Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  VI

  The world had become very different. The streets were filled with men in khaki, either on leave or in uniforms bearing the extra piece of gold braid that signified they had been invalided home after a serious wound. In some parts of London, where houses had become nursing homes for the severely wounded, whistling for taxis was banned after 10 p.m. until dawn, to give the shattered heroes the rest they needed. Life was a struggle: although those doing war work were often paid far more than in peacetime because of high levels of overtime, their disposable income was hit by high taxation; and by late July 1916 food prices were estimated to be 65 per cent higher than two years earlier.126 Clothing had increased in price by 55 per cent and that of coal had almost doubled.127 The middle classes and those on fixed incomes were especially hard hit: the new army of industrial workers coped better, but still found that £1 was now needed to buy what 12s 6d would in July 1914, and that as a consequence meat was a luxury to be eaten once a week. A report in August 1916 said the working classes lived principally on a diet of ‘tea, sugar, bread, margarine and vegetables’ and bought scraps of ham ends and bacon rinds to flavour soups.128

  Nor did civilian life inevitably protect one from the ‘frightfulness’ of the enemy. As the government tried to cope with the fallout from the Somme, it found itself under further attack from the press and the public after frequent Zeppelin raids on the eastern counties in early August inflamed criticism of the provision of air defences. It was a hot, dry spell, and many of their bombs were incendiaries dropped on open countryside. Farmers concluded this was an attempt to start fires to burn down fields of cereal crops awaiting harvest. To speed up that harvest, the Army Council had announced that 27,000 soldiers would be temporarily seconded to agricultural duties. Meanwhile, Chamberlain’s Manpower Distribution Board was supposed to ensure the maximised use of labour, judging what was or was not a reserved occupation, and who else could claim exemptions.

  The frequency of Zeppelin raids had increased again, with thirteen airships raiding on the night of 2–3 September, killing four civilians and injuring thirteen more. The raid stimulated one of the most morale-boosting acts of the war, however, when Lt William Leefe Robinson shot down a Zeppelin over Cuffley in Hertfordshire: his feat was witnessed by thousands on the ground who sang the national anthem as it came down. All sixteen on board were killed, and Leefe Robinson was awarded the Victoria Cross. Shot down and taken prisoner himself later in the war, he would die of Spanish flu. During September there were two even more damaging raids, with two Zeppelins being shot down on the 23rd, but this time forty civilians died as far apart as Nottinghamshire and Kent and one hundred and thirty were injured; two days later forty-three died and thirty-one were wounded in attacks on Lancashire, Yorkshire and Lincolnshire.129 The government’s anxiety about the raids forced the Press Bureau to restrict what could be published about them. Its justification was that ‘the military damage has been slight, but at the same time, so long as the Germans think that the raids have great effect, they will be continued, and long accounts tend to produce the impression both in England and abroad that they are of greater importance than they are in reality.’130

  The air defences eventually fought back. When twelve Zeppelins attacked London on the night of 23–24 September – an unprecedentedly heavy raid – an RFC pilot shot down one near Billericay in Essex, killing the crew of twenty-two. A little later, at 1.40 a.m., a crippled Zeppelin made a forced landing at Little Wigborough, on the Essex coast just south of Colchester. Although part exploded on landing, the nose and engines remained intact and the crew survived. A special constable who rushed to the scene told The Times: ‘About halfway there I met about 20 men walking along towards me. They were mostly well-built young fellows, probably not much more than 20 years old. They wore a uniform not unlike that of a fireman, except that they wore no helmets.’131 One, the commander, asked him ‘in very good English’ how far it was to the nearest town. He told him six miles, and they wished to walk there to surrender: but the constable took them to the village post office and rang for a military escort to be sent from Colchester.

