Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Lloyd George remained deeply concerned about the allocation of manpower and told Riddell on 11 February that he was about to have ‘a big fight’ with the Army over it. ‘I have today determined to be quite firm,’ he said. ‘I will not have any more men taken from the farms, the collieries, the shipbuilding yards or the railways.’143 The Army had demanded another 60,000 farm workers; Prothero said he could not release more than 30,000. That caused a row within the ministry, and on deeper enquiry he found he could only spare 6,000, even with the help of women volunteers. Lloyd George was by now no longer so blasé about conscripting the Irish, realising the anger it would provoke not just in Ireland – where men would, he feared, be had only ‘at the point of a bayonet’ – but in parts of the expatriate British Empire, and in America. In any case, most Irishmen of military age were working on the land and producing essential food. He recognised, therefore, that such extra numbers as were required would have to come from a population that had already been finely combed for recruits.

  Prisoners of war – some 30,000 in due course – were now taken to work on the land. But their contribution was dwarfed by that of women. The Women’s National Land Service Corps, begun as a voluntary society in February 1916 to channel women into agricultural work to release men for the front, had by the beginning of 1917 gathered 200,000 volunteers. Then in early 1917 the Board of Agriculture set up a women’s branch that ultimately brought in 260,000 volunteers for farm work, far surpassing Prothero’s target of 50,000 to 60,000 women (which he thought equivalent to 35,000 men).144 Meanwhile, Meriel Talbot, director of the women’s branch of the Board of Agriculture, set up a labour force of 12,000 mobile workers known as the Women’s Land Army. Unlike the bigger army of women volunteers who lived where they worked, the Land Army women went wherever in the country they were most needed. After four weeks’ training the women, many of them well-to-do and from urban areas, would be assigned to farm duties such as milking (for which they trained on dummy cows made of wood) and care of livestock, and paid 18s a week, rising to £1 after passing a proficiency test. This appeased women affronted that Chamberlain’s scheme for a system of volunteering seemed restricted to men only (he said this was a misunderstanding). By March there were more women volunteers than the state could deploy, whereas the Army received just 140,000 of the 350,000 men it had requested for the first quarter.145 Even though land girls had alleviated the demand for agricultural labour, releasing men for the services, the War Cabinet ordered the War Office to release 2,000 skilled ploughmen in October 1917 to ensure 1918’s crop could be sown. The wet weather prolonged the harvest and delayed sowing; but 388,000 extra acres had been cultivated in 1917 compared with the previous year.146

  Although the deployment of women in agriculture was a great success, other initiatives had mixed results. The manpower crisis worsened with every casualty list, and the measures the government discussed taking became more radical. Because of doubts about the practicalities, ministers had been dilatory in introducing the necessary legislation for Chamberlain’s planned scheme of National Service in industry, and so Parliament had to wait to discuss it: that did not happen until 20 February, over two months after Chamberlain’s appointment. The government had announced that, by enrolling in the scheme, every man from eighteen to sixty would place himself at the government’s disposal, ‘to go anywhere and do anything’.147 William Anderson, a highly regarded Labour MP who would lose Sheffield Attercliffe at the 1918 election over his opposition to the war, and then die within weeks in the flu epidemic, feared an avalanche of applications from workers too valuable to be spared from their existing duties, and bureaucratic chaos processing their applications: he had a point. Also, very few men above military age and in work would volunteer for a scheme without having the slightest idea of where or in what trade they might end up, and without knowing the effect on their families.

  There was public resistance to the notion that the government should direct the energies of working-class people in conscripting them for industry, yet not harness the skills and aptitudes of their social superiors. Anderson believed resources were being wasted because of the profligacy of the ruling class. ‘Everybody will agree that it is wrong that men should be employed on, and that money should be spent upon pearls, jewellery of various kinds, golf courses, and so on,’ he told the Commons on 15 February. ‘I saw an advertisement in a high-class journal the other day offering strings of pearls at from £4,000 to £10,000, and that after two-and-a-half years of war. I am quite sure that nobody would object to the very strongest possible steps being taken to deal with that particular matter.’148 Anderson wanted a scheme of redeployment from the least essential to the most essential work: but not compulsion. He feared the scheme was typical of Lloyd George having an apparently excellent idea, but no idea how to execute it: something even the pro-government press remarked upon.

  Auckland Geddes, in a speech later in the year when the manpower problem remained severe, took up Anderson’s theme. He emphasised that finding more men and women for ‘work of national importance’ meant some ‘luxury trades’ would effectively have to be closed down, with the Department of National Service reassigning those working for them.149 ‘At the very moment in a certain town, when we are looking for women to make aeroplanes, we have advertisements for girls to dress dolls and to fix wigs on dolls. Dolls versus aeroplanes, and the doll makers able to pay wages on the same scale as the aeroplane manufacturers. That is obvious misdirection of human effort.’

