Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Lloyd George now took his campaign for compulsion directly to the trades unions. On 9 September, two days after the Trades Union Congress at Bristol heavily passed resolutions against compulsion, he went to the city and addressed the TUC, seeking to confront some of the pre-war prejudices that threatened the drive for victory.74 ‘The German advance in Russia is a victory of German trade unionism,’ he told them: now it was the turn of British trades unionists to rise to the challenge.75 The state had set up sixteen arsenals and was building eleven more, but needed 80,000 skilled men and 200,000 unskilled ones to meet production targets. In case the workers thought the munitions industry was indecently enriching the owners of capital, Lloyd George said that 715 factories had become controlled establishments, which meant 95 per cent of their operatives were effectively working for businesses with profits regulated by the state. Union leaders, with a unanimous hatred of Prussian militarism, were generally cooperative: but too many of their members saw the war as an opportunity to advance the class struggle. Their stubbornness rendered 15 per cent of weapons-making capacity idle at night. By day, shop stewards told workers in several centres – he named Enfield, Woolwich and Coventry – to restrict their output. Woolwich had banned women from working at lathes.

  He called for more skilled and unskilled workers of both sexes for munitions work, with trades unions abandoning remaining restrictive practices for the duration, a sacrifice comparable with their employers being heavily taxed on excess profits. He made a plea for skilled labour to help train unskilled. (However, away from the TUC – at the annual meeting of the British Association – it was reported there were many cases of fatigue caused by overwork in arms factories, leading either to accidents or low output.) Union leaders were delighted Lloyd George had exposed some of the practices of their members: he had sensibly stuck to the truth, and it would be easier for the leaders to bring the syndicalists into line. The munitions minister, posing as a man of working-class origins (which in truth he was not), also made a subtler point. ‘After the war there will be things you can do, if you win the heart of the country, which you could not achieve in generations. The country will want a re-settlement and a reconstruction. It feels in its conscience that things are wrong, and it will want to do right. Don’t put the country against organised labour.’76 Mrs Webb, who was present and who reflected to an extent the feelings of the rank and file of the labour movement, felt the speech ‘left a bad impression, it lacked sincerity: he told obvious little lies, and his tale of working-class slackness and drink was much resented … here and there men were boiling over with anger at his prevarications.’ She also felt Lloyd George ‘looked exactly like a conjuror’. When Ernest Bevin, attending his first TUC on behalf of the dockers, asked the minister ‘whether he did not think that the workmen in the skilled trades would alter their regulations with more confidence if they were given a share in management,’ he had an ‘evasive’ answer.77

  Even if Mrs Webb accurately reflected some suspicions about Lloyd George, other speeches at the TUC showed massive support for the war – a resolution justifying it was passed by 600 votes to 7. The Congress also unanimously passed a resolution proposed by the Federation of Women Workers to demand equal pay for equal work: it recognised at last that there could be such a thing as equal work. A week later, in a further attempt to command confidence among the labouring classes, Lloyd George told engineering workers the war would not be used as an excuse to wreck their power; and drafted in Henderson, who had arranged the meeting, as chairman of a Labour Supply Committee within the Ministry of Munitions to see both sides played by the agreed rules while drafting in semi-skilled and unskilled workers of both sexes to jobs hitherto done only by skilled men. This was known as ‘dilution’, and greatly assisted the supply of labour.

  The main pocket of resistance to dilution, and to the Munitions of War Act, was on ‘Red Clydeside’. The Left in Glasgow had launched a two-pronged attack on the authorities. First, the previous May the Glasgow Women’s Housing Association, led by Mary Barbour, Mary Laird and Helen Crawfurd, had started a rent strike over conditions and overcrowding in Govan. As well as refusing to pay rent increases the strikers led violent demonstrations against evictions. Rent strikes spread across the city into the slums and by October 15,000 tenants were refusing to pay rents (20,000 by November). Workers then took action in sympathy with them. Unions threatened factory strikes, and one broke out in September 1915 at the Fairfield Shipyards in protest over the Act. In October, when female ‘dilutees’ were sent, with the agreement of Henderson’s committee, into the highly skilled machine-tool workshops of John Lang at Johnstone, engineering unions threatened to strike. Resistance to dilution became a cornerstone of Red Clydeside, whose cadre of revolutionaries saw the policy as a superb opportunity to build support by engaging in militancy, whatever the cost to the country. The dispute continued until December, when Lloyd George realised he had no choice but personally to intervene.

