Family History 1.110

Momentous Times (Continued)

The inescapable difference between the second half of the Nineteenth Century and the first half of the Twentieth was the difference between peace and war.  In the Victorian era wars were little skirmishes fought on the edges of the Empire against under-resourced enemies who were little more than “noble savages”. Stories of the Indian Frontier battles and of the Boer War filled the pages of the boys adventure magazines which were so popular and which Noel read eagerly. In the Twentieth Century, wars were titanic struggles between heavily armed Empires fighting for their survival. Several of Noel’s cousins served in Europe in the Great War. His family had constant reminders of the effects of the fighting. And in the second war a second cousin, Viv Eady, was lost: Missing in Action navigating a Kittyhawk over the islands. 

Edward VII’s values were anything but “Victorian” and the hints which the public got of his activities out of the media spotlight during his days as the Prince of Wales blurred the edges of the classic straightlaced Victorian rectitude, of which the Royal Family was the model. His son, George V, from 1910, reversed the trend somewhat during the days of the Great War, but by and large the relaxation of Victorian taboos went on throughout the Twentieth Century. 

The year which marked the beginning of the real landslide is 1956, when a court case in the UK released Lady Chatterley’s Lover from the strict censorship which banned it.  1956 was also the year when the old maxim “The British Empire Right or Wrong” took a severe hammering from the British and French Governments’ attempts to browbeat Egypt over the Suez Canal.  Imperialism was no longer possible in a world which had seen countless colonies of all the major European Empires gain independence. And we remember it as the year of the beginnings of modern popular music: the Beatles and Elvis Presley. 

But the changes which struck Noel most were the technological inventions.  During his lifetime, radio, invented in the nineties, became a real everyday tool. When he was two years old the first powered aeroplanes took off.  In his fifties he travelled regularly by air. Motor cars became a universal phenomenon. Steam replaced sail finally on the sea-routes of the world. One of Noel’s ambitions was to travel in the greatest of all steamships, the Queen Mary. In 1956 he did.

 

(to be continued)