by Simon Heffer
This may have helped efficiency, but it also played its part in creating the war profiteer, not least when some of those drafted in opened up negotiations on behalf of the government with firms from which they had been seconded, usually to the benefit of the latter. One notorious example, rumbled by Christopher Addison, the under-secretary, was a Colonel William Wright, a coal-owner who became Controller of Iron and Steel Production, and who was found seeking better terms for a business in which he had an interest, the Port Talbot Steel Company.276 Such men were, supposedly, civil servants: but after December 1916 some would become ministers. People took a cynical view of Lloyd George’s network of friends; the Duke of Northumberland, on the Western Front the following winter visiting territorial units he had helped recruit, told Haig he thought that ‘much of the money now spent on munitions is sticking to the hands of someone, or rather that Lloyd George’s friends are drawing large salaries and doing very little in the way of turning out ammunition.’277 Before long the words ‘Lloyd George knew my father, / Father knew Lloyd George’ became a soldiers’ marching song. As well as moving the tectonic plates of government, the Welsh Wizard had become emblematic of a new, harsher form of politics, incomprehensible to the likes of Asquith but excusable in the name of national salvation.
The Shells Committee, formed the previous October and on which Lloyd George sat, had found that although Kitchener wanted seventy divisions in the field, the officer in charge of ordnance, Major General Sir Stanley von Donop, had ordered only enough ordnance for twenty-four, to be delivered in June 1915. Thanks to an initiative by Lloyd George the order was increased from 900 to 3,000 guns, to be delivered by the end of May. The committee had also persuaded the Ordnance Department to use suppliers not on its approved list. Despite the huge demand for munitions, Parliament learned on 8 June that the new ministry had an additional list of 300 firms who had offered to make ordnance, but had received no orders.278
This was the sort of institutional caution and sclerosis that, as well as the Germans, Britain was fighting, and Lloyd George had lobbied Asquith and his colleagues about the need to deal with it radically. He had von Donop in his sights, gladly absorbing tales from contractors that he had turned down their offers to make munitions. Unprecedented demands for ammunition had caught him, and other senior officers, by surprise. Nor had he the political means to deal with the restrictive practices of trades unions, and labour shortages. Lloyd George would strip powers from von Donop, but he would survive in post until late the following year; and Lloyd George, in keeping with the spirit of the times, would take the credit for the increased shell production von Donop had already instituted since war broke out, limited though that was. No one could question the munitions minister’s energy; but he had never let principle stand in the way of anything he wanted, and the existentialist struggle gave him even less cause to do so.
Lloyd George wanted to remain chancellor too, but Asquith felt that if the new ministry were to respond to the crisis it would require the undivided attention of its minister. The ministry would have two main purposes. The first was to organise private industry to provide the most efficient service in the manufacture and supply of armaments. The second would be to take over the inspectorate of such factories from the War Office. A new network of munitions factories would be set up, starting in railway workshops. It meant a serious loss of responsibility for Kitchener and the War Office. A Bill was put through Parliament suspending the Act of Queen Anne to force ministers moving jobs to resign their seats and fight by-elections: Lloyd George, with more important things to do, would not have to endure such a distraction.
His hope of sidelining Kitchener (which Northcliffe shared, as did the Irish, who felt him unsympathetic to the National Volunteers) would not be granted. The war secretary had the support of rank-and-file Unionists – who had always believed, politically, he was one of them – if not of those of their leaders who had experienced working with him; and he remained a nationally inspiring figure who had raised a massive army from scratch. Lloyd George’s criticism of him was simple: ‘I blame K for not having, in spite of saying the war would last 3 years, got all the factories etc together from the very first.’279 Also, that Asquith had no idea that French had asked Kitchener for more shells said much about the Field Marshal’s methods.
In early June 1915 legislation settled the powers and responsibilities of the new department, the first ever to be termed a ‘ministry’ (before that all except the great offices of state had been ‘boards’). Lloyd George saw central control of the industry as essential, but the powers he wanted to close the gulf between demand and supply were not all forthcoming until late 1915. He also recruited a small army of scientists – notably chemists – to develop explosives and to improve productivity. Almost immediately on his assuming office he formed a Liquor Traffic Control Board of a dozen men, mostly MPs and civil servants, but also including Neville Chamberlain, the Lord Mayor of Birmingham and half-brother of Austen, to ensure his best efforts to equip the Army were not sabotaged by drink.
Lloyd George’s appointment was announced as ‘temporary’. There was nothing temporary, however, about the system he sought to put in place. He ordered the construction of state-owned National Shell Factories, National Projectile Factories (producing ammunition for heavy artillery) and National Filling Factories. Existing government arms factories at Enfield, Waltham Abbey and Woolwich were also expanded. Woolwich would be the centre of the industry. By 1918 it would cover 285 acres of land and contain nearly 150 miles of railway track. Its workforce rose from 15,559 in 1914 to 96,325 by 1917.280
The Munitions of War Act 1915 banned the resignations of workers without permission. This attracted fierce opposition from what had become known as ‘Red Clydeside’, whose main priority was to free workers to fight capitalism rather than direct their efforts against the Germans. The Clyde Workers Committee called the Act ‘a method to furnish the employers with a machine which would shatter to its foundations the whole fabric of trade union liberties and customs.’281 It determined to organise workers according to their station ‘and maintain the class struggle until the overthrow of the wages system’. Winning the war was a lower priority. For other workers there was a different problem: their wages had now risen so much that they could afford to work three or four days a week and drink themselves insensible for the rest of the time.
