by Simon Heffer
On 13 April Lloyd George, keeping the press on his side as ever, took Scott for tea with Riddell and Sir William Robertson Nicoll, editor and owner of the British Weekly, to discuss whether he should resign. He said that although conscription would be the reason, ‘I should really resign as a protest against the general conduct of the war.’242 He added that: ‘There is no grip. Asquith and Balfour do not seem to realise the serious nature of the situation.’
The two press barons thought he should resign, if that would be the only way of effecting change. Scott kept quiet, but after the meeting warned Lloyd George that any resignation speech he might make should be ‘extremely restrained and generous in tone.’243 Lloyd George answered that he would make no speech, but simply send a carefully worded letter to Asquith outlining his reasons. He asked Scott to visit him at Walton Heath the following Sunday to go through the text of the letter with him: but, as Scott recalled, ‘when I got there no letter of course had been written.’244 After some dithering – which included Lloyd George falling asleep in the middle of his drafting the letter with Arthur Lee and his private secretary – a message arrived from Stamfordham, asking to see Lloyd George on behalf of the King. Law had told the Sovereign of the proposed resignation, and it was Stamfordham’s job to urge him to change his mind. According to Scott, ‘Stamfordham placed before him the obvious considerations of maintaining the Coalition, standing together in the face of the enemy etc, to all of which George replied that he would be most happy to act upon them “but for the oath I have taken to serve his Majesty faithfully” – a reply which appears to have considerably non-plussed the worthy Stamfordham, who is not, George says, a brilliant person.’
Lloyd George was not alone in scheming against Asquith. Churchill, who with other MPs at the front was ordered home to vote on Carson’s motion, had been plotting his return to politics by letter with Lloyd George, Smith and Carson. On 12 April he sent his wife a letter for Asquith asking to be relieved of his command, and which she was to await the signal to deliver. He longed for Lloyd George to resign, so that with Carson they could form a proper Opposition. Yet since all the Unionists backed compulsory service, if Lloyd George resigned on that issue they would have no choice but to go too: so an interesting question would arise of what would be the government, and what the Opposition – a question that would end up being thrashed out the following December. Sensing the wind was changing, Churchill sent his wife the signal and was back in London on 11 May.
Negotiations over the extension of conscription continued, with a twice-postponed cabinet meeting eventually taking place late on Friday 14 April, its discussions then adjourned until 17 April at 4.30 p.m.; a meeting that began in the House of Commons and finished in Downing Street. It broke up at 6.15, but Lloyd George and other senior ministers stayed talking until 8 p.m. It was decided the cabinet committee on compulsory service would dissolve without reporting. A new committee – this time of Asquith, Lloyd George, Balfour, Crewe and Law – was formed to thrash the matter out. It was unable to agree, and Asquith twice had to tell the Commons he could not make the promised statement about the Bill. By this time Law, like Asquith, was having serious problems with his party, who admired the more robust stand Carson was taking. Law felt he was fighting for survival as leader of the Unionists.
By the end of 17 April Lloyd George, motivated in Scott’s view too by his ministerial salary, had decided not to resign. His egotism also played a strong part. He told Miss Stevenson he was reluctant because a new minister ‘would find lots of things not running quite smoothly, and some of the biggest factories not yet working. He would take all the credit himself for putting these things right.’245 He felt that within six weeks he would have everything working, and he would get the credit, and so could hand over to a successor ‘safely’. He said something similar to Scott.
