G R Searle

Biographic Data

ID1006153
NAMEG R Searle
GIVEN NAMESG R
FAMILY NAMESearle
SIGNATURESEARLE G R
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of East Anglia
VERIFIEDNo
TOTAL WORKS39
TOTAL CITATIONS27
AUTHOR COUNT39
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1972
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2004
H-INDEX2

  • The Years of ‘Crisis’, 1908-1914

    G R SearleCHAPTERA new England?2004

    In retrospect, the Liberal government’s welfare reforms look the most significant part of its legislative programme, but a scrutiny of the postbags of Liberal politicians suggests another perspective. The claims of Nonconformity may have been pushed into the background within the first few years of Liberal rule (Asquith drifted away from his roots under the influence of his smart, Society-loving wife-the symbol of his move away from Dissent was n…

  • Nationalism and Nationality

    G R SearleCHAPTERA new England?2004

    So wrote the Poet Laureate, Alfred Austin, in 1900. These lines capture the tone of an era in which British people, from all classes and social backgrounds, threw themselves enthusiastically behind a succession of small and medium-sized wars in the belief that they were carrying out God’s Will-before finally plunging into the tragedy of the Great War of 1914-18. It is no coincidence that so many of the most enduring of our patriotic poems and son…

  • Abbreviations

    G R SearleOTHERA New England?2004

  • Tables

    G R SearleOTHERA New England?2004

  • The Unionist Project, 1902-1905

    G R SearleCHAPTERA new England?2004

    Arthur Balfour was an unlucky Prime Minister. He had largely inherited his ministry from his uncle: fourteen of his nineteen Cabinet colleagues still retained their former posts. Hicks Beach’s retirement necessitated one major change, the promotion to the Treasury of C. T. Ritchie. However, only two men joined the Cabinet for the first time: Balfour’s friend George Wyndham, the Irish Secretary (now promoted to Cabinet rank), and Joseph Chamberlai…

  • Chronology

    G R SearleOTHERA New England?2004

  • The Boer War, 1899-1902

    G R SearleCHAPTERA new England?2004

    The British entered the war in October 1899 determined to avenge Majuba, just as they had recently avenged Gordon’s death. They did so in a spirit of blithe confidence. Moberley Bell, the manager of The Times, privately predicted that ‘about the 15 December we shall have in South Africa a nice little Army & all the materials for a respectable war except the enemy’.1 Few foresaw that the forces of two small pastoral republics, with a combined whit…

  • The Road to War

    G R SearleCHAPTERA new England?2004

    The Liberal landslide victory of 1906 had swept into the Commons many MPs who hoped, above all else, that the new government would decisively break with the foreign and imperial policies of Balfour’s discredited regime. These Radicals took reassurance from Campbell-Bannerman, who, during the election campaign, had struck an authentically Liberal note, excoriating the recent growth of armaments and arguing that Britain’s role was ‘to place itself …

  • The Pursuit of Pleasure

    G R SearleCHAPTERA new England?2004

    According to the 19u census, actors and chefs were the occupational groups which had grown fastest during the previous decade, while two of the most rapidly expanding towns were Southend and Bournemouth. Many Edwardians, clearly, were not only making steel and preparing for the possibility of war, but were also having a lot of fun.

  • Science and Learning

    G R SearleCHAPTERA new England?2004

    In few periods has technology so dramatically altered people’s lives as between 1886 and 1914. Evidence of change was visible in the homes and streets of every English community. In the mid-188os the carriage of persons and goods across urban areas was still taking place almost entirely on foot or by horse. Gottlieb Daimler’s invention in 1885 of the internal combustion engine soon put an end to that. In 1914 the unmistakable odour of horse-dung …

  • Uneasy Dominion

    G R SearleCHAPTERA new England?2004

    Englishmen may have been notoriously unwilling to accommodate themselves to foreign ways and foreign food. But though insular in this sense, late Victorian England was remarkably open to the rest of the world-exhilaratingly, perhaps dangerously so. Until 1905 the United Kingdom had virtually no restrictions on immigration, no exchange controls, and there were few barriers to the importation of foreign goods and commodities, customs duties being l…

  • The Liberal Party and Social Welfare Politics

    G R SearleCHAPTERA new England?2004

    Retrospectively, the pre-war Liberal government’s main claim to fame rests on the extraordinary number and variety of welfare reforms that it sponsored. Yet, in the aftermath of the 1906 General Election, ministers probably had no more idea than the general public that such a major initiative was in the offing.

