Road to War Andrew Marr's The Making of Modern Britain

March 1906.

German uniforms in central London.

The unsmiling men begin to disperse among the early morning shoppers.

SIREN

They'd arrived to bring fear to the very heart of Britannia's imperial capital.

They were now goose-stepping down Oxford Street.

No, this was not a real invasion, of course,

which has been unaccountably missed out by the history books,

but nor is it entirely television fantasy.

It did happen.

But it was a publicity stunt for the Daily Mail,

who were serialising the latest thriller to shock the Edwardian British -

The Invasion Of 1910.

The German military threat was real enough

and Britain was being drawn into a ruinously expensive arms race.

But a Liberal government

had just been elected by a landslide, promising a welfare revolution.

And Britain couldn't afford both.

So, which was it to be? Battleships or pensions?

The underpinnings of warfare, or of welfare?

We are about to enter one of the most dangerous and exhilarating periods

in the history of British politics.

And our stage is set for a showdown.

The Edwardian era is often remembered

as a romantic golden age...

A long hot summer of big hats, cottage gardens,

and messing about on the river.

A time of simple pleasures...

country-house parties, with picnics on the lawn.

A lost Eden of innocence and imagination,

immortalised in classic children's stories -

The Railway Children,

The Wind In The Willows,

and Peter Pan.

Now, it may be partly because of those children's stories,

but Edwardian Britain has been covered by a golden, dappled glow

despite the facts, which are that this was a country tearing itself apart

politically, economically and socially.

Millions of real Edwardian children

were barefoot and living on diets worse than the Middle Ages.

The glitter was real, fun was being had,

but almost everywhere you look in Edwardian Britain,

dark, angry storm clouds were brewing.

THUNDER RUMBLES

On 15th July 1906, a young woman called Adela Pankhurst

made her way to a park in Manchester called Boggart Hole Clough.

She'd just been released from prison

for heckling a local MP, Winston Churchill, at a public meeting.

She was here to make a speech about that most basic right -

the right to vote.

Adela Pankhurst and her fellow speakers

were standing here at the bottom of the hillside.

A massive crowd spread out around them in all directions.

As the meeting began,

a group of thugs began mingling with the Pankhurst supporters.

One of the speakers asked what the "Tory cave-dwellers" and "medieval Liberals"

were going to do about women's suffrage.

The answer was a terrifying Northern roar,

and down the hill poured the men,

many of them carrying sticks, and coming straight for Adela.

SHOUTING

People in the crowd began to scream and panic.

The men went straight for the women, grabbed them

and brutally hauled them back up the hill, passing them from man to man.

Their clothes were half torn off,

they were beaten around the face until the blood flowed,

and older men, respectable-looking men, started to shout obscene suggestions.

The mood of the crowd turned until they were roaring like savages.

What happened here one long ago Edwardian Sunday

was only the very beginning,

because the battle for democracy, women's votes,

would prove to be extraordinarily violent.

And this was only one of the increasingly violent arguments

about poverty, privilege and liberty

that provided the soundtrack for Edwardian Britain.

SHOUTING

BREAKING GLASS

But calming, progressive help was at hand.

In January 1906, the Liberals were swept into power,

promising to tackle inequality and reform politics.

Their policies were exciting.

Their prime minister wasn't.

Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman had a radical streak

but looked and sounded like an elderly sea lion.

Sir Henry once declared,

"Personally, I am a great believer in bed,

"in constantly keeping horizontal.

"The heart and everything else goes slower,

"and the whole system is refreshed."

Now, Sir Henry wasn't a well man, as well as being rather an idle one.

Never mind. He did lead the Liberals to their greatest-ever election victory.

A new dawn after ten years of Tory rule.

And the new Liberal government contained three of modern Britain's great future prime ministers.

Herbert Asquith was ridiculously clever, a self-made statesman

whose sternly sober face hid a wildly romantic heart.

Cartoonists called him "the Last of the Romans".

Alongside him was Lloyd George, a charismatic Welsh radical,

and his unlikely admirer,

a young aristocrat and former Tory MP, Winston Churchill.

