Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  CHAPTER 3

  COALITION

  I

  The King opened a new session of Parliament on 11 November, the speech from the Throne dealing with one subject only: ‘The prosecution to a victorious issue of the War on which we are engaged.’1 Whatever might have been imagined three months earlier, with two entrenched armies in France and Flanders, and the expected naval war (and rapid British victory) nowhere in sight, it was now manifest the war would be long in duration. The King enunciated his speech ‘with measured gravity’, The Times noted, and ‘its delivery made a deep impression.’2 The Queen and many of the peeresses present were in black or purple, signifying mourning.

  On 17 November Lloyd George introduced an emergency War Budget, designed to deal with a drawn-out conflict. It was preceded by notice that a new vote of credit, of £225 million, would be put before the Commons: as he said, the newspapers had all underestimated how much the war was costing, and until he announced the new Vote of Credit ‘the public … had no idea as to the costliness of the undertaking.’3 There were 2 million men under arms, and another million expected within a few months: and ‘we are maintaining a huge Navy as well.’4 The separation allowances were ‘more liberal’ than in any other country, and once the next million men had enlisted would cost £65 million a year. Before the war it was estimated public spending would be almost £207 million, and even that would have led to a shortfall of £11 million. The extra war expenditure for the year was predicted to be £328 million, so Britain was facing the most expensive year in its history: it had to find just under £340 million from somewhere to fund itself. The Boer War had cost £211 million spread over four financial years: the first year of this war was expected to cost at least £450 million.

  It was ‘out of the question’ to raise the whole sum by taxation: but a failure to ‘tax and tax heavily’ would depart from the policy adopted in every war hitherto, and would undermine British financial soundness.5 Loans had paid for more than half of the Napoleonic and Crimean wars, but the rest had come in taxes. In those lower-wage societies, Pitt and Gladstone respectively had raised taxes proportionate to wealth that, if copied by Lloyd George, would require no borrowing at all. It had not just been that taxpayers – and Lloyd George pointed out that many things were taxed to raise the money, not just income – had been aware of their duty to their country; they had also been made aware of their duty to posterity, in not saddling future generations with huge levels of debt on which they had to pay interest.

  For the present year he would need to find £16 million and the following £50 million just to cover the loss of revenue and the interest on the loans; and perhaps as many as 2 million men who had been contributing by direct or indirect taxes before war broke out would be abroad, and not contributing, a year hence. To borrow to cover these costs would be ‘cowardly finance in the extreme.’6 His next justification for raising taxes was that much of the additional state spending – possibly four-fifths – would take place in Britain, giving a huge boost to industry. It was only sensible to tax that windfall. He predicted a programme of reconstruction after the war: peace would bring with it severe economic problems, a remarkably prescient assessment. Therefore, all the money that could be raised by taxes should be thus raised.

  He proposed to double income tax from 1s 3d to 2s 6d in the pound. Beer was taxed very low, relative to its alcohol content, compared with spirits; so he proposed to put a halfpenny on each half-pint of beer, which researches had told him was the measure in which it was usually drunk. ‘Every half-pint that a man drinks he will be contributing to the carrying-on of the War,’ he proclaimed, effectively making drinking patriotic. He admitted that a heavy increase in spirit duties in 1909 had cost the Treasury money because it had driven down consumption and hit distillers hard. He would not therefore be increasing those duties: but he would be putting 3d on a pound of tea, which he expected to raise £3.2 million in a year.

  None of this came close to covering the additional expenditure – he estimated that after tax rises there would still be a ‘deficiency’ of £321 million – and so he announced a War Loan.7 The government would issue a 3.5 per cent security, redeemable on 1 March 1928 or, on three months’ notice, after 1 March 1925 if that happened to be a period of cheap money. In anticipation of such a loan, institutions and individuals had already offered £100 million, and prospectuses would be issued immediately for a total of £350 million. He justified the step by saying that ‘it is a loan to help the country to fight the battle for its existence—to fight a battle which lends value to every other security which we have got. Victory means value, defeat means depreciation. It is an excellent investment, because the credit of Great Britain is still the best in the market, and after this War it will be a better investment than ever. There will be no more loose and malevolent talk about the decay and downfall of the British Empire.’8 He called it an excellent way for those too old or ill to fight to make their contribution to the battle. In a largely non-partisan speech the shadow chancellor, Austen Chamberlain, endorsed his proposals, especially the loan. The next day the Commons began considering proper financial support for its servicemen, their families, their widows and a generous pension scheme for those whose wounds rendered them unfit for work.

