Dukes and dreadnoughts
Sir: Mr Robinson is being disingenuous (Letters, 2 April). He must know as well as I do that Lloyd George's 1909 Budget had nothing to do with Blue Streak or Mar- sham Street office blocks, and that my examples were of wealth, not tight- fistedness. I am aware that great landown- ers are sometimes great benefactors, but we are talking of different orders of gener- osity. The Government wanted the money to pay for dreadnoughts and to fund the pension needs of an industrial state. And what pitiful little needs they were! 5s a week if you lived to be 70, and 7s 6d for a married couple. The navy wanted the dreadnoughts to keep ahead of the Germans. The Lords didn't like to get their collective hand down, and tried to tamper with the pen- sions. They wanted the dreadnoughts, but didn't want to help pay for them. As Lloyd George quite fairly said, 'A fully equipped duke costs as much to keep up as two dreadnoughts, and dukes are just as great a terror, and last longer.' The more one reads of those pre-1914 years, the more one is aware of the rancid odour of bitter class warfare. Generosity? Precious little. To quote Charles Master- man, the Liberal social critic, 'The rich despise the Working People, the Middle Classes fear them.' And, if I'm allowed a second quote, 'Between 1910 and 1914 there was relentless industrial warfare which showed the world how divided Brit- ish society really was' (Asa Briggs).
Old wars, old wounds, and it doesn't matter now, save to show the dangers of a polarised society. As a good Thatcherite, I believe that things are entirely different now, no matter what the Bishop of Durham says. And, yes, the rich are more generous.
I have to admit, though, that it must have been a consolation to those Edwar- dian admirals and old age pensioners to know that they could go and admire the Duke of Buccleuch's improved woodlands, read Lord Bute's translation of the Roman breviary, and even run down to Derbyshire and look at the inside of Chatsworth, free. C. A. Latimer
3 The Street, Melton, Woodbridge Suffolk
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