London: The Biography

The Great War of 1914-18 cannot be said to have impeded the city’s growth or its essential vitality. London has always been energetic and powerful enough to buttress itself against distress and disaster. Herbert Asquith heard a “distant roaring” on the final day of peace at the beginning of August 1914. He wrote that “War or anything that seems likely to lead to war is always popular with the London mob. You remember Sir R. Walpole’s remark, ‘Now they are ringing their bells; in a few weeks they’ll be wringing their hands.’” London was accustomed to violence and to latent savagery, not least in the manifestations of the mob, and for many the vision of chaos and destruction acted as a restorative. The inhabitants of a large city are always the most sanguineous. It is true, also, that London expanded during the years of war. Just as in earlier centuries it had killed more than it cared for, so in the present conflict it seemed to thrive upon slaughter. The city’s economy was fuelled by full employment, with so many of its young males detained elsewhere, and as a result the standard of living improved. Of course there were local hazards and difficulties. Building work was suspended, and at night the city was only partly illuminated by lamps which had been painted dark blue as a precaution against the raids of Zeppelin warships. Parks and squares were used as kitchen-gardens, while hotels became government offices or hostels. But there were more foreign restaurants and pâtisseries than ever, as a result of the presence of émigrés, while the dance halls and music halls were full. There was a loss of life in the capital-it is still not unusual to find plaques upon the walls of long-since renovated buildings, commemorating a Zeppelin raid upon the site-with approximately seven hundred killed in the four years of war. In contrast it has been estimated that almost 125,000 Londoners died in battle. Yet London is prodigal of life.

The close of the war in November 1918 was greeted with scenes of revelry and enthusiasm which have always punctuated the city’s history. Stanley Weintraub has depicted the occasion in A Stillness Heard Around the World: The End of the Great War. “The street was now a seething mass of humanity. Flags appeared as if by magic. Streams of men and women flowed from the Embankment … Almost before the last stroke of the clock had died away, the strict, war-straitened, regulated streets of London had become a triumphant pandemonium.” This is a description of the city stirring into life again, with the “streams” of its citizens like the blood once more racing through its arteries. Pedestrians “were dancing on the sidewalks” and vast crowds gathered in all the public places in order to experience that inchoate sense of collective feeling which is one aspect of urban identity on these occasions; the citizens do indeed become one body and one voice. George V drove “through waves of cheering crowds,” with the image of the sea once more invoking the strange impersonality and inexorability within this expression of mass emotion. Osbert Sitwell recollected that the last time he had seen such a crowd “was when it was cheering for its own death outside Buckingham Palace on the evening of August 4, 1914; most of the men who composed it were now dead.”

Here the exultation comes very close to savagery, and a kind of barbaric triumph is let loose upon the streets of London. “The God of Herds” had taken over as the people “sometimes joining up, sometimes linking hands, dashed like the waves of the sea against the sides of Trafalgar Square.” The celebrations there would continue for three days without ceasing. Paradoxically there was a certain amount of violence and riot to celebrate this peace, while one observer described it “as a sort of wild orgy of pleasure: an almost brutal enjoyment. It was frightening. One felt that if there had been any Germans around, the women would have advanced upon them and torn them to pieces.” The same cruelty had of course been visible in the crowd’s delight at the beginning of the war. In one novel relating these events, James Hilton’s Random Harvest, the scenes represent “a common earth touch-a warm bawdy link with the mobs of the past.” The frenzy spread in unexpected directions. There is the story of the famous parrot in the Cheshire Cheese Public House who with his beak “drew a hundred corks without stopping amid the din of Armistice Night 1918 and then fell down in a faint.” It may seem perverse to pay more attention to the celebrations of a few days in winter than to the whole course of a war, but in that shorter period the city became more intensely itself.