After Grey had turned down the German offer, the German naval estimates for 1912 were larger than ever. Britain’s reaction was to remove, very ostentatiously, the whole of her magnificent battle fleet from Toulon and away from the Mediterranean. Henceforth the two navies of the Anglo-French Entente were to divide the guarding of their respective waters between them. The French were to be responsible for the Mediterranean, while the British were to protect the Channel and North Sea.
The military links between the French and English governments became soldered together. Unknown to most of the Cabinet except for the foreign secretary and the prime minister Asquith, in 1912 France and England began to share military secrets and to second staff to one another’s armies.
Morally speaking there was now an alliance in all but name: an attack by Germany on France’s Channel ports or her northern and western coasts must, in the French view, bring Britain into the war. But the British government nevertheless refused to make it official. British public opinion would not allow the country to fight for France if France attacked Germany first. Three-quarters of the Liberal Cabinet were pacifists who would not countenance an alliance with France, and the government continued to wish not to alarm Germany with an alliance she would perceive as aimed at her. If it did come to war, the two Entente governments would meet to hammer out what would be their next move, whether in fact they would act together. With this curious position the French had to be content. But the actions of the Liberal government spoke louder than words. Early in 1912, spurred by the Agadir crisis, Asquith set up the Invasion Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence, which met off and on until 1914. Discussions on how to get troops to France began to absorb government attention.
The Agadir episode had been seen by other countries as a sign that force was rewarded, that aggression paid. During September 1911 when the Admiralty was quarrelling with the army about war procedure (the Admiralty wanted the army to stay offshore in boats while most of the battles were fought at sea), Italy successfully invaded Tripoli in north Africa. She had no difficulty in swiftly defeating its nominal overlord Turkey, which was racked by the chaos of a new regime. Italy’s success gave hope to all the unsatisfied Balkan countries for their own war against Turkey.
Against this background of international lawlessness the peaceful fabric of British life, which had successfully survived the upheavals of the industrial revolution, frayed to breaking point. The trade unions, the suffragettes, the Conservative and Ulster Unionists, all one way and another were dissatisfied by too many or too few government reforms. Despite the Parliament Bill, many of the more recent elements in politics–the working classes, the trade unionists and the militant suffragettes–were disappointed by the slow nature of the Parliamentary process. All broke with traditional or legal methods of expressing themselves; anarchy loomed.
During 1912–14 Britain was swept by a series of national strikes that almost brought the country to her knees. Labour had lost 25 per cent of their seats at the January 1910 election. From fifty-three MPs their numbers went down to forty. It confirmed the blue-collar workers’ disillusionment with Parliament as a way of addressing their concerns. The single-ballot system was weighted against a third party, which made it hard for Labour to get elected, and its supporters felt that they were not being represented in numbers proportionate to the Labour party membership. This bitterness was aggravated after 1909 when sixteen Labour MPs had to go without salaries after the Osborne case had dried up the party’s funds. The Liberal-supporting railwayman W. V. Osborne had successfully challenged his trade union’s compulsory levy to the Labour party, the Law Lords ruling that trade unions could no longer provide for Parliamentary representation by a compulsory levy. In 1911 the Liberals remedied this when they instituted the payment of MPs, a Chartist demand since the 1840s.
But the damage was done. The optimism which the historic number of Labour MPs in Parliament had created turned to anger when they appeared to make so little difference. Hardship remained widespread for many industrial workers. Wages had remained the same from the beginning of the century, even though prices and the cost of living had risen. People wanted instant solutions, which the threat of stoppages provided. Thanks to Labour pressure, laws relating to strike action had recently been relaxed. As a result the country was rocked by them. To the short-sighted they seemed an easier route to power than Parliament; some trade unionists came under the influence of the French Trade Union or Syndicalist movement which distrusted Parliamentary methods, preferring the strike as a method of operation. The Syndicalists looked to a Utopian future where trade unions would form the basic unit of society.
