ABSTRACT
By the early twentieth century Britain was already very different from what it had been when Gladstone and Disraeli had clashed over the 1867 Reform Bill. The toilet roll did now exist, at least in middle-class homes. The milk bottle appeared for the first time in 1907 and soap powder in the previous year. Britain had changed and was changing rapidly. The differences between 1904 and 1914 are marked. In 1904 there had been 2,500 horse buses in the capital but the last one was withdrawn from service on 4 August 1914, a date deserving of note for other reasons. Technological change was accelerating. Electric lights and trams were transforming the cities no less than the internal combustion engine. Typewriters and the telephone were creating a whole new world of work for young women, an alternative to the drudgery of domestic service. The servant problem produced grumbles in the houses of the wealthy but even here technology would come to the rescue with the new ‘vacuum dust extractor’. Marconi's company was to erect wireless stations throughout the Empire in 1913, linking the king's dominions by means of the mysterious notion of communication through the air waves. Dirigible airships and the aeroplane ought to have been exciting the military mind but in England little such excitement was discernible. Perhaps more than any other gadget the humble bicycle should symbolize Edwardian Britain, freeing as it did villagers and town dwellers from their homes and the tyranny of the railway timetable.