Three musketeers, they were ready to slash through

the complacency of Westminster.

But just at that moment,

Campbell-Bannerman's clever lying-down-in-bed cure failed him.

In April 1908, he became the first and only prime minister

to die in Downing Street.

Asquith took over.

Now the reforms would really begin.

A little later, alarmed by his exuberant drinking habits,

colleagues would refer to the Prime Minister as "Old Squiffy".

But in 1908, Herbert Asquith was reshaping the administration

into the greatest Liberal government of modern times.

The Liberals came to power in an age of technological change -

careering motor cars,

the telephone craze,

talk of hydroelectric energy and wave power...

..and, above all, the flying machine.

A Frenchman - Louis Bleriot -

was the first man to fly across the Channel in July 1909.

Britain wasn't quite an island any more.

Within 24 hours, his plane was on display at Selfridges in London.

And a motor car salesmen called Claude Grahame-White

was one of thousands of visitors who came to gape.

Well, Claude was hooked and within six weeks, he'd been over to France,

helped to build his own aircraft

and then, when it was trundled out of the factory,

no instruction, no training, he'd flown it

successfully for at least 20 minutes,

which meant that he was officially

a magnificent man in a flying machine.

The Daily Mail, always ready for a sharp stunt,

offered a prize of £10,000 - huge money,

more than £750,000 today...

to the first pilot to fly the 195 miles from London to Manchester.

And the race of the year was filmed.

Two men came forward - another Frenchman, Louis Paulhan,

and our Claude.

Things didn't start well for Claude.

He went for an afternoon nap

to prepare himself for the race the following day.

Meanwhile, Paulhan, not even waiting for a test flight, had set off.

By the time Grahame-White was woken up, he was already an hour behind

and he decided on a desperate measure.

He would fly through the night.

Now, he had no lights, no altimeter,

no fuel gauge, no compass - this was enormously dangerous.

He relied on the headlamps of friends' cars on the roads below.

By four in the morning, his engine had failed and he had to put down.

A huge crowd gathered and he was off again.

Next time, he was forced down by winds,

to hear the dreadful news that it was too late.

Paulhan had already arrived in Manchester and claimed the prize,

thanks to such dastardly tactics as not having a sleep before he started.

Meanwhile, swathes of deepest England were also sleeping.

Compton Verney, near Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire -

the traditional seat of the Willoughby de Brokes.

Here, for centuries,

there was hierarchy and order, fox-hunting and forelock-tugging.

And it would go on like this for ever.

Or would it?

Soon after the Liberal landslide, a quizzical, long-faced aristocrat,

the 19th Lord Willoughby de Broke, was clip-clopping around his estate,

reflecting on the joys of fox-hunting.

That morning, Willoughby de Broke met an old farmer who told him

that after the Liberal victory, nothing would be the same again.

"Everything that you 'ave will be taken away from you

"and divided amongst the people."

"I didn't believe a single word of it," said the 19th Lord later.

"I carried on hunting as if nothing was going to happen."

For Willoughby and his kind,

the modern world was a most unpleasant rumour.

But they were all about to get the shock of their titled little lives.

From the day the Liberals came to power,

a small army of gloriously old-fashioned Tory peers

had been vetoing almost every attempt at reform.

And in 1909, Asquith's Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lloyd George,

was about to ignite one of the greatest political battles of the age

whose result shapes our politics even now.

David Lloyd George

was the most radical Chancellor this country had ever known.

He was pledged to bring Britain into a new age of welfare...

IN WELSH ACCENT: ..."when wretchedness and human degradation

"will be as remote to the people of this country

"as the wolves which once infested its forests."

But to the rich, Lloyd George himself

was a great deal more dangerous than any wolf.

In 1909, recession was looming, unemployment was rising.

With no State pensions or national insurance,

Britain was still tormented

by Victorian levels of poverty, sickness and hunger.

Lloyd George wanted to pay for welfare reforms

by making massive cuts in defence spending.

But with fears of a German invasion being stoked by the popular press,

he had little room for manoeuvre.

Out on the streets,

patriotic crowds were chanting for the latest awesome war machine -

the British-built dreadnought battleship.