  The Zeppelin was cordoned off, and people came from miles around to stare at it, forced to keep their distance by soldiers with fixed bayonets; its frame was spread across two fields and a country lane, and the farmer who owned the field from which it could best be viewed charged admission by taking a collection for the Red Cross. ‘It looks like a great monster with its back broken,’ The Times’s man reported. Britain was getting its own back, but by this stage raids had accounted for 352 killed and 799 injured. That night Suffolk and Lincolnshire were also bombed, and the raid on London killed people in Streatham, Kennington and Brixton: the total casualties for that night alone were 40 dead and 135 wounded. Another 43 died on the south and east coasts two nights later. The censor allowed only vague references to the casualties, and no mention of the locations.

  Such raids helped sustain the powerful sense of anti-German feeling that had grown since August 1914, and which the vicarious experience of the Somme had intensified. Earlier that year this sentiment had played itself out in an embarrassing sideshow. Three members of the extended Royal Family held allegiance to the enemy. They were the Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale, a great-grandson of George III; and two grandsons of Queen Victoria, the Duke of Albany (who had inherited the title of Duke of Coburg and had thereby become a German prince) and Prince Albert of Schleswig-Holstein. Cumberland, who was seventy-one, was not fighting for anyone: he had left Hanover, of which he was still technically Crown Prince, in 1866 when Prussia annexed it, and fled to Austria, where he still lived and was a close friend of Franz Josef. He was also married to Queen Alexandra’s sister, so was George V’s uncle by marriage as well as his cousin by blood. He had not visited England for nearly forty years and had never taken his seat in the Lords. Prince Albert, son of Queen Victoria’s daughter Helena, held no British titles, but had been born at Windsor. On the outbreak of war, aged forty-five, he had requested and received an exemption from the Kaiser from fighting against the British.

  Albany, however, was a different matter. He was the King’s first cousin (his father had been Prince Leopold, haemophiliac younger brother of Edward VII), and the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. A posthumous child, he had been brought up as an English prince and educated at Eton until he was sixteen, when he inherited the German duchy. He then became a protégé of another cousin, the Kaiser, and was Germanified. In 1914 he had broken with his British family and joined a German infantry regiment: and although he had been invalided out with rheumatism in 1915, he continued to provide moral leadership for soldiers from his duchy, and made frequent visits to the front. Like Cumberland, he had had his name struck by George V from the roll of Garter knights in 1915.

  Following a question in the Commons on 12 April the press – who had not noticed that an Irish MP, Swift MacNeill, had brought the matter up originally on 7 June 1915, to be swatted away by Asquith – whipped up a campaign against these men. It had short shrift from Stamfordham, who in a letter to Gwynne on 27 July blamed the 1772 Royal Marriages Act. ‘So long as the Royal family have to go abroad for wives and husbands these complications are bound to arise in the event of a European War,’ he said.132 This was not strictly true: one of Queen Victoria’s daughters, Princess Louise, had married the Duke of Argyll in 1871; and one of Edward VII’s daughters, also Princess Louise, had married the Earl of Fife (raised to a dukedom two days after his marriage) in 1889, neither having to go further than Scotland to do so. It was the pursuit of rank, not the law, that had caused this problem.

  Stamfordham acquitted Albany of outrageous behaviour because he was a German prince, and would have been a traitor to his adopted country had he not fought for the Kaiser. He told Gwynne that ‘in my humble opinion the House of Commons seem to have lost all sense of proportion on this subject.’ Gwynne assured Stamfordham that his only motivation for raising the issue was to prevent malevolent gossip about the
King being unduly pro-German, in having taken no steps against his kinsmen. In an attempt to be helpful, on 2 August the Morning Post ran a concocted letter – written by Gwynne under a pseudonym – observing that an Act of Parliament could strike the three men from the succession, but since none was likely to succeed it would be a distraction when there were more important matters before Parliament. That very day the cabinet discussed it, and Asquith made an equivocal statement to the Commons. It would not go away and, along with other consequences of the King’s German ancestry, would dog the Royal Family for months until decisive steps were taken.

