Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  To add to Asquith’s troubles the newspapers were, by early April, reporting the shell shortage as vividly as censorship would allow. Hankey, who had been to Ypres to meet senior officers, reported to Asquith about ‘the universal demand for more shells’.148 Two committees – one from the Commons under Lloyd George and including Montagu, Balfour and Arthur Henderson, the Labour leader; and a departmental one in the War Office, under Kitchener – were appointed to examine the problem and, in Asquith’s words, ‘to ensure the promptest and most efficient application of all the available productive resources of the country to the manufacture and supply of munitions of war to the Navy and Army.’149 Kitchener’s agreement to serve was interesting, given his intimation on 29 March that if such a committee were formed he would take it as a criticism and would resign. Asquith said the committee had full authority to order whatever measures were needed to improve the situation. In towns such as Leeds, Sheffield, Newcastle and Glasgow, where there were concentrations of armaments factories, local committees were formed of managers and union representatives to discuss how productivity might be improved. Obvious means were to import more labour from other industries not vital to the war, and to step up recruitment of women. A measure of urgency was that there were even calls for men trained as wheelwrights, blacksmiths or engineers but who were now in the police to be transferred to Woolwich Arsenal, the main explosives factory in Britain, and replaced by special constables. In London the City police announced that the chief commissioner had ‘invited’ all unmarried constables to enlist. No one of military age was being recruited to the force, and vacancies were being filled by pensioners. Nevertheless, Lloyd George was still at Kitchener’s throat about the shell shortage: Asquith told Maurice Bonham Carter, his secretary and future son-in-law, on 16 April ‘that LG really said some things that he would find it impossible to forgive had they been said to him.’150

  It was not just shells but soldiers that were in short supply. The men who had answered Kitchener’s call were still in training and few would get to France before June. The numbers enlisting were tailing off. On 13 April an embarrassing consequence of this was disclosed in the Daily Mail. Reproducing a map from Le Matin, it showed that while the French were defending 543½ miles of front the BEF had a mere 31¾, not much more than little occupied Belgium’s 17½. The Mail called this ‘an ignoble position’ and blamed the government for its lack of foresight.151 To free up yet more men for the Army, initiatives were taken to get those unsuitable for military service into essential jobs. On 1 April it was announced that a dockers’ battalion would be formed in Liverpool, on the initiative of Derby and with the approval of Kitchener, to discharge government work in the port. It would be composed of men too old to fight, but who wanted to get into uniform. They would be under military discipline, so the threat of a strike paralysing a key port would be averted: if the Liverpool ‘experiment’, as it was termed, succeeded it would be repeated elsewhere.152 However, to propitiate the union, no man would be taken unless he was a member, and any man who left the union would be discharged from the Army. The NCOs were all ex-union officials and veterans, one having been wounded at Ypres.

  Recognising the challenges his administration faced, Asquith went to Newcastle on 20 April and made a speech to munitions workers there. He hoped his words would quieten the Tory press, damage Northcliffe’s credibility, raise morale and highlight the importance of improved productivity. A Zeppelin raid there five days earlier – they had become routine on the east coast – appeared aimed at arms factories and shipbuilding workshops, so it was an appropriate moment for the prime minister to visit. The press smoothed the path for his arrival by retailing stories of alcoholic excess on Tyneside.

  The Times said that while there were few complaints from munitions factories about the commitment of their workers, the same was not true in shipbuilding. ‘The men who may need straight words from the Prime Minister are a section of the workmen employed on the lower reaches of the river,’ it wrote.153 The Admiralty were chasing ships that were on order: but ‘some of the men, it is alleged, have so far refused to change their habits or increase their energy to meet the national emergency.’ The Times’s reporter paid an afternoon visit to a yard and found ‘the hammers were silent’. He added that ‘a director told me that it seemed impossible to get the riveters to work more than 50 hours in the week.’ There had been Sunday working, but it had been stopped because of the ‘slacking’ that followed on Mondays and Tuesdays. The clinching argument appeared to be that ‘strong ale is drunk by these men – light beer is not popular in Newcastle – and while there may not be much actual drunkenness the employer with whom I spoke said he was convinced that the drinking indulged in at weekends lowered the efficiency of his men and made them indifferent to work on Monday.’ The reporter added that after a four-day Easter holiday some departments had only 20 per cent of their men turning up for work on the Tuesday. Scarcity of labour meant such men could not be sacked; but if drink were proved to be the problem, the new government Armaments Committee had the powers to restrict its sale. Also, under recent amendments to DORA, the government could take over factories producing ‘war material’ and direct how the work was done. Within two months, those who missed work because of drunkenness were being prosecuted, though for breach of contract rather than under DORA, the first case being of four Tyne shipbuilders at Jarrow on 14 June.

