The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Lloyd George was thinking along parallel lines. He too wrote to Asquith saying that more trench warfare would destroy the morale of the troops and that any attempt to force the well-defended German lines would end ‘in failure and in appalling loss of life’. His preferred alternatives were to attack Austria through the Balkans, rousing the Serbs, Greeks and others; or to attack Turkey via Syria, thereby helping the Czar’s army, which was in dire trouble in the Caucasus and begging for help. These political searches to avoid mass slaughter in France led to increasingly bitter rows with the military, above all Lords Kitchener and Fisher. The army high command believed that, bloody as it was, the only way to defeat Germany was full-frontal in Flanders and many historians today agree. Lloyd George and Churchill have been attacked as romantic, know-nothing busybodies, distracting the men properly in charge of the war and diverting vital soldiers and guns to hopeless causes.

  Indeed, Lloyd George’s hopes for some kind of Balkan uprising showed little understanding of the politics of the region, or of Greece. Whether an attack could have succeeded across the North Sea and whether the disastrous attempt on the Dardanelles, meant to shake Turkey out of the war, could have worked with better luck and leadership can never now be known. Both Lloyd George and Churchill were men who tended to believe they knew more than the experts and the latter was schoolboyish enough to rouse the cabinet to mocking laughter at some of his antics. He had a very odd attitude to the war, telling Margot Asquith at a dinner party in January 1915, ‘I would not be out of this glorious delicious war for anything the world could give me . . . I say, don’t repeat that I said the word delicious but you know what I mean.’ Yet he and his old Welsh leader were democratic politicians, acutely aware of the difficulties of sustaining public support for a long blood-sacrifice without hope of breakthrough. Both, but particularly Lloyd George, were slogging up and down the country making speeches to keep up morale and offer hope – something military historians tend to easily dismiss as mere politicking. They had a duty to try to use their ingenuity to look for alternative strategies. Inevitably, however, this pitted them against those who were sure that the war would be won or lost in France, and that any diversion would simply prolong the killing.

  These arguments were being thrashed out in the War Council and between ministers. And it seems that the views of Maurice Hankey, a brilliant official who was secretary to the War Council and later the man who effectively created the modern Cabinet Office system, proved decisive. He argued strongly against Churchill’s northern attack and in favour of the Dardanelles assault. The cabinet agreed, initially authorizing a naval attack through to Constantinople, which could be threatened with bombardment, possibly then bringing down the Ottoman Empire. Though the battleships’ bombardment was ferocious and quite effective, they sailed straight into a minefield. One French battleship and two British were sunk and the entire fleet withdrew, giving the Turks time to reinforce and prepare land that would have been relatively easy to seize. Now it was decided to make this a full landing of troops. Kitchener, who knew the Middle East well and easily understood the luscious prospects for the Allies if Turkey surrendered, became a supporter of this Churchillian adventure at least. The eventual landing by British and Australian troops at Gallipoli, badly organized and poorly supported, ran into ferocious and deadly Turkish defence led by Kemal Ataturk, who would later become the founder of modern Turkey. Just getting ashore was murderous, near-impossible: troops drowned, were killed by their own side or easily fell prey to well-sited machine guns. In the early stages they had to use bayonets against the guns, with predictable results. Pinned down on the beaches, with little cover and at the mercy of Turkish artillery, the slaughter was terrible; some 50,000 British, Australian and New Zealand troops died of wounds or disease. As the disaster continued, conditions became ever more horrible, a corpse-scented, fly-covered landscape as bad in its way as anything in Flanders, and even more hopeless militarily. One eyewitness was the father of the modern media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, who, despite having his notes seized and destroyed, sent a savage report about British incompetence to Australia and London. Though Churchill blamed the admirals and generals at the scene, it was he who was most blamed by the public, and the disaster nearly destroyed his political career. At the time the Daily Mail called him ‘guilty in the first degree’.

  One of those who died in the adventure was the poet Rupert Brooke, who had become a gleaming symbol of British manhood, despite his generally second-rate verse. He dreamed of a second Trojan war, and of another British crusade. But he was bitten on the lip by a gnat before he reached the Dardanelles and died of blood poisoning. He was buried on Skyros, the Greek island which reputedly had produced Theseus, ‘some corner of a foreign land’ – which would have pleased him. His epitaph in Greek read: ‘Here lies the servant of God, a sub-lieutenant in the British navy, who died for the deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks’, thus extending Britain’s war aims even beyond Churchill’s wilder dreams. At home, Asquith, whose daughter Violet had loved Brooke, told Venetia his death ‘has given me more pain than any loss in the war’ and spoke of a ‘dazed, dim, premonitory feeling’ that the next loss would be even closer to home. His son Raymond would be killed on the Somme the following year. Churchill took it upon himself to write Brooke’s obituary for The Times, piling up clauses to help build one of the iconic reputations of the time. Brooke’s lush late-romantic style, his unabashed but self-conscious patriotism and his blond good looks made him a perfect pin-up for the ‘lost generation’, even though he was always a tricky character, half way between Lawrence of Arabia and Sassoon. Had he lived, he might of course have developed into a tougher, angrier war poet. Dead, he was safely frozen rigid as England’s young Galahad – the only time a gnat has turned a man to marble.

