by Simon Heffer
Haig and Esher were far from alone in their criticism of Lloyd George. He had to use his speech on the vote of credit in October partly to justify himself as a loyal supporter of Asquith. The French had commented adversely on his self-advertising conduct while in their country, and British journalists sneered at him for inviting this rebuke. An attack by the Manchester Guardian caused him great embarrassment and, consequently, outrage, to the extent where he accused Scott of having had a journalist not in Paris make the story up. Scott rebuked him for the suggestion, saying the paper’s man in Paris was ‘honest, capable and well-informed.’ The war secretary’s public-relations drive had led to his being attacked by the Morning Post as well. In the vote-of-credit debate Charles Trevelyan, the pacifist Liberal MP who would later join Labour, put on the record a claim by The Times that casualties for the first three months of the Somme were 300,000, and ‘cannot now be far short of half a million.’ He said that while the ‘sanguine Welsh temperament’ might think the war could be finished in months, that it might not be was a terrible prospect, if losses were to continue at that rate.144 That was why so many deplored the tone of Lloyd George’s interview.
Also, he appeared to have made an enemy of Northcliffe. The press baron called at the War Office on 11 October – the Secretary of State, perhaps fortunately, was absent at the vote-of-credit debate – so he told J. T. Davies, Lloyd George’s principal private secretary, that Robertson was so perplexed about political interference in his job that he could not sleep: and that Northcliffe would regard it as his ‘duty’ to expose this interference if it went on.145 Esher picked up this intrigue, noting on 17 October: ‘Last week Lloyd George, behind the back of Robertson, tried to get the Cabinet to agree to send Divisions from the French front to Salonika. Robertson went to the King and to Asquith, and threatened to resign if the S of S made incursions in to the Department of “Operations”.’146 McKenna, whose views on Lloyd George must come at a discount because of his vintage animus against him, had told Repington that Lloyd George wanted Robertson out because he ‘really believed himself to be inspired and to have a divine mission, and would not let anyone else stand in his way.’147 Repington told Northcliffe, who sent the message back to Robertson that his newspapers would support him, not least because Northcliffe agreed with Robertson’s opposition to Lloyd George’s Salonica ideas.
Miss Stevenson believed Northcliffe’s threat to attack Lloyd George over interfering with Robertson was rooted in the fact that ‘Northcliffe is furious because D does not take his advice.’148 His views gave Lloyd George a grievance against Robertson, which would fester. Miss Stevenson also noted that ‘as for Northcliffe, everyone says he has gone mad – suffering from a too swelled head.’149 However, evidence kept coming of the intrigue which a mixture of crisis, mischief and poor judgement produce: Riddell saw Lloyd George on 16 October and told him: ‘there is a conspiracy between Northcliffe and certain members of the Army in high offices to get rid of Ll.G’, something of which there was already much circumstantial evidence, albeit from unreliable sources.150 Also, it became noted that, for all Lloyd George’s keenness to go to France, he spent most of his time there in Paris or well behind the lines and seldom went near the front: in contrast with his enthusiasm for visiting munitions workers in his previous job. His most authoritative biographer attributes this to ‘his fear of high explosives’ but above all to ‘his squeamishness’.151 It was fortunate the younger men he had spent the previous two years exhorting did not share these traits.
His relations with the Army were not helped by his deep disapproval of the continuing offensive: but by the end of October the armies in France were 80,000 men below strength, so practically he had a point.152 Nor had he stopped trying to neutralise Robertson. He cooked up a plan to send him to Russia to report on the situation there. According to Esher, who heard of the plot, Robertson refused ‘point blank’ to go.153 Lloyd George had felt it wise to inform the King of the plan, who had replied almost immediately: ‘I will certainly not allow R to go to Russia. He is first of all much too valuable a man to run risks with like poor K … I will not hear of it.’154 Riddell warned Lloyd George on 5 November that without ‘substantial progress’ in the next spring and summer campaigning season ‘the nation will grow weary of pouring out blood, treasure and ships, and that there will be a danger of a strong peace party.’155
As Lloyd George schemed, Asquith laboured under a workload that would have overwhelmed a younger and even cleverer man. Since January 1916 the War Committee had met on average six times a month; but met fifteen times in November. Even then, according to Hankey, it could not ‘keep abreast of its work’.156 The struggle to keep the country functioning was growing: foreign exchange was running out, so more goods had to be produced at home rather than bought from abroad. This helped obviate the failure of Britain’s shipyards to replace merchant shipping anything like so quickly as it was lost. At one of the War Committee’s last meetings the prospect of industrial conscription for all men under sixty, and possibly for all women too, was discussed, and a subcommittee constituted to work out how this would happen.
