Life on the eve of war We’ve delved into the Telegraph’s archives and read the newspapers of 1914. They show just how unaware we were of the horrors ahead. This is the life Britain unwittingly left behind. 22 July 2014

A month before the outbreak of war Henley Regatta opened in “brilliant fashion”, The Daily Telegraph reported, with record crowds and “perfect” weather. It presents an image of Edwardian Britain as we fondly imagine it to have been, before the sudden cloudburst of August 1914. Of course, the reality was far different for the 99 per cent of people who did not own land, collect rents or vacation at Biarritz and Marienbad. Most Edwardians worked in dark, noisy factories, cut hay in fields, toiled down dirty and dangerous mines; had bones bent by rickets and lungs racked by tuberculosis. Life expectancy then was 49 years for a man and 53 years for a woman, compared with 79 and 82 years today. They lived in back to back tenements or jerry-built terraces, wore cloth caps or bonnets (rather than boaters, bowlers and toppers) and they had never taken a holiday - beyond a day trip to Brighton or Blackpool - in their entire lives. The country was a seething mass of social tension and violent confrontations. It was a land torn and dislocated by the struggle of increasingly militant suffragettes; strikes in mills, mines and on the railways; the constitutional battle between Lords and Commons; and the threat of civil war in Ireland. Readers of the Telegraph - as a glance at the archives will reveal - were far better informed about the true state of their nation and the world than our sugary sentimental view allows us. In a dramatic scoop, the paper had published an exclusive interview with Kaiser Wilhelm II in October 1908 in which the Kaiser had expressed alarmingly frank - and hostile - views about his mother’s native land (the Kaiser’s mama, Empress Victoria, was Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter). In this interview the Kaiser accused “you English” of being “mad, mad, mad as March hares” for fearing that the construction of Germany’s High Seas Fleet was aimed at challenging the Royal Navy’s command of the world’s oceans. Implausibly, he claimed that Germany’s real target was the rising sun of Japan. As the new year of 1914 opened, the Telegraph’s pages were dominated by stories about strikes and worries about whether Britannia could continue to rule the waves (reflected in a feature comparing the Royal Navy with its rival fleets - Germany’s above all). The biggest political story was the looming crisis over the demand for Home Rule in Ireland. It gave more coverage, at least initially, to the sinking of the liner “Empress of Ireland” in Canada’s St Lawrence seaway on June 1 than to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand at the end of the month - a “dastardly crime which has filled the whole civilised world with consternation”. On the second day after the event the Telegraph’s leader suggested that the murder would “exasperate Teutonic feeling against the Slav nationality”, but of course it got nowhere near what actually happened. What is so unnerving reading the Telegraph in those days after the assassination was the way life carried on as normal. People continued to browse dress patterns, plan weekend drives, tear out recipes and queue at cinemas, quite oblivious to what was coming. This is the life they were about to leave behind forever. by Nigel Jones

Fashion in 1914 by Drusilla Beyfus

Outfits called “ready-mades” had arrived in the West End shops and women began daring to go hatless, with the boldest adopting the Eastern-influenced couture of Paul Poiret. A Page for Women was published in The Daily Telegraph on Saturdays and at its core was a fashion column aimed at the reader who wanted to be kept well abreast of advances in style, colour and shopping options. The storylines reflect a new world in the making and the tone is of no talking down. Moreover, the approach was geared to a generation of women who were stepping out of the home into life outside and wanted a wardrobe to match. The columns and sketches are devoted to the changed silhouette of dress design; collections coming out of London and Paris houses had moved on from the restrictive corseted mode that had crushed women’s waists for generations and replaced it with a loose, draped columnar line. Along with the new freedom - a relative state, it has to be said, as a fashionable garment might well entail a hobbled skirt - came news of a colour palette in which the soft powdery shades of the 19th-century Belle Epoque gave way to brilliant hues overlaid with silver and gold. Exotic topics, such as the feature headlined, Orientalism in Dress, found a place too. The story picked up on the vogue for Westernised versions of Eastern sartorial ideas, a trend fostered by the innovative Paris couturier Paul Poiret. Illustrated with sketches of a Turkish-style tunic combined with a skirt cut to resemble Turkish trousers, it included an evening headdress captioned as being of “Eastern potentate splendour”. Photography being in the wings for newspaper coverage of sartorial stories, the features were illustrated with line drawings in black and white. In fact, these little sketches (by uncredited artists) conveyed a great deal of precise detail.