  Asquith went to Newcastle, with the country, thanks to the press, expecting him to tell the British working man to increase his productivity, work longer and harder, stop drinking and put his country before himself. As The Times put it on the morning of his visit, ‘if our skilled workmen cannot be trusted to do their duty when they see it, like men, then the Germans are right about our national decadence and we do not deserve to win this war.’154 Unlike the modern processes of drafting and redrafting by a team of advisers, this speech was given from notes scribbled by Asquith as he rode in the train to Newcastle, and then finished off in his hotel room. His audience was of munitions workers, most wearing the lapel badge that marked them as ‘industrial soldiers’; the theme of his forty-minute speech was ‘deliver the goods’. He flattered his audience for their key role in the war effort, and reiterated his case for entering the conflict. Problems with supply of munitions were because the ‘best experts’ had been unable to predict the ‘unprecedented scale’ on which ordnance would be expended.155 He said the state would take over the employment contracts of many workers, and ensure they were put on the most important jobs; and that other engineering factories not currently producing munitions would be converted to do so.

  However, his repudiation of press reports of an ammunition shortage by saying that ‘there is not a word of truth in that statement’ was highly ill-judged.156 Kitchener had told Asquith that the shell shortage was rectified; this was based on a comment French had made to the war secretary about how he had enough ammunition for his next offensive, though French had been complaining to him since the end of October about shortages, something of which Kitchener had admitted he was aware.157 It was an uncharacteristic act of clumsiness for Asquith to rubbish reports that there had been a shell shortage in previous offensives. Every soldier knew this was wrong, as did MPs and Asquith’s own colleagues. Perhaps he was rattled by Miss Stanley’s threat to withdraw: but it shows how little he had attended to the realities of the war and the requirements of leadership in his obsession with her, and his hours of retreat into bridge and his library.

  Asquith did not confine his remarks to munitions and ships. He also had before him the latest coal production figures, which were alarming: an 11.9 per cent fall year on year in February and a 10.8 per cent fall in March, at a time when demand was rising. Around 20 per cent of miners had enlisted, but a third of them had been replaced by men from other industries. Therefore he singled out the miners in his speech – even though none was present – and having observed that munitions workers were putting in sixty-seven to sixty-nine hours a week, he
issued an ‘appeal to the miners who remain in the pits to rival the patriotism of their fellows who have gone, or are going, to the front, by regularity of attendance and, if possible, by increased output.’ He reminded his audience that DORA gave the government powers in such matters, but was anxious to avoid ‘compulsion’. The munitions workers cheered, but to miners it seemed a veiled threat. He added that coal-owners might have to limit their profits, and unions would have to end restrictive practices, in the national interest. Things would be back to normal after the war: but for now there had to be a ‘mutuality of sacrifice’.

  The Newcastle speech had a complicated background, its considerations rooted in lifting not just productivity but morale. Asquith understood the problems the war had created for working-class households. The cost of living for them, according to the Board of Trade, had risen by 20 per cent between July 1914 and March 1915. Although the opportunities for overtime had rocketed, and munitions workers were comparatively well paid, others felt the time had come for a serious pay rise to compensate for the erosion of their disposable income. The Miners’ Federation of Great Britain led the way, demanding 12.5 per cent with immediate effect, reduced from an initial 20 per cent. The owners offered 10 per cent. However, Asquith travelled to Newcastle having heard that a substantial element on the executive of the MFGB was planning to advise all the country’s million miners to resign on the same day. It was unlikely they would prevail, but the fact that such a move was being mooted constituted a desperate threat to the country. In defiance of the union’s leaders, random strikes in pursuit of war bonuses would run throughout the spring and early summer in the West Midlands and South Wales, where a 15.5 per cent bonus was demanded.