In 1910 the government reluctantly used troops against miners in the Rhondda Valley in South Wales who had attacked a pithead to get more pay. At first it sent only London policemen. The Liberals were disturbed by the thought of using soldiers in industrial disputes, believing that the owners were frequently as unreasonable as the men. But the use of troops deepened the unions’ sense of grievance. During the summer of 1911, in the midst of the Agadir crisis, another rash of strikes by the seamen’s, firemen’s and dockers’ unions brought the Port of London to a standstill until there were pay rises all round. It was followed by what was very nearly a national railway strike to protest against the deaths of two rioting dockers in Liverpool fired on by soldiers. The strike shut down most of the industrial midlands for four days. So tense was the situation, and so great was the fear of revolutionary action, that troops were brought into the centre of London. In the blistering heat their tents crowded the dried-up lawns of St James’s Park, Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, which were more usually thronged with prams. But Lloyd George was skilful in his handling of the union. The new leader of the Parliamentary Labour party, Ramsay MacDonald, joined the negotiations and the railway strike ended with no recriminations and no job losses.
Permanent machinery was set up to sort out the railwaymen’s grievances. The generally sympathetic treatment the unions received helped ensure that, despite talks between the dockers, the miners and the railwaymen about a general strike, in Britain strikes never became a revolutionary instrument for social change. In 1912 after a new miners’ strike for a minimum wage, when the intransigence of the owners prevented attempts to fix it mutually at local level, the Liberals passed a minimum-wage bill. By 1913 there was still less room for discontent when the government rescinded the Osborne judgement. The 1913 Trade Union Act made it legal for trade union levies to be spent on politics as long as members were canvassed for their views. Any member of a different political persuasion could decline to contribute.
The strikes petered out, but London was now subjected to an arson campaign. This was conducted by a militant branch of the suffragette movement, the Women’s Social and Political Union, or WSPU, founded in 1903 when the Independent Labour party failed to include women’s suffrage in their programme. It was run by the charismatic Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters Sylvia and Christabel; Christabel had been prevented from reading for the bar, despite her law degree, because she was of the female sex.
The 1907 Qualification of Women Act allowed women, married or single, to be councillors, aldermen or mayors and to sit on county and borough councils, but the Parliamentary vote continued to be denied them. Thousands of women marched for the vote, but nothing was done. Mrs Pankhurst, her daughters and other suffragettes were imprisoned several times for causing public disorder when they heckled Liberal election rallies. Two attempts at franchise reform failed, the first because the Liberal government would not introduce a bill to enfranchise single women with property, as that would mean increasing the vote of the traditionally Conservative spinster. In frustration the Pankhursts decided to abandon constitutional means.
Letterboxes, a school, a railway station were set on fire. The British Museum was attacked, as was the orchid house at Kew. The suffragettes even went for the Tower of London. Across England members of the society, who numbered around 40,000 women,
hoisted up the long skirts that continued to be de rigueur in the early twentieth century and stole out after dark to cut telephone wires. They even tied themselves to the railings of 10 Downing Street. Soon several hundred suffragettes were locked up in Holloway Women’s Prison. Moreover, once the suffragettes were incarcerated they went on hunger strike. As some began to die, the anxious prison authorities turned to force feeding. But there were fears about its legality. In desperation the home secretary Reginald McKenna introduced the so-called Cat and Mouse Act, which allowed hunger strikers to be released and to be rearrested without further proceedings once they had recovered at home. One of the Pankhurst suffragettes, the forty-one-year-old Emily Davison, threw herself under George V’s horse at the 1913 Derby and died from her injuries. The WSPU’s extremism alienated many more moderate campaigners for women’s suffrage like the veteran campaigner Emily Davies, one of the founders of Girton College, Cambridge. When Christabel Pankhurst escaped to Paris after a warrant was issued for her arrest, much of the agitation died down.
