Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  He announced a quadrupling of the duties on wines, and surtax on strong beers. He proposed to double the spirit duty. Thanks to an increase in sparkling wine duty from 2s 6d to 15s a gallon, a bottle of good champagne would rise to £1 – the fact that this was not the boisson du choix of the Tyneside shipworker made the rise in beer prices seem less like class war. The ‘four ale’ – so called because it had long been 4d a quart – had risen to 6d a quart in the first War Budget and would now rise to 8d, a doubling in price in less than six months. Stronger beers, such as Guinness or Bass, would be even more expensive. A bottle of decent claret would rise from 2s 6d to 4s, and whisky from 4s 6d to 7s. More controversially, the government would close public houses or restrict sales of spirits and heavy beers in areas where their operation was ‘prejudicial’ to the output of local factories or to the well-being of locally stationed troops, though it would compensate those whose livelihoods were harmed.47

  The Daily Citizen, a Labour-supporting paper, said the speech constituted ‘the most sweeping indictment of the working classes that has ever been heard’, with the British workman painted as a ‘drunken sot … wilfully betraying his country into the hands of the enemy.’48 The Times said the ‘inevitable inference’ was that the government ‘in order to hide their own shortcomings were libelling the whole class of working men.’49 The paper asserted that the casual labourer was most given to drink, not the skilled worker, and he could afford to drink to excess only when trade was good. But it understood the consequences could be terrible in wartime, and therefore endorsed heavy taxation of strong drink, and special restrictions on areas with a high concentration of key factories.

  Lloyd George’s measures did not simply outrage the tribunes of the working man; they were attacked not just by Unionists, who apart from their links with the brewing trade saw his proposed tax increases on wines as harming French exporters with whom Britain was allied, but by the Irish Nationalists, who saw a threat to the whiskey trade and Irish farmers. Redmond accused Lloyd George of proposing, ‘in effect, to destroy root and branch a great Irish industry.’50 He said he had failed to prove the ‘necessity’ of imposing the measures on Ireland. The Irish press was uniformly hostile, and forecast the closure of distilleries, breweries, and the provocation of unrest.

  Justifying its drink taxation plans, the government issued a Treasury White Paper on 2 May entitled Report and Statistics of Bad Time kept in Shipbuilding, Munitions, and Transport Areas. It detailed drink-related delays in various shipyards on the Tyne and the Clyde, based on investigations made by senior naval officers. Although Unionists and their press supporters deemed some of what was in the report contentious, it did expose a restrictive practice in the shipyards that was causing such poor productivity. This was the ‘black squad’ system. The wages of a group of workers were paid to its leader. If he was indisposed – say by heavy drinking – the rest did not work. And the tradition was that the leader would take his men to a pub and divide the wages, and each bought a round of drinks. One squad the worse for drink was bad enough; if several squads were affected the losses could be enormous. A factory inspector remarked that earnings had risen, but the workers ‘have not yet been educated to spend their wages wisely, and the money is largely wasted, for they have few interests and little to spend their wage on apart from alcohol.’51 The report also contained pleas by officers superintending the production of ships to ensure pubs remained closed until 10 a.m., since men were having early drinking sessions before work: the captain superintendent of the Clyde district even advocated a ban on selling spirits.

  The brewers, distillers and their political clients vowed to fight the taxes. There would have to be a vote in the Commons, and given the anger of the Irish it was far from clear the taxes would be approved. There were protests in Dublin, and claims that the taxation was contrary to the spirit of the inoperative Home Rule Act. With a third of champagne production coming to Britain, and export markets in Belgium and Russia lost, the potential effect of Lloyd George’s super-tax was ruinous. Bordeaux was no less vociferous. The French Parliament made a formal complaint to France’s Foreign Ministry and urged it to raise the matter with London. Australia complained too, fearing damage to South Australia’s wine industry.

  Jellicoe, the commander of the Grand Fleet, added his weight to the argument in favour of taxes, saying the Navy was in peril because of poor working practices. Having heard how men on the Clyde refused to work on Saturday and Wednesday afternoons, and often took the whole of Wednesday off, he said that ‘my destroyer dockings and refits are delayed in every case by these labour difficulties, and they take twice as long as they need do.’52 Jellicoe’s words incensed Tyneside labourers, who blamed shipyard owners for not reallocating men from work on merchant vessels.

  His support was to no avail. Such was the deluge of opprobrium that on 4 May, before a Budget with no further increase in taxes, Lloyd George arranged leaks to the press that the taxes would be scaled back. The rise in beer taxes would be delayed. The wine taxes, designed to prove it was not a class issue, would not be imposed. However, Lloyd George was as determined to impose the tax on spirits as the Irish were determined he should not. Yet after further talks with the drinks trade on 7 May all new duties were withdrawn (as Mrs Asquith had predicted to her husband they would be, even before they became public), but the sale of spirits under three years old – stronger and cheaper and therefore within the pockets of working men – was banned, all such spirits being compulsorily placed in bond. Government control of drinks outlets around munitions factories was, however, approved. It was reckoned that consumption halved by 1918, thanks mainly to the difficulty in obtaining alcohol.

