Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  The next day the Daily News blamed Northcliffe for the political crisis and stated that getting him under control was the main task facing the new government. However, Northcliffe was convinced he was right to expose the shell shortage and the failings of the military leadership. He believed he had acted patriotically, and was unconcerned by the effect on his business. ‘I did not care,’ he later claimed, ‘whether the circulation of The Times dropped to one copy and that of the Daily Mail to two. I consulted no-one about it except my mother, and she agreed with it. I felt that the war was becoming too big for Kitchener, and that public belief in him, which was indispensable at the outset, was becoming an obstacle to military progress. Therefore I did my best to shake things up.’302 For a time the Mail proclaimed itself as ‘THE PAPER THAT REVEALED THE SHELL TRAGEDY.’303 When, within weeks, it was apparent that Northcliffe had had a point, public enmity declined, circulations rose, and his influence increased.

  Northcliffe may have alienated some of his readers by his attack on Kitchener, but Kitchener was, nevertheless, losing allies. Neither Law nor Balfour trusted him. His colleagues persisted in the belief that he was secretive about his failures, and was loath to take them into his confidence on matters that should have been subject to discussion under collective responsibility. He once said about his relations with the cabinet that ‘it is repugnant to me to have to reveal military secrets to twenty-three gentlemen with whom I am barely acquainted.’304 Churchill found himself similarly assailed. Having failed to remove the war secretary, Northcliffe’s Times now reported that rank-and-file Liberals were ‘raging’ against Churchill, whose ‘adventures’ had brought the government down.305 The paper said his colleagues did not want him in the new cabinet; but they had been disappointed, as Churchill clung on. He himself was chastened and angry. He wrote to Hankey on 2 June to say, apparently without irony, that ‘the lost opportunities of this war from Antwerp to the Dardanelles are a tragic catalogue. Nowhere has there been design or decision.’306 He was unequivocal about his own indispensability: ‘Now it will be a hard and stern task to carry through the Dardanelles: and without decision and design very terrible catastrophe may ensue.’

  The one senior politician who seemed to have won the respect of the Northcliffe press was Lloyd George: and the effect Northcliffe’s confidence in and support for the munitions minister had in propelling Lloyd George from one crucial job to another during 1915–16 cannot be overestimated. He admired Lloyd George’s energy, and his already monstrous ego was fed by the minister of munitions’s egregious flattery of him. It fed Northcliffe’s sense of his own importance. In a talk with Riddell in May 1915 Northcliffe said he was a rich man and could, if he chose, spend all his time fishing, ‘but I feel my responsibility to the nation. I feel that I must remain to guide and criticise.’307 In A. J. P. Taylor’s words, Northcliffe ‘aspired to power instead of influence, and as a result forfeited both.’308 Too many of Lloyd George’s colleagues thought Northcliffe was simply doing his bidding, which was hugely damaging to a man who, with Asquith weakened, saw the ultimate prize moving into his grasp. He remained unhappy with Asquith’s general approach to the war, but realised he would isolate himself if he resigned on so general a matter without the support of the Conservative Party. His close association with Law – which became closer by the day – would help him to find common ground with the other party, and that common ground would be the need for conscription.

  Hankey, who was loyal to Asquith, saw how vulnerable he was, and urged him over lunch on 2 June ‘strongly to insist in future on having all naval and military operations telegrams and letters, as well as the Foreign Office ones sent to him, so that he … would at least know all there was to know about the war.’309 He saw how bad it was that no single person had a complete strategic overview of what was happening in the war, and knew the prime minister should be that man. Asquith agreed, and promised to appoint Hankey as liaison officer between himself, the Admiralty and the War Office. He also decided to issue a formal warning to the press ‘against speaking of munitions, or strengths, dispositions, and movements of our fleets and armies, even in leading articles, without censorship.’ Hankey noted that ‘drastic action’ would be taken against transgressors; and it was clear to him that Northcliffe’s attack on Kitchener had only reinforced Asquith’s determination to keep him.

