Songs of Innocence (8 page)

The best kind of childhood, then, was spent outdoors in the countryside, largely free from the ministrations of the adult world but always under its watchful gaze, and with regular parental
interventions. This growing obsession with the virtues of the countryside and fresh air had its roots in mythology, then, in a desire to return to something that resembled the core of what the
nation thought of as ‘Englishness’. ‘The English are by nature a country people. The very manner in which they neglect their towns proves that,’
The
Times
²⁰
explained. Yet there was an even more pressing, more pragmatic urge to find a healthier way of life for the next generation: the very
future of the Empire was at stake.

3
 Scout’s Honour

As Sonia Keppel’s mother had celebrated the Relief of Mafeking astride a Trafalgar Square lion in May 1900, Robert Baden-Powell – commander of the British troops
– had been reflecting on a job well done. The siege had lasted 217 days and its victorious end turned him into a national hero. Yet a few years on Baden-Powell had concerns on his mind, too
– about the future of Britain’s young. His intervention would have a profound effect on attitudes to, and the lives of, millions of children and young people – an effect whose
ripples still spread today.

The youth of Mafeking had done sterling work during the siege. Organized into a well-run cadet force in khaki uniforms and wide-brimmed hats and with a thirteen-year-old named Warner Goodyear as
Sergeant Major, they had acted as lookouts and had carried messages, often as far as a mile over open ground. Back in Britain, and with time to reflect, Baden-Powell now wondered whether the
children of the English slums would have been up to the job.

Even before the Boer War, the future founder of the Scout movement had been worrying about this issue. He had been very struck by a book called
Degeneration
, which had made quite a stir
in the early 1890s. Its author, Max Nordau, had claimed that a wave of degenerate writers and artists – Oscar Wilde and Henrik Ibsen, to
name but two – was
symptomatic of a deeper malaise. Socialism, anarchism and the demand for women’s rights were corroding the values of European societies, Nordau said. As a result they were ‘marching to
certain ruin because it is too worn out and flaccid to perform great tasks’.
¹

In fact, Britain’s eventual victory in the Boer War masked the fact that throughout the conflict there had been concern about the physical fitness of many of the British troops. In 1900,
the army had been forced to cut the minimum height requirement for infantry soldiers from five foot three and a half inches to five foot three, yet even so almost three out of ten prospective
recruits were rejected.

Now, Baden-Powell became a leading voice in the national debate about where the youth of Britain’s industrial cities was headed. In February 1904, in an address to the Liverpool Patriotic
Society, he described working-class teenage boys as ‘loafers’ and ‘wasters’. They drank, smoked and watched – rather than played – sports. They gambled and spent
hours on street corners. Even the public schoolboy was not immune to slouching around with a cigarette in his mouth and his hands in his pockets. The message hit home, not least because it chimed
with an already rising note of alarm in the public discourse on the issue. An official committee had been set up to investigate whether – despite advances in public health –
Britain’s physique was deteriorating. If it was, Baden-Powell and others pointed out, it would endanger not just the economic wellbeing of the nation but also its defence, and the future of
its Empire.

A walk around any inner-city area would have confirmed the impression – life had not been easy for working-class families in the last years of Victoria’s reign. The disruption to
colonial trade during the Boer War had led to unemployment and a drop in wages, and the quality of the food eaten by the poor had also deteriorated. White bread had largely replaced wholemeal, and
this alone was a
major factor in determining children’s condition, for bread – along with unfortified margarine and cheap jam, which sometimes contained so little
fruit that it contained wood chips to mimic pips – formed the basis of most children’s diets. In Dundee, one observer reported that ‘a combination of hot strong tea and soft bread
is fatal to the teeth as well as bad for the digestion. Yet this is the most frequent diet taken by the working classes.’
²

Edith Sowerbutts, who was born in Suffolk in 1896 but grew up in London, recalled later her shock at seeing children her own age in Camden Town and Bloomsbury, dressed in rags:
³
‘I became sharply aware of poverty,’ she wrote. ‘Around the streets were pasty-faced, ragged, barefoot children, verminous and smelly. They
stank not only of body dirt, but also had that unmistakeable odour of the badly under-nourished and unhealthy. Little urchins who played in the streets when I was a child were puny and pallid,
often had rotting grey teeth and always hair full of nits.’

