Dimming of the Day

24 The Picture of Britain – George V – agreed reluctantly that if necessary he would create 500 new peers to swamp the Tory majority. A list found in Asquith’s papers was published in his biography (by J.A.Spender and Cyril Asquith in 1932) and (unromantically) is not full of cricketers, though it is not a complete list. Lionel King, writing in The Cricket Statistician 18 , claimed that Asquith’s grandson, Mark Bonham Carter, had suggested in a conversation with him that the full (original) list included W.G.Grace, C.B.Fry, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and even Ranjitsinjhi: this list too, it was said, was found in Asquith’s papers. But the Tory party, still believing in its divine right to run the country, was not finished and was to inflame the next crisis. The most serious potential disturbance of that Edwardian peace was the threat of civil war in Ulster. The third Irish Home Rule Bill was introduced into Parliament in April 1911. Gladstone’s two earlier attempts had failed, but after 1910 the Liberal majority in the House of Commons had fallen sharply, and Asquith as Prime Minister needed the votes of the Irish Nationalists. It would have given Home Rule to the whole of Ireland, and was bitterly resented by the Protestant majority in the six counties of Ulster. There were two elections in 1910 and Irish Home Rule was a dominant question in both. By 28 September 1912 half a million people in the North had signed the Ulster Covenant, described as a pledge to defend themselves against the prospect of Home Rule. Both sides – the Ulster Volunteers and the Irish National Volunteers – were arming themselves with smuggled weapons. The Act was due to become law in 1914 and (as we shall see) the threat of civil war in Ireland seemed a good deal more significant than the prospect of European war even days before the outbreak of that war. There was much running about trying to reach a compromise, but the Ulster Protestants wanted no compromise, and there was a growing militancy in the Catholic South. In March 1914 the mutiny at the Curragh showed that – when it came to the Ulster Protestants – the government could not rely on the Army. Then there were the “suffragettes” as the Daily Mail sneeringly called them. The Times , more polite, always said “suffragists”. The Women’s Social and Political Union, devoted to direct action, did not stop at breaking shop windows and during the spring and summer of 1913 had turned to arson. At least two cricket pavilions were burned (they would be unguarded and there was little risk to life). Hotels, railway stations, racecourse grandstands and golf clubhouses were also targets. In a six- month period in 1913 there were apparently some 250 arson attacks. The Edwardian era was certainly not a “golden age” for most workers, as those who have read Robert Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists will know. The Taff Vale judgement of the House of Lords in 1901 allowed employers to sue unions for losses incurred through strike action. This was reversed by the Trades Disputes Act of 1906, with 18 The Cricket Statistician , No.163, Autumn 2013