  Just before Christmas Lloyd George went to Glasgow to meet workers’ leaders and to try to reduce the revolutionary temperature. It was regarded as the only place in Britain where those opposing the war could rely upon a sympathetic hearing. He had a flavour of the mood when he met David Kirkwood, a prominent local union leader, who told him the Munitions Act had ‘the taint of slavery about it’.78 On the morning of Christmas Day Lloyd George addressed 3,000 trades unionists at the St Andrew’s Hall. In a preposterous gaffe, he had not by then found the time to meet local union bosses – many of whom were moderates compared with their followers – and so they boycotted the meeting. As a result, it was filled with hard leftists and their followers. Girl munition workers in khaki adorned the platform, deemed a red rag to the anti-dilutionist bull. A band played ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’ when Lloyd George entered the stage, only to be drowned out by ‘The Red Flag’ from the audience. Matters descended into absurdity when, his luxuriant hair falling down over his forehead, the minister was heckled with yells of ‘get your hair cut’.79

  It was unquestionably brave of Lloyd George to confront these men, and it won him grudging respect in the union movement. But his speech ended with his being shouted down, despite attempts by Henderson, who was with him on the platform, to calm the meeting. The men were outraged that he had made no attempt to address their grievances, but had instead concentrated on what many appeared to consider the secondary matter of defeating Germany. On his return he told Miss Stevenson that the Clydesiders were ‘ripe for revolution’ and ‘completely out of hand’.80 He was hardly exaggerating: one of Red Clydeside’s main agitators, John MacLean, would be nominated by Lenin as the prospective head of a British Soviet government and, pending that, would be appointed Bolshevik consul in Glasgow: he was eventually imprisoned for sedition.

  Lloyd George’s rough ride was barely mentioned in the censored, official reports. However, a local workers’ paper, Forward, printed full details, including the heckles that mocked the minister – such as, when he claimed that the job of a minister in wartime was an unenviable one, a man shouting out ‘the money’s good!’81 Forward was immediately suppressed and its machinery confiscated, a move regretted by the government almost as it was made. William Anderson, the MP for Sheffield Attercliffe, asked a junior War Office minister once Parliament returned after the Christmas recess ‘whether it has become an offence and a crime in this country to give a truthful account of the reception accorded by organised labour in Glasgow to the Minister of Munitions’, and whether this was ‘the first fruits of conscription’.82 Lloyd George was warned that if such practices continued it would do nothing to stop labour unrest: angered, he told the Commons that ‘My hon Friends did not give me any notice of this question being raised. If they had I should have supplied myself with a copy of the paper, and could have shown the House that this paper has been deliberately inciting the workers there not to carry out an Act of Parliament which has been passed by this House in order to promote the output of munitions.’83
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br />   A new Clyde Workers’ Committee paper, The Worker, duplicated the suppressed report. It confirmed Lloyd George’s view that the Clydeside agitation had to be suppressed before it got out of hand. The CWC then played into the government’s hands, by printing an article in only its fourth edition entitled ‘Should the Workers Arm?’ Enough was enough. On 1 February 1916 the Worker’s editor, Tom Bell, and its printer, John MacLean, were arrested for sedition. Asquith had already announced that resistance to dilution was sabotaging the war effort, and would have to stop. Commissioners were sent in to enforce dilution. Arrests of strike leaders, including Willie Gallacher, president of the CWC, when industrial action began soon brought most of the workers into line. A separate commission, under Lynden Macassey, a barrister and King’s Counsel, examined the Clydeside problem factory by factory, and by the following August had successfully placed 14,000 women dilutees there. By then six more union leaders had been prosecuted and deported out of the Glasgow area; 1916 recorded the lowest number of disputes since 1907.

