{"id":27298,"date":"2014-08-11T10:35:09","date_gmt":"2014-08-11T15:35:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=27298"},"modified":"2014-08-11T10:35:09","modified_gmt":"2014-08-11T15:35:09","slug":"ordinary-british-life-before-august-1914","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/08\/11\/ordinary-british-life-before-august-1914\/","title":{"rendered":"Ordinary British life before August 1914"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Telegraph<\/em><\/a> has an interesting series of short articles drawn from their 1914 archive, showing ordinary life in Britain before the start of World War One. This isn’t the upper-crust’s way of life we tend to see in TV and movie presentations of the immediate pre-war era:<\/p>\n

A month before the outbreak of war Henley Regatta opened in \u201cbrilliant fashion\u201d, The Daily Telegraph<\/em> reported, with record crowds and \u201cperfect\u201d weather. It presents an image of Edwardian Britain as we fondly imagine it to have been, before the sudden cloudburst of August 1914.<\/p>\n

Of course, the reality was far different for the 99 per cent of people who did not own land, collect rents or vacation at Biarritz and Marienbad. Most Edwardians worked in dark, noisy factories, cut hay in fields, toiled down dirty and dangerous mines; had bones bent by rickets and lungs racked by tuberculosis. Life expectancy then was 49 years for a man and 53 years for a woman, compared with 79 and 82 years today. They lived in back to back tenements or jerry-built terraces, wore cloth caps or bonnets (rather than boaters, bowlers and toppers) and they had never taken a holiday — beyond a day trip to Brighton or Blackpool — in their entire lives.<\/p>\n

The country was a seething mass of social tension and violent confrontations. It was a land torn and dislocated by the struggle of increasingly militant suffragettes; strikes in mills, mines and on the railways; the constitutional battle between Lords and Commons; and the threat of civil war in Ireland.<\/p>\n

Readers of the Telegraph<\/em> — as a glance at the archives<\/a> will reveal — were far better informed about the true state of their nation and the world than our sugary sentimental view allows us. In a dramatic scoop, the paper had published an exclusive interview with Kaiser Wilhelm II in October 1908 in which the Kaiser had expressed alarmingly frank — and hostile — views about his mother\u2019s native land (the Kaiser\u2019s mama, Empress Victoria, was Queen Victoria\u2019s eldest daughter). In this interview the Kaiser accused \u201cyou English\u201d of being \u201cmad, mad, mad as March hares\u201d for fearing that the construction of Germany\u2019s High Seas Fleet was aimed at challenging the Royal Navy\u2019s command of the world\u2019s oceans. Implausibly, he claimed that Germany\u2019s real target was the rising sun of Japan.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

H\/T to Marian L. Tupy<\/a> for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Telegraph has an interesting series of short articles drawn from their 1914 archive, showing ordinary life in Britain before the start of World War One. This isn’t the upper-crust’s way of life we tend to see in TV and movie presentations of the immediate pre-war era: A month before the outbreak of war Henley […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,246],"tags":[33,91,720],"class_list":["post-27298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-britain","category-history","category-ww1","tag-ireland","tag-poverty","tag-protest"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-76i","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27298"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27299,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27298\/revisions\/27299"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}