Not all was high fashion. Among news items in January 1914 was the launch of a paper pattern service for dressmakers. The first offering was a long frock promoted as one of those useful designs that “could look equally well with or without a hat”. Another point referred to in the copy as an advantage was that although, to all appearances, the design followed fashion’s edict of a skirt narrowing at the foot, in practice there was ample room to walk. In June 1914 a pattern was supplied for a bathing costume; the occasion of “mixed bathing in Weymouth” was to make a current item in the news pages. Unstinting praise greeted the arrival in the West End shops of outfits that were called “ready-mades” at good prices. It prompted the editorial that “it was not so very many years ago that girls would have considered such well-crafted, beautiful clothes to be a real extravagance”. Depicted are ankle-length frocks of comparatively simple outline, flounced and sashed in tulle, crepe and embroidered lawn. A group of women at Ascot wearing the latest fashions, 1914 Getty With many challenges awaiting readers, an arbiter of taste was called for, and this was provided by Mrs Eric Pritchard, the fashion editor. Mrs Pritchard signed a weekly column which established her as a strong personal authority. She appears to have been a combination of a cheerleader for innovation and a watchdog for her reader’s foibles. Among Mrs P’s enthusiasms was vibrant colour as a constituent of dress design. “We no longer fear colour or daring effects,” she declared. “Real studies of colour have revolutionised our old view of the possibilities of dress. The modern dyer is a genius.” But on the topic of Parisian spring millinery in February 1914 Mrs Pritchard had this to say, “The popularity of the floral toque, I fear, offers many a pitfall to the unwary Englishwoman who is perhaps too inclined to adopt designs that are new, but too small or too something [sic] for her particular personality [..] A model that is at its birth French in chic and daring may be very unsuitable when worn on an English head.” Although news and innovation was given its head, the approach was set within the framework of the old order. Gowns and jewellery worn at presentations at Court were reported in detail. Clothing tended to be categorised according to prescribed gradations of purpose, hour and occasion. Society’s social round determined the fashion diary. Eight days before the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, readers were advised on the quandary of what to wear at summer tennis and croquet parties. In the spirit of the page, the recommendation was a “ready-made” fashioned in the season’s striped fabrics. A dress in pale blue and white batiste (a fine light linen) with horizontal and vertical stripes came in for special praise.

Cars & Planes in 1914 by Christopher Howse

There are fewer fatalities on the roads now than there were before the First World War, despite there being eighty times more motor vehicles. Danger seemed dashing, and brakes could be a little tricky, back then. Mrs Patrick Campbell was invoked in court on the eve of the war to prove that a driver charged with “exceeding the motor-car speed limit” (20mph) was really driving “very carefully”. This formidable actress, fresh from her triumph as Eliza Doolittle in the first production of Shaw’s Pygmalion, was renowned for her remark that she didn’t mind what affectionate men did together “so long as they don’t do it in the streets and frighten the horses”. But horseless carriages proved just as troublesome. In May 1914 she had just married George Cornwallis-West (after his divorce from Winston Churchill’s mother) when her new husband was up in court. Theirs, it seemed, was a fast set. To the policeman who had sprung a speed trap, Cornwallis-West said, “There isn’t a sportsman among you. You ought to be shot.” But he insisted he must have been driving carefully, as his wife was “nervous”. The court fined him 30 shillings.