  Anderson told the Commons that in 1916 two million women had applied to labour exchanges for work and only 800,000 had been placed.150 Farmers remained reluctant to take them: and it was two and a half years before the Army realised it could use women as cooks, at home or behind the lines in France. Anderson voiced the widespread concern of further ‘dislocation of home life’ if more women were taken.151 When the directorate was put on a statutory basis it was confirmed that this was for the purposes of males only: women were resources ‘to whom a separate appeal and one of a different character will be made’.152 Several such appeals would occur, notably when on 1 August 1917 the Women’s Forestry Service was established, to help ensure felling of more trees for timber – needed for shoring up trenches in France – and their planting. Sourcing more timber at home liberated space on merchant ships for food. In February 1917 the commissioner of the Metropolitan Police agreed women could drive taxi-cabs: London’s taxi-drivers, however, took a different view, and threatened to withdraw their labour if women appeared behind the wheel.

  It was agreed that working-class men in the scheme would be compensated at the same rate as in their previous occupation; the government stressed that any professional man on a salary who volunteered would not be paid at his accustomed rate. As before, munitions workers, because of their special value and importance, would be treated differently. Farm workers could expect a minimum of 25s a week. The law constituting the directorate made it clear that no man would be taken out of his existing calling; but also that no volunteer would be allowed to work in a business not of national importance. The Army refused to cooperate with Chamberlain to get more skilled men back from the front to make munitions; and he felt deserted by Lloyd George, who made no effort to intervene to solve the problem. Northcliffe joined in and began to attack Chamberlain, who lacked the authority to resolve the matter. Northcliffe had a compulsion to search for weakness, and in Chamberlain he thought he had found it in the government whose creation he had done so much to effect.

  Neville Chamberlain was one of the few brought into Lloyd George’s orbit who would not accept the standard, obedient relationship the prime minister expected. His reputation now may be that of an appeaser and a weakling, or one who was unduly naive, but he was determined to show no such credentials to Lloyd George. They had had worsening relations from the moment of his appointment. Chamberlain had struggled to forge understandings with the other departments such as Labour, Munitions and the Board of Trade that were esse
ntial if he were to work effectively. He had failed properly to organise his department, and he and Lloyd George had had policy differences over exemptions. In late June the movement of a parliamentary secretary to another department without Chamberlain’s being consulted had so outraged him that he wrote to Lloyd George to say that it ‘seems to me an exhibition of discourtesy so extraordinary that I have difficulty in believing it to be unintentional.’153 The prime minister, apologising, claimed it had been a misunderstanding. In fact the new parliamentary secretary, Cecil Beck, a rare Lloyd George Liberal, was already conspiring with the prime minister against the director.

  Lloyd George encouraged Hodge, the minister of labour, who was hostile to Chamberlain and had stifled cooperation by labour exchanges with the national volunteer scheme, to present his views about how manpower policy should proceed. He asked Auckland Geddes, who had bolstered Chamberlain as director of recruiting, for a report too: Geddes recommended releasing men from exemptions by occupation rather than by age. This set him against Chamberlain, who reiterated his belief in cancelling all exemptions for younger men in his latest report to the War Cabinet on 13 July.154 He said that ‘unless the Government were prepared to reverse their present policy in regard to the younger classes of men, he did not see that there was much object in the continued existence of his Department.’ Geddes said there were around 500,000 men of military age in the coal mines, and he wished to take a quota by ballot.

  The War Cabinet decided in early August 1917 that a single director of National Service should control both military and industrial manpower, a job Chamberlain was deeply reluctant to take on. He had read briefings against his department in the press – which he now recognised as the traditional means of undermining someone – and prepared for his departure. With both Lloyd George and Northcliffe unimpressed by him his survival became improbable, and on Milner’s advice he resigned. Auckland Geddes, a trained doctor and former professor of medicine who had imagined he was about to be put in charge of the Army’s medical service, replaced him: Chamberlain felt Geddes had been set up to bounce him out of his job. The day before Chamberlain resigned Lloyd George sent Geddes to meet him for an interview. Chamberlain thought it was about Geddes occupying a subordinate position at National Service; but Geddes learned from the prime minister’s office that Lloyd George had told Chamberlain that morning that if he didn’t feel he could do the job, Geddes could. Chamberlain never forgave Lloyd George for this humiliation, and when the time came in 1922 it would play a considerable part in his downfall and that of his coalition. Meanwhile, like trades unions squabbling over demarcation lines, a formal agreement had to be drawn up between the Ministry of National Service and the Ministry of Labour about which part of the bureaucracy would do what. Bluntly, the latter would exist to help the former, and would be subservient to it.155

  At least Chamberlain was spared the struggles Geddes would have in the months ahead, as men were fed to the guns at Passchendaele, and others had to be found. The re-examination of the medically unfit increased during the summer and autumn of 1917, with a large number of fraudulent cases being discovered: men who, usually without (but sometimes with) the complicity of the doctor, had been thought epileptic or diabetic were the most frequent cases. It was believed 4,000 fit men were deliberately evading military service in the London borough of Stepney alone.156 Later in the autumn Geddes announced a reform of medical classification, assisting enlistment of those deemed unfit.

