Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Carson and Derby also spoke in the Commons that day, arguing that if the latest appeal for volunteers failed the government should bring in compulsory service. Derby was at odds with the War Office over two matters: he told Kitchener on 2 July that ‘this new order which forces recruits for the Territorials to sign to say they are willing when enlisted to transfer to any other Regiment has simply murdered recruiting in this district.’44 Three days later Derby complained that the erratic payment of separation allowances meant ‘recruiting is dead as far as this part of the world is concerned.’45 That informed his remarks on 9 July: ‘They would come only when they are fetched,’ he had told the War Office.

  With opposition from a few Liberal and Labour MPs, the National Registration Bill went through the Commons, designed to compel all adult men and women between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five to declare themselves, their ages and occupations to the government, so the authorities could be aware of them for deployment on essential war work. Kitchener admitted that the register would be useful should such a measure be introduced. Mrs Pankhurst addressed a public meeting in London on 1 July about her visits to munitions factories in France, where women were heavily employed; she wanted the same in Britain. Again, registration would identify such women. She was supported by Clara Butt, the nation’s leading contralto, who opened the meeting with a rendition of ‘God Save the King’ and whose reputation came to rest on her charitable public performances during in the war, and her legendary and inimitable 1911 recording of Elgar’s ‘Land of Hope and Glory’.

  On 17 July Mrs Pankhurst led 30,000 women down Whitehall to the Ministry of Munitions, demanding the right to serve. Lloyd George received Mrs Pankhurst and a deputation, and she told him: ‘The women in this procession today have taken part in it because they wished to demonstrate their desire to serve in any and every capacity in which they may be of use.’46 She emphasised that where a woman was doing the same job as previously done by a man, she should be paid his rate; Lloyd George, delighted she should be singing his tune, assured her that women would not be exploited. He then went outside to Whitehall Gardens and addressed the rest of the demonstration, saying that while women could not expect equal pay while they were being trained and producing less than skilled workers, ‘there should be a fixed minimum, and we should not utilize the services of women to get cheaper labour.’

  These were impressive sentiments, but since the Munitions of War Act imposed the regulation of wages to prevent unions from strong-arming employers into paying them more, a whole new regulatory system would have to be devised, leading eventually to a new Act. He promised the unions that war work was for the duration, would end when the war ended, and no man need fear losing his job. The women seized the National Register, to be compiled four weeks later, as an opportunity to identify those who wished to serve. Inevitably, a woman heckled Lloyd George with ‘what about the vote?’ He replied: ‘We will get her into the shell factory first.’47 Lloyd George had no doubt about the importance of mobilising an army of women workers. In late June the War Office had asked for the arms to equip an army of seventy rather than fifty divisions; wishing to be ahead of demand, Lloyd George planned to increase output to a point where one hundred divisions could be armed. For once, his rhetoric lived up to reality. In the war’s first year around 400,000 women had transferred to industry; in the second a further 1.25 million were recruited.

  Soon 200,000 women were working in government departments, 500,000 took over clerical jobs, 250,000 were on the land and, most crucially, by the summer of 1916 there were 800,000 in engineering. Over 400,000 of them left domestic service.48 More were training as doctors, and appeals were made for others to join them. Women also worked as temporary labour to give overworked munitions workers (some of whom routinely put in seventy to a hundred hours a week) a break; and females of all classes volunteered wherever possible. The sudden ubiquity of women workers where they had previously been absent brought the occasional difficulty; when a shopkeeper took a fancy to a fourteen-year-old messenger girl who delivered a parcel to his shop and kissed her several times – he claimed ‘in a fatherly way’ – the Bow Street magistrate fined him £3 with 10s costs. ‘In these days, when girls were so much used in place of men, it was important that they should be protected against conduct of this sort,’ the magistrate said.49 On 16 June 1915 the Women’s Institute (which had originated in Canada in 1897) was founded in Britain, its first meeting being held in Charlton, West Sussex, on 9 November: its main aim was to galvanise the gentle sex in the war effort and especially in the production of food.