The new ministry’s approach to munitions manufacture would have far-reaching consequences, notably the enormous expansion of numbers of women in the workforce, in jobs that had been considered male preserves, as what were called ‘munitionettes’. This required Lloyd George to talk round the trades unions: in many places local agreements existed to ‘dilute’ skilled labour by allowing unskilled and semi-skilled workers of both genders to do some of the jobs; in other areas it was forbidden. The new ministry also spurred the growth of what the later twentieth century would know as health-and-safety regulations, though these did not prevent three terrible explosions during the war: in factories at Faversham (115 dead, all men and boys as it was a Sunday, and no women were working) on 2 April 1916; Silvertown (73 dead) on 19 January 1917; and at Chilwell (134 dead) on 1 July 1918.
In the coalition negotiations Asquith managed to keep Unionists out of the main posts in the cabinet. His wife was surprised by his loyalty to Grey, whom she pronounced ‘terribly egotistical’ and ‘useless’ during the crisis.282 Lloyd George, while effective, was in a different way unhelpful to Asquith through his love of intrigue and his capriciousness, but had a constituency in the party and the country so large that his retention was inevitable: he was the only man who could challenge Asquith’s authority, and Asquith knew that Lloyd George, however sceptical he was about him, was essential to his survival as prime minister. Law told Hankey in October 1920 that the Unionists had regarded entering the coalition ‘as a stop-gap arrangement’ because ‘no-one expected it to last.’283 It was also felt in Tory circles that a refusal to cooperate would have dama
ged them greatly, the argument Gwynne used to justify his and the Morning Post’s volte-face on the subject: the alternative, a general election, would, he told Lady Bathurst, ‘be worse than letting the Germans get to Calais.’284
The greatest agony for Asquith was having, at Law’s insistence, to sack Haldane, who took his removal with the stoicism to be expected of a philosopher. Asquith secured his appointment to the Order of Merit – for services to science and philosophy – as a consolation. To many, including himself and Mrs Asquith, this dismissal of a close and old friend gave every appearance of a caving-in to the press. Asquith insisted on the Attorney General, Buckmaster, replacing Haldane on the Woolsack. ‘No-one knows,’ Asquith told Samuel, ‘how much I have suffered. Very gladly indeed would I have gone.’285 In a meeting that included Lloyd George, Crewe, McKenna and Balfour, Asquith then pointed at McKenna and said to Law: ‘I propose to keep my friend here where he is, he is indispensable to me. Have you anything to say?’286 Law protested that McKenna was felt, as home secretary, to have been ineffectual about enemy aliens; Asquith asked McKenna whether he would like to move, but McKenna said he knew what he was doing and so might as well stay at the Home Office.
In fact, McKenna, a former banker, ended up as chancellor, succeeding Lloyd George. Asquith had intended to do the job as well as being prime minister, but met huge resistance from the Unionists, who said he could not devote himself full-time to the direction of the war if he held two cabinet posts. The Treasury, whose mandarins had disliked Lloyd George and never thought him up to the job, were delighted to have McKenna back: he had served as financial secretary in the Campbell-Bannerman administration. Simon, whose career had very nearly ended when trying to resign over the declaration of war, became home secretary, having declined the Woolsack: he was only forty-two and too young, he felt, to leave the Commons. Redmond, the Irish Nationalist leader, objecting to Carson’s inclusion, declined to serve as a counterweight, maintaining the Nationalists’ principle of non-participation in a British government. Lansdowne, a Unionist as passionate as Carson, agreed to be joint leader of the Lords and minister without portfolio, even though it had been reported that his health was not equal to a cabinet place. The Nationalists promised to support the coalition so long as the Unionists did not impose their anti-Home Rule views on it. Asquith refused to allow any Unionists to serve in the Irish administration. These promises would be tested to destruction.
Arthur Henderson, as Labour leader, was invited, to make the new government truly representative of the country. Henderson was a Glaswegian iron-moulder and teetotaller who, despite having left school aged twelve, became president of the Board of Education. He was a devout Methodist and a sincere patriot, hugely popular among his colleagues and universally respected; he was the first Labour MP to become a cabinet minister, and would lose a son, killed in action, in 1916. Curzon came in as Lord Privy Seal – he would soon irritate Asquith through his tendency to go freelance, causing Asquith to tell Crewe that ‘he would have to have his comb clipped before long’.287 Selborne became minister of agriculture and Long president of the Local Government Board, thus, with Curzon, accommodating three other Unionists with considerable followings in the party.