  Asquith bore the scars of the great industrial unrest before the war, which by late April 1915 seemed resurgent. He was aware of rising food prices, claims of profiteering and the adverse effect of such matters on morale. Therefore on 29 April he convened a meeting of miners’ representatives and coal-owners over pay demands. A coal strike would have devastated Britain’s fighting ability. The miners knew the opprobrium they would provoke if they walked out at such a time: even so, the South Wales Miners’ Federation was calling for industrial action. Food prices had now risen to their highest point since the outbreak of war, and were predicted to rise further. A quartern loaf of bread, 5½d the previous August, was by late April 8½d. There was also widespread anger that Spillers, the milling company, had just posted profits of £368,000 compared with £89,000 a year earlier, taken as proof of profiteering while the workers made sacrifices. The prime minister agreed with the justice of the miners’ case: but, recognising the variations from one coalfield to another, he refused to recommend a uniform pay rise across the country: instead, he said that if any regional discussions between the owners and the MFGB did not agree a rise in each area within a week, the government would impose one. This prompted a settlement.

  The morning after the Newcastle speech Asquith went to Armstrong’s arms factory outside the city, which had increased its payroll tenfold since August, from 1,300 to 13,000 operatives, and had colonised acres of adjoining fields in putting up new huts. The old anti-suffragist seemed surprised at how well the women in the factory worked on machines ‘wh they learn if they at all clever to handle in 3 days, & if stupid in not more than a fortnight.’158 However, the huts were unmanned for the want of skilled labour. He went having read that morning a deluge of criticism about his speech from the Northcliffe press, which branded it dishonest in his dismissal of reports of a shell shortage. The Times praised his appeal to patriotism, but added that it ‘would have done more to encourage the nation at large, if he had displayed less anxiety to cover up the deficiencies of his Administration.’159 It questioned Asquith’s taste in seeking to establish his administration’s ‘infallibility’ during such a ‘solemn exhortation’ and at ‘a time so big with fate.’

  The Times mocked his denial of under-equipment of troops and his claim that the government had addressed the munitions problem. It ridiculed Asquith’s ‘self-satisfaction’. If all was going so well, it asked, why the urgent appeal for better productivity? It questioned his credibility: it concluded he and his colleagues had made ‘false calculations’ and ‘mistakes’. It stopped an inch short of demanding a cabinet reconstruction. The newspaper also noted that Asquith had not accused the men of Newcastle of being hampered by drink, which would not only have been provocative but also, coming from him, hypocritical.

  Mrs Asquith recorded that The Times’s editor – Geoffrey Robinson, who in 1917 would for inheritance reasons change his name to Dawson, the name of his maternal aunt, and who would distinguish himself in the 1930s by being the main establishment cheerleader for appeasement of Hitler – was ‘a real blackguard of the lowest kind.’160 He ‘has openly boasted that he will do for Henry. He wants a coalition Gov. – Ll G Prime Minister, Austen (Chamberlain) Home Office, B Law Foreign Office (or vice versa), H [Asquith] Ld Chancellor etc.’ Dawson was an ex-member of the ‘Kindergarten’ of brilliant young diplomats assembled by the former proconsul Alfred, now Viscount, Milner, who had created the Union of South Africa; and was a fellow of All Souls. He was also, at this stage in his career, keen to show complete obedience to Northcliffe, with whom he would break after the war. While other papers were savaging her husband – the Morning Post ‘who hates Winston first and Henry next has constantly abused us’ – Mrs Asquith singled out The Times as ‘extremely vindictive and underhand’, and claimed no English paper ‘has shown so little patriotism’. Because of its influential readership, its editorial line was of paramount significance when the only means of mass communicating news and opinion was through the printed word.