  III

  Assisting productivity by restricting drinking was a useful measure, but far more effort would be required to bring essential industries up to necessary wartime output. As men left in large numbers for the Army, attention turned to how best women could contribute to the war: though this would require, in many instances, the breaking down of entrenched prejudices. Farmers still questioned the physical powers of women as agricultural labourers, and preferred to hire boys too young to fight. Ironically, the government itself was accused of putting obstacles in the way of civil servants who wanted to join up. It was obvious that women could be trained for many civil service jobs, though The Times reported that ‘doubt is expressed as to whether it is practicable to substitute women for men to the extent which is said to be in contemplation.’53 Despite the national emergency, departmental heads were still reluctant to open even the most junior jobs to women, apparently doubting their ability to be a basic male bureaucrat’s intellectual equal. And although the government would soon lead the drive to have women employed in nationalised munitions factories, many privately owned arms businesses would take women only as a last resort. To encourage employers to see that a woman could be trained to do a skilled job that would enable a man to be released to fight, the government embarked on a campaign of what can only be described as re-education.

  The Board of Trade had announced on 17 March that it wished women to volunteer for war work through labour exchanges, where registers of those available would be kept. The 1911 census had revealed 15,650,778 women in Britain aged between fifteen and fifty-four, only 5.5 million of whom were in work.54 In the first eight days nearly 21,000 came forward, a third of them in London. By 16 April 47,000 had volunteered, with more than 8,000 seeking armaments work.55 Many from the capital were described as ‘middle class and well-to-do’, a large number of whom expressed a wish to work in munitions.56 Others offered to drive taxis or vans, or to replace men in government offices. Railway companies requested women employees, though not for engine-driving; and retailers sought women for shop work. Most skilled factory jobs were male preserves: the war started breaking those barriers down. The state did not compel private employers to take women: it did not need to, as businesses would soon be unable to function without them. Soon, women’s organisations mounted recr
uitment drives among their members.

  The Times, in an article written ‘by a Woman Correspondent’, conceded that ‘there is an enormous number of capable women coming down from the universities employed … under the title of secretary for members of Parliament and other public men, who could fill such posts usually given to youths from Oxford or Cambridge with none of their experience or love of work.’57 Working-class women were highly adaptable too. The ‘male monopoly’ of catering had decided to offer courses for women, and the 1911 census had discovered that there were four women bricklayers, so anything was possible. She also wrote that ‘to suggest that the many gaps in the ranks of Parliamentarians should be filled by women deputies would be perhaps hoisting the President of the Board of Trade with his own petard. But the experiment, being a temporary one, would have its useful points.’ The drafting of women into the workforce, and their inestimable contribution to the war effort, would make the final, unanswerable case for women’s suffrage. In April 1915 an experiment in Glasgow to use women as tram conductors was declared a success, and was soon emulated elsewhere; and agricultural colleges began training women in light farm work. While not all women might be suitable for manual labour (though Kitchener told Asquith he had seen women loading ships in Zanzibar), a prime minister deeply opposed to women’s suffrage now began to realise there were jobs women could do that would relieve men if not for the services, then for jobs requiring physical strength.

  But as well as being an untapped human resource, women were also providing society with a challenge it would rather not have faced – the lingering prudishness of the Victorians had yet to be eradicated – but now had to: ‘the large number of unmarried girls and women in this country who are expecting to become mothers’.58 The cabinet had discussed an aspect of this in January 1915. Randall Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had signified his disapproval of unmarried women who had lived with, and had children by, soldiers, being assisted at the same rate as married ones. ‘It appears that the Archbishop does not wish them or their children to starve,’ noted Frances Stevenson, who as Lloyd George’s mistress had an insight into such matters, ‘but he does not wish them to be openly treated as deserving of relief’.59 Lloyd George, who knew something about such relationships, argued for every woman living with a soldier as his wife to be treated equally, and won: which prompted Davidson to tell the government it had dealt ‘a death-blow to the marriage tie, and [was] encouraging immorality.’

  The Times was horrified by this social effect of the upheaval, fearing that ‘a great wave of emotional nonsense has been set in motion, and much that is being said is subversive both of the principles of morality and of the foundations of the State.’ The consequences of this wave of fornication could not, it seemed, be understated. The ‘nonsense’ was the idea that the expected children were fathered by ‘the men that fought at the Marne and Mons.’ This, the paper asserted, was true ‘only in a very few cases’ and people were ‘talking rubbish’ about ‘the children of our dead heroes.’ In the seclusion of his Essex parish the Revd Andrew Clark recorded that ‘very evil reports reach me of the immorality of young women in Chelmsford, Halstead and Terling, where soldiers have been quartered. The leading women at the Mothers’ Meeting this afternoon affirmed that the illegitimacy of this year in all these three places will be shocking beyond not only record, but belief.’60