"We want eight and we won't wait!"

Lloyd George's problem was that dreadnoughts were ruinously expensive.

To pay both for them and for welfare,

he devised what he called his People's Budget.

He said it was "a war budget,

"to wage implacable warfare

"against poverty and squalidness."

To pay for both dreadnoughts and welfare,

Lloyd George announced an increase in estate duties -

a huge blow to the wealthy.

And he also introduced a new super-tax for the super-rich.

The People's Budget was a direct hit on landowners in the Lords,

many of them in Lloyd George's own party,

and they still had huge power over the elected Commons.

Lord Rosebery, an immensely wealthy landowner

who'd also been Liberal prime minister,

described the People's Budget as pure socialism...

The negation of faith, of family, of property, of Monarchy, of Empire.

In fact, he said, it wasn't really a budget at all, it was a revolution.

And around Britain, the wealthy began the most ferocious campaign

in the newspapers, in the City, among landowners

and in the House of Lords.

They even formed the Anti-Budget League.

And so, on the evening of July 30th 1909,

Lloyd George decided he had no choice

but to take his People's Budget directly to the people.

That night, 4,000 men crammed themselves

into a former pub called the Edinburgh Castle in the East End of London.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer stood up, to raucous applause.

Many who heard Lloyd George in his prime

said he was the greatest orator British politics ever produced.

And this was to be the speech of his life.

"Was it not a shame that a rich country like Britain

"should allow people who had toiled all their lives

"to die in penury and starvation?"

His People's Budget, he said, was being opposed by "shabby rich men".

He needed the money for dreadnoughts,

he reminded the audience,

"And the workmen put in their coppers."

But when he went round wealthy Belgravia,

"There arose such a howl.

"Well, I tell you, the day of their reckoning is at hand."

This was bare-knuckle class warfare.

Rumours were already spreading

that some landowners were threatening to sack their servants

if the People's Budget was passed.

Lloyd George was merciless.

"Are they going to threaten to devastate rural England

"by feeding and dressing themselves?" he asked.

"A typical nobleman needs one man

"to fix his collar and adjust his tie in the morning,

"a couple of men to carry a boiled egg to him for his breakfast,

"a fourth man to open the door for him,

"a fifth to help him in and out of his carriage,

"a sixth and seventh to drive him...

"Why, a fully equipped duke costs as much to keep up

"as two dreadnoughts."

To his fervent admirers,

Lloyd George was the Welsh wizard.

He was the Merlin of radical politics.

And on that night, he blew on the fire with all his magic-dragon might

and brought the trouble to boiling point.

APPLAUSE

This was an age of public meetings and mass hysteria,

live politics and live theatre.

While Lloyd George was wowing them at the Edinburgh Castle,

another rising star was doing the same in the West End.

Music hall, or vaudeville, mattered in 1909. Films didn't.

They were mostly novelties and curiosities.

Like the aristocrats, music-hall stars would surely

be around for ever...

Not quite.

One young Londoner would become the symbol of this next revolution.

Charlie Chaplin grew up in Lambeth, south London,

and his early life was as grim as anything you'll find

in the novels of Dickens.

His father deserted the family

before drinking himself to an early grave.

The Chaplins ran out of money and food

and they touched bottom here at the Lambeth workhouse,

a place built to be scary,

designed to be humiliating.

Desperately trying to help out the family finances,

Chaplin tramped all over Britain as a child performer.

He had a go at singing, clog dancing and a disastrous attempt

at stand-up comedy

before settling on slickly timed, gag-filled comedy sketches.

In early 1908, he had his big break -

a contract with the Fred Karno Company.

Karno had been a famous acrobat and clown,

credited with the invention of the custard-pie-in-the-face gag.

Now he was head of the greatest comedy troupe in Britain,

if not the world.

Fred Karno's headquarters, here in Camberwell in south London,

was known as the "fun factory".

It really was a kind of factory.

He drove his performers very hard with frantic rehearsal schedules,

and if he didn't like an act, he'd stand in the wings

and blow raspberries at his own actors.