  Newspapers of less prestige were by now writing about an intrigue against Asquith. The Daily Chronicle had been categorical about its existence, and Mrs Asquith believed the loose tongues of Lloyd George and Churchill, particularly with friends such as Balfour and Smith, caused much to end up in the Northcliffe press that would have been better left unsaid. Lloyd George believed McKenna was intriguing against him by telling tales to Asquith about the chancellor’s loathing of McKenna. McKenna believed Lloyd George was intriguing against him, and trying to get him sacked from the Home Office. Both men were right about the other. Therefore Asquith had to referee a feud between his home secretary and his chancellor. From what Asquith said to his wife, Churchill was running out of rope – ‘he will see FE Smith and discuss every cabinet secret with him’, he told her – and he had reached the point where ‘it is no good discussing things with Winston.’161

  After he returned from Newcastle, and while the Commons was debating a backbench motion on whether the munitions industry should, in effect, be centrally controlled or nationalised to ensure it performed better, Asquith wrote to Miss Stanley about the ‘worship and love’ he felt for her: and although she had warned him it could not go on he still held out hope: ‘I know that fate … has just cut me off from the chance of the best tho’ it has given me, & please God will still give me, the richest plenitude of love and happiness that has fallen to the lot of any man of my time.’162 He pleaded: ‘Whatever you may be tempted to do, my own darlingest, don’t “spoil the bread and spill the wine”. Don’t …’ But he conceded that should she choose someone above him, it would signal he was simply not worthy, and he would rejoice in her happiness.

  It was too late. That same day Miss Stanley was writing a letter – of which she later claimed to feel ashamed because of its lack of generosity towards Asquith – to Montagu about how she could once have moved on from Asquith and it would not have mattered: and now, ‘I feel so ungrateful to him & yet at times I resent very bitterly that he should stand in the way.’163 Asquith had told her that life would have nothing to offer him if they parted: ‘How could he have been so cruel as to say that to me?’ she asked Montagu.164 In the following days she and Montagu tried to work out how to tell him they were marrying: ‘I can’t see the way out,’ Montagu told her, ‘bu
t best beloved, we must find one … for we ought not to waste time.’165

  Asquith continued to be savaged by what he called ‘Northcliffe & his obscene crew’ for the Newcastle speech.166 With politicians largely silent in the interests of national unity, the press took over. The Times returned to kick him on 22 April, calling his speech ‘short of courage and candour’ after further reflection, and asserting that the initial enthusiasm for it would soon wear off and be replaced by ‘disappointment’.167 Singing its proprietor’s tune, the paper continued that ‘he said not one single word about the position in which the war stands, nor did he make the slightest attempt to warn the nation of the enormous magnitude of the task with which it is now confronted.’ This was not entirely fair, for Asquith had stressed, without using the phrase ‘total war’, that this was a war that required everybody, whether at the front or not.

  The main criticism of Asquith at this time – that he was insufficiently communicative to Parliament and to the nation about the progress of the war – was, however, justified. Chamberlain, a few days earlier, had accused him of putting blinkers on the nation: by which he meant the excessive censorship of details about the fighting, keeping the truth from the public and, perhaps, not making them realise how desperate the need for a stronger contribution from the workforce was. Derby used a recruiting meeting in Oldham on 22 April to call for accredited war correspondents, so that the public might learn the gravity of the situation and more men might see the importance of enlisting. A few days later he spoke at Manchester and said that Asquith’s statements about munitions were ‘absolutely and perfectly opposed to the facts. There is not a single man in the Army or, I believe, the War Office who would support that [Asquith’s] view.’168 The press lauded him for this, and others ‘of high station’ were urged to follow his example. Derby had worked tirelessly since the start of hostilities and was universally respected. Although a Tory, no one believed he criticised Asquith out of partisanship, but out of desperation. He did, however, apologise if anyone had interpreted his remarks as an accusation that Asquith had lied: he felt there had been a misunderstanding of what Asquith meant in his speech, an assertion that had quite the opposite effect from clearing the matter up.