  It took several days for the coalition negotiations to be completed, and it was not clear until 24 May – Whit Monday – what the composition of the new administration would be. That bank holiday most of Britain basked in unbroken sunshine, and Lord Derby addressed an estimated 100,000 people at a recruitment rally on the sands at Blackpool. Among men not in uniform there was a self-consciousness if they were seen enjoying themselves: a Times correspondent said that a young man seen to be off to play tennis would be regarded as ‘a double-dyed traitor’ for not being at the front, and not behaving with more tact. It surmised that most who saw him would think he ‘ought to be taken out and shot’.310 Two or three times a week newspapers published casualty lists, often of hundreds of officers and thousands of men, and feelings were running high. A further pall was cast over the bank holiday by news of the Quintinshill rail disaster in Dumfriesshire, which happened just before 7 a.m. on 22 May. The death toll was believed to be 226 (some bodies were never recovered). It remains the worst railway disaster in British history, and was caused by a signalling failure on the main line outside Gretna Green, involving five trains. Half the occupants of a troop train – soldiers of the 1/7th Leith Battalion of the Royal Scots off to the Dardanelles – were killed.

  The new cabinet first met on 27 May, in what Asquith told the King was an atmosphere of ‘harmony and good will’, but with elder statesmen already lining up to criticise it.311 The Unionist Party had gathered at the Carlton Club the previous evening to express its support for the coalition, but there remained dissidents. Milner had written to The Times that morning to say that although it was full of talent it lacked leadership, signalling the start of the paper’s eighteen-month campaign to remove Asquith. Milner’s evidence was that the state had been forced to ‘tout’ for men in this time of extreme emergency, a sign the leadership had no idea how to prosecute the war.312

  The cabinet’s first discussion was about the Dardanelles, where matters were going exceptionally badly. A cabinet committee, under Asquith and including the deposed Churchill and leading Unionists, was set up to monitor the situation, and Hankey became its secretary. The War Council had wound up; but Hankey steered the Dardanelles Committee towards becoming a successor body, by inviting service chiefs from time to time. This lasted through the summer of 1915, as ministers debated whether to send reinforcements to the failing campaign. The following November it was renamed ‘The War Committee’.313 Its main shortcomings were that the Unionists found it hard to stop finding fault with Liberal proposals; and its conclusions were not binding on the full cabinet, which slowed down the decision-making process. This was not the ideal mechanism for directing a great war.

  Francis Hirst, the editor of the Economist, wrote to his former colleague C. P. Scott to ask: ‘Will not this Coalition Government be weak and discredited from the start, without any common purpose or object? … Are not horror and disgust about the war prevailing everywhere? And is there not a reaction against the foul Northcliffe pogrom of people with German names … Why should all of us Britons be ruined because a little group of Liberal and Tory Imperialists has taken the idiotic resolution of destroying the German nation?’314 That was too much even for the Liberal Scott, who told him the ‘aggressive imperialism’ of Germany had to be resisted. Even people such as him were coming round to the view that Britain had to ‘remain armed and on something like the European scale. It is a dire and hateful necessity.’315 Any idea of a general election to ‘validate’ the coalition was ruled out: the following month a Bill was introduced to prolong the life of the 1910 Parliament by another year. This too would be renewed, and no election would be held un
til after the Armistice.

  On 15 June Asquith defended to the Commons his action in forming a coalition. ‘I have a deep, an abiding and an ineffaceable sense of gratitude to the colleagues who, under the stress of new and unforeseen responsibility, for the best part of ten months, sustained with undeviating loyalty, and, in my judgement, with unexampled efficiency, the heaviest load which has ever fallen upon the shoulders of British statesmen … there is not one of them to whom I, as the head of the Government, and, I think, the nation at large, does not stand under a permanent debt of obligation. To part with them, or with any of them, has been the severest and most painful experience of my public life.’316 He made clear his distaste for coalitions, citing that of Fox and North: and said the policy remained unchanged, ‘to pursue this War at any cost to a victorious issue.’317 He argued it was as well to show the parties were united in their determination to beat Germany, formalising the truce that had existed since August.

