1867 AND ALL THAT A “KNOCK BRITAIN” MOVEMENT THAT STARTED 100 YEARS AGO

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31348, 19 April 1967, Page 14

1867 AND ALL THAT A “KNOCK BRITAIN” MOVEMENT THAT STARTED 100 YEARS AGO

(By

PETER JENKINS

S <n the "Guardian". Manchester/

(Reprinted by arrangement;

Self-denigration is seen as a recent British habit. Yet like many other things British it is at least one hundred years, old. From April 1 1867, there was staged in Paris one of those great industrial and commercial exhibitions which served as milestones along the nineteenth century pursuit of progress. Britain did badly for prizes at the Exposition Universelie compared with previous international exhibitions, especially the triumphant Great Exhibition in London in 1851. British visitors to Paris in 1867 were pulled up short by the engineering advances which had been made by the Germans and to a lesser degree the French even in the five years since the Paris Exhibition of 1862. Soul-seeking commenced. Was Britain falling behind?

If any man deserves tbe credit (or the blame) for starting the “knock Britain” movement which so flourishes today it is Lyon Playfair, chemist, educational reformer and politician. Playfair had been a Special Commissioner for the Crystal Palace Exhibition and was one of the international jurors at Paris in 1867. On his return he called for an urgent inquiry into technical education in Britain. He wrote a letter to Lord Taunton, who was chairman of a commission then inquiring into public schools. The letter said: “That as an inevitable result of the attention given to technical education abroad and of its neglect in England, other nations must advance in industry at a greater rate than our own country. . . . This result has already arrived for some of our staple Industries.” Technical Education

Playfair began a controversy which was in effect about economic growth. There was a correspondence in "The Times.” Scientists like Huxley and Kelvin supported his campaign for organised technical education (Britain and Belgium were the only two advanced industrial countries without it) and for State aid for scientific research. The publicist Samuel Smiles supported them. So did many business men: for example, James Kitson, a Leeds ironmaster, who told the committee set up by the Government in response to the furore caused by Playfair: “I do not know a single manager of an iron works in Yorkshire who understands the simple elements of chemistry.” Concern about technological backwardness was by no means, however, the only familiar cry of those times. Visitors returning from Paris complained that the trade unions were holding Britain back in relation to her Continental competitors. Following trade union outrages in Sheffield in 1867 the first Royal Commission on the trade unions was set up. The Victorians began to worry about employers and unions sharing in what Halevy called—in a phrase which would do well for a

leading article in 1967—“ an unconscious alliance against that appetite for work, that zeal for production, by which British industry had conquered the markets of the world.”

End Of Pre-eminence History can make too much of dates. Economic historians tend to take 1873, the beginning of what is called the Great Depression, as a convenient date for marking the passing of the Victorian heyday, the end of British preeminence as the “workshop of the world” and the beginning of a relative decline. But if any year marks the cracking of confidence it is 1867. The year of the Paris Exhibition and the trade union disturbances followed the year of the greatest financial crisis for thirty years; in 1867, 1600 people were obliged to give up their carriages.

It was the year of Reform —’The end of poor old England” said Carlyle—and of the publication in German of “Das Kapital.” True, adverse comparisons between Britain and abroad were made before 1867; French superiority in chemical technology was noted as early as 1851: and it was not until 1901 that a member of the Royal Family (the Prince of Wales) actually told British business men to “wake up,” which was a Victorian way of telling them to “take their fingers out.” Nevertheless, from 1867 onwards it is not difficult to find examples of most of the complaints and criticisms with which we are familiar, and which remain mostly valid, one hundred years later.

Disraeli’s Thought For example, Disraeli in 1867, then Chancellor of the Exchequer and not yet an imperialist, thought that Britain’s world role was too great for her resources. He wrote:

"Leave the Canadians to defend themselves; recall the African squadron; give up the settlements on the west coast of Africa; and we shall make a saving which wMi at the same time enable Us to build ship* and bave a good Budget.

Today’* Chancellor, Mr Callaghan, could quickly revamp that text

In 1867 Bagehot was argutag in the “Economist” for faster and more stable economic growth, worrying about the reserves, and blaming the Bank of England for what he could have called—had he but thought of it—

stop-go. By the 1870 s there was controversy about overseas investment Were not we investing too much abroad, not all of it wisely—particularly in other people’s railways—at the expense of our own economic growth? William Rathbone in effect posed the question of an incomes policy. He argued that Britain because of high wages, was consuming more than current output and meeting the difference out of capital, by the dissipation of foreign assets. Consular reports in the second half of the century contained strictures familiar to us. British manufacturers were not tailoring their goods to the tastes and pockets of foreign customers, they were slow in trying new products in new markets, they were Indifferent to style and design; standardisation was neglected in the name of quality; and they would insist that everybody in the world spoke, or ought to speak, English.

Matthew Arnold thought it was a moral Issue. "Ask yourselves,” he invited the mid-Victortans, “if you do not sometimes feel in yourselves a sense, that in spite of the strenuous efforts for good of so many excellent persons among us, we begin somehow to flounder and beat the air: that we seem to be finding ourselves stopped on this line of advance and on that, and to be threatened with a sort of standstill. It is that we are trying to live on with a social organisation of which the day is over.” “First and foremost of the necessary means towards man's civilisation we must name expansion," wrote Arnold.

It would make an Ideal desk motto for Mr Fred Catherwood at the National Economic Development Council. Britain, of course, continued to expand.

Rate Of Growth From the middle of the century until the First World War our growth in output and In productivity was about the same as Germany’s and was better than France’s, though inferior to the United States’. The historical rate was 2.6 per cent a year which is about what we achieved in the 19505.

And in response to foreign opinion, in particular from Germany, who in the latter part of the century established her superiority first in chemicals and then in electricals, Britain did change and shift her endeavours into the new technologies. But the pace of change was slow—too slow. Primary education did not become compulsory until 1880. The Technical Instruction Act was not until 1889. For 20 years after the Paris Exhibition the neglect of scientific research continued. In spite of Lord Ashburton’s 1867 warning that Britain’s “instinctive genius” could no longer be relied upon (another phrase that rings a bell today), not much was done; we persisted with what Arnold called the “blunder and plunder” approach to engineering technology.

“League Tables” Then, as now, “league tables” were drawn up; Zurich Polytechnic had 60 science teachers, Karlsruhe 47, Dresden 23, Hanover 24, Vienna 57, South Kensington College had 12 and Owen’s College in Manchester (cramped and ill-equipped in Cobden’s old house) had 17. The admirers of Continental technical education regarded the Zurich Polytechnic (which received the enviable State subsidy of £lO,OOO a year) rather as the proponents of management education today regard the Harvard Business School. What the critics a hundred years ago began to note was a soft-centredness about Britain, a complacency, a reluctance to scrap and build, a sense of uneasiness about the future too readily appeased by great pride in the past The Annual Register for 1867 judiciously sets the tone for a hundred years of slow absolute advance and alow relative decline: The prospect* of the future are also somewhat clouded with apprehension and uncertainty; but there are. on the other hand, many symptoms of a hopeful nature: and if England can but glean the lessons of true wisdom from her experience of the past, there should be no ground for despondency in our vatlcinaUona of tbe future.