Whenever he was asked, "Who's your star turn?",

he'd reply, "My name's up there, and that's enough!"

Mr Karno - and who's heard of him nowadays? - had a cuckoo in the nest.

In February 1908,

Charlie Chaplin topped the Karno bill for the first time.

In the same year,

a young comic called Arthur Stanley Jefferson joined the company.

He's better known now as Stan Laurel.

So, for a couple of years, two of the great comic geniuses of cinema

shared shabby digs and performed together all over Britain

and the United States.

In 1912, Chaplin was spotted by the emerging American film industry

and offered a contract with the Keystone Company in Los Angeles.

Chaplin had seen some of the Keystone films and he wasn't much impressed.

He described them as "crude rough and tumble".

But he took the money - it was a lot - and said ta-ta to the Karno troupe.

Stan Laurel thought he was making a great mistake.

"We all wished him well from the bottom of our hearts," he said later,

"while secretly congratulating ourselves on possessing a superior wisdom."

Even Chaplin didn't really get the movies.

"A year in that racket," he said,

"and I could return to Vaudeville an international star."

In his first movie, Making A Living,

Chaplin played a hapless newspaper reporter.

Drawing on his Karno training,

he packed every scene of the eight-minute reel with improvised gags.

Later, he sat down with great excitement

to watch the edited version of his first performance on screen...

and it broke his heart.

Chaplin's first film performance had been butchered beyond recognition.

The next day, he was told to go away and put on some comedy make-up.

Anything would do. They were already haphazardly improvising the next film.

On his way to the wardrobe, Chaplin said,

he decided to put on some baggy pants,

big shoes, a cane and a derby hat.

Already, gags and joke ideas were racing through his mind.

And with the single addition of a small moustache,

The Tramp was born.

By 1912, the British were flocking to the movies in their millions,

and the boy from the Lambeth workhouse

would go on to become the greatest film star of the age.

Had he not taken that reckless gamble on the other side of the Atlantic,

he'd have been stuck in the declining world of the music hall

and Charlie Chaplin would be a name

known only to a tiny number of enthusiasts.

Actually, more likely, given the streets he came from,

he would have signed up early for the First World War and been killed.

Throughout 1909, British fears about German military expansion grew and grew.

But five months after his great People's Budget speech,

Lloyd George's attempt to balance defence and welfare

was still being blocked by the House of Lords.

In November 1909, by a huge majority,

they finally kicked it out.

The first time the Lords had ever rejected a budget.

It was an act of suicidal stupidity,

and it was Asquith's chance to clip the old buzzards' wings.

Under the British system,

the Lords would only lose those powers by voting themselves.

A kind of political self-slaughter.

Not very likely.

And so Asquith asked the King

to allow the creation of 400 to 500 new Liberal peers.

Democracy would swamp aristocracy.

Edward VII hated the idea.

The man was, after all, a king emperor.

And so, to try and delay things, he said to Asquith

there'd have to be another special general election first.

This concession did not reassure the landed aristocrats.

In this chamber, behind gnarled hands, where blue blood still flowed,

they started to call the King himself a traitor.

1910 would be a year of political turmoil.

There would be two general elections -

the first to break the deadlock on the People's Budget,

the second to decide the fate of the House of Lords.

The Liberals hung on to power with the backing of 40 Labour MPs

and 82 Irish Nationalists.

And the People's Budget was finally passed.

Asquith now turned his attention to the House of Lords.

His Reform Bill, to cut away their powers of veto,

wouldn't mean the total abolition of the upper house.

But it did mean that the domination

of the House of Commons

over this place would be near absolute.

In May, worried old King Edward died.

His successor, George V, was just as queasy,

but he was afraid the monarchy would be the Liberals' next target.

Feeling bullied, and with great reluctance, he secretly gave Asquith

the promise he'd been looking for.

If the Government won a second election in December,

the King would allow the Lords to be swamped

by 500 mass-manufactured Liberal peers.

To the King's dismay, the Liberals won that election too.

On the 23rd of July 1911, Asquith set out for his Parliamentary triumph.