  It was an anodyne version of the truth, but for all the subsequent criticism of him as lethargic, bloodless or – as his dismissive colleagues would often call him, ‘judicial’ in his approach to political questions – his peroration to this important speech was, to use an anachronism, Churchillian, and reveals a conviction not always matched by action. ‘We have for the moment one plain and paramount duty to perform: to bring to the service of the State the willing and organised help of every class in the community. There is a fit place, there is fit work for every man and every woman in the land, and, be it sooner or later—it will certainly come—when our cause has been vindicated, and when there is once more peace on earth, may it be recorded as the proudest page in the annals of this Nation that there is not a home nor a workshop over this United Kingdom that did not take its part in the common struggle, and earn its share in the common triumph.’318

  His speech was emotionally draining, and when his wife visited him in his bedroom that evening he cried in her arms. ‘I realised,’ she wrote in her diary, ‘how frightfully he is taken out of when he has to confess himself.’319 She knew that was not the only reason: he was feeling battered by Liberal opposition to the coalition and ‘is low about Venetia’s marriage.’320 Mrs Asquith was also more convinced than ever about Lloyd George’s conspiring against her husband. Reading confided in her that he had warned the munitions minister to stop letting Northcliffe and his newspapers ‘run’ him. Mrs Asquith was convinced he was planning to break with the Liberals, ‘not consciously to smash H, but he sees that after the war things will completely change, and the man who will be adored in England is the man who helps our poor devils in the trenches.’ She detected a movement in the press to ‘crush’ Asquith and Kitchener, and was worried by Lloyd George’s friendship with Riddell. Others warned the Asquiths that Lloyd George was ‘a traitor and a cad’: but it was up to the prime minister himself to take firm action to prevent his colleague from supplanting him.

  He, meanwhile, had become obsessively devoted to Sylvia Henley. He told her that in a period of ‘the chaos of munitions, and Dardanelles … and unfortunate gossip as to Lloyd George, fate of the coalition, leadership of party and government, the campaign in France … the future attitude of the United States, and about 199 other things – what (I say) emerges as to me the salient and dominant factor of the week? Can you guess? I know you don’t need to guess. Of course, it is You.’321 She did, however, give him one important piece of counsel on a point that had been noticed by, and brought him the disapproval of, colleagues: ‘You gave me a great deal of good advice today, and I shall never write to you again from a Cabinet or War Council.’322 He quickly pushed his luck too far, writing to her on 20 June about a ‘cri de Coeur’ she had made when she thought he was making an advance, causing Asquith to claim it had caused him ‘a twinge of pain that you could ever have suspected that I shd be tempted to convert our wonderful relation of love and confidence into – what shall I call it? – an erotic adventure?’323 She seemed embarrassed by his remarks, prompting him to promise never to mention the ‘incident’ again and telling her to ‘burn the offending letter’.324 The letters to ‘my dearest and best’ from ‘your ever loving and entirely devoted’ continued, but he was never as open with her as he had been with her sister. He also attempted in 1916 to forge an intimate friendship with Emily Strutt, daughter of Lord Rayleigh, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, whom he had first met at her father’s Essex house a decade earlier.325 His intense loneliness had plagued him in the time of peace: in war it threatened to become unbearable.

  X

  On 31 May London suffered its first Zeppelin raid. Eight people were killed in Whitechapel and ten injured. The inquest into two of the deaths was told how the bodies of a married couple, killed in the blast, were found kneeling by their bed, as if in prayer. It was an ideal symbol of the victims of what the public now routinely termed the barbarism of the Germans. It took nearly three weeks for the government to issue standard advice on what to do in an air raid: which was not to go out in the street, and to keep supplies of sand and water upstairs to put out any fires, since the attacks were expected to happen at night. Downstairs, doors and windows were to be kept closed to prevent the intrusion of ‘noxious gases’.326