  VII

  Once it became clear that the Battle of the Somme would not bring a rapid end to the war it was also apparent that, to avoid an election based on a badly out-of-date electoral register and with much of the electorate overseas, the life of the Parliament would need to be further extended. It was agreed to prolong it to 31 May 1917, six and a half years after the last election, in the hope that something approaching a satisfactory revised register could be drawn up, and a legitimate election held. This would not be easy, and Asquith set out to Parliament the complexities involved. Ideally, he had hoped to extend the vote to every soldier and sailor, which would mean some men under twenty-one would vote. But there would also be the problem about the constituency in which a man in France or Mesopotamia should vote. He said the military authorities opposed strongly a vote being held while men were on active service; and he also asked whether munitions workers, who ‘have severed their old family ties and their old residential ties, and have gone into places hitherto unknown to them, and crowded there in enormous numbers’, should not have their sacrifices recognised by enfranchisement, even if unqualified otherwise.133

  And Asquith had an even more radical proposal to make about extending the franchise. He proceeded to make a historic statement, reaching a watershed in his political creed: it was an observation of such significance that it must be quoted in full:

  And, further, the moment you begin a general enfranchisement on these lines of State service, you are brought face to face with another most formidable proposition: What are you to do with the women? I do not think I shall be suspected—my record in the matter is clear—that I have no special desire or predisposition to bring women within the pale of the franchise, but I have received a great many representations from those who are authorised to speak for them, and I am bound to say that they presented to me not only a reasonable, but, I think, from their point of view, an unanswerable case. They say they are perfectly content, if we do not change the qualification of the franchise, to abide by the existing state of things, but that if we are going to bring in a new class of electors, on whatever ground of State service, they point out—and we cannot possibly deny their claim—that during this War the women of this country have rendered as effective service in the prosecution of the War as any other class of the community. It is true they cannot fight, in the gross material sense of going out with rifles and so forth, but they fill our munition factories, they are doing the work which the men who are fighting had to perform before, they have taken their places, they are the servants of the State, and they have aided, in the most effective way, in the prosecution of the War.134

  He had received a deputation of women’s suffrage campaigners shortly before his statement, and it had made him that apparently unanswerable case.

  However, even if Asquith was undergoing a remarkable conversion, he remained enough of a politician to see he was opening the proverbial can of worms, and that in the midst of war his ideal franchise reform would not be possible. He therefore offered a compromise. He said the register would be drawn up on the existing franchise: but after the war, the next register would need to take into account the contributions of unfranchised men and women. He planned that male munitions workers who had moved into lodgings and lost a property qualification to vote would have their right restored; but soldiers would be unable to cast a ballot unless they were at home on election day.

  Asquith’s change of mind on women’s suffrage outraged one prospective voter, Lady Bathurst. In a letter to the newspaper she owned, the Morning Post, on 19 August, she denounced his change of heart as ‘this final act of betrayal’.135 She continued: ‘I have seen much of women during the war and … I have seen nothing to make me alter my opinion that as a sex they are inferior to men, and are totally unfitted to take part in the government of this country.’ Demanding government by ‘real virile, strong men’ (she gave Carson as an example), she set out her vision of the franchise. ‘I should like every soldier and sailor who has fought in the Great War to have a vote for his lifetime, and later on to see the vote given only to males who have passed some test of education and usefulness to their country.’ It was fortunate for Asquith that further discussion of franchise reform could be delayed until circumstances were more benign. It would prove less easy for him and the government to sidestep other controversies.

