuity and Change 11, no. 2 (1996): 246, 56. 208 LRO 920 DUR 14/3/32 Catherine Holt to Richard Holt, 12 November 1886. 98 marriage and business good sense). Susan Parker Smith wrote to her daughter Daisy that the engagement “will make much commotion in the circles of cousins, + I expect they will think it a dull marriage”.209 Sara’s fiancé was “much older than she is” (45 to her 22) and a widower with a ten-year-old son. His first wife, a daughter of Archbishop Tait, had died in childbirth within a year of their wedding in 1888.210 Sara Crum’s husband John Ellison was tangentially linked to her cousins as the widower of a sister to Edith Davidson, who was already known to them.211

The dissatisfaction with these marriages suggest how the kinship marriage system was looking less appealing to the younger generation.212

The existence of generations of kinship marriage above these new exogamous generations softened the blow. Endogamy had knit together an elite where most members were already distantly related, so to find outside marriage partners required people to look outside their class or city. Distant kinship marriages therefore continued, but those between first cousins or close in-laws became unusual. Even if you had only twelve first cousins, your numbers of second cousins (reliant on the forty first cousins your parents had) would be in the hundreds.

209 GML TD 1/1022 Susan Parker Smith to Margaret Smith 7 September 1900. 210 They married 12 January 1888, Agnes Sitwell Ellison died 9 December 1888. 211 GML TD 1/1022 Susan Parker Smith to Margaret Smith 7 September 1900 describes his late wife as “sister to Mrs Davidson” 212 I do not think the difference between generations is that romantic love became more important to marriage. While these examples express distaste for the grooms involved, these are comments from female cousins rather than the brides themselves. Susan Parker Smith’s elder daughter, Mary Susan, married Charlie Duff, a general practitioner, who was a friend’s brother and no relation. If romantic love was leading women to choose spouses outside the family, one might expect her to describe Charlie as a romantic choice. But Mary’s letter to her sister was fairly bland, and described Charlie’s suitability in terms of his height and appearance. Her romantic feelings do not appear in this letter as far more critical to the marriage than among marriages in her parents’ generation — her comments rise only to the level of “Dear girl, I am very very very happy.” GML TD 1/1014/14 Mary Susan Smith to Margaret Smith, 14 August 1892. 99

Leonore Davidoff describes young people “still cushioned by a far-reaching kinship network” whose extended family reached into unknowability. 213

Decline in fertility

The decline in fertility within marriage has been subject to renewed debate with Szreter’s investigation into the subject using the 1911 census, so much about it is a matter of controversy.214 What is known for sure is that for many professional families, finding suitable employment for the next generation became more expensive and difficult. Civil servants, doctors, and lawyers used to serve apprenticeships quite informally and then set up full practice through kin recruitment. Around the mid-nineteenth century these professionals began to take themselves more seriously with formal training, entrance exams, and meritocratic recruitment.

The new seriousness was good for the professional man with an established career, but a headache as far as placing his sons went. Now parents would have to pay for more formal school education, a university education, and a period of apprenticeship — and there was the possibility of a child failing to make the cut and experiencing downward social mobility. A son would not fall into a respectable position through social connections, instead that position had to be won by expensive training. The problem of future generations’ education and employment may be the most important cause of fertility decline for professional families, and perhaps the new economic squeeze on families also led them to reduce their fertility. Whatever the cause, a demographic transition was underway as families began to get smaller and smaller, and ever more people did not marry, so that by the 1930s fertility was at its lowest level. The middle class

213 Davidoff, 105. 214 Szreter. 100 were early adopters of fertility decline, and a couple married in the 1850s might expect on average to have more than six children, whereas a couple married in the 1890s would on average have three.215

The decline in fertility was probably not achieved by any new contraceptive technologies, although these proliferated in the last decades of the nineteenth century. While the technology existed it was far from widespread. Instead there was a ‘regime of attempted abstinence’ in which married couples combined abstinence and withdrawal to reduce their fertility.216 Couples delayed marriage, and fewer people married. Large families came to be understood as evidence of male sexual unrestraint, for abstinence and withdrawal were considered a husband’s duty.217

High rates of gonorrhoea and syphilis may have helped reduce fertility. Szreter estimates for

1911 that among the richest in society, around one in three bachelors were infected with syphilis or gonorrhoea by the time they wed. In port cities such as Glasgow and Liverpool this certainly would have been true. Men of this class married on average at the late age of 33.5 by 1911 and were tacitly expected to purchase sex in order to delay marriage.218

Within the small circle of rich families in Liverpool and Glasgow, it is not easy to pinpoint these changes. The seven children of George Holt (1790-1861) provide a frustrating sample that is fairly typical for the families I have explored in depth.219 The seven were born

215 Davidoff, 103. Adam Kuper estimates from his sample of bourgeois couples, that those marrying in the 1860s had an average of 6 children, those marrying in the 1900s had 4 children, while those marrying 1910s had 3. Kuper, 252- 3. 216 Szreter, 393-424. 217 Davidoff, 104. 218 Simon Szreter, "The Prevalence of Syphilis in England and on the Eve of the Great War: Re-Visiting the Estimates of the Royal Commission on Venereal Diseases 1913–1916," Social History of Medicine 27, no. 3 (2014): 528. 219 They also demonstrate how Census data can be misleading for this group. In several censuses children are separated from their parents: in 1871 Alfred Holt’s two young sons George and Alfred (but not his daughter Jane) 101 between 1823 and 1835, and married in the 1850-60s when they might expect to have more than six children each. The eldest child, Anne, never married and had no children, the youngest child

Emma died young. The fourth son, Philip, married but had no children, and the second son

George married with only one child. The first, third, and fifth sons had larger families, with eight, five, and eight children each. Their children, married in the 1880s onwards (Cicely, who married Hugh Melly, being the first in 1886) might have been expected to show signs of fertility reduction.220 The third son Alfred’s children all either had two or no children. Yet the fifth son

Robert’s eight children, born between 1868 and 1882 and married between 1897 and 1936, show no particular signs of fertility reduction, producing 26 grandchildren in total. Two had three children, one four children, two had five children, and one had six. The mother of six, Catherine

Holt, was a eugenicist who may have felt her upper-middle class genes were particularly worth preserving. But her siblings do not show signs of fertility reduction either: the eldest, Richard, had only three daughters and was disappointed not to have a son. Robert’s tally of 8 children and

26 grandchildren was only limited by two daughters marrying later in life, producing only one son between them. The ages of his children were spread out enough that Robert’s eldest great- grandchild, Anthony Richard (born 1923), was older than his youngest grandchild,

Lawrence Stopford Holt (born 1928). The fourteen-year gap between Robert’s oldest and youngest child had thus become a generational gap by the 1920s, showing the same generational

are recorded with their maternal grandfather; in 1881 Robert’s second and third children, Kitty and Bob, are with their uncle Alfred; and for most of the censuses all teenage boys are recorded at their school. The extensive travel I discussed in chapter one further complicates the matter. To find fertility averages, census data would need to be incorporated with extensive genealogical research which lies outside the possibility of this dissertation. 220 Her uncle Robert Holt had noted hers was the “First wedding in younger generation”. LRO 920 DUR 1/6 Robert Holt diary (1886-1894). 102 overlap that was classic of the mid-Victorian patriarchal family. There was still wide variation in family size and composition, even as the average number of children began to fall.

Decline in married population

Very rich married couples in Liverpool and Glasgow might have been shielded from fertility limitation to a certain extent both because they were wealthy enough to educate and place all their children, and because they were not hampered by expectations of primogeniture as the aristocracy were.221 What they were not shielded from was a rise in the age of marriage and a growing number of unmarried people. Britain’s demographic transition from the 1870s had three strands: marital fertility declining, age of marriage rising, and a growing proportion of the population opting out of marriage. The latter is clearly evident in the experience of Glasgow and

Liverpool business families. In the population overall the decline in marriage rates was a difficult change, as this was a culture that favoured marriage and family, and made it nearly impossible for middle-class women to support themselves through work rather than through legacies from their families. The rise in the unmarried population was therefore seen as a crisis, with concern particularly directed towards single women.222 Unmarried women were more of a concern than unmarried men because their existence threatened to encourage sexual freedom and middle-class poverty.

221 The aristocracy had a difficult tightrope to walk, especially as their economic basis was eroded by the decline in land prices. They had to produce a limited number of children, but only of the correct sex. 222 There is a rich literature on the problem of single women — for example Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920 (University of Chicago Press, 1985). Sharon Marcus, Between Women : Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton University Press, 2007). John Tosh, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (Yale University Press, 2007). 103

In a publication entitled “Why Are Women Redundant?”, (1809-

1881) saw single women as “the problem to be solved, the evil and anomaly to be cured.” 223 He was a cotton manufacturer in Manchester, and connected to Liverpool through his mother, from the Liverpool Lightbody family; and his two sisters Elizabeth and Ellen who married respectively into the Rathbone and Melly families, both merchants in Liverpool. His investigation of the problem led him to conclude that for the marriage-aged population there were 106 women for 100 men, but that in fact 30% of marriage-aged women were single. He estimated three quarters of a million women were permanent spinsters, and suggested that they might emigrate, both women and men might give up luxury in exchange for marriage, and men might be expected to be entirely chaste before marriage.224 Others promoted similar schemes in continual attempts to solve the problem of single women, but the numbers of unmarried people continued to rise.225 For the Claremont and South Woodside estates in Glasgow, two areas made up of a mixed middle-class population, Gordon and Nair have estimated that among women over thirty, the never-married percentage rose from thirty to forty-five between 1851 and 1891. These women became more concentrated in female-headed households, with fifty percent in female- headed households in 1851 and sixty-five percent situated similarly in 1891.226 “Victorian commentators were right: there were large numbers of single women in the middle class; and these numbers were increasing as the century progressed.”227 But they point out that in their 1891

223 William Rathbone Greg, "Why Are Women Redundant?," in Literary and Social Judgements (1873), 281. 224 Ibid., 282-3. 225 Although interestingly the trends may have been different between England and Scotland. Overall the percentages of unmarried women dipped slightly in Scotland while rising in England — but among the richest cohort the overall trend was to fewer married people. Gordon and Nair, 172. 226 Ibid., 173. 227 Ibid., 172-3. 104 cohort of over-thirties, 43.6% of men as well as 44.1% of women were unmarried.228 Some of these people, especially the men, would marry in their thirties and forties, but many, both men and women, would not. By delaying or avoiding marriage, these people depressed the fertility of their cohort and reduced the size of their kinship group.

Some unmarried women may have opted out because of the dangers of fertility, perhaps because they did not want children or perhaps they feared dying in childbirth. Many women had close female relatives who died in childbirth: several have already been mentioned in this chapter, such as Alfred Holt’s wife Frances who died in 1869, and William Rathbone’s wife

Lucretia who died in 1859. In some cases there was no need to give birth to children in order to mother them. Anne Holt (1821-1885) lived with her brother Robert and his wife Lallie after their marriage in 1867, and educated the eldest few of their eight children, who were born between

1868 and 1882. Gordon and Nair give examples of Glasgow women who appear from census records to have lived with a brother and been responsible for the upbringing of their nephews and nieces, although they say “this was not as common as literary and anecdotal evidence might suggest”.229 Even without cohabitation, the practice of aunts being responsible for their nieces and nephews was common enough that in 1901 one Glasgow aunt, Daisy Smith formed a humorous ‘Maiden Aunt’s Union’ to protect their rights. Five men and ten women were listed as members, along with a chaplain.

“With the opening of the New Century we find it incumbent on us to supply a long felt

want by raising the social status and rights of Maiden Aunts. In the past centuries Maiden

228 Ibid., 173. 229 Ibid., 178. 105

Aunts have been a down-trodden race. Owing to the Noble Amiability of their

dispositions they have patiently submitted to tyranny and oppression. But — “the Worm

will Turn” and — “Union is Strength” Many Aunts who might lack the courage to stand

alone will now enjoy the support of this Society.”230

Rules 1-2 show some of the ambivalences in the MAU. Rule 1 stated that “Aunts are reminded by the Union that they have other duties and occupations besides herding children.”

This argument that children are unappealing included complaints about , sticky fingers, toys, and interruptions to adult conversations and enjoyments – evidence echoed in the memoir of Frances Murray, who wrote unflatteringly of a friend’s life in London suburbia: “conventional dullness” which was “the apotheosis of babydom.”231 But rule 2 of the MAU argued that aunts were more expert on children than parents “especially when their home is the depôt for all children whose presence is inconvenient to their parents.” The bachelor uncles had a much more straightforward attitude to children: rules 11-12 stated that their “smoking properties are to be respected” and they “need not kiss the Baby.”

The MAU had a broad view of family, stressing the integral part of aunts and uncles in a family. Under the heading of ‘aunts and uncles’ they were happy to include ‘Welsh aunts and uncles’; a Welsh uncle is a child’s parent’s first cousin. The role of grandparents was also a concern of the MAU: “Maiden Aunts must be careful in asserting their own rights, that they do not add to the oppression of Grandparents, and thereby bring the Union into disrepute.” The

MAU’s (comic) attempt to regulate the relationship between parents, children, and aunts and

230 GML TD 1/1025 Maiden Aunts’ Union. 231 Gordon and Nair, 174. Frances herself later married a Glasgow-based lawyer. 106 uncles suggested that unmarried women were far from the “unwholesome social state” Greg worried about in the 1870s. The divide between married and unmarried women was for him absolute: single women were those “who have to earn their own living, instead of spending and husbanding the earnings of men; who, not having the natural duties and labors of wives and mothers, have to carve out artificial and painfully sought occupations for themselves; who, in place of completing, sweetening, and embellishing the existence of others, are compelled to lead an independent and incomplete existence of their own.”232 For the MAU, by contrast, it was a struggle to establish independent existence rather than spending time embellishing the existence of others and taking on the duties of mothering.

Unmarried rich women

Among the rich of Glasgow and Liverpool there appears to be a certain group of women who did not marry because they did not need to. Of course it is difficult to disentangle motivations and meanings behind individual choices to marry or not. Yet if a woman’s father had enough money to settle on her that she would be comfortably wealthy all her life, then marriage was purely a choice. Most unmarried women had to live on less than their married counterparts, because they relied on legacies from their father rather than earnings from their husband. But some wealthy businessmen had enough money that their daughters would be well-off even if they never married.233

For women to live an unmarried life that also included plenty of money gave them possibilities that few had had before. Several took up charitable work that shaded into political

232 Greg, 276. 233 Only children or a few sisters without brothers would be the best off, as de facto ‘heiresses’ to their fathers. 107 work, as it became clear that solving the problem of poverty would take more than private philanthropy. At one extreme, Eleanor Rathbone (1872-1946), daughter of William Rathbone and

Emily Lyle, became a Member of Parliament and one of the foremost proponents of feminist and radical politics. She tried to introduce family allowances, arguing that expecting families to be paid for by men’s wages was a faulty system, and worked for refugees from fascism. Her biographer Susan Pedersen hails her as “Britain’s most accomplished and capable woman politician” of her generation, and shows how her career charted a new path for female achievement. Pedersen makes clear that “[a]t the heart of the story of the ‘new woman’ lies a complex family drama — a story not only of the daughter’s valiant conquest of hitherto male realms but equally of her rejection of the demands of family, her abandonment of a prescribed womanly sphere. For as long as they lived, Eleanor’s relations with her mother were marked by fear and compunction, with her sisters by apology and gratitude.” 234 Her work drew her down to

London, to the national government, and removed her from the types of maiden aunt work that the MAU documented. In the early 1930s she had permanently relocated to London and rented out her home in Liverpool; in 1935 she stood down from the (she had been first elected in 1909).235

As Pedersen shows, unmarried women were still enmeshed in the social systems of kinship and friendship that defined the marriage choices of those women who did marry. Of

George Melly’s seven children, three never married, one son and two daughters. Eva and

Florence, the eldest two of the seven, lived lives that were exemplary in their charitable work.

234 Pedersen, 4. 235 Ibid., 266-7. 108

Florence (1856-1928) was more in the mould of Eleanor Rathbone, an outspoken woman with a passion for education. At 22 she was manager of Harrington Street Schools, by her early forties she was on the city School Board (after 1903 this position became membership of the City

Council), and in her mid-sixties she was given an Honorary Master of Arts by Liverpool

University for her work. Like Eleanor Rathbone, she was involved in war work during the First

World War, especially ‘moral welfare’ work around war babies. She was known throughout

Liverpool’s education system, partially because she visited every in person at least once a year. A new primary school opened in 1927 was named the Florence Melly Primary

School. 236 Yet Florence’s achievements were in part possible because her elder sister Eva (1854-

1937) took on more domestic work. She cared for their mother between their father’s death in

1894 and her own in 1909. She also became “chatelaine” of the house at 90 Chatham Street, living there with Florence and their bachelor brother William Rathbone Melly (1867-1944). Her nephew wrote in 1962 that the work of chatelaine was “no mean task as the amount of entertaining that was done at that house was almost incredible. She continued to do this till her death, keeping the family together in a most capable manner.”237 Eva’s work as chatelaine allowed Florence more freedom to take on her educational work.

Eva’s own charitable work shows something of how kinship remained important for those who did not marry. Kinship was a way to arrange marriages, but also so much else of social life. Eva had a multitude of charitable interests, including in education like Florence. She also inherited charitable work: she took on the Mission to Friendless Girls which had been started by

236 Smith, 7. 237 Ibid., 6. 109 her aunt. Another interest was the Hall of Residence for Women Students in Edge Lane, which her nephew noted was “[h]er main interest in later life, outside the family which always came first”. This was a family affair: the two other champions of the Hall were Eva’s first cousin

Emma Holt (1862-1944, the unmarried daughter of George Holt and Bessie Bright), and Jane

Brandreth Herdman, née Holt, first cousin to Emma (1867-1922, daughter of Alfred Holt).

Emma was in the best position to avoid marriage if she wished. She was an only child, born more than eight years after her parents’ wedding, and her father made a fortune from his shipping line . When her father died in 1896 she was left a large fortune and her childhood home of Sudley. Her mother lived until 1920, so they lived together at Sudley while Emma enjoyed the freedom of being very rich. She seems to have little idea of marrying.

In 1888, when she was 26, her aunt Sarah Melly recorded that Emma’s mother had “turned to

Emma + said in a loud voice “Emma what is love”? to which E. responded “nothing” + took no further notice of her ma – but [Eva Melly] says the effect on all who heard was very ludicrous238

–”. Whether the effect was ludicrous because it was already clear that Emma would not marry, or because women were not expected to be so unsentimental, is not clear. Emma’s mother Bessie had married Emma’s father in 1853 at the age of 18 — he was ten years older. The archives on

Bessie Holt are very few, but a perhaps revelatory comment by her sister-in-law Anne Holt has her looking “intensely quiet but extremely elegant” at her brother-in-law Robert Holt’s wedding to Lallie Potter in 1867.239 She may have participated in her husband’s art collecting, which had strong religious themes and some important Pre-Raphaelite works. Regardless, Emma did not

238 LRO 920 MEL 32 6080 Sarah Melly to George Melly, 22 June [1888]. 239 LRO 920 DUR 3/10/2 Anne Holt to Emma Holt, 21 June 1867. 110 have economic incentives like most other women that necessitated marriage — George Holt left

£596684 4s 11d when he died in 1896 and Emma never needed to find any other man to fund her life.240

Work and women

These women did not need to work, but for some their dedication to philanthropy approached a full-time career, blocking out any of the ordinary roles for single women. Later in the period middle-class women’s work became more common and it became more normal for unmarried women to have careers even if they did not need the money. This was not an easy route. William Rathbone Greg in the 1870s showed some of the prejudice of the older generation when he considered work and the ‘problem of single women’. For women to become “lawyers and physicians and professors” would be terrible for their brains and health, as they were suitable, by subtlety, delicacy, and sensitiveness, only for “their appropriate work” and lacked the strength and tenacity to stand continuous and severe application to work. They could dabble, but never achieve “mastery”.241 But the vehemence of his opposition to women’s work suggests how aware he was that this was the way the tide was turning.242

The personal cost of choosing work could be high in some families. The older generation seems to have been particularly confused by career choices that were not vocational or cerebral; vocational work such as nursing or philanthropy could be explained as the working of religion, and professional work might be explained by the particular intelligence of one woman. Twenty-

240 Probate — his executors were his brother Robert, his nephew Richard, and his brother-in-law George Melly (ignoring two living brothers, Alfred and Philip, in favour of his wife’s sister’s husband George). 241 Greg, 301. 242 For example, when Sir William M[a]cEwen addressed a group of nurses in 1891 he argued that every woman should have a profession, but it must be ‘womanly’. Gordon and Nair, 183. 111 five-year-old Betty Holt, for example, caused ructions in her family when she decided to become a school matron in 1900. She discussed it with her father, but neither she nor her father informed her mother until matters were fairly advanced, causing a family fight about who knew what when. Miss Lawrence, the owner of the girls’ school Roedean, had offered that Betty an unpaid position as a trainee matron. The existing matron was leaving in a year to be married, and Miss

Lawrence suggested that Betty could spend a winter working alongside the existing matron, with the option to take the job when the matron left. The role included housekeeping, hiring servants, and looking after the boarding house girls.243

Her mother seems to have been unhappy about Betty becoming a matron, and within the context of existing family disagreements between Betty (and her two sisters) and their sister-in- law Eliza, the idea of Betty leaving Liverpool was controversial. These original disputes between

Richard’s wife Eliza and his sisters Catherine, Betty, and Molly are only alluded to rather than explained in family letters, so it is unclear why they disliked her, but the seems to have been unpleasant. Eliza was perhaps happy to lose her sister-in-law from everyday life, but those in the family who sided against Eliza saw it as Betty being driven out. Despite her mother, Betty did take up the position, and in the 1901 census is captured living at Roedean in Brighton, with a

German teacher and eight pupils.

Betty found a job in the same kinds of networks in which she might have found a husband, through the links of Unitarianism. As a small denomination linked together in ties of friendship and marriage, Unitarians such as the Holts and the Lawrences would stick together. It

243 LRO 920 DUR 11/17/8 Eliza Holt (Betty’s sister-in-law) to Lallie Holt (Betty’s mother), 2 September 1900 “Betty seemed quite pleased + happy about it.” 112 was common for marriages to be arranged between coreligionists, but Betty’s job at Roedean shows these religious links being exploited for a new purpose. Betty had no particular qualifications to be a matron — and indeed there were no qualifications for such a job — but the

Lawrences trusted her because she was also a Unitarian, and very distantly related to them through the intermarriage of previous generations of Unitarians.

Effects of the decline of kinship marriage system

The fights among the Holt siblings seem to have been particularly fierce, and from 1900 onwards there was always some estrangement within the family. The hierarchies within the patriarchal family were supposed to be simple: husband and wife would agree with his viewpoints, and their sons would follow and their daughters obey. But the kinship marriage system which had been in place in the mid-nineteenth century was breaking down under the pressure of declining endogamy, fertility, and marriage. The Holt siblings had been born into this system, but their own marriages did not fit the pattern and they struggled to reconcile old and new.

Much of the conflict was about the place of unmarried sisters within the family. The disagreements between the Holts, and the fights over Betty’s job, escalated dramatically in 1902 with a violent physical incident between the two youngest siblings, twenty-two-year-old Molly and nineteen-year-old Lawrence. He and Betty were competing over whose whistle Lawrence’s dog would respond to; when the dog went to Betty instead, Lawrence hit the dog with a whip.

Molly intervened between Lawrence and his dog, and he went after her instead with the whip, 113 badly injuring her.244 Their father sided with Lawrence, giving as his reason that he was “very much afraid that Lawrence would do something desperate if home is made too wretched for him.”245 Their mother Lallie was much more sympathetic to Molly, and nursed Molly through her injuries. The eldest brother Richard and his wife Eliza took his father’s side, although Eliza’s letters to Lallie show that her sympathy for Lawrence himself was very thin: “above all I wish

Lawrence would show more feeling. + behave more kindly. I glad to hear the Dr saw him + spoke to him. + hope it has made a difference. I can’t understand the boy.”246

The problem was that both Molly and Lawrence lived at the family home, 54 Ullet

Road.247 Betty seems to have been an agitator for Molly, a far more forthright character unwilling to let her younger sister live in the same house as Lawrence, and she left her position at Roedean to take care of Molly. The sisters were furious that their father would side with

Lawrence, knowing he did so because he saw his sons as more valuable than his daughters. Betty wanted to take Molly to live together outside Liverpool, but their father refused to give them the money for it. It was not until 1904 that the family feuds calmed and Betty again resumed her career. Eliza Holt found the idea of Betty leaving very satisfactory:

Of course it makes everything here much easier. But quite apart from that. I do not

believe that anything could be better for Betty. both for her happiness + for her own

character. I am really awfully glad + relieved. I only wish I had not had to play such an

244 Caine, 155. Barbara Caine’s account of this is far clearer than the family letters, and draws from conversations with Philip’s son George Holt (1910-1990). 245 LRO 920 DUR 11/17/21 Eliza Holt to Lallie Holt 25 August 1902. 246 LRO 920 DUR 11/17/22 Eliza Holt to Lallie Holt 27 August 1902. 247 LRO 920 DUR 11/17/23 Eliza Holt to Lallie Holt 29 August 1902. A temporary solution was Lawrence should go to their home in the Lake District, High Borrans, where Eliza and Richard were staying, but it was hardly satisfactory “I hear Lawrence comes to-night. I do not altogether want him. but I dare say it is best. + perhaps we can make him see things differently. Once can but try. And I dare say it will be good for Molly to have him away.” 114

unpleasant part in this business. I have always had a very real regard for Betty. + it has

been a most real mortification + sorrow to find out the way in which most of them regard

me.248

Perhaps Betty’s ill-will was because Eliza had sided with Lawrence. Betty’s job as a matron does not seem to have lasted. In the 1911 census Betty and Lawrence were living together alone at 17 Ullet Road while Molly was living with their uncle Philip, who would die in

1914, at 52 Ullet Road, next door to their childhood home at 54 Ullet Road, where their brother

Richard now lived.249 How Lawrence ended up living at least temporarily with his sister, who had been so against him back in 1902, is confusing, but in 1913, at the age of thirty-eight, Betty married and was able to set up her own home. The fights would only escalate from here, and we will return to the Holt feuds in chapter three.

Sect and the kinship marriage system

Lines of sect and nationality also started to erode as the mid-century marriage system collapsed. Kinship endogamy had always been partially reliant on denominational endogamy, as it was an easy place to find a spouse of the same sect. Many of the Liverpool merchants and shipowners who have appeared so far in this chapter were Unitarians, and several were passionate about their small denomination. They formed friendships outside the city based on faith connections and political sympathies, for example to the Chamberlain family of

Birmingham. When Catherine Holt went away to school, she went to Allenswood in Wimbledon,

248 LRO 920 DUR 11/17/41 Eliza Holt to Lallie Holt, August 30 1904. 249 Although Richard and Eliza were in London at 30 Sloane Court, Chelsea, so only their three daughters were there, with his brother Ted and Ted’s wife. 115 and was friends with Joseph Chamberlain’s daughters and their cousins the Kenricks.250 She wrote: “it is rather queer but all the jolly girls are unitarians; and none of the Unitarians have curled fringes which are very plentiful amongst the others. We rather separate from the others”.251 Perhaps it was through these links that her sister Betty got her job as a matron at

Roedean, as the Lawrence sisters, founders of the school, were related to the Chamberlain,

Kenrick, and Martineau families.252 James Martineau was a minister in Liverpool between 1832 and 1857 and one of the most famous Unitarians of nineteenth-century Britain.253

To marry outside the Unitarians was to give up the social links that came from meeting every week at chapel. When Ashton Rathbone married Christabel Barton in 1893, Robert Holt wrote sternly to his twenty-four-year-old son Richard (on his business trip to the Far East described in chapter 1) “I said it was miserable to see men like Ashton marrying a girl of 18 (and no one) giving up his old associations and connection with Renshaw St Chapel – such a want of principle – surely I said a girl should understand she marrys her husband for better + for worse and takes him all faults including his religion-”.254 Robert’s daughter Catherine went even further in her letters to her brother, calling him “Poor old Ashton!” Ashton’s fiancée, 18 to his 36, had refused to consider conversion to Unitarianism, and Ashton instead was joining the Church of

England congregation at . Her resistance was perhaps motivated by the fact that her

250 The same school as Eleanor Roosevelt attended, although she was there later (1899-1902). 251 LRO 920 DUR 14/3/33 Catherine Holt to Richard Holt, 6 February 1887. Catherine uses both lower-case unitarian and upper-case Unitarian in her letter. Unitarians did not notably dress plainly, but curled fringes were often created through false hair, which had (and has) its own connotations and controversy. 252 Gillian Avery, ‘Lawrence, Penelope (1856–1932)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 253 Ralph Waller, ‘Martineau, James (1805–1900)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 254 LRO 920 DUR 14/1/151 Robert Holt to Richard Holt, 19 January 1893. 116 late father had been a clergyman.255 “The young lady has absolutely refused to go to a Unitarian place of worship or to Mr Stubbs or to Mr Watson, & Ashton has now become the unhappy possessor of two seats at Mossley Hill – Again I say, poor old Ashton!”256

Yet Ashton’s choice was becoming more and more common, and sectarian divisions were felt less deeply. Richard would continue to be a staunch Unitarian up to his death in 1941 – in

1918 he became President of the British and Foreign Unitarian Association.257 His youngest brother Lawrence would marry Evelyn Jacks, daughter of Lawrence Jacks (Unitarian minister in

Liverpool from 1888) and granddaughter of Stopford Brooke (a famous preacher who had withdrawn from the for Unitarianism).258 But the other siblings seem to have mostly drifted away into the Church of England.

The pattern of religious behaviour in Liverpool reinforces Ross McKibbin’s argument about the creation of a singular middle class in the interwar. During the Victorian period, argues

McKibbin, the Anglicans and nonconformists of most provincial cities had “almost mutually exclusive social networks,” dividing up the middle class into sects. But in the interwar, he argues, all portions of the middle class could agree on a “secular hostility to the organized working class” and developed a “secular, ‘apolitical’ sociability.”259 This sociability was based on being more similar: middle class people became more homogenous in their behaviours and

255 Norfolk, Church of England Marriages and Banns, 1754-1940 19 Jan 1893 256 LRO 920 DUR 14/3/43 Catherine Holt to Richard Holt, 12 January 1893. Poor Ashton would become even more unfortunate, dying in 1895 of blood poisoning (See Pedersen, 56.) His widow would remarry in 1899 to a Frederic Harrold Payne (England & Wales, Civil Registration Marriage Index, 1837-1915 1899 Q1 1a611). 257 J. Gordon Read, ‘Holt, Alfred (1829–1911)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 258 R. K. Webb, ‘Jacks, Lawrence Pearsall (1860–1955)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; R. K. Webb, ‘Brooke, Stopford Augustus (1832–1916)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 259 Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951 (Oxford University Press, 2000), 102. 117 hobbies. One of these new leisure activities, particularly associated with business classes, was golf — which chapter three with explore in more detail.260 Glasgow was different by its

Scottishness: the divide between Established Church and dissent did not hold anything near the meaning it had in England. But for England alone, McKibbin can conclude that the interwar middle class “had become (or was becoming) a national class.”

International marriage

In Liverpool and Glasgow the middle class was even becoming an international class. In the historiography of the aristocracy of this period, the presence of the dollar princesses is notable.261 One of the first was the 1874 wedding of Jennie Jerome and , son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough, but he was only a younger son.262 Two years later in

1876 Consuelo Yznaga and the future Duke of Manchester married, the trend escalating so that by the 1890s American heiresses were hunted for their fortunes by never-married dukes, and their marriages provoked a frenzy of interest.263 The 1895 wedding of the ninth Duke of

Marlborough, nephew to Lord Randolph, to Consuelo Vanderbilt — goddaughter to Consuelo

Duchess of Manchester — and that the same year of Mary Leiter and George Curzon (heir of the

Baron Scarsdale and later Marquess Curzon),264 solidified the publicity around such ‘dollar

260 Ibid., 359-60. 261 Ruth Brandon, The Dollar Princesses : Sagas of Upward Nobility, 1870-1914 (New York: Knopf, 1980). Maureen E. Montgomery, "Gilded Prostitution": Status, Money, and Transatlantic Marriages, 1870-1914 (Routledge, 1989). 262 “At this time, it was virtually unprecedented for the son of a leading aristocrat to marry an American, but Churchill was only the younger son of a poor duke, and when Leonard Jerome agreed to settle £50,000 on the couple, the duke agreed to the marriage.” Roland Quinault, ‘Churchill, Lord Randolph Henry Spencer (1849–1895)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 263 The trailblazers had married younger sons or previously-married men — a second marriage usually was of lesser importance, as the children of a second marriage would inherit less than that of a first. 264 His second wife was also a wealthy American, Grace Duggan, who had been left money by her first husband. , ‘Curzon, George Nathaniel, Marquess Curzon of Kedleston (1859–1925)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 118 princesses’. Consuelo Vanderbilt brought a fortune of $4.2 million in railroad stocks (paying out

4% dividends)265: she was a living symbol of the decline of the aristocracy, as her fortunes propped up a bankrupt dukedom.

Not just aristocrats married Americans. What is neglected in this historiography about

“dollar princesses” is the wealthy men of the British middle classes who married Americans.

These were not the very biggest heiresses but those of families similar in status and fortune to the wealthy middle class of Glasgow and Liverpool. Instead of a trade between status and wealth, these were marriages of people of similar backgrounds but different nationalities. The historiography has tended to be obsessed with the biggest fortunes and the grandest titles, reflecting what the press reported at the time. But the press and this historiography have not captured the equal importance of these less showy dollar princesses, drawn from the rich upper- middle class rather than the super-rich.

The paranoia about American heiresses was tied into a set of worries about how Britain was being overtaken economically. Arthur Conan Doyle parodied the atmosphere well when he had Sherlock Holmes read in a fictional newspaper “There will soon be a call for protection in the marriage market, for the present free-trade principle appears to tell heavily against our home product. One by one the management of the noble houses of Great Britain is passing into the hands of our fair cousins from across the Atlantic.”266 The numbers were in truth significant.

Over 100 aristocratic men married Americans between 1870 and 1914, which excludes all those

265 David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (Yale University Press, 1990), 397. He takes his information from Consuelo’s autobiography. 266 Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Noble Bachelor’ (1892) 119 who hunted but did not find heiresses.267 It is unclear what proportion of overall aristocratic marriages this represents, but it was enough to be notable. Certainly there was a great deal of mercenary searching for heiresses, which now extended beyond Britain and gained a desperate edge as even dukes went bankrupt. But the examples of middle-class international marriages suggest that other forces beyond pure fortune-hunting were at work. Lines of nationality were like lines of kinship, business sector, and sect: as marriage shifted as a social practice, people began to marry across these lines. In the process, they welded together a new elite of that was less reliant on its home city.

These international marriages in the middle class do not show any signs of fortune hunting. Instead, where we have details, there seem to have been many of the same factors that created mid-century kinship marriages. In 1893 Richard Holt and Eliza Wells met in New York when he was circumnavigating the world on business (as discussed in chapter 1). Between

Liverpool and New York they managed to conduct a romance, partially encouraged by the 1895 marriage of Charles Booth and Grace Wells.268 Grace was Eliza’s sister, just under two years younger than her.269 Charles Booth was from a Liverpool shipowning family. His uncle, also

Charles Booth, was famous as a social investigator. The younger Charles Booth’s father Alfred and American mother Lydia Allen Butler270 married in 1867 in Manhattan.271 Her father

Benjamin Franklin Butler had been US Attorney General. Charles, Alfred and Lydia’s eldest

267 Cannadine, 398. F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society : A Social History of Victorian Britain 1830-1900 (London: Fontana Press, 1988), 106-8. 268 2 November 1895 269 Grace was born 30 July 1870. 270 Lydia was born 19 March 1839. Passport Applications; Roll 139 (1 May 1866-21 May 1866), Ancestry.com 271 New York City, Marriages, 1600s-1800s Ancestry.com 120 child, was born in Liverpool, but the 1870 census captures them living in Eastchester New York,

Charles’s six-month-old sister Mabel having been born in the United States.

The Booth and Holt families were entwined in various business ventures that went back decades, mostly in shipping and cotton trading. They also had direct family connections. Anna

Booth, the sister of Alfred Booth and the elder Charles Booth, was married to Philip Holt, uncle to Richard Holt, in 1857. Although Richard Holt and the younger Charles Booth had no direct family link, the childless Philip and Anna Holt were close to their nephews and nieces and must have brought together her nephew Charles and his nephew Richard, both the same age. The mix of family connections and business allegiances that connected Richard and Eliza were typical of many other marriages of an earlier period, with the twist that they differed in nationality.