  Opposition to female workers went far beyond Clydeside. There were still reports of difficulties getting in the harvest because of farmers’ reluctance to have women working in the fields, as they did in France and Germany. Elsewhere, however, prejudices slowly began to disappear. In August Edith Smith of Grantham had become the first female police officer with full powers of arrest; and women who had been working in Glasgow as bus and tram conductors on a provisional basis since April had their positions formalised on 20 October. By the following May 1,200 female conductors in the city outnumbered 400 men.84 The Metropolitan Police lifted its objection to women working on London buses and trams. On 30 September – the day of the funeral of the arch-pacifist Keir Hardie, who died from pneumonia in a Glasgow nursing home – union leaders met ministers and agreed to support new measures of voluntary recruitment, to include a special Labour Recruiting Campaign. The government continued to press employers to allow men to enlist and hold their jobs open for them; and on 23 October it was announced that women in munitions factories doing the same work as men would receive the same pay.

  There was public sympathy for demands by railway workers for a substantial pay rise to compensate for the higher cost of living. (An increased war bonus was agreed, after weeks of negotiation, on 16 October, but once the railwaymen won it, the clerks threatened industrial action.) Being a railwayman was a reserved occupation, and it was hard for workers to volunteer so their families could benefit from separation allowances. An announcement that the ‘triple alliance’ between the miners, railwaymen and dockers had been renewed rattled the government. Leaders of the unions said no coordinated action was contemplated, but reserved the right to do so – which would, as in 1910–11, paralyse the country.

  For its part, the government sought to remove provocations to organised labour. On 17 November legal action against rent strikers in Glasgow was stopped. Thomas McKinnon Wood, the Scottish secretary, asked the cabinet to agree to legislation that would freeze all rents at pre-war levels. Just ten days later the Rents and Mortgage Interest Restriction Bill was brought in, seeking to remove one of the great grievances behind the unrest on Clydeside. Lloyd George asked Lord Balfour of Burleigh and Lynden Macassey to inquire into why Clydeside was so volatile; their report in December suggested that a failure to nip disputes in the bud before they got out of hand was the main problem, and that a full-time local arbitrator should be appointed.

  On 25 November Charles Stanton, a miner’s agent, won the Merthyr by-election, caused by Hardie’s death, as an Independent Labour candidate opposed to the party’s pacifist policies. This appeared to contradict assertions by some politicians that conscription, because it would mostly affect working men, would breed revolution and set class against class. It also temporarily silenced trades unionists and Labour MPs who had been advocating pacifism. Stanton’s resignation from his job to fight his seat had been spectacular: in his letter to the executive of the Aberdare district – his employers – he told them that ‘there is a pro-German section in your district that has made my life a hell for many months … I have always been loyal to my class without being a traitor to my country.’85 Such evidence badly undermined Labour’s denials that its movement harboured those seeking to exploit the war to overthrow the established order.

  Yet unease was spreading among all classes. The war’s stalemate, air raids, industrial unrest (although the mines were, with the exception of one rogue pit in the Rhondda, temporarily quiet, there was the threat of a widespread railway strike), the mounting cost of the war (on 15 September Asquith moved another vote of credit, this time for £250 million) and people realising food production was not being maximised, all contributed to falling morale. Shortages had caused rises in prices, hitting hard those on fixed incomes, and women on allowances. Asquith noted, though, that middle-class people whose businesses produced essential goods were doing increasingly well. A Food Production Committee was constituted under Milner, as it was realised the war could last beyond the 1916 harvest. Questions of manpower with which Milner had been concerned in his drive for conscription were highly relevant to questions of agricultural labour and food production.

  On 21 September McKenna introduced the third Budget of the war. He raised income tax at the top rate to 3s 6d (17.5 per cent), lowered thresholds, levied an excess-profit tax of 50 per cent on all profits above a £100 increase on the previous accounting year. Only a fifth of national expenditure was being met from taxation. McKenna said borrowing could rise provided taxation covered interest repayments, and the sinking fund on the national debt. This rose from £625 million in 1914 to £7,809 million by the Armistice; but too much money chasing too few goods meant sterling was one third its value in 1919 as in 1914.86 There were tariffs on luxury goods such as cars, many of which were imported, in the hope of freeing space on merchant ships for goods vital to the nation’s survival.

