by Simon Heffer
The fundamental cause of the inflation, though, was the huge growth in the supply of money because of the issue of paper currency, not just in Britain, but around the world as a consequence of the disruption to commerce. Francis Acland, financial secretary to the Treasury, in response to requests to take some of the notes out of circulation, told the Commons on 22 February that ‘there is no depreciation of the currency’: which was rubbish.23 Before the war there had been £28 million of high-denomination notes in circulation: by February 1915 there were £87 million, mostly 10s and £1 notes that had replaced half-sovereigns and sovereigns – which were either retained by banks, hoarded or had left the country. The overall supply of money had, however, increased, as the total sum of notes plus gold was above the pre-August 1914 level. Acland confirmed that any holder of a note could exchange it for gold at the Bank of England at will: had everyone done so, however, the economy would have collapsed, as the country would have been denuded of gold reserves.
Throughout the winter the government was never free from having to handle industrial unrest. Inexorably rising food prices continued to spur demands for higher wages – London dockers wanted an extra 2d an hour, but representatives of the owners refused to meet them until pressed by the Board of Trade – and there were threats of strikes. In February 1915 engineers on the Clyde walked out over pay, and other shipyards became restive. The government’s committee on shipbuilding announced an award of 10 per cent for piece workers or 4s 6d a week for waged staff on government contracts: the unions had wanted 15 per cent and 6s, but accepted the lower figure as a compromise. However, the Clydeside workers, who wanted an extra 2d an hour because of the rise in food and coal prices, were not appeased. They renamed their strike committee the ‘withdrawal from work’ committee and ultimately agreed to return to work, but once there refused to do overtime and, when at their lathes, contrived to do as little as possible.24 The Times quoted one operative as saying that while he was sorry if their action led to a shortage of ammunition, ‘we regard our 2d an hour as much more important than ammunition for the Army.’ Clydeside would vex the government throughout the war: it became the base of the revolutionary Socialist Labour Party, who saw the war as an opportunity to kill capitalism, and exploited it to that end. What they achieved for ordinary workers rather than for their own ideological satisfaction is highly debatable. The newspaper’s report said that was not the view of most men, and the union urged a return to normal work, but such sentiments inflamed public opinion.
Asquith was disturbed, when the industrial situation was discussed in cabinet on 24 February, to note Churchill and Lloyd George trying to outdo each other in suggested sanctions against unpatriotic workers, including ‘compulsory labour & martial law’.25 With things going badly in France, a collapse of industrial morale and social divisions were the last things needed. However, because of censorship the true state of the war, the shortage of ammunition and the huge dependence the Armed Forces had on industrial production had been kept from the public, including from striking workers who were almost certainly not aware of the damage they were doing. Such a world of make-believe was unsustainable. The Times, constantly complaining about censorship, even suggested that groups of workers be taken to the trenches to see things for themselves, instead of ‘squabbling over farthings’.26 By early March there was a drift back to normal work on the Clyde, mainly because money was running short among strikers’ families: but the unrest continued among London dockers and bootmakers in Northampton, in whose trade disruption could cripple the fighting forces.
DORA gave the government power to seize a factory essential to the war and to compel its owners and workers to carry on production; an Amending Bill in March 1915 conferred the right to control plant not used for war work, but which had that potential. It met little parliamentary opposition. Understandably, Asquith was immensely reluctant to use such a measure, and an early agreement in Northampton for a return to work obviated the need. However, a strike then broke out on the North Eastern Railway after a demand for a 20 per cent pay rise was refused; and 2,000 Scottish steelworkers asked for a 25 per cent increase, while 4,000 blast furnacemen sought 50 per cent.
Lloyd George’s indispensability to the government arose not because of his knowledge of finance but because of the rapport he could establish with the unions. Matters were so restive in the coal trade that the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain called a conference to discuss its pay demands, which turned into a three-day meeting at the Treasury, from 17 to 19 March, with the chancellor. However perilous the national situation, some workers were in no mood for sacrifice, and the rise in prices enriching many already well off gave them cause to take such a view. Nevertheless, the meeting ended with an agreement – known as the Treasury Agreement – by the unions (thirty-four of them) to accept arbitration instead of going on strike. There was a strict understanding that new working practices would pertain for the duration of the war only. More controversially, the unions were promised a say in the management of the arms industry, and that profits would be restricted – which served the government’s purpose, as the taxpayer was footing the bill.