With Grace’s sister married to Richard’s boyhood friend, their romance continued. They became engaged on the 10 February 1897 at a wedding party in Liverpool. Blanche Forget, a distant relation to the Holts through the Melly family, had married Harold Ashby, a solicitor.272

On the Wednesday following the wedding, the Holts held a dance for 120 to 130 people who had been involved in the wedding. Richard and Eliza’s romance was being monitored by his younger siblings: the family diary kept by his father describes an “attachment long suspected and anxiously watched + encouraged by the juvenile members of our family. they were specially suspected this evening and at one oCk when Miss Wells was enquired for to go home neither

Miss Wells nor Dick could be found – excitement great. shortly they were seen coming downstairs looking happily guilty.”273 Her mother was initially opposed but was won around —

272 1911 Census. Their marriage records says that their wedding was on Sunday 7th. 273 LRO 920 DUR 1/7 Robert Holt diary (1894-1901). The lower case “they” is in the original; oCk is a common shorthand for o’clock. 121 the Holt family diary and letters do not give any reasons why she was resistant, because they were unsympathetic with her position and it only lasted for a few days.274 Within a few weeks

Eliza and her mother were coming to private family dinners and being inducted into the Holt family, with one evening spent “talking of things past present + future and showing various family treasures.” They married in New York that summer on June 15th.

When Richard and Eliza married in 1897, much of his family travelled to New York for the wedding. His father Robert was even interviewed by the New York Journal, with the discussion centred around Robert’s expertise as Mayor of Liverpool on “large civic problems” and the contemporary controversy in New York over the Greater New York charter. He gave details about Liverpool’s civic government, and laughed at some of its absurdities. He listened to the Greater New York idea and offered his opinion. “The British municipal expert thought deeply over the bi-partisan Police Commission, and smiled benignantly at what evidently appealed to him as a greater New World curiosity than would a herd of buffaloes in Broadway. “But I should think,” he said at length, “that such a body would soon arrive at a deadlock!” He nodded his head

274 Richard’s father recorded: “Mother Wells professes herself “upset”. never suspected such a thing. what is she to say to her people in America.” The rude reference to her as ‘Mother Wells’ was followed the next day by the sobriquet “Old Lady” — the Holt family does not seem to have taken her opposition very seriously, considering her merely “inconvenient and very inconsiderate.” Eliza and Richard were 28 and confident they could get their own way: “Dick is happy + says she will come round.” They told Richard’s parents that “this is [Mrs Wells’] way.” Richard’s two brothers Bob and Ted also took matters into their own hands by confiding in friends about the engagement, thus encouraging rumours and capitalising on the fact that “so many people saw what was going on on Wednesday that it is impossible to stop gossip.” By Saturday 13 Richard’s parents were calling on Mrs Wells to get her consent: “tried soothing treatment. but we think sharp bracing would be better.” By Monday she was compliant with the marriage: she was “coming round very nicely + having got over her surprise or “shock” is evidently going to take a happy view of the future”. LRO 920 DUR 1/7 Robert Holt diary (1894-1901). 122 sagely when informed that such was, indeed, the case. He continued to nod his head, with a sympathetic air” when given further details.275

The dollar princess literature has focused on the appeal of aristocratic connections to supposedly-meritocratic American families. From the perspective of the middle class, however, the question of whether Americans were ensnared by titles does not appear to be particularly important. An impoverished duke was still a very rich man overall! From around the mid-1890s, a backlash against the marriages of aristocrats and dollar princesses took hold on both sides of the Atlantic, which tended to exaggerate the gap and distrust between the two countries.276 But putting these marriages into context within other Anglo-American marriages among the middle class suggests that Britons considered Americans very similar to themselves, despite their lack of aristocracy and monarchy. Robert Holt, a former mayor of an English city, was of interest to an

American readership as an informed commentator on city issues — and he was sufficiently interested in New York politics to give this interview and felt able to consider and predict

American trends. British and American elites were drawing closer together, and intermarriage was a natural consequence of that. Dana Cooper argues that the Anglo-American marriage was in decline after 1900 and was killed off by the First World War.277 But it appears from the wealthy

275 LRO 920 DUR 25 Family Scrapbook, 102. “Viewed by an English Mayor. R. D. Holt, of Liverpool, Talks About Greater New York Problems. Studies the Question. Calls the Idea of a Bipartisan Police Board Simply “Amazing.”” New York Journal, Friday 14 May 1897 276 Overall, Anglophobia rather than Anglophilia was more characteristic of the United States in the nineteenth century, although in the last quarter of the century it lessened. Dating this change is hard however — Stephen Tuffnell, "'Uncle Sam Is to Be Sacrificed': Anglophobia in Late Nineteenth-Century Politics and Culture," American Nineteenth Century History 12, no. 1 (2011). describes late-nineteenth century Anglophobia and Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (University of Chicago Press, 2008). concentrates on antebellum Anglophilia. It may be more accurate to speak of waves of both Anglophilia and Anglophobia working concurrently. 277 Dana Cooper, Informal Ambassadors : American Women, Transatlantic Marriages, and Anglo-American Relations, 1865-1945 (Kent State University Press, 2014), 179-82, 86-88. Cooper profiles various American women, but does not distinguish much between various aristocratic husbands, and Joseph Chamberlain (1836-1914), from 123 of Glasgow and Liverpool that it was only the aristocratic marriages that really declined — and that was probably more to do with the increased poverty of the aristocracy than anything else — while across the broader elite, Anglo-American marriages continued.

By ignoring middle-class Britons, the dollar princess historiography has overlooked the middle-class British women who married dollar princes. For aristocratic women, marrying outside their class meant a loss of class status for themselves and for their children, without any compensation to their family of origin. There was therefore no incentive for aristocratic men to fund their daughters or sisters to marry rich Americans, given that a bride generally needed her family to provide some kind of financial settlement. As the amount of money in an aristocratic family dwindled away, an obvious place to cut back was in dowries and settlements given to daughters and widows, and in gifts to younger sons. A stricter form of primogeniture meant that younger sons became less marriageable, meanwhile the number of oldest sons looking for status- rich but cash-poor brides also decreased. Aristocratic women saw their marriage pool narrow without being able to fish in other ponds: this accounts for some of the dislike and envy that the dollar princesses encountered as they hooked the few dukes and earls available.278

For middle-class women the incentives were different. There was no loss of status in marrying a similarly middle-class American man. Family wealth was divided more equally, with preference given to sons but not the strict primogeniture of aristocrats. Violet Brocklebank, daughter of Sir Thomas Brocklebank, partner in Brocklebank shipping company, was one

the rich nonconformist industrialist middle class of . She even describes Chamberlain incorrectly as of “a working-class background” (76) which does not accurately depict his childhood — for example in the 1851 census their family is recorded with five servants. 278 Ibid., 187. Brandon. 124

Englishwoman who married an American. 279 In 1909 she married George Westinghouse (III), only son of the engineer and inventor George Westinghouse (II).280 There were several competing romantic scenarios that explained the match. Some claimed they had known each other from childhood, others that it was a coup de foudre like that of George’s parents. The story of love of first sight claimed that they had first met in 1904 while he was working in his father’s electrical factories as a engineer, learning the business from the ground up. She “liked him in overalls” without knowing who he was and that he was heir to a $50 million fortune.281

The Westinghouse family, while extremely rich, were not related to anyone important, as

George Westinghouse (II, 1846-1914) was the first of his family to make money. The family tree before George (II) was undistinguished: his father George Westinghouse (1809-1884) and grandfather John Ferdinand Westinghouse had been farmers in Vermont. John Ferdinand’s father

John Hendrik Wistinghausen had emigrated from Germany in 1755.282 But the Westinghouses’ humble background did not seem to matter to the Brocklebanks, who were a more established family.

The dollar princess phenomenon, as popularly understood, was a managed decline of the aristocracy. Aristocrats who had lost agricultural wealth looked elsewhere for heiresses with greater fortunes than ever before. But within the bigger context of many British-American marriages, such marriages appear as the creation of an international elite.

279 Their engagement ran for a long time, as in 1907 they were already engaged when George fell ill with typhoid (New York Times, 26 March 1907). 280 Henry G Prout for The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, A life of George Westinghouse (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 9. 281 New York Times, 19 February 1907. 282 Prout, 1-2. 125

At the start of this chapter I described another international marriage, between Louise

Forget and Charles Pierre Melly. Superficially the dollar princesses and princes look no different from the pragmatic Melly/Forget alliance. But what had changed between their wedding in 1854 and Violet and George Westinghouse’s wedding in 1909 was the unravelling of the whole kinship marriage system. Families had changed shape and size, and women were finding avenues outside marriage. The decline of this system caused anxiety and friction about family relationships, as shown in Holt family fights.

Louise and Charles married probably in part to combat a family fragility. Charles’ father

André had died suddenly in 1851, and with his death the link between the Liverpool family and the Geneva family was damaged. By contrast, Violet and George’s marriage was based not on kinship but on membership in an international elite of wealthy people. Endogamy had defined the upper-middle class as a clan-based class.283 They were acutely sensitive to kinship relations, organized their social lives around these relationships, married within these networks, and of course did business together. From the 1870s this endogamy crumbled, and the elite of the middle class became subsumed into a larger international elite. It happened faster than the decline in family business, but this collapse in kinship was softened by older generations whose lives were already stuck in these patterns. It was among the younger generation that unhappiness and dissent was most concentrated.

Beyond concerns about genetics, endogamy collapsed under a series of concerns and re- evaluations of marriage. The younger generation did not want to marry in the way their parents

283 Kuper, 253-4. 126 had, and both daughters and sons rebelled against old patterns.284 In years following Married

Women’s Property Acts and new divorce laws this was not surprising. Endogamy to some extent had apparently been based on daughters obeying their parents, and once they refused it collapsed.

As very wealthy people in Liverpool and Glasgow joined an international elite rather than being the elite of their local middle class, their links with their cities began to strain. This was hastened by the better travel conditions explored in chapter one. It does not seem that foreign brides such as Louise Forget spent much time going back to their home cities (Geneva for

Louise), but among the younger generation it was easier to travel. Richard Holt’s wife Eliza seems to have spent quite a bit of time in New York after her marriage, sometimes with him and sometimes without. As she spent less time in Liverpool, her loyalty to the city was also divided.

The question was, would the wealthy people of Glasgow and Liverpool stay in the city now that their kinship networks were breaking up? And if they headed elsewhere, where did they go and what effect did their mobility have?

284 Caine, 153-4. 127

Chapter Three Home and Leisure

In 1893 Benjamin Guinness Orchard undertook to create a compendium of important people in Liverpool. This Legion of Honour would be a record of the most notable citizens whose businesses, politics, and philanthropy shone glory on the city. A friend of his from “one of our old families” remarked that the 250 names did not properly represent the city — “That’s not

Liverpool!”285 The turnover from old families to new men had been so complete that this older man did not recognize this list of notable citizens. The city, Orchard said in his defence, had grown so much and acquired so many new men that this older view of the city did not apply much anymore. The city was in flux, with new men moving in and at the same time some of the legion of honour leaving. But in early-twentieth century this concern about turnover became a fear about withdrawal, that notable citizens were leaving cities and not being replaced.

The question of ‘old families’ and the landscape of the city has sparked a rich historiographical literature. Across Britain wealthy people left cities for suburbs and the countryside in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and even more quickly and pervasively in the early-twentieth century. There are several questions about this slow drift out of the city: why did it happen, how did it happen, and what were its effects? Liverpool and Glasgow have suffered devastating urban decline in the twentieth century, and while the city centres have been regenerated — in part through European Union funds — both cities have huge quantities of

285 B. Guinness Orchard, Liverpool's Legion of Honour (1893), 5. 128 derelict buildings and decayed neighbourhoods.286 Was the movement of wealthy people out of the cities to blame?

The question of suburbanization therefore has a moral dimension, an element of ethical judgement. The cities made many people rich — that those people then took their money and left the cities to rot suggests a profound failure of the elite. Scholars have taken particular interest in local government, which in the mid-nineteenth century was dominated by those ‘old’ rich families but by the mid-twentieth century was (or so it is argued) neglected by them. These civic leaders, the argument goes, became enamoured of aristocratic lifestyles, left the city, stopped being proper leaders and economically innovative, and merged into the ‘county set’.

Elite suburbanization has been studied mostly in debates on gentrification. This scholarship on gentrification has explored how the middle class reacted to the decline of the upper class from the 1880s.287 What would appear as a great opportunity for the elite of the middle class — the bloodless economic self-destruction of their superiors — never quite became a middle-class coup. Thus, according to some extreme views, Britain remained mired in nostalgia for its glorious past and fell into economic decline.288 Either some strength of the

286 Regeneration is concentrated in Liverpool around the docks and the central shopping district; and in Glasgow along the Clyde near the SECC. Liverpool and Glasgow both voted to Remain, Liverpool at 58.2% and Glasgow at 67%, and the withdrawal of EU funds will be a severe blow to both cities. 287 It is well summarized in David Edgerton, "The Decline of Declinism," Business History Review 71, no. 2 (1997). 288 Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (Cambridge New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). This book has been dismantled and refuted from many angles. The thesis is that English culture was naturally anti-business, backward-looking and aristocratic, and this culture had a fatal lack of respect for industrialization. Money from industry and commerce was therefore used towards rural unbusinesslike aims. Controversial, polemical, and political, it was loved and loathed on publication, and this thesis is now held in general disregard. One of the most punishing blows was dealt by Peter Mandler, who described England of the early-twentieth century as a culture that was notably uninterested in the past. See Peter Mandler, "Against 'Englishness': English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850-1940," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 7 (1997). F.M.L. Thompson, Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture: Britain 1780-1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Peter Mandler, The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). William D. Rubinstein, Capitalism, Culture, and Decline in Britain, 1750-1990 (London: 129 aristocracy or weakness of the middle class reduced the friction between old and new money, and the plutocrats were hoodwinked into socializing with those above them when they should have been focused on those below them. A line of thought associated most prominently with

Martin Wiener is that these businessmen ‘failed’ in some critical way. They withdrew from economic competition, and retired to a “post-industrial” life.289 Rich businessmen rose up to assimilate into the aristocracy via the “slow magic of gentrification”290 and the boundary between middle and upper became virtually indistinguishable.

How far business families disengaged from city life has been a topic of debate. The most recent contributions, such as Tosh Warwick’s work on , have argued that until at least the Second World War, civic leaders who left the city remained socially integrated with it.291 He disagrees in particular with Asa Briggs’ Victorian Cities. Briggs, drawing on contemporary press discussion, points to physical location and town councils as markers of elite integration with cities. He argues that for various towns and cities, during the late-nineteenth century wealthy families moved away from the cities, and they no longer numerically dominated or led town councils.292 Warwick argues instead that urban governance was changing in the late-

Routledge, 1993). Elites and the Wealthy in Modern British History: Essays in Social and Economic History (: Harvester Press, 1987). F.M.L. Thompson, Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture: Britain 1780-1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Supporters of the Wiener thesis include Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War: The Illusion & Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (Macmillan, 1986). Wiener drew his ideas partially from Asa Briggs, Victorian Cities (Odhams Press, 1963). 289 J. Mordaunt Crook, The Rise of the Nouveaux Riches: Style and Status in Victorian and Edwardian Architecture (John Murray, 1999), 14. 290 Ibid., 16. 291 Tosh Warwick, "The Maturity of ‘the British Ballarat’: The Changing Relationship of Middlesbrough’s Steel Magnates with the Urban Sphere 1880-1931," in Urban Transformations: Booms, Busts and Other Catastrophes (11th Australasian Urban History/Planning History Conference), ed. A. Gaynor et al. (2012); "“Country Houses in the Vicinity but Away from the Smoke of Their Blast Furnaces”: Reconsidering Elite Withdrawal from Victorian Middlesbrough," in Victorian Cities Revisited (Middlesbrough2014). 292 Briggs. 130 nineteenth century and town councils are not a useful way to understand governance holistically.

The rural homes of Middlesbrough’s wealthiest could be used for business activity, philanthropic organization, associational institution-building, and other purposes that continued to engage the industrial centre of Middlesbrough.293 This argument however hinges on precise definitions of what it means to be socially integrated with a place, or to have fully disengaged, which is an endlessly debatable boundary. It is useful to correct Briggs’ myopic focus on town council membership, which is simple to measure, but moving to less clear-cut markers such as philanthropic and cultural engagement makes the definition of elite engagement blurry.

Rich people left cities in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. But many other people did too — suburbanization was a large movement which included a wide band of people. That does not mean that wealthy people ‘failed’ the cities or were immoral. Scrutiny of the actual patterns of moving out shows how the cities were expanding, and what the attraction of moving out was. Instead of seeing an inexorable and irreversible movement, we can explore how wealthy people actually made choices about where to live — choices that were often based on their lifestyle, marital status and gender. In fact, all matters of property and housing were connected with gender and family composition, because owning property was a significant part of a family’s wealth. Businessmen, I argue, did not merely adapt to aristocratic behaviour, but also invented their own gentrified leisure activities. When wealthy businessmen took on some aristocratic leisure activities, they used these activities for their own needs, as we shall see. They

293 Tosh Warwick, "Middlesbrough's Steel Magnates : Business, Culture and Participation, 1880-1934" (University of Huddersfield, 2014). (Unpublished PhD thesis) 131 also simultaneously developed upper-middle class leisure activities that would also be suitable for business lives.

It is difficult to obtain a fully accurate picture of suburbanization in a social group that can be defined in various ways. Some have used the collective biographies written in the 1880s-

90 such as Orchard’s Liverpool’s Legion of Honour and MacLehose’s Memoirs and Portraits of

One Hundred Glasgow Men.294 With census data, one might hope to capture all these men’s addresses and thus their movement over time. This however skews towards the men who were interested in public service, or more than extraordinarily wealthy. A neat way to bypass this is in clubs that existed beyond particular interests, and instead were dedicated simply to socializing.

The Wellington Club in Liverpool, as described in chapter two, was an organization for arranging balls. It was structured like a company, but with the ideals of a patriarchal family. It also kept an address book that records where members lived — although unfortunately it is not dated, and none of the multiple deletions and additions of addresses are dated either. Sampling sections of it shows many members moving out to the Wirral, and some relocating down to

London. But at the same time, it shows suburbanization within Liverpool. Taking the ‘M’s who were never deleted, their homes are spread across the outer fringe of Liverpool, in the spacious and genteel suburbs of the late-nineteenth century. But they are still well within the bounds of the city, even though the city’s population has fallen since the Second World War.

294 Orchard. James MacLehose, Memoirs and Portraits of One Hundred Glasgow Men Who Have Died During the Last Thirty Years, and in Their Lives Did Much to Make the City What It Now Is (1886). 132

Figure 1 Addresses of those with surnames starting with M, who were never deleted from the Wellington Club Address Book. Business addresses marked in green and home addresses marked in blue.295

Another method is to explore business records for sharebooks of family businesses. This shows how family members moved about over time. The sharebook of the Garston Tanning

Company shows family members moving and suburbanizing between the company’s incorporation in 1913 and the 1930s.296 The company was created and operated by the Boston family, who had already been very successful in other tanning ventures. The new Garston location, to the south of Liverpool, was another piece in the family portfolio. The sharebook records who owned what shares, and because it details shareholders’ addresses over a twenty- five year period, it shows how family members invested, worked, and lived together.

The biggest and most active shareholders were men, and the sharebook shows how younger men in the family lived with parents or uncles/aunts for long periods of time. Men

295 LRO 367 WTN Address Book of the Wellington Club. 296 LRO 380 TAN/4 Garston Tanning Company Sharebook. 133 would live with their birth parents, brothers, and unmarried sisters until they themselves married, later than those sisters might marry. As they got older, these men tended to move further away from Garston into the countryside of the Wirral area. But even as they moved ‘away’, they stayed together, living in the same households or as near neighbours. Rather than seeing their movement as an individualistic flight from the pollution their money-making caused — for their tannery made Garston stink to high heaven — I would reinterpret it as a collective trend that retained the advantages living together in Liverpool had given them.

Figure 2 Addresses of Male Shareholders in the Garston Tanning Company represented as a heat map.

The family stuck together wherever they lived, but they had not always lived in Garston.

The family did not originate in Liverpool: rather, tanning had brought them in from their original homes in Sandbach, in . In 1913 suburbanization was well underway for many of the 134 city’s elites, and at this point many of the young Boston men were moving in to the city from

Cheshire where the previous tanning business was situated. They may have been from a wealthy family, but these young men were at the start of their business careers, so they began their working lives in Liverpool, with other young men of the same family, before moving out into the

Wirral as older married men.

This pattern applies beyond the Boston family and much earlier. Alfred Holt (1829-1911) writes of the conveniences living with his parents afforded him:

My home continued at Rake Lane. I never should have left it except that, as changes are

sure to come, I must needs prepare to play my part. I look back with the happiest feelings

to the years of virtual manhood I spent at home before I broke, or wished to break, the

ties of childhood. I had no unsatisfied want there, and I hope I contributed to the peace

and comfort I enjoyed. No young man, with his way to make, could be better placed. I

had everything provided, yet was so independent that I could be absent for a day or a

month, at the call of either business or inclination, and when I came back, home and

society were ready, and this unfettered, sympathising, and efficient existence continued

till I was over 36 years of age, when I left my widowed mother's house to be married,

September 20th, 1865.297

His new wife was twenty-four, an age gap that was normal for their class. His new home at 12 Holly Road, Fairfield, a little further away from the city centre. Later in life he would

297 Alfred Holt, "Fragmentary Autobiography of Alfred Holt. Written on Scraps at Various Dates. Collected, Corrected, and Printed August, 1911.," (1911), 35. 135 continue to move away from the centre into ‘Crofton’ house in Mossley Hill, although he never moved outside the city bounds of Liverpool.

Figure 3 Map of company headquarters in the city centre at India Buildings, family home at Rake Lane where Alfred grew up, his first home after marriage at Holly road and his second at Crofton

Marriage was an impetus to leave the family home, and therefore to move further away from the city centre. So what of those who never married, and therefore never left ‘virtual manhood’ in Alfred Holt’s terms? In chapter two we saw how the unmarried proportion of the 136 population was rising. Unmarried women tended to live with family: after Alfred’s brothers all married and then his mother died, his spinster sister moved in with their brother Robert and his wife. When a bachelor’s parents died, however, he might happily live by himself or with his unmarried sisters. The unmarried children of George Melly (1830-1894) show this pattern at work. Once their mother died in 1909, the unmarried siblings Eva (1854-1937), Florence (1856-

1928) and Willy (1866-1944) lived together at the family home at 90 Chatham Street until

Willy’s death, when the house was left to the university.

While around Willy his brothers and cousins married and moved out of the centre, he remained well in the city, and as time went on the trio became isolated. A much younger relative remembered seeing Eva and Willy in the 1930s after this once-fashionable area had been abandoned. “Chatham Street and Abercromby Square had once been fashionable but the merchant princes had long since departed. Most of the houses had become seamen’s lodgings, and Number 90 alone, like a Victorian whale stranded on a polluted beach, retained its original identity. The Mellys, with their passion for appropriation, referred to this one house at ‘Chatham

Street’ or ‘Chatty’ for short, as though the lodging houses didn’t exist.”298

Moving out of the centre or out of the city was a step in the lifecycle for a married man.

Over time therefore areas such as Abercromby Square came to be “polluted beach[es]” — but the choices that led to this were not based on dislike of the city. These choices about where to live were based on marital status, religion, and gender among other idiosyncratic characteristics.

298 George Melly, Owning Up: The Trilogy, (Penguin, 2000). 84. 137

Figure 4 Map of the house at 90 Chatham Street, marked as Willy Melly, and the homes of two of Willy’s married brothers.

Religion and suburbanization

One thing the Boston family of tanners lost when they moved from Sandbach in Cheshire to Liverpool was their Methodist church. Methodism was central to their family: they were 138 teetotallers, philanthropic, and heavily involved in the Methodist church in Sandbach. 299 Scholars have thought a great deal about elite residence and the problem of religion. Morris argues that by the mid-nineteenth century, and after a great deal of controversy, finally class began to matter more than political party divisions or religious sects.300 Denominations, especially minority ones such as Methodism, may have had their own coherence, but they were integrated into a larger class structure: class mattered more than sect, most of the time. This was the thin end of the wedge: religious decline was setting in. Secularization hit minority religions more acutely than the Church of England or Scotland, as wealthy people converted to the majority religion before drifting away entirely.301 Among the rich of Liverpool there were many who drifted to

Anglicanism and practical secularism. In Glasgow the difference between Presbyterianism and other Protestant denominations was less and so the drift was not quite as bad.

Minority religions tend to flourish better in urban than in rural areas. A congregation made up of a twentieth of the population of Liverpool was far more viable than one made up of a twentieth of Sandbach. Some historians have therefore suggested that therefore dissenters tended to stay living in cities longer than Anglicans, and even if they did move out the city they were more likely to continue coming into the city for worship, and therefore tied to philanthropic and

299 Cheshire Archives EMS 222/9/2 Sandbach Wesley Avenue Methodist Chapel Accounts of J. Summerfield, secretary, in account with F. Boston, treasurer of the Building Fund. 300 R. J. Morris, Class, Sect, and Party : The Making of the British Middle Class : Leeds, 1820-1850 (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1990). 301 Some specialists argue that secularization did not in fact happen until after the Second World War, arguing that there was a large urban working-class church-going population until the 1960s. Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800-2000 (Routledge, 2001). In Glasgow and Liverpool working- class religion was unusual because of Irish Catholic immigration. The division between Catholic and Protestant was very sharp in the nineteenth century and they are still the two most sectarian cities on the mainland. I witnessed Orange marches in both cities while living there; in Glasgow during the marching season they shut down parts of the city almost every weekend. But among the wealthy elite there were almost no Catholics, and they were well removed from working-class religion. 139 social concerns in the city.302 On the other hand, endogamous marriage patterns could encourage dissenters to look outside the local area for spouses, because they had fewer options locally. This could tend to dilute the family’s loyalty to a particular place.

Minority religions thus had a difficult time with suburbanization, which could stretch their resources thin. The old chapels were located in the old city, and were considered emotional hubs: people were buried here, history had been made here, the buildings were familiar and loved. The Unitarian congregation in Liverpool had two old chapels: the Renshaw Street

Unitarian Chapel, and the ‘Ancient’ Unitarian Chapel — but one was deep in the city and the other was small. Once families moved out to the suburbs in the south of the city, they often did not want to trek into the centre of the city to Renshaw Street on Sundays. The Ancient

Chapel was closer to the suburbs but very small. It was built by Puritans in the early-seventeenth century and was not capable of absorbing the Renshaw Street congregation in the late-nineteenth century.

302 Barry M. Doyle, "The Structure of Elite Power in the Early Twentieth-Century City: Norwich, 1900–35," Urban History 24, no. 02 (1997). 140

Figure 5 Map of the three Unitarian churches of Liverpool

Some in the Renshaw Street congregation were anxious to move out of the city centre.

Robert Holt recorded in his family diary in 1894:

“The constantly recurring idea of moving our Chapel to the outside of the Town is again

before us and seems to have taken a firmer hold than on any previous occasion: The idea

is to buy land and build on one of the sites in Sefton Park. we feel that there are now few 141

if any members of the congregation actually living in the town near the chapel and the

distance from most of the congregation is a serious drawback.” 303

And so they did move, building a large new church opposite Robert’s house. The old

Renshaw Street location was turned into a garden, with a memorial to prominent Liverpool

Unitarians such as William Roscoe. Since then it has lost the appearance of a garden, and all that is left is some plaques on a patch of grass hemmed in by buildings and a Tesco Metro. Perhaps the experience of moving the chapel dislodged some people from the community, and perhaps the growing use of cremation (the biggest supporters of cremation in Liverpool were Unitarians) reduced the emotional resonance of burial places — and of course secularization affected every church — so that in the end the large Sefton Park church was not really needed for much longer, as the congregation dropped.304

Those outside Christianity also faced assimilation and secularization. Within a small group such as the Jewish population of Liverpool, denominational and other divides were potentially fatal to their abilities to act together. Therefore, the richest Jews of Liverpool tended to stress that they represented an entire community, rather than just a congregation. Baron Louis

Benas, a wealthy banker, Justice of the Peace, and Orthodox Jew, tried to claim a place on

Liverpool’s Education Committee by claiming a right to represent “the Jewish Community…an influential and numerically important portion of our municipality”.305 As well as using the language of ‘community’, at the same time he positioned Jews as a group like dissenting

303 LRO 920 DUR 1/7 Robert Holt diary 1894-1901. 304 Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton University Press, 2015), 495-548. discusses cremation within discussions about churchyards and cemeteries. The scant records of the Liverpool Cremation Society show the prominence of Unitarians among cremation enthusiasts LRO 367 CRE Acc 5807. 305 LRO 296 BLB 1/1/2 17 October 1907 Baron Louis Benas to Alderman Oulton 142 denominations by describing them as a ‘church’: “Almost every other Church has its spokesman except our own.”

Yet Liverpool Jews, like many others, were split between Orthodox and Reform congregations. Baron’s orthodoxy was centrally important to his life and he was an important member of the Old Hebrew Congregation. When in 1879 he married Amelia Schloss of

Manchester, part of the rapid breakdown of their marriage was due to conflicts between her family’s Reform tendencies and his family’s Orthodoxy.306 Possibly this experience hardened his heart against Reform; certainly he was a stickler for Orthodox practice for the rest of his life.

Baron’s claim to represent the entirety of ‘the Jewish Community’ was therefore somewhat dubious. His religious life was centred around the wealthy and Orthodox Old Hebrew

Congregation, and excluded the Reform congregations and the poor immigrant congregations elsewhere in Liverpool.

306 LRO 296 BLB 1/1/2 3 October 3 1880 Draft of letter from Baron Louis Benas to his father-in-law Louis Schloss 143

Figure 6 Map of 74 Parliament Street and 5 Princes Avenue

Baron’s family lived first at 74 Parliament Street and then at 5 Princes Avenue in

Liverpool, close to the Princes Road which opened in 1874 to house the Old Hebrew

Congregation. The closeness of the synagogue likely kept the Benas family in Toxteth. The 144

Benas family did not have a long connection with Liverpool: Baron’s father Louis had moved from Prussia in 1844, the same year that Baron was born.307 Possibly the breakdown of Baron’s marriage also helped prevent him moving away into the suburbs, as his household was a small one of just his son, unmarried sister, widowed mother, and two unmarried brothers. If he had had more children, however, these homes at 74 Parliament Street and 5 Princes Avenue would have been unlikely to be large enough. Family circumstance, along with his personal attachment to the synagogue, kept the Benas family in the Princes Park area of Liverpool long after they might have otherwise moved out to the suburbs.

Personal quirks and suburbanization

Generation gaps and lifespans could affect residential patterns in an exponential way. A couple of chance events could end up with an entire family living away from Glasgow and

Liverpool. Archibald Smith and Susan Parker’s family shows how chance, personal choice, and systematic factors could work together to pull their family away from Glasgow. The Smith family had made money from West Indian trade, and purchased the estate of Jordanhill to the west of Glasgow. The lack of money after the decline of West Indian trade led Archibald to become a barrister in London. But while this was a systematic problem, it was exacerbated by the long life of his father. Archibald and Susan married in 1853 but did not inherit Jordanhill until 1866, by which point Archibald was in his fifties and their family was settled in Surrey and unlikely to move back to Glasgow.

307 National Archives HO 1/55/1819. Naturalisation records 1854. 145

Another systematic factor pulled their family to London: age at marriage. In 1853 when they married, Archibald was forty and Susan only eighteen. As was the common pattern,

Archibald had only set up his own household when he married, although he had lived in chambers at Lincoln Inn rather than with his family before his marriage.308 Their age gap was large but not extraordinarily so. The chance fact that he died before turning sixty meant that

Susan long outlived him. She was merely thirty-seven when he died in 1872, and lived for over forty years after this. The fact that widows often long outlived their husbands affected residence patterns. In 1872 Susan’s children were very young: the eldest, James, was eighteen, and the youngest, George, only four. She therefore remained at her home in Putney after his death rather than moving to Jordanhill, so all her children grew up in Surrey rather than Glasgow. Later she moved to the village of Stokeleigh, near Weybridge, to be closer to her sister and brother-in-law,

Ellen and Edward Rose, who lived there. Ellen and Susan’s father Sir James Parker was of a

Glasgow and Liverpool family, but like Archibald Smith he had been drawn elsewhere by his brilliant legal career.

Once Susan’s children were grown up they also made choices about where to live, but were pulled by her choice to live in Surrey. Her two daughters lived with her until the elder Mary married (1892, aged 29) and the younger Margaret ‘Daisy’ died (1904, aged 37). The future location of the sons was affected by primogeniture, and career choice. Archibald and Susan’s eldest son, James Parker Smith, kept the original family home at Jordanhill, and James served as an MP for Partick, a suburb of Glasgow, between 1890 and 1906 while also working as a barrister. As the eldest son, the weak form of primogeniture that the middle class practiced

308 1851 census Lincoln’s Inn chambers aged 37, Ancestry.com. 146 allowed him the privilege of this home. The second son Walter Edward took on a career in the church. Somehow, he seems to have been drawn to Anglicanism rather than Presbyterianism, and ended up as vicar of Andover in .309 Charles Stewart, the third son, had a diplomatic career and frequently travelled between London, the centre of diplomacy, and his postings in

Odessa and Barcelona. The fourth son, Arthur Hamilton, made a career in curation, and moved to

London, where the most high-level curatorial jobs were to be found. He became Keeper of Greek and Roman antiquities at the British Museum. The fifth, Henry Babington had a civil service career that took him out to India, where he married the daughter of the Viceroy, the earl of Elgin.

The sixth and youngest son, George Edward, entered the army and was sent across the world like

Charles and Henry.

For Charles, Henry, and George, their careers took them around the empire, and were in service to the imperial centre of London. And so when they returned to Britain with their families, their urge to go to Glasgow was weak. Their mother was in Surrey, a location very convenient for London, so they were pulled towards her. None of the Smith children married spouses from Glasgow, although several married Scots.310 When George was Director of Surveys in Nairobi, he used Stokeleigh as a postal address.311 When Henry was in India, he did the same.312

309 An aunt had also converted. 310 Two sons, James and Charles, married their cousins (Maimie Hamilton and Nannie Macaulay). Mary Susan Smith married a Scottish doctor (Charles Duff). The grandest marriage was Henry Babington Smith’s to Lady Elizabeth Bruce, daughter of the Earl of Elgin, who was Viceroy of India at the time that Henry worked in the Indian Civil Service. 311 For example “Smith, Capt. G. E., R.E., Director of Surveys, Nairobi, Br. E. Africa, and Stokeleigh, Weybridge” in ‘List of Members’ Journal of the Royal African Society Jun 1906, 473. 312 The Journals of the Society for Psychical Research show him as a subscriber at his mother’s address 147

The Smith brothers were perhaps unusually brilliant in their careers, the Dictionary of

National Biography noting of Henry that “Henry Babington Smith was the sixth of seven brothers, all but one of whom distinguished themselves in later life; the exception died in infancy.”313 This was perhaps part of the problem, as by the time they were building their careers in the 1880s and onwards, Glasgow was too small for their ambitions, given that they chose religious, diplomatic, historical, and military trajectories. If Susan had moved to Glasgow, she would have had seen her younger sons less often. But similarly, perhaps her sons who lived abroad would have travelled to Glasgow rather than staying with her at Stokeleigh. They always seem to have chosen to stay at Stokeleigh rather than Jordanhill, even when their mother Susan or unmarried sister Daisy were not there. Henry came back to England when he was suffering from tuberculosis and stayed in Surrey alone rather than renting his own home or staying with

James at Jordanhill.314 All their families therefore grew up without any ties to Glasgow. James, the ‘4th Smith of Jordanhill’, had two sons and a daughter, but the younger son Wilmot died in the First World War and the elder Archibald emigrated to Australia in the 1920s. By now

Jordanhill was within the city of Glasgow and the Smiths sold off the last of their land, including the house of Jordanhill itself, as a teacher training college.315 Some systematic changes, such as the decline of West Indian trade after the abolition of slavery, had moved the family away from

Glasgow. But there was also a great element of chance and personal choice.

313 William C. Lubenow, ‘Smith, Sir Henry Babington (1863–1923)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 314 GML TD 1/1022 Aug-Sep 1900 Susan Parker Smith to Margaret Smith. 315 http://www.wsmclean.com/Smiths.htm 148

Gender and property

The middle-class experience with real property before 1870 was a patriarchal one.316 Men used property investments to provide ‘safe’ investments for their old age and for the widows and children, especially daughters. Property’s stability as an investment had made it a very suitable bequest for women, along with railway stock. The notion of a family home was imbued with ideals of femininity, but property was also part of men’s investment strategies. Men spread the risk of early death by linking their wives and children into a larger family, what Robert Morris calls the ‘networked family’. A man would use property to create links with other men who might be able to help his dependents if his own business failed or he died young. Supporting a young nephew or cousin with the loan of money or business premises could pay off if he was successful and the lender died young. Buying housing for oneself and as rental properties was a critical part of the patriarch’s strategy. It was a stable income perfect for leaving to women, who needed stability because they did not work. Property was therefore the bedrock of family finances, upon which younger unmarried men could speculate more innovatively. The tension between domestic setting and patriarchal power caused some heady divisions once gender divisions were in flux — the age of the New Woman and Married Women’s Property Acts did not sit well with the patriarch-controlled networked family.