Industrial conscription became an important topic because, throughout the autumn as the toll of casualties from the Somme mounted, the ‘combing out’ of unskilled men from reserved occupations for military service continued: not just from munitions factories, but also the railways. It created a demand for 800 to 1,000 women a week to replace them, and urgent appeals were made for them to volunteer; the railway unions had reluctantly conceded that women could do certain jobs in their industry. With Christmas coming, the Post Office asked for 7,000 women to volunteer to collect, sort and deliver the post. Nonetheless, the nation was starting to buckle. On 13 November Lansdowne circulated a paper to the cabinet saying the war was about to destroy civilisation, and arguing for a negotiated peace. He believed the death and destruction of the preceding year had been to little avail, and that to go on would mean that ‘the war with its nameless horrors will have been needlessly prolonged, and the responsibility of those who needlessly prolong such a war is not less than that of those who needlessly provoke it.’157 He noted that 1,100,000 casualties had already been acknowledged, with 15,000 officers dead and many others missing: ‘We are slowly but surely killing off the best of the male population of these islands.’158 In addition, the country was bankrupting itself and beggaring generations to come.
It was agreed the cabinet would consider his paper. Lloyd George’s argument for a ‘knock-out blow’, made in his United Press interview and so antipathetic to the Americans, was, however, increasingly popular in the country, and most of his colleagues reluctantly agreed with the sentiment too. Lansdowne’s Unionist colleagues adamantly rejected his paper, and the leading brass hats, led by Robertson, were contemptuous. Lansdowne was a wise and decent man, but was seventy-two, and his heyday had been in the years around the turn of the century. He, and those like him, such as Balfour at the Admiralty (as Jellicoe had recognised), were increasingly anachronistic, unsuited to all-out war and the rough-and-ready politics it necessitates; and the greatest example of this was Asquith. The much despised ‘new men’, with their coarser attitudes and more aggressive manners, were more suited to the fight. It was time for a changing of the guard.
As if to bring British policy failures even closer to home, on 28 November the first bombing of London by fixed-wing aircraft occurred, when six bombs fell near Victoria station. With perhaps unintentional irony, Hankey recalled that ‘the atmosphere in the Government, as in London itself in that gloomy season, was becoming daily more sulphurous.’ Revolution, as well as the whiff of high explosive, was in the air.
CHAPTER 7
COUP
I
When, in the last weeks of 1916, Asquith’s leadership of the nation finally came under irresistible pressure it was the culmination of a corrosive process that had its roots in the conscription debate, but which then branched out throughout 1916. He had been criticised for his
administration’s record in Ireland, and, after the mismanagement of the Rising, for failing to implement Home Rule there. The Navy’s capabilities endured serious scrutiny after the indifferent performance at the Battle of Jutland. The debacle of the Somme saw criticism heaped upon the government within days of that battle starting, not least from its own MPs. And then, on 18 July, Asquith had come under further attack in the Commons for refusing to publish papers outlining the background to the Dardanelles fiasco. He had done this not least after reading a long memorandum on the matter from Hankey, who felt it was not in the public interest to publish. He thought the War Committee’s deliberations should be as confidential as the cabinet’s, and nothing should be published until the war was over. There was too much in the documents about Allied strategy and diplomacy that would help the enemy. Publication would, for example, reveal Churchill’s plan to enter the Baltic and launch naval operations along Germany’s northern coast. If the whole story could not be told – and Hankey argued that it could not – then best not to tell any of the story at all. Churchill still felt he was being blamed for the disaster, and believed publication would cast him not just in a better light, but in a light that would enable him to revive his political career. As it was, he told Riddell he would ‘have to remain under a stigma until after the war.’1 Asquith then faced demands to establish a select committee on the subject. His inclination was to resist, as hostilities were still in progress and such an inquiry would distract parts of the government better occupied pursuing victory. Also, it was not as if the news from the Somme – of which the public, at that time, was only beginning to have even the slightest conception – left the government in a position of strength.
Hankey supported Asquith by supplying precedents from the previous century where such a process had been refused. Not the least of Hankey’s fears was that a select committee could bring down the government. Grey, like Hankey, thought the whole government should have resigned rather than give in to the demands for an inquiry. However, the War Committee took a different view; and on 20 July Asquith announced an inquiry to the Commons – though it would not be a parliamentary inquiry, but a commission, under Lord Cromer, a friend of Churchill’s mother. It would meet in secret so it could consider all the evidence available. A second commission would meet to investigate the background to the humiliating British surrender at Kut-al-Amara. Asquith acceded to the demand because the last thing his administration needed at that stage was to be accused of mounting a cover-up of another of the war’s most inglorious strategic decisions.
Hankey offered to write an extensive memorandum in which the government’s case for initiating the Gallipoli expedition, and the way it was conducted, would be laid out. Asquith, who wanted as little to do with this morass as possible, readily agreed. Grey told Hankey on 4 August, while Hankey was preparing the memorandum, that he was ‘very disgusted at the weakness of the Government in granting the Inquiry and threatening that, if people were taken away from their war work on account of it, he would resign in order to show the country it was preventing us from winning the war.’2 Churchill would be allowed to attend only as a witness. Hankey set about finding all the available documents he could to support his case, and drawing up lists of other witnesses the commission should examine in order to ensure his side of the story was told.
