Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War.
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The twentieth century heralded many advances in technology, and where this meant improvement and a better and more effective navy, Fisher never hesitated. He improved the range, accuracy and firing rate of naval gunnery, introduced torpedo boats and submarines to the fleet and, as first sea lord, was responsible for the building of the first huge dreadnought battleships. Of all Fisher’s innovations, however, the most crucial was the introduction of oil to replace coal-fired boilers. Despite old-school admirals labelling him an eccentric dreamer, he insisted that fuelling the navy with oil would give Britain huge strategic advantages. There would be no telltale smoke to alert enemy vessels, and while nine hours might be required for a coal-fired ship to reach peak power, it would take only minutes with oil. Twelve men working a twelve-hour shift could fuel a vessel with oil, while the equivalent energy for a coal-fired ship required the work of five hundred stokers for five days. Crucially, the radius of action of an oil-powered vessel was up to four times as great as coal.24
Fisher got his way, but not without a tense and often bitter struggle with the Liberals and socialists in Parliament, who deemed the vast expenditure on new developments in naval warfare costly and wasteful.
Fisher’s task of changing the framework of command within the navy was particularly challenging. By 1900, a naval officer would have found little difference in his career structure from the time of Nelson. Despite early reforms in 1902, and Fisher’s long crusade to widen and democratise recruitment, the naval high command, like that of the army, remained the narrow preserve of the upper classes. Promotion was bound rigidly by the rules of seniority and class. As the Naval and Military Review later stated:
The British Navy has long obtained an ample supply of capable officers … without recruiting from the Democracy to any visible extent … We should view with grave apprehension any attempt to officer the fleet at all largely with men of humble births.25
Such ingrained prejudice hampered Fisher in his reforms, and he would not have survived without the support on which he was able to call.
Although he did a sterling job in improving the navy, Fisher presented Haldane and the Committee of Imperial Defence with problems. He was a stubborn autocrat with a huge ego. He knew it all. No committee would be telling him what to do with his navy. If Germany was to be taken out, it was a job for him and his beloved ships.
On 12 April 1905, with the Moroccan crisis threatening to boil over into war, the first sea lord and Lord Lansdowne attended a meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence, after which Fisher intimated to the foreign secretary that the dispute was a ‘golden opportunity’26 to bring forward war with Germany. Ever the war-hawk, Fisher confidently predicted that ‘we could have the German fleet, the Kiel canal, and Schleswig-Holstein within a fortnight’.27 Little wonder that Delcassé was able to claim in July 1905 that, if it came to war, the British fleet would be mobilised, seize the Kiel canal and land 100,000 men in Schleswig-Holstein. Fisher’s ambitious plan to use the navy in a pre-emptive strike against Germany had clearly been shared with Delcassé, who told the French press. No matter how often it was denied by the British government, this caused great alarm in Germany.
Fisher strongly believed that Britain depended upon naval supremacy above all else, and that the army should be a subsidiary force. He called into question the huge budget allocated to the land forces and never tired of reiterating Sir Edward Grey’s ‘splendid words’ that the British Army was simply a projectile to be fired by the navy. Fisher worked hard to influence the Committee of Imperial Defence and demanded that every plan for offensive hostilities against Germany should be subsidiary to the actions of the fleet. He was reluctant to discuss naval cooperation with the French, whom he distrusted, and kept even his most senior fellow officers in the dark. He did not believe in the plan for a military expeditionary force going to France. His preference was the Schleswig-Holstein option in conjunction with a close naval blockade to starve Germany into submission. His ideas were dismissed by an ever-growing number of the Committee of Imperial Defence, and some senior figures in the navy, but Fisher’s option for a close naval blockade warranted much more consideration than it was given.
