Wales Online, United Kingdom
Dec 30 2008
Looking back …1909 brought good and bad tidings
Dec 30 2008 by Dan O’Neill, South Wales Echo
NEW Year’s Eve, 1908, Cardiff… part of a world as different and
distant to ours as the world described by Dickens.
And Dickens would have been pleased to see relief approaching at last
for those children like his immortal Oliver Twist who suffered in the
country’s workhouses. MPs would agree in February that such
institutions `were not fit places for children’.
`I said that in Oliver 70 years ago,’ his shade must have whispered to
those MPs.
Good news, too, for the nation’s over-70s. On January 1, they got
their first old age pensions ` five bob a week for single men, seven
and sixpence for couples. One old boy overcome by this largesse
dropped dead in the post office. I wonder if he collected his pension
before departing.
(Who could have guessed that exactly a century later pensioners would
outnumber under-16s?)
To pay for these pensions ` and rearmament as Germany flexed its
muscles ` David Lloyd George, Liberal Chancellor, proposed his
celebrated `People’s Budget’ in April. Just sixpence in the pound for
the 10,000 people with incomes over £10,000 a year but there
were howls of outrage from the usual suspects: `An attack on the
propertied classes,’ raged the Tory opposition. Predictably, the
budget would be thrown out by the Lords in November.
Meanwhile, that pension didn’t buy much. One survey found that in 1909
a family of five could barely exist on £1.0s 6d a week, and
then only if they ate no eggs, butter, fresh meat and `very little
tea’.
So what lay ahead for them that year when Britannia ruled the waves,
when Edward VII presided over the greatest empire ever known in what’s
so often called, by those with sepia-tinted specs, the last Golden
Age, that period of peace and content before the Great War changed the
world forever?
Not much golden for those Cardiffians who existed, rather than lived,
in the squalid little courts around the centre, in the terraced
streets of Temperance Town and what was then called Tiger Bay. But a
truly gilded life for our coal and shipping tycoons, 1909 promising
yet another great year of profits as the coal cascaded down from the
Valleys, nine million tons in Cardiff alone.
Meanwhile, it might have come as a surprise to those thousands of
coal-trimmers who kept the coal ships moving that a survey would tell
them they were better off than workers in Germany and France. But
there’d be plenty of money on offer in Germany’s shipyards ` Kaiser
Bill demanded 13 more `dreadnoughts’ in March, convincing those who
feared he wanted war that they were right. France joined the arms
race, spending £120m on new warships.
But on this New Year’s Eve, there was no thought of war as they packed
the pubs and drank to 1909 and what it would bring. Well, the Echo
would report in January that a British team led by Lieutenant Edward
Shackleton had got closer (111 miles) to the South Pole than any
previous expedition. Captain Scott was 18 months in the future, while
in April America’s Robert Peary would be first to the North Pole.
There were wonders to come, dramatic proof that we were entering a new
era. Colour films were being shown for the first time in the little
halls where flickering screens had shown Edward VII’s 1907 visit to
Cardiff and our own Peerless Jim beating the former world champion Joe
Bowker ` with Jim himself in the audience. In 1909 Cardiff’s first
purpose-built cinema, the 668-seat Electra opened, the Echo reporting
that America’s motion picture industry was already employing 100,000
people, among them Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, `the World’s
Sweetheart’ who would give birth in December to Doug Jr. Headline
news, but only his nearest and dearest celebrated the arrival in
January of little George Thomas ` not in Tonypandy but Port Talbot.
It was only six years since the Wright Brothers flew their
heavier-than-air machine but in 1909 London would see the first
international aircraft exhibition and you can bet that Ernest Willows,
Cardiff’s pioneer aviator (he built his first airship in 1905) would
be there to see it.
Yes, flying was here to stay: in July, 1909, Louis Bleriot would be
the first man to fly across the English Channel.
Ironically, in view of what was to come, President William Taft
announced in November that a naval base would be built at Pearl
Harbour ` `to protect America from Japanese attack’.
For some the year would bring only horror. Halfway through January
Europe’s worst ever earthquake killed 200,000 in Sicily and southern
Italy. In April we reported 300,000 Armenians massacred by Muslims. An
anti-government revolt in Spain would leave thousands dead in August.
But on the last night of 1908 all that was yet to come.
Tomorrow, the last night of 2008…
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