This was reported deadpan by the Daily Telegraph under a heading “Motorists in trouble”. Other motorists, who had paid hundreds of pounds for vehicles, and spent much of their own or their chauffeur’s energy keeping them in tip-top condition, resented being stopped just because they were whizzing along after a drink or two. “I have driven racing motor-cars,” said a 24-year-old who pleaded guilty to being drunk, but not guilty to driving in a dangerous manner. “And I am a flying man.” Indeed, each Saturday before the First World War, the Telegraph ran a page of “Motoring & Aviation”, under a pictorial banner of a neat monoplane flying above a new four-seater tourer with two men in the front, wearing peaked caps, and ladies in the back in dustcoat and veil. Each week gave a diagrammatic route for a pleasure run (Winchester to Oxford; Leamington to Cheltenham), drawn up by a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. Troublesome gradients were highlighted, for brakes could still be tricky, and rolling back was not always prevented by a chisel-pointed “sprag” hung from the chassis, meant to bite into the ground. The white roads of England, not yet asphalted, kicked up a fine dust in dry weather. In the wet, thin mud was skiddy. With narrow tyres, motor-cars faced a dread hazard of “side slip”. Dunlop ran big advertisements exploiting this fear, and a rival manufacturer sold steel-studded tyres, boasting, “Palmer studs stop in”. On granite paving, though, they simply made adhesion worse. The Motoring & Aviation page insisted that danger was exaggerated. In the last full year before the war, 2,099 people died on the road (compared with 1,754 in 2012). It is true that 717 of those were in accidents with horse-drawn vehicles. But attitudes to risk were different then, and compared with the unsuspected slaughter soon to come, the toll was in truth negligible. Competitors at the Isle of Man TT, 1914. To the left is a Straker Squire car, to the right a Minerva. National Motor Museum/HIP/Topfoto Kenelm Lee Guinness at the wheel of a Sunbeam at the Isle of Man TT Race, 1914 National Motor Museum / HIP / TopFoto A Humber in 1914 Classic Image / Alamy A 14mg Sopwith Tabloid 80HP plane at Brooklands airfield Brooklands Museum aviationancestry.com Motor-cars and aeroplanes shared facilities at Brooklands, Surrey, where a landing-strip fitted inside the 3.25-mile motor-racing circuit. On April 8 1914 a young flying pupil came down steeply from 1,000ft and, at 100ft “fell out of his seat and came tumbling down”. The Telegraph report emphasised the “necessity of strapping” to prevent future accidents. It argued too that safety was improving. A table of figures showed that, only six years earlier, with just five pilots in the world, one had been killed. In 1910 of the 500 pilots active, 29 died, in half a million miles of flying. Much safer were the 5,800 pilots of 1912, of whom 140 died in 12.5 million miles. The writer correctly predicted the remedying of “preventable causes”; present-day aviation fatalities run at one every 1.24 billion miles. In the meantime, thrills linked motoring and aviation. Charles Rolls had died, aged 32, in his biplane at an air display near Bournemouth in 1910, only three years after his and Henry Royce’s Silver Ghost grabbed from Mercedes the reputation as the “best car in the world”. Since his death, there had been “no more dramatic aerial tragedy,” the Telegraph declared, than the disappearance over the Channel in May 1914 of Gustav Hamel, “the most famous aviator in the world”, bound from Paris for the “Aerial Derby” around London. It had been foggy but, the paper guessed darkly, “the probability was that his engine failed”. Fishermen found a body on July 6. Danger seemed dashing. The Daily Telegraph offered a £1,000 prize for the Isle of Man Tourist Trophy – for motor-cars not motor-bicycles. Reliability was the key to finishing the 600 miles in two days, round 16 laps of 37½ miles. The motor-cars were bright as jockeys’ silks: Straker-Squires painted blue, Humbers stone grey, Sunbeams purple and Stars red. In a Sunbeam Kenelm ‘Bill’ Lee Guinness, tipped as a man to watch, beat the other 22 entrants, with a lap record of 56.44 mph. Telegraph readers following the action at home were tempted by illustrated advertisements for a Ford Touring Car, made at Trafford Park – theirs for £135. Then (as they complained) there were taxes: four guineas a year plus 3d a gallon on “motor spirit”. Now that motoring was not just a rich man’s pastime, Avon boasted that its tyres cost only a penny for every 5½ miles. Tax on a plain Ford tourer was to rise by 1920 to six guineas, but its torpedo body, breaking the “horseless carriage” conventions of massive Edwardian coachwork, was already the shape of the future, when motoring for pleasure resumed after its interruption by the Great War.