In some respects society was changing more slowly than might have been imagined. There was still resistance to women doing men’s jobs, hence the preference for schoolboys to be put on the land rather than direct the large number of unemployed women whose businesses had been hit by the war to do such work. Visitors from Canada and the United States – such as Mrs Alfred Watt, of Toronto University, who lectured the League of Honour in London on 4 March – spoke of the ubiquity of women in agriculture in North America, and how labour-saving devices for the home had been developed to allow them more time to work on the land. Yet the day she spoke it was reported that Leicestershire planned to issue permits for boys of eleven or twelve to abandon school and work on farms during the spring and summer. The Bishop of Oxford, writing to The Times, called such a policy ‘a disastrously reactionary measure’: and, in a portentous observation, noted that the country clergy of his diocese had seen their soldier parishioners ‘greatly improved by military service and better feeding’ when home on leave, and wanting a better life than agricultural labour when and if they returned from the war. The boys of eleven would in all likelihood have to stay on the land for life: their older brothers, however, if they survived, were minded to move on. The war was already expanding horizons for those lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.
Civilians would soon have to become used to another privation: restrictions on the supply and availability of alcohol. On 15 March Kitchener had made a statement in the Lords about the Battle of Neuve Chapelle (which he called ‘a marked success’), claiming the fighting had been confined to trench warfare because of the waterlogged ground: either he did not grasp that mobile war was out of the question whatever the weather, or saw no reason to share that news with the wider world.27 On munitions, he said orders of ‘vast magnitude’ had been placed with factories, and the ‘great majority’ of workers had ‘loyally risen to the occasion’.28 However, he reported manpower shortages and delays in producing plant; and ‘instances where absence, irregular time-keeping, and slack work have led to a marked diminution in the output of our factories.’29 He blamed ‘the temptations of drink’ and restrictive practices of unions, and warned the House that unless the supply of recruits for the Army and of munitions improved, the prosecution of the war ‘will be very seriously hampered and delayed.’ The shortage of munitions, especially, caused him ‘very serious anxiety’. To incentivise workers he announced that the profits of their employers would be curtailed and a medal for loyal service would be issued at the end of the war.
Lloyd George, like Kitchener, believed drink was handicapping productivity in armaments factories: and that was what the government told the public, perhaps shifting some of the blame for the underperformance of the arms industry on to the shoulders of its inebriated workers, instead of concentrating it on the War Office, which
needed to get a grip on this essential industry. Lloyd George’s own constituency in the Liberal Party, being predominantly Nonconformist, was closely associated with the temperance movement: so taking a hard line on drink was personally helpful to him, and there were even this early in the war sufficient reports of drunken and absentee workers to provoke action.
The previous August, Parliament passed a law allowing local authorities to control the hours of public houses, something hitherto only possible if a riot was expected. In November 1914 a deputation, led by the Duchess of Marlborough, went to see McKenna, the home secretary, to demand the government ‘take instant steps to deal with the lamentable increase of drinking among women.’30 The grand ladies told the home secretary they believed – on what grounds it is unclear – that women who turned to drink did so in the mornings; so they asked him to ban the opening of public houses before noon. He told them he did not believe he could get parliamentary support for such a measure.
Although taxation had increased, the longer hours worked in arms factories, and in others concerned with war production such as textiles and machinery, meant a rise in disposable income. Much of this rise was spent on alcohol. The statistics did, however, prove that not only were women drinking more, they were doing so when the nation overall was drinking less, doubtless because so many men were now under military discipline and women were moving from the closely supervised and poorly paid world of domestic service into factories. At Bangor on 28 February the chancellor said that ‘drink is doing more damage … than all the German submarines put together.’31 The speech caused huge disquiet, not just among the drinks trade but among the public, who feared prohibition. The press was briefed that the speech was a warning rather than a threat; but Lloyd George intended to fulfil the long-held Liberal desire to bring the Tory-supporting brewing industry under control while claiming to do so for patriotic reasons. The question was how to do this without aggrieving drinkers, damaging the Treasury’s revenues or intervening to an unacceptable level in private business. Mrs Asquith, who claimed hardly to drink at all, was ‘violently hostile, and full of compassion for the drinkless workers, and of indignation against those who “would rob a poor man of his beer”.’32