  Women seized opportunities to help the country: and not just working-class ones who saw the war effort as an escape from drudgery or domestic service. Among those enrolled at the Vickers factory in Erith in August 1915 were Lady Colebrooke and Lady Gertrude Crawford, who had both trained as master turners, and Lady Gatacre and Mrs England, Lord Loreburn’s sister. Miss Vickers, daughter of the proprietor, was enlisting in the next batch of trainees; and Lady Scott, widow of the hero of the Antarctic, was working in the electrical department, ‘where her deftness, acquired in her art as sculptor, allows her to do work requiring great delicacy of touch.’50 Cynicism about what women might do was, however, rife: the Revd Andrew Clark, the rector of Great Leighs, heard from someone familiar with Woolwich Arsenal that ‘they have never handled a tool and can do nothing’ and ‘they crack up within a week.’51 Even those gentlewomen working in canteens attracted criticism, as men ‘hate being served by young ladies, whom they are shy of’, and preferred ‘a motherly working woman.’

  As fears grew of a smaller harvest than in 1914, there was a ridiculous struggle to persuade farmers to use the army of female volunteers who had offered to do agricultural work. Rider Haggard, who advocated training colleges to school women in the ‘lighter branches’ of agricultural work, voiced the prevailing view: ‘I most earnestly trust that, save in very exceptional instances, no attempt will be made to use them for its heavier operations, with which Nature has not fitted them to cope. Even a Zulu woman could scarcely face a week’s ploughing with heavy horses on heavy land, and to impose such tasks on English girls who are not bred to it must, in my opinion, lead to failure and often to the wrecking of their health.’52

  Following the passage of the National Registration Act, compelling every adult to register on 15 August, 25 million forms were distributed. Each respondent had to cite his or her age, occupation, skills and marital status, to help the government deploy each worker to maximum effect. Some Liberal MPs felt it an unpalatable intrusion into the privacy of the public, and gave warning of the resistance that would be mobilised against conscription. A committee under Long deliberated on how to use this information. In October a Reserved Occupations Committee decided that 1.5 million of the 6 million men of military age were in jobs vital to the war effort.

  The cabinet was divided roughly between Unionists and Liberals on compulsion, and the nature of cabinet decision-making – or lack of it – was a matter of increasing concern. Leo Amery had ‘tea and a real heart to heart talk with Carson’ on 21 July. ‘He is very depressed about the hopelessness of the present system of governing by 22 gabblers round a table with an old procrastinator in the chair.’53 A week later one of Asquith’s own MPs and a former whip, Freddie Guest – Churchill’s cousin and ADC to French – came to the Commons on leave and initiated an adjournment debate on conscription. Guest, who would become the ringleader of pro-conscription MPs, claimed he did not seek to embarrass the government, but felt it was time to give the issue a proper parliamentary ‘ventilation’.54 He proceeded subtly, reassuring the government that many lifelong opponents of conscription had changed their minds, and there would be substantial support for the policy. The question was now one of ‘urgency’, given that the Allies needed ‘to win and to win quickly’.55 He said the failure of more men to do their ‘fair share’ was corrosive of the morale of volunteers.56 He also argued that skilled men had volunteered by clai
ming they were casual labourers, to the overall detriment of the war effort. He had numerous supporters in the House, such as Major Rowland Hunt, who said that his opponents’ ‘idea of individual liberty is liberty for a man to get somebody else to fight for him.’57 Others stuck to the view that conscription was profoundly un-British, and appallingly Prussian. Yet the unpleasant realities of war were growing: between 9 August and 13 September there were frequent Zeppelin raids on the east coast, mainly on Kent, Essex, and on London, but as far north as Yorkshire and as far south as East Sussex, most of them inflicting deaths and injuries. The public avoided panic, but there was growing irritation that the bombers kept getting through. To stop them, more effort and sacrifice would be required.