Within Britain there was a growing sense of despondency. The confidence which had been so manifest in 1906 was ebbing away, chased by vague but prevalent fears about a coming conflagration. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 by an iceberg underlined the frailty even of modern man and his engineering. Even more haunting to the pre-1914 imagination was the fate of Captain Scott’s expedition to the South Pole. Nature was not tamed as easily as the twentieth century thought.
At Christmas 1912 Captain Robert Scott and four others including Captain Lawrence Oates reached the South Pole, only to discover that the Norwegian Roald Amundsen had beaten them to it. When the frostbite on Oates’s feet began to endanger the expedition’s progress, Oates sacrificed himself for his friends by walking out of his tent into the blizzard. ‘I am just going outside and may be some time,’ he said. His body was never found, but his words became revered for their very British understatement. Captain Scott and the rest of the expedition failed to reach the food depot they were seeking. When an Antarctic search party at last reached them in November 1913 it was to find them dead in their tents several miles away. Beside Scott’s body was the journal in which he detailed Oates’s heroic end.
Even the Asquith government, which had taken power as the essence of probity and high-mindedness, was rocked by financial scandal. The telegraph signal company Marconi was awarded the contract to provide a radio service throughout the empire under the aegis of the Post Office. But in 1912 it was alleged that both the postmaster-general Herbert Samuel and the attorney-general Sir Rufus Isaacs held shares in the company and had not declared their interest. Both parties were cleared of insider dealing, Samuel outright and Isaacs because he had only bought shares from the American branch of the company after Marconi had won the contract. However, the secretary of the American company turned out to be Isaacs’ brother. The suspicion that Rufus Isaacs had used his influence to secure the contract for Marconi would not go away. There was a feeling that something underhand had been going on, even if it could not quite be pinned down. The affair left a cloud over the Liberals.
Above all, Asquith was unable to control the situation in Ireland. Since 1912 when preparations for the Third Home Rule Bill began, Sir Edward Carson, the formidable solicitor-general in the last Conservative government, and the MP James Craig had assembled a private Protestant army named the Ulster Volunteers to resist Home Rule in Ulster. Now that the automatic Unionist majority in the Lords could no longer prevent Home Rule, they would put their trust in force. Andrew Bonar Law, the inexperienced leader of the Conservatives and Unionists who succeeded Balfour, encouraged this lawless behaviour. In a series of astonishing speeches, he pledged the Conservatives to defend Ulster physically against the British government if it tried to enforce Home Rule. He even went to Ireland to take the salute of the Ulster Unionist troops as they paraded.
On 28 September 1912 the whole of Belfast closed down to sign the Solemn League and Covenant to resist Home Rule. The hooting sirens of the shipyards and the machines of the factories stopped as nearly 500,000 people lined up to sign the pledge by which they refused to recognize the authority of any Home Rule Parliament. Most of Ulster seemed to be armed. Many of the men signed the pledge in their own blood.
But, although half of Ulster, the Protestants, was against Home Rule, the other half was Catholic and in favour of it. Moreover the head of the Irish Nationalist MPs, John Redmond, could not give up Ulster and Irish unity. By going for Home Rule instead of independence, Redmond had already sacrificed much. For the past few years his leadership had been challenged by Sinn Fein, the total-independence movement in Ireland, which had become notably popular in southern Ireland among blue-collar workers politicized during a series of strikes in 1912 and 1913. In Dublin an army of strikers called the Irish Volunteers had grown up under two leaders, James Connolly and James Larkin, who had none of Redmond’s scruples about violence. The Irish Volunteers started drilling like the Ulster Volunteers. By 1914 they were 100,000 strong, and a third of them were in the north.
As the situation in northern and southern Ireland became more intemperate, with both sides plotting to import arms, the Home Rule Bill was passed twice by the House of Commons and thrown out twice by the House of Lords. But, by the autumn of 1913 as Home Rule came closer to implementation, the government was becoming increasingly uneasy at the idea of imposing Home Rule on Ulster. Perhaps it would be impossible to coerce Ulster; in any case it was very un Liberal to coerce anyone.