The Unionist War Committee, with 125 members of both Houses present, met on 18 April under Carson’s chairmanship and called for general conscription. The next day Asquith admitted the cabinet was split: he could not reconcile Henderson and Labour to the new policy of conscripting all adult men under forty-one.246 Lloyd George told Stamfordham he thought Asquith feared strikes or possibly even revolution, threats he thought exaggerated. Churchill enlisted Fisher to try to persuade Lloyd George to resign; and Law told Lloyd George that if he resigned Law would too, which would probably have brought down the government and necessitated an election. The manoeuvring disgusted Scott: ‘I left them closeted at the Munitions Office,’ he recorded, ‘glad to escape from this atmosphere of futile intrigue.’247
Meanwhile, the hitherto intransigent Henderson accepted a plan put to him by Robertson that compulsion should come only if 60,000 men did not join up in the first month of a new recruitment campaign, and 15,000 a week thereafter. The moment it fell below that, compulsion would be brought in by a parliamentary resolution. Lloyd George went along with this because he was convinced it would fail, and it was thus a question of waiting five or six weeks before the government had to accept conscription for all men was inevitable. Churchill, though, was disappointed: Miss Stevenson reported that he was ‘very sick at the idea of the thing going through quietly.’248 Asquith was buckling under the strain, and the efficiency with which he had conducted affairs in peacetime was now rather ragged. Therefore, senior colleagues suggested appointing a secretary to the cabinet to note its decisions and ensure they were carried out. At first it was thought this should be a minister, and Montagu suggested he was the ideal man. The idea’s time would come, and when it did Hankey would be there to oblige.
The first parliamentary secret session of the war was held on 25 April, the second day of the Easter Rising in Ireland. The purpose of the secrecy was not to deny knowledge to the enemy but to conceal government rifts, while presenting the case for married men’s conscription. Northcliffe’s newspapers were furious at being unable to report this. Asquith – who over Easter had had Ottoline Morrell bending his ear about respecting conscientious objectors – proposed changes to the service regulations. Time-expired men would be made to serve until the end of the war; Territorials could be transferred to any unit where needed; men whose certificates of exemption had expired would be liable for immediate call-up; all youths would become liable to the Military Service Act the moment they reached eighteen; and (crucially) Parliament would be asked for powers to compel unattested men to serve if in any week the numbers joining up fell below 15,000.
The Commons rejected these proposals, thanks to Carson and his allies on the Unionist War Committee who wanted nothing short of total compulsion. Two days later they were reintroduced in the form of a Bill, which Asquith then had to withdraw, so heavily was it attacked; Carson demolished it point by point. The press was almost unanimous in attacking ‘patchwork’ recruitment. On 29 April the cabinet agreed to universal National Military Service. Although Asquith was personally opposed to this his confidence had been rocked by the tone of the secret session, and he went with the majority. The Bill, introduced on 3 May, was rushed through Parliament and became law on 25 May. As Asquith told the King, the cabinet ‘agreed that the proposal to include Ireland in the Military Service Bill was impracticable and ought to be resisted’ – initiating a controversy that would echo for the rest of the war.249 Otherwise, the Bill would apply to every youth in the country thirty days after reaching his eighteenth birthday – giving him the opportunity to enlist voluntarily, if he desired that distinction. There would be a review of the cases of thousands of men exempted for medical reasons, so they could be called up for home duties and less arduous service than required overseas. Asquith said the measure was ‘urgently needed’; Hankey had noted the previous day, though, that he ‘obviously hated the job.’250
At the Bill’s second reading Lloyd George put the government’s case, using the opportunity to deny that he had betrayed Liberal principles – something of which he was routinely accused by the Liberal press:
Every great democracy which has been
challenged, which has had its liberties menaced, has defended itself by resort to compulsion, from Greece downwards. Washington won independence for America by compulsory measures; they defended it in 1812 by compulsory measures. Lincoln was not merely a great democrat, but his career was in itself the greatest triumph that democracy has ever achieved in the sphere of Government. He proclaimed the principle of ‘Government of the People, by the People, for the People’, and he kept it alive by Conscription. In the French Revolution the French people defended their newly-obtained liberties against every effort of the Monarchists by compulsion and by conscriptionary levies. France is defending her country to-day by Conscription.251
Simon reiterated the arguments he had used when resigning: the Bill was contrary to the liberal principles for which Britain was fighting. Yet it passed by 328 votes to 36; the conscription debate, in parliamentary terms at least, was over. Derby told a Tory meeting in Lancashire after the Act passed that ‘we ought to have had universal compulsion in the first week of the war.’252 The day he gave the Bill the Royal Assent, the King issued a message to his people in which he expressed his ‘recognition and appreciation of the splendid patriotism and self-sacrifice’ many had shown by volunteering, and saluted in advance their ‘additional sacrifice’.253
It was not only men who were being compelled to make a patriotic ‘sacrifice’. The people who would pay the greatest price relatively for compulsion would be middle-class women. The allowances for the wives of soldiers from working-class occupations were regarded as generous; middle-class wives whose husbands had forfeited white-collar salaries were poorly compensated, and their standard of living plunged in a season of rising prices. The emphasis on volunteering would now shift to women, to become munitions workers, nurses or farm workers; within a month of the Somme offensive starting an urgent appeal was issued to them to volunteer for the Red Cross or as VADs, and to help at canteens set up to feed factory workers. A long list of remaining agricultural exemptions were removed as the Bill passed, forcing reluctant farmers to use female labour.