He had the King's promise to swamp the Lords chamber with Liberal peers

in his pocket,

and on the short journey, he was cheered by crowds.

But when he got into the Commons chamber,

Asquith was shouted down

by almost-berserk Tory MPs

chanting "Traitor, traitor, traitor!"

and "Who killed the King?"

After 45 minutes of this,

Asquith gave up and walked out.

But the Last of the Romans wasn't going to crack.

The Tory party itself was now at daggers drawn,

with the leadership calling for surrender.

234 Tory peers eventually agreed to throw in the towel,

including Lord Curzon,

who'd led the campaign for the defence of aristocratic government.

Curzon said that anyone who kept fighting

"deserves to be sent to a lunatic asylum".

Willoughby de Broke preferred Bedlam to Curzon.

"I am prepared to defend the hereditary principle," he said,

"whether it be applied to peers

"or to fox hounds."

After a bitter debate, the vote was going to be very tight.

Lord Willoughby de Broke could see that some of his allies were wavering.

Some cowardly souls were even sneaking out of the House.

In a rather desperate bid to keep one wobbly duke in the chamber for the vote,

Willoughby de Broke stole his top hat and coat.

In 1911, it would have been unthinkable for a gentleman to go outside hatless.

But the noble peer bolted anyway.

He scampered off into the night

without his hat.

And that's as good an image, perhaps, as we'll get

of the final political scuttling of Britannia's aristocratic order.

The Liberals had triumphed over the Lords.

But they weren't nearly radical enough for the trades unions,

now aflame with anger and a sense of injustice,

and nowhere more so than in the docks.

The Edwardians were hugely dependent on imported food...

..unloaded by tens of thousands of badly paid men.

At the start of a scorching August in 1911,

the London dockers came out on strike.

Piles of vegetable on the wharves rotted,

barrels of butter turned rancid, fish and meat began to stink.

It was getting hotter, and tempers rose.

Armed police and the Army prepared to break the strike.

The key union leader, a flamboyant man called Ben Tillett,

wrote a letter to the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill.

Tillett's letter to Churchill was a blood-curdling warning.

"We shall bring about a state of war.

"Hunger and poverty have driven the dock and ship workers

"to this present resort,

"and neither your soldiers, nor police, your murder,

"shall avert the catastrophe that is coming to this country."

In the early years of the century,

most radicals and socialists had relied on the Liberals.

But the Russian revolution of 1905 changed the mood.

Ben Tillett and his comrades intended to take Britain

down the same revolutionary road.

Now they challenged the Liberals directly by calling strikes all over Britain.

The mood turned ugly when police intervened

in a dock strike in Liverpool.

Violence spread rapidly through the city.

The Mayor of Birkenhead warned that this was no longer a strike.

A revolution was in progress.

And he told the Home Office,

"If you cannot offer me more military or naval support,

"I cannot answer for the safety of life or property."

Within days, the entire Aldershot Garrison had been ordered north

and off the coast of Birkenhead, there were two warships.

The strikes and violence continued to spread.

It was getting hard to see how the Liberals,

with so many landowners and mill-owners among their MPs,

could ever be the true champions of the working class.

In 1912, the leader of the London Port Authority, Lord Devonport,

tried to break another strike in the London docks

by drafting in blackleg labour with police protection.

Tillett came here to Tower Hill to a huge open-air meeting

to test the workers' resolve.

In front of the now silent river and a sea of faces,

with his hat tipped back on his head,

Tillett demanded to know how many of the striking dockers

had military training?

And how many would serve in a workers' police.

And a forest of hands went up

and his language became more inflamed.

"Sedition or no sedition, I want to say that if our men are murdered,

"I am going to take a gun and shoot Lord Devonport."

And later, he called upon God to strike Lord Devonport dead.

And the cry came back from the crowd,

"He shall die! He shall die!"

Mounting panic.

Army camps appeared in Hyde Park, Regent's Park, Battersea Park.

It's reckoned that almost every available soldier in the country

was on standby for the coming uprising.

In the West End, gents left their clubs

to go and buy revolvers to protect themselves

from the revolution that was about to happen.