Food in 1914 by Carolyn Hart

Tinned food was all the rage, as were cookery books and new home refrigeration devices. But we still hadn’t learned to prepare vegetables properly. Neatly sandwiched between the arrival of the fish and chip shop in 1902, and the imposition of licensing laws in 1921, the second decade of the 20th century was a period of massive upheaval in the kitchen. Previously a cook’s life was ruled by Mrs Beeton and Alexis Soyer, seasonal food and a lack of refrigeration. The new century introduced commodities such as tinned food, Bisto gravy, Heinz baked beans and Bird’s custard, and ice closets to put it all in. Food could be shipped from distant corners of the world and chains of high street grocery stores were replacing small specialist tradesmen.

Heinz Baked beans Topfoto

One hundred years on, it all sounds horribly familiar, up to and including the number of cookery books in existence. Thousands were published in the early years of the 20th century - Hints and Recipes for Cooking Today, The Atora Book of Olde Time Christmas Recipes, Kitchen Essays, The Importance of Eating Potatoes – all designed to educate a new breed of woman who, owing to economic privations, was having to go it alone in the kitchen often without benefit of cook or scullery maid. Naturally newspapers were on hand to assist. The Telegraph’s helpful women’s page included a cookery column for the novice housewife. It is hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy for poor Telegraph woman, as you read the bossy exhortations printed therein. Plainly she is something of a hopeless case, way behind her Continental sisters, and prone to making dreadful kitchen gaffes. “The mistake universally made by the English [as she was then] cook is in being indifferent to seasoning the vegetable and being careless about its appearance,” the anonymous cookery correspondent notes on 28 March 1914. “Foreigners who visit this country are only too ready to declare that vegetables are abominably served.” To avoid this Anon has a tip or two for asparagus (“Rules must be very carefully followed. Stalks should be crisp and the sauces either butter melted or hollandaise”). The English housewife, impoverished and incapable, was encouraged to buy plovers’ eggs (“on the market now at a reasonable price”) and fresh water trout, “in prime condition now… a luxury much less appreciated here than on the continent”. That goes for cherries too, which are also less “popular in this country than on the continent” although “gooseberries in the form of Fool is recognised as an English sweet throughout the civilised world; the word fool however comes from the French foule”. But then it is back to the veg and a brief note on Jersey potatoes. “Beyond the average purse, 5lbs for 1s and 2d – they are a luxury as are fresh peas. To have them you are going to have to economise on other articles of diet.” In the pursuit of economy, Telegraph woman was encouraged to try a soufflé, “acceptable at any season and with a little ingenuity can be made from almost any ingredients” so long as you remember that “the oven door must never be slammed” and that “attention must also be paid to buttering the mould very carefully, else there will be a fiasco.” The looming fiasco was, of course, rather more than a collapsed soufflé. By 1916 imports of food had virtually ceased and the nation was thrown back on its own devices – trying to feed a population that had more than doubled since 1851 and largely failing; statistics show that for every nine men of conscription age, two were unhealthy, three were physical wrecks and one was a chronic invalid – though you would never have known that from the food writers of 1914.

Art & Culture in 1914 by Rupert Christiansen

Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford reigned supreme at the cinema, Serge Diaghilev was a sensation at Drury Lane and the works of a young Pablo Picasso shocked the nation. Diplomacy was all the rage. Starring the matinée idols Owen Nares and Gerald du Maurier, this comedy of romantic intrigue by the French playwright Victorien Sardou was such a big hit that the King and Queen brought it to Windsor Castle by royal command. On 3 February, the Daily Telegraph reported on the glittering court occasion, remarking that “a daintier bijou theatre than the Waterloo Chamber would be hard to conceive.” At the other end of the social spectrum, an announcement was made on 23 April of a charitable scheme to raise the level of working-class culture by establishing a People’s Theatre Society, whereby “a shilling subscription would entitle the subscriber to two reserved seats at any one performance under the Society’s auspices.” It was on this sort of philanthropic impulse that Lilian Baylis would build at the Old Vic and Sadler’s Wells.