  However, for all Lloyd George’s ingenuity, Britain’s role as a great debtor nation had begun, and would survive him indefinitely. The country was handicapped by the fact that, because of the uncertain credit status of some of its allies, it was borrowing money (mainly from America) to lend on to them, but remained responsible for the debt. This would have dire economic consequences when Russia defaulted after the revolution and its unilateral peace treaty with the Central Powers. Also other nations – such as Romania that autumn – asked Britain to fund them as allies, having rejected offers from Germany. As Balfour told the War Council in December: ‘if we were to become the treasurer and universal provider of a number of nations, we must maintain our economic position.’9 With the war promising to last for years, the more men that enlisted, the more the economy was weakened by their leaving it, even with women replacing them. This tension would become explosive during 1915.

  On 3 November the war reached the English mainland. A German naval raid – unreported at the censor’s order – was launched on Great Yarmouth, the easternmost point of England. It seemed to support Kitchener’s thesis of Germany fighting an aggressive war against Britain itself and not just on the Continent, and the need for more ships in the southern North Sea. Shells were fired at the town but fell in the sea, serving to terrorise the inhabitants while providing cover for yet another German minelaying operation. However, this coincided with the news from the South Atlantic about the loss of ships at the Battle of Coronel, which caused some of the reinforcements destined for the east coast to be sent down there and led to the Battle of the Falkland Islands in December 1914 against the German East Asia Squadron, under Vice Admiral Graf von Spee. The German High Seas Fleet was not seen until Jutland in May 1916, and never came out again. Asquith, though, embarrassed by the attack on Great Yarmouth, was angry about Coronel. He told Miss Stanley that had Rear Admiral Sir Christopher Cradock, who commanded the 4th Squadron, not ‘gone to the bottom’ with HMS Good Hope ‘he richly deserves to be court-martialled’.10 This was a mightily unfair and ill-informed view: Cradock had engaged the enemy despite his own forces being hugely inferior, and had behaved with enormous gallantry; three days before he went down he had requested, and been denied, reinforcements.

  A far worse German raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby at dawn on 16 December provided another example of Churchill’s volatility, and his failure to understand that his high-flown phrasemaking was not always appropriate. As with the Yarmouth raid it was cover for minelaying, but this time the shells did not all fall in the sea: there were (according to official figures at the time) 137 dead and 360 (later revised to 455) injured in the three towns after a bombardment lasting from just after 8 a.m. until 8.50 a.m.: Hank
ey later claimed there were 86 dead and 426 injured in Hartlepool alone.11 There had been no programme to build shelters, and the War Office announced that evening that people in West Hartlepool had ‘crowded in the streets, and approximately 22 were killed and 50 wounded’ as a result.12 It said there had, however, been ‘an entire absence of panic’ in all three towns, which ironically may have helped increase casualties as people chose not to hide away during the attack. Much housing was damaged, and three churches were struck in Hartlepool, as well as the gasworks. In Whitby the abbey ruins were damaged, and a church and hospital were hit in Scarborough, as was the Grand Hotel. Once order was restored, the mayor of Hartlepool issued a proclamation advising people to stay indoors.

  The German ships were 10 to 12 miles offshore. The Royal Navy pursued them but, the official report claimed, lost them in the fog and failed to sink them. It seems the ships sent in pursuit were simply not fast enough. Under the 1907 Rules of War agreed at the Hague conference, Scarborough and Whitby were undefended towns, and the raids were therefore illegal. Churchill’s gaffe was that he wrote a letter to the mayor of Scarborough that concluded: ‘Whatever feats of arms the German navy may hereafter perform, the stigma of the baby-killers of Scarborough will brand its officers and men while sailors sail the seas.’13 Mrs Asquith was outraged by his tone, ‘because the one thing in war times that no one can stomach is rhetoric’. Her husband agreed, thinking the letter ‘rather banal; a lot of cheapish rhetoric & an undertone of angry snarl.’