For a short while, it seemed

that those who predicted a British revolution weren't so daft.

All of this happened exactly between

the first Russian revolution and the second Russian revolution.

And though, in the end, this fever,

with its talk of workers, police and revolvers,

would be washed away in the vastly greater violence and bloodshed to come,

in 1912, the old order

seemed not only old but fragile.

And the same was true in private life.

In 1913, a 33-year-old biologist

marched into the British Museum reading room with only one thing on her mind.

She'd been married for over a year to a Canadian called Reginald Gates

but she was still a virgin.

Her name was Marie Stopes.

And like so many women of her time,

sex was a subject she knew very little about.

In true scientific spirit, and showing considerable courage,

Marie Stopes came here, to the reading room at the British Museum,

to find out everything that was known about sex.

And for six months, she read her way through every document and tract

in English and French and German,

some of them so explicit, so dangerous,

that they were kept locked away in a room with restricted access

known simply as "the cupboard".

Marie Stopes was genuinely puzzled

about what was wrong with her marriage.

She had recently fallen in love with a married man,

a translator of Tolstoy, Aylmer Maude, who was lodging in her home.

Reginald Gates was suspicious of their friendship

and in a jealous rage, he threatened to shoot him.

When Marie Stopes returned home each evening,

her husband was waiting for her,

livid and brimming

with abuse and taunts.

She wanted to escape to the arms of Aylmer Maude

but in those days, for an Edwardian woman, divorce was almost impossible.

Edwardian Britain wasn't a nation of universal sexual repression.

Among working-class families,

huge numbers of children were born out of wedlock.

Among the upper classes,

sexual behaviour was getting wilder.

The late King Edward had led the way.

Rather earlier, his notorious appetite for women

had earned him the nickname Edward The Caresser.

Herbert Asquith's diaries and letters

reveal floods of passion for his much younger mistresses.

If Asquith was an elderly romantic, and possibly a lecher,

Lloyd George was a notorious goat.

Lord Kitchener used to say that he objected to discussing

sensitive military matters in front of the Cabinet

because they all went home and told their wives...

except for Lloyd George, who went home and told somebody else's wife.

But, like Marie Stopes, most people

were still comparatively ignorant about sex.

In the course of her research, Stopes came to the conclusion

that her husband was impotent.

To get a divorce, however, she'd have to prove it.

In May 1914, she underwent a medical examination

that certified her virginity.

And the marriage was annulled.

Marie Stopes wrote about her traumatic experiences of love, sex and marriage

in the pioneering book Married Love.

She was the first to write about sexual intercourse in a matter-of-fact way.

We tend to think of "women's lib" as a 1970s thing,

but it was also one of the growing intellectual movement

of Edwardian life.

GLASS SHATTERS

Just after 6am on the 19th of February 1913,

there was an explosion at Lloyd George's new house,

still under construction near his golf club

at Walton-on-the-Hill in Surrey.

The servants' wing was badly damaged, the ceilings ruined,

doors and windows blown out.

The bombs were simple - canisters filled with gunpowder -

and the timing device very crude -

simply a lighted candle stuck on top of a paraffin-soaked rag.

No note was found,

but the police did discover two broken hatpins

and, in the road outside, one woman's shoe.

The main culprit was a gawky, rather awkward young redhead

called Emily Wilding Davison,

and within a few months, her name would echo around the world.

But for now, responsibility was taken,

on behalf by the whole suffragette movement, by Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst.

Speaking that very night in Cardiff,

she said, "We may not have yet got the whole Government in prison,

"but we have blown up the Chancellor of the Exchequer's house."

Now, some people booed and one protester said, "Why have you blown him up?"

to which Mrs Pankhurst replied, "To wake him up!"

Laughter, applause,

and hooting of horns.

Even radical Liberals like Lloyd George still drew the line at votes for women.

On both sides, the struggle became more intense...

Hunger strikes, forced feeding, windows smashed, paintings slashed,

post boxes burned and telegraph links brought down.

And sweet-looking little old ladies

terrorising the authorities by applying for gun licences.