Numerous middle-class women were happy to work, and there was a high demand for them: but that raised problems of childcare. After May 1916 many such families moved to cheaper, smaller rented accommodation – few of them were freeholders or mortgagors. Women’s groups and societies were organised to give mutual support. The government announced a system of grants, to a maximum of £104 a year, administered by local commissioners to help meet mortgage interest or rent payments, school fees, insurance premiums, and other middle-class outgoings. By the late summer of 1916 there were demands that ‘educated’ women be admitted to middle-grade clerkships in the civil service, liberating thousands of men who had received exemptions. Some women were doing heavy jobs that would have been unthinkable for their sex a few months earlier: The Times reported on 15 September that ‘at a slag reduction works women have been set on for shovelling slag into a crusher. At an ironstone works 22 women have been substituted for men, chiefly at loading and unloading wagons … at several docks they are acting as pit prop carriers, and in several cases they are working as labourers in the building trade, though none are carrying hods.’254
Most obviously, the extension of conscription increased reliance on women in munitions factories and on the land. Concerns were raised about their health: night work for women had been banned in the textile industry in 1844 but had returned through necessity. Many women suffered from exhaustion because they undertook domestic duties by day too. The government was urged to enforce statutory rest periods for mothers with young children. The birth rate was falling because of the absence of so many young men; it was feared that the decline of women’s health through overwork would depress it further.
Despite a patronising observation by Francis Dyke Acland, parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture, that ‘women workers cannot be regarded as a substitute for skilled men, they can only be regarded as supplementing male workers,’ he conceded that women were perfectly capable of looking after livestock and poultry, and that ‘many women are ploughing and doing it well, but that is, of course, exceptional.’255 This attitude had echoes of the appointment the previous spring of a Miss Ruth Davis as town sergeant of Colchester, the previous incumbent having enlisted: it was reported that ‘she will not have to carry the mace nor act as toastmaster.’256 Acland announced a grant to the Women’s National Land Service Corps to organise the training and placement of volunteers. Committees in each county undertook the organisation and registration of women, and 35,000 had registered by late May 1916. The Board of Trade also appointed a special committee, chaired by the Duchess of Beaufort and dominated by women, to deal with the welfare, and especially the housing, of women workers, to ensure they were not allocated unsuitable billets where moral danger might await them.
Acland told farmers that ‘all who have tried women are pleased and swear by them … a few weeks’ training makes all the difference.’257 He added: ‘The position is: “The women are here; we know they are useful—that is proved up to the hilt; you must try them. If you do not you are doing the Kaiser’s work, not the King’s.”’ Even that, however, would not be enough: 250,000 to 300,000 of the 1,000,000 pre-war agricultural labourers had joined the forces. Therefore, Acland urged people not to take conventional holidays that summer, but to spend the time working on the land. Local committees would organise that too. There were calls for women to serve as Army cooks, and the War Office arranged for German prisoners of war to work on the land.