  These were not the only new privations. In late September Greater London was put under state controls for the sale and provision of alcohol. From 11 October it became illegal in the City, all of Middlesex, and parts of Essex, Hertfordshire, Kent and Surrey for someone to buy another an alcoholic drink, as it already was in many industrial centres around the country, except with a meal. The punishment was a £100 fine and six months’ hard labour. Inevitably, what constituted a ‘meal’ became a matter of philosophical debate; equally inevitably, drunkenness declined. The government also ordered a crackdown on night clubs, where anecdotal reports had it that many young officers were succumbing to drink and drugs: the Army wanted all those in central London closed down forthwith, but the phenomenon took root and would flourish between the wars. A correspondent to The Times protested that such establishments were for the benefit of ‘the prostitute, the harpy, the dissolute and the shirker.’87 The profits and dividends of these businesses were ‘based on corruption’ and they were spreading westwards along the Thames. The London Council for the Promotion of Public Morality weighed in, in the person of its president, the Bishop of London, who described night clubs as ‘the haunts and hunting grounds of sharks and loose women’.88 As a further obstacle to creatures of the night, London instituted a blackout from 1 October, to thwart Zeppelin raids. As a result, numerous stores announced a 5 p.m. closure, because of the difficulties in getting around London in the dark. Night-club patrons would have to take their chances.

  V

  Criticism of Asquith continued to grow, and throughout the autumn the Northcliffe press increased its attacks on him personally and his conduct of government, attacks about which Lloyd George showed no signs of protesting. Now that Asquith’s political opponents saw his working methods at close hand, they linked his apparent lack of dynamism to lack of progress in the war. Backbiting would grow into full-blown intrigue. Disillusion was fast overcoming Lloyd George. He dined with Churchill and Curzon on 14 September, the latter telling him the Tories planned to demand conscription: the Commons, back that day after the recess, had deb
ated the issue again. Asquith, who attended the brief debate and made it clear he deplored the fact that it had happened, said acidly that ‘this is a matter which has not escaped the attention of His Majesty’s Government. When the Government, without undue delay, with as much deliberation as the gravity of the subject demands, arrive at their conclusions, they will present them to the House, and they will become the subject of Parliamentary discussion.’89 On 18 September Asquith told Hankey he ‘has definitely made up his mind in favour of voluntary service and not compulsory service’.90 Lloyd George told Miss Stevenson that ‘he cannot possibly be a party any longer to the shameful mismanagement and slackness … things are simply being allowed to slide, and … it is time someone spoke out.’91 For the moment, that would not be Lloyd George. Conscription and Lloyd George’s unfulfilled threats to resign would be recurrent themes until late 1916.

  The Battle of Loos, the largest British attack of 1915, started on 25 September. After a debate about ‘frightfulness’ and sinking to the enemy’s level, Britain for the first time used poison gas. The outcome after a fortnight’s fighting was around 60,000 British Empire casualties – more fuel for the fire of the conscription debate – against 26,000 German. The failure of the attack to gain ground was the beginning of the end for Sir John French. Most ministers had opposed a new attack on the Western Front as they believed it could only fail; but it was demanded by Kitchener, at Joffre’s insistence, as a complement to an offensive by French troops. Lloyd George told Asquith that French’s policy of highly optimistic attacks on an entrenched army – Haig had opposed Loos saying the ground was unfavourable – could not continue, or he would have to leave office. Lloyd George’s friends – notably Churchill – were lobbying for him to replace Kitchener at the War Office, with Haig becoming military director (Kitchener was doing both jobs). The Ist Army commander was now much viewed as the coming man. Asquith bought time in the compulsion debate by setting up a committee under Lansdowne to consider how the new National Register might be used to find recruits.