The Edwardians
On a windy, rainy morning in July 1909, a seemingly fragile monoplane – constructed from wood, canvas, wire and glue – crash-landed on a clifftop meadow near Dover Castle. According to an account in the local press: ‘Police Constable Stanford… patrolling his beat… saw what he first took to be a huge bird rushing towards him.’ The pilot, Louis Blériot, emerged unscathed (apart from a previously injured foot), was mobbed by the gathering crowd and taken, in triumph, to the nearby Lord Warden Hotel at the foot of the Admiralty Pier. Two days later, The Aero Club of Great Britain honoured Blériot with a dinner at the Ritz Hotel in London. To the aviator's amusement, a pastry chef placed a scale model of the plane in sugar and almonds on a small table in front of the chairman's dais. So ended the first crossing of the English Channel by aeroplane.
The Daily Mirror recorded the historic event in a strikingly modern photographic spread. Alfred HarmsWorth (later Lord Nortlicliffe) founded The Daily Mirror in 1903 as a middle-class newspaper ‘run by women for women’. Poor sales prompted a relaunch with an innovative, illustrated format. Leafing through faded copies of The Daily Mirror, the pages filled with sensations, scandals, royal gossip, fashionable diet advice and advertisements for household brands still going strong today, the Edwardian age feels surprisingly familiar.
For anyone brought up in the 1970s and 80s, the Edwardian period conjures up romantic visions of pretty girls in long white dresses, croquet lawns and tea taken under a cedar tree in the garden of an English country house: a nostalgic fantasy, captured in films such as The Go-Between (1971), and Room with a View (1985), or the BBC's 1975 adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. More recently, ITV's Downton Abbey portrayed the era as a glittering, golden age destroyed by the cataclysm of The Great War.
Historians use the description ‘Edwardian’ to pigeonhole the nine years