  Meanwhile, in the great old Admiralty, almost a state within a state, Fisher and Churchill were at each other’s throats. Theirs was one of the strangest relationships of the British wartime story. Fisher had always been charismatic and had known almost every interesting ruler of late-Victorian and Edwardian times: czars, kaisers, grand dukes and presidents. He had a strangely oriental face, which led many to doubt whether he was really fully British, and a charm so intense that both men and women fell for him. The admiral had first met Churchill at Biarritz, the favoured pleasure promenade of Edward VII, and noted: ‘Fell desperately in love with Winston Churchill,’ who in turn apparently told Fisher, ‘You are the only man in the world I truly love.’ As we have noted before, it is dangerous to read Edwardians with twenty-first-century spectacles, but Fisher’s adoration of Churchill was intense enough to make him the enemy of Clementine, Churchill’s wife. During the Gallipoli crisis, when Churchill was briefly in France without taking the First Sea Lord and she had invited Fisher to lunch, he lurked round afterwards before leaping out to suddenly inform her: ‘You are a foolish woman. All the time you think Winston’s with Sir John French he is in Paris with his mistress.’ She was very upset and bundled him out. Much later, when Fisher had long gone from the Admiralty and so had Churchill, but the two of them seemed to be in cahoots again, Clemmie shouted at the little old man: ‘Keep your hands off my husband. You have all but ruined him once. Leave him alone now.’73

  So this was no humdrum office alliance. Fisher’s return to the Admiralty was greeted with something like the applause for Kitchener at the War Office, and in his first weeks he encouraged a speedy revenge attack by British cruisers which resulted in the Battle of the Falklands, a notable and crushing victory over five German ships which effectively put the Kaiser’s surface fleet out of contention across most of the world’s oceans. But Fisher was by now an old man. His furious rate of work and his eccentric, often brilliant thinking came up against a younger man, Churchill, who was just as brilliant and just as hard-working but who now was not his adoring protégé but his absolute boss. Churchill did little to calm or cultivate Fisher. The latter did not like the idea of the Dardanelles campaign, partly b
ecause it was not his thrust at Germany and partly because he wanted to keep the whole fleet ready for a coming Trafalgar-like confrontation in the North Sea. He was won round for a while but became increasingly irascible and unpredictable. At the key War Council meeting he had to be physically stopped from walking out by Kitchener and led back to the table. His memorandums became violent and, in the view of Hankey, completely mad, and he announced his resignation no fewer than eight times. The worse things went at the Dardanelles the more he ranted about how he had been against the affair all along.

  On the morning of 15 May 1915, as the bloody disaster of Gallipoli was becoming apparent, he simply disappeared. He went to see Lloyd George to tell him he was going off to Scotland and then vanished . . . later it turned out that he had taken refuge in a hotel room at Charing Cross, within a few hundred yards of the Admiralty, whose officials were desperately combing central London and railway stations to find him. When at last a note from Asquith reached him, commanding him in the King’s name to return to his post, along with an emollient letter from Churchill, he was unmoved. He returned to Downing Street, telling Asquith and Lloyd George he could stand ‘it’ (Churchill) no longer. Meanwhile he had tipped off Andrew Bonar Law, the Unionist leader, to what he was doing. This was further treachery. And in the middle of it all reports began coming in suggesting that the German High Seas Fleet might be finally coming out to do battle. By now all London was ablaze with rumour. The Queen wrote to Fisher asking him to remain at his post like Nelson. Churchill said he regarded the Sea Lord’s behaviour as desertion and the King agreed, saying later that Fisher should have been ‘hanged at the yardarm for desertion of his post in the face of the enemy’ or at least punished by ‘dismissal from the service and degradation’.74

  Fisher, unaware of all this, was riding on a wave of euphoria. He sent an ultimatum to Asquith saying he would stay only if Churchill was kicked out of the cabinet, and he was given absolute control of the war at sea, all naval appointments, fleet dispositions and ‘absolutely untrammelled sole command of all the sea forces whatsoever’. He would not serve under Balfour, either. Furthermore he wanted this published to the fleet so that everyone would know of his victory. Meanwhile he sent a letter to Bonar Law telling him that Churchill ‘is a bigger danger than the Germans by a long way’. It was the kind of fantasy of a constitutional coup by the military over the politicians that many generals and admirals may have entertained but nobody before or since has proposed to a British prime minister. Even Fisher’s highly partial biographer called it a deranged letter and it finished him. Asquith told the King that Fisher was ‘somewhat unhinged’. Some of the papers agreed, though others championed his cause. Fisher’s resignation was, however, devastating for Churchill. He, after all, had appointed him in the first place and then been unable to work with him. If a coalition with the Tories was to be the result, then he knew he was likely to lose the Admiralty, for the Tories still loathed him. He desperately petitioned Asquith to keep him on, bombarding him with letters and personal pleas, but Asquith was thinking of other things, including his own survival as prime minister. And this was only one part of the crisis breaking over him. Fisher was a lethal torpedo, but the heaviest bombardment had come from another force which was itself reshaping British public life.