  The public, however, seemed to side with Churchill, the raids provoking defiance and anger; and the press demanded to know why casualties had been so high. The Times, which had long called for a detailed programme of instruction to civilians of how to protect themselves, berated the government for ‘dealing with the matter in piecemeal and furtive fashion.’14 The authorities, acting under DORA, moved enemy aliens from the attacked towns 30 miles inland, allowing some back after the investigation of individual cases. Nevertheless, the vulnerability of the east coast was confirmed. On 21 December the Admiralty Pier at Dover was the apparent target of the first bombing from an aircraft over England, when two missiles were dropped from an aeroplane in the sea nearby; and on 29 December the first Zeppelin was sighted over the British coast.

  Although the government thought a German invasion might be attempted to break the stalemate on the Continent, it had, illogically, done little to advance formal home defence beyond the earlier instructions to lords lieutenant of coastal counties. Counties adjoining coastal ones had received no guidelines, even though an enemy that had landed would almost certainly reach them. Under pressure in the Lords, Crewe, the Liberal leader in the Upper House, was forced to admit that the plans had been modified already, and might be modified further. However, he said it was not ‘desirable’ to issue instructions to every county, or for each to have a coordinator of home defence.15 What he perceived as Crewe’s complacency outraged Curzon. ‘The poor people at Scarborough who went out into the streets at eight o’clock on the morning of December 16 had no time to go to the police and ask for the address of the chairman of the emergency committee,’ he remarked.16 He wanted the emergency instructions published for all to see and understand, not kept secret among a select group. He also criticised the lack of coordination of Volunteer Training Corps – bodies of men beyond military age designed to mobilise their energies – as rendering the corps ‘useless’ in the face of any emergency.17 In Scarborough, the railway station had been besieged by people wanting to get away: Curzon feared a ‘stampede’ in the event of a serious attack, and rebuked the government for having made no contingency plans for transport.

  On 19 January the Zeppelins returned, with lethal intent. From 8.20 p.m. bombs – thought to be from three airships sighted that afternoon off the Dutch coast – fell for ten minutes on Great Yarmouth. The municipal authorities turned off street lights immediately and, unlike in Scarborough and Hartlepool, people stayed indoors during the raid. Experimental blackouts were in force along the east coast. The airships went on to bomb Cromer, Sheringham and, at 11 p.m., King’s Lynn. The bombing killed four people – a cobbler and an old lady in Lynn, a boy of fourteen and a twenty-six-year-old widow of a soldier in Yarmouth. A baby and an off-duty soldier were injured. With the country gripped by spy fever, word arose that a motor car with flashing lights had guided the airships. Further inquiry revealed the car in question belonged to the King’s domestic chaplain, heading to the rectory at Sandringham: the Royal Family had returned to London that morning. The Zeppelins had not intended to target Cromer and Lynn: they had sought industrial plants on the Humber, but became lost in fog and jettisoned their bombs over the first urban areas they saw. The raid panicked the authorities along the coast: in London all special constables were called out and put on air-raid duties.

  The reaction to the raid was one of predictable fury. ‘The German Government and the German people alike have made it clear in a hundred ways to the whole world that they are ready to commit any outrage and do not propose to obey any of the laws of GOD or man,’ proclaimed The Times.18 ‘They practise ruthless and inhuman destruction of the weak and helpless.’ The paper expected that this brutality – which it claimed was ‘such as the world has not witnessed for a thousand years’ – would be renewed on a larger scale; but it said that Britain should not retaliate, but should concentrate on defeating the German army and winning the war. This manifestation of German ‘beastliness’ should have come as no surprise: Wells had predicted it in his 1908 novel The War in the Air, showing how the home front and the military front would become one and the same.