Which is all to say that property could create divisions within families like nothing else, and many of these divisions stemmed from the highly gendered nature of property. Inheritance questions were some of the thorniest fights about property within families. On some occasions

316 R. J. Morris, Men, Women, and Property in England, 1780-1870: A Social and Economic History of Family Strategies Amongst the Leeds Middle Classes (Cambridge University Press, 2009). 149 daughters questioned why they should get less, and debated the idea of their safe property inheritances.

Take for example, the case of the Holt women, who in the 1920s disputed a will to claim that property ought to belong to them. This dispute began with the death of Alfred’s brother

Philip (1830-1914). He left no children, so his wealth was divided between nieces and nephews.

Since 1902 his brother Robert’s (1932-1908) children had had tense relationships between themselves, as discussed in chapter two. Philip’s will caused the battle lines to be redrawn. Now it was daughters against sons, and at stake was the company headquarters, the impressive property at India Buildings.317

Philip had given £15,000 worth of holdings in India Buildings to Robert for his three daughters, distributing it well in advance of his death. He specified that he had given property rather than shares in the family shipping company because “Steamship property does not seem to me suitable for ladies.”318 This was the patriarchal networked family at work: women needed secure investments such as property rather than risky shares, and they should be provided for by arrangements between men. The eldest daughter married in 1897 and the second in 1913, but the youngest was still unmarried when Philip died in 1914, and therefore especially in need of patriarchal protection according to custom (although Catherine the eldest had married a

Cambridge professor and had six children, so seems to have often felt relatively poor).319 Molly had lived with their uncle Philip from his wife’s death until 1914: the niece caring for her uncle

317 The modern India Buildings is a 1930s creation so slightly postdates this fight, but the older building from the 1860s was also impressive and valuable. 318 LRO 920 DUR 14/4/7B 319 LRO 920 DUR/14/6 /18 [1915] Elizabeth Holt to Richard Holt 150 in his new aloneness, and the uncle providing a home to a young unmarried woman who could not live alone.320

But did Robert pass on this £15,000 to his daughters when he died in 1908 or did he not?

Various sums had gone into the ‘Hotchpot’ that was left to his children, from his father-in-law, sister, and brother; and then various withdrawals had been made for wedding settlements and other gifts to the children. Further confusion was added by the fact that there was a barrier against women owning any part of India Buildings, so the £15,000 would have to be given out in cash rather than in part-ownership of the building.321 The five sons were adamant that the money was included in the settlement Robert had left to his daughters — and the three daughters were adamant that the £20,000 each received from their father had not included Philip’s bequest.

The crisis came to a head in 1920-1 when Catherine had suffered a mental breakdown and her family were financially stretched. A flurry of letters and legal documents re-examined the wills and re-read the memorandum that “Steamship property does not seem to me suitable for ladies” to support different theories. Had Robert passed on Philip’s money to the girls or had it been absorbed into Robert’s estate and given to his sons as well as his daughters? At stake was

Robert’s character as a father: his eldest son Richard maintained that Robert must have passed on the money to his daughters because Robert was a moral man and a good father, writing: “I cannot be party to anything which reflects upon my father’s character:- there can be no acquiescence on my part in the view that my father failed to carry out any obligation morally binding upon him – a suggestion which I should not believe as long as any alternative surmise

320 1911 census 52 Ullet Road Liverpool, Ancestry.com. 321 The documents are slightly unclear about whether the barrier was against all women or only married women, but the married and unmarried Holt sisters decided not to make this an issue. 151 exists.”322 On the other hand, the sisters believed they had been essentially robbed by their brothers: as Catherine’s husband wrote to her eldest brother “your sisters believe their brothers to be in possession of property meant for them, and to which they have a moral right. They feel a burning sense of injustice, which, indeed, had something to do with Kitty’s breakdown.”323

There was a lot of money involved, but all parties said it was about more than the money. Who was right about the money is unclear to me. The sisters had lawyers investigate Robert’s

‘Hotchpot’ for his children that Philip’s money had gone into, but could not conclusively prove that they had not received their fair share. On the other side their eldest brother Richard seemed willing to give a smaller money settlement to his sisters, but asked that their estrangement end before making a settlement, arguing that otherwise the brothers would be ‘buying’ their sisters’ love. The sisters refused to socialize with their brothers, perhaps seeing Richard’s request as a tactic rather than a real olive branch. It ended with a stalemate and a renewed commitment on both sides to non-communication. No money moved and there was no formal legal proceeding, probably because the sisters lacked the money and the will for a fight. In 1921 the eldest sister

Catherine was confined to Holloway Sanatorium and her husband had six children to take care of in her absence (aged ten to twenty-one); the middle sister Betty was a war widow with a seven- year-old son; and the youngest sister Molly was a spinster with weak health.324 They were comparatively well-off women but could not rival their brothers in money and influence.

322 LRO 920 DUR 14/4/13B 323 LRO 920 DUR 14/4/2A 324 Holloway Sanatorium was in Virginia Water. Catherine’s breakdown seems to have been very serious, and Sir Marriott Cooke, chairman of the Board of Control for Lunacy and Mental Deficiency, was in charge of her care. Betty’s husband Edward Stanley Russell (1883-1917) left only £120 according to his probate, so she must have relied on her inherited wealth for herself and her son. 152

Some family disputes were less spectacular, but still show the strain of gendered property inheritance. The Boston family of the Garston Tanning Company carried on male-preference inheritance well into the twentieth century. When Francis Boston died in 1930, his two sons received the bulk of his wealth. They were already involved in the family tanning company, and as most of the daughters’ inheritances were in shares — and company directors had almost unlimited powers to set shareholder payments — the pair directly controlled how their mother and sisters received the money they were given by Francis. But if the women had little moral claim to the business, they did have a better moral right to housing.

Figure 7 Map showing the company headquarters at Garston in relation to Halton Grange

First up was the family home, Halton Grange, which was a large house based on Osborne

House (’s retreat on the Isle of Wight), just across the river from the tanning 153 works at Garston.325 Neither son wanted the house, so it was sold in 1932 to the local council along with 12 acres of land for £2,250.326 The house became a town hall for the new cheap suburbs that were built on the 12 acres. Was it a good deal for the family? The executors thought so, but others in the family thought that selling the land to the council instead of to developers was a waste, and selling land at all at the height of the economic depression was foolish. The interests of the brothers, who had their own homes and did not really need the extra money from the sale of Halton Grange, were not the same of those of the sisters who had lived at the Grange or who needed the money from its sale. Possibly also the brothers, who lived quite close to

Halton, and were major employers at Garston, were less interested in driving hard bargains with the local government than the women of the family.

The estate also set the interests of married against unmarried sister. Francis’s widow and two unmarried daughters went to live at a house called Lansdown in Buckinghamshire after the sale of Halton Grange.327 But the money used to buy Lansdown was taken from trust money that would be distributed to all the children once Laura, the widow, died. The two unmarried daughters were the responsibility of their father’s estate, so they lived for free with their mother during her lifetime. When Laura died in 1950, one of the married sisters, who had been widowed, hoped to profit from the sale of Lansdown, as the house should have been sold and the money put back into the family trust to benefit all the children. For the brothers, however, this extra bit of money was not worth the trouble of rousting their sisters out of the Buckinghamshire

325 At this point the bridge across the Mersey had not been completed, so the journey time was longer than it is today. 326 Leaflet guide to Town Hall, 1970s. Private collection of Angela Goldsmith. 327 Laura Boston Probate 1951, Ancestry.com. Lansdown was a family name sometimes spelled Lansdown and sometimes Lansdowne. 154 house, so they allowed the unmarried sisters to live there rent-free until 1957 when they finally sold it. The married sisters had no power to control these aspects of the family trust: as executors, the brothers were responsible for everything. Then finally, when Lansdown was sold, they again failed to capitalize on the housing market. After they sold the house, it was bought by developers who split the site and made the money that had been latent in the property.

Everyone involved in these inheritance disputes — covert or overt — understood that property had symbolic resonances including home, domesticity, family, and wealth. Property inheritance was a feature that marked out the wealthy middle class from the aristocracy, because the Liverpool and Glasgow elite had never practised aristocratic male-preference primogeniture.

Eldest sons might find themselves inheriting the family home, and might be more the focus of family ambitions, but younger sons would be well compensated too in wills. In 1870 the balance between a merchant daughter’s inheritance and that of her brother was far more favourable to her than that of an aristocratic woman and her brother. But by 1930 the rich middle-class woman would no longer feel quite so well-favoured, and might be inclined to question why her brother should receive more than her at all.

What had happened across this period were many major changes in the lives of women, as described in chapter two. Unmarried middle-class women now worked far more often, and more commonly lived outside the family house. The system of domestic service that had allowed the ‘merchant palaces’ to be so palatial had almost disappeared within a relatively short time.

Demographic changes meant that an inheritance fight between multiple siblings was now rarer because siblings were fewer. As described in chapter 1, Family firms had become less ‘family- like’: less subject to the insecurities of the market and less reliant on the family network to 155 support them. And as a result of all these changes, the male-centeredness of the middle-class relationship with property had to be adjusted.328 But of course one could hardly change a fundamental part of middle-class lives, a mechanism which had shaped how families related to each other and the economic bedrock of innovative business, without considerable heartache and disruption.

Clearly suburbanization in its initial phase was not primarily driven by the concerns of women, who tended to be relatively powerless in these decisions. The Holt sisters lost their argument with their brothers, and the £15,000 of property in central Liverpool remained out of their reach. The married Boston sisters could do very little to get money from their brothers — the widowed sister ended up leasing a cottage because she was unable to buy property herself.

Yet thinking of women’s changing attitudes to property changes our account of suburbanization by showing property as a crucial part of family investment strategies and gendered power dynamics between family members. Individual cases demonstrate how differently the overall movement out of the city, intersecting with new possibilities for women, could play out.

By 1930 the idea of the networked family, the security that property brought to women, was gone. Property was not ungendered: men still owned the majority of housing and women were still the ‘domestic’ sex. But a critical link, the investment in urban property in order to provide for female dependents, had disappeared, under the barrage of social and economic change, and of contestation from those female dependents themselves. They did not want their money held for them in property controlled by their brothers. If they had married and moved

328 “The property cycle was predominantly though not exclusively a male matter." Morris, Men, Women, and Property in England, 1780-1870: A Social and Economic History of Family Strategies Amongst the Leeds Middle Classes, 370. Morris does suggest some ways in which this change occurred. 156 away from Liverpool or Glasgow, holding property there could be a burden rather than an asset.

As they became increasingly vocal about their inheritances, the trend to sell up in the cities intensified.

Living outside the city

What then did a new life in the suburbs and countryside feel like? Often it was very boring, especially for young people, and young women were particularly stuck once their parents moved out of the city. Barbara Holt, daughter of Robert Holt (1872-1952) was born in 1900 in

Liverpool. Her parents were living at Abercromby Square, in what is now the University of

Liverpool, in 1911.329 The Mellys at 90 Chatham Street were also living in the square. Around the same time they moved permanently to High Borrans which was considerably isolated in the

Lake District. There was no telephone and no car until 1924, so it was difficult for Barbara to travel outside the family home. She attempted to get away in 1923 by taking up nursing training in London, but became too ill to continue. Only in 1927 did she eventually leave permanently.

She never married; she was well-off enough not to have to.

Another two young women, born about the same time as Barbara, were far happier with country living. The two daughters of Thomas Lawrence Anderson, Margaret and (Janet) Oonah, were born in 1899 and 1904.330 In 1920 their father died, leaving them and their mother at the isolated home at Auchterarder. At some point in the last twenty years of his life, he had bought

329 1911 census, Ancestry.com. 330 Information that she used her second name rather than her first comes from Probate: “Anderson Janet Oonah Lawrence otherwise Oonah Lawrence. 1957 England & Wales, National Probate Calendar (Index of Wills and Administrations), 1858-1966 Ancestry.com. 157 this house and a working farm. This was far removed from Glasgow and the home at 4 Rosslyn

Terrace in Kelvinside where they had both been born.

Figure 8 Map showing the remoteness of Auchterarder, between Stirling and Perth

Barbara Holt left the Lake District but Margaret and Oonah did not leave their rural location. With their mother, they moved into Kirklands, a smaller house nearby.331 While none of

331 It is not clear when the move took place, but by the 1950s they were living at Kirklands. 158 their letters or papers are archived except their father’s estate papers, these show a quiet and rural life. Neither married, and both predeceased their mother: Margaret died in January 1956 aged 56, from cervical cancer, and Oonah died in November of the same year, at the age of 52, in a road accident.332 Both their death certificates record them as ‘Farmer’ — a suggestion that they had found useful and interesting lives in the remote countryside. Staying away from the excitements of the Glasgow social scene had all but ensured neither would marry, but neither needed to for money’s sake.

It is unclear whether Margaret and Oonah were accepted into a new social scene, that of the gentry ‘country set’. Barbara’s diary suggests that the countryside considerably narrowed her social horizons, but she was living in the Lake District rather than a more populated part of the countryside. J. M. Lee argued in 1963 that as rich middle-class people moved into the countryside, they were able to move into the country set.333 But the strict boundaries of Society were also ebbing away, as a response to the migration of rich people. As Leonore Davidoff argued, elite families living in cities had social lives interwoven with their civic government.

This was lost when they moved to the suburbs, with their new social lives being focused on charity, the arts and the marriage market.334 Yet moving too far away, like Barbara, Margaret, and

Oonah, cut one off entirely from social life.

332 Death certificates in GML TD 862/4/2 Sederunt book. 333 J.M. Lee, Social Leaders and Public Persons: A Study of County Government in Cheshire since 1888 (Clarendon Press, 1963). 334 Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season (The Trinity Press, 1973), 73. 159

Shooting

Moving into the suburbs or countryside gave more opportunities for rich businessmen to use their leisure time in ways that borrowed from aristocratic traditions, yet harmonized with their commercial interests. Many of the “old families” (as discussed by Orchard) loved shooting, polo, and hunting. The merchant George Melly, for example, had a very significant political career, including a stint as an MP.335 He also had literary accomplishments, publishing on a variety of political, historical, and geographic topics. On his death in 1894 his obituary nonetheless noted a few other activities: “The deceased had been all his life an ardent devotee of shooting and other out-of-door sport, and he was constantly to be seen in the cricket or polo field. He evinced a great interest in the proceedings of the Liverpool Polo Club, and was a well- known attender at the various meetings that took place.”

Shooting has been a major target of subsequent accusations that businessmen aimed to become gentlemen rather than make money. The shooting holiday took a man away from his business, sunk his funds into pure pleasure-seeking, and allowed him to masquerade as a landed gentleman. Today it is fox-hunting which is seen as quintessentially aristocratic (and therefore attacked); but in the nineteenth century hunting was more accessible to a non-aristocrat, because it simply required horses and access to a meet. Shooting was the privilege of those to whom the land belonged, and one needed to own land or be invited to shoot on someone’s property as well as own guns and pay to licence them.336

335 Though of Stoke-on-Trent, not Liverpool — Tory control of Liverpool was so great as to block his ambitions in this direction. Richard Durning Holt faced the same problem in the next generation, and ended up as MP for Hexham, in Northumberland. 336 Thompson, 107. I also choose to focus on shooting because it allows me to include both Glasgow and Liverpool. In Scotland fox-hunting was not at all common ibid., 109. 160

But while shooting was the most landed, and therefore aristocratic, of all sports, it was enormously popular with urban businessmen. Can it really be written off as either the act of class traitors or the self-indulgent? FML Thompson argues against the “aristocratic derivation”337 of shooting and hunting, claiming that the notable feature of the hunting-and-shooting man was his

“wilful and unashamed deviation from the abstinence model”.338 He dismisses the class-traitor claim, suggesting that businessmen took up shooting because of their personal tastes rather a like or dislike of the aristocracy or landed wealth.

But this stress on personal tastes ignores the fact that shooting was a communal activity, and was passed on like an infection through the ranks of a city’s elite. A man would not arrive at a passion for shooting on his own, but by being invited to shoot by other people — and most likely those people were like himself. Businessmen from Liverpool and Glasgow went shooting with great enthusiasm, like rich middle-class men across Britain; and the broad base of their enthusiasm made the shoot into a place of networking and business dealing.

Being asked to join a shooting party could further a relationship, especially the ‘rougher’ types of shooting that required trust in the competence of other members of the party.339 Archie

Smith, son of James Parker Smith, barrister and MP in Glasgow, was injured in 1912 in a shooting accident, probably in Canada.340 His grandmother Susan wrote to James “It is dreadful to think of what might have been, + I am most thankful that the account now to allow us to hope that he is really recovering. But it will certainly be more satisfactory for him to have English – or

337 Ibid., 104. 338 Ibid., 112. 339 There was a similarity to army life, which will be discussed more in chapter four. 340 Her mention of the SS Pretorian in this letter leads me to suspect that this accident happened in Canada, which seems to have sailed between Boston, , and Glasgow in early 1910s. 161 home advice. I wonder that he should have gone out shooting with such incompetent men.”341

From the accounts of journeys through Canada by Liverpool and Glasgow men, it may have been impossible for British men to pass through Canada in this period without picking up a gun!

Going shooting together was a relationship, whether in Canada or Britain. Things could go wrong, so one would want to avoid being with “incompetent men.” It was a day-long activity, so one would avoid loathsome men. On 21 June 1888 George Melly was invited shooting with

Richard ‘Dick’ Holt, the message being relayed through Richard’s mother and George’s wife.

George was 57 and Richard 19,342 so one of George’s party suggested privately that she “hoped she would transfer Dick’s invite to Willy”, George’s son who was a mere year older than

Richard. George’s wife continued in her letter: “but evidently there was no such intention +

Willy has never tried to be friendly with Dick, so richly deserves the snub”.343 Richard’s preference was to go shooting with the older man with whom he had a closer relationship.

A passion for shooting, sometimes repressed, is evident in the biographies, letters and obituaries of some businessmen and shows shooting and other sports as a central part of their lives. Willy Melly, son of George and snubbed by Richard Holt, was a devotee of shooting along with other sports. His nephew wrote that “His interest in life was never business but always birds and shooting.”344 He even managed to combine sports in a freak accident: according to his great- nephew “In 1903 W. R. Melly drove off the 3rd tee at Formby Golf Club. His ball struck a thrush in the air, killing it instantly, and holed in one.”345 That same great-nephew remarked on his own

341 GML TD 1/1000/6 Susan Emma Smith to James Parker Smith 24 Nov 1912. 342 George was born 20 August 1830, Richard 13 November 1868 343 LRO 920 MEL 21/6082 Sarah Melly to George Melly 21 June [1888]. 344 W H Rawdon Smith, The George Mellys (1962), 11. 345 This was the legend on a glass dome housing a stuffed thrush and golf ball, noticed by his great-nephew and described in his autobiography Melly. 101. 162 father Francis Heywood Melly, known as Tom (1899-1961, grandson of George Melly): “My father’s discretion is for me implicit in the way he stored his rods and guns — the proof of his frustrated desire for a country life — in the chest in the hall” of their Liverpool home.346

According to his son, the countryside and shooting was the repressed heart of Tom’s life. Tom’s passion for shooting could be described as a gentrifying force that pulled him into the countryside. But it did not pull him into relocating, as he continued living in Liverpool.347

The family aspect is striking — love of shooting seems to have been a dynastic trait. It bound families together, especially links that were more distant. The much-older George Melly and the much-younger Richard Holt were not directly related, but George’s brother-in-law

George Holt was Richard’s uncle. George Holt and his wife Bessie had only one daughter, so

George’s own love of shooting was shared with his nephews rather than sons. From 1894 to

1913 George (and then his executors) owned ‘The Farm’ (or Llwyn Ynn) near Ruthin, for its shooting. George apparently bought the place “for the entertainment of his nephews (and nieces)” and Willy had special responsibility for the place and over time put more of his own money into it. Willy’s nephew wrote “It was a good general shoot producing over 1,000 head most years. All the members of the family went there year after year, his sister Florence acting as hostess.”348

346 Ibid., 20. The chest was dated 1694. George writes that he remembers so well because he “understand[s] people initially through the objects they accumulate and the manner in which they display or conceal them.” 347 Francis Heywood Melly Probate (Death 3 April 1961) shows him at 14 Sandringham Drive in Liverpool, still very close to their first family home on Linnet Lane. His son George records that when he was born in 1926 Francis and his wife were living in a “tiny flat in Linnet Lane and could only afford one cook—housemaid, an almost unheard of privation for the middle classes in 1926.” Ibid., 7. When he was very young they moved to 22 Ivanhoe Road with a nanny, a cook, and a house parlour-maid. Ibid., 15. In the mid-1930s they moved to “a very ugly but large late-Victorian house in Sandringham Drive”. Ibid., 175-8. 348 Smith, 11. 163

The “(and nieces)” is telling — women did not go shooting but took part in the ancillary activities. Women often spent longer than men at shooting locations, as they would not return home briefly from holiday for business as men did. George Melly’s mother and sister lived permanently for many years at Coniston in the Lake District, and would host George’s children for shooting and other sports. But there were occasions when women might do a little shooting.

Richard Holt’s sister Kitty learnt from her [maternal] cousins: “Bill taught me to shoot with a rook rifle which was quite a new experience”.349 Even if shooting was a gender-segregated sport, it held an appeal across gender lines.

Families would decamp as a group for the glorious twelfth, and spend weeks in the countryside. Shooting took businessmen out of their natural habitat. It was a sport that (unlike cricket, rugby etc.) could not happen in a city, so it always drove its adherents out of the cities into the countryside, whether for a few weeks’ holiday or permanently.350 Robert Durning Holt built a home in the Lake District for his family to holiday at, called High Borrans. High Borrans attracted the Holt family for multiple reasons: the beauty of the landscape, long walks, sailing on the lakes, and fox-hunting.351 But it was also shooting that brought Liverpool families into the

Lake District.

349 LRO 920 DUR 17/3/1 Catherine Holt to Robert Holt (her brother) 19 Sept 1886. She obviously took to it, as soon she was writing from school “I long for my gun to shoot the five cats that are continually prowling round; I could knock them over so nicely” LRO 920 DUR 14/3/35 Catherine Holt (at Allenswood) to Richard Holt 13 March 1887. 350 One sport that unusually brought people to the city was horse racing. Wealthy Liverpool households seem to have often been packed with visitors during the Aintree races. The rich middle class attended but do not seem to have been passionate about racing as aristocrats often were — it could be a terrible way to lose money so it was probably best avoided. Thompson. 351 An account of fox hunting from the family cutting book: Windermere Harriers “met at High Borrans, Windermere, by the kind invitation of Mr. R. D. Holt, the foxes having lately done great damage to that gentleman's game…Among the hunters were the misses Holt, Messrs. Holt, and others.” LRO 920 DUR 25, Monday 28th [1894] 65. 164

Neighbours, business associates, and family members in Liverpool became neighbours in the Lake District. The Holt family’s original holiday base at The Terrace and their subsequent home at High Borrans were close to Lanehead House, where George Melly’s mother and sister lived and his family holidayed. None of these three houses were particularly grand, although over time Lanehead and High Borrans were enlarged and made more impressive.

The argument that describes the middle-class love of shooting as a capitulation to the aristocracy is certainly comprehensible. If wealthy men were driven by the attraction of shooting into renting country houses, this would line the pockets of the nobility and gentry, propping up aristocratic houses and fortunes for longer than might have happened if they had been reliant on agricultural support alone.352 Shooting also allowed them to play as feudal benefactors to their vassals by distributing their kills. The birds killed would be given to friends and family, and sometimes even to charitable causes such as hospitals. It was economically unproductive to take long holidays during shooting season, and donating birds instead of money shows an uneasiness about the cash economy which had crept over from aristocrats. But drawing from aristocrats should not be overstated. This was a period of great change for shooting, from limited shoots to planned massacres. This made it harder for anyone but the rich to keep up, and also untied shooting from land-ownership as syndicates began to organize shooting. Other field sports took the same path, changing and becoming more popular with both aristocrats and businessmen at the same time. From the 1840s grouse moors and deer stalking grew in favour, catching on “with

352 Edward Bujack ‘Sport and the survival of landed society in late nineteenth century Suffolk’ in R. W. Hoyle (ed.) Our Hunting Fathers: Field sports in England after 1850, 84. 165 a section of the rich businessman pretty much in step with its adoption by a section of the

English aristocracy.”353

While shooting continued to be an aristocratic sport that kept many of its original connotations, it also fitted comfortably within a businessman’s life. Not all businessmen in

Glasgow and Liverpool took up field sports (John Ellerman did not hunt or shoot), but they were enjoyed by many.354 A convincing copy can be disruptive even as it appears to just mimic the original. For Liverpool and Glasgow businessmen, family links and business goals were pursued out on shoots.

Yet businessmen were not content to merely take up, adapt, and transform aristocratic sports. They also developed their own sporting culture, most apparently of all in taking up golf.

Golf today is almost a caricature of ‘the businessman’s sport’, but its popularity originated in the late-nineteenth century. Shooting did push businessmen out into the countryside proper, but golf could easily be a suburban game. Golf therefore further proves that concerns about gentrification are overblown.

Golf

Golf was the boom sport of the middle class between 1870 and 1930. It grew from being a Scottish and rare sport, to a British and popular sport. From around 20 clubs in the 1860s, by

1913 there were 1,200.355 It was a pleasant sport for the middle-aged sedentary people with lots

353 Thompson, 106. 354 Ibid., 113. 355 Roland Quinault, ‘Golf and Edwardian Politics’ in Roland Quinault and Negley Harte, eds., Land and Society in Britain, 1700-1914 : Essays in Honour of F.M.L. Thompson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 191. 166 of opportunity for conversation. Glasgow and Liverpool men fell in love with golf much as other businessmen men did.

There were many reasons why it might be a suitable sport for powerful people. Ronald

Quinault argues that it was the quintessential sport of the Edwardian politician. “[T]here was nothing aristocratic about golf” and it was therefore appealing to people who were sensitive to this.356 It was not as expensive as yachting or racing.357 It had no links with betting or drinking.

Women as well as men golfed. Businessmen, like politicians, hobnobbed on the golf course.

Membership of the golf club was suitably gated so that it was inaccessible to the working classes. It was therefore a perfect sport for male bonding (or female socializing, in the Ladies

Golf Clubs).

Glasgow Golf Club had a long history, so long that its foundation date is unknown.

According to the Glasgow Herald, “the club’s antiquity is guaranteed by the survival of minutes down to 1832, and a silver club with twenty-four silver balls attached bearing the names of the captains from 1787 to 1828.”358 They played on Glasgow Green, then when the club was reconstituted in 1870 they moved to the South-Side Park, before moving onto Alexandra Park.

Finally, in 1895 they moved to a newly-laid-out course at Blackhill. The Club laid out a lot of money to shape a patch of land into a fine course. Turf was brought in from Ayrshire and the grounds were sculpted to create interest. In the end the new course had some artistic merits as well as golfing ones. The fifteenth hole allowed the golfer, “[i]f he can take his attention for a minute off his ball, and if the too frequent fog is absent,” to “command a magnificent panorama

356 Ibid., 201. 357 Ibid., 206. 358 Glasgow Herald 6th April 1895, cutting in City Minutes GML MP 26, 63-4. 167 of the Cathkin Braes and the valley of the Clyde on the one side and the Campsie Hills on the other.”359

The old course had become overwhelmed by the number of people who played. The

Glasgow Herald wrote: “The green, the property of the Corporation, was, of course, open to all comers. As a consequence it was greatly overplayed.”360 The course was damaged by the abundance of players, and on Saturdays there were long queues at the first tee. In 1892 they opened a ‘relief course’ to take some of the pressure off as “the taste for golf” increased. In a

1914 commemorative book entitled Greater Glasgow, the authors described golf as a second favourite sport in Glasgow. “Next to Association the citizens are specially concerned with Golf. Indeed, among the purely business people this is the sport of the hour.”361 With the

Blackhill course’s attractions and capacity, golf was now fashionable and popular.

In Liverpool, golf did not have such a long history, and yet grew apace in just the same way. Golf Club, opened in November 1900, was supported by luminaries such as Sir

Alfred Lewis Jones, the banana magnate, and Louis Samuel Cohen, owner of Lewis’s department store.362 The recollections of R. H. Green, who caddied at the club during the First

World War, included the memory that “Mr. Cohen was a short, stubby gentleman, who enjoyed his golf and was the Club’s President. The President was usually a very wealthy man in those days”.363 The list of Captains (a similar position to President) also shows that golf was dominated

359 Ibid. 360 Ibid. 361 Greater Glasgow 1914 Published by Henry Munro Ltd Glasgow GML LK 5/514 362 A D Power, A History of Woolton Golf Club Doe Park Volume Two 1900-1990 (unpublished notes) The first Captain was A I Eccles (Cotton Broker) and the second was William Winwood Gossage (W Gossage and Son, Soap Manufacturers, married to daughter of Henry Tate). 363 Ibid. Green was born 1905, and later emigrated to Canada. Louis Cohen’s presidency suggests that Jews were able to take part in golf, while I discovered no evidence of Jews shooting or taking part in other sports. Rabbi 168 by businessmen still in important positions, rather than retirees or men of leisure. The Ladies’ club was founded concurrently with Woolton Golf Club, and perhaps because women also played, golf survived longer than shooting as a popular sport.

There is not much evidence about which groups favoured golf and which shooting — and there were other popular sports too such as yachting — but I suspect that golf in Liverpool was more eagerly adopted by ‘new men’ rather than the ‘old families’. Sir Alfred Jones and Louis

Cohen were self-made men, and Cohen was Jewish. The old families certainly played golf, but their attitude was a little less enthusiastic. When Richard Holt took up golf in 1887, his sister wrote to him “The idea of you playing golf! it is most funny. I can’t imagine you creeping through hedges & long grass at all. Isn’t it the game where you hire little boys at the rate of about sixpence a day to carry your sticks for you. Surely they play it on the rough ground about

Hoylake”.364 Possibly this surprise was because he was a teenager, and golf was an older man’s game. His sister’s reaction may also support the thesis that it was a self-made man’s game. He was not a self-made man, and never did become an enthusiast, preferring shooting and fishing.365

Friedeberg, of the Princes Road Synagogue, was a member and lists in a 1917 publication of Lancashire: Biographies, Rolls of Honour that his one recreation was golf (151). Yet while he was a member of the Liverpool Recruiting Committee and an Acting Army Chaplain, he also felt threatened enough by anti-German feeling (tinged with antisemitism) to change his surname to Frampton during the war. Giles Fraser, “I am haunted by the ghosts of my family's past”, Friday 2 May 2014. At Formby Golf Club Frederick Isaac (1894-1965), also Jewish, became Captain in middle-age. His sister converted to Anglicanism and married Tom Melly; their son George describes discussing the antisemitism of Formby Golf Club with his father Tom and uncle Fred in the late 1950s. Tom denied that Formby was antisemitic, while Fred said of Jewish golfers “They’ve got their own club...They don’t know how to behave. They drink lemonade and bring out wads of money to pay for it. They discuss business.” Melly. 36. This antisemitic argument suggests that Jews took to golf, but still faced barriers in their way; barriers which Fred preferred to describe as the fault of those barred rather than those barring. 364 LRO 920 DUR 14/3/39 Catherine Holt to Richard Holt 3 November 1887. 365 J. Gordon Read, ‘Holt, Alfred (1829–1911)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 169

Even if the old families adopted it more slowly than the new money, golf was still a growing sport.

Why did it take off so fast for businessmen in particular? Golf was considered cerebral, and suitable for men with brains. An enthusiast called it “the best game yet invented for the man who works above his eyebrows”.366 One member of the Woolton club — C W Bailey — published a 1923 book ‘The Brain and Golf — some hints for Golfers from modern mental science”. Bailey argued that the brain was needed for golf, and golf would help the development of the brain. He argued: “Using the golfing brain gives the workaday brain a rest. You cannot give sustained attention to golf and think of your business at the same time.” Yet business and golf were complimentary in that they strengthened each other, while being mutually exclusive.

The golfer was considered an obsessive. At the opening of the Blackhill course, quoted above, the player is enjoined to look at the view “[i]f he can take his attention for a minute off his ball”.367 The obsessive profit-making of a businessman and the focus of a golfer could be likened in an unflattering way. As golf’s popularity grew, a new narrative associated playing golf with apathy in local leadership.

Golf was vulnerable to criticism, even though it was not in any way aristocratic — it did not get a ‘free pass’ based on its middle-class origins and popularity. Attacks on golf referenced the past in a way that suggests that it was understood to be part of a new pattern of behaviour.

The Liverpool Mercury in 1904 wrote of (seventy-two-year-old) Robert Holt: “It made for the highest tone of public life when they had gentlemen of Mr. Holt’s position and standing devoting

366 Victorian premier W A Watt: quoted in Quinault and Harte. The fondness of US Presidents for golf can perhaps be fitted into this pattern. 367 Glasgow Herald 6th April 1895, cutting in City Minutes MP 26, 63-4. 170 so much of their time and thought to the public weal, and it afforded a bright example, which, he thought, was needed very much in these days, when they saw so many of their younger men devoting themselves to the fascinations of golf and the tennis green.”368 The Liverpool Courier in

1906 wrote of the late Emily Booth: “We hope that the inspiration of this record may fire others to follow in the same track and save the woman of to-day from the charge that bridge and golf are her highest ambition and alone make life worth living.”369

Decline in civic leadership

The criticism against golf was levelled against many other forms of leisure, and against businessmen who became consumed by work. This denunciation held that wealthy elite men were no longer taking part in city politics to the extent they had before. The imagined golden age was somewhere in the past, I would estimate around the youth of the grandfathers of those being criticized. Back then, men had worked hard on their business but they also taken time for politics and cultural activities; and those non-business pursuits had been for the good of humanity rather than mere partisan politicking or leisurely enjoyment. This criticism of the lack of public-spirited men became particularly loud in the interwar period.

The idea that there was a lack of public-spirited men gained ground in the interwar period, particularly in newspaper and social commentary. Those surveying the state of provincial society, most notably J.B. Priestley, focused on the problem of elite leadership as a cause of other

368 “Mr. Robert D. Holt” Liverpool Mercury Thursday February 4, 1904 in LRO 920 DUR 25 Family scrapbook, 140. 369 “Two Liverpool Women” Liverpool Courier 23 May 1906 in LRO 920 DUR 25 Family scrapbook, 150. 171 provincial malaise.370 In 1921 John Owen, a cotton trader in Liverpool, wrote a novel set in the cotton business.371 He describes the wealthy cotton merchant Belstock as a man who refused to take part: “Efforts had been made to persuade Belstock to engage in municipal life in his own city, but he had only laughed and shaken his head.” 372 Belstock considered municipal politics a joke, not worth his time to take part in. It was a well-understood enough trope that it did not need to be explained. This withdrawal from local politics was possibly a moment of gentrification and suburbanization. The wealthy no longer lived in cities, so did not take part in city government; and being wealthy became disassociated from public service. I argue that this withdrawal was underway by the 1920s, but only among the younger generation, and it was not such a dire trend as some have seen it.