Under George V’s aegis, discussions were opened between all parties at Balmoral to discuss the possibility of excluding Ulster. Redmond reluctantly agreed to partition, angering many of the Sinn Feiners and further weakening his position with the Irish Volunteers. The question was, where should the exclusion line run? The talks continued throughout the winter of 1913–14, while the two illegal armies of southern and northern Irish drilled regardless.
The apparent favouring of the Unionist side was epitomized by the government turning a blind eye to what was called the Larne gun-running in April 1914 when the Ulstermen landed 30,000 rifles and a million rounds of ammunition. The police and coastguards made no real attempt to stop the operation. But in July that year, when the Irish Volunteers landed guns at Howth near Dublin, troops were called out to stop them. Protesters threw things at troops in Dublin, provoking the soldiers to fire into the crowds, killing three and wounding forty more. This more than ever aggravated relations between Dublin and Westminster, and between Redmond and the Irish Volunteers.
Meanwhile the very loyalty of the army in Ireland had been called into question. The commander-in-chief of the army in Ireland, Sir Arthur Paget, who had strong Unionist sympathies, had chosen to ignore the tradition that the British army was apolitical and that its first duty was to obey the civilian government. In an episode known as the Curragh ‘mutiny’ after the area where the army was based, in March 1914 Paget told officers that he could not order those who disapproved of Home Rule, especially if their homes were in the north, to impose it on Ulster. He recommended that those who did not wish to coerce Ulster should resign from the army. No fewer than fifty officers out of seventy said they would resign if ordered north.
The secretary for war who had encouraged Paget’s extraordinary dereliction of duty was sacked after this became public. Nevertheless the officers concerned could not be court-martialled, as there was an increasing anxiety at top government levels that some kind of war was not far off. The atmosphere in Europe in late May 1914 to an American observer Colonel House was ‘militarism run stark mad’. The French had vastly added to their conscripts. There were constant rumours that the German army was the real force behind its country’s foreign policy, that it had insisted on a war tax and had called in all foreign loans.
May and June passed. In May it seemed that a way out of the Irish impasse had been found. It was a typical piece of Lloyd George cunning: there would be an amendment to the Home Rule Bill that any county, if a
majority of its voters agreed, could vote itself out of Home Rule for six years. The Nationalists concurred, but the House of Lords insisted on changing the amendment: the whole of Ulster must be excluded from Home Rule without a time limit. However, when the altered bill returned to the Commons on 14 July, the government’s attention was shifting away from the passions of Ireland to the wider world.
For on 28 June the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the archduke Franz Ferdinand, had been assassinated by a Bosnian Serb in Sarajevo. Austria–Hungary had long been wanting to crush the Serbs. With her military establishment hot to strike, she was using the excuse to reach the brink of war. The question was, would she drag all the other allied nations of Europe in with her? Anxious telegrams flew between the chancelleries of Europe.
While the world once more held its breath, discussions on the Irish Home Rule Bill pressed on. The bill could not be accepted by the Commons in its amended state, but there had to be a resolution to the crisis. So uncompromising was the atmosphere that at Asquith’s instigation on 18 July another round-table conference was called at Buckingham Palace. Redmond and the Nationalists accepted the exclusion of Ulster, and the Unionists agreed to Home Rule for the rest of Ireland. But the conference broke down over the counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone. With their equally mixed Catholic and Protestant populations, should they be part of northern or southern Ireland? The drilling continued in both parts of the country. Though there was as yet no civil war, the threat remained. However, the whole matter was overtaken by events in the outside world. The conference broke up without conclusion, to reconvene in the autumn. Just as its members were rising from their seats, the foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey came in, carrying the ultimatum which Austria–Hungary had sent to Serbia on 24 July. Although Serbia replied in the most abject manner, Austria–Hungary broke off relations and began to bombard her capital, Belgrade. It was the beginning of the First World War.
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