  • Dedication

    G R SearleOTHERA New England?2004

  • Politics and the Social Question, 1886-1899

    G R SearleCHAPTERA new England?2004

    ‘Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible’, Salisbury once characteristically observed.1 The new Prime Minister had spent most of his life under Whig-Liberal governments: only once since 1846 had the Conservatives won an overall majority of Commons seats (Disraeli’s victory of 1874). This may explain why he was slow to read the runes of the recent election results: far fr…

  • Governance and Politics

    G R SearleCHAPTERA new England?2004

    It could not easily be predicted, merely from a knowledge of their background, how late Victorian electors would cast their vote. Would the determining factor be class, occupation, ethnicity, religious denomination, or even (in the case of School Board elections) gender?1 The outcome invariably depended upon circumstance, context, and the interplay of party rivalries. For parties, with their proud histories and distinctive traditions, could resha…

  • Home Rule and the Politics of Unionism

    G R SearleCHAPTERA new England?2004

    The party realignment of 1885-6 dealt the Liberal Party a heavy blow, from which it may never fully have recovered. Gladstone’s dissolution of Parliament in July 1886, following the defeat of the Home Rule Bill, produced a Commons in which his followers numbered only 191. Even with the support of the eighty-five Irish Nationalists, this did not give him anything approaching a Commons majority. With Liberal Unionist support, the Conservative Leade…

  • The Patriotic Experience

    G R SearleCHAPTERA new England?2004

    Throughout the British Empire as a whole more than 900,000 military personnel were killed, died of their wounds, or went missing during the Great War; 723,000 of these came from the British Isles (1.5 per cent of the pre-war population). These figures do not include those who died after the Armistice from war-induced wounds or disease, nor those who died in the Spanish ‘flu epidemic that wreaked such havoc between 1918 and 1920, killing more peop…

  • General Elections 1885-1910

    G R SearleOTHERA New England?2004

  • The Great War

    G R SearleCHAPTERA new England?2004

    Lloyd George, his hand strengthened by his powers of patronage, managed to form a ministry with surprising ease. The much-criticized Balfour, who had earlier submitted his resignation as First Lord of the Admiralty, was won over with the offer of the Foreign Office-despite being thought of as the Conservative who stood closest to Asquith. The other leading Conservatives, the ‘3 Cs’ included, also decided that their patriotic duty required them to…

  • Art and Culture

    G R SearleCHAPTERA new England?2004

    The expansion of the popular entertainments industry formed merely a part of a wider growth in the market for cultural productions and artefacts of all kinds. Between the censuses of 1881 and 1901 the number of authors, editors, and journalists rose by 81 per cent, that of musicians by 69 per cent-a trend which continued, at a slightly less hectic rate, during the following decade.1 More rapid still was the expansion of the acting profession: the…

  • Title Pages

    G R SearleOTHERA New England?2004

  • The Great War

    G R SearleCHAPTERA new England?2004

    As ministers made their way through cheering crowds to hear Asquith tell an enthusiastic Commons that Britain was at war with Germany, they sensed that they enjoyed the backing of most of their fellow countrymen. ‘Peace resistance’ melted away almost overnight. The ILP directed a greeting of sympathy ‘across the roar of the guns’ towards its German comrades, but the international solidarity of the working class proved to be little more than a slo…

  • Plates

    G R SearleOTHERA New England?2004

  • War and the Reshaping of Identities

    G R SearleCHAPTERA new England?2004

    We have seen that during the war the birth-rate declined: from 23.9 per thousand in 1914 to 19.4 in 1918. Partly in response to this decline, but more generally because the saving of infant lives seemed necessary to replace the carnage of the battlefields, great efforts were made by both government and private agencies to provide support for the expectant mother and her children. Indeed, this seemed nothing less than ‘a patriotic and humane duty …

  • General Editor’s Preface

    G R SearleOTHERA New England?2004