A powerful and persuasive statement of the notion that business elites retreated from civic leadership is found in J.M. Lee’s Social Leaders and Public Persons: A Study of County

Government in Cheshire since 1888 (1963). He argues that local government in Cheshire shifted from the hands of social leaders, a “[g]roup of families established in land or business who exercised political functions by reason of their social standing”; to public persons, those who gained social standing by taking on local government.373 County ‘Society’ (the Cheshire equivalent to the Glasgow and Liverpool Societies described in chapter two) shifted to a mere collection of “families with certain common habits of leisure rather than families with political

370 J. B. Priestley in English Journey (1934), quoted in Richard Trainor, "Neither Metropolitan nor Provincial: The Interwar Middle Class," in The Making of the British Middle Class?: Studies of Regional and Cultural Diversity since the Eighteenth Century, ed. A.J. Kidd and D. Nicholls (Sutton, 1998). 371 Andrew Popp calls it “badly written and weakly plotted” but worthwhile for being written by an insider. Andrew Popp, "The Broken Cotton Speculator," History Workshop Journal 78, no. 1 (2014): 145. 372 John Owen, The Cotton Broker (1921), 155. 373 Lee, 100, 5. 172 concerns.” Because these families merely “spent their money in certain accepted ways”, their lives were lived in a “spirit of self-advertisement wholly alien to the social leaders who had constituted the old ‘county society’.”374 Local government became professionalized, as central government increased their demands and elites began to grasp how inadequate philanthropy was for the problem of poverty.375 While a professional government divorced from Society might seem like a positive development, Lee wrote his book somewhat as an elegy. By 1963, he wrote,

“nobody believed that ‘county society’ was in any way responsible for the public welfare.”376 In the 1880s Cheshire industrialists had felt required to take part in local politics “almost as part of their commercial activities.”377 With the development of suburbia in the interwar, the industrialists’ homes were divided from their workplaces, “which divorced the sense of community from the sense of political responsibility.”378 These suburbs were purely middle-class and avoided paying city rates. Government had degenerated from a social responsibility to an option: “There is clearly no longer a ‘governing class’ with its own social mores.”379

Pushback against this diagnosis of decline has been particularly focused on the interwar, where historians have emphasized instead the continued local political power of the wealthy. 380

Just as with the long afterlife of the kinship network described in chapter two, old habits of city government took a while to fade. Nick Hayes writes “if by the 1930s a younger generation saw themselves as part of a broader eclectic national elite, in some cities their parents remained

374 Ibid., 100, 03. 375 Ibid., 86; Tony Lane, Liverpool: City of the Sea (Liverpool University Press, 1997), 53. 376 Lee, 212. 377 Ibid., 91. 378 Ibid., 104. 379 Ibid., 82. 380 Nick Hayes, "Things Ain't What They Used to Be! Elites, and Constructs of Consensus and Conflict in Twentieth Century English Municipal Politics," in Urban Politics and Space in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Regional Perspectives, ed. Barry Doyle (2007). Doyle. Trainor. 173 politically and cultural wedded to a pre-war culture of “active” civic engagement through

“closed” social networks centred on kinship, religious and political affiliation, charities and business organisations.”381 Things were about to change, after the Second World War, but elite local power was still comparatively entrenched. Hayes argues that “the inter-war period may be viewed as one of transition; the last years of an enduring “heyday of local government”, but where, spatially, cities also became increasingly working class in culture, politics and experiences.”382 These revisionists also show how elite ‘withdrawal’ from local politics was not only voluntary. In the interwar, the Labour Party was gaining ground in local politics, especially in Glasgow where local government was run along lines of ‘municipal socialism’.383 New MPs included people like Neil Maclean, MP for Govan in Glasgow, a socialist and Labour politician, rather than the grandsons of old MPs. Instead of seeing the wealthy giving up on local leadership, it is possible to see them as bloodlessly giving way for democracy — hardly a flaw.

The interwar decline in local government, however slow, was matched by a decline in local Society which has been less eagerly studied than political change but, I would argue, was of equal importance. The disentangling of politics and Society must have had an effect on local politics too, as in London it widened the cultural gap between Conservative and Labour.384 The

381 Hayes, 49. A similar statement is phrased more negatively by Trainor when he diagnoses a “strong revulsion, by the young upper-middle-class people of the interwar period, for their parents’ pre-1914 commitment to civic affairs.” Trainor, 207. 382 Hayes, 49. 383 The literature on ‘Red Clydeside’ is broad and detailed: see Alastair Reid, "Glasgow Socialism," Social History 11, no. 1 (1986). and Iain McLean, The Legend of Red Clydeside (Birlinn, Limited, 1983). The perspective of business owners on the socialism of their workers has also been examined, in Ronald Johnston, Clydeside Capital, 1870-1920: A Social History of Employers (Tuckwell Press, 2000). 384 Davidoff, 69. She argues that in the late-nineteenth century it was easier to integrate trade unionists and others into Society; but by the interwar the larger number of Labour politicians and their pride in working-class culture meant that these politicians and their wives could not be absorbed in Society. It could even be inferred from her account that the socially marginal position these wives held made it much more difficult for them to be politically influential, potentially limiting their role in the Labour party. 174 decline of Society was in large part, Davidoff argues, due to the decline of domestic service during and after the war, which had a dramatic effect on middle-class families’ ability and wish to take part in Society. Middle-class girls also worked more and had more personal freedom.

Moreover, the idea that it was a duty rather than a pleasure to take part in Society took a hit.385

“This lack of confidence undermined the morale of middle-class women just at the time when housing, material and servant shortages made the struggle to carry to carry through the round of social duties—paying calls, acting as social leaders in community activities and charities, maintaining a formal, ritualised pattern of life—infinitely more difficult.”386

By the interwar Society was disappearing in both Liverpool and Glasgow. The

Wellington Rooms, the Liverpool system for organizing balls, struggled in the interwar and closed in 1930. After that there was no possibility of a Liverpool debut; debutantes had to be presented in London. Lee argues for Cheshire that interwar Society was guided by “metropolitan manners” rather than political work, and describes the first appearance in the mid-thirties of a published “deb’s page” with photos of all the Cheshire debutantes of that year. With such self- advertisement, it was no longer necessary to come out locally.387 Local Society throughout

Britain had lost its political meaning and role as a serious duty for women. By the interwar it was a mere offshoot of a London system based around leisure and marriage.

Priestley’s description of suburbanization stressed how provincial cities then experienced

“social disintegration” as “the various social and artistic activities of these towns are now chiefly

385 Ibid., 99. 386 Ibid., 100. 387 Lee., 102-3 175 organised by people who belong to the employed and not the employing class”. 388 Among this employed class were university professors, who could often mix with the wealthiest in Liverpool and Glasgow but were their own separate group. Liverpool University was the product of the rich businessmen of the city: William Rathbone, George Holt, and others provided the money that funded the opening of the University College in 1882.389 Glasgow’s University is older, but its nineteenth-century growth was funded by the wealthiest men in Glasgow. In 1870 it moved from the city centre westwards to Gilmorehill, where it offered more subjects and educated more students; in 1892-3 the first cohort of 131 women students matriculated into the university.390 The expansion of the universities concentrated the intellectual life of both cities into the universities and weakened the older associations that were based around amateur cultural and scientific exploration, such as Liverpool’s Athenaeum. This club, opened in 1800, had a newsroom stocked with newspapers and periodicals for business knowledge and intellectual development, and a fabulous library.391 With the opening of the university this was no longer the cutting edge of intellectual life in the city. The rich men of the city were still interested in discoveries and progress, but increasingly their role was only that of benefactors. Alfred Holt, an innovator in shipbuilding, and his brother George paid for Oliver Lodge’s experimental work.392 George even observed some of Lodge’s experiments, but the Holts were the money rather than the physicists.

388 J. B. Priestley, English Journey (1934), 359. quoted in Trainor, 208. 389 Thomas Kelly, For the Advancement of Learning: The University of Liverpool 1881-1981 (Liverpool University Press, 1981), 54. 390 Irene Maver, Glasgow (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), 185. Women made up two-fifths of the first cohorts of day students at University College in Liverpool, rising to over half within a few years. The major restriction at Liverpool was that women were unable to join the Medical School. Kelly, 58. 391 Thank you to Peter Urquhart for giving me a tour of the Athenaeum, and a description of the ‘hearties’ who dominated Liverpool business life in the 1950s. His account of the distinction between the golf-loving hearties and the Athenaeum-loving arties influenced the development of this chapter. 392 Bruce Hunt, "Experimenting on the Ether: Oliver J. Lodge and the Great Whirling Machine," Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 16, no. 1 (1986): 115. 176

It was more difficult by the late-nineteenth century for amateurs to contribute to scientific or cultural advances. Willy Melly (1867-1944), whose keen love of shooting and unmarried life have already been described in this chapter, attended university in Berlin as a young man to study zoology. This unusual choice and the length of time he spent in Berlin, between 1887 and

1891, suggests that this was a genuine interest for him.393 He studied under Franz Eilhard

Schulze, working on sponges in Naples. But his health broke down and he was unable to finish his thesis, and Schulze advised him that if Willy was to go into a “Commercial life [Schulze] could not see what [Willy] wanted with a degree in Zoology. or what good it would do

[Willy].”394 His zoological ambitions were irrelevant to his future business life, and after he returned to Berlin he went off to South America to learn the role of Supercargo (or agent) in the

Lamport and Holt shipping line.395 His father’s friend Laura Russell (wife of Lord Arthur

Russell) was sorry that Willy did not get his degree, but wrote “if he makes a good living by business + has an eager taste for his scientific work + a little leisure to give it, what can be happier?”396 Yet that leisurely scientific work was never a reality, and his scientific ambitions came to nothing.397 Willy’s father George was described above as a Renaissance man: a

393 Of his three brothers, two did not attend university and one spent a short time at Heidelberg, where he ignored the academic side of university life. The two German choices suggest that the Mellys may have been cultivating their cosmopolitanism, as a part-Swiss family. Smith. His arrival in Berlin in 1887 is referenced in a letter by his brother- in-law LRO 920 MEL 32 6055 Francis Rawdon Smith to his father-in-law George Melly 27 Oct 1887. 394 LRO 920 MEL 33 6346 Willy Melly to his father George, Berlin Sunday April 1891. This letter has three circular water marks on it in the final paragraph where Willy describes how “I am pretty low about the whole thing”, suspiciously like teardrops. 395 Smith, 11. describes Willy as a Supercargo; the OED defines this role as “A representative of the ship’s owner on board a merchant ship, responsible for overseeing the cargo and its sale. [or] an agent who superintended a company's business abroad”. The latter is probably more descriptive for a shipping line such as Lamport and Holt. 396 LRO 920 MEL 33 6353 Laura, Lady Arthur Russell, to George Melly 4 June 1891. She also wrote “Your work + trouble sending him abroad will not be lost, by any means. It is perhaps for the best – you say he is happy, + that is very important”. 397 He was a member (from 1894) of the Liverpool Physical Society, which was headed by Oliver Lodge, but so two were a couple of his siblings. Peter Rowlands, Oliver Lodge and the Liverpool Physical Society (Liverpool University Press, 1990), 142, 48. 177 businessman, an MP, an author, and a sportsman. His publications and speeches covered education (including fagging), Italy, Poland, Volunteerism, and Egypt.398

Figure 9 George Melly in his library at home

Willy’s abortive degree suggests that such a mix of intellectual and business worlds had become far more difficult by the 1890s. He had to make a choice between zoology and business, and after he came back from Berlin he could only dabble in science. By the 1890s scientific,

398 His pamphlets and published speeches were bound in seven volumes of Stray Leaves (LRO H 825 MEL). The first volume’s epigraph is “Work! for there is enough to do / In the world of thought within; / Work! for the world without is filled / With wretchedness and sin.” I have been unable to find the source of this poem, so it may be his own composition. He also published full-length books Khartoum and the Blue and White Nile (1851, also published in French) School Experiences of a Fag at a Private and a Public School (1854) and an autobiography Recollections of Sixty Years (1893). This undated photograph is taken from volume VII of Stray Leaves. 178 literary and social discoveries were made by those such as Oliver Lodge who worked full-time at universities, not businessmen in their leisure hours.

Philanthropy was also becoming professionalized and separated from wealthy families in the late-nineteenth century.399 The first state pensions, provided by 1908 Pensions Act, replaced voluntary societies set up by the wealthy people that had provided for the deserving poor of their cities. Hospitals, another destination for philanthropic money, also came to rely on other funding sources. Gorsky’s study of Bristol philanthropy, a port city not unlike Glasgow or Liverpool, shows that the Royal Infirmary turned from private funding to institutional funding.400 He calls this the ‘limits of charity’ and describes how by the 1920s almost half of subscriptions to the hospital came from institutions, as support for the hospital moved from private sources to “the public world of work.”401 Working class Bristol men gave to the hospital through their workplace, trusting that they could then be treated in sickness or old age. There were many factors at work in the decline of formal philanthropy among the wealthy: New Liberalism, working-class organization, even medical advances. Suburbanization may have lessened the urgency for the wealthy to find solutions to urban poverty, which was no longer directly on their doorstops, but it is only a fraction of the answer.

399 This paragraph draws on Spencer Jordan, "The Development and Implementation of Authority in a Regional Capital : A Study of Bristol's Elites, 1835-1939" (University of the West of England at Bristol, 1999). Bristol shared enough similarities with Glasgow and Liverpool to make the comparison useful, and Jordan’s account of elite politics and philanthropy in the city explores how formal philanthropic institutions rooted in the eighteenth-century merchant elite collapsed in the early-twentieth century. 400 Bristol had been a slave trade port just like Liverpool, until Liverpool captured Bristol’s trade. Liverpool overtook Bristol in trade in the 1760s. In the second half of the nineteenth century Bristol turned more towards industry, bringing it closer to Glasgow’s economy. 401 M. Gorsky, Patterns of Philanthropy: Charity and Society in Nineteenth-Century Bristol (Royal Historical Society, 1999), 213. 179

Informal local philanthropy suffered more directly than formal philanthropy as urban

Society declined and the wealthy moved out. Alongside organizations meant for charity there had always been informal charities, often solicited by the poor who felt they had a deserving case, and some of this was fairly indirect. Emily Tinne, a shopaholic who amassed an astounding collection of luxury clothing, purchased some of her wardrobe in part because Liverpool shop girls relied on sales commissions to earn a livelihood. In the darkest days of the Depression

Emily’s shopping continued unabated because she was trying to indirectly help these shop girls.402 Her husband, a doctor, also helped the poor at his practice in Aigburth. He could afford to because he had inherited part of a family fortune based on West Indian trading by Sandbach,

Tinne & Co. The Tinnes lived in the suburbs but still helped the Liverpool poor. But those who had moved further afield, such as Robert Holt who relocated to High Borrans in the Lake

District, felt more moved by the plight of those closest to them. Robert went ahead with renovations and wall building in the Depression out of a desire to provide jobs for local people in the Lake District. The wealthy leaving the city also meant that their money was no longer spent in the city on food, fuel, servants and other costs. They also no longer paid city rates, which hit city budgets hard. City governments expanded their boundaries to accommodate new suburbs, but then also had to pay to provide services for new areas.

As I suggested in chapter two, by the interwar the wealthy middle class of Glasgow and

Liverpool had become far more incorporated into a national elite. Richard Trainor argues of the

402 Pauline Rushton, Mrs Tinne's Wardrobe: A Liverpool Lady’s Clothes 1900-1940 (National Museums Liverpool, 2012). This justification for shopping comes from Emily’s daughter rather than Emily herself. It is possible she was merely extravagant, but the quantity of furs and other luxury items she bought in the Depression does support this thesis. At other times of her life she bought huge quantities of more mundane items and left them unworn, but during the Depression years she seems to have bought fewer but more expensive items on which a shop girl might earn a significant commission. 180

1930s that there emerged “a much more geographically united British middle class in which the distinction between ‘the provinces’ and ‘the metropolis’ lost much of its sting.”403 The wealthy had an “easy social interchange among prosperous middle-class people from different regions” and “the provincial upper middle class was better integrated into national élite than before”. 404

He argues that London and the South East did not become more powerful than the North.405 I will discuss this more in chapter five.

Assessing the gentrification thesis

The gentrification thesis holds that the rich middle class deserted the cities, turning their backs on city government and retreating to the countryside. I argue that suburbanization certainly did happen, yet the reasons it happened were often personal and rooted in the behaviour of families rather than in a conscious desertion of city life. Families were influenced by ideas around domesticity and gender when making decisions about property. As women became more independent and less reliant on the networked family, the function and distribution of property became a contested topic in families such as the Bostons and the Holts — a very different notion of property to aristocratic primogeniture. Nuclear families lived separately in the suburbs, replacing endogamous kinship networks in adjacent townhouses. Finally, in examining the sports that pulled men out of the cities, I argued that they were not exhibiting a desire to become

403 Trainor, 206. 404 Ibid., 210, 12. 405 Ibid., 209. The relative importance of London is neatly dramatized by John Owen in The Cotton Broker in a conversation between brokers: “Weftport [Liverpool] is not big enough? What then — are you thinking of catching the next train to Euston?” “London. No, London counts for little enough in our world. I met Dodson the other day who's a very big man in Leadenhall Street, and ‘You can have London!’ I said. ‘We give you London! Quite a nice place to stay in and some really decent things to look at. We didn't think of the Provinces until you'd got well established. But you can take London away so far as we are concerned.’ No, where I'm going is America.” Owen, 204. 181 aristocrats. They adapted shooting for business needs, and took up golf at the same time to mould it into the classic businessman’s sport.

I have also suggested that the moral argument against abandoning the cities was far from clear-cut. Leaving city government, for example, could be a case of abandoning civic leadership or could be democratically ceding control to the working class who were, after all, the majority of the population. Charles Reilly was a professor of architecture at the University of Liverpool from 1904 to 1933.406 At the end of the 1930s he described how the south of Liverpool appeared to him when he arrived. “There were great areas like Mossley Hill and Aigburth where there were hardly any small houses and where one fine estate joined another. Now they have nearly all been cut up for building.”407 In the 2010s they remain cut up or demolished, and provide rather sad evidence for how money has left the city. But, as Reilly pointed out in 1938, this disappearance “it must be remembered, is contemporary with the great attack on the slums.

Thirty years ago they existed almost side by side as if dependent for their existence one on the other, as no doubt in a sense they were.” The suburbanization of wealthy people from Glasgow and Liverpool was a sometimes painful process with many negative effects. But the mid-

Victorian heyday, while glamourous, was dependent on the poverty of the slums, far worse than any poverty today.

406 Simon Pepper, Peter Richmond, ‘Reilly, Sir Charles Herbert (1874–1948)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 407 Charles Reilly, Scaffolding in the Sky (1938), quoted in J. Sharples, Merchant Palaces: Liverpool and Wirral Mansions Photographed by Bedford Lemere and Co (Bluecoat Press, 2007). 182

Chapter Four War

This dissertation covers the period from 1870 to 1930, but up to this point it has skirted around the years 1914 to 1918. This has been an effect of the historiography. The scholarships I have engaged with — on business, on family, on gentrification, on cities — most commonly treat the war as an anomaly. The classic periodization of the long nineteenth century takes 1914 as its end point; the twentieth-century literature often does not begin until the interwar. In this chapter,

I argue that the First World War had transformative effects for businessmen’s relationship with the government bureaucracy and military aristocracy. The orthodoxies of free trade were challenged by bureaucrats supported by public opinion, and businessmen were forced to bend to the new conditions.

The rich businessmen of Glasgow and Liverpool took part in the war to a far greater degree than they had ever engaged with the military before. They volunteered and were conscripted, and a large number of the younger men died in this war. Suddenly they were forced up against a military culture that was almost totally alien to the business world. The army was a bastion of aristocratic power — there was no institution that was so dominated by the aristocracy, apart from the . David Cannadine has called the aristocracy ‘the fighting class…Honour and glory, courage and chivalry, gallantry and loyalty, leadership and horsemanship were quintessential patrician attributes, inculcated in the country house and learned on the hunting field.’408 Other historians have concurred that the Victorian army

408 David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 264. 183 hierarchy was substantially drawn from the landed aristocracy.409 recruitment was a closed circle: the army was a good option among the very few available for aristocratic younger sons, it allowed a way of life that suited the aristocracy, it tended to be an inherited career, it matched the ethos of the public schools, and needed social skills and financial lubrication that only the aristocracy provided.410 The First World War, for the first time, forced the worlds of army and business together as new allies meant to win the war together.

The war was the first time that the wealthy middle-class men of Glasgow and Liverpool were forced together with the military, but it was not the first time they had come together. The army was in general hostile to outside interference, but from the mid-nineteenth century rich men from provincial cities had been trying to reshape the army in their own image: rational, economic, and technical. They hoped to confront the army’s bad elements and reform it. It was unusual for sons of businessmen to become professional soldiers, but some did. More often they took part in the army as Volunteers. Traditions of urban self-defence and local independence made voluntary soldiers organized on a civic basis an attractive idea to many groups of people across the first two thirds of the nineteenth century, but it was not until the invasion panic of

1858-9 that urban volunteerism was securely established.411 Over the next five decades

Volunteers, including the wealthy men of Glasgow and Liverpool, would slowly start reform the army to their tastes, although the resistance was strong.

409 E.M. Spiers, The Late Victorian Army, 1868-1902 (Manchester University Press, 1992), 94. C. B. Otley, "The Social Origins of Officers," The Sociological Review 18, no. 2 (1970). provides the original data from which subsequent historians have drawn this conclusion. 410 Spiers, 90-117. 411 Ian F. W. Beckett, "The Amateur Military Tradition, 1558-1945," (1991). 184

But this slow reform of the army suddenly took on a life-and-death edge in 1914. Now everything wrong with the army became a pressing concern because it was leading to deaths, including those of local businessmen, and threatened to destroy the British Empire. The businessmen who fought during this war reacted differently from the classical man in the trenches. They talked about war as a horror of inefficiency rather than of death. Their reactions to the problems of the war focused on the type of problems that might be identified in a business, rather than the carnage depicted most famously by war poets.

In this chapter I trace the history of Volunteerism, showing the reforms of the army developed by the wealthy of the middle class between 1859 and 1914. I show how the Boer War previewed some of the critiques that would re-emerge in the First World War. Then I examine those businessmen who fought in the First World War, showing how their experiences and descriptions developed a critique of army inefficiency. I explore this critique as it developed among men fighting in France, and also in the anti-conscription politics of Richard Holt. But this was a confrontation that the businessmen did not win. The army certainly did change during the war to become less aristocratic and inefficient, but control shifted into the hands of bureaucrats rather than businessmen. The war years then were a pivot point where the rich businessmen of

Glasgow and Liverpool came to redefine their opposition. Victorian businessmen had never had to deal with such interventions but the war licensed all kinds of intrusions. They had always understood aristocrats as their opponents, defining themselves in contrast to aristocratic behaviour. The experience of the war and interwar began a new story about business, that it was in fact government bureaucrats who were the most unbusinesslike and a primary opponent. 185

Volunteer Soldiers

A Volunteer army was attractive to many Victorians because they contrasted a standing army — which might be a source of repression — with a Volunteer army based on citizens defending their own cities supported British freedoms and allowed commercial expansion. In both Liverpool and Glasgow there were wealthy men passionate about local military volunteerism. The military hierarchy tended to see these people as insufferable amateurs.

Much of the government and the army’s hierarchy were opposed to the idea of volunteer forces412. The army was still overwhelmingly run along a rural and aristocratic vision of army based on feudalism and chivalry, which was going to rub uncomfortably against the urban middle classes flocking to join in this heyday of volunteerism.413 Glasgow and Liverpool businessmen therefore made themselves comfortable in the army by forming their own groups within it. Despite this separation between their new units and the bulk of the army, they hoped to reform, even domesticate, it by imparting business values and market rationality.

In 1859 the shipowner James Walter and merchant George Melly set up the Fourth Brigade

Lancashire Artillery Volunteers.414 George Melly was in charge of finances, and recounted his role partly as a story of financial savvy.415 Despite his own substantial investment of wealth and power into the Fourth Lancashire Artillery Volunteers, he wrote about it as a collective endeavour of Liverpool’s middle class. “The Fourth Brigade is not supported by the patriotism of a wealthy merchant prince, but by the subscriptions of its own rank and file. It was not raised in

412 Ibid. 413 Cannadine, 264-80. 414 Elizabeth J. Stewart, ‘Melly, George (1830–1894)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, May 2012 415 George Melly, Recollections of Sixty Years, 1833-1893 (1893), 103. 186 the vast works of some great employer of labour, or organised as a brilliant appendage to a grand commercial undertaking; but it appeals to the individual sympathies of the important class from which it sprung, and by whom it is daily recruited.”416 This vision of collective effort rather than personal achievement was purposefully modest, but also fitted exactly with the British distrust of standing armies. A merchant prince, large employer, or commercial undertaking with an army was as suspicious as the British government with a permanent army. Instead the volunteer army belonged to its volunteers, to a class, to the city, or to the British people. Melly’s pamphlets on the volunteers tied together commercial life and armed masculinity: the nation of shopkeepers warns Napoleon “These are the Boys who keep the shop.” This sketch of the Liverpool volunteer shop-keeper shows him in the open air with the sea in the background. He is ready to defend

Britain’s coastline, in a plain uniform with a rammer for cannon. The weapon itself is not even shown. But after the Charge of the Light Brigade, especially in Tennyson’s evocative poetry, no- one could mistake how this boy shopkeeper’s weapon would fare against the nobleman on horseback.

416 Ibid., pp128-9 187

Figure 10 Page from George Melly, “A Week at the North Fort by a Gunner of the Fourth Brigade Lancashire Artillery Volunteers” in Stray Leaves vol 1. (1861?)417

These Volunteers became a focus of civic pride, appearing at public events in the life of the city and then in the newspaper accounts of those civic rituals. In these idealized representations of the volunteer army, business culture modified the army and improved its

417 LRO H825 MEL 188 status. Serving by virtue of their patriotism and skills rather than their feudal duties or impressment, the shop boys injected rationality and eliminated corruption.

The ideal was that the “moral strength of the country” would be improved “when you break down the barrier between the standing Army and the general population, by giving young men an opportunity of serving in the Army, and then, after having taught them habits of discipline and the practice of a trade, allowing them to return to the society from which they came, but ready to become soldiers again when they are wanted.”418 This argument was made in

Parliament by a man who was a great supporter of the volunteer movement but also in a position to reorder the bulk of the army. He was the son of a Liverpool merchant, Edward Cardwell, who as a Government minister brought in rationalization to the bulk of the army. Cardwell was a lifelong politician, but his background was in the Liverpool business elite, and he was also married into the mercantile Parkes family which had branches in both Liverpool and Glasgow.

By the time Cardwell became secretary of state for war in 1868, previous reforms had been tried and abandoned, but now rationality and meritocracy would finally come to the army. Against much opposition, he ended in 1871 the system of purchase whereby officers’ commissions had been bought and sold.419 His speeches on the subject were full of facts and figures in support of what his opponents called “a sop to democracy”.420 He showed how dominant the aristocracy was within the army, for he disingenuously (or cannily) claimed that abolishing purchase would make little difference to their hold. “[I]f we pass this Bill into a law, its effect will be to attract to

418 House of Commons Debate, “Second Reading. Adjourned Debate. [Fourth Night.]” 16 March 1871 vol 205 cc57- 151 419 Brian Bond, ‘Cardwell, Edward, first Viscount Cardwell (1813–1886)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 420 House of Commons Debate, “Second Reading. Adjourned Debate. [Fourth Night.]” 16 March 1871 vol 205 cc57- 151 189 the Army the aristocracy of merit and professional talent, which is after all the true aristocracy. It is a libel upon the old aristocracy of this country to say that they are ever behindhand in any race which is run in an open arena, and in which ability and industry are the only qualities which can insure success”.421 These multiple definitions of aristocracy obfuscated his meaning: ‘of merit’

‘of professional talent’ ‘old’ or ‘true’. These various adjectives could appeal to different audiences, and show how difficult it was to attack aristocratic privilege in the army.

Yet the volunteers and reformers were a small minority within the army, and not well- liked by much of the hierarchy.422 From the other side it seemed that aristocratic patriotism and tradition were being co-opted by jumped-up businessmen who would make poor military leaders.

How would these volunteers actually fare under the realities of war?

Boer War

The establishment of Volunteers and the both suggested that the army was turning in the direction of the type of army idealised by businessmen. But the change was minor in relation to the demand for change, and over time the reformers were developing a complete critique of the army. During the Boer War in particular, Liverpool and Glasgow men previewed some of the arguments they would offer in the First World War. In December 1900 a letter appeared in the London newspaper The Morning Leader which cast an extremely unflatteringly light on the army’s leadership in the South African war. It was anonymously published as from the son of “One of the most prominent Liberals in the North of England, a

421 Ibid 422 Beckett. 190 gentleman of the highest repute”.423 The anonymity is removed by its appearance in Robert

Durning Holt’s family cuttings book and his label “Letter from Phil.”424 Robert was indeed a prominent Liberal in Liverpool, as well as a major cotton merchant. His son Philip (1876-1958) was in the Orange State as a Lieutenant in the Gloucestershire Yeomanry.425 He had joined up in

January 1900, possibly at the urging of his maternal first cousin Bill Playne, who was a Captain in the corps that Philip was accepted into (William Heyworth Playne, 1870-1935).426 Philip’s father was unhappy and anti-war, but not prepared to oppose his son.427 Robert wrote that “it seems to me a wild + very foolish proceeding on his part + will probably wreck his career in the law. but he is in that frame of mind that I feel any words from me will be wasted + probably only

423 LRO 920 DUR 25 Holt cuttings, 121. Cutting “Are These Things So? Revelations From A Yeomanry Camp. Alleged Colonial Mutiny.” Morning Leader Friday 14 December, 1900 424 Unfortunately the original letter does not survive, so it is unclear whether Philip intended his father to publish it or not. The Morning Leader does say that “the letter…was written without any idea of publication”. It may be a letter that Robert describes receiving on October 13th: “Received a long + interesting letter from Phil dated 18 Sept. Very glad to have news from the boy as it is a month since we had news and the district in which he is, is very disturbed. His account of affairs + management would be amusing if the results of inefficiency were not so serious to the lives of our men and so disastrous to the welfare prosperity + happiness of our own Country as well as to S Africa.” LRO 920 DUR 1/7 Robert Holt diary (1894-1901) 425 LRO 920 DUR 25 Holt cuttings, 119. 426 LRO 920 DUR 1/7 Robert Holt diary (1894-1901) writes on 7 January 1900 that Philip “with his cousin Bill Playne is accepted for a yeomanry corps in which Bill holds office as Captain”. He left England on 28 February 1900 and returned 1 May 1901. Bill became a Major by the war’s end (Hart's Annual Army List, 1908 Ancestry.com). The maternal side of Philip’s family was split over the Boer War: his aunts Mary Playne and Kate Courtney ended up on entirely different sides. “The Playnes strongly supported the British war effort and threw themselves into recruitment...On the other hand, the Courtneys were ardent pacifists, attacking the war itself and England’s part in it.” Barbara Caine, Destined to Be Wives: The Sisters of Beatrice Webb (Clarendon Press, 1986), 178. 427 LRO 920 DUR 1/7 Robert Holt diary (1894-1901) he wrote on 1 October 1899 “politically the War clouds are gathering fast around us.”… “that we can “walk over” the Boers hardly admits of doubt _ but then what remains? probably a lasting racial hatred”. Robert’s attention might also have been distracted by his younger son Ted (1878- 1955) who emigrated to New Zealand around the same time to become a sheep farmer. Ted gave up his volunteer position just before war was declared — Robert wrote on 8 October 1899 “Ted tells me that he has resigned his position with the 4th LAV. The Transvaal muddle gets worse day by day -” The juxtaposition of these two facts points to a causal relationship. Robert thought the New Zealand plan was “Wild” but Ted pushed through his plan and emigrated on 13 November, leaving a job at Smith, Edwards & Co, the largest cotton broking firm in Liverpool. His “office companions...showed their friendly feeling by presenting him with a Revolver.” (22 October 1899). Ted lived in New Zealand for the rest of his life. Of his five sons, all seem to have lived most of their lives in New Zealand: Edward Durning (1913-1977), David Lawrence (1918-1969), Christopher Damer (1921-2010) died there (Peter Allen (1914-1996) died in England and Philip de Vere (1916-1941) was killed in action in Libya). 191 tend to make him more determined”.428 Philip’s military service ran against the interests of his career and the advice of his father, but the opposition was not enough to dissuade him.

Philip’s letter gave a comprehensive critique of the army’s behaviour in South Africa. He complained that the army was betraying the terms of his volunteer service by keeping the

Volunteers in South Africa as a police force. If they could not leave Africa before the New Year

“a great many of [the volunteers] will never recover from the loss” of their jobs. The authorities had failed to organise a police force for the Orange State because they offered too little, and

Philip warned “Their only chance is to get recruits at home who don't know what they are signing to.”

Philip portrayed an army fallen into disarray and a corrupt hierarchy. He described how

Colonial (meaning South African, although his terminology managed to confuse at least one reader) troops had rebelled against the same pressures that the 4th LAV were under. Like the

British Volunteers, they had farms and jobs to return to and yet the authorities kept them in

Africa “longer than the term for which they had signed”. They first refused to fight, and then turned their weapons on the authorities. While this “Alleged Colonial Mutiny” (as The Morning

Leader termed it) was something Philip had heard talk of rather than witnessed, he portrayed it in an entirely sympathetic light. “This is a fair sample of the treatment a Volunteer may expect to receive from our gallant commanders, and of the only way they can get their bare legal rights.”

The brunt of Philip’s moral outrage was against the lack of “fair play” in the camp, rather than the illness and poor conditions. Fair play was missing in the betrayal of the legal right that

428 LRO 920 DUR 1/7 Robert Holt diary (1894-1901) 31 December 1899 The idea of the army as “wild” is identical to Robert’s opinion on Ted emigrating to be a New Zealand sheep farmer. 192 the Volunteers had to be sent home, and consequent job loss.429 He constantly referred to “the authorities” and their mistakes, and even personally blamed Kitchener. As a Lieutenant he did not consider himself part of “the authorities” and also mentions a captain who was unable to get his men sent home. It was the top brass who had betrayed the men — those aristocrats who were holding on to control of the army.

Outrage against the South African war was not unusual in 1900-1. Many of those who attended the Liverpool Reform Club Congratulatory Dinner to welcome Philip (along with two other Liverpool men) back from active service would have agreed that the war had been politically shameful. The Rev Watson (a Liverpool Presbyterian minister, also known as the author Ian Maclaren) praised the “grit” and gallantry of the “young men”.430 Unlike Philip, he blamed the government ‘authorities’ rather than the military ones. Watson reiterated the dream: that England could keep a small army and be protected by the natural defences of the sea from vast continental armies. He went further, claiming that he could support a law compelling all young men “to pass through a course of drill”. The South African experience had shaken the insistence that British military power should be totally voluntary. But Watson’s vision was still akin to a civic defence force rather than a conscript army. With an army “small and yet sufficient for the defence of their dependencies,” matched with the drilled young men, there would be “a sufficient Army, not for offence, but for defence, [which] would have incalculable physical and

429 It may possibly be connected that Fairplay was the title of a shipping magazine that circulated among the wealthy of Liverpool. 430 Liverpool Daily Post, Thursday 23 May 1901 193 moral advantages.”431 Despite the move to a small amount of conscription (although merely to a drill course rather than actual military service), Watson’s dream was for a defensive-only army.

At the Liverpool Reform Club evening, Philip was hardly recognizable from his earlier complaining letter. In his response to Watson’s toast he said nothing about the betrayals he felt from the army hierarchy. Instead he dwelt on his respect for those below him on the ladder, those

‘Tommies’ with whom he was very glad to have been associated “on equal terms.” How he could have been their equals when he was a Lieutenant he left unclear, but he did not repeat his criticisms. The dinner reinforced the in-group solidarity of Liverpool’s Liberal elite as they welcomed back these three men. They stressed Liverpool’s patriotism and public service, as well as their personal status and dynastic ambitions. “These three names were the names of families all well-known in Liverpool, and…the names of Holt, Brunner, and Watson had been covered with new dignity and eclat by the heroism of the younger members of their family”.432

The division between the civic Volunteer model and the realities of poor leadership and unpopular government policies seem to have widened during this moment of crisis in South

Africa. Yet critics of the war gave no coherent statement about who was to blame: was it the government or army hierarchy? Was the crime that of illegal war or illegally keeping Volunteers in Africa? The critique of the army by wealthy men of Glasgow and Liverpool would only be fully elaborated in the next war.

431 Ibid 432 Philip seems to have picked up malaria in South Africa, and he also spent time in hospital while there. In August 1901 his father recorded that “Phil has been seedy with an attack of Malarial fever but it is passing away — we had to get a nurse to administer to him as he was very far from civil to those of the household who tried to look after him while confined to bed.” LRO 920 DUR 1/7 Robert Holt diary (1894-1901) 194

Philip’s letter made very little impact on its publication until it caught the eye of the fiercely anti-war MP Bryn Roberts. In the last meeting of the Commons in 1900 he used the letter in a speech about the South African situation.433 He used the letter to attack the government and entirely subscribed to Philip’s account. Unfortunately he mistook the ‘Colonial’ troops for

Australians, and he was forced to apologize for his mistake amidst official telegrams back and forth from South Africa, many editorials attacking Roberts for trusting and misreading an anonymous letter, and fierce newspaper support for Australian troops. The controversy was short-lived and put the anti-war contingent on the defensive.

The First World War

The Boer War was a shock to the imperial system, but in the end the conflict was far away and limited in scale. The next war was much larger and for the first time involved conscription, which was so alien to the aims of the Volunteer movement. While the army in many ways modernized, it did not shift into the hands of the businessmen. Instead they found themselves losing ground to the bureaucrats, whom they came to identify as a newly empowered and dangerous threat.

James Lithgow and his brother Henry were shipbuilders in Glasgow, part of the firm founded by their father. Perhaps their position at the forefront of military technology, well aware of the arms race that was going on between Germany and Britain, made them unusually prescient. They realized that a European war was coming and that the company could not be left unheaded during such a critical period. Wartime was boomtime for makers of military

433 House of Commons Debate, “Consolidated Fund (Appropriation) Bill.”15 December 1900 vol 88 cc879-910 195 technology such as ships. This left a dilemma: the family needed to have representatives in

Glasgow to run the firm during this critical period, but they also needed to show patriotism in the event of a European war. Unlike the Holts, with two generations with multiple sons, there were only two Lithgow brothers: James (born 1883) and Henry (born 1886). Both were unmarried and their father had died in 1908.