  Throwing his weight around as war secretary, Lloyd George was doing little to endear himself to others. The ever-feline Esher, observing him at work at British headquarters in France on 17 September, delivered a damning judgement. ‘The impressions left here by the PM, who remained three days on a visit, were excellent … Lloyd George made the worst impression and showed himself to be what he really is, a clever political adventurer seeking limelight. He came surrounded by satellites, Lord Reading, who lowers the dignity, authority and status of the great office he holds by dabbling in finance and politics, Murray of Elibank, whose reputation for honest dealing is more than doubtful, and lesser lights of equally questionable character.’136 Reading was now Lord Chief Justice, and his presence was especially curious: but as Esher told Leo Maxse, it was ‘the old Marconi Gang’, the men whose political careers were almost ended in 1913 by dabbling in shares of a company run by Reading’s brother Godfrey Isaacs.137 Isaacs himself turned up too.

  Esher had not finished with Lloyd George: ‘He seemed to seek the camera, and the cheers of the soldiers. He was insolent and offhand. None of these things are [sic] surprising. You cannot make a silk purse out of a Welsh solicitor’s ear.’ This was not Tory venom: Esher was a Liberal. But it showed how much the old Establishment distrusted and disliked him, and why. When the time came for Lloyd George to assume the highest office, he would do so with a substantial segment of the political class believing he was at best shady, and at worst corrupt. In June 1916 Lord Salisbury had told his cousin Balfour, for example, that he considered Lloyd George ‘a windbag and a liar’.138 The war secretary’s cause was not helped by the freedom with which he expressed his low opinion of British generalship, nor by his desperation to curry favour with the other ranks, who Northcliffe had said disliked him.

  Lloyd George caused more offence on his return from France by giving, at Northcliffe’s request, an interview to Roy W. Howard, president of the United Press of America. Esher, and many others, found it shocking. ‘LG publishes an “interview” with an American journalist today,’ he wrote on 29 September. ‘The substance of what he says is sound enough, but the vulgarity with which he clothes his ideas, his common phraseology and braggadocio, make one blush for one’s country. In their day Gladstone and Peel were accused of departing from the high standard of political manners which had been the glory of our public life. What would they say to this phenomenal little cad?’139 Lloyd George’s assertion in the interview that the Allies would fight the war ‘to a knock out’ caused most upset.140 It was his way of signalling to President Wilson that his ambitions to arbitrate a peace, for which America would take credit, might not be realised. However, it was interpreted as Lloyd George meaning he wanted to destroy Germany as a great power, something he had privately claimed was impossible; but it also seemed he was keen to assert that Britain would prevail, and British morale would be elevated by victory: what Lloyd George called a ‘natural demand for vengeance’.141

  Referring to the group in France with the war secretary by the neologism ‘the Marcon
igang’, Esher ranted: ‘He deliberately came out to France for a “joy ride” with his “pals” … He has allowed himself to be exploited by a set of adventurers, whose boldness increases with success; and under their suspicious flattery he is beginning to believe that a field-marshal’s baton was hidden in his first dress-suit case. This illusion, if he does not promptly awake, may prove his undoing.’ Northcliffe was immensely proud of his role in securing the interview. On 5 October he cited it to Aitken as proof of his apophthegm, ‘the best propaganda, in my opinion, is newspaper.’142

  Lloyd George had made a point of expressing his concern that casualties had been so heavy, which Haig could only take as an implicit criticism of himself. However, to the commander-in-chief the minister’s gravest offence had been, on meeting General Ferdinand Foch, commander of the French army in the north, to question him pointedly about the relative performances of the French and British armies, and British generals, on the Western Front. Although Foch had been scrupulous in not talking down Haig, and had stressed that Kitchener’s army lacked the experience of the French veterans, Lloyd George implied he was unimpressed with Haig’s leadership. Haig noted: ‘Unless I had been told of this conversation personally by Gen Foch, I would not have believed that a British minister could have been so ungentlemanly as to go to a foreigner and put such questions regarding his own subordinates.’143 Haig must have led a sheltered life to acquire any notion that Lloyd George was a gentleman; and there was an element of hypocrisy attached to Haig’s criticising the manners of others. He had episodes in his own conduct, such as in his replacement of French the previous year and what would, in early 1918, become the drama of the replacement of Robertson, that would call his own credentials in that respect into question.