ABSTRACT
Late Victorian and Edwardian working-class life was, it has often been argued,
a ‘life apart’.1 The rapid expansion of trade unionism and the concomitant
anti-trade union measures of the early 1900s led to social and political tensions
unparalleled since the age of the Chartists in the 1840s. The formation of the
Labour Party in 1900 marked the organisational break of the trade union
movement from its long-standing political alliance with the Liberal Party. As the
middle classes moved out of the towns and cities and into the suburbs, the working
classes found themselves segregated by geography. Exclusive middle-class leisure
activities, such as golf and tennis, grew in popularity and served to further increase
the division between the classes in the social sphere. In a sense, the turn of the
century was marked by a return to the harsher, more adversarial social climate of
the mid-nineteenth century, when the lack of contact between the classes had
been one of the spurs to the creation of the rational recreation movement. But
unlike earlier times, there was no movement of sections of the middle classes
attempting to bridge that gulf. Despite differences of degree and regional varia-
tions, the working class increasingly occupied a sphere of existence outside of the
knowledge and experience of the middle classes. Not only were the classes segre-
gated, they were also alienated from each other. As Ross McKibbin has argued:
the British ideology, for in effect that is what it was, ensured a high degree of
social cohesion but not social integration. Associations, groups and classes lived
and let live; they knew there were certain boundaries that could not be
crossed and rights which could not be infringed.2