  The May Coup

  On the morning of Friday 21 May 1915 there was unaccustomed uproar on the floor of the London Stock Exchange. More than a thousand men of all ages were shouting, jeering and carrying bundles of newspapers to the middle of the floor, where they were piled up and set alight. This bonfire blazed to choruses of cheers and groans. The cheers were for Lord Kitchener. The groans were for Lord Northcliffe, owner of the Daily Mail and The Times, and one of the most powerful men in Britain. The burning papers were copies of that day’s Mail. Some painted a message and carried it round the corner into Throgmorton Street to the City offices of the newspaper and hung it outside: ‘The Allies of the Hun’, it read. A little further west, in London’s clubland, pinstriped, frock-coated servants gathered up copies of the papers published by Northcliffe, which included the Evening News and the Weekly Dispatch, and threw them in waste bins. The reaction was not confined to a few walrus-suited clubmen or City clerks. Similar protests followed in Bristol and Liverpool and across Britain, the circulation of the Daily Mail, the best known and most successful newspaper in the country, fell by more than a million overnight, from 1,386,000 to just 238,000. No article in the history of British journalism has ever had such a dramatic negative effect on circulation. The man responsible, Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe, liked to say he had the hide of an elephant. When the news was brought to him he was sitting surrounded by his senior journalists – they always stood while he sat, to show respect. He took off his glasses, told them he didn’t care what they thought but that he was right. Then he turned to the news editor and asked about the next day’s news: ‘Fish, what’s on the schedule?’

  The article that had caused the uproar was written by Northcliffe himself, in pencil at his country home, and was a culmination of his campaign to shake the government into taking seriously the shortage of high-explosive shells for the Western Front. This was no academic or merely personal vendetta. It went to the heart of how a government needs to work in wartime. Sir John French in Flanders had already lost unimaginable numbers of casualties trying desperately to break the German line. He could be blamed himself, but he blamed the lack of the right number and quantity of shells. Shrapnel shells, sending out a hail of small metal fragments, were devastating against troops in the open but of little use in demolishing trenches or deep bunkers. Kitchener, who had made his name in South Africa, had overseen the supply of the wrong kind of shells and, once he had accepted the idea of the Gallipoli attack, had diverted a fifth of French’s shells to the Dardanelles. Furthermore, until recently, the British navy had done nothing to obstruct the supply of cotton to Scandinavia and other neutrals, from where it had gone directly to Germany to manufacture ‘gun cotton’, the essential raw material of the day for high-explosive shells. The German artillery was much more effective. Sir John and the British high command were right. Kitchener, fussing about wasting ammunition, was hopelessly wrong. Lloyd George knew it, but Asquith and the majority of the government – what one Mail journalist called ‘a Cabinet of tired lawyers’ – were still backing the war minister. The Mail had been campaigning aggressively about the shell problem, with headlines such as ‘Killing our Men by Cotton’. At Neuve Chapelle, the shells had run out. Asquith made a speech pooh-poohing the idea that there was a shortage and at that point Sir John French’s patience snapped.

  He did something widely regarded as reprehensible but which led directly to the Daily Mail crisis. He showed the Times war correspondent Charles Repington the secret War Office correspondence which backed up his belief on the shells shortage and led to Repington reporting that the British failure had been directly caused by a ‘fatal’ lack of high explosives. It infuriated Kitchener, questioned Asquith’s veracity or grasp of facts and led Northcliffe to assault the ‘tired lawyers’ head-on. His Mail leader asserted bluntly that

  Lord Kitchener has starved the army in France of high explosive shells. The admitted fact is that Lord Kitchener ordered the wrong kind of shell . . . He was warned repeatedly that the kind of shell required was a violently explosive bomb which would dynamite its way through the German trenches and entanglements and enable our brave men to advance in safety. The kind of shell our poor soldiers have had has caused the death of thousands of them . . . We are growing callous about the size of the daily lists of killed, wounded and missing . . . Thousands of homes are mourning today for men who have been needlessly sacrificed.

  Apart from the fact that ‘thousands’ was a wild underestimate, this was a deliberately brutal assault on the reputation of the man who until then had been seen by most Britons as the greatest soldier and leader the nation possessed. People knew Kitchener from the posters, and they knew he had recruite
d the huge new citizen armies, and they were outraged. Yet Northcliffe was absolutely right. His attack, combined with the efforts of another press owner, Sir Max Aitken – soon to be Lord Beaverbrook – convinced the Tory leadership and some leading Liberals, notably Lloyd George, that things could not carry on this way. It was time to sweep aside what Northcliffe referred to as the Edwardian country-house style of government.