By contrast, the diet in the Suffolk countryside, where Olive Everson was growing up in the environs of a ‘Big House’, was stodgy but plentiful: ‘On our breakfast toast we
usually had dripping from the Hall kitchen. We children liked cocoa to drink at breakfast. The meat joint was for weekends of course, but there was some kind of hot meal each day. We had bread and
butter pudding, currant duff, treacle pudding. A general favourite was suet pudding, half of which we usually reserved for the second course, to be eaten with golden syrup. Once a week we had pea
soup, very thick . . . on Friday when the Dutch oven was in use there was lovely, tasty potato pie.’

Seebohm Rowntree, who had previously noted stark differences in height and weight between the children of the rich and of the poor, pointed out that country children fattened on a diet such as
Olive enjoyed had, up until recently, been replenishing the puny population stocks of the towns. But now the stock of strong countryfolk was dwindling.

‘Already the country dwellers have given up their best, and the prospect, from the point of view of the maintenance of the national physique, is not bright,’
he wrote.
⁴
‘It is doubtful whether the health conditions in the cities are being improved as rapidly as the vitality of the country districts
is being exhausted.’ Rowntree was concerned, too, about a moral decline in the population: ‘Work on the land, in constant contact with natural objects and often in comparative
isolation, produces a solid strength of character which our English nation can ill afford to lose . . . The town dweller suffers from living too quickly and living in a crowd. His opinions are the
opinions of the crowd – and a crowd is easily swayed, for evil as well as for good.’

The idea of the countryside, and of a sort of natural connection between the innocence of children and a perceived purity in the rural environment, had long held a powerful place in European
culture. And, gradually, as urbanization proceeded apace, it had gained almost the status of a lost land – a repository, in the popular imagination, of all that had previously been good and
desirable about Englishness. But while the devotees of the Arts and Crafts movement filled the rural idyll of
their
minds with free-spirited elves and sprites, left to run free among softly
wooded glades, the followers of Baden-Powell had quite another idea. Their England was a far more militaristic, colonialist land. And just as the German
völkisch
movement moved on from
an early Romantic nationalism, its interest in self-sufficiency and anti-urbanism to a much harder-edged form of patriotism, so the English notion of the rural ideal began to move in the same
direction. Europe was gearing up for war.

The state of Britain’s children became a central theme in an increasingly fraught debate about the future of the nation – and to some extent, the facts seemed to support the
doomsayers. For generations, there had been around thirty-four births each year for every 1,000 people, and in the mid-Victorian period this had risen slightly. But families were now getting
smaller, and by 1914 the birth rate
had dropped to twenty-four per 1,000 – a decline of 33 per cent in forty years. This would not have mattered much – after all,
the death rate was falling too – except for one factor. The poor, unable to take advantage of contraception, were continuing to procreate at a much faster rate than the rich. It was
middle-class families that were getting smaller. Sidney Webb, joint founder of the Fabian Society, published a tract claiming that the number of babies born in England and Wales had fallen by
200,000 in two decades: ‘It is the differential character of the decline in birth rate, rather than the actual extent of the decline, which is of the gravest import. Volitional regulation of
the marriage state is demonstrably at work in many different parts of Great Britain, among all social grades except probably the very poorest.’ Both the
Daily Mail
and the
Lancet
weighed in to sound the alarm, describing the falling birth rate as ‘an ominous threat’, a ‘menace’ and ‘a national calamity’.
⁵
Yet these eugenic fears would prove unfounded, for none of those who chose to comment on the problem had considered the differential death rate. In the event,
the balance would be maintained – the children of the poorest remained almost three times as likely to die in their first year as the children of the wealthiest.