Lloyd George suggested to the King – to whom he had taken to referring, in private, as ‘my little German friend’ – that if he foreswore strong drink for the duration, and imposed that rule in all royal palaces, the nation would follow.33 The King agreed: he was already being careful to make patriotic gestures whenever possible. In public he now wore only military or naval uniform; he had already toned down his social life, having given up eating out; and in the first days of the war, when the food panic was at its height, Buckingham Palace had announced that the Royal Family would eat only plain food for the duration. There were precedents for sacrifice. He told his diary, apparently enthusiastically: ‘I am all for drastic measures & all alcohol being stopped during the war.’34 Asquith, who had no intention of stopping drinking, was troubled. Claims that he was an alcoholic rely on a loose definition of the term: he certainly drank heavily, as did most men of his era and class, and he certainly drank more than was ideal for conducting great affairs of state.35 He also increased his intake as the strain grew, and his colleagues occasionally detected a physical deterioration: Lord Crawford, joining the cabinet in the summer of 1916, noted that the sixty-four-year-old Asquith was ‘somnolent – hands shaky and cheeks pendulous’, and ‘his eyes watery and his features kept moving about in nervous twitching fashion.’36 Lloyd George told Asquith he could, of course, get a medical exemption. Churchill, also en route to such a state, said that if forced to abstain he too would consult his doctor. Lloyd George was thought to be teetotal, having signed a pledge when he was nineteen, and being heavily reliant on the support of Nonconformists. However, he drank throughout his life in moderation, and seems to have seen nothing hypocritical in urging the King to take the pledge too, while he, as one already pledged, systematically broke his promise not to drink.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer then put himself at the forefront of the nation’s self-sacrificial spirit without doing too much self-sacrificing of his own. He made a speech in which he said: ‘we are fighting Germany, Austria and Drink, and as far as I can see, the greatest of these three deadly foes is drink.’37 The Temperance Department of the Wesleyan Methodist Church liked the quotation so much it produced a poster to plaster all over Britain proclaiming it. On 1 April a letter was published in the press announcing that the King, his family and his household would renounce drink from 6 April until the war ended. Kitchener announced he was following suit. Lloyd George and McKenna signed the pledge, and the Church of England issued an official call for ‘restraint’ in consumption. Elizabeth Asquith, the prime minister’s daughter, observed of Kitchener that ‘neither the retreat at [the] beginning of [the] War or [the Battle of] Neuve Chapelle affected his spirits as badly as 3 days on lemonade.’38 Oc Asquith, en route to the Dardanelles with the Royal Naval Division, sent a telegram to his father that read: ‘Reported spread of temperance alarms and amazes us. Stand fast.’39
The King, however, soon felt he had been wrong-footed because of the lack of other public figures actually abiding by his example, and was especially aggrieved that his other ministers were not following suit. He told Stamfordham to tell Lloyd George that the abstinence would be delayed – but Lloyd George told him it could not be. The Sovereign then complained to Mrs Asquith that he had never intended to give up drink unless the government passed ‘drastic legislation on the subject’.40 He was angry with Lloyd George about the way he had handled the temperance pledge, and the acrimony lingered. Over a year later, when knighting Lloyd George’s former under-secretary Arthur Lee, the King told him he had ‘persuaded him to give up alcohol during the War, as an example, but unfortunately the public did not respond and he felt he had been made a fool of.’41 Most in public life ignored the pledge: the King occasionally took alcohol for medicinal purposes, such as when he was thrown from his horse and injured while visiting troops later in 1915.
Lloyd George’s desire for prohibition, which Asquith believed would lead to a general strike, among other things, therefore never extended far beyond the Monarch. He then looked for other means of controlling consumption, arguing that the government should buy all public houses, a suggestion by which the prime minister was ‘entirely unconvinced’.42 After that he tried but failed to secure agreement for sizeable tax increases on drink. He then wanted to nationalise the drinks trade, to control the production and distribution of alcohol, which would have cost the taxpayer £250 million. Asquith told Miss Stanley: ‘I warned him to go very warily: a State monopoly in drink would I think be a most dangerous thing politically.’43 However, Law wrote to Lloyd George on 7 April, having heard of the proposal, and said his brewer- and distiller-funded party would back it if such a measure were deemed ‘necessary for the successful prosecution of the war’.44
Some steps to control drinking were taken nonetheless. An amendment to DORA in mid-May 1915 allowed the government to enforce special regulations for the sale of alcohol in any area deemed essential for the production or transport of materials of war. It established a Central Liquor Control Board – which, in the effect the board and the policies it enforced had in drastically reducing drunkenness, was regarded as perhaps the most effective act of bureaucracy imposed during the war. A bane of twentieth-century life, the licensing laws, had been born, and as well as enforcing them the board ordered the production of weaker beer, and limited off-sales.
That was not the end of the anti-drink campaign. Later in the spring, an attempt by Lloyd George to raise alcohol duties caused trouble for the government that Asquith, beleaguered on an increasing number of fronts by then, could have done without. The chancellor spoke to the Commons on 29 April about the government’s policy on drink, and his ‘perplexing and disagreeable’ duty to implement it.45 He claimed drink was third on the list of impediments to productivity, after r
estrictions on the mobility and availability of labour and the unions’ restrictive practices. The other two had been dealt with, he claimed, thanks to DORA and his negotiations with workers’ representatives. Drink alone remained. A report by an admiral said that in one shipyard there were 135 fitters of whom, one Monday, only 60 worked a full day. On the following four days only 90, 86, 77 and 103 turned up; of 7,155 man hours on what would have been normal peacetime shifts, only 5,664.5 had been worked. This was a loss of 30 per cent, and it was not peacetime: war demanded maximum effort.46 Across the nation, 493 men in every 1,000 in private factories and yards were working under forty-five hours a week each, which was disastrous: and rises in wages, far from motivating the men, made matters worse, by supplying more money for drink and less need for overtime. On the other hand, in the Royal arsenals, according to Lloyd George, men were working up to eighty hours a week: there was no excuse.