Observatoire de la société britannique 11 (2011) Londres : capitale internationale, multiculturelle et olympique ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ Susan Finding London 1911 : celebrating the imperial ................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ Avertissement Le contenu de ce site relève de la législation française sur la propriété intellectuelle et est la propriété exclusive de l'éditeur. 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Référence électronique Susan Finding, « London 1911 : celebrating the imperial », Observatoire de la société britannique [En ligne], 11 | 2011, mis en ligne le 01 août 2012, consulté le 03 octobre 2013. URL : http://osb.revues.org/1178 ; DOI : 10.4000/osb.1178 Éditeur : Université du Sud-Toulon-Var http://osb.revues.org http://www.revues.org Document accessible en ligne sur : http://osb.revues.org/1178 Document généré automatiquement le 03 octobre 2013. La pagination ne correspond pas à la pagination de l'édition papier. Tous droits réservés London 1911 : celebrating the imperial 2 Susan Finding London 1911 : celebrating the imperial Pagination de l'édition papier : p. 21-37 Introduction 1 The year 1911 is a choice vantage point from which to survey London at the beginning of the twentieth century in the perspective of the international, multicultural and Olympic dimensions of the city. It was a year of pomp and circumstance, of a Coronation and a Festival of Empire1, a year of stock-taking with the census, but it was also a year of change: in social and political expectations and achievements; in technological developments, and in principal characters in the country’s pageantry. It was also, it is to be argued, the year in which London took on the mantle of capital of the British Empire, the ‘heart of the Empire’ as well as the heart of the nation, in its public persona, its town planning, its ceremonial architecture, and its public displays. 2 Celebrating the imperial front when on the European and domestic scenes the situation was far from glorious appear to be a recurrent theme in history2. In this case, the nation, and especially its political, social and cultural elites appear to have been throwing a veil over the less congenial aspects of the British social condition, capturing public imagination, panem et circenses, keeping the masses amused, and turning their thoughts away from the visible injustices on the streets and in the homes of London people, a landed class with all the political power and a poor community whose slums in the heart of the imperium left the impression of a ‘heart of darkness’ in ‘darkest England’3. 3 The imperial veneer bestowed on Britain’s capital took the form of official celebrations and semi-official and commercial shows from processions and parades, to pageants and pleasure grounds. London imperial 4 Seat of the government and administration of Great Britain and the British Empire, London had by 1911 truly assumed its central role and invented its imperial persona. The colonial office, India House, Australia House4, were situated in the Foreign Office in Whitehall, between Horseguard’s Parade, Downing Street and Parliament Street. South Africa House a few hundred yards up Whitehall on Trafalgar Square. The latter formed the hub leading from the political and administrative districts to the commercial and financial centres of the West End, Holborn and the City and the popular areas of the East End and the Docks5. 5 From within these walls, Britain supervised trade with its Dominions and administered its colonies. According to the 1911 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica : The white population of the empire reached in 1901 a total of over 53 000 000, or something over one-eighth of its entire population, which, including native races, is estimated at about 400 000 000. [...] The population of the empire may therefore be calculated as amounting to something more than one-fourth of the population of the world. [...] The British empire gives occupation to more than one-third of the persons employed in mining and quarrying in the world. [...] it produces one-third of the coal supply of the world, one-sixth of the wheat supply, and very nearly two-thirds of the gold supply. But while these figures may be taken as in themselves satisfactory, it is far more important to remember that as yet the potential resources of the new lands opened to enterprise have been barely conceived, and their wealth has been little more than scratched.6. 6 Such imperial panegyrics and disregard for ‘native races’ common in official discourse reflect not only British policies but also the pride of place which was deemed natural amongst the ruling elite. London, as capital city, figured heavily in this constellation as the heart, in the geographical and medical sense of the metaphor, of imperial activity. Two paintings portraying the Royal Exchange, bustling streets and a horizon-less city skyline, from this period celebrate that nomenclature: Niels Moeller Lund’s 1904 oil painting “The Heart of the Empire” hanging Observatoire de la société britannique, 11 | 2011 London 1911 : celebrating the imperial 3 in the Guildhall, London, and F.M. Bell-Smith’s 1909 watercolour of the same name, in Vancouver (Canada)’s City Archives7. 7 Compared with the Empire and Dominion population, that of London, the capital city of the empire, might appear limited at eleven and a half million souls in 1911 (Greater London: 7 537 196, Inner London: 4 892 7108) but it made London the biggest capital city in the world at the time, a bustling town where the dynamics of world trade were everywhere visible. 8 The London docks were the centre of a vast network of shipping lines bringing raw material and foodstuffs to Britain and taking manufactured exports to its trade partners (along with Liverpool) with the colonies. Empire trade stood for a third of British exports and a quarter of its imports (one half and more of its staple foodstuffs such as wheat, rice, tea, cocoa, and more surprisingly, cheese, tin, wool, jute, oilseed, rubber). However it was not trade which made the Empire vital to Britain (though this was to be the case in the inter-war years) or to London. Looked at in another way, two-thirds of exports and three-quarters of British imports were non-imperial9.In 1907 one-third of the goods imported to the United Kingdom came in through the Thames, and one half (53%) of the foreign and colonial produce exported. The Thames lighter-men also dealt with 17.5% of the home produced goods exported by the UK, and one-fifth of all import-export bonded goods10. 9 Occupational distribution in Britain in 1911 was still dominated by domestic service (1 302 438), agriculture (1 229 555), coal mining (971 236), building (817 942) and cotton manufacture (623 825)11. London’s contribution to the national economy in 1907 was nevertheless estimated at 18.8% of all taxes and duties raised in the country12. Manufacturing and small scale workshops employed over 684 000 Londoners in 1904 and the number of dock workers varied monthly between 3000 and 650013 but the total employed in and around the docks at the turn of the century reached fifty thousand14. 10 The administrative organisation of the capital had been rethought with the new London County Council in 1889 (1888 Local Government Act) to which a large number of progressive councillors had been elected, including Sidney Webb, Will Crooks, John Benn, John Burns (later to become a wartime Minister) and Ben Tillett, the docker’s leader15. The LCC was responsible in large part for progress in transport and town planning, and, from 1904, educational provision in the metropolis. In 1910, plans were made to build County Hall, on the south bank of the Thames, destined to become the home of the London ‘government’ in grandiose fashion16. 11 London’s urban growth continued abated. Walter Besant, the London essayist, reckoned there were two million inhabitants in the new districts17 of West Ham, East Ham and Stratford, a figure surpassing that of capital cities such as Berlin, Saint-Petersburg or Philadelphia. The population of West Ham rose from 19 000 in 1851 to 270 000 in 190118.