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It is impossible to exaggerate the long-term consequences, social and psychological, of the experiences of the new industrial workforce in the raw fa… - Correlli Barnett
" "It is impossible to exaggerate the long-term consequences, social and psychological, of the experiences of the new industrial workforce in the raw factory settlements of the late Georgian and early Victorian England under conditions of ferocious competition and unbridled exploitation. It was in that era, when men, women and children were flooding into these settlements from the countryside and exchanging the slow, natural rhythms of the land or self-employed crafts (however hard that life might have been) for the harsh mechanical discipline and the pace and clamour of the mill, exchanging the village for the back-to-back terrace, that the British industrial working class, with its peculiar and enduring character as a culture apart, an alienated group often embittered and hostile, was created. It happened that water power and coal and iron largely existed in the bleak, wild landscapes of northern England, South Wales and lowland Scotland – regions hitherto lacking the numerous population and rich civilisation of the south; indeed regions traditionally turbulent and remote from the government of the Crown since the middle ages. Rare it was for the new factory settlements to cluster round an established city, as later would German industries develop round Leipzig and Dresden, Düsseldorf and Cologne: instead villages like Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Huddersfield, Bradford, Halifax, Middlesbrough proliferated into vast brick-built industrial camps; nothing but mean dwellings, drink-shops and "works".
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About Correlli Barnett
Correlli Douglas Barnett (28 June 1927 – 10 July 2022) was an English military historian, who also wrote works of economic history, particularly on the United Kingdom's post-war "industrial decline".
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Correlli Douglas Barnett
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Additional quotes by Correlli Barnett
It remained only for Britain during the war to pour out the rest of the investments and the gold on the purchase of war supplies from the United States, while at the same time cutting visible exports to a third of the 1938 level for the sake of war production, and the basis of Britain's economic existence for the last hundred years had been comprehensively destroyed.
In 1945 Britain was therefore left by this nemesis of free trade with none of the advantages of being highly dependent on foreign trade, and all the vulnerability. In the immediate postwar era, and for the first time since the beginning of the industrial revolution, she would have to depend almost entirely on visible exports in order to secure the life and work of the nation and to rebuild her old prosperity.
With the outbreak of war in 1914 the internationalists in the Liberal and Labour parties, already losing credit, seemed to go into intellectual bankruptcy. The moral law was demonstrated to carry less weight than a military railway timetable. A solemn treaty was shown to have the protective power of a magic charm. The natural harmony of human interests was disproved by the spectacle of great nations at each other's throats. The pacifying and unifying effects of modern science and communications were ridiculed by the convenience with which railways launched into battle millions of men equipped with artillery and machine-guns. The liberal-evangelical faith in love, reason and the brotherhood of man was cruelly mocked by the ferocious hatreds bayed by the mobs in the great cities of Europe.
Nor, except in the garden or allotment or on the sports field, did Britons generally evince an eagerness for strenuous effort. A journalist with the British Army advancing into the heart of Germany in April 1945 noted: "It occurs to me that the Germans are a menacing race by reason of their docility and their ability to toil. No man ought to love work as they do – it's indecent, certainly uncivilised. We English don't love work in this slavelike way, and thank God for it." And a week later the same journalist, J. L. Hodson, confided to his notebook that the reason why the British were unable to maintain hatred for long was their temperament was "too lazy, too indifferent, too good-natured".
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