...the 1910's

The early years of George V's reign were full of unrest. The struggle for women’s suffrage became increasingly violent, while in places like Liverpool worker’s rioting and strikes were at their worst and the army were called out to keep the peace. ‘Trouble at mill’ accelerated when 300,000 cotton workers were locked out in dispute with their employers. Meanwhile a bottle with London anarchists had reached a climax with the siege of Sidney Street (1911). Ireland too was in uproar as the clamour for home rule intensified.

After the American explorer Robert Peary reached the North Pole in 1909, the race was on for the South Pole. A Norwegian, Roald Amundsen, just beat Captain Scott in December 1911, a journey from which Scott never returned. The next year a major disaster struck when the ‘unsinkable’ ocean liner ‘Titanic’ hit an iceberg on her maiden voyage and sand; 1,513 passengers and crew died.

The craze for the Tango (and later for Jazz) was matched by another for going to the ‘flicks’. The public queued to see Charlie Chaplin’s latest film ‘The Tramp’ (1915), in which his bowler hat, cane, baggy trousers and outsized shoes would become his trademark. The big names of the early silent movies included Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, Ben Turpin and ‘Fatty’ Arbuckle.

Another American import, the Model T Ford, arrived in 1909. So successful were sales that an assembly plant was established in Manchester in 1911. When, in 1913, the revolutionary moving production line was introduced, 6,000 cars were produced that year, selling for £135. Over 16 million ‘Tin Lizzys’ were made worldwide by the time the model was replaced in 1927.

In 1914 an assassination in Sarajevo escalated into ‘the war to end all wars’. The British liner ‘ Lusitania’ was sunk by a German torpedo in 1915, killing 1,195 people, including 128 US citizens. The attack changed the prevailing isolationism in America. Sales of charity flags rocketed as money was raised for the war. Rationing was eventually introduced in 1918, but the war was soon over. However, an influenza epidemic was by now sweeping the world. It cost twenty million lives – many more than the eight and a half million lost in the war itself.