Even so, the government’s Interdepartmental Committee on Physical Deterioration, which reported in 1904, prescribed radical action to boost the health of the working class. A slum
clearance programme was needed, it said, and the state might have to intervene in the lives of those who were incapable of an acceptable ‘standard of decency’: ‘In the last resort
this might take the form of labour colonies with powers of compulsory detention. The children of persons so treated might be lodged temporarily in public nurseries or boarded out,’ it
suggested. Feckless parents might be held liable for the costs of this, and subjected to forced labour until they had paid off the debt.
⁶

Others had radical solutions in mind, too. S. C. Johnson, a
contemporary historian, suggested mass emigration:
⁷
‘Population, we know, increases more freely in the colonies than at home; therefore, if a number of the inhabitants of the United Kingdom are permitted to emigrate, it is logical to argue
that the empire will benefit numerically and, consequently, in military and commercial strength.’ Naturally, the colonies would be expected to come to Britain’s aid in any future
military conflict, he said.

Britain was already, and would remain, a major exporter of its population, but in the event no such radical measures were taken, and indeed there were already some signs that the health of the
urban population was improving. Child mortality was dropping, even in the poorest areas, and the average life expectancy was rising, thanks to improvements in public health and medicine.

As before, charities continued to plug many of the cracks in the fabric of inner-city life. In Dundee, the school board authorized head teachers to offer ‘penny dinners’ of soup and
bread to the neediest children. For the first time, childcare manuals began to be distributed among poorer families,
⁸
many of them by organizations
such as the Ladies Sanitary Association and the Infant Health Societies of Marylebone and St Pancras. Some of the advice was brutal. In
Mrs Blossom on Babies
⁹
, Helen Hodgson, a Durham health worker, advised that dummies were ‘an invention of the devil to tempt mothers to harm their children. If the Lord had intended little
babies to be always sucking something, he’d have sent them with dummies round their necks already.’ More liberal was the St Pancras School for Mothers, set up in 1907, which offered a
‘Babies’ Welcome’ where infants could be weighed and examined free of charge by a doctor. Breastfeeding was recommended, and breastfeeding mothers were offered free dinners.

At around this time, pasteurized milk began to be more widely available, as dairies were set up under the leadership of an American paediatrician called Luther Emmett Holt. Holt was the Gina
Ford of
his day, and his
Care and Feeding of Children
,
¹⁰
originally written as a training manual for nurses in the
New York Babies’ Hospital, was revised twelve times during his lifetime. Recognizing that contaminated milk was a major cause of ill-health among children, he established a chain of
laboratories to deliver pasteurized milk in sealed bottles to doorsteps in the United States. In 1914, he began doing the same in England, from a dairy at Wembley.

But measures designed to improve the nation’s health, and in particular that of its children, were not universally welcomed. As doctors pressed for more vaccination – smallpox jabs
had just become compulsory and had massively reduced the incidence of the disease – parents pressed for a right to choose. There was concern that the use of infected calves’ lymph in
the vaccinations would transmit tetanus, syphilis, tuberculosis and other diseases. Anti-vaccination societies began sending postcards to new parents, urging them to withdraw their babies from the
schemes.

Such was the ferocity of the protests that the government was urged to withdraw the penalties it had previously imposed on recalcitrant parents. Sonia Jex-Blake, one of the pioneers of
women’s medical education, was horrified. ‘In civilised communities the wellbeing of the many must override the suicidal hobbies of the few,’ she wrote.
¹¹
‘Just as people should be stopped from setting their own houses on fire because of the danger to other people in the street, so parents should be forced to
vaccinate their children for the general good.’ Gradually, the fuss would die down, and children’s health would continue to improve – until the vicissitudes of the next war came
along to cause another setback.