  The Times continued: ‘In the excitement created at the outbreak of the war many young girls lost their balance. It required such an abnormal situation to disclose how far the weakening of parental control, the decline of faith, the lowering of ideals, and the partial failure of the churches have sapped restraints.’ The Establishment’s view was not indulgent. ‘These are cases for pity and help rather than condemnation, but we shall not solve the problem presented by foolishly excusing what has happened.’ It asserted that the fighting forces ‘responsible for the miserable position of these girls and women belong either to the Territorials or the new armies.’ The overcrowding of towns through billeting was blamed, for the way in which it provided opportunities for liaisons. A War Babies’ and Mothers’ League was founded, and announced that by April 1915 it had already dealt with over 4,000 cases, handing out grants for food. It made a national appeal for money. The Bishop of Carlisle preached on the subject, and blamed a lack of discipline in the home; the Archdeacon of Surrey announced he would ask the forthcoming Synod to call attention to the need for ‘well-managed maternity houses in which unmarried girls may be received for their confinements and may be taught the duty of self-control and purity of life’; better late than never.61

  The legalistically minded worried about whether such children could be legitimised: but that would have an impact on inheritance law, and depended on knowing who the father was. State assistance for the affected women and children was unpopular, it being assumed a girl’s parents would have thrown her out in such circumstances. ‘We have already gone a long way in the direction of undermining the special recognition of the marriage tie, on which the whole structure of the State largely and in reality depends,’ The Times continued. ‘If every girl who is with child by some unknown male whom she says is a soldier is to be provided with a State allowance, we shall see an almost unthinkable upheaval in our social conditions. We shall be saying, in effect, that every future war is to be the signal for an outburst of indiscriminate licence for which the State will pay the cost.’ It returned to the subject the next day, suggesting that if it could be proved a soldier had fathered a child out of wedlock, and he died, some allowance might be made for the child: but that while it might seem harsh that parents were under no obligation to support their adult daughters, and that employers had a perfect right to sack them, these harsh powers ‘cannot be swept away for the benefit of the incontinent.’62 Any legal changes, it argued, should be kept to a minimum.

  The subject came up in Parliament, where it was given short shrift on the grounds that those airing it in the press were clearly suffering from a sex obsession. James Hope, a Unionist MP, asked: ‘Is it not much more important, in order to deal properly with those writers on the subject in newspapers who are suffering from erotic hysteria to amend the law of lunacy?’63 It amused Bertrand Russell to receive a letter from his mentor George Santayana, who had read about ‘war babies’ in a Spanish newspaper, which had written: ‘Kitchener, in creating an army, has created love. This is a great change in a country where only marriage was known before.’64

  The influx of women into essential jobs was, however, insufficient to meet the Army’s requirements for men. Around 4,000 men a day were joining in early November, and the War Office dropped the regulation height to 5 foot 3 inches from 5 foot 6 to get more. Clothing and arms factories were working around the clock. But even 5 foot 3 was not short enough. Because of the chronic problem of undernourishment of the working classes it would be hard to find enough men without allowing even lower height and smaller chest measurements. The rules were relaxed, hence the formation of ‘bantam battalions’ whose soldiers were under 5 foot 3 and whose chest measurements were below 34 inches. Permission was initially given to four towns with large industrial populations to raise such battalions – Manchester, Leeds, Birkenhead and Bury. After protests, the scheme was extended to Glasgow and Edinburgh in February 1915. By late February some regiments were taking men as short as 5 foot 1.

  Another drag on recruiting was that many reluctant to join were those whose families could not afford to live on the separation allowances for wives and children; and although numerous employers promised to keep jobs open for men after the war, others did not. Churchill lobbied Lloyd George about this, calling it a ‘scandal’: ‘No soldier’s wife shd be dependent on charity.’65 Men feared either that they would return from the front and be unemployed, or be killed in action and leave their families destitute. The government also agreed to pay an allowance to unmarried men with a dependent relative, such as a mother or grandmother, to help them enlist. However, the trades unions
asserted that a more generous system of allowances would obviate the need for desperate appeals for men.

  Feelings ran high against ‘shirkers’: so much so that Derby suggested a badge be issued for men who had volunteered but been found unfit, as well as for those doing essential work or waiting to go into uniform. As the debate about compulsion grew, initiatives were used to persuade men to enlist: crowds (and teams) were still addressed at football matches; Harry Lauder – the King’s favourite music-hall turn – took a band of pipers around Scotland, with War Office approval, to drum up 1,000 recruits. As a further inducement to enlist, many job advertisements specified they wanted only men unfit or too old for the forces.

  IV

  With the training of volunteers taking up to eight months before they were ready for service overseas, the military situation continued to deteriorate. The First Battle of Ypres was indecisive and Neuve Chapelle an embarrassment, when early gains could not be exploited for want of ammunition. The cabinet – few of whom had any military expertise – regarded Kitchener with awe when he took up his post, but this soon wore off as the rapid success they had expected him to deliver failed to materialise. Politicians had not prepared for the new, industrialised weaponry and the carnage it could cause, nor for the attritional nature of static warfare. On 25 October Lloyd George told Riddell – who was more than his tame press proprietor, being also landlord of his grace-and-favour house at Walton Heath in Surrey, an arrangement that would not pass today – that ‘he [Kitchener] is a big man, but he does not understand English life; and whatever he may have done in the past, pays no attention to details and does not properly control his staff. He is just a big figurehead.’66