Despite the electoral promise of ‘Peace and Retrenchment’, Campbell-Bannerman’s ideals were successfully thwarted. The first two years of the Liberal government saw steady progress in building the foundations for war, though no one outside the Secret Elite’s circles understood their true purpose. In January 1908, Campbell-Bannerman, who had suffered three heart attacks, fell terminally ill. The king ‘really did wish to say goodbye to his Prime Minister’,28 but such an inconvenience would have interrupted his holiday in Biarritz, and he had no wish to return to fog-bound London. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman died in 10 Downing Street on Wednesday, 22 April. In an act of symbolic irony, Asquith was obliged to take the train to the South of France to kiss the royal hand before his appointment. King Edward was reportedly ‘far too ill’ to travel back to London for such a mere formality.29 More likely he had no intention of interrupting his holiday just to appoint Asquith.30 It remains the only instance in which a British prime minister has formally taken office on foreign soil.
There was much for Asquith to consider as he put the finishing touches to his government. The Secret Elite kept in close contact. Days before Asquith’s formal visit to Biarritz, Lord Esher was able to note in his diaries that Lloyd George would become chancellor and Winston Churchill, president of the Board of Trade.31 Asquith wrote from Biarritz to offer them those precise positions, so it is safe to assume that this was all approved by the Secret Elite beforehand. Some in the Liberal Party considered both men a danger, but this Cabinet needed to be balanced. Lloyd George had a large following on the backbenches and was popular with the working classes. Churchill had no such following but was energetic and single-minded. Asquith commented that ‘Lloyd George has no principles and Winston no convictions’.32 They appeared an extremely unlikely pairing. Winston Churchill came from the aristocracy and fully accepted class distinction as part of the British way of life. Lloyd George came from the opposite end of the social spectrum and was consumed at times by class-consciousness. Yet in the years that led to the First World War, they worked together in a formidable partnership.
Winston Churchill was an enigma for many in the inner circle of the Secret Elite. They all knew him and he knew all of them. Winston’s family connections allowed him access to Arthur Balfour, Herbert Asquith, Lord Rosebery and Lord Rothschild, to mention but a few. His association with Alfred Milner dated back to South Africa, where he declared himself a great admirer of Milner’s ‘genius’.33 By birth and connection, by education and politics, by instinct and breeding he had all of the necessary prerequisites. Churchill had, however, one fatal flaw, one characteristic that kept him at arm’s length from the highest level of influence. He had an unstoppable capacity to be maverick. He had a need to see himself, and be seen by others, as the central player. He was useful as an agent to energetically promote big ideals, but his enthusiasms could not be fully controlled. His urge to portray himself as the government’s action-man was at times laughable, but Churchill was an important political actor whom the Secret Elite influenced throughout his career.
Churchill was the product of a marriage of convenience. His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough, was a spoiled playboy who wandered into Conservative politics, gambled and frolicked in the entourage of the Prince of Wales and died aged 46 from syphilis. His debts to Lord Nathaniel Rothschild would be calculated in millions of pounds in today’s money. Randolph’s wife, Jennie Jerome, was the daughter of an ambitious wealthy American businessman who paid a substantial sum to secure the marriage.34 She gave birth to Winston in 1874, some seven and a half months after their wedding in Paris. Jennie had little time for motherhood, and Winston was abandoned to his nanny. He was kept at some distance from his parents and lacked maternal love and paternal interest. But what did that matter when surroun
ded by all of the advantages of privilege?
David George had no such advantage. Born in Manchester in 1863, his father William, a schoolteacher, died when David was one year old. He was sent to live with his uncle, Richard Lloyd, who gave him a nonconformist education and a new name, Lloyd George. Self-motivated and ambitious, he wrote, ungallantly, to Margaret Owen, later his wife: ‘my supreme idea is to get on … I am prepared to thrust even love itself under the wheels of my juggernaut, if it obstructs the way’.35
Lloyd George was a gifted orator, though the Establishment saw him as a ‘rabble-rouser’. He was elected to Parliament as Liberal MP for Caernarfon Boroughs in 1890 and became an outspoken critic of the Boer War. He saw it as ‘an outrage perpetrated in the name of human freedom’.36 While the war in South Africa was staunchly supported by Asquith, Grey and Haldane, Lloyd George stayed true to his core belief that it was an expensive waste, conducted in a blundering and cruel fashion.
