E.S. Turner

The man of the year in 1909 was Louis Blériot, in whom I have a personal interest, since I was a five-month foetus at the time of his cross-Channel flight. Notoriously, this exploit showed that Britain was wide open to aerial attack and I was one of numerous infants born in the Belle Epoque who were called on to spend up to four years of their adult lives trying to shoot aircraft out of Britain’s skies; and a damned difficult task it was.

The patron saints of tailoring, it seems, include Homobonus, who ‘all week long cut garments that were miraculously assembled’ every Sunday while he was at Mass, and Bartholomew, a victim of flaying, who ‘carried his skin draped over his arm’ rather as if returning with a suit from the cleaners. Whether either of them would be happy to retain his patronage of the scissor-men after leafing through Farid Chenoune’s heavyweight dossier – in which the dandy and the incroyable give way to the quiet gentleman and the dégagé sportsman, only to be followed by a collapse into androgyny, street-wise dumb insolence and ‘a syncopated disestablishmen-tarianism’ – is problematical. This book packs some of the nastiest shocks since Richard Walker in The Savile Row Story (1988) disinterred a Lloyd’s Weekly News headline on a sweatshop exposure of 1892: ‘The Duke of York’s Trowsers Made in a Fever Room.’’’

Making love on a dead cat was a fantasy of the Belle Epoque. The much-quoted squib by Anon went:

When 19-year-old Rider Haggard, an underachiever straight from the crammer, secured his first job in 1875, his mother addressed an earnest poem to him. He had now finished drifting ‘adown Life’s vernal tide’ and faced a stiffer challenge. ‘Rise to thy destiny!’ she exhorted. ‘Awake thy powers!’ His father, Squire Haggard (a crusty fellow, but otherwise unlike the old villain invented by Michael Green), had viewed him as fit only to be a greengrocer. The post found for him was that of junior aide to the Lieutenant-Governor of Natal. Within two years, as a sort of legal odd-jobs man, he had been deputed to raise the Union Jack for the first time in the Transvaal, and had helped to hang a Swazi chieftain for murder (taking over from the drunken executioner, according to his own story). This was good going for a greengrocer. Why, then, did he not rise to his destiny and become a great judge, a tribune or a proconsul? He had the imperial instincts in abundance. His misfortune was that it was the time of the gross military disasters of Majuba Hill and Isandhlwana, with the Boers waiting to snatch the lands the Zulus claimed. Britain could not, or would not, hold on to the Transvaal. Disenchanted, the young adventurer decided that the time had come to make money out of Africa, like everyone else. Instead of digging for gold or diamonds, he turned to supplying ostrich feathers for fine ladies back home. Four years after hoisting the Union flag he and his wife (a ‘brick’ of a girl, not his first choice) rented their house at £50 a week to the members of a Royal Commission organising the cession of the Transvaal, leaving Queen Victoria to enjoy that most nebulous of assets, suzerainty. Then he was back in Britain, with a confident presence and a good moustache, an imagination topped up by strange sights and ‘the highest sort of shame, shame for my country’. And perhaps a touch of shame at having made £50 a week out of the national climb-down?

In the sixth year of Queen Victoria’s reign two well-bred brothers-in-law faced each other with pistols in the fields of Camden Town and one shot the other dead. The survivor, who had issued the challenge, was sure that his Merciful and All-Seeing Maker would hold him guiltless, for he had been grievously wronged: in the course of a business dispute he had been ordered out of the other man’s house in front of a servant. Both parties were officers and gentlemen, and at this level a breach of good manners could carry the death penalty. ‘Satisfaction’ could be demanded for an accusation of lying or cowardice, for eyeing a woman, for derisive laughter or taking a pinch of someone’s snuff without permission. Such rules did not apply, of course, to solicitors or tradesmen, though editors and even contributors could find themselves called out. The affair of the brothers-in-law greatly perturbed nation, government, church and throne. Thereafter the rate of duelling fell to a trickle, but there were many who saw its decline as a fatal blow to the maintenance of good behaviour.