  Parliament, which had gone into recess early for Whitsun at the time of reconstruction of the government, did not sit again until 3 June. It passed the necessary legislation for setting up the Ministry of Munitions, stimulating opposition from a small number of pacifist MPs. Lloyd George was not present: he was in Manchester launching a new productivity drive, and Asquith had gone to France to see the commander-in-chief of the BEF, French. In Manchester Lloyd George made a speech that showed how the wind had changed, at least for him. The key passage was that ‘when the house is on fire, questions of procedure, of precedence, of etiquette, of time, and division of labour, disappear. You cannot say that you are not liable to service at three o’clock in the morning if the fire is proceeding. You don’t choose the hour; you cannot argue as to whose duty it is to carry the water bucket and whose duty it is to tip it into the crackling furnace. You must put the fire out.’327 He reminded trades unionists who were blocking reform of working practices or use of female labour that men in the trenches could not stand down after working a prescribed number of hours, nor refuse to fight in a specified part of the line. But Lloyd George’s other interesting observation, given what would happen over the ensuing eighteen months, was that ‘party politics are gradually vanishing’. His remarks annoyed the Labour Party; but also many Liberals, as they smelt some sort of compulsion being introduced to industrial practices. But Lloyd George was right. As munitions minister he would inaugurate a programme of 218 national factories, financed by taxpayers’ money, making all sorts of weapons and components essential to the war effort, as well as establishing control of the labour force and output of much of industry.328

  He went on to Liverpool, to appeal again to unions to lift restrictive practices for the duration. He spoke, as in Manchester, of a situation of unprecedented gravity. The Germans had subjugated themselves entirely to winning the war. Now Britain had to do the same. This meant the unions making it easier to train unskilled men, and to have women in the workplace, as in France. But all had to work harder: ‘There is no room for slackers,’ he said to cheers. ‘I don’t want to get rid of the slackness. I only want to get rid of their slackness.’329 More controversially, he made a further nod towards compulsion, civil and military. ‘It ought to be established as a duty, as one of the essential duties of citizenship, that every man should put his whole strength into helping the country through, and I don’t believe any section of the community would object to it if it were made into a legal right and duty expected of everyone.’

  With the exodus of women into higher-paid jobs in industry causing a shortage of kitchen and parlour maids, and provoking more articles on the servant problem, some might have disagreed, unpatriotic though it would be to do so. Others in work of national importance refused to see the p
atriotic point; in early June the South Wales coalfields threatened to strike; colliery engine winders and stokers in the Black Country rejected a 10 per cent bonus as inadequate, even though their wages had doubled in two years; and 20,000 cotton workers in Rochdale were threatened with a lockout after their employers refused to pay a 10 per cent bonus for war contracts: all this on the same day, 9 June, when a further 50 officers and 2,100 men appeared on the casualty list from France. More than 50,000 men had died since August, and 53,000 were missing.330

  On 10 June Lloyd George met seventy-five representatives from twenty-two unions in London and held private talks with them. That same day the first public meeting of the National Union of Women Workers was held in the capital, at which it was said that ‘as a whole, the women have behaved well, but there were a number of young, giddy girls excited by the presence of so many men in khaki.’331 The National Union wanted funds to set up clubs where girls could meet soldiers under supervision, and at which they could be taught ‘greater self-control and greater modesty’, and the men ‘respect for women.’ Of all the bursts of idealism since the outbreak of war, that was one of the more remarkable.

  Lloyd George went to Bristol on 12 June to visit munitions factories, and to continue to plead for cooperation from the unions. He announced that Kitchener had been asked to return all skilled engineers to factories to make munitions. ‘Britain means to make up for lost time,’ he said.332 At the moment of victory, ‘the engineers will know with a thrill that the workshops of Britain have won a lasting triumph for the righteousness that exalteth a nation.’ But he told the unions: ‘There is only one way in which you can increase the labour supply, and that is by the suspension, during the war, of the regulation with regard to girls and unskilled labour helping the skilled.’ The French had abandoned this luxury for the duration: he wanted Britain to do the same.