What they decided was to split the duties by James joining the army and Henry remaining as business chief.434 James joined the Volunteers in 1902 as a teenager, perhaps encouraged by

Boer war jingoism.435 It is not hard to imagine a teenager joining the local Volunteers at the end of a war, but it is harder to explain why he would have remained working his way up the ranks of the Volunteers for the next dozen years. His father’s extraordinary career had been cut off young, leaving James and Henry at the helm aged only 25 and 21. They had only become full partners in

November 1907, after their father’s stomach cancer had become apparent.436 At such a time, volunteering would have taken up valuable hours, and with the arms race with Germany intensifying (in a one could hardly remain unaware of such developments) the army might have seemed less like a lark and more potentially dangerous. Yet from 1908 to 1914 James stuck in the army, perhaps because he enjoyed it, perhaps because of nationalism, but also because of a conscious decision to split business and army duties in a wartime situation. The

Lithgow brothers foresaw the war and planned to meet it with a solution that was pragmatic but

434 J. M. Reid, James Lithgow, Master of Work (London: Hutchinson, 1964), 45, 58. 435 Ibid., 46. 436 Anthony Slaven, ‘Lithgow family (per. c.1870–1952)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 196 also somewhat feudal — each family to offer a tribute to the army — for the modern family business.

By the outbreak of war in 1914 James was 31, a captain, and used to commanding local defence forces, yet war was an enormous blow to his business career. Before the war James and

Henry had become an effective team that balanced their personalities and used their notable closeness to further the influence and turnover of the company. In wartime this team was split up with James in France on active service, only able to reach his brother through letters. Their letters to each other are often impenetrable to an outsider, full of acronyms, in-references, and shorthand. James’ nickname for Henry was ‘Master’, probably due to Henry’s role as younger sibling, the Master Lithgow to James’ Mr Lithgow.437

As James and Henry spent most of their lives working side by side and living close to each other, the largest part of their correspondence is from the war years. Henry may have been the head of the business during these years, but he consulted closely with James. Until the summer of 1915 James had been based in Greenock on defence duties, and did not leave for

France until early 1916.438 When he did leave, he wrote forlornly to his brother: “I shall be glad to have about one letter a week from you, Muirhead or W.B. letting me know how you are getting on. I think it will be well for me to keep up an interest in things as there may be a tendency to brood too much on what is going on over there which may get on your nerves. Quite a number have crocked up that way.”439 James was clearly aware of the dangers of psychological stress, and when his went semi-AWOL due to shell shock and the loss of his brother,

437 Reid, 49. 438 Ibid., 47-8. 439 GUA DC35/4 Letters from James Lithgow to Henry Lithgow 26 Feb 1916 (Avonmouth) 197

James covered it up by writing irregular notices of leave.440 James’ letters back to Glasgow were a lifeline back to normality, while he was stuck in the Battle of the Somme as it dragged on into late 1916. He discussed technical details for ships, carefully considering the needs of the business with the likelihood of more orders coming in due to the war.441 He also kept reassuringly upbeat, writing even in April 1917 “I hear there are rumours going about of casualties here — all balls.”442

Once James Lithgow got to France he was thrust back into a detailed technical world, only this time with guns instead of ships. He was put in charge of the new howitzers, landing in the world of big guns which would come to characterize the war. He was considered suitable because he had commanded guns in Greenock, but also because he was used to working with shipbuilding machinery. He not only dealt with the maintenance and transport of big guns, a huge operation in its own right, but also organized and interpreted aerial photography. James wrote: “It is a slow and laborious job getting a start here one has to make great protective preparations. The aeroplanes are very annoying and there is always the uncertainty of how much

440 GUA DC 35/32 contains a newspaper cutting describing how brothers Thomas and Angus Rae “were lying side by side in a dug-out, resting, when shell struck it. Thomas was killed but his brother escaped unhurt”. This happened on 16 September 1917. When Angus Rae filled in his application for membership to the Clyde Royal Garrison Artillery Regimental Association he described under “If Wounded or Gassed” that he had “Shell Shock Sept, 16/1917” (application dated 14 November 1919 and contained inside this bundle of misc Lithgow papers). It’s not exactly clear what Rae did afterwards, but my reading of the evidence is that Rae was given immediate leave, which he overstayed because of his shellshock. Lithgow was in London in September 1917 but communicated with Rae’s captain to help accelerate an extension of leave, and then when official channels failed he wrote “I propose to take upon myself the responsibility of extending your leave until some definite word is received.” (5 November 1917) He also sent a telegram “Some hope of extension dont return until hear from me again” and told Rae by letter to “produce to anyone who questions you.” (6 November 1917) Rae had a long friendship with Lithgow after the war and Rae seems to have organized Lithgow’s war letters for Lady Lithgow after his death. 441 GUA DC35/4 James Lithgow to Henry 13 October 1916 442 GUA DC35/4 29 April 1917. Soon after arriving in France he was normalizing the sounds of the war in letters to his brother: “At present 5 guns might be having a good two-gun shoot at Cockburn’s, with say 3 pneumatic riveters chipping in every now and again, and a squad dumping a shoe plate in Denny’s. Nothing very alarming and personally it has not cost me 5 min. sleep.” Reid, 50. 198 they can see.”443 It is impossible to tell from today how successful these new aerial bombardment tactics were in James’ specific case, but numerous aerial photos contained in his personal archives show the effects of his bombardments circled in red across the trenches: these certainly appear effective. His war diaries also show the use of chemical weapons in the guns, along with the special preparations needed to handle poisons444. He records the markings of the shells along with some notes:

“SK lacrimatory [sic]

PS half + half violent tear but quick partly lethal

CBR very valuable — lethel [sic] die next day even with small dose (like German)

Remainder445 large dose kills at once small dose no effect— observation only”

The spelling errors and the repetition of words found in official literature suggest that perhaps this was jotted down from a handbook or instructor. The appearance of both the obfuscatory official term ‘lacrymatory’ for the SK (South Kensington, or ethyl iodoacetate),446 and the plain and descriptive term ‘tear’ for the PS (Port Sunlight, or chloropicrin),447 shows that the effort to conceal the dubious ethics of chemical weapons was partially but not totally successful. The aside “(like German)” may be meant to refer to German use of poison gas,

443 GUA DC35/4 Letters from James Lithgow to Henry Lithgow 12 March 1916 444 GUA DC 35/72 Notebook written by James Lithgow 445 The remainder include shells VN, JL, and JBR. 446 C.H. Foulkes, "Gas!": The Story of the Special Brigade (W. Blackwood & Sons, Limited, 1934), 23. It also contained 25% ethyl alcohol A. Palazzo, Seeking Victory on the Western Front: The British Army and Chemical Warfare in World War I (University of Nebraska Press, 2002), xiii. 447 Foulkes, 193. The name Port Sunlight derived from the fact that it was created by Lever Brothers at Port Sunlight, just outside Liverpool. 199 hinting at the justification for British chemical weapons that the Germans had used it first.448 If he had an ethical dilemma over the use of poison gas, nothing in his diaries or letters suggests it.

He was awarded the Military Cross and promoted to for his work.

But the yards back in Glasgow were busier than ever with war work, and as the Battle of the Somme wound down in late 1916 James began to feel superfluous.449 His work had caught on with a larger group of officers, and new men could do what he did: “I am therefore forced to the conclusion that I would be more useful helping you in our own business than messing about out here.”450 And so he turned to his brother in order to get himself back from France. “Of course it is not just a question of saying “Come home”. I am afraid it may give you a lot of trouble to convince the various Departments or compartments…It will probably mean personal visits to many Johnnys in London. I hope you survive.”451 This idea that survival was less likely among the Whitehall mandarins than on the Somme is typical of the kind of understatement that businessmen of Glasgow and Liverpool were prone to. This process of trying to return filled him with “contempt for the flunking blow-hards who get off their own business to try to run other people’s” because he was so sure of the rightness of his cause. He compared himself in his two roles as a shipbuilder — vital to the war effort — and gunner, wishing that government knew

“the relative value of a practical trained cargo shipbuilder...and a siege gunner of 18 months, or

448 British use of chemical weapons is well covered in D. Richter, Chemical Soldiers: British Gas Warfare in World War I (University Press of Kansas, 1992). Palazzo. and M. Girard, A Strange and Formidable Weapon: British Responses to World War I Poison Gas (University of Nebraska Press, 2008). 449 Reid, 55. 450 Ibid. 5 Nov 1916 451 Ibid 200 really only 9 months, standing.”452 This was a simple inefficiency that he was frustratingly unable to correct.

Like Philip, James was contemptuous of army bureaucracy, and he was right that it took a long time to organize a return. Only in May 1917 did he finally leave France, yet unlike the other cases in this chapter, he was healthy when he left the trenches, rather than a casualty sent home injured. So instead of being able to return to Glasgow and his shipyards there, he was sent to a civil service job as Director of Merchant Shipbuilding at the Admiralty. Here he would formulate standard ship designs and building plans for shipbuilders to follow.453

Government management of British shipbuilding was more unfulfilling for James than being on the front line, because it was bureaucratic rather than technical. He had already complained in his letters to his brother from France about all the mistakes the government was making in regard to shipping. “It is a bit sickening to think what a bloody guddle the powers- that-be are making, and won’t let people alone who know the business and would be quite glad to get on with it.”454 In London he found it all the more horrifying, and revelled in the irony of having to officially rebuke his brother for breaking department rules, as civil servant to shipbuilder.455

It is unclear how common James’ story of getting out of the army was. Certainly many of his peers from wealthy Glasgow and Liverpool families did die in the war, although these

452 Reid, 59. 5 Nov 1916 453 Lewis Johnman and Hugh Murphy, Scott Lithgow: Déjà Vu All over Again! The Rise and Fall of a Shipbuilding Company (International Maritime Economic History Association, 2005). 454 Reid, 63. He is quoting from a letter dated 4 April 1917. Guddle may be a use of the Scottish verb ‘to guddle’: “To catch (fish) with the hands, by groping under the stones or banks of a stream.” Oxford English Dictionary. James’ use of it as a noun is not recorded by the OED but it may be conveying both muddle and to guddle, an inefficient and messy method of fishing. Possibly it also suggests ‘goddamn muddle’! 455 Ibid., 69. 201 casualties tended to be younger men. Perhaps James was merely unusually lucky, for it seems that his route out was in the fact that Sir Eric Campbell Geddes, newly appointed Controller of the Navy, wanted him in London.

Bureaucracy

Bureaucracy was the bane of existence for technical businessmen. While running a major business of course required some bureaucratic knowledge, they valorised technical endeavour above bookkeeping. Another Glasgow man, like Lithgow, who became involved in bringing technical expertise to the army, but running up against bureaucracy, was Frederick Maurice

Crum. Born in 1872 and from a Glasgow calico-manufacturing family, he had built an army career through the 1890s and fought in South Africa, ending as a Major.456 He therefore represents a rare case of a man who bridged the business/military divide throughout his professional military career, rather than as a volunteer. After South Africa he seems to have semi-retired, but at the outbreak of war he came back to serve. He spent time in the trenches of the First World War but old injuries hampered him. He came back to Britain and went into training, drawing on his experience of Scouting before the war. His expertise was in sniping, so he travelled the country to give specialized instructional lectures to a variety of soldiers-in- training.

456 His trajectory was: 24 May 1893 2nd Lieutenant; 1 Jan 1896 Lieutenant; 10 Jan 1901 Captain; 22 Aug 1902 Major. From Hart's Annual Army List 1908. London, England: John Murray, 1908, Ancestry.com. He is also described as a Major in British Army WWI Medal Rolls Index Cards, 1914-1920 Ancestry.com 202

Around 1917 Crum hit on the idea of using the new technology of film to give sniper training.457 He was passionate about the possibilities of film, and paid himself for films to be made that he could use in his lectures. But despite his long army career and relatively high rank, he was unable to get the War Office interested in his innovation. “If it was a business concern – I shd. be being hustled – as it is I am – as far as my reduced energy + humble position permit – hustling them!”458 Some time in his old age he went through his letters and marked particularly important passages in a red pen. This sentence merited the red pen: the unbusinesslike nature of the army still clearly rankled despite many years’ distance.

Until April 1918 he had had local successes in using cinema, but around this point his ambitions became greater. The crisis on the Western Front, as the Ludendorff Offensive brought large German gains, coincided with a period of unemployment, and he turned to the War Office to arrange a tour of cadet battalions.459 This was arranged through personal favours: Crum’s friend Major Barber arranged him to Colonel Hewlett, who “said he had so often heard of

“Crum’s methods” + was v glad to meet me. (W.O. diplomacy!)”. After this point Crum began to expand his methods into a reproducible system that could be implemented throughout the army, and turn ‘War Office diplomacy’ into official War Office policy.

Crum’s system was to create training films, put into practice in a 3-stage system. He proposed a simple alliance between local businesses and the army. He argued that the local

British cinema owners would often make “the most liberal arrangements” for training troops,

457 In his “Report by Major Crum on Cinema Lectures and Tour in Scottish Command” of July 15th to August 2nd 1918 (Glasgow Mitchell Library TD 1073/10/16) he reports that he has used cinema for over a year, both in France and at Home. 458 GML TD 1073/10/16 Letters from Frederick Maurice Crum to his father and sister. 7 July 1918 459 GML TD 1073/10/16 FM Crum to William Crum, 5 April 1918 203 motivated by patriotism and the chance to advertise their premises to soldiers.460 Instead the army often tried to make all the arrangements themselves, and ended up spoiling the usefulness of the cinema training. The second critical part of the training was to break down the strict hierarchies and humanize the students.

For Crum his endeavours were of critical personal importance. “What a mighty effort

[our glorious men] are making, what ghastly slaughter + what an Armageddon. I give up thinking – It is too big – too awful – so I just think harder of my small part”461 Some consolation came from religious faith: during the German push of early 1918 he wrote to his sister he wrote

“I believe that I have done more good by real prayer – than by active soldiering…even in danger + noise – it has been given to me to know something of real prayer.”462 He found this work exhausting and showed the same awareness of psychological stress as James Lithgow did. After a bombing demonstration he wrote to his father that despite its interest, he was very tired and slept badly: “the result was a bad night + ‘nervy’ feeling ”.463 Nervy, often used inside quotation marks as ‘nervy’, was a word used by psychologists studying shell shock such as Charles Myers or William Turner.464

460 “Report by Major Crum on Cinema Lectures and Tour in Scottish Command” July 15th to August 2nd 1918 (GML TD 1073/10/16). 461 GML TD 1073/10/16 FM Crum to William Crum, 29 April 1918. 462 GML TD 1073/10/16 FM Crum to Edie Crum, 15 February 1918. ‘Have done’ was added above the line. 463 GML TD 1073/10/16 FM Crum to William Crum, 26 January 1918, from Army & Navy Club, Pall Mall, S.W. With his red pen he later added “Rest still badly needed” 464 William Aldren Turner, "Remarks on Cases of Nervous and Mental Shock: Observed in the Base Hospitals in France," British Medical Journal 1, no. 2837 (1915): 835. Through the Google Ngram viewer, the word nervy also shows a substantial peak in 1918, and another in the 1930s, before falling out of favour. 204

None of his letters back from the trenches survive, but in 1915 his father gave a letter he had received from Frederick Maurice to his friend Professor George Ramsay.465 The letter concerned action at Hooge, near Ypres. Ramsay’s response praised the “splendid and terrible letter” as the best account he had ever read of the war, which allowed Ramsay to “understand the greatness + the true heroism, of war [as he] never understood it before”. He mentioned that Crum had enlightened him as to “the work, the feeling, + the thinking that has to be done by the officer…How clear it is what need there is for brains in our officer!” This vision of the active- duty officer described him as hard-working, emotionally attuned, and also brainy.

Crum also held some darker thoughts about the government hierarchy. In February 1918 when he was promoting his scheme in Sheerness he wrote that his “successful lecture to 500 of the older men on 18th. at local cinema hall” ended with him “stirring them up to fight – fight. fight! + we may need it badly before we have done – especially if our scheming elements at the top do not change their ways.”466 At this moment of the Black Book, the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and the German push, dark thoughts about government schemes were common. It was not the army leadership he blamed (“we have Leaders the whole army trusts”), but those ‘at the top’ presumably in government.467 The year after the war he specifically mentioned “I dislike

Committees + Lawyers”.468

Crum’s failure to bring modern technology to sniper training seems surprising given that this was in many ways a war of technology. His frustration was not with the technological limits

465 GML TD 1073/10/16 1 September 1915 Professor George Ramsay to William Crum. George Gilbert Ramsay was University of Glasgow Professor of Humanity 1863-1906, and returned after the war as Dean of Faculties, 1919-1921. GML, 920.04BAI 466 GML TD 1073/10/16 FM Crum to Edie Crum 19/21 Feb 1918 In the red pen he added “cryptic?” to this last part. 467 GML TD 1073/10/16 FM Crum to Edie Crum 16 April 4 1918. 468 GML TD 1073/10/16 FM Crum to Edie Crum 19 October 1919. 205 but the bureaucratic ones: the letter from the War Office finally confirming “we shall be getting your Films out to Cadet Battalions very shortly” remains in his archive, dated 1st November

1918.469 The irony that his breakthrough occurred only ten days before the end of war must have made him throw up his hands in frustration, for he never again pursued the project of cinema training.

Unbusinesslike War

Philip Durning Holt, the unhappy Boer war soldier, was another man frustrated with the army. At the end of 1915 Philip was back in the army and facing enemies much closer to home.

He was now in his late thirties,470 and married with two children. All his old complaints were back in force as he prepared for and then fought in the trenches of the Western Front. He was extremely unhappy, and poured out his grievances in his letters to his brother Richard, begging that Richard help him “out of the Army”.471 Not only was Philip more personally unwilling to fight, but the war in France was on a different scale from that in South Africa. Britain was on the brink of conscription, and while Philip had predicted while in training at Salisbury on November

4th 1915 that “we have seen the worst of the war now as far as fighting in France is concerned,” he was far wrong. Soon after his arrival in France, possibly once he realised that the war was not nearly over, he began, like James Lithgow, to campaign to his brother to get out of the army.

His business career between 1901 and 1914 had given him an even greater distaste for the army. He told Richard the army “is no place for a business man, the waste of time + money is

469 GML TD 1073/10/16 1 Nov 1918 to F M Crum. 470 He turned 39 on November 26th 1915. 471 LRO 920 DUR 14/7 Letters from Philip Holt to Richard Holt. 4 November 1915. 206 appalling”.472 His criticisms were not about broken promises (as in South Africa) but poor supplies. The billeting in the French villages was atrocious and poorly organized: at one point he had to borrow straw from the French Army for British soldiers to sleep on, while 2 tons of straw languished in the wrong village. He wrote “I rather gather this is typical of the lack of business method in the Army and seriously injures our efficiency.”473

Overall he argued that “The Army is still much hampered by the lack of businessmen on the Staff particularly in supplies.”474 He judged the supplies “much better than South Africa” but now, perhaps as an older man, he found it all intensely frustrating. 475 Everything that was wrong with the war was due to lack of capable staff. Philip argued that the hierarchy was incompetent because the army favoured the wrong kind of behaviour. Men were promoted on the basis of their previous military experience rather than their business efficiency when “as far as I can see previous military experience is not of such great ex importance in this war as everything is so different, in fact it is rather a disadvantage”.476 Instead the army should work like civilian businesses and recruit staff officers who were proven in their abilities to supply the army. Philip wrote that “I would not have any man on the staff who could not show he had been a success in civil life or as a regimental officer if previously in the Army.”477 Instead, the best way to get a promotion was ill-health or inefficiency.478 The hierarchy was poorly staffed and marked by blind obedience. Philip’s Colonel would not complain lest he be black-balled: he and others

472 Ibid 4 November 1915. 473 Ibid 9 December 1915. 474 Ibid 9 December 1915. 475 Ibid 9 December 1915. 476 Ibid 9 December 1915. 477 Ibid 9 December 1915. 478 Ibid 22 March 1916. 207

“would rather let their men starve than annoy their superiors by complaining.”479 By incentivizing the wrong behaviour and appointing the wrong men, the army hierarchy became corrupt and inefficient.

There was however an irony about these complaints: while criticising the unfair and wrong-headed nature of promotion in the army, Philip used his family connections to leave the nepotistic army. The letters that survive are those to his brother Richard, who was an MP and in a position to possibly help. Philip claimed that this nepotism was peculiar to the military: “in the

Army all these things are done by influence, so if you can do anything for me I should be much obliged.”480 Family business itself was intensely nepotistic, relying on insider promotion of qualified yet pre-picked candidates. He was unlikely therefore to have an objection to insider promotion per se. To Richard, he eagerly set forward why he would be useful in another job, from horse and motor car knowledge to “Business knowledge and business honesty.”481 On the surface, he kept a gentlemanly stiff-upper-lip about his troubles, constantly reassuring his brother that his problems were not too desperate. “I hope I am not giving you too much trouble, if you can’t do anything don’t bother as I will manage alright, but it is no use being uncomfortable if one can change.”482 The vision of the battlefield as lacking comfort shows how he tended to downplay his problems. Yet his letters carefully meandered between such comments and descriptions of shelling, deaths, and trenches “not too full of water.”483 Richard surely understood such unsubtle hints. In April 1916 Philip still was unhappy: “I think I am rather too

479 Ibid 9 December 1915. 480 Ibid 22 March 1916. 481 Ibid 20 December 1915. 482 Ibid 30 December 1915 (also 22 March 1916 “You need not think I am in any distress or miserable”). 483 Ibid 20 December 1915. 208 old for the trenches and would be glad to be back, it is a poor life for anyone who has been used to business, the waste of time money + life makes one sad.” 484

Philip was wounded and sent home before the Somme, and never had to return to the trenches. 485 How traumatic he found war is impossible to tell: possibly his incessant talk about business was an attempt to redirect his emotions beyond the chaos around him. His brother’s responses do not survive to tell the complete story of their correspondence, but we do have the brother’s political history of anti-war to suggest what the responses would likely have been.

Philip does not describe in detail the fear, terror, depression, or fatalism that other war letters have led us to expect. Perhaps he was particularly repressed, or perhaps his relationship with his eldest brother was not one of emotional closeness. Among his siblings he was the only one to get divorced, when his wife left him for a war hero. In 1908 he had married Phyllis Adela

Palmer (1888-1978), the granddaughter of Sir Charles Palmer, first baronet, who had been a very successful colliery owner and shipbuilder on the Tyne at Jarrow. He was 31 and she was 20.

Their marriage lasted until 1934, when she filed for divorce on the basis of his adultery. When it ended he was 58 and she was 47.486 In 1935 she announced her engagement to Lieutenant-

Colonel Campbell Newall Watson (1876-1957), a contemporary and childhood neighbour of

Philip’s whose later war heroism had led him to be awarded a Distinguished Service Order.487

484 Ibid 6 April 1916, from Froissey (Somme Canal). 485 His brother Richard’s diary records Aug 6 1916 “There has been fierce fighting at the front. Just before it began my brother Philip was slightly wounded and sent home…” George Herdman, Pete Melly “and many other Liverpool boys” killed (George and Pete both killed at the Somme on 1 July 1916). LRO 920 DUR/1/10 Richard Holt diary 1900-1916. 486 National Archives J 77/3346/2164 Appellant: Phyllis Adela Holt. Respondent: Philip Durning Holt. Type: Wife's petition for divorce. She filed 2 August 1934, and was granted Decree Nisi on 4 February 1935, and Decree Absolute on 14 August 1935. 487 Their engagement is announced in ‘Personal Paragraphs,’ Aberdeen Press and Journal Friday, September 06, 1935; pg. 6; Issue 25173 and ‘People in the News,’ The Evening Telegraph and Post (Dundee), Thursday, September 05, 1935; pg. 6; Issue 18339. Campbell Watson was described as a Liverpool cotton merchant in the 209

Did Philip’s behaviour during the war lead her to leave him for a war hero? Without any of her writing, and only these letters to his brother, it is impossible to tell, but the divorce hints that the war might have had long-term effects on his marriage.

Government and business in wartime

Despite all the turmoil and the need for large-scale organization of production, the

Liverpool and Glasgow businessmen who interacted with the military hierarchy were frustrated.

The war had not become an opportunity for their vision of business efficiency to take over. As the old army proved itself incompetent, the new army had been taken over by bureaucrats rather than businessmen. As the businessmen saw it, they used market logic and the smallest staff possible to work on the cutting edge of technology, rather than creating personal fiefdoms to annoy other civil servants.488

There were many places were Liverpool and Glasgow businessmen would run up against government policies during wartime, especially if they were involved in international trade and shipping. For shipping, there were two problems: the need to supply Britain with food and other necessities, and the need to build warships. For trade, the same need to supply Britain was matched by a desire to economically cripple Germany. For merchants this idea of cutting off

German trade was a policy that ran counter to all their free trade norms, but one they had to

1911 census, although he had retired to Scotland by the time of his marriage to Phyllis. He grew up as a neighbour to Philip, as his family is recorded in the 1891 census living at 40 Ullet Road — Philip’s home was 54 Ullet Road. His father was a ‘South American merchant’ while Philip’s was a cotton merchant. Watson’s DSO was awarded in 1917 “For conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty at a critical moment. Whilst commanding his battalion in an advance, he suddenly came under heavy artillery and machine gun fire, but he promptly deployed, attacked the enemy, and gained possession of a commanding position. This he not only held gallantly for four days, but was indefatigable in his endeavours to improve upon his success, and his courage and cheerful bearing had a marked effect in enabling his men to hold their own under most adverse weather conditions and continuous hostile shelling.” 488 Reid, 68. 210 suddenly come to terms with. What can seem like reasonable accommodations today — when we have far more extreme examples of total war — were considered as unreasonable and destructive by many businessmen. And in comparison to other industries, such as munitions, the interference experienced by shipping and trading was reasonably mild, especially early on in the war.489 But no other group was so invested in free trade and so jealous of any infringements on it. In extreme cases, their dissatisfaction with the war hardened into outright anti-war sentiments. This was the case with Philip Durning Holt’s brother Richard.

Richard has appeared in every chapter so far, but by 1914 he was a Liberal MP, for

Hexham in Northumberland. He was also out-of-step with the party hierarchy, as he was a free- trader and opposed to anything “socialistic”, including New Liberalism. He was already a thorn in the government’s side, with his “Holt Cave” of anti-government Liberal MPs.490 With the outbreak of war his distance from the party increased. Conscription, compulsion, massive military expenditure: these were horrific to Liberals like Holt. It was not necessary to abandon

Liberalism to support conscription, as some of conscription’s most enthusiastic supporters came from the Liberal party.491 While Liberalism was a broad church and some could reconcile

Liberalism and total war effort, Richard Holt was among those who found compulsory war effort and Liberalism totally antithetical. While in 1914 Richard cautiously supported the war’s outbreak, he quickly became a critic of how the war was budgeted, and free trade and business

489 Roger Lloyd-Jones and M.J. Lewis, Arming the Western Front: War, Business and the State in Britain 1900–1920 (Routledge, 2016). discusses the munitions problem which led to the creation of the Ministry of Munitions, and national factories which the Ministry directly controlled. 490 Historians have debated the Cave’s significance: see Ian Packer, "The Liberal Cave and the 1914 Budget," The English Historical Review 111, no. 442 (1996). 491 Matthew Johnson, "The Liberal War Committee and the Liberal Advocacy of Conscription in Britain, 1914- 1916," The Historical Journal 51, no. 2 (2008). 211 were sidelined.492 Manpower was diverted to the army, risking “the financial and commercial disaster likely to ensue from the further abstraction of labour from industry.”493 As his brother risked his life in France, Richard’s passion on the subject increased. He opposed the

Conscription Bill in which passed in early 1916, despite warnings from his constituency chairman that this was against popular opinion. Lloyd George called his opposition “very violent indeed” and accused Richard of having compared the government to Gadarine swine and of endangering national unity.494

It was not a personal attempt to stay out of conscription: he was 45 and a married man at the outbreak of war. Philip was in France as a volunteer, and his other brothers were not conscripted either. Richard had no sons, sons-in-law, or nephews at risk of conscription.495 His opposition to conscription stemmed from a deeply-held vision of a volunteer army fighting a limited war: he noted Zeppelin attacks as “simply murder” and worried about the merchant navy.496 He envisaged a war of attrition, where if the “Navy can stand firm and whether our

492 On the 2nd August he considered entering the war “the crime of dragging us into this conflict in which we are no way interested” but within a week the invasion of Belgium changed his mind. LRO 920 DUR/1/10 Richard Holt diary (1900-1916). The most complete account of Richard’s stance on the war is David Dutton, "One Liberal's War: Richard Durning Holt and Liberal Politics 1914–18," Journal of Liberal Democrat History, no. 36 (Autumn 2002). His diary was also used by Anthony J. Morris, Radicalism against War, 1906-1914: The Advocacy of Peace and Retrenchment (London: Longman, 1972), 404, 10. but Holt is incorrectly lumped together with Liberal Radicals. 493 26 December 1915 LRO 920 DUR/1/10 Richard Holt diary (1900-1916). 494 I have not been able to find an occasion when Richard used the phrase Gadarine swine. Lloyd George’s speech appears in House of Commons Debate, “Military Service Bill.” 04 May 1916 vol 82 cc142-267. 495 Although he did have cousins who volunteered, some of whom were killed. None of his brothers except Philip served, but his sister Elizabeth’s husband Captain Edward Stanley Russell did, and would die in Palestine on 6 November 1917. His brother Edward was a reservist — his name is recorded in the Roll of the Second Division of the New Zealand Expeditionary Force Reserve (Compiled August-October 1917), 778. “Holt, Edward Durning, Sheep-farmer, Waikura, Cape Runaway.” He was Class D, as a Reservist with three children. Ancestry.com. New Zealand Army WWI Reserve Rolls, 1916-1917. The youngest brother Lawrence, in January 1916 an unmarried man of 33, was a manager of the Blue Funnel line from 1908, and managed to avoid military service. Perhaps the Blue Funnel was considered of greater importance than military service, or he was somehow medically unfit for the army. 496 4 February 1916 LRO 920 DUR/1/10 Richard Holt diary (1900-1916). In this diary he also describes a personal experience of a Zeppelin raid in London as “murder not warfare” 9 September 1915. It is also noteworthy that he gave over his house at 54 Ullet Road to be a hospital at the start of the war. Malcolm E. Falkus, The Blue Funnel Legend: A History of the Ocean Steam Ship Company (1990), 159. 212 finances can stand firm” for long enough, victory would be possible. He was a pessimist: “[it] is not a question of victory sooner or victory later. It is a question of victory or defeat.”497 While for some people the spectre of defeat suggested that Britain should conscript its population to ensure victory, for Holt it was the long game of attrition that was important.

By early 1916 it was clear that the war was going very badly, and the government was intent on overriding the objections of shipping and mercantile interests which opposed state control over their behaviour. At the start of the conflict many businessmen were expecting to keep war out of their trade, and within the government there was a muddled debate between the limited-war (business-as-usual) and total-war camps.498 But through 1915 the economic situation worsened and the government’s will to interfere became stronger. The balance of trade swung against Britain, with more imports, fewer exports (especially invisibles), and the pound falling against the dollar.499 Economic warfare was now a key concern for the government, and they needed merchants to bring in food and war materials — while not exporting to the enemy. The navy imposed a blockade, which businessmen questioned.500 The government also imposed a bureaucracy limiting what could be imported and controlling what was exported. Their concern was that exports were reaching Germany and Austria through neutral nations, and to prevent this they imposed red tape that frustrated merchants. Businessmen working in international trade

497 House of Commons Debate, “Military Service Bill” 4 May 1916 vol 82 cc142-267. 498John McDermott, "“A Needless Sacrifice”: British Businessmen and Business as Usual in the First World War," Albion 21, no. 2 (1989): 265. Lloyd George originally set out that the war would be “business as usual”. British businessmen could not trade with the enemy, but they should try and replace enemy trade in home, allied, and neutral markets. 499"Total War and the Merchant State: Aspects of British Economic Warfare against Germany, 1914-16," Canadian Journal of History 21, no. 1 (1986): 66. 500 "“A Needless Sacrifice”: British Businessmen and Business as Usual in the First World War," 276. 213 quickly found that business as usual was nothing of the sort — years of free trade had left them unused to restrictions, and they chafed against government bureaucracy.501

Richard Holt was on the side of the free traders, and throughout the war he spoke for free trade in the Commons as an antidote to the war. He was particularly opposed to the tide of enthusiasm for post-war boycotts of German goods. On March 9 1916 he made his feelings plain in the Commons: “I am not at all sure that the idea of nations being self-sufficient and independent is a good idea. I believe that the idea of the interdependence of nations is a far better idea, and one which is more directed to establish peace and good will on earth. I do not believe in the idea of proud self-sufficiency in any nation502.” Free trade nations and institutions (such as the mercantile marine) were the natural victors of the war, while Protectionists such as Germany struggled to keep up the supply of money to its army. In this speech Richard argued that peace must mean and depend on commercial peace, and nationalistic hatred of Germany must be trumped by business: “In commercial operations there is no more fruitful source of loss and disaster than to allow yourself to be led away by sentiments of hatred.”503

Richard’s Blue Funnel line relied on international trade, but it also needed labour and ships, both of which were threatened by government policy. Conscription was a major headache for him, and he and others argued that it was being poorly organized. Men with specialist skills needed to build or sail ships were instead being conscripted as cannon fodder, with disastrous

501 Ibid., 269. 502 House of Commons Debate, “Trade After War.” 09 March 1916 vol 80 cc1755-78 503 By his death in 1941 he might have been considered somewhat prophetic: this speech argued “Whatever happens, if you are going to have a peaceful settlement such as everybody longs for and looks to as the only tolerable result of this War, it must be one providing for Germany an honourable position in the family of nations with which a reasonable Germany can reasonably be satisfied. I question the doctrine that economic weakness in Germany is going to be necessarily followed by military weakness. I think it is far more likely if you refuse opportunities of economic expansion to Germany that she will be driven back to the Prussian policy of expansion by military force.” 214 effects for Britain’s ability to feed itself and supply the army with munitions. For businessmen across Britain the war years saw an explosion of trade union activity, and the shortage of labour led to higher pay and strikes. Richard himself was not against trade unions, but during the war the Blue Funnel and other shipping lines wrangled with trade unions several times. In February

1915, for example, the Birkenhead dockers’s union secured a raise of a shilling per day. But these wages would now be paid once a week instead of daily, and overtime rates did not budge.504 They therefore refused to work on the weekends without being paid upfront. Richard and others at the Blue Funnel had been sympathetic to the poverty of dock workers, who worked on a casual basis that could mean days without work — but they thought that with the labour pool depleted by the war, dockers could easily secure five days of work a week (and thus five shillings over even a generous prewar pay). Yet Richard’s brother Lawrence and Alfred Allen

Booth, another shipowner, issued a manifesto that was extremely conciliatory: “there is no reason to suppose that the strict letter of the agreement lately concluded would be rigidly insisted upon if good cause could be shown.505 The shipowners were suddenly at the mercy of dockers and other casual labourers, when previously they had always had a cheap and easy supply of such men.

For shipbuilders such as the Lithgows it was more skilled labour that suddenly became scarce. When James Lithgow complained that he was stuck in France rather than helping to build ships back in Glasgow, he was also corresponding with his brother constantly about the problem of getting labour for their shipyards. James agreed with Henry that “wages are outrageous, but so

504 “Liverpool Docks Dispute” The Western (Yeovil), Tuesday, March 31 1915, 17823, 6. The original agreement was signed February 22nd. 505 “Obdurate Dockers” Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser Wednesday, March 31 1915, 18221, 8. 215 are profits for that matter and we have just to accept the unhealthy conditions which are not of your making and are not really to our detriment.”506 They looked everywhere for men who could build ships, including scouring the Highlands and Ireland for older men who might be enticed to

Glasgow.507 These problems with labour led James to see all government decisions about where to send people as short-sighted, and strengthened his belief that he was far better off as a shipbuilder than a gunner: “I would be of more public service at my own civilian job than here”.508

While the labour problems caused by conscription were a major headache for many businessmen, Richard’s objections to conscription were far larger than the damage it did to the

Blue Funnel line. As he attacked the business logic of conscription, he also made a larger claim about how governments and subjects interacted. In Parliament he argued: “I object to this or any other form of compulsion for personal service, because I think it is based on an entirely wrong conception of the relation of the individual to the State. I do not agree with the view that the

State should be a great machine run by politicians and bureaucrats in which every single person is to have his place, his own proper little pigeon hole, and in which everyone is to do the work assigned to him. I entirely disagree with that idea.”509 He believed that such efficiencies would alter the character of British political life: David Dutton writes that Richard “was not prepared to wage war in the name of liberal democracy if the means of doing so involved the destruction of those very values which Britain had set out to defend.”510

506 James Lithgow to his brother Henry 13 October 1916 Reid, 61. 507 Ibid., 62. 508 Ibid., 59. 5 November 1916 509 House of Commons Debate, “Military Service Bill.” 04 May 1916 vol 82 cc142-267. 510 Dutton. 216

This defence of personal liberty led him to attack the treatment of conscientious objectors.511 He frequently compared himself during the South African war with present conscientious objectors: “If this measure had been introduced sixteen years ago, when, I think, both [Lloyd George] and myself were of military age, I believe we should have been found at that time to be conscientious objectors.”512 With his brother a veteran of South Africa this was an unusual statement to make — but his brother’s letter to the Morning Leader had been discussed in Parliament in the same session as one of Lloyd George’s speeches against the Boer war.513

This time around however Lloyd George was on the side of war.