  Curzon, frustrated and under-employed since joining the cabinet in May, and an advocate of conscription since long before the war, wrote to Asquith in early August to warn him ‘that before very long I – if no other – must bring up the question of compulsory service and seek a decision from the Cabinet’.58 He added that his, and certain colleagues’, positions might become ‘intolerable’ otherwise. Lansdowne, independently, wrote a similar letter. Asquith set up a cabinet committee on the question, but his handling of it showed why his coalition was doomed. He did not even consult Law, let alone put him on the committee. Law was outraged and complained to Asquith, who made matters worse by saying he had put Law’s name on the list, but following a consultation with Curzon they had agreed to remove Law (and Simon) as they had heavy departmental responsibilities. Fed up with Asquith’s disregard of him, Law flatly refused an invitation to serve that was issued when he complained about his treatment. The cabinet finally had a proper discussion about compulsion on 11 August, only for Asquith to adjourn it in mid-stream as ‘it was already late for lunch.’59

  Then Lloyd George brought up the inevitability of conscription at a meeting of the War Policy Committee on 18 August, just as the Northcliffe press was opening a new front on compulsion: that morning The Times had run a leading article entitled ‘The Case for National Service’, in which it had argued that although Britain had industrial, commercial and financial obligations that drew on its manpower, ‘the principle of universal liability to military service is the only rational basis upon which we can organise and co-ordinate, without waste and dissipation, our whole effort both military and economic.’60 The King feared the issue might divide the country; he summoned Asquith, Balfour, Grey and Kitchener to Buckingham Palace to discuss it for two hours. Churchill wanted unlimited recruiting, which Grey called ‘madness’.61 The foreign secretary pointed out a striking paradox: ‘The Germans carefully exempt from military service the people necessary to carry on the life of the country: if they had not done so they would have had a break down by now. We on the other hand recruit without regard to the trades necessary to keep the country alive & even to supply military and naval needs.’ The Northcliffe papers returned to the subject almost daily, and took Asquith’s refusal to act on their advice as proof that ‘there has been the same lack of forethought and leadership in the new cabinet as in the old.’62 Northcliffe’s campaign ignored the fact that many of the fittest men of military age were engaged in work of national importance in mines, skilled engineering or munitions, and women could practically only replace them in the last of those. After a cabinet meeting in mid-August at which Curzon brought the matter up, Asquith, after listening to a debate on the question, observed that ‘I have listened to a lot of very unsound talk,’ which prompted Lloyd George to say, in sarcastic tones, ‘then I suppose there is nothing for us to do but apologise.’63

  The question was now driving a wedge between the two leading men in the government, and splitting the Liberal Party. Balfour took Asquith’s side, but whether he would defy Curzon and Smith, who had become Solicitor General in the coalition ministry, was doubtful. (For all Smith’s enthusiasm for conscription, he had not enjoyed his time in uniform, and had been delighted to extricate himself from it as soon as possible.)

  Asquith appeared increasingly isolated, and his wife realised the danger this put him in: or, rather, what she called ‘this panic-stricken agitation for Conscription’.64 There was an equally panic-stricken opposition to it: Derby, second only to Kitchener as a figurehead of the recruiting campaign and who from October would lend his name to the scheme to register men as willing to fight, believed that ‘a lot of Trades Union people are dead against it and it might, though I do not say it would, end in a big general strike.’65 However, despite such warnings, Lloyd George told Riddell that he needed 120,000 skilled munitions workers back from the Army, and conscription of other men to replace them was the only means to achieve this.66 Unfortunately for Asquith, the press and his colleagues were sympathetic to Lloyd George’s case, and moving in favour of compulsion. On 16 August the Daily Mail called for conscription, and printed a form demanding that its readers cut it out, fill it in and post it to the government. Writing after the war, Churchill observed that the credit Northcliffe received for bringing down the Liberal government went to his head. ‘Armed with the solemn prestige of The Times in one hand and the ubiquity of the Daily Mail in the other, he aspired to exercise a commanding influence upon events. The inherent instability … of the first Coalition Government offered favourable conditions for the advancement of these claims. The recurring crises on the subject of conscription presented numerous occasions for their assertion.’67