  II

  Yet for all the people’s supposed commitment to the struggle, and the attacks on the British coastline that reminded them of the war’s immediacy and lethal potential, the industrial strife that had marked the years before the war resumed. Miners in Yorkshire voted in January 1915 about whether to strike in pursuit of an increase in the minimum wage. The union wrote to colliery owners to ask whether they would support such an idea; but before they could reply the industry’s conciliation board was convened, and the widespread belief was that the government would intervene. The Yorkshire coalfield supplied power for textile mills working twenty-four hours a day to make uniforms. There was also a serious shortage of labour, as around 20,000 Yorkshire colliers – a sixth of the total – had enlisted. However, the owners said profitability had fallen, and they could not afford to pay more.

  The shortage of labour also disturbed farmers, who predicted problems of cultivation and harvest because of losing men for labour-intensive work; and this came at the same time as a sudden rise in the cost of living. The price of food, having stabilised since August, was now rising again, because of a shortage of imported wheat and the increased cost of shipping and congestion at ports, again caused by a shortage of men. Labour announced that when Parliament resumed on 2 February it would demand full state control of the distribution and price of food, ideas utterly abhorrent to the Liberal government, despite the compromises about state intervention made since August 1914. Shipowners, attacked for profiteering, said they had not increased their charges, and instead blamed foreign food producers for taking advantage of shortages in Britain by raising prices. Even if the Liberals had had no ideological objection to intervention, it would have been pointless. Sensing a larger slice of the cake might be available, fish porters at Billingsgate also went on strike.

  The high price of food throughout the winter of 1914–15 also made the public restless. In London, a 20-stone sack of flour that had cost 26s 6d a year earlier was now 40s 6d.19 Farmers were urged to grow more: but that would bring no immediate relief, and the increasing shortage of labour caused by the enlistment of farm workers meant it would be hard to bring the 1915 harvest in. One possible solution was to grant exemptions under educational by-laws that existed in many rural districts to take boys as young as eleven out of school to work on the land: but this caused huge disquiet. Labour, and some Liberal
s, felt it was the continuation of a long campaign by farmers for more child labour, because it was cheap. As Hardie said on 25 February, the labour movement had campaigned for free and compulsory education for years, and many of its members had never been to school; they were loath to see this entitlement eroded, even by the war.20 Hardie advocated the employment of women for certain farm jobs – a suggestion ahead of its time, which would quickly catch on – and also the nationalisation of the land and the formation of local workers’ cooperatives – which would not. Sir Harry Verney, an agriculture minister, said farmers should make better use of labour exchanges, employing boys as a last, not a first, resort.

  Problems of food supply worsened because Russia, instead of exporting wheat, now sought to buy on world markets, which had driven prices up. In early 1915 sugar (the average consumption of which was a pound and a half per person per week) went up from 2d a pound to 3½d, rice from 2d to 2½d, bread from 3½d to 4d a loaf: in all cases the increased price of freight was a factor, meaning that in remote parts of Scotland prices were even higher. A man earning 25s a week had spent 13s 9d on food before the war; now he spent 16s 6d, unless his family had cut down.21 High-quality coal from Newcastle, sold in London before the war for 30s a ton, was now 34s. Even worse, the low-quality coal used by the poor, which had been 22s a ton, was now 32s, making life exceptionally difficult for them. The logistical problems of assembling a new army of seventy divisions – Kitchener’s ultimate aim, whose creation would require a cultural revolution to establish a mentality of total war – were ceaseless, and for all Parliament’s willingness to vote new loans, financial restraints remained. Nonetheless, further small increases in allowances for wives, children and widows were announced on 9 November, such as raising the widow’s pension from 5s to 7s 6d a week: a move that caused outrage in a certain section of society. ‘A Householder’ – he was wise not to give his name – wrote to The Times to say that if wives and widows with children really were to be paid £1 a week ‘we shall not be able to keep a single maidservant in my particular district. They will all be running after the men who are “worth a pound a week alive or dead.” Numbers of young girls are already persuading men to marry them on the strength of these allowances.’22 He suggested allowances be paid only to women married before the war, or before enlistment.