Parliamentary exchanges between Churchill and Lloyd George after 1900 revealed some common ground, and a friendship of sorts developed into evening dinners and serious discussions about policy and government. By 1904, Churchill had decided to switch allegiance and abandon the Conservatives. The reason he gave was ostensibly the issue of Joseph Chamberlain’s conversion to a new scheme of tariffs and imperial preference. Detractors believed that Churchill abandoned the party because it was about to lose the next election and he had little or no hope of attaining office, and certainly not high office.
There is another possibility. Was Churchill asked by the Secret Elite to defect to the Liberals in order to bring Lloyd George into their sphere of direct influence? While this might seem an outrageous question, later developments lend it credence.
Lloyd George had qualities that the Secret Elite could use: leadership, sharp and acerbic wit and popularity with the masses. He addressed colossal audiences, had no fears in parliamentary debate, cared passionately about social reform and had credibility in the public arena that was unsurpassed in its time. He was ambitious, relatively poor, had no additional sources of income, no benefactors or any likelihood of finding any in the capitalist bear-pit he railed against. His enemies were the wealthy, the aristocracy, the privileged, the warmongers and, of course, the House of Lords. He was a man of the people, but, as Asquith had said, he was not necessarily a man of principle. From the day he took office in Asquith’s 1908 government as chancellor of the Exchequer, no one expected anything other than the Liberal government’s absolute opposition to war, opposition to massive spending on the machines of war, opposition to the naval race and opposition to exorbitant wealth … all the core values that made Lloyd George the champion of Liberal radicalism. No one, that is, except the Secret Elite, who were preparing the ground to make him their man.
Although Churchill and Lloyd George were friends, they were also rivals. Both intended to be prime minister. They had a tendency to rile other Cabinet ministers, even Richard Haldane, when they started to demand cuts in military expenditure.37 In their early years in government, Lloyd George labelled Haldane ‘Minister of Slaughter’. Their crusade against the vast spending on the navy in particular brought them into conflict with Grey and Haldane, which caused initial discomfort. They were, in 1908, the ‘younger generation knocking at the door’,38 and the Secret Elite monitored their progress with interest.
SUMMARY: CHAPTER 7 – 1906 – LANDSLIDE TO CONTINUITY
The 1906 Liberal landslide victory promised radical reform but brought no change in foreign policy.
Grey continued the grand design for war with Germany and was cocooned in the Foreign Office with seasoned permanent under-secretaries who were part of the Secret Elite.
A close examination of the list of politicians, diplomats and newspapermen who knew about the secret military ‘conversations’ provides a snapshot of key members of the Secret Elite in 1906.
Haldane’s reforms of the War Office had the full backing of King Edward and the Committee of Imperial Defence.
He transformed the organisation of the British Army, but the navy remained stuck in centuries-old tradition.
Admiral Sir John Fisher introduced oil-driven warships and radically modernised the fleet.
Fisher, however, believed in naval supremacy and that the army should play a subsidiary role. He would not budge from his stubborn belief that the German fleet should be ‘Copenhagened’ and that the Royal Navy should attack Germany in a pre-emptive strike. The CID resolutely refused to accept his plans.
Campbell-Bannerman’s death in 1908 gave the Relugas Three unfettered control of the government.
The Secret Elite knew and approved the Cabinet reshuffle before it was confirmed to the ministers themselves.
Two very different politicians, Churchill and Lloyd George, were given Cabinet posts from where their worth to the Secret Elite could be evaluated.