The government sent women to France to see how Frenchwomen organised and undertook farm work. County committees held recruiting drives: within a month 3,000 women had joined from 170 villages in Norfolk. Meriel Talbot, who would command the Women’s Land Army, ran a panel of speakers to tour the country to recruit female workers. The Women’s National Land Service Corps was formed to organise this labour, its first priority being to recruit those ‘of the professional classes’ as forewomen and to train others.258 Gangs of university women spent their long vacations fruit-picking and harvesting. This was as well, because anger with the Irish over their reluctance to join the Army caused farmers in Lincolnshire and the Fens to boycott Irish potato pickers. A degree of organisation similar to that used to recruit Kitchener’s army was finally being used to maximise women’s contribution to the war.
Hankey’s memoirs cited the official figures: 4,970,902 men served in the forces during the war: just over half – 2,532,684 – enlisted under the voluntary system, with 2,438,218 called up under compulsion.259 No one would now escape the dragnet of the recruiting sergeants, including those who felt themselves too rarefied to engage in the somewhat vulgar collective activity of saving the country. In March the unmarried Lytton Strachey, a founder of the Bloomsbury group and limbering up to write his breakthrough work Eminent Victorians, had been ordered from internal exile with the Morrells at Garsington to attend a medical examination at White City. ‘He told us,’ Lady Ottoline recalled, ‘that he had waited there from 11 to 3.30, reading Gardiner’s History of England. He was then examined by an RAMC orderly. He undressed with three other young men, rough fellows, and then appeared naked before the Doctor. One of the young Doctors burst out laughing when he saw him, and no wonder, for he must have looked a very odd sight amongst the other strong sturdy fellows, he so tall and emaciated, with his long beard. They exempted him entirely.’260 At a preliminary tribunal Strachey had been asked what he would do if he saw a German soldier trying to rape his sister, and he had replied: ‘I should try and interpose my own body.’261
The alleged treatment of some conscientious objectors was far less amusing, and MPs started to raise questions about it. Sir William Byles asked for it to be confirmed whether Rendel Wyatt, a schoolmaster, Quaker and Cambridge graduate, had been ‘arrested and imprisoned, and made to scrub floors and carry coal for fourteen or fifteen hours a day; whether he has since been given a month on bread and water and put in irons for refusing to drill; whether he
is now in a dark cell with twelve others; and whether such treatment is in accordance with Regulations?’262 He asked whether the War Office was aware that ‘Oscar Gristwood Ricketts, a conscientious objector to military service, was arrested, charged at Brentford Police Court, fined two guineas, and handed over to the military authorities, and that in conveying him to Felixstowe they exposed him to the shame of being handcuffed in the public streets and railways; whether he is now in the Harwich circular redoubt, confined to a cell, and his only food dry biscuits and water; whether this young man has resigned a good post in a city bank and offered himself for any work of national importance that is consistent with his religious and moral convictions; and whether he proposes to take any action in the matter?’
Snowden claimed that conscientious objectors from Darwen in Lancashire ‘were taken to the military barracks at Preston and there subjected to the grossest ill-treatment, being forcibly stripped and marched round the barrack square practically undressed, and after being put in uniform one of them was taken into a room and, on the testimony of a person there, brutally kicked around the room until his groans could be heard outside’.263 He said there were similar stories from all over the country, and demanded that such behaviour be stopped and the soldiers committing it punished. Tennant pleaded with colleagues not to demand inquiries into individual cases, because officials were so overworked; which prompted Snowden to ask: ‘Are these men then to continue to be tortured because inquiry may involve a little trouble at the War Office?’264 As other MPs turned on Tennant, he exclaimed: ‘I am asking the House not to believe all this tittle-tattle.’265