The commission convened in mid-September. Hankey made the Government’s case over two days on 19 and 27 September, though caused trouble in saying the commission could not see the minutes of meetings of the War Council. Eventually, the government agreed that Lord Cromer, the chairman of the commission, would be allowed to see the minutes to corroborate Hankey’s story. Hankey did not make things difficult for Churchill, who was effectively the man in the dock: he said he had put both sides of the argument, and did not appear to have withheld vital information. He did stress, however, that the War Council had received the impression that Fisher was entirely supportive of the proposals. Hankey was pressed about the 28 January meeting at which Fisher had said nothing, and conceded that usually when a naval adviser kept quiet at such meetings his silence was deemed to indicate consent.
Churchill gave evidence on 28 September and 4 October, spending the first day delivering a long and detailed statement. He took full responsibility for everything that had happened under his rule at the Admiralty and specified that he had no complaint against any naval officer. ‘I am,’ he said, ‘here to defend those by whose professional advice I was guided.’3 He said the attack had been necessary to come to the aid of the Russians; and he implied that Kitchener’s refusal to commit a substantial number of troops at the outset had caused problems. He denied ever having interfered in the planning process, which was the province of his naval experts and not of a politician; but said that the men who were now the Admiralty’s two most senior advisers, Jackson, the First Sea Lord, and Rear Admiral Sir Henry Oliver, his chief of staff, had supported Carden’s original plan to force a passage through the straits. Effectively, Churchill was challenging the commission to attack both of them. Asked whether he had pressed Jackson and Oliver to back Carden’s plan, Churchill denied it. The War Council had at the outset unanimously backed the plan, and Fisher had not dissented, nor (at that stage, in mid-January 1915) made the case against Carden’s plan. Churchill admitted his share of the collective responsibility of the War Council in making the later decision to land troops; however, in his mind the decision was mainly down to Kitchener and Asquith, taken when it was clear that a predominantly naval operation could not succeed.
He spoke for five and a half hours. Cromer, who would die the following February, was so exhausted he took to his bed. It was a week before the commissioners – a collection of parliamentarians, colonial politicians and military men – could question Churchill on his evidence. His main task was to persuade his questioners that Fisher had kept quiet during the early planning stages about his misgivings: which, for want of documentary evidence, it seems he did. Also, Churchill contended that his desire for troops to be landed was not to help the Navy get through, but to ensure their success in getting through could be exploited to the maximum. Landing soldiers once the naval push had failed was something he supported but had not originated. When Fisher gave evidence he did nothing to undermine Churchill; he said he had remained silent at the crucial moment on 28 January because the only other option was to resign, which he did not wish to do. However, when asked why no one on the War Council had asked his views, he answered: ‘Why they all jolly well knew!’4 In a letter to Cromer later Fisher emphasised about Churchill: ‘Mr Churchill is quite correct. I backed him up till I resigned. I would do the same again. He had courage and imagination. He was a war man.’5 The commission would drag on until 1919, to little effect, but Churchill’s rehabilitation had slowly begun.
Asquith’s credibility, by contrast, continued to erode throughout the late summer and autumn. Lloyd George asked Riddell on 30 July what would be the outcome of a general election on the issue of ‘more vigorous prosecution of the war’, with a new party led by Carson – whom Lloyd George described ‘in eulogistic language’ according to Riddell – arguing that case.6 The main actors would be Lloyd George, Law and Chamberlain. Riddell feared the public’s reaction, but Lloyd George asserted that ‘I think the nation would prefer Carson to Asquith’; and stated he would be ‘glad and proud’ to serve under him.7 Carson was now sixty-two. He had grown up in a family of Dublin Protestants, his father a successful architect and his mother the daughter of an old Ascendancy family. He had read law at Trinity College, Dublin, and by the 1880s had made a reputation as the greatest advocate in Ireland. His own country was too small a stage for him: he had been called to the English Bar in 1893 and had shot to fame defending the Marquess of Queensberry against Oscar Wilde’s suit for criminal libel two years later.8 In 1910 he had secured a victory for his client in the Archer-Shee case, when a boy expelled from Osborne Naval College for theft was exonerated – the case on which Terence Rattigan based his
play The Winslow Boy.
His political career had begun in 1892 when he had been appointed Solicitor General for Ireland; he had been elected as Liberal Unionist MP for Dublin University, and had become Solicitor General for England in 1900, in Salisbury’s administration. But this pillar of the legal establishment had spent the years immediately before the war masterminding the anti-Home Rule movement in Ulster, and coming close to organising sedition in the process. He had raised an armed volunteer movement and had been the first of almost 450,000 signatories of the Ulster Covenant, which pledged to resist Home Rule by all means necessary; and had seemed prepared, just before the outbreak of war, to lead the UVF in a civil war against the Nationalists.9 Half statesman and half buccaneer, his charismatic leadership qualities made him irresistible to those charged with prosecuting the war.
Churchill, writing on 13 August to Seely, who was in France, said he thought Asquith would survive the session but ‘his position is however not at all good. The Tories outside the Gvt despise him: the Irish have lost faith in him & many of the Liberals are estranged or sore. There are vy hostile forces at work in the Cabinet and at any time a collapse is possible.’10 There was also the shadow of the first report of the Dardanelles Commission, expectations of which added to the strain he was under in the autumn of 1916.