Haldane remained philosophical about the attacks on him when writing his memoirs after the war. He recalled that he had made a visit to Berlin on government business in 1912 that his opponents later misrepresented, though all questions about what was discussed on it – mainly the railway to Baghdad and policy towards Portugal’s African colonies – could have been cleared up by publication of papers by the Foreign Office, which it was reluctant to do. But beyond that, ‘every kind of ridiculous legend about me was circulated. I had a German wife; I was an illegitimate brother of the Kaiser; I had been in secret correspondence with the German Government; I had been aware that they intended war and had withheld my knowledge of this from my colleagues; I had delayed the mobilisation as despatch of the Expeditionary Force.’288 Nor was it just the Northcliffe press that persecuted him. ‘On one day, in response to an appeal in the Daily Express, there arrived at the House of Lords no less than 2,600 letters of protest against my supposed disloyalty to the interests of the nation.’289 Haldane admitted that he knew too much for his own good about Germany and the German character, but regretted that his fellow countrymen knew too little. He had offered his resignation to Asquith in the autumn of 1914, but Asquith had laughed it off. Haldane did not, but fumed that the Foreign Office’s refusal to clarify pre-war negotiations left him needlessly vulnerable.
The insistence on Haldane’s removal almost caused another casualty. Grey, who felt the matter ‘intolerably unjust’, told Asquith on 26 May that he had only not resigned because of the national interest.290 But he reminded Asquith that allegations of Haldane’s ‘intriguing with Germany behind the back of his colleagues’, of ‘weakening the Army, more particularly by reducing the artillery’, and of ‘opposing or obstructing’ the sending of the BEF to France were not merely rubbish, but the reverse of the truth. ‘That, after this,’ Grey continued, ‘Haldane of all people should have been singled out for the special sort of attack that has been made upon him, and accused of lack of patriotism or public spirit, is an intolerable instance of gross ignorance, or malice, or of madness.’291
Grey had a private interview with Law to try to make him change his mind, but Law implied that his party had mandated him. A coalition was essential; it would not happen without the Unionists, and the Unionists would not tolerate Haldane. It remains one of the most shameful episodes in the Conservative Party’s chequered history, made worse by the fact that Asquith – who told Grey the attacks ‘are a disgraceful monument of the pettiest personal and political spite’ – failed properly to explain himself to Haldane, and their relations were never the same again.292 Haldane maintained a life of conspicuous public service, visiting the war zone whenever he could be useful, sitting as a judge, and doing heroic work to stimulate interest in the creation of new universities and opportunities for extramural students for after the war: and he would sit on the Woolsack again, as Lord Chancellor in the first Labour government in 1924.
IX
Kitchener had spoken in the Lords on 18 May, ostensibly to bring Parliament up to date on the war, which he did with the depressing admission that ‘there has been no marked change or decisive action in the various theatres of war since I last addressed your Lordships on the military situation.’293 Instead, there was confirmation of the struggle at Ypres, the extensive use of gas and significant casualties, especially among Canadian troops, and ‘necessarily slow’ progress in the Dardanelles.294 Hours before Lloyd George’s appointment relieved him of the worry, he promised that poor productivity in arms factories was being addressed – the King that day was visiting Clydeside to try to raise morale in the shipyards – and said that ‘a very considerable improvement in the output’ had already occurred.295 He announced that 300,000 more men were needed for the Army. ‘Those who are engaged in the production of war material of any kind should not leave their work,’ he said. ‘It is to men who are not performing this duty I appeal’. The public agreed, and had what The Times termed the ‘thousands of youthful slackers’ increasingly in their sights.296
Within two days of Kitchener’s speech in the Lords, advertisements in the form of a facsimile letter from him appeared in newspapers, and new recruiting posters were plastered over the nation’s billboards and public buildings. The upper age limit for recruits was raised to forty from thirty-eight. However, the idea of voluntary appeals looked outdated. The press were debating compulsion, and public opinion seemed increasingly to favour it. Although the demands for uncensored news – to bring home the gravity of the situation, and the urgency of more men joining up – continued, it may have been as well for morale that some veil was drawn over the realities of war.
Having secured a coalition, though not one entirely to its liking, the Daily Mail savaged Kitchener as a ‘fighting general’. It attac
ked him for neglecting the manufacture of high-explosive shells and instead sending out shrapnel shells, which it said were ‘useless’ in trench warfare, not least in their failure to destroy barbed wire.297 These criticisms were included in a leader written by Northcliffe himself. Lloyd George had made the same point, privately, to Asquith two days earlier, and one can only conjecture what input he might have had into the leader.298 That coverage went down exceptionally badly with the public; the Mail’s circulation fell precipitately – from 1,227,000 copies a day in May to 1,070,000 copies a day in July – and many advertisers withdrew their custom.299 Most London clubs stopped taking it and copies were burned on the Stock Exchange, the Baltic Exchange and in the streets. Esher noted in his diary: ‘This morning there appeared a virulent attack on Lord K in the Daily Mail. It was engineered by a small knot of people who believe themselves to be friends of Sir John [French].’300 He added that Cambon, aware of how things were done in France, thought it ‘mad’ that the censors had allowed publication of such an article. Repington, who at that time took the Northcliffe shilling, observed after the war that ‘all that Northcliffe did by this particular attack was to get Lord K the Garter and, by causing a revulsion of feeling in Lord K’s favour, to confirm him in his office.’301