By 1916 Lloyd George had problems other than conscientious objectors — he was trying to supply the army and feed the country in the face of deep shortage and the constant attacks of

U-boats.514 The government had mostly ignored merchant shipping in the early days of the war, and asked shipbuilders instead to concentrate on warships. At first the fall in the volume of trade made freight rates cheaper, but as merchant ships were sunk and labour shortages bit, the price of freight went up and up, forcing the government to readjust their strategy. The Lithgow brothers had been ordered in 1915 “in the national interest” not to build cargo ships anymore, and to instead build patrol boats for the Admiralty. Unwillingly they did so, until “[l]ate, and suddenly,

511 For example House of Commons Debate “New Clause.—(Conscientious Objector.)” 15 May 1916 vol 82 cc1147-72. 512 House of Commons Debate “Military Service Bill.” 04 May 1916 vol 82 cc142-267. 513 In the House of Commons debate in which Philip’s letter was discussed, Lloyd George condemned military policies of burning farms and destroying property in South Africa, saying “We are organising a famine in South Africa.” House of Commons Debate, “Consolidated Fund (Appropriation) Bill.”15 December 1900 vol 88 cc879- 910. 514 When the Cunard’s Lusitania was sunk in 1915 there were several passengers from the Liverpool and Glasgow business circles aboard. Paul Crompton, a partner in Alfred Booth & Co. died along with his wife and six children. Marguerite, wife of Sir Hugh Montagu Allan, a managing director of the Allan line, and her daughters Anna and Gwendolyn were also on board — Lady Allan survived but both her daughters died. Information from rmslusitania.info/people/saloon/. 217 the British government realized that cargo tonnage could be quite as important as warships—that

Britain might starve”.515 But this excursion away from cargo ships had damaged Lithgows as well as contributing to the spiralling cost of importing food into Britain.

For the shipowners and shipbuilders the later years of the war were a golden time for their income. Richard’s Blue Funnel did extremely well — so much so that he was aware of the

“envious eyes” looking “grudgingly” at such profits.516 The Blue Funnel did try to limit profits to a certain extent.517 Richard attempted to keep outward freight prices in check because he wanted

Blue Funnel to “contribute towards the stability of the national finances”. When Richard was opposing conscription in early 1916, outward freight rates had risen by half and inward freights had doubled. Malcolm Falkus, author of an excellent history of the Blue Funnel, calls this “a rather curious example of financial myopia since in the last analysis wars can be won by imports but not by exports.” 518 But for Richard this was no myopia but a sincerely held belief the British economy would be destabilized by neglecting exports, and therefore Britain could lose the war by failing to export.

For some businessmen profits merged into profiteering, as government was not able to perfectly control prices. There was not much bite behind the bureaucratic bark, and the only punishments that really had effect were public scandals and social ostracism. 519 The line

515 Reid, 56. 516 Falkus, 158. 517 Blue Funnel was particularly stingy in distributing dividends, which in real terms did not rise over the war, unlike in many other shipping companies. Of course this meant that the company kept most of the wartime profits for itself. In August 1915 they were able to acquire Sir Thomas Royden’s Indra line, and they also extended their wharfs in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Hankow, and Sumatra. They also started to buy up shipbuilding shares to better control the supply of ships, but this would turn against them in the postwar. Ibid., 160-3. 518 Ibid., 159. 519 Jonathan S. Boswell and Bruce R. Johns, "Patriots or Profiteers? British Businessmen and the First World War," Journal of European Economic History 11, no. 2 (1982): 438. 218 between profiting and profiteering was murky and subjective. Shipowners might evade requisitioning, merchants might trade illegally, manufacturers might make huge profits — but there was public scorn and disgust for these practices. On the other hand, many businessmen acted against their own interests and ignored the profit motive. James Lithgow, for instance, wrote in frustration to his brother that the Admiralty’s early policy of ignoring merchant shipping; “has now landed where you and I expected it—in the soup”. But he was aware that for their business the Admiralty’s desperation to produce more cargo ships would be more lucrative than a steady supply. “Put bluntly it does not matter a damn to us selfishly how deep in the soup it gets as it will be all the more profitable to pull it out, but both of us can lay definite claim to having been guided by better motives in all we have done since this trouble arose.”520 When businessmen felt that government failure had given them the opportunity for profiteering, they were less likely to feel scruples.

As the war went on, some sectors of businessmen came to terms with government interference. The sugar refiners, for example, came under government scrutiny very early on.

Prewar Britain had the biggest sweet tooth in the world, and its sugar was mostly sourced from

German and Austrian beet that was immediately cut off. The refiners therefore had to find new sources of sugar cane, adapt their technology to cane rather than beet refining, and deal with the labour problems that affected all industries. From the earliest days of the war the government was very keen that Britain would not run out of sugar, and became closely involved with major sugar refiners including Henry Tate & Sons and Abram Lyle & Sons. These two companies — originally Liverpool- and Glasgow-based respectively but by 1914 concentrated in London —

520 Reid, 58. James Lithgow to his brother Henry, 5 November 1916. 219 did very well out of the war. They had a respite from foreign competition and forged links with the government bureaucracy that would be useful in the interwar, after they merged to become

Tate & Lyle. The profits made by Lyles especially verged on profiteering, and because their most profitable item was Golden Syrup rather than ordinary sugar, the government turned a blind eye.521 The Boston tanning business, discussed more extensively in chapter three, also benefitted from the war in a major way. Suddenly the government had to purchase millions of leather and tanners were able to sell huge quantities of leather.

A 1916 photo of Francis Boston (1857-1929) and his two sons Arthur and Edward shows a comfortable relationship between the businessman and the army — Francis poses with a gun just like his son’s, dressed in shooting clothes that do not differ dramatically from his sons’ uniforms.522 Francis and Edward wear boots and Arthur wears puttees; Francis’s shooting costume lacks the shiny buttons of Edward and Arthur’s uniforms; and Edward and Arthur wear uniform instead of flat caps — but the silhouette is very similar. For businessmen such as sugar refiners and tanners, who escaped foreign competition during the war and had never been totally ideologically committed to free trade, it was easy to come to terms with the army and its bureaucracy in the war years.

521 Philippe Chalmin, The Making of a Sugar Giant: Tate and Lyle, 1859-1989 (Harwood Academic Publishers, 1990), 117-26. 522 Francis loved shooting, like many Liverpool and Glasgow businessmen, as discussed in chapter three. 220

Figure 11 Photograph captioned “Father Arthur and Ted 1916” of Francis Boston and his sons Arthur Shakerley Boston (1891-1965) and Edward Lansdowne Boston (1895-1982) 523

523 Arthur enlisted on 1 Sept 1914 and went into Army Ordnance Corps (British Army WWI Pension Records 1914- 1920 Ancestry.com, British Army WWI Medal Rolls Index Cards, 1914-1920 Ancestry.com) Edward went into the Royal Engineers (British Army WWI Medal Rolls Index Cards, 1914-1920 Ancestry.com). Photograph from Angela Goldsmith. 221

But in shipowning and shipbuilding relations with the government were much more fraught, because the bureaucracy tended to limit their actions and run against their aims rather than the opposite. The government also started late and blundered during their early interactions, such as in ordering the Lithgows to build naval ships rather than cargo ships. These early mistakes led Lloyd George to create a Ministry of Shipping headed by a Sir Joseph Maclay, a

Glasgow shipowner. The Ministry was intended to liaise between shipowners and the government, build more merchant ships, and take charge of shipping food and war materials.524

The Ministry set out “Blue Book Rates” decreeing the profits that shipowners could make, and requisitioned cargo space for food. In 1917 resources were stretched even further by both the U- boat threat and the need to transport US troops to Europe, and the Ministry requisitioned all remaining merchant ships and further restricted non-essential imports. The requisitioning did not totally cut out the shipping lines — Maclay asked them to run their ships as normal but then give all profits to the government. Most shipowners complied, with one exception: Richard Holt. He argued that the government could requisition ships but could not requisition the effort of shipowners, and he challenged the Ministry in court. He won his case, but after that did voluntarily cooperate with the Ministry. He did not object to volunteering the Blue Funnel’s services, only to being conscripted to do so.525 Richard was the most intransigent shipowner the

Ministry had to deal with, but his dissatisfaction represents a broad swathe of opinion that was less combative.

524 Keith Grieves, ‘Maclay, Joseph Paton, first (1857–1951)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 Various tussles between the Ministry of Shipping and the Admiralty ensued, and by the time James Lithgow came to London to be Director of Merchant Shipbuilding, he was under the Deputy Controller of Auxiliary Shipbuilding, which was part of the Admiralty. By this time the Admiralty was under the reign of Sir Eric Campbell Geddes, so it was not so very different from the Ministry of Shipping. Reid, 66. 525 Falkus, 166-7. 222

In shipbuilding the tension between government and business was also apparent, and the

Ministry of Shipping and the Admiralty attempted several measures to bring shipbuilders into line. They created twelve standard ship designs that were designed to be simple and easy for yards new to building certain types of ships. But for Henry Lithgow, whose yards had perfected a standard design that fitted perfectly to their size and layout, the imposition of this new standard was a painful and pointless process.526 James Reid, whose 1964 biography of James Lithgow assumes a readership which had lived through another world war, recounts an oral history of

Henry hearing of a new piece of standardization which would hold up production: “he called on all his riveters for overtime, formed and led a squad of his own and laid the keel of a new ship in a single night so that no official specification might delay him.”527 In Reid’s formulation the heroic “squad” is not a military one but a group of riveters led by a shy businessman, avoiding red tape. Henry’s brother James feared that these interventions would destroy their industry: “It looks as if all the Govt. people were taking far too much interest in shipbuilding, and if we don’t mind our eye the whole industry will be ruined by interference even after the war is over.”528

Finally, perhaps sick of the renegade riveters, in 1917-18 the government began to build national shipyards along the same lines as the munitions factories they owned and ran. The labour would be provided by soldiers and prisoners of war, and the ships would be built to completely standard designs. It was too late in the war for much to happen; only three keels were laid.529 But

526 Reid, 60-1. 527 Ibid., 69. Reid’s comparison to the Second World War is most explicit in his discussion of the interwar: “Nearly all of us who are adults can remember the strange atmosphere of a world which was just emerging from war” ibid., 71. The biography is an interesting document in its own right, a paean to a world of no-nonsense businessmen which is firmly against the state, written in the days of “never had it so good”. 528 Ibid., 63. Henry Lithgow to his brother James, 4 April 1917. 529 Ibid., 68-70. 223 shipbuilders could sniff the threat of nationalization which was coming after the next world war, and hated this new development.

For merchants, too, the relationship with bureaucracy was contentious. The war undermined the organization of international trade, and with it attacked the entire worldview of rich merchants. One of the most fundamental changes was the shift from defining enemies by domicile to by nationality. In the Far East and South America, important trading grounds for

Liverpool and Glasgow businesses, until October 1915 British and German businessmen were still trading together. Because these German middlemen were living in, say, China or , they were not defined as enemies by the British government and so could still act as agents for

British firms or load their cargo onto British ships.530 The cosmopolitanism I described in chapter one made this normal for businessmen to continue to use German contacts, along with a dose of economic sense. British merchants could not export as efficiently to South America without German agents, and when British (rather than American or Japanese) ships carried

German-owned cargo they were paid in German gold — the money from both activities could be used for the British war effort. This was “the dilemma of the merchant state at war”: should the government be pragmatic or punitive when it came to trade with German businesses?531 The realpolitik pragmatism to allow businessmen to trade with Germans held until 1915-6, when the tide turned against the merchant and towards the state. Merchants involved in international trade held out the longest, and defended their position forthrightly — John McDermott calls the struggle between these traders and the British state a “war within a war” in the summer of

530 McDermott, "Total War and the Merchant State: Aspects of British Economic Warfare against Germany, 1914- 16," 70-1. 531 Ibid., 72. 224

1916.532 Each side believed theirs was the only successful path forward, but in the end the bureaucrats won. Laissez-faire was over as far as government policy went, and their priority was to destroy Germany economically.

As the war wore on and conscription became entrenched, Richard became an outsider and by January 1918 had promised his constituency that he would not stand there again in the next election.533 Opposition to the war had become politically suicidal in light of the sacrifices made.

His comments in the House became tinged with irony: when the question of the overinflation of honours was raised he asked “Can the right hon. Gentleman arrange to have these men organised as a complete and homogeneous division of the British Army?”534 This lampooned the inflation of honours by suggesting the honoured were sufficient to staff a division, while also hinting that the newly-ennobled had not been willing to serve, and perhaps even been war profiteers. While many in Britain felt extremely anti-German, Richard found humour in the attempts to demonise everything German. While Lord Denbigh was promoting maps, books and lectures based on jingoistic anti-Germanism, Richard commented in the Commons “Is the right hon. Gentleman aware that Lord Denbigh publishes a pedigree showing himself to be of enemy origin, and will he warn people against looking at maps and reading books emanating from this tainted source?”535 He seems to have not quite realized the extent to which this attitude alienated voters.

532 "“A Needless Sacrifice”: British Businessmen and Business as Usual in the First World War," 279; ibid. 533 Richard Holt, "Odyssey of an Edwardian Liberal: The Political Diary of Richard Durning Holt ", ed. David J. Dutton (Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 1989), 52. 534 House of Commons Debate “Order of British Empire.”13 June 1918 vol 106 cc2370-1. 535 House of Commons Debate “War Aims (Lord Denbigh's Lectures).”16 July 1918 vol 108 cc886-7. 225

He contested the Eccles seat in the Coupon Election and saw the Liberals totally wiped out.536 His Parliamentary career was over, and after the war he devoted himself full-time to business. Richard Holt’s war career shows a man fighting for his vision of a war run according to business aims: limited, volunteer-based, and overseen by a state that was rational yet not totalitarian.537 Not long after the war, in July 1920, his eldest daughter Grace (1898-1972) married the Honourable Anthony Methuen (1891-1975), son of Field-Marshal Lord Methuen.538

The Methuens were an aristocratic family raised to a barony in the early-nineteenth century for political service, who had been based at the sixteenth-century Court since 1745.539

Field-Marshal Methuen had entered the army from Eton and purchased his commissions as lieutenant and then as captain, before Cardwell’s 1871 reforms ended the purchase of commissions.540 His army career took him to Egypt and South Africa, and he advanced through the ranks, taking on a prominent role in the Boer War (ending up with the dubious distinction of being the only British general captured by the Boers).541 He was then governor of Natal, and during 1915-19 was governor of . His second son Anthony also served in the First World

War, although he did not build a career in the army. Grace and Anthony’s marriage united the upper-middle class Richard Holt — sceptical of the war and suspicious of the army — with Paul

536 His commitment to conscientious objectors stretched to asking that the Labour candidate for Eccles be released from prison to contest the election. This man, James Hindle Hudson, went on to serve as a Labour MP. House of Commons Debate “Conscientious Objectors (Candidates).” 19 November 1918 vol 110 c3335. 537 The Liverpool public seems not to have taken much notice of his political activities, and concern about his anti- war stance seems to have been confined to the national level and to Hexham and Eccles. 538 The wedding was on July 22 1920, and the engagement dated to the previous September. “Busy Cupid: Weddings and Engagements” The Tatler and Bystander 950, September 10 1919, vi. 539 Ramsden, Lena, “”, Britannia and Eve, 36.5 (May 1948), 28-29. 540 C. T. Atkinson, ‘Methuen, Paul Sanford, third (1845–1932)’, rev. Roger T. Stearn, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. 541 As a measure of his rise, he “was appointed CB in 1882, CMG in 1886, KCVO in 1897, KCB in 1900, GCB in 1902, GCVO in 1910, and GCMG in 1919.” Atkinson. 226

Methuen, aristocratic holder of the highest rank in the army.542 But Richard’s attacks on total war had been directed against government and bureaucracy, rather than against the old aristocratic generals like Field-Marshal Lord Methuen. This marriage then might be viewed as a symbolic rapprochement between the aristocratic army and the business war-sceptics, allied in rejecting the bureaucratic view.

Charles Jones’ thesis about the cosmopolitan bourgeoisie, discussed in chapter one, argues that one of the key issues which turned businessmen towards Conservatism and into an alliance with bureaucracy was war.543 “In the bellicose atmosphere of the period, bourgeoisie and state drew closer.”544 Richard’s trajectory of increased alienation from government and a diehard commitment to Liberalism, suggests that this was dependent on personalities and business types.

The sugar refiners were happy to make friends with the government and be saved from foreign competition, but it was a bitter pill to swallow for the merchants and shipowners who did so well from free trade. For the shipbuilders, government blunders at the start of the war were so apparent that the relationship continued to be contentious, and the national shipyards were an unpleasant foretaste of nationalization.

By the 1930s, some businessmen were happy to push for rearmament, particularly if they made munitions or warships. In Glasgow some shipbuilders specialized in warships, and especially in the depths of the Depression they were happy to deal with government. The

Admiralty was a very good customer in the interwar, building more than any other navy in most

542 Methuen did support the volunteers and reject conscription, and his role in South Africa is subject to debate. See Stephen M. Miller, Lord Methuen and the British Army : Failure and Redemption in South Africa (1999). Nevertheless he was an aristocrat, lifelong military man, and field marshal. 543 Charles A. Jones, International Business in the Nineteenth Century: The Rise and Fall of a Cosmopolitan Bourgeoisie (Wheatsheaf, 1987), 201. 544 Ibid., 204. 227 years.545 But for builders of merchant ships and for the merchants, the coming of another war was a disaster they hoped to avoid. During the next world war, free trade was, in David

Edgerton’s words, “done for” and the country was totally mobilized at the direction of the government.546

By the interwar, too, the army was a very different thing to what it had been in the mid- nineteenth century. Aristocratic dominance was over, and many within the army now embraced technical warfare. Yet the businessmen of Glasgow and Liverpool retained the sense of being outsiders to military culture. They had helped change the army, but the end result was not quite what they wanted. The decline of aristocratic power had not been a straightforward opportunity to them — instead the new rulers of the army were the bureaucrats and pen-pushers that businessmen despised. Those in shipping had made huge profits in wartime but there had been considerable disruption to their hallowed idea of free trade. It was also, as they were about to find out, the last moment of serious profitability before a painful interwar period. Those exports which Richard Holt had been so concerned about never came back to their pre-war strength.

Imports gained over exports in the interwar, but it was London that reaped the benefits. In 1921

Liverpool had 22% of Britain’s imports, slipping to 18% in 1938, while London had 40%.547

After the next war the economic misery would only intensify, and the merchants, shipbuilders and shipowners of Glasgow and Liverpool would either have to find new industries or go down with the demise of British shipping.

545 David Edgerton, Warfare State : Britain, 1920-1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 32. 546 Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources, and Experts in the Second World War (Oxford University Press, 2011), 4. 547 Sheila Marriner, The Economic and Social Development of Merseyside (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 98. 228

Chapter Five Disappearance

George Melly (1926-2007), whose observations on the Liverpool businessmen of his youth have been mentioned quite frequently throughout the past chapters, was the grandson of

Heywood Melly (1871-1937), a Colonel in the Volunteers during the First World War. In

George’s autobiography he repeated one of his grandfather’s favourite after-dinner stories.

On the eve of leaving for France, the 4th West Lancashire Brigade held a day of

manoeuvres on a plain outside Liverpool. A tea-tent was erected on a nearby hill so that

the Colonel’s lady and the wives and families of his brother officers could watch their

husbands charging about below; a picture which bore little relation to the filthy, lice-

ridden trenches which were their destination. Due to the hostilities the regiment had

trebled in size and among the men were many volunteers from the Liverpool docks, a

class far removed from the clerkly respectability of pre-war days.

Among the lieutenants was a very young man called Tom Todd who had never been

exposed before to six hours of strong language on such an insistent level. During the tea

interval, seeing my grandfather in conversation with his wife and without a cup, he

hurried over to make good this deficiency. ‘Have a cup of fucking tea, Colonel,’ he

proposed politely.548

This episode reads as a metaphor for the effect of the war on the wealthy families of

Glasgow and Liverpool. The contagion of the dockworkers spreads via the unknowing Todd to explode in the faces of the assembled officer families attempting to pretend that all is well. The

548 George Melly, Owning Up: The Trilogy, (Penguin, 2000). 52-3. 229 docks were an integral part of the wealth of these families, but in the interwar they were the site of racial violence, strikes, and economic depression. In the face of such challenges, the wealthy families of Liverpool and Glasgow retreated from the cities. Some of this was a continuation of the process of suburbanization discussed in chapter three. But there was also something more final going on. The rich businessmen of the two cities became instead part of a national upper middle class that was at its zenith, leading a cohesive middle class and integrated with the remnants of aristocratic power into a national elite.

This assimilation to the national elite has been mentioned several times in previous chapters: chapter two described the end of Society, and chapter three explored the homogeneity of the interwar middle class. In the discussion of business trips and dollar princesses I also argued that Liverpool and Glasgow businessmen became part of an international elite at the same time as they became subsumed within the British national elite. This final chapter elaborates the theme more fully. The wealthy businessmen of Liverpool and Glasgow changed how they took part in education and the honours system, becoming more integrated into national patterns. Their local particularities vanished and they became more like the rest of the upper middle class. The

Depression was economically hard on businesses focused on international trade such as those based in Liverpool and Glasgow. The economic centre of gravity shifted ever more to the South-

East, away from shipbuilding and industrial trade. These years further weakened the hold of

Liverpool and Glasgow over wealthy businessmen, some of whom went bankrupt in the 1930s.

After the Second World War the upper middle class to which they now belonged was displaced from primacy as a national elite by taxation and social change. The rich businessmen did not 230 return to their former place in Glasgow and Liverpool; instead they dissipated into the upper and middle classes and became unmoored from particular local loyalties.

The scholarship on this process of elite formation has focused on the interwar upper- middle class and its cohesiveness. Chapter two discussed Ross McKibbin’s argument about the old religious and regional differences between the Victorian middle class, including his pronouncement that interwar middle class “had become (or was becoming) a national class.”549

He cites “growing occupational and residential mobility” as a cause, as middle class people moved more often for the purpose of work. They then felt no particular attachment to their town.

At the top of the middle class was the upper-middle class, whose power grew as the aristocracy above them crumbled and the middle class which they headed unified. The economic and political gap evaporated between the lowest level of the aristocracy (the gentry) and the ordinary level of the upper-middle class, while a few middle-class plutocrats challenged the peerage in wealth and influence. According to Simon Gunn, the interwar was for the upper-middle clas “a gold age, based on substantial wealth and income, the power of command and a remarkably cohesive set of assumptions about status, duty and social behaviour.”550 W. D. Rubinstein agrees and argues that the national elite, centred in the upper middle class, became more cohesive across this period. He argues that the zenith of Britain’s elites was in 1937, as financial, landed, and industrial elites were finally brought together by the First World War and then by the 1930s politically unified into the Conservative Party.551 This was not a unification in which Liverpool and Glasgow businessmen had a strong hand in. Rubinstein writes that “[t]he centre of gravity of

549 Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951 (Oxford University Press, 2000), 102. 550 Simon Gunn and Rachel Bell, Middle Classes: Their Rise and Sprawl (Cassell & Co., 2002), 86. 551 A.J. Kidd and D. Nicholls, eds., The Making of the British Middle Class?: Studies of Regional and Cultural Diversity since the Eighteenth Century (Sutton, 1998), 187-8. 231

Britain’s élite structure was now clearly represented by the south of England commercial élite along with the London-based higher professional classes.”552 The shipbuilders and shipowners of the North-West were junior parties in this interwar upper-middle class elite.

These arguments tend to focus on the national level and highlight the achievements and conformity of the upper-middle class elite rather than the effects of their local withdrawal. In local histories there has been noticeably little discussion of the interwar years. While scholars have looked at the Victorian urban elites again and again, for multiple cities including Liverpool and Glasgow, these histories end around 1900-1914.553 After that, urban histories take up themes of working-class life and ignore the wealthy. When the wealthy are noticed, Tony Lane’s description gives a good taste:

“‘Liverpool society’ gradually dropped out of view. Congregations of the rich and

powerful at fashionable churches disintegrated. Assembly Room balls vanished and

daughters ‘came out’ in London, no longer in the Wellington Rooms. Town Hall dinners

now marked only the rituals of the calendar of state and monarchy. ‘Stately homes’ on the

city’s edge became schools or convents. Big houses on park perimeters converted to

nursing homes, student residences, flats, clubs and, very occasionally, brothels.”554

But the wealthy of Liverpool and Glasgow did not merely “disintegrate” and “vanish”.

These families often had generations of wealth stored away besides deep troves of cultural

552 Ibid., 188. 553 Irene Sweeney (Maver), "The Municipal Administration of Glasgow 1833-1912: Public Service and the Scottish Civic Identity" (University of Strathclyde, 1990). serves as a good example of this division. When she expanded this into a longer history of Glasgow, her division points were 1690, 1800, 1860, and 1918. Irene Maver, Glasgow (Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 554 Tony Lane, Liverpool: City of the Sea (Liverpool University Press, 1997), 53. 232 capital. They chose to embrace their new class position and to become part of a national elite.

They became like other elite families across Britain and the Empire in education, accent, and honours, joining into national systems and abandoning local ones.

Joining the upper-middle class

Class was a shifting and slippery concept for those at the top of the middle class in the last decades of the nineteenth century. This was a period of new definitions and categories: the distinction of “upper middle class” was first used in the 1870s. It took until early in the twentieth centuries for novelists to provide dramaticizations of the upper-middle class, the best being John

Galsworthy’s Forsyte Saga novels.555 Galsworthy extracted a great deal of dark comedy and pathos from the foibles of his characters, portraying them with a sharp and often cruel edge.

Galsworthy’s Forsytes have an unattractive instinct for possession, which in the extreme leads to

Soames’ rape of Irene.556 The Forsytes are a sprawling group of siblings and cousins, perhaps almost a patriarchal family with too many patriarchs, whose bitter fights and estrangements immediately come to mind when exploring the Holt family disputes (in chapter two). Unlike a mid-Victorian novel with an orphan hero or heroine desperately trying to make his or her way into a family, the Forsyte family is a claustrophobic and unpleasant place, and each character is convinced of his or her own individualism557. Yet while Galsworthy provided a complete rendering of the upper-middle class, his novels are from the start plagued by questions around

555 Gunn and Bell, 79-80. 556 John Galsworthy, Man of Property (1906). chapter 27 “Voyage into the Inferno” 557 On meeting his son again after a long estrangement, Old Jolyon “demonstrated to perfection all that unconscious soundness, balance, and vitality of fibre that made of him and so many others of his class the core of the nation. In the unostentatious conduct of their own affairs, to the neglect of everything else, they typified the essential individualism, born in the Briton from the natural isolation of his country's life.” 233 the knowability of the upper-middle class.558 In this early portrait of the upper-middle class, it is difficult for Galsworthy to exactly define who these people are.

The subjects of this dissertation showed some confusion and ambivalence about their class position. Some had ideas which would perfectly map onto a modern understanding of class

— most notably shipowner Charles Booth (1840-1916), whose research into class of course shaped later schema of class divides. He divided areas into seven levels: three of poverty, one mixed, one comfortable, one “middle class. well-to-do.” and one “upper-middle and upper classes. wealthy.” At another point he made a simple structure based on the relation between parents and children. In “the upper classes of the rich” the relationship was for children to depend on their parents until the parents died, whereas among the poor “all favours come from the young, the old having to look to their descendants to save them from starvation or the parish”. Halfway between those positions, middle class children relied on their parents “during the whole period of a prolonged education,” but not later. In the lower-middle class “there are reciprocal benefits” between old and young. In the upper middle class sons “are expected to fend for themselves” but most parents left “a patrimony” to their children.559

Philanthropy was a key way in which wealthy men understood class. William Rathbone

(1819-1902) had a simpler division than Booth, also based on philanthropy. He wrote that “I feel

558 The reader finds sympathetic as well as repellent characters among the Forsytes, and this diversity suggests that perhaps the upper-middle class is not one thing after all, because no absolute rule can be formulated about them. Galsworthy though sees in them “a racial stamp, too prehistoric to trace, too remote and permanent to discuss—the very hall-mark and guarantee of the family fortunes.” He argues in the opening paragraph of A Man of Property (1906) that the “obscure human problem” of how a family who has no liking or sympathy between them has instead a “mysterious concrete tenacity”, is in fact a key to the question of how society works. An observer of “an upper middle-class family in full plumage” such as the Forsytes, has in fact “been admitted to a vision of the dim roads of social progress, has understood something of patriarchal life, of the swarmings of savage hordes, of the rise and fall of nations.” 559 [Mary Booth], Charles Booth: A Memoir (St. Martin's Street, London: Macmillan and Co., Limited, 1918), 154. 234 intense discontent with myself and the class of educated men above the pinch of poverty. It seems as if it would be so easy to make this world so different.”560 For him there was a divide between those who were “labouring” or “wage-earning” and those who were “wealthier”,

“property-owning”, “capitalist”, “comfortable”, “educated”, or “leisured”.561 He argued that

Jesus himself had used the phrase “the poor” in a similar way: “he did not use it to designate those sunk in abject misery and poverty, but used it of those who were not rich: of the fishermen, of the carpenter, of the class to which he belonged, and through the agency of whose unweakened and unperverted manhood he intended to sweep away the corrupt and luxurious civilisation of which Rome was the centre.”562

But others did not particularly understand themselves in the middle class in the late- nineteenth century. When Catherine Holt disparaged the 1893 engagement of Hester Booth to

Alfred Hughes she mentioned that “his relations (chiefly sisters & brothers) are very middle class”.563 Hester was the daughter of wealthy shipowner Alfred Booth (1834-1914, brother to

Charles) and only eighteen, while Alfred Hughes was headmaster at the Liverpool Institute High

School for Boys and thirty-three. The disparity made the snobbish Catherine Holt “[laugh] at intervals” and she wrote the news to her brother in a way that conveyed shock: “Hester Booth is engaged to Mr Hughes of the Institute!” Catherine disliked Alfred: “his manners are atrocious, &

560 Eleanor F. Rathbone, William Rathbone: A Memoir (London: Macmillan, 1905), 278. Letter from William Rathbone to his wife Emily 2 July 1871. 561 Ibid. Some of these are his own words and some are his daughter Eleanor’s words; but they show his overall viewpoint. There were those who needed philanthropy, and those who received it. Eleanor wrote of her father in his youth working to establish herself before marrying, and acknowledged the vast gap between what her family considered “established” and the general population “There are probably some people who, in reading advice like this, cannot shake off the feeling that in a country in which the great majority of families have incomes of less than £3 a week, it is an anomaly that there should be a class at all to whom six or seven hundred a year represents poverty, or at least the modest competence suitable for young people to begin life on.” Ibid., 124. 562 Ibid., 436. Excerpt from a speech he made at the Annual Meeting of the Domestic Mission in 1874. 563 LRO 920 DUR 14/3/55 Catherine Holt to her brother Richard 20 April 1893. 235 his Manchester accent terrifying in its intensity – he always seems to me weak & wanting in back-bone”. He had worked his way up from being “very middle class” by education at

Manchester , Owens College (later the University of Manchester), and Corpus

Christi Oxford (where he matriculated in 1878 and received his BA in 1882). From there he had gone to be an Assistant Master at Manchester Grammar School (1883-9) and to the Liverpool

Institute (1890-96).564 This made him acceptable to Hester’s family, especially as Hester herself was rather a problem child — as Catherine said, “he is undoubtedly doing well at the Institute & it is a good secure position.”565 Catherine’s distinction between the Booths and the Hughes families was that the Hughes were “very middle class” yet Alfred’s position as headmaster made the gap bridgeable.

Education

As Alfred Hughes’ story hints, education was a key mechanism for producing class, and changes to the ways Liverpool and Glasgow children were educated altered how they fitted into the middle class. For a national upper-middle class to cohere, it needed to be educated together: in schools that were similar and mixed children from across the country. Those born in the first half of the nineteenth century tended to have local education to a secondary level and then go directly into business. Shipbuilder John Elder (1824-1869), whose wife Isabella has been

564 In 1896-1903 he was Registrar at Victoria University (now University of Manchester), and then was Professor of Education at the University of Birmingham from 1903. 565 Catherine wrote that “Every body seems very pleased, especially Aunt Anna, [Hester’s aunt, married to Philip Holt, Catherine’s uncle]…There seems to be a general feeling of relief that it is not Constance [Hester’s younger sister], with whom he has flirted considerably, but there are suggestions that she is disappointed…I believe [Hester] is very independent & accustomed to go about along, & being something of a managing disposition I fancy from something Cousin Emily said, it will be rather a relief in the family to get rid of her, besides making room for Connie who will come out next winter”. LRO 920 DUR 14/3/55 Catherine Holt to her brother Richard 20 April 1893. 236 mentioned in previous chapters, went to a grammar school in Glasgow and then attended classes in civil engineering at the University of Glasgow, before a five-year apprenticeship in shipbuilding under his father.566 He never took a degree, and the university classes were meant to be educational rather than prove a class status. In the second half of the nineteenth century, however, these men began to send their sons to schools further away and to Oxbridge. Glasgow provided technical education, but Oxbridge offered class benefits. John Elder’s successor

William Pearce (1833-1888), a self-made man with little formal education, sent his son (1861-

1907) to Rugby and then to Trinity College Cambridge.567 Chapter two described William

Pearce’s personal scandals and his failure to adhere to social norms, but he ensured his son would be able to socialize with middle-class boys from across the Empire. His fellows new boys at Lee Warner House in May 1876 included Thomas Housman Higgin, son of a Liverpool salt merchant; Ernest Martineau, whose father was later Mayor of Birmingham; Henry Norman

Morison, son of an Indian coffee planter; Roland Quinnell, son of a medical officer in India;

Joseph Marland Scott, whose father headed Scott Brothers, shipbuilders in Newcastle; and John

Charles Williams, son of a Cornish millionaire banker and merchant whose family had a background in mining.568 Public education inducted the wealthy of Glasgow into a national middle class rather than consolidating their local connections. The effects were gradual, as schoolboys retained strong social ties with family and neighbours while they met new boys from

566 Michael S. Moss, ‘Randolph, Charles (1809–1878)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 567 H. M. Innes, ‘Pearce, Sir William George, second baronet (1861–1907)’, rev. Ian St John, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. The DNB says of his father that his “early education is unknown, but he trained as a shipwright and naval architect at the Chatham Dockyard under Oliver Lang.” Anthony Slaven, ‘Pearce, Sir William, first baronet (1833–1888)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 568 Register Volume III 1874-1887 (1891) 237 across the Empire. Local ties were developed through all kinds of other social activities, as described in chapter two, chief among them marriage. But as those local social links — familial,

Society-based, political, religious — atrophied, school ties already existed as an alternative.

This transition happened in Liverpool too, perhaps more strongly because the local university was a modern rather than an ancient establishment. Boys from wealthy and influential families often went to local private schools and straight into business without any tertiary education. Alfred Holt (1829-1911) was the son of a rich cotton merchant but his education was all private and local. At the age of six he went to as a day boy to Mr Brown’s school in Edge Hill for a year, and then went as a boarder to Misses Hunts at , “an ordinary good dame's school”.569 Edge Hill and Gateacre were then just outside Liverpool, and when Alfred escaped from the Misses Hunts it was only four to five miles home. From nine to fifteen he was at Mr

Green’s at Heathfield, in Knutsford. This was just across the county border in Cheshire, and was a small Unitarian minister’s school. His schoolfellows included local boys such as Thomas Gair

(later his brother-in-law), his brother Philip Henry Rathbone, and two Jevonses.570 Then from fifteen until his seventeenth birthday, he was a private boarder at 10 Daulby Street in Liverpool with a Mr Donald Cameron — this situation was something of a mini school, as only Alfred and another boy (James Sinclair) were boarders and just three day boys also attended. Then, just after he turned seventeen, he was apprenticed for five years to Edward Woods, engineer of the

569 Alfred Holt, "Fragmentary Autobiography of Alfred Holt. Written on Scraps at Various Dates. Collected, Corrected, and Printed August, 1911.," (1911), 10. 570 Ibid., 11-13. “My Father told me that he fixed on Knutsford from having returned from a driving tour in Derbyshire, by that town, and struck by the Heath, and hearing of the Unitarian Chapel, and finding that the minister kept a boys' school determined to send me to it.” 238

Liverpool and Manchester Railway.571 This early introduction into the workforce was a very ordinary thing for Liverpool boys of his generation.