Next target - the social event of the year - Derby Day in Epsom.

Emily Davison arrived at Epsom by railway,

made her way to the racecourse,

and then marked up her card,

waiting for the all-important three o'clock race

when the King's horse, Anmer, would be running.

The race was a flat sprint.

As the horses turned into the final straight,

Anmer was running in third-from-last position.

Emily Davison slipped underneath the barrier.

One of the bystanders tried to grab her

but he said later that she shook herself free and cried, "I will!"

And then she strode straight into the path of the King's horse.

The horse hit Emily Davison with colossal force.

She fell and rolled over two or three times...then lay unconscious.

Film footage shows her grabbing the reins.

Some believe she was trying to pin a banner on the horse.

Davison was taken to hospital.

Hate mail was to follow.

This being Britain, more concern was expressed for the horse...

which survived.

Emily Wilding Davison didn't.

On 8th June 1913,

four days after her protest, she died of terrible internal injuries.

MUSIC: The March Of The Women

# Shout! Shout! Up with your song... #

At the funeral, her coffin was draped in a suffragette flag.

# ..For the dawn is breaking

# March! March... #

Thousands of men and women lined the streets as it passed.

# ..Wide blows our banner and hope is waking

# Song with this story... #

The coffin was flanked by women dressed in the colours of the suffrage movement.

Green for hope, purple for dignity and white for purity.

# ..Loud and louder it swells

# Thunder of freedom

# The voice of the Lord! #

These rebel women and rebel girls

smashed the complacent face of Edwardian Britain

and changed the image of this country around the world.

No longer the stuffy, narrow, unchanging society.

Suffragettes turned Emily Davison, quite deliberately,

into an international martyr.

Impossible to ignore and unforgettable.

What she did to herself here was horrible,

but what happened to her after her death was everything she hoped for.

Attacked by militant women and challenged by socialist strikes,

Asquith now made another,

even more dangerous enemy.

For more than a generation,

the Liberals had been committed to loosening Britain's grip on Ireland

with a form of devolution or Home Rule.

But they'd always been angrily opposed by the Protestant majority in Ulster.

In April 1912, Asquith tried again.

Under the leadership of lawyer and QC Sir Edward Carson,

the Ulster Unionists started organising fellow Protestants,

and the Tories were with him.

At a vast meeting here in Belfast, Edward Carson challenged the crowd

to raise their hands and declare that,

"Never, under any circumstances, will we submit to Home Rule."

Even the leader of the Conservative Party, standing beside Carson,

raised his hand as well.

And then they set out to get the entire unionist population of Northern Ireland

to sign an oath of resistance,

not just with speeches and pens,

but, if necessary, bullets and bayonets too.

This oath was called the Ulster Covenant,

and in the end nearly half a million people signed it,

including a man called Fred Crawford,

who, to show his dedication to the cause, signed in his own blood.

In January 1913, the Unionists formed the Ulster Volunteer Force

to defend the northern counties of Ireland

against British attempts to enforce Home Rule.

Some 100,000 men joined up,

armed with half a dozen machine guns and 50,000 rifles...

mainly smuggled from Germany.

CHEERING

This wasn't just about Ireland.

All across Britain,

huge sums of money were being raised

for the unionist cause.

In Liverpool shipyards and Hammersmith pubs,

working men were secretly stockpiling massive quantities of arms.

Lorries were jolting across the roads of England and Scotland

with secret cargoes of guns and ammunition.

Young men were slipping quietly away from their homes

to go across the water and fight for Ulster.

Because for many people,

the loss of Britain's first colony would be the beginning of the end

for that great imperial power, Britannia.

On 20th March 1914, British troops based near Dublin

were ordered to prepare to move north to Ulster.

The commander of British forces in Ireland,

Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Paget,

was worried by the orders

because many of his men were from Protestant unionist families.

Paget sent an urgent, secret telegram to the War Office.

"All but two officers resigning their commissions today.

"Fear men will refuse to move."

From London - silence.

Paget sent another telegram.

"Brigadier and 57 officers prefer to accept dismissal if ordered north."

For a large swathe of the British Army in Ireland,

this was close to outright mutiny.