Vaslav Nijinski and Tamara Karsavina in "Le Spectre de la Rose" by Diaghilev's Russian Russes. Roger-Viollet / Topfoto Douglas Fairbanks, Charles Chaplin and Mary Pickford (l-r) on the set of Caprice, 1913 The Ronald Grant Archive Gerald Du Maurier and Owen Nares in a scene from the play 'Diplomacy' at Wyndhams Theatre, London. Getty Images The gashes made in Velazquez’s Venus with the Mirror in the National Gallery by suffragettes in 1914 Topham Picturepoint

In the visual arts, modernism was rearing its problematic head. The Daily Telegraph’s distinguished art critic Sir Claude Phillips discoursed at length on 5 January about an exhibition of post-impressionists, which displayed canvases by Miss Vanessa Bell and Mr Duncan Grant alongside Señor Pablo Picasso, under the auspices of Roger Fry. Were these painters merely “delightful humourists”, he wondered, and was their style merely “a storm in a teacup … stale, flat and unprofitable”? Sir Claude hedges his bets, discomfited by what he saw as their tendency to purvey the “grotesque and monstrous.” A more immediate threat to the established order was presented by militant suffragettes embarking on a terrorist campaign against national treasures: on 11 March, Velazquez’s nude Rokeby Venus was hacked with a meat cleaver in the National Gallery, while on 10 April porcelain was smashed in the British Museum. Then, as now, art could become a potent political weapon. About the era’s other major manifestations of a new and distinctly twentieth-century culture, there was no scepticism. The great impresario Serge Diaghilev had already triumphantly introduced London to the erotic splendours of the Ballet Russes and the divine physiques of Tamara Karsavina and Vaslav Nijinsky; now he returned to Drury Lane for a season of Russian opera which proved equally sensational. The Daily Telegraph was left awestruck on 1 June by the “unparalleled” genius of the bass Fedor Chaliapin in the title-role of Mussorgsky’s previously unknown masterpiece Boris Godunov. “It is difficult”, gushed the anonymous critic, “to convey in words an adequate account of its transcendent splendour.” The cinema also provided marvels. Alongside reels from Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford which delighted the masses came more artistically ambitious fare: from Italy, according to a review published on 11 March, came The Passions of the Renaissance, “a masterpiece of cinematography” which “simply enthralls the spectator”, and a “startling” documentary about the British army which featured “some very wonderful pictures of bursting shrapnel”. Little could the innocent critic have known how many more of such images would be seen in the looming years of war.

Women’s Rights in 1914 by Emma Soames

The Telegraph called it “a hopeless exercise” but the suffragettes were bolder than ever in their fight for women's right to vote in 1914. One of the abiding images of the women’s suffragette movement is the arrest of its militant leader Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst as she tried to present a petition to the King at Buckingham Palace in May 1914. She was lifted off her feet in a bear hug by Chief Inspector Rolfe, who thus provided a seminal photograph which encapsulated so much about the movement – dramatic, militant acts committed by middle class gentlewomen in genteel dress, handy for concealing weapons. Although Mrs Pankhurst had been accompanied by a large group of women who hoped to storm the palace gates, a large police presence meant that she was the only one to get anywhere near them. She got the publicity she craved, but the Telegraph saw the attempt by her and her supporters as a complete victory for the police. The women were undertaking what the paper called “a hopeless exercise” and the police plan to counter them was a “a masterpiece of precaution”. As for Mrs Pankhurst herself, her “black silk dress, relieved by touches of white lace, and her bonnet were undisturbed” - a strong contrast to the appearance of some of her supporters after the subsequent fighting was over. Indeed, due to her age (she was 55 at the time) and status, Mrs Pankhurst was treated with relative consideration by the police, who in the course of that summer set about the militant suffragettes with increasing violence, despite their initial reluctance to manhandle women. The day after the Buckingham Palace protest some 60 women appeared at Bow Street and there was utter chaos as they shouted, sang the Marseillaise, threw newspapers and launched a shoe at the magistrate which he neatly caught and passed to an attendant. The Telegraph coverage was headlined “Suffragette Orgie [sic], Pandemonium in Court”.

English suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst being removed from a suffragette protest by a policeman, May 1914 Getty Suffragettes on a 'poster parade' in July, 1914, advertising their newspaper the Suffragette. Getty Images Militant suffragette Mary Richardson (right) and Miss Wallace Dunlop wait outside London House for an appointment with the Bishop of London, 10th February 1914. Getty Images Riot at the Constitution Hill gate of Buckingham Palace, 21st May 1914. The suffragettes had sought an audience with King George V but he refused. There were many reports of police brutality. Photo by Museum of London/Heritage Images/Getty Images