William Rathbone (1819-1902) had a similar education, with private and local schooling and an early apprenticeship. From 1830 to 1835 he was at a school of a hundred boys run by a

German émigré named Voelker at St. Domingo House , then just outside Liverpool. His verdict was: “The school was a very good one in leading boys to think, in giving them a liking for reading, and in teaching them mathematics and modern languages; but it did not turn out classical scholars, and fitted people more for practical thought and action than for the learned professions. Many of the boys were afterwards successful as merchants, manufacturers, and politicians.”572 Then he was apprenticed to Liverpool Bombay merchants Nicol, Duckworth, and

Company for three years, and then spent some time as a clerk at his father’s offices. At nineteen, in October 1838, he convinced his father to let him and friend Thomas Ashton go to Heidelberg, where they spent five months in study.573 As nonconformists they could not attend Oxbridge, but in Heidelberg they learnt history and law enough to satisfy them. These men born in the first half of the century were educated locally, privately, and somewhat haphazardly, before embarking on apprenticeships and business careers.

571 Ibid., 15. Woods’ offices were at Edge Hill. 572 Rathbone, 60. Before this he had been at sent at age four day-school Seel Street, then at age six to a small boarding-school at Gateacre, then at age nine to William Brown’s school at Cheam. Ibid., 57-59. 573 Ibid., 71-2. Susan Pedersen, ‘Rathbone, William (1819–1902)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. They then travelled through Germany and spent six weeks in Italy. Rathbone, 91. Ashton was such a good friend that he married William’s sister-in-law Elizabeth Gair, another sister to Thomas Gair. He owned a cotton mill near Manchester. Jane Bedford, ‘Ashton, Thomas (1818–1898)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. William and Lucretia Gair’s third child was named Thomas Ashton in his honour. 239

There was a sense of dissatisfaction among these older Liverpool men about their education. In Alfred Holt’s memoirs he writes of his education at Mr Green’s as “Good food, good morals, bad teaching.”574 William Rathbone recorded that he “left school a fair French and

German scholar, a very poor classical one, with a decided desire for knowledge, a good deal of miscellaneous information and general observation, but a careless worker, with a very bad hand- writing.”575 One boy of their generation who attended public school had a far different feeling about his schooling. George Melly (1830-1894) was unusual in attending Rugby as a boy, arriving there with his elder brother Charles Pierre (1829-1888) in 1844. Perhaps it was because their father was Swiss rather than English, or it was because George had been badly bullied at preparatory school and was unusually concerned with finding a school with a “very considerable reputation, [which] was spoken well of on all hands”.576 George’s love for the school continued long after he left. He wrote a book about his experiences of the monitorial system at Rugby as compared to the usher system used in private schools, in which he claimed that “[n]o one who

574 Holt, 12. 575 Rathbone, 61. 576 George Melly, School Experiences of a Fag at a Private and a Public School. (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1854), 89. The impetus to attend Rugby probably did not originate from their English mother: her brothers appear to have attended schools catering to their Unitarianism rather than public schools like Rugby. (1795-1875) “probably attended Lant Carpenter's Unitarian school at Bristol before proceeding to Edinburgh University” (C. W. Sutton, ‘Greg, Robert Hyde (1795–1875)’, rev. Mary B. Rose, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004) William Rathbone Greg (1809-1881) “was educated by Dr Lant Carpenter at his Unitarian school in Bristol, and in 1826 attended courses at Edinburgh University” (Mary B. Rose, ‘Greg, William Rathbone (1809–1881)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004) Samuel Greg (1804-1876) From 1811 to 1819 he attended the Unitarian school of the Revd J. J. Taylor of , followed by two years at Dr Lant Carpenter's school in Bristol…Two years spent gaining experience in the family business were followed, in 1823, by a winter of study at the . (Mary B. Rose, ‘Greg, Samuel (1758–1834)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004) But from the 1850s some Gregs do appear among the Rugby Register names, suggesting that they followed the Melly lead rather than vice versa. Rugby was also the school of George’s future brother-in-law Henry Bright, who entered in August 1844. The connection between the Brights and Mellys preceded Rugby, but the first letter he ever wrote to his future wife Sarah Bright was written while he was still at Rugby. 240 has not experienced such sensations can in any way appreciate the feelings with which a man looks back on the public school in which he was educated—feelings of love and of devotion to its memory, of affection to all who its name, of indignation against all who assail its reputation and honour.”577 This love for all Rugbeians reached its fullest fruition in 1891, when he arranged the first Old Rugbeian dinner in Liverpool. An anonymously-authored printed poem, possibly by George himself, proclaimed “Long years may have passed, but the love never cools /

That we feel for Old Rugby—the best of all Schools.”578 It also noted that “Rugbeians are thick amongst Liverpool men / The Mellys alone make a total of ten!” Between 1870 and 1883 there was always a Melly at Rugby, with all seven of Charles Pierre’s sons and two of George’s being educated there.579 The Melly passion for Rugby shows how the switch to public school could become permanent.

George Melly, like Alfred Holt and William Rathbone, did not attend university — all three were Unitarian and unable to attend Oxford, Cambridge, or Durham for that reason. In the middle of the century some of the obstacles began to fall away. The barrier of the Thirty-Nine

577 Melly, 93. He informs the reader “if it be thought that I have depicted my experiences of a public school in too bright colours, I can only reply that I have truly expressed the feelings with which I look back upon that schoolboy portion of my younger days.” Ibid., iv. 578 LRO 920 MEL 33/6348 “Vive La Compagnie Old Rugbeian Dinner Liverpool. 8th May, 1891.” 579 Charles Pierre and George’s sons at Rugby were: CP1 Charles Henry (May 1870) aged 13 Left 1872. Elsee CP2 Edward Ferdinand (January 1872) aged 14 Left 1875 Elsee CP3 Ernest Louis (April 1874) aged 14 Left 1876 Elsee G1 George Henry (Jan 1875) aged 14 Left 1877 Elsee CP4 André Leonard (Sept 1876) aged 13 Left 1880 Elsee G2 Hugh Mesnard (Jan 1877) aged 13 Left 1878 Elsee CP5 Augustus George (May 1878) aged 13 Left 1882 Elsee CP6 Albert (Sept 1880) aged 14 Left 1883 Elsee CP7 Henry Greg (Sept 1882) aged 13 Left 1882 Elsee Rugby School Register Volume II 1842-1874 and Rugby School Register Volume III 1874-1887 (1891) George’s third son William Rathbone was educated in Liverpool, perhaps because he was sickly as a child. His youngest son Samuel Heywood, who would have been 13 in 1884, went to “as his father did not approve of the then Headmaster of Rugby”. W H Rawdon Smith, The George Mellys (1962), 11, 13. 241

Articles was abolished at Oxford in 1854 and Cambridge in 1856, allowing these nonconformists to matriculate and graduate without affirming articles which would be impossible for

Unitarians.580 But even before this development, wealthy Liverpool men were interested in university education. Several rich families gave financial support to Manchester College, which was situated in Manchester until 1853, London between 1853 and 1893, before a final move to

Oxford. The college offered an education to nonconformists and from 1840 graduates received a

University of London degree. Some, including William Rathbone and Alfred Holt’s brother

George, began to work seriously towards a new university in Liverpool. As William’s daughter

Eleanor (1872-1946) noted, most of the founders were men who “had never been members of any English University”.581 Eleanor herself attended Somerville, Oxford, in 1893-6, arriving before Somerville was even a college and graduating at a time when women could not receive degrees from the university. Liverpool women of the second half of the nineteenth century encountered similar barriers to their nonconformist fathers

For those born in the second half of the century in Liverpool there was a far greater likelihood of attending public school and university. Alfred’s nephew Richard Holt, who has appeared several times in previous chapters, went to College and then to New

College Oxford. He matriculated in October 1887 when he was nearly nineteen, at which point his uncle had been well into his apprenticeship.582 Alfred’s youngest son, also Alfred (1877-

1931), went to Liverpool University College before matriculating at Pembroke College

580 Oxford University Act 1854, Section 43 and Cambridge University Act 1856, Section 45. In 1871 the Universities Tests Act allowed those taking up fellowships to avoid affirming their Anglicanism. 581 Rathbone, 336. 582 Joseph Foster, Oxford Men and Their , 1880-1892, 2 Volumes. (1893), 301. 242

Cambridge in October 1897, receiving his BA in 1900.583 His daughter Jane (1867-1922) was in

1890 the first woman to take first-class honours in Experimental Physics at the University of

London.584 This was particularly noteworthy because women were considered to be ill-suited for the rigours of science.585 When Jane’s cousin Catherine Holt (sister to Richard, 1871-1952) was a new student at Newnham Hall, Cambridge in 1889 she was advised to “read either a little

History or Literature instead of going in completely for Physics”.586 She stayed for three years and worked in the Cavendish laboratory, but did not take a Tripos. Women’s degrees at

Cambridge were titular until 1948. In 1998 these unofficial degrees were given full equality, and

Catherine’s youngest daughter Edith (four of Catherine’s five daughters attended university) finally received her Cambridge degree.587

The speed with which Liverpool women took up university education shows how quickly the desire for tertiary education accelerated among the city’s wealthy. When Catherine Holt attended Newnham, it had only opened fourteen years earlier in 1875. It was still very unusual for a woman to attend university in the 1880s, and they were steadily demolishing “hasty generalizations” as to what women could achieve, as described by a historian of the college: at

583 A Cambridge Alumni Database http://venn.lib.cam.ac.uk/ It is not clear what education his brothers had. Alfred Holt’s eldest son George (1868-1916) entered the Blue Funnel at the same time as his cousin Richard, but his career was less spectacular. In 1885 Alfred’s brother Robert wrote to his son Richard “Uncle Alfred has gone to Scotland to visit George at Edinburgh and decide whether he is to go up to Oxford or Cambridge”. (LRO 920 DUR 14/1/74). He does not however appear on any list of Oxford or Cambridge alumni. Alfred’s other son Philip Henry Holt (1873-1938) also does not appear to have attended Oxbridge either. 584 B. Guinness Orchard, Liverpool's Legion of Honour (1893), 395. 585 Paula Gould, "Women and the Culture of University Physics in Late Nineteenth-Century Cambridge," The for the History of Science 30, no. 2 (1997). 586 Catherine Durning Holt, "Letters from Newnham College 1889-92 Edited by Her Daughter Elizabeth O Cockburn," (Newnham College, Cambridge1987), 8. Catherine Holt to her mother 19 October 1889 “The girls all say I am not strong enough to do honours in the Science Tripos, as even the very strong ones break down at it, and it seems much better to get a low play and a more general education.” 587 Edith became an academic. The BBC interviewed her in 1998 and she remembered “It was a man's university and very much a man's club. They definitely didn't want that atmosphere disturbed”. BBC News, ‘Cambridge women return for their rights’ Friday, July 3, 1998 243 first it would said that women attempting the triposes “would fail or else break down in health.

When they succeeded and remained vigorous, it was said that they might get through but would not get first classes. When they obtained first classes in the newer triposes, it was declared that they would never get a first class in classics or mathematics. The death-blow to all these hypotheses came in 1890, when Miss Philippa Fawcett’s name was read in the Senate House as

“above the Senior Wrangler.””588 The role of Senior Wrangler was awarded to the top candidate in the mathematical tripos, and Fawcett was only not Senior Wrangler because she was a woman.

The dissatisfaction with women’s inheritance described in chapter three is certainly connected with these great strides in women’s education. Catherine Holt attended Newnham and saw these

“hasty generalizations" being dismantled, but her father still saw her brother Richard as his legacy and dreamed of his political future, and her uncles Philip and Alfred Holt were eager to employ Richard at the Blue Funnel line but would never have considered her.589 Daughters with university educations began to ask why they could not take part in family business or should receive a lesser inheritance. In 1915 Catherine’s sister Betty (who did not have a university education) wrote pointedly to Richard of Catherine’s financial difficulties “I rather suspect that at least one of our brothers might have been in much the same position if his inheritance had been on the same scale as Kitty’s”.590

588 Alice Gardner, A Short History of Newnham College, Cambridge (1921), 26. 589 Richard was sympathetic to the cause of women’s education: in 1917 he spoke in Parliament in favour of equating women’s and men’s degrees so that women could vote for the Oxford or Cambridge MP. He wrote an amendment “to provide that where a woman has had in substance the same university education and has passed the same tests as a man she shall be entitled to the vote, and it shall not be in the power of the university authorities, merely by reason of her sex, to deprive her of that vote.” CLAUSE 4.—(Franchises (Women). HC Deb 15 November 1917 vol 99 cc683-730 590 LRO 920 DUR/14/6/18 Elizabeth Holt to Richard Holt “As far as I can see it would be quite a fair suspicion that Kitty is living beyond her means _ But I certainly think that Kitty was led to expect more than she got from the earliest days of her marriage: which to my mind was hard on her : + probably she is not one of the most 244

The cause of women’s education also proceeded quickly in Glasgow. Isabella Elder

(1828-1905), whose husband John had attended classes in civil engineering but never taken a degree at Glasgow University, was a major benefactor of education in Glasgow after his death in

1869.591 She supplemented the salary of the professor of civil engineering in 1873, and in 1883 created the first chair of naval architecture in her husband’s honour. She was particularly interested in women’s education. The Queen Margaret College provided university education for women in Glasgow and in 1883 she purchased a building for their activities. In 1890 she paid for a new women’s medical school at Queen Margaret College. She was made an honorary Legum

Doctor for her support. Liverpool University had admitted women from the start of its existence, but like her brothers Catherine chose to go to Oxbridge. The wealthy of the city socialized with

Liverpool lecturers, patronized their research, and hired them as tutors for their children looking to be accepted to Oxbridge; but they saw an Oxbridge education as more beneficial than a

Liverpool University one. Possibly the younger generation also wanted to leave, as if they had attended a local university they would have lived at home.

This embrace of public schools and university education for both men and women brought them into closer contact with wealthy people from across Britain and the Empire. This solidified their place as part of the upper-middle class, able to mix easily with the upper-middle class of London or anywhere else. Education also locked those who had not been to public school or university out of opportunities in business. In the last decades of the nineteenth century it was increasingly difficult for newcomers to enter businesses in Liverpool and Glasgow without

commercially minded of us _ I rather suspect that at least one of our brothers might have been in much the same position if his inheritance had been on the same scale as Kitty’s” 591 Joan McAlpine, The Lady of Claremont House: Isabella Elder Pioneer and Philanthropist (1997). 245 family connections, education, or an upper-middle class status — all three being connected to the other. The patchy and private education of the first half of the nineteenth century could no longer uphold an upper-middle class status. An older route to business opportunity was to join as a clerk and work one’s way up, but in the late-nineteenth century clerkdom became entrenched in the lower-middle class. It also became feminized: R. Guerriero Wilson counts that in Glasgow in

1881 only six per cent of commercial clerks were women, rising dramatically by 1911 to forty per cent.592 Men deserted the role of clerk as it became a lowly career rather than the first step on the route to business success. The ladder was now blocked by barriers of class and education.

Mobility and fitting in

Of course, wealthy families still had sons not suited to academic careers who flunked out of public school or never went to university. They were still able to find jobs and maintain their class status. Hugh Mesnard Melly (1863-1924), who appeared briefly in chapter two, was one of

George Melly’s sons who attended Rugby. He did attend Heidelberg University for a time, but his nephew recounts that “he did not cut much ice as academic subjects had no interest for him at all.”593 But at twenty-one he inherited the cotton-trading fortune of his uncle and godfather Hugh

Meyler Bright (1839-1866) and was able to buy a partnership in a wool brokers firm Seward and

Melly. His two sons, Hugh Peter Egerton Mesnard Melly (1896-1916) and André John Mesnard

Melly (1898-1936) were both educated at public schools. “Peter” went to Rugby and Malvern before joining up in 1914 and being killed, aged nineteen, on the first day of the Somme.594

592 R. Guerriero Wilson, Disillusionment or New Opportunities? The Changing Nature of Work in Offices, Glasgow, 1880-1914 (Ashgate, 1998). 593 Smith, 10. 594 Richard Holt calls him “Pete” when recording his death on August 6 1916. LRO 920 DUR/1/10 Richard Holt diary (1900-1916) 246

“John” was educated at Marlborough and also served in the First World War, and was awarded a

Military Cross. He then took a degree at Oxford and became a surgeon; he was killed in

Abyssinia during the Italian invasion where he was working for the Red Cross.595 Their father’s lack of academic “ice” had been balanced by his inheritance, and his sons were able to have the same kind of upper-middle class educations before their violent deaths.

Money could prevent or slow downward mobility, but upward mobility into this upper- middle class was difficult. In 1889 Clara Arnold, wife of Ernest Arnold, headmaster of

Wixenford and nephew of Thomas Arnold (headmaster and reformer at Rugby), wrote to George

Melly of a son of one of their schoolmasters who needed a job. William Wilkins had “been well educated in a good middle class school.” I know that it may be quite impossible as I believe it is very difficult for a stranger without connections or interest to get any appointment in a good house – Still you I have written to George Holt too as I think amongst all his brothers + friends he may possibly hear of something”.596 Other evidence suggests that neither George Melly nor the Holts were able to help the boy.597 A sixteen-year-old boy without family connections or a was no longer able to break into these wealthy circles with the kind of private schooling that most of the Holt brothers had received.

595 Smith, 19. The story of John Melly is well covered in a posthumous biography that emphasizes his Christianity and particular concern for the Abyssinians. Kathleen Nelson and Alan Sullivan, John Melly of Ethiopia (London: Faber & Faber, 1937). There is also a large plaque in that shows him working in Abyssinia in beautiful detail. 596 LRO 920 MEL 33/6210 11 August 1889. 597 Based on the clues in the letter, his career was as a bank clerk. A William Ernest Wilkins was born in 1874 at Eversley in Hampshire, a mere four to five miles from the school. He was one of five children (according to the 1911 census) of James Francis Wilkins and Kate Wilkins — Clara describes them as “rather a large family”. James was described in the 1881 as a “Teacher of Drawing English”, in 1891 as “Teacher of Mathematics” and in 1911 as a “Tutor (retired)”. William Wilkins appears through the censuses after 1889 too: in 1891 as a seventeen-year-old boarder in Chelsea, listed as a bankers clerk; in 1901 as a boarder in Paddington, listed as a bank clerk; and in 1911 with his family in Eversley also as a bank clerk. Probate after his death on 5 July 1920 gives him an address at 30 Sutherland Place Bayswater, and records that he had managed to amass £2678 6s 1d. 247

Many of the businessmen of Liverpool and Glasgow discussed in this dissertation came from inherited wealth, which acted as a glass floor and ceiling to protect their families from downward social mobility and keep others out. There were exceptions, such as William Pearce, whose skills in engineering brought him from humble origins to a millionaire status.598 But these exceptions in Liverpool and Glasgow Society tended to be of the generation born in the 1830s or before. To be in your twenties in the 1850s was a moment of opportunity when steamships were just becoming profitable and new trade routes were blossoming. Men of rich families such as

Alfred Holt made a fortune, but the opportunities outstripped the supply and several well-placed men from humbler backgrounds made their millions from scratch.599 The case of wealthy businessmen goes against a broader historiography that suggests that mid-Victorian upward mobility was unimpressive and possibly lower than it had been at the start of the century. 600 For shipowning and shipbuilding, I believe that the structural changes to the economy allowed mid-

Victorian upward mobility to the upper-middle class that settled down once technological innovation was over. The lines were redrawn, and even though there was great upward mobility from the upper-working into the lower-middle class from the 1870s, no similar enlargement happened at the other end of the middle class. Realizing that upwards social mobility was now limited, wealthy families poured money into preventing downward social mobility for their younger members through education. Young William Wilkins was a potential threat: his upward mobility could only mean downward mobility for someone else.

598 Frederick Leyland is another example. 599 Graeme Milne calls this the “an era of transition and opportunity” in Graeme J. Milne, Trade and Traders in Mid- Victorian Liverpool: Mercantile Business and the Making of a World Port (Liverpool University Press, 2000). 600 Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society (Routledge, 1969). 248

In Catherine Holt’s description of headmaster Alfred Hughes’ family as “very middle class” in 1893, she also mentioned Alfred’s intense Manchester accent. This is another clue to class, and to how rich provincial people became part of a national class. Over time, it became essential to speak with Received Pronunciation (RP) to be upper-middle class. In the mid- nineteenth most wealthy men in Glasgow and Liverpool had spoken with an “educated version of the local accent”.601 But this changed as more went to school elsewhere and to Oxbridge, which became hotbeds of RP. For Alfred Hughes to attend Oxford without losing the intensity of his

Manchester accent suggested an imperfect assimilation to the upper-middle class. It was different however for most women, as Catherine Holt was unusual in attending Cambridge. George Melly

(1926-2007) describes his cousin Emma Holt (1862-1944) as having a “clear unpatronising voice with its Lancashire-inflected A’s…[Emma] pronounced glass to rhyme with ‘ass’ and would offer us in consequence ‘a glas of mealk’.” That difference between /aː/ and /a/ is still one of the most noticeable difference between Southern and Northern English. Melly notes that “Most of my elderly female relations had this slight regional intonation, but none of their brothers or male cousins displayed the least trace.”602 RP was distinct from the accents of the aristocracy; it instead marked out something particularly middle class, that was universal across England.603 In

Glasgow it was slightly different, as a Scottish inflection was more acceptable. There is scant

601 The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (2nd Edition) (Routledge, 2002), 267. 602 Melly, Owning Up: The Trilogy. 116. 603 Harold Perkin defines the difference between RP and aristocratic accents in terms of the difference between Neville Chamberlain and : “[RP’s] affectations can still be heard in repeats of Neville Chamberlain’s 1939 ‘We are at war’ broadcast, so nervous, tinny and insincere compared with Churchill’s rousing, aristocratic prose.” Perkin, The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880 (2nd Edition), 267. To my modern ear, Chamberlain’s difference appears to be someone attempting to be understood, as compared to Churchill’s indifference to his audience’s complete comprehension. The oddness of the aristocratic accent is perhaps contextualized by remembering that the Royal Family spoke with some trace of a German accent through most of this period. 249 evidence from Glasgow businessmen as to how they spoke, but their writing uses some Scottish words or phrases, often in a way that marks those words out slightly. James Lithgow (1883-

1952) writing to his mother in 1917 playfully used a Scottish intonation: “What do you think of

“ma letter” enclosed?”604 Whether this was an accurate transcription of his own accent, or joke, is unclear. But the wealthy of Glasgow already had softer versions of the accent that were easy to assimilate into a RP world, so that the difference between /ʌɪ/ and /a/ was not worlds away. This does not appear to have affected differences in social mobility between Glasgow and Liverpool.

The economic conditions of Glasgow perhaps encouraged mobility slightly later than in

Liverpool, as innovations in shipbuilding lasted longer than advances in shipowning.

In the early-twentieth century middle class, public education and RP supported the idea of being a gentleman. This term, which had long been used by wealthy businessmen in Liverpool and Glasgow, was connected with aristocratic traditions but had never been exclusive to the aristocracy. It was a usefully malleable category that fell between various class boundaries. It was historically connected with the gentry, those who belonged to the aristocracy but not the peerage. But it was also a measure of personal worth, as in the term “one of nature’s gentlemen”, which asserted that gentility was a personal characteristic rather than a class position.605 It might be applied to a head gardener who was particularly well-liked, as in the case of a man employed at Halton Grange around 1900.606 Or it might be given to William Todd Lithgow (1854-1908), a

604 J. M. Reid, James Lithgow, Master of Work (London: Hutchinson, 1964), 60. 605 The Google ngram viewer shows this phrase as particularly popular between 1860 and 1940, after which its usage tailed off. 606 Private information from Angela Goldsmith. Her grandmother, Laura Boston, had a good relationship with the gardener and used to refer to him as one of nature’s gentlemen, possibly a play on his role as a gardener. 250 shipbuilder who had risen to head his own company off his own merits.607 The idea of a gentleman was also useful to the middle class as a counterbalance to scientific and managerial culture. Miles and Savage argue that the “proliferation of classification systems within audit culture…compels people to insist on their own un-statedness, their own inability to be placed or categorized through managerial systems”.608 The use of the term gentleman allowed for a healthy degree of class slippage and class elision that helped conceal inequalities and solidify the position of the upper-middle class.

Honours

Along with education, changes to the honours system in the late-nineteenth century brought the wealthy businessmen of Liverpool and Glasgow firmly within the upper-middle class and a national elite. The last decades of the nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth centuries saw government honours distributed fairly widely among the upper-middle class. Most were at the level of knighthoods or baronetcies rather than the peerage.609 A knighthood was good for the recipient’s lifetime, but a baronetcy could be inherited by his sons and was a higher rank. The reasons why the government might want to distribute honours more widely and businessmen might want to accept them are well understood. The historic basis for honours — land — was undermined as from the 1880s land prices began to fall dramatically and undermine the position of the aristocracy. When land had become more unstable, why should honours be based on land?

Meanwhile the price for fighting elections rose and political parties began to look for ways to

607 GUA DC 35/90 Manuscript history of the Lithgows, written c1950s. Anthony Slaven, ‘Lithgow family (per. c.1870–1952)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004. 608 Andrew Miles and Mike Savage, "The Strange Survival Story of the English Gentleman, 1945-2010," Cultural and Social History 9, no. 4 (2012): 597. 609 The honours of Baron, Viscount, Earl, Marquess and Duke were peerage honours. 251 fund themselves. After the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883, political parties had to spend far more than they ever had on winning elections. Honours, which were chosen by the government of the day, were a perfect thing to sell. But the sale of honours was often too blatant to avoid scandals and crises, most famously under Lloyd George in 1922.610

The expansion of honours brought the wealthy businessmen of Liverpool and Glasgow into the national elite, binding them together with the weakened aristocracy and the upper-middle class of the rest of Britain. A baronetcy or knighthood was an easy-to-understand status marker that was portable all over the Empire. Within Liverpool or Glasgow it was already clear who was important without the need for honours. Most citizens would recognize the city’s leading families, but outside Liverpool and Glasgow this name-brand recognition dropped dramatically.

Honours therefore looked outward, an ironically antiquated system used for a distinctly modern purpose. Where their mothers and fathers would spend money on local philanthropy and local socializing, the younger generation found it more useful to buy into an aristocratic trapping. With its proliferation, the honours system became detached from the aristocracy: according to David

Cannadine, it “took on a separate and autonomous life of its own: it lost its essentially territorial and patrician character, and became plutocratized, and then democratized.”611 The honours system opened to wealthy businessmen only late in the nineteenth century, in the 1880s.612 Early on, several Liverpool and Glasgow men took on honours: the Forwoods, Pearces, and many others all received baronetcies.

610 Tobias Harper covers this scandal comprehensively in Tobias Harper, "Orders of Merit? Hierarchy, Distinction and the British Honours System, 1917-2004" (Columbia University, 2014), 58-76. 611 David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (Yale University Press, 1990), 298. 612 W.D. Rubinstein, Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain since the Industrial Revolution (London: Croom Helm, 1981), 177. 252

Yet this was not a process that began with demand by businessmen for honours — the impetus came from cash-strapped political parties discovering they had something potentially saleable. Many from Glasgow and Liverpool were hesitant about taking up honours, either avoiding or refusing them. They rejected national honours and argued that local or other honours, such as seats on the city council or the position of city mayor, was more important to them. In some instances this may have been a reaction to the corruptions of the honours system. But there was another dimension at work: it appears that these rich families held themselves apart from the honours system. It was an assertion of their particularity, of a particular place in local society and a separation from a national elite. The honours system therefore suggests how wealthy businessmen held off from being part of a national elite, rather than rushing towards it.

The honours system itself went through several changes and crises from the 1880s. At first businessmen were honoured if they were particularly political. The party in power would reward supporters with honours — with supporters often being those who had given large amounts of money to the party. The connection between honours and wealth had always been there — it was expected that a baronet would have an income of £2000 and a peer that of

£5000.613 But the decline of landed wealth opened the way for other types of wealth to be honoured, in a way that very easily crossed into the outright sale of honours.614 Governments began to give away more honours, especially at the lower levels of knighthood and baronetcy, and some rich men began to work out the steps needed to gain a title: become a philanthropist, woo the party in power by running for Parliament in a hopeless seat, and donate money to the

613 Cannadine, 299. 614 H. J. Hanham, "The Sale of Honours in Late Victorian England," Victorian Studies 3, no. 3 (1960). and Cannadine, 308-25. 253 party coffers. Both the Liberals and the Tories whips began to ask that their big donors be considered for honours, and implicitly promise honours for cash. By the 1890s the situation was such that in May 1894, one MP tried to stipulate that there be a statement for each recipient of which services had merited the award.615 After that it improved, and until 1905 there was a certain discretion to the process. After 1905 the giving of honours escalated, reaching its peak in the Lloyd George scandal of 1922, when it became clear that honours were being quite simply sold. A knighthood cost £10,000, a baronetcy £30,000, and to become a peer you would have to spend a minimum of £50,000. Again the process was cleaned up, this time more radically with the passage of the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act in 1925.616

It is tricky to find out why any person would refuse an honour, because refused honours are discussed more in oral tradition than written documents. The Prime Minister would offer an honour in private correspondence, to which the recipient would accept or decline. The information was considered private until the government announced any new honours — and forever if the honour was declined. It was socially unacceptable to decline an honour and then allow anyone else to hear about it. One case for which there is particularly good evidence is

Robert Holt (1832-1908), the Liberal local politician whose family, especially his son Richard, have appeared in every chapter of this dissertation. The Holts were a very wealthy and well- known family in Liverpool — his brother George was a partner in the shipping line Lamport and

Holt and a major benefactor to the university, and his brothers Philip and Alfred were partners in the Blue Funnel shipping line and also wealthy philanthropists. Robert, the youngest brother, was

615 House of Commons Debate 4 May 1894 vol 24 cc410-7 Motion for an Address. 616 Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925 Legislation 15 & 16 Geo. 5 c. 72 254 a cotton merchant and a strong Gladstonian Liberal and Home Ruler, rising to be Lord Mayor of the city in 1893-4. In 1895 he was offered a baronetcy by Rosebery’s government, a shaky period in the Liberal party’s history just after the final retirement of Gladstone. It was politically useful for Rosebery to ally himself to stalwart Gladstonians such as Robert Holt, and the honour was intended in thanks for Robert’s loyalty. Robert refused, but unusually his refusal was overlooked and his name was accidentally announced. He therefore received a flood of congratulations, followed by newspaper coverage of his subsequent refusal.

The reasons why Robert might refuse are not obvious on the surface. The text of his refusal to the Prime Minister was bland. He was “grateful” and “deeply sensible” and

“appreciative” “but I would rather decline the honour”. He had consulted with his wife (the would-be Lady Holt) and eldest son (the would-be 2nd Baronet) and obtained their support for his refusal. He gave two reasons, both rhetorical. The first reason was that when he had become

Lord Mayor of Liverpool, the first Lord Mayor of the city (all the previous mayors had just been

Mayor), that was the height of his ambition in titles. This local title of Lord Mayor was far more important than a national one for Robert. The second reason was that other men honoured by

Liberal governments “especially in this district” had after their honours often become “violent”

Unionists: “I dare not run so great a risk. I trust a kind Providence will spare me this humiliation.”617 The joke made some sense in the context of 1895, when both Robert and the

Prime Minister were preparing for the summer elections which would see the Liberals put out of power by a Conservative/Unionist coalition, but it was a rather poor excuse. It was rumoured to

617 LRO 920 DUR 10/14/1 Robert Holt to Lord Rosebery. 255 have been the second time he had refused a baronetcy, so Rosebery might not have been surprised.618

Some of the letters and press coverage show a strong feeling that even though Robert had declined the honour, now it was made public he ought to accept. To stand firm in his refusal was insulting to the government and even to the Queen. It provoked “a good deal of astonishment” in

London that Robert would refuse after having been publicly named as a recipient.619 In

Manchester there was “curious speculations” because his refusal was so public. The Manchester

Courier assumed he must have accepted and than changed his mind “due to personal reasons” which had arisen afterwards. They noted snidely that “Radicals [such as Robert] are in private as clamorous as any section of the community” for baronetcies, and Robert’s refusal must have some mysterious cause, “for no one would lightly assume that of the Radical party in

Liverpool would wantonly take a step which implies insult to Ministers and to the Crown. It would be intolerable that honours bestowed by her Majesty should be liable to capricious rejection.”620 Robert appeared to have changed his mind and thereby insulted the Queen.

The press coverage that supported Robert’s refusal referenced reasons why businessmen would avoid honours. The Liverpool Courier diagnosed a form of shyness: “We believe this was

Mr. Holt's personal feeling in regard to the matter. Though he is a public man, he is averse to the glare of public light. He prefers to use his influence in an unostentatious way and objects to anything like obtrusive parade.”621 The Liverpool Mercury, noting that Robert had turned down

618 LRO 920 DUR 25 Family Scrapbook page 83. 28 May 1895 and Daily News 28 May 1895 and Liverpool Mercury 28 May 1895 all claimed this was a second refusal. 619 LRO 920 DUR 25 Family Scrapbook page 83, 28 May 1895. 620 LRO 920 DUR 25 Family Scrapbook page 83, Manchester Courier 28 May 1895. 621 LRO 920 DUR 25 Family Scrapbook page 82, Liverpool Courier 27 May 1895. 256 previous offers and made his intimate friends aware that he was determined not to accept honours, suggested a broader cause. “Among local families who have shown genuine public spirit and made munificent gifts to the city those bearing the names of Holt and Rathbone stand out prominently; but it is almost a tradition among their members that honours like the one now referred to shall not be accepted. The recollection of having served the city well and faithfully is deemed sufficient reward.”622 This tradition of avoiding honours was also described by B.

Guinness Orchard in his 1893 collective biography of the important men of the city. He referenced the dislike of publicity, “There is perceptible among our best men a double resolve, first to live on the highest moral level, and second to scrupulously avoid drawing attention to themselves.” But it was also a mark of their status as locally-important men: “Liverpool men have declined baronetages, even peerages.”623

To be publicity-averse and to decline honours, then, was to display a type of gentility that prioritized local connections above national ones. Robert Holt was Lord Mayor of the city, and preserved his letters and diaries in a fashion that suggests he saw himself as an important man.

Nonetheless Orchard stressed “his natural aversion to “self-advertisement” which so many local gentlemen shrink from”. Robert and his brothers were all “shrewd and active men of business, although constitutionally averse to being stared at by a crowd, so that even Robert, after many years annealing, still must often be forced to the front by friends.”624 For Robert to refuse was to place himself among the elite who also refused honours. The “old families” of Liverpool and

Glasgow saw themselves as serving in politics as honourable volunteers rather than thinking that

622 LRO 920 DUR 25 Family Scrapbook page 82, Liverpool Mercury 28 May 1895 ‘Mr. R. D. Holt and the Proffered Baronetcy.’ 623 Orchard, xx. 624 Ibid., 398. 257 they ought to be compensated. Refusing was not at all a statement of political opposition to the current government, or to the monarchy — rather it was a statement of classiness, of rising above such baubles.

There were many, especially in politics, who felt that humility rather than honours would enhance their popularity. Charles Booth, another Liverpool shipowner, did important work in exploring and mapping poverty, but refused a viscountcy. Joseph Chamberlain was always known as ‘Joe’ and refused any honours.625 At the extreme, even the marquesses of Salisbury and

Lansdowne refused to be elevated to dukes.626 But others outside of politics also refused. James

Lithgow, the shipbuilder whose service in the First World War was described in chapter four, refused a CBE and KBE because such honours would supersede his Military Cross.627 Some of this was a reaction to the honours scandals, some to the sheer proliferation of baronetcies and knighthoods, which devalued their rarity. But some part was clearly due to an idea that it was classier to refuse than accept. Orchard described how Thomas Ismay (1837-1899) refused chairmanships and positions in government: “Never hasting, never resting, he marches placidly onward, apparently indifferent to all which ordinary ambitions pants for, the manliest among many many men.”628 Orchard hinted that Ismay had declined honours, but the code of silence around such refusals meant this was just a hint: “Mere gossip, however, has no place in these pages, and it would be useless to seek information on such matters from himself.”