The Government sent a battle fleet to the Ulster coast.

"If it comes to rebellion and civil war," Winston Churchill said,

"the Government will fight to win it."

In the end, the rebellion was stopped dead in its tracks.

Not by troops, not by battleships, but by the Great War.

Within weeks, the men of the Ulster Volunteer Force

would be reorganised into the 36th Ulster Division.

And their action in battle would be so heroic,

the scale of their slaughter so overwhelming,

that the idea of betraying their memory by imposing a single,

united Ireland disappeared from most British minds.

GUNSHOT

On June 28th 1914,

1,500 miles away in Sarajevo,

a single shot rang round the world.

A Serbian nationalist had assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne,

Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

The starting pistol for Armageddon.

The Austro-Hungarians declared war on the Serbs.

The pro-Serb Russians declared war on them.

And, suddenly, half Europe was mobilising.

Churchill wrote to his wife, Clementine,

"Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse.

"I am interested, geared up and happy.

"Is it not horrible to be built like that?

"The preparations have a hideous fascination for me."

Right to the end,

Herbert Asquith was working through the night to preserve peace.

After midnight on 1st August, he drove to Buckingham Palace.

Asquith said, "The poor King was hauled out of his bed..."

to appeal to his cousin, Tsar Nicholas II,

to stop the Russian mobilisation.

King George appeared "in a brown dressing gown over his nightshirt

"and with copious signs of having been aroused from his beauty sleep."

He topped the diplomatic letter, "My Dear Nicky,"

and signed it "Georgie".

But Russian mobilisation continued.

Later that day, Germany declared war on Russia.

Asquith called an emergency Cabinet meeting.

He'd been told that three-quarters of his own MPs

were against intervention in Europe.

Churchill stood firm.

But his great friend and ally Lloyd George

was threatening to resign from the Government rather than vote for war.

Lloyd George and Churchill spent a lot of the meeting

scribbling hasty notes and throwing them across the table at each other.

After it was over, Lloyd George tore most of them up

but his mistress and secretary, Frances Stevenson,

gathered together the pieces and she kept them.

And what they show is Churchill

exerting all his eloquence and cajoling charm

to win his ally round.

"I am deeply attached to you

"and have followed your instinct and guidance for nearly ten years."

And again...

"Pray God, it is our whole future, comrades...

"or opponents?"

And again...

"All the rest of our lives we shall be opposed."

Lloyd George's replies are much terser,

almost coquettish in their brevity, and fewer.

But they do show that he was coming round.

Like most radical Liberals, Lloyd George

had always been a patriotic imperialist.

In the end, he believed that the two democracies, Britain and France,

would have to stand together.

"Awful but necessary."

On the street, it seemed simpler - time to teach the Hun a lesson.

The Daily Mail's old goose-stepping Germans

would turn out to be the ghosts from a terrible future.

An anti-war demonstration in Trafalgar Square

on Sunday August 2nd was a damp squib.

Very late the following night,

Asquith heard a roaring sound half a mile away.

It was the crowd cheering the King.

And he found himself disgusted.

He wrote to his lover, Venetia Stanley,

"War or anything that seems likely to lead to war

"is always popular with the London mob."

On 3rd August at 6.45 in the evening,

Germany declared war on France.

German troops were gathering on the Belgian border.

The Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey,

informed the German Ambassador that if Germany invaded Belgium,

Britain would go to war.

Armed guards suddenly appeared at British railway junctions and ports.

Britannia's home fleet, lights doused, slipped down the Channel

to take up battle stations in the North Sea.

The British ambassador in Berlin packed his bags and hurried home.

At dusk on 3rd August,

Edward Grey was standing by a window in his room at the Foreign Office,

looking down at the lamplighters going about their business,

and he said,

"The lamps are going out all over Europe,

"and we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime."

At 11pm on 4th August 1914,

Britain declared war on Germany

and, in doing so, committed herself

to the greatest bloodletting the world had ever seen.

In the next programme,

anti-German riots, trench warfare, the first blitz

and the dictatorship of David Lloyd George.

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