  In a private letter of 18 August about conscription, Gwynne, leading his own campaign in the Morning Post, told Asquith that ‘the vast majority in this country are in favour of compulsory service being enforced at once; and I go further, and say that 95% of your Cabinet are in favour of it and that 85% of the House of Commons wish to see it carried now.’68 By this time Gwynne was conspiring with Lloyd George and Sir Henry Wilson, seeking to bring Kitchener out against Asquith. On 24 August Kitchener, questioned by the War Policy Committee under Crewe, said he recognised that raising his seventy divisions would be impossible under voluntary means, and that he would ask for a Conscription Bill by the end of the year. Once Kitchener wanted conscription, its opponents were facing defeat. The prime minister was being cornered, and his concept of liberalism – attacked in the Northcliffe press as unserviceable in a national emergency – rendered obsolete.

  IV

  Although the German guns were devouring men, and those men had to be replaced, a balance needed to be struck in order to preserve those who had the skills essential to strategically vital industries. War production remained inadequate: Lloyd George told Scott on 3 September that Germany was producing 320,000 shells a week and Britain 30,000. He said 25,000 munitions workers had enlisted since May, further retarding output. Nonetheless, he told Scott that military compulsion was inevitable within three months, and he wanted it now: the only danger was introducing it too late, given the time it took to train men.69 Such compulsion would, however, raise the issue of compelling those ineligible for call-up to work in munitions. Asquith remained opposed to military compulsion, but would go wherever the cabinet went: the cabinet was still divided, with Simon, McKenna, Runciman and Henderson the most strongly opposed. Henderson, however, believed that if the cabinet unanimously supported military conscription, and Kitchener recommended it, British working men would accept it.

  Lloyd George said that, to keep organised labour happy, men would have to be recruited in drafts: ‘If it were a question of calling up two million men at one time there might be danger, but not if they were called up only 30,000 or so at a time,’ he told Scott. He suggested this might be done by ballot, but Scott advised him – and he agreed – that it would be better to call up unmarried men first, then men below a certain age. Local committees would have to ensure key industries were not being denuded of key workers, and no younger son from a family where his elder brothers had already enlisted should be forced to go.

  This new turn to the conscription debate soured relations between Asquith and Lloyd George. The first the prime minister ha
d heard of the munitions minister getting up a campaign for conscription was when Law told him about it. On the Unionist side Curzon – whom Simon described as ‘the brazen pot among the earthen vessels’ – remained the main agitator for conscription, not least as a means of presenting his credentials as the next leader of his party, who almost to a man echoed the public’s widespread belief in the ubiquity of ‘slackers’.70 On 5 September Lloyd George asked Scott to Sunday lunch with him at Walton Heath, and told him that if he were defeated on compulsion – which he saw as ‘practically our only chance of winning the war’ – he would ‘decline to be further responsible for the war’, even though that would probably precipitate the fall of the government and the fracture of the Liberal Party.71 Two days earlier Esher had written: ‘The Government lacks courage and unity. Lloyd George, who might render such great service, is unfortunately a Girondin [a faction in the French revolution that campaigned to end the monarchy, and were themselves mostly executed] by temperament – a rhetorician of the first quality, but lacking in courage. Robert Smillie [the president of the MFGB] and Ramsay MacDonald will one of these days have his head in a basket.’72

  Lloyd George’s tone allied him with the Unionists, who were becoming agitated by Asquith’s style. Carson felt the cabinet useless – too many men, no agenda, and no way of ensuring that decisions, once taken, were acted upon. He asked Churchill whether there was any way of raising the question of a smaller, more decisive cabinet without it reflecting badly on Asquith, whose design the existing wartime body was: he said the cabinet should be ‘vy small 5 or 6 sitting daily to consider the problems. Personally I look on all our Cabinet Meetings as useless & a waste of time & I earnestly wish I could humbly retire.’73 Churchill agreed with him about the inefficiency with which the government was run.