625 “To the end of his life he refused any honour which would give him a title other than Mr.” Peter T. Marsh, ‘Chamberlain, Joseph (1836–1914)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 626 Cannadine, 307. 627 Reid, 60. 628 Orchard, 414-5. 258

Against this idea that honours should be refused was local patriotism which celebrated national approval of local men. When Robert Holt declined a baronetcy, there were some who felt that an honour to Robert was also an honour to the city, because Robert had been the first

Lord Mayor. In the Liverpool Mercury they described “great pleasure by Liverpool citizens” at the news, and when he appeared at the Stock Exchange there was cheering and handshaking.629

The Liverpool Courier likewise wrote that “Liverpool citizens are naturally much pleased that a family so long associated with the commerce of the “good old town” has been honoured in one of its members.”630 The Star wrote that “Liverpool has its own baronet in Sir Robert Durning

Holt”: this reflects a feeling that honours should be distributed evenly between different regions.631 Even the Manchester Courier was able to support Robert’s honour, as “[t]he list of birthday honours cannot be grumbled at on the ground of want of variety.” Because of his family’s shipping line, and his personal support of the Manchester—Liverpool Ship Canal, the

Courier considered Robert “a factor in Manchester commercial life, as he is in that of Liverpool, so Lancashire men will not consider his baronetcy altogether undeserved.”632 Although Robert was from Manchester’s rival, they could appreciate him as a fellow Lancashire man at least.

Within the wealthy families there was a belief that it was classier to refuse honours, but other citizens seem to have disagreed.

Because many honours were inheritable, honours were not intended solely for their recipients, but also for their families.633 The Liverpool Courier mentioned the badly-kept secret

629 LRO 920 DUR 25 Family Scrapbook page 82, Liverpool Mercury 27 May 1895. 630 LRO 920 DUR 25 Family Scrapbook page 82, Liverpool Courier 27 May 1895. 631 LRO 920 DUR 25 Family Scrapbook page 83, The Star 25 May 1895. 632 LRO 920 DUR 25 Family Scrapbook page 83, Manchester Courier 25 May 1895. 633 This might be compared to the accumulation of honours by the Harmsworth brothers: between 1904 and 1939 and 5 brothers, they managed 4 baronetcies, 3 baronies, and 2 viscountcies. Cannadine, 305. 259 that Robert’s brother Philip had given a great deal of money to form a park at . This gift seems to have added to Robert’s lustre — perhaps Philip himself might have been deserving of honours if he had had sons to pass it on to, but he and his wife Anna Booth were childless and left their fortune to family, including Robert’s children. They also believed that his brothers, along with the rest of his family and friends, would have put pressure on Robert to accept.

Robert was the most political of his family, and therefore could be singled out, but the Courier’s appreciation for him went beyond the political: “Robert Durning Holt has no doubt been singled out [from his brothers] for distinction because of his great and steadfast service to his party, but this circumstance does not diminish general satisfaction, as locally he is recognised as deserving of honour irrespective of his political labours.”634 The wider Holt family had certainly agreed in

1895 that the baronetcy should be declined, even though Robert had only consulted with his wife and eldest son. Robert’s eldest daughter Catherine was away from home in 1895, and telegrammed immediately when she saw that her father had supposedly become a baronet:

“Scandalous dont [sic] have it family will go on Strike Kitty”.635 The reply, probably from her father, showed no insecurity and vast amusement: “Announcement in papers erroneous honour declined such fun here Holt”.636 The critical newspapers would have been horrified.

This family unanimity makes it all the more noticeable that wealthy businessmen in

Glasgow and Liverpool did begin to take up honours more reliably later in the period. It is difficult to get an accurate sense, as declined honours are difficult to prove, but within the Holt family there were more and more honours finally in the 1930s. Robert’s youngest son Lawrence

634 LRO 920 DUR 25 Family Scrapbook page 82 Liverpool Courier 27 May 1895. 635 LRO 920 DUR 10/14/1 Catherine Holt to Robert Holt. 636 LRO 920 DUR 10/14/1 Robert Holt to Catherine Holt. 260 seems to have refused a knighthood in 1925, suggesting that their resistance was still in place at that point.637 But in 1935 his eldest brother Richard, who would have become the second baronet in 1908 had Robert accepted the baronetcy offered in 1895, accepted an offer to become Sir

Richard Holt baronet.638 Richard had technically surpassed his father’s political career by becoming an MP rather than a mere Lord Mayor, although he had been forced out of politics in

1918. This honour was instead offered because of his role in the shipping industry, leading a major shipping company through the tough times of the Depression. Perhaps this swayed him.639

Lawrence and Richard’s sister Catherine, who had threatened a family strike if her father took a baronetcy, was also persuaded. Catherine’s husband, a scientist and Cambridge Fellow, accepted a knighthood in 1931 for his scientific agricultural work.640 Again it may have been the apolitical nature of the honour which helped him accept, and as a knighthood it was not hereditary. Tobias

Harper argues that the First World War was a particular hinge point, when the honours system was reformulated around the concept of ‘voluntary service’ and widened to include many more recipients than before.641 But the honours system had been through so many crises and scandals by the 1930s that it seems likely there were extrinsic factors for why Liverpool and Glasgow families began to take the preferred honours more reliably. To reject honours was no longer part of a specifically local form of gentility, and so wealthy businessmen joined with other elites from around Britain and the Empire as part of an upper-middle class elite. The upper-middle class and

637 This knighthood would not have been inheritable by Lawrence’s three sons. Malcolm E. Falkus, The Blue Funnel Legend: A History of the Ocean Steam Ship Company (1990), 148. 638 J. Gordon Read, ‘Holt, Alfred (1829–1911)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 639 It is theoretically possible that Robert had been concerned about the dangers of inherited honours, as by 1935 Richard knew there would be no heir to his baronetcy — he had only three grown-up daughters. 640 William Cecil Dampier Whetham 641 Tobias Harper, "Voluntary Service and State Honours in Twentieth-Century Britain," The Historical Journal 58, no. 02 (2015): 645-6. 261 the aristocracy both took part in this reformulated version of the honours system, and rich families could recognize each other by nationally-awarded titles rather than needing local knowledge to understand each other’s elite position.

The next generations

With their education and status unmoored from a local context, the wealthy families of

Liverpool and Glasgow no longer derived a particular benefit from the cities. This was more than suburbanization as discussed in chapter three — some families left entirely. The Tates show this effect over a couple of generations. Sir Henry Tate (1819-1899), moved from a small town in

Lancashire to Liverpool as a teenager, and there became a successful grocer and then sugar refiner.642 His nine surviving children, born between 1842 and 1857, were born in the Liverpool area. In 1874 he began to move his sugar refining business down to London, building a new refinery at Silvertown, to the east of London, to add to the one he had in Liverpool. With this he relocated to Park Hill, Streatham, which was to the south of London.643 When at the end of his life he became the benefactor for the Tate Gallery, the new art gallery was in London rather than in Liverpool.644 But because he was in his fifties before he moved to London, and the firm still had a refinery and other business concerns in Liverpool, many of his children still lived there. In around 1884 his sixth son Henry Tate (1853-1902) built a home designed by Norman Shaw called Allerton Beeches on Allerton Road in Liverpool, opposite Calderstones Park.645 At the

642 His father William Tate (1773-1836) was a Unitarian minister. Roger Munting, ‘Tate, Sir Henry, first baronet (1819–1899)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 643 This house has been redeveloped as ‘Henry Tate Mews’, a gated community of several very expensive houses. 644 The official name was the ‘National Gallery of British Art’ but it was always popularly known as the Tate Gallery. It opened in 1897, and cost around half a million pounds in total. He left £1,264,215 5s. 5d at his death. 645 Richard Pollard, Nikolaus Pevsner, and Joseph Sharples, Lancashire: Liverpool and the South-West, The Buildings of England (Yale University Press, 2006), 389. Norman Shaw also designed other houses and offices in Liverpool, including the White Star offices at Albion House (an iconic striped building) and Dawpool, the huge 262 same time, his sister Isolina Gee (1842-1935) built a neighbouring house with her solicitor husband, called Greenhill.646 While the elder Henry Tate had set up a home near London, in the

1880s his children felt secure in their attachment to the city enough to build large and comfortable homes in the suburbs.

By the end of the century, however, the London refinery was attracting more of the Tate second generation away from Liverpool, and in early 1900 the younger Henry Tate, then forty- six, left Liverpool for London.647 He sold off his furniture and his collection of greenhouse plants, including 1300 orchids.648 Their new home was Bolney House, part of the Ennismore

Gardens development south of Hyde Park, another home like their old one in Liverpool designed by Norman Shaw and built in 1883.649 This move to London was permanent for Henry and his family. His two sons, Henry Burton (1883-1962) and Arthur Wignall (1888-1939), were still teenagers when their father died of pneumonia in February 1902, and stayed down in in

London.650 His wife Grace (1859-1945) was born in London, so in the forty-three years after his

home of the Ismays, owners of the White Star. Dawpool was so big it was impossible to find anyone willing to live in it after the Ismays left, and it was demolished in 1927. After 1902, Allerton Beeches was owned by shipowner Charles William Jones (1842-1908) and then Sir Alfred Allen Booth (1872-1948). It was demolished around the Second World War. Alfred Allen Booth was brother to Charles Booth (1868-1938) whose American wife Grace Wells (1870-1951) was sister to Eliza Wells (1868-1951), whose marriage to Richard Holt (1868-1941) I described in chapter two. Alfred Allen Booth was in residence by 1909, as he is listed in “New Lancashire Justices”, Manchester Courier and Lancashire General Advertiser, Saturday, May 29, 1909, Issue 16399, 6. 646 When Thomas Gee retired they left Liverpool for Wales, and the house was owned by shipowner Thomas Hughes (1852-1912) before being demolished. 647 LRO 920 DUR 1/7 Robert Holt diary (1894-1901) He writes on Sunday 28 January 1900 that he had been to “call on the Harry Tates + say “farewell”_they are leaving L’pool for London on account of his business _ we all regret their leaving our City + shall miss the support + interest he always took in things Unitarian. 648 The Liverpool Mercury has advertisements for this sale on 10 February and 3 March 1900, and the advertisement also appears in the Manchester and London newspapers. 649 This building has been demolished. 650 The 1911 Census shows Arthur Wignall and his wife living with Grace at Bolney House. The 1911 Electoral Roll shows Henry Burton registered at Bolney House, although he and his wife do not appear on the census itself. 263 death she continued living in London and Surrey.651 Their house back in Liverpool was demolished along with Isolina’s home Greenhill; the demolition of houses in the wealthy parts of

Liverpool around Sefton Park and Allerton during the years immediately before and then after the Second World War has led scholars to call Allerton Road “a document of destruction.”652

The two-generation nature of this move away from Liverpool suggests that there was a compounding effect going on. The younger Henry’s wife Grace was born in Brixton and they married in Lambeth — would he have chosen a Liverpool bride instead if his father’s business was not already pulling the family down to London? If so, would she perhaps have been pulled back to Liverpool after his death, a mere two years after their move to London? Would their teenage sons then have lived as adults in Liverpool? As it was, both sons lived mostly in

London.653 Something of the future fate of the family of Henry Tate junior comes from the

651 She appears on passenger lists to Egypt and from Algiers in 1932-3, and gives her address as 9 Wilbraham Place SW1 London. UK, Outward Passenger Lists, 1890-1960 and Incoming Passenger Lists, 1878-1960 Ancestry.com. At her death in 1945 probate records her address as Briavels Downs Hill-road Epsom Surrey. 652 Pollard, Pevsner, and Sharples, 389. 653 Henry Burton Tate (1883-1962) had a series of personal losses through his life. In 1909 he married Ida Gwendolen Legge (b1887) and they had two sons and a daughter together, but he filed for divorce in 1924 on the basis of her adultery. She remarried to the co-respondent, Edward Thomas Walhouse Littleton, later fifth , the next year. Before the divorce the family seems to have been settled at Billesley Manor, Alcester, Warwickshire (according to Canada, Ocean Arrivals (Form 30A), 1919-1924). Henry Burton Tate also remarried in 1925 to Maybird Constance Gott, another divorcée, who later changed her name to Mavis. She was elected to Parliament in 1931 as a Conservative, and became an increasingly feminist MP until her defeat in 1945. (Martin Pugh, ‘Tate , Mavis Constance (1893–1947)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004) On Boxing Day 1931 Henry Burton Tate was driving his two sons through Staines, just to the west of London, when he overturned the car in a ditch. Both his sons died; Anthony Henry was twenty-one and Robin David was nineteen. (“Brothers Killed in Car Crash” Daily Mail Tuesday 29 December.) The newspaper coverage of the inquest describes their address as Great Cumberland Place, which is an address close to Marble Arch. Henry and Mavis continued to live in London — when he received his flying licence in 1934 he gave his address as 39 Cadogan Square SW1 (Great Britain, Royal Aero Club Aviators’ Certificates, 1910-1950) — she also enjoyed flying. That address is just over a mile away from Great Cumberland Place, to the south of Hyde Park. They separated in 1938 and divorced in 1944; then after painful health problems led her to feel herself an “invalid” she killed herself in 1947. He remarried for a final time in 1944 to Gwen Edwards (1897-1957) until her death. By this time he was living near Bath; her address at probate was Vale Court, Colerne, Wiltshire, and at his death in 1962 he was living at Woodside House, Freshford, Somersetshire (the two addresses are just over seven miles apart as the crow flies). 264 descendants of his granddaughter Monica Pelly (1912-2000 née Tate), only child of Arthur

Wignall Tate.654 Her grandsons include the eighteenth earl of Pembroke, and Guy Wignall Pelly, famous for being close friends with the Princes William and Harry and godfather of Prince

George.655 The Wignall name comes from Jane Wignall, the Lancashire-born first wife of Henry

Tate (1819-1899), the founder of the Tate sugar business. Within two generations the family had moved away from Liverpool to London; within six they had been absorbed into the highest reaches of the aristocracy.

The Tates rose perhaps unusually high, in part because sugar refining continued to be a profitable business throughout the twentieth century, unlike the depressions in shipbuilding and shipowning. But in the late-nineteenth century they looked very similar to other families in

Liverpool. The elder Henry Tate refused baronetcies twice before the Prime Minister warned him that a third refusal would be a snub to royalty — he accepted one in 1898.656 The family was

Unitarian, like the Mellys, Rathbones, Holts and others. Robert Holt recorded the younger Henry

Tate’s farewell in 1900 by noting “we all regret their leaving our City + shall miss the support + interest he always took in things Unitarian.”657

654 Arthur was an army officer. His probate in 1939 gave his address as Lenwade House, Great Witchingham, Norwich, but states that he died at 16 Eaton Square, London. When his widow Violet Elaine Tate died in 1973 (they had married in 1910 in South Africa) her address was 59 Kingston House London SW7. 655 Her daughter married the seventeenth earl of Pembroke. An interview with the eighteenth earl of Pembroke describes how “On the walls, enlarged photographs show Lord Pembroke’s great-grandfather, Arthur Wignall Tate, at the controls of an Edwardian-era 13.5-litre Grand Prix Mercedes-Benz. Apparently the car was a gift from Tate’s father on his 21st birthday. "My great-grandfather was absolutely car mad. I've actually managed to track down the whereabouts of the Mercedes in the photos. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't tried to secure it. I undoubtedly inherited the fascination from him."” George Chapman, “Lord Pembroke – the 200mph Earl from Wilton”, Classic Driver 11 May 2015 656 Roger Munting, ‘Tate, Sir Henry, first baronet (1819–1899)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 657 LRO 920 DUR 1/7 Robert Holt diary (1894-1901) Sunday 28 January 1900. 265

While other families discussed throughout this dissertation have not become quite so aristocratic as the Tates, they have managed to maintain wealth through a postwar period that up until the 1970s that saw escalating taxes on the wealthy. Before the 1880s there was certainly resentment of the huge fortunes some Glasgow and Liverpool families amassed, but there was no political programme to oppose their wealth.658 While under New Liberalism their taxes rose, it was in the interwar that tax really began to bite. This coincided with an economic downturn for shipping and for Liverpool and Glasgow.

The interwar local economic crisis and Great Depression had some high profile casualties in Liverpool and Glasgow. Some had believed that shipping would boom after the war — particularly Lord Pirrie (1847–1924), who bought several Clydeside shipyards and a steel company (Colvilles) to keep up with the demand he anticipated. Quite quickly it became clear he had gambled in the wrong direction, and in 1923 had to shut shipyards.659 This could not help a spiralling crisis which ensued after his death, compounded by his lack of planning. The Royal

Mail group, with which Pirrie had been closely associated since 1903 and in which he was a major shareholder, was headed by Lord Kylsant (1863-1937). The group became major shareholders in more and more shipowning companies, including in 1911 Lamport and Holt. The

Holt in Lamport and Holt was George Holt (1825-1896), brother to Alfred and Philip Holt, founders of the Blue Funnel line. As George Holt’s wife Bessie née Bright was sister to Sarah

Melly née Bright, two of George and Sarah Melly’s sons were important at Lamport and Holt after George’s death. George Henry Melly (1860-1927) had worked at Lamport and Holt since

658 William D. Rubinstein, "What Shall We Do About the Rich?," History Today December 2009, 5. 659 Michael S. Moss, ‘Pirrie, William James, Viscount Pirrie (1847–1924)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 266

1877, and Samuel Heywood Melly (1871-1937) had also joined after leaving school. George rose to become Joint Managing Director of the company, and Heywood, in his brother’s shadow, was

Passenger Superintendent. But in 1924 both resigned in disgust at Lord Kylsant’s direction for the company.660 By then the Royal Mail group was in serious financial trouble and was barely holding on; the acquisition of the White Star line in 1927 finished it off.661 British shipping was dangerously overconcentrated in the Royal Mail group, which was at that point the largest group in the country; and the 1920s boom which Lord Pirrie had expected had not only failed to materialize, but was about to turn to absolute bust. The Treasury intervened to prevent an absolute collapse in late 1929, at which point the group had twenty million pounds of liability. In

1931 Lord Kylsant was found guilty of issuing a false prospectus and imprisoned for a year in

Wormwood Scrubs.662 It was an ignominious moment for British shipping.

For wealthy families it only got worse as far as taxation was concerned. The top marginal tax rate was never less than forty per cent in the interwar, a huge increase on pre-1914 levels.663

W. D. Rubinstein calculates that a bachelor with £10,000 a year would have kept £9242 a year in

1913. But by 1928 he was only a third as rich: the pound was worth half as much, and the

Treasury now left him with £6968. In 1937 he would have had £6222 after tax.664 Now these were of course still extremely comfortable sums, but a shipping businessman’s wealth was not

660 Smith, 9, 13.. 661 Michael S. Moss, ‘Philipps, Owen Cosby, Baron Kylsant (1863–1937)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 662 F. Wilson, How to Survive the Titanic or the Sinking of J. Bruce Ismay (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2012), 266. 663 William D. Rubinstein, "Britain's Elites in the Inter-War Period, 1918-1939: Decline or Continued Ascendancy?," British Scholar (2010): 21. He does note “To be sure, during the inter-war years there were still colossal fortunes, such as the extraordinary £37 million estate left by the mysterious shipowner and financier Sir John Ellerman in 1933”. 664 Ibid., 20-1. 267 quite so spectacular any more.665 After the Second World War this accelerated — it was not until after the war that the political attack on wealth began in earnest. Rubinstein argues that these taxes “virtually eliminated most of the very rich in Britain.”666 Servants became finally unaffordable for the upper-middle class.667 The Japanese invasion had destroyed British shipping in Asia, and shipowners were unable to rebuild after the war. Shipbuilding companies were shut down by nationalisation, sometimes against owner resistance. Sir William Lithgow (born 1934) was furious at the Aircraft and Shipbuilding Industries Act of 1977 and took the fight as far as the European Court of Human Rights. Over the course of his fights about compensation, he came to adopt a Thatcherite position on ownership, arguing that the case had become about

“fundamental property rights which are part of the basis of the free world”.668 His grandfather would have recognized the Victorian nature of this view of ownership.

Very few of the families described in this dissertation have descendants living in Glasgow and Liverpool today. In 1962 a grandson of George Melly wrote that his cousin’s widow, Maud

Melly, was leaving Liverpool for Brighton. “When she does so there will be no Melly left in

Liverpool (the Henry Mellys live outside Liverpool in Crosby), for the first time since André

Melly returned to Liverpool from Manchester in 1834.”669 Around 1912 a pamphlet on ‘The

House of Earle 1688-1912’ described how the Earle family’s long history in Liverpool came to

665 They were not as hard hit as the professional middle class. In 1930, for example, Dorothy L Sayers characterized one of her novels’ victims as of “the unfortunate professional middle-class — over-taxed and with very little financial stamina.” Dorothy L Sayers, Strong Poison (1930), 84. 666 Rubinstein, "What Shall We Do About the Rich?," 6. “In 1953, one Inland Revenue officer claimed that there were only 36 persons in Britain with an after-tax income of £6,000 or more (equivalent to about £200,000 today), representing a pre-tax income of around £56,000, the approximate return on wealth of £1 million.” 667 Gunn and Bell, 97. A. Light, Mrs. Woolf and the Servants: An Intimate History of Domestic Life in Bloomsbury (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2010). is an excellent account of the process. 668 Quoted in Frances Gibb, "600 Million Pounds Industry Claim Rejected / Court of Human Rights Ruling on Privatization Compensation," , July 9 1986, Wednesday. 669 Smith, 20. 268 an end with the children of Sir Thomas Earle: the “old family business of T. & W. Earle, who were amongst the leading merchants of Liverpool during the last century…ceased to exist at Sir

Thomas’ death in 1900, and curious to relate none of his eight sons are now resident in

Liverpool.”670 The Parkers of Glasgow went even further afield, emigrating to Australia.

The objects treasured by wealthy businessmen have also scattered, suffering from shifts in fashions and often becoming museum pieces rather than status markers. Businessmen had sometimes taken objects instead of money even from their companies. Thomas Ismay of the

White Star line refused money from his shareholders in 1881, but allowed them to commission his portrait from Millais and to gift him a dinner service.671 The whole set, costing more than four thousand guineas, is now in the Merseyside Maritime Museum and shows Ismay’s idea of himself. The centrepiece shows a globe and four famous sailors: Jason, da Gama, Colombus and

Cook. Now instead of showing the Ismay family’s likeness to these men, it sits at the centre of the Titanic exhibition, showing the hubris of these shipowners who thought their ships unsinkable.

Other families’ objects have also become museum pieces. Many of George Melly senior’s possessions stayed with his two spinster daughters and one bachelor son at their childhood home,

90 Chatham Street, as discussed in chapter two. When the last of them died in 1944, the house went to the University of Liverpool. Some of the objects from the house ended up in an auction in July 1944, and a sale catalogue describes the multitude of objects that took five days to auction off. The last child in the nursery there was Heywood, born in 1871, but that room still

670 LRO 283 DUN 15/13 A photocopy of a pamphlet entitled ‘The House of Earle 1688-1912’. Photocopied 1983 from Original held by Peter N. D. Earle, 28. 671 Wilton J Oldham, The Ismay Line, 78-9. 269 contained lantern slides, cameras, barometers, guns, and a microscope slide cutting machine.672

Throughout the house there were pictures and objects linking the Melly to the other rich families of late-Victorian Liverpool, including the Earles and Rathbones, such as “Doulton 6in jugs with printed portrait panels of William Rathbone, Liverpool, to commemorate his 80th birthday”.673

Some objects ended up with the city, and at the there is an exhibit with

George Melly’s desk and study furniture, along with a video with an actor playing George Melly to explain the exhibit. The question of what to do with some objects fell by male-preference primogeniture to Francis Melly (1899-1961), whose son George’s memoirs opened this dissertation. Francis faced the question of what to do about a “massive and enormous book supported on an elaborate if spindly brass lectern…presented to…George Melly, by the electorate of Stoke-upon-Trent after business reasons had forced him to retire as their MP.” His answer, according to his son, was simple: “I feel it should be returned to Stoke-on-Trent so that the sins of the fathers should be visited on the sons”.674 The sins of the fathers, their ornate

Victorianism and pious Liberal politics, Francis implied, were not to be visited on him.

The wealthy families of Liverpool and Glasgow were by the end of the Second World

War no longer of Liverpool and Glasgow — they had been absorbed into a national upper-middle class. The middle class which this upper-middle class headed was coherent and unmoored from local places. To be middle class meant being mobile, able to shift with the winds of economic change. In the interwar the upper-middle class took its place as part of a national elite, and the

672 LRO 942.72132 CHA Sale Catalogue of Chatham Street; estate of the late Wm. R. Melly, Esq…sold by Ellis & Sons on Monday, July 24th, 1944 and 4 following days upon the premises, 90 Chatham Street, Liverpool. 673 Ibid, item 454 674 Owning Up 270 wealthy of Liverpool and Glasgow were finally indistinguishable from the rest of the elite by education, accent, or honours.

271

Conclusion

In 1907 Ramsay Muir wrote a which ended with this foretaste of the future:

“The life-story of our community is a long one; if it has been rightly told, it is a thrilling

one too, full of strange contrasts and marvellous changes of fortune and ideas. It has not

been rightly told if, at the end of it, the reader feels any disposition to glory in the

colossal heaping up of wealth and the colossal increase of population. Trade may go as

swiftly as it has come; the great docks may lie empty, with grass-grown wharves; the

miles of cheap houses may drop to pieces in vague heaps where dockans and nettles will

flourish. If that fate should come, what will be the judgment of the world upon the

character and the work of the dead city? Will travellers come to Liverpool in the spirit in

which we may go to Carthage, to view the inexpressive relics of a people that pursued

gain with remorseless energy, and then were blotted out? Or will they come in the spirit

in which we still visit Athens or Florence, to see a real city, a city whose very atmosphere

enriched the lives of all its citizens, a city which, for that reason, the world can never

allow itself to forget?”675

This vision was a fair prediction. The docks are mostly empty and rows of houses derelict or demolished. Tourists come neither in the spirit of Carthage or Athens, but to shop and see

Beatles’ history. One of the pleasures of this project has been to see what the heyday looked like in the wealthy parts of the city. In Glasgow the past is more obviously preserved in the West End

675 Ramsay Muir, A History of Liverpool (Liverpool University Press, 1907), 339. 272 of the city but still takes some leaps of imagination. The worst slums and workhouses are also gone from both cities, and overall inequality has dropped in both cities from the chasm of the

1870s. Yet within Britain inequality has grown and the imbalance between North and South is staggering in terms of income, house pricing, and life expectancy. Glasgow has male life expectancy rates 13.5 years lower than in wealthy parts of London.676

It appears to be a fair guess that inequality will continue to rise in the West, spurring more work on the history of the wealthy. The question of why inequality dipped has to begin in the early-twentieth century, if not before, rather than in the period immediately after the Second

World War. The rise in taxation, as described in chapter five, reduced the wealth of the upper- middle and upper class from the interwar onwards. More study of inequality will surely focus on why by the 1980s the fear of a super-wealthy elite had ebbed away, at least for politicians, compared to the fear of an overall stagnant economy. Had the behaviour of rich people changed?

Or was it merely the stories told about them by politicians that shifted?

With the renewal of concerns about inequality, most of the conversation has concentrated on the very wealthy. In the United States it is “the 1%” that elicits a reaction, while in the United

Kingdom most have concentrated on a “”-type group. What has confused the debate in the is the assumption that such a group is particularly aristocratic.

While the businessmen of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century were quite clearly distinct from the aristocracy, some of their descendants have blurred the lines enough to confuse the issue. The “Sloane Rangers” of the 1980s, as described in The Official Sloane Ranger

676 Office of National Statistics Statistical bulletin “Life expectancy at birth and at age 65 by local areas in the United Kingdom, 2004–06 to 2008–10” (2011) See also Danny Dorling, So You Think You Know About Britain? The Surprising Truth About Modern Britain (Constable, 2011). 273

Handbook, worshipped the aristocracy. But this humorous caricature also made it clear that there was a distinction: “Sloanes make a joke of owning [fish knives]. They’re not supposed to—the

Georgians didn’t—but many do, because Sloane fortunes were Victorian fortunes.”677 Over thirty-five years since, however, the distinction between owning fish knives and not owning fish knives has been lost, and Victorian fortunes naturalized into the appearance of being aristocratic.

If one assumes that the very wealthy today have pre-Victorian fortunes, their continued wealth and power appears more continuous and natural. It is harder to imagine them experiencing downward social mobility if one forgets that their upward social mobility was only recent. I believe the subtle shift from imagining all wealthy people as rich “from the year dot” to understanding how and when certain fortunes were accumulated gives a better picture of inequality that at least helps to discount policies which are neutral or unhelpful towards inequality.678

We will understand more about the flows of inherited money over time, as records come into the public domain. With the release of the 1921 census in 2021, and the 1931 census in

2031, there will be more information about where wealthy people from provincial cities settled and the composition of their households. I would be particularly interested to find out the occupational shifts that the shipowning, shipbuilding, and merchant families went through after the Second World War. I would guess that many went into banking and management

677 Ann Barr and Peter York, The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook: The First Guide to What Really Matters in Life (Ebury Press, 1982), 66. Italics in the original 678 The focus on education as a cure for social mobility, for example, is debunked by Erzsébet Bukodi, "Cumulative Inequalities over the Life-Course: Life-Long Learning and Social Mobility in Britain," Journal of Social Policy 46, no. 2 (2017). and John H. Goldthorpe, "Social Class Mobility in Modern Britain: Changing Structure, Constant Process," Journal of the British Academy 4 (2016). It remains, however, as a key priority of the Department of Education. 274 consultancy — the latter offering “that odd upper-meritocratic combination of love of competition, herd mentality, and aversion to risk.”679 It would also be fascinating to discover where they put the money that survived into the 1980s. A couple of anecdotes lead me to think that some of this money is now invested in modern engineering and computing companies, a minor example of money gained from old technology funding new technology. While the decline of British shipping has had many negative consequences especially for the citizens of Liverpool and Glasgow, it was not an absolute and total loss if some of the money gained has been invested in new areas of the British economy.

Alfred Holt concluded his autobiography with the modest statement “I may give as a reason for ending here, that subsequent events have not deserved notice, none have risen above the level of family records.”680 I do not quite have the same modesty and at the very end of this dissertation come to finally reveal my own hand. My great-great-grandparents were part of the wealthy Boston family discussed in chapter three, as tanners in Cheshire who moved into

Garston, in south Liverpool, in the last years of the nineteenth century. My great-grandmother,

Elizabeth Walsh née Boston (1901-2000), was the daughter who was unhappy with the settlement she received from her father as compared to her brothers, who moved out of the area to go to university, then married an Australian and settled in Oxfordshire. Her glamour and intrigue prompted some of my curiosity in this topic, as an interesting person I knew as a child and have learnt more about since from her daughter Angela Goldsmith née Walsh (born 1930).

679 Nicholas Lemann, "The Kids in the Conference Room," New Yorker, 18 October 1999. 680 Alfred Holt, "Fragmentary Autobiography of Alfred Holt. Written on Scraps at Various Dates. Collected, Corrected, and Printed August, 1911.," (1911), 49. 275

She was simultaneously proud and distant from her roots, keeping family heirlooms and photographs, trying to retain some power in the family business despite opposition from her brothers, and yet also rejecting some of her background. The Bostons were strict Methodists — teetotallers who had mementoes of Wesley in their home — but she married a Catholic and then settled into the Church of England. She was touchy about the idea of being “in trade”: when my parents moved to an address on “Commercial End” she refused to write that on their address, instead writing to them at “Comma End”. She organized a court presentation for her daughter in

1950, when such things were rather purposeless, because she had been denied one of her own by her religious parents.

Her trajectory away from Liverpool and “trade” was matched by others in the family. The

Bostons retained enough sense of history to create a tradition of a summer “Boston Tea Party” which brought together the cousinhood, but it was based at Hemingford Grey Manor, a twelfth- century house in Cambridgeshire which was only bought by novelist Lucy Boston in the Second

World War — not in the least an ancestral home. The family tannery in Liverpool, by contrast, is now a derelict site surrounded by low-cost modern housing. Something about that uneasy relationship with the past, the dance between pride in the achievements of those Victorian forebears and adhering to Southern upper-middle class values, has always puzzled me. This question did not even occur to me consciously as I began this project, but at the end it seems apparent that this is where I have ended up.

What is obvious is that the story of gentrification as assimilation to the aristocracy does not work. As I discussed in chapter three, supposedly aristocratic features such as shooting or living in the countryside developed for many other reasons and fulfilled other goals. Even 276 several generations later, the Bostons have no intention of hiding that their money came from leather tanning. What happened instead was an assimilation to a national upper-middle class.

Rich families became upper-middle class migrants, from nowhere in particular but orbiting around London. The place of Liverpool has no particular resonance nowadays for the Bostons, and Hemingford Grey is an acceptable stand-in for the family past. With public schools and RP, it was easy to be dislodged from local importance, exchanging the firm social place that came from Liverpool Society and being local employers, for a class identity built on money and presentation. Inside that generic upper-middle-class-ness is a connection to Liverpool, but over time this frayed as it became more and more understood as a problem city. I suppose then the answer is that the uneasiness I detect, which can be misdiagnosed as aspirations to aristocracy, is the result of one class identity being layered over with another. The markers which used to mean that the Bostons were important, the tanneries and employees and place in local Society, have evaporated as signals and in their place new social currencies have arisen. Sometimes the two have been at odds with one another, such as their link to Liverpool when it slipped from imperial city to problem city.

While the class which had ruled the cities of Liverpool and Glasgow disappeared by the

1930s, the people of that class lived on. Some moved into the professional middle class, and some into an international elite. Few experienced serious downward social mobility, as they were protected by the glass floor of their money and their adaption of new social behaviours. The change was perhaps subtle, almost undetectable in retrospect. Yet for the cities themselves, as I discussed in chapter three, the disappearance of this class had serious effects. They were the employers, the politicians, the philanthropists, who made the cities in their image for good or ill. 277

It is impossible to feel much sympathy for the rich families who left Glasgow and

Liverpool behind and took their wealth with them. I have shown them when they were complicit in practices that verged on slavery, when they were patriarchal, and when they made huge profits from war. Yet as I claimed in the Introduction, I believe the history of the winners tells as much as the history of the losers. Even their combined wealth and power was not enough to withstand the decline in British exports and shipping overall, which destroyed their coherence as a class. I believe this story gives an example of how unstable class can be, and how complex class division is. If we wish to understand modern class divisions and the range of possible futures available, a little more comprehension of how class has changed might do us some good.

278

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William Durning Holt b. 9 Mar 1823 d. 22 Dec 1887 & Frances Jane Needham b. 29 Aug 1832 d. 6 Nov 1891

(Frances) Margaret Holt Cicely Anne Holt (William) Durning Holt (Mary) Winifred Holt b. 1858 b. 1862 b. 1865 b. Apr 1867 d. 3 Sep 1947 d. 23 Mar 1890 d. 21 Apr 1898 d. 20 Mar 1949 m. 20 Sep 1898 m. 11 Aug 1886 m. 16 Feb 1892 John Richard Lloyd-Williams Hugh Mesnard Melly Oswald Asheton Critchley b. 1862 b. 23 Jul 1863 b. 27 Mar 1864 d. 13 Jul 1915 d. 9 Jun 1924 d. 4 Nov 1935

Margaret Mesnard Melly Joan Mesnard Melly John Asheton Critchley Gerald Holt Critchley Richard Oswald Critchley b. 1887 b. 18 Nov 1888 b. 4 Nov 1892 b. 30 Apr 1905 b. 30 Apr 1905 d. 10 Dec 1966 d. 1971 d. 5 Apr 1917 d. 10 Nov 1981 d. 12 Jul 1983 m. 11 Sep 1912 m. 1910 m. 1949 m. 1935 Duncan Irving Kerfoot Henry Arthur Bromilow Phyllis Tringham Kathleen Butler-Brockwell b. 1885 b. 1883 b. 17 Sep 1907 b. 6 Oct 1910 d. 1946 d. 1972 d. 1997 d. 8 Sep 1982

Janet Elizabeth Holt (Emma) Dorothy Holt Oliver Needham Holt John George Holt b. 1868 b. 1871 b. 30 Mar 1872 b. 3 Sep 1873 d. 16 Jul 1913 d. 17 Oct 1932 d. 27 Jul 1934 d. 14 May 1933 m. 1905 & Stanley Edwards m. 1904 Rupert Oswald Fordham b. 20 Jan 1864 Henrietta Conyngham Corfield b. 1861 d. 14 Aug 1894 b. 1883 d. 31 May 1939 m. 1891 d. 2 May 1978

Henry Holt Edwards John Stanley Edwards Phyllis Holt-Needham Oliver William Durning Holt-Needham Pamela Conyngham Holt-Needham b. 18 Jun 1894 b. 15 Jun 1892 b. 1905 b. 1 May 1907 b. 1911 d. 21 Nov 1957 d. 24 Apr 1918 d. 26 Mar 1988 d. 26 Nov 1977 d. 1997 m. 1922 m. 1961 m. 1937 m. 1938 Frances “Fanny” Millet Allen Sir Arnold Henry Moore Lunn Isabel Katherine Butcher Arthur Francis Hamilton-Smythe b. 1886 b. 18 Apr 1888 b. 27 May 1907 b. 25 Dec 1905 d. 2 Oct 1965 d. 2 Jun 1974 d. 9 Feb 1979 d. 12 Sep 1964

280

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