CHAPTER 8
Alexander Isvolsky – Hero and Villain
ALTHOUGH PREPARATIONS FOR THE LONDON Olympic Games and introduction of a bill to introduce an old-age pension proved a welcome distraction in 1908, try as he might the new prime minister could not avoid the prickly issue of Russia. Following the signing of the Anglo-Russian Convention the previous year, plans were set for what was billed as a family visit between King Edward VII and Czar Nicholas at Reval (now Talinn in Estonia) but was in fact the next step in the Secret Elite plan. The visit upset many sections of British society, who objected strenuously to any association with czarist Russia and its repressive regime. Asquith had barely taken office before he was being asked questions in Parliament that should have seriously embarrassed a Liberal prime minister. How could the king go to Russia when 100 members of the first Duma (Parliament) and 50 members of the second had been sent to Siberia or were held in prisons like common criminals, pending trials that might never take place? And what of the official and unofficial murders that still continued while the perpetrators went unchecked?1 In the first two years of so-called ‘constitutional reforms’, 1,780 people had been executed and 15,557 imprisoned.2 British trade unions, the Labour Party, churchmen and Asquith’s own Liberal Party were united in their disgust at the vicious suppression of Russia’s early attempts at democracy, but to no avail. What had Milner urged? ‘Disregard the screamers.’
The new prime minister curtly reminded members of Parliament that it was not their business to make allegations about the internal conditions and policy of a foreign nation. Grey lied in the Commons on 28 May when assuring MPs that ‘no new convention or Treaty is under discussion, nor is it intended to initiate any negotiations for one during the [king’s] visit’.3 Although Grey claimed that the visit was ‘purely dictated by family affection’ and without ‘any suspicion of politics attached to it’,4 his own permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office accompanied the king. The royal visit to Reval would lead to the realisation of a scheme that the Secret Elite had devised years before: the encirclement of Germany.5
Protests in Parliament continued, but the Relugas Three did not buckle under pressure. When Asquith was asked if he was aware that the czar was to be accompanied by Pyotr Stolypin, his prime minister, and Isvolsky, his foreign secretary, while King Edward had no minister of the Crown with him, he feigned not to know the arrangements made by the Russian government.6 It was unconstitutional for the king to discuss foreign affairs with other nations without the presence of a minister responsible to Parliament.7 Rules? Regulations? Precedent? What did these matter to the Secret Elite in the pursuit of their great cause? They lied before the visit took place and lied after the entente was agreed.
Despite the moral, political and constitutional objections, the king and his entourage sailed off to the beautiful Estonian town that had never experienced such a profusion of royalty since Peter the Great captured it from Sweden some 200 years before. Both royal families, the Saxe-Coburgs and the Romanovs, were in full array, and the two days of talks were interspersed with banquets on board the royal yachts.
One positive action stemmed from the meeting at Reval. King Edward responded to an appeal from the Rothschild brothers to speak to the czar about protection for Russian Jews under threat from brutal pogroms. He did, but little changed inside that anti-Semitic court.9
King Edward was accompanied by Admiral Jacky Fisher, the first sea lord, General Sir John French, inspector general of the army, and Sir Charles Hardinge, the Secret Elite’s leading diplomat and the man who pulled the strings in the Foreign Office. The rabidly anti-German Admiral Fisher and Sir John French had discussed military and naval actions at the Committee of Imperial Defence in the presence of Asquith, Grey, Haldane and Lord Esher,10 and the king’s entourage was nothing more than a select sub-committee of that cabal. Fisher urged King Edward to support him in his plans to crush the German fleet before it could close the Baltic to the Royal Navy.11
On the bay off Reval on 9 June 1908, bathed in brilliant sunshine, the imperial and royal yachts, ‘surrounded by British and Russian warships’, set an impressive scene. Both czar and king spoke in English and emphasised the good relations that had replaced the coolness between the two countries in past years. After lunch, King Edward retired to his cabin with Premier Stolypin for ‘a long private consultation’. As the New York Times reported the following day: ‘nothing has been published’. Edward held private talks with the Russian prime minister, not his cousin the czar, on matters that have been kept secret. There was no official communiqué. Admiral Fisher and General French held private talks with Prime Minister Stolypin and Foreign Minister Isvolsky.12 These too went unreported. Significantly, the Russians were known to be concerned about Germany’s potential dominance of the Baltic, and Stolypin desperately wanted British support to ‘prevent the Baltic becoming a German lake’.13