  By contrast with the manpower scheme the management of the nation’s coal supplies worked reasonably smoothly. It was just as well: industry, the trains and the electricity grid ran on it. In 1915 Asquith had appointed a committee to monitor the coal industry, and by spring 1917 it had reported three times, on each with a greater degree of concern. By 1 September 1916 around 165,000 miners, or 14.8 per cent of the workforce, had enlisted; output had fallen to 253 million tons in 1915, 12.5 million less than in 1914. A coal controller had been appointed; more than 15,000 men on home service had been recalled from the Army and output had increased by 4 million tons. In December 1916 the government had assumed overall control of the South Wales coalfield: in mid-March it became responsible for all mines in Great Britain, coordinating production and distribution. This was not nationalisation, but a temporary measure during whose operation the government came to a financial arrangement with the owners. Nonetheless, in unseasonably cold weather in April 1917 – the coldest April since 1839 – there were coal shortages in London, attributed to transport problems; the railways had had little investment during the war and were in appalling repair.157 The new, more efficient organisation would take a while to bed in, but the controller would regulate output, terms and conditions of employment, distribution, price, export and consumption of coal.158

  Production of munitions remained a crucial priority, but corners were too often cut in the attempt to raise output, sometimes catastrophically so. Munitions workers were routinely hauled before the courts and fined for falling asleep on duty, for ‘failing to take all precautions against the occurrence of fire or explosion … and endangering the lives of thousands of hands’, as a report in March 1917 recorded.159 This report came in the aftermath of one of the gravest accidents of the war years. Just before 7 p.m. on 19 January 50 tons of TNT exploded at the factory at Silvertown, in the Essex docklands east of London, after a fire broke out. The government had taken over the site to purify TNT – a process more dangerous than its actual production – in September 1915, despite warnings from its owners that such a process was highly dangerous, and the factory was in a built-up and highly populated area. The warning was, if anything, understated. The plant was devastated; 900 nearby properties were wrecked or made unsalvageable; around 70,000 sustained some damage, usually from hot rubble dropping on them and starting fires; a gasometer in nearby Greenwich was hit, creating a huge fire. Silvertown’s blaze could be seen 30 miles away, and straight after the explosion the whole London sky was illuminated ‘like many golden sunsets in one’. The explosion was heard all over London and the eastern counties, and up to 100 miles away.160 A seismologist found the earth had shaken in Radcliffe-on-Trent, 122 miles from the explosion.161

  Miraculously, there were just seventy-three dead and four hundred injured, because many workers had gone home and most in surrounding houses were downstairs, as it was the upper storey that absorbed the blast. At least £2 million worth of damage was caused; the next day the site of the blast was ‘a smouldering, steaming nothing’.162 Few details were glossed over in press reports: all London knew what had happened. Efforts began to rehouse thousands of homeless, and a relief fund was established to ensure that those whose workplaces no longer existed had enough to live on. A government report – not published until the 1950s – attacked the casual attitude to safety at the plant. Most of the TNT had been outside in a goods yard, awaiting shipment, and its containers were inadequate to protect it from a blast starting elsewhere.

  V

  Despite the enormous demands of dealing with the day-to-day fighting of the war, Lloyd George hoped to show that the government was also thinking of the future. Asquith had formed a small reconstruction committee and, on 17 February, Lloyd George expanded it and altered its terms of reference. Montagu was executive vice chairman (under Lloyd George) and Vaughan Nash, Asquith’s former private secretary, continued as secretary. Some MPs complemented a few of Lloyd George’s ‘Garden Suburb’ lieutenants, such as Philip Kerr, the future Marquess of Lothian, as well as some Tory and Labour luminaries: among the latter was Beatrice Webb, who came to regard Montagu as a ‘dead failure’.163 It was suggested that both Shaw and Wells be invited to join, but Lloyd George – wary no doubt of the reputations for bloody-mindedness that preceded each man – struck their names off the list. The committee lasted until 17 July, when replaced by the Ministry of Reconstruction.

  For purposes of morale it was vital to signal to the public that their rulers were giving consideration to how life after the wa
r was going to be better. In the late winter of 1916–17 Robertson had observed that ‘there are gradually accumulating in this country a great many wounded and crippled men who are not of a cheery disposition,’ though voluntary organisations were assiduously setting up training schools to teach skills to them, and charities were supplying networks of hostels for them to live in.164 The music hall and theatre played an important part in funding these hostels, through charity performances strongly supported by high society. Many factories were training the disabled for important work, making munitions and other goods vital to the war effort. However, the authorities remained slow in paying allowances to such men, leaving them and their families in serious hardship as a man’s service pay and his wife’s separation allowance were stopped on his discharge. With food being dear, this risked becoming a highly combustible problem. Moreover, the potentially sulphurous problem of these aggrieved ex-servicemen became worse still when mixed in with the agitations of pacifist leftists and trades unionists inspired by events in Russia.

  Distracting though such matters were, however, Lloyd George’s most fundamental responsibility remained the prosecution of the war: and from the moment he put his faith in Nivelle within weeks of moving into Downing Street, his judgement on how best to do that appeared highly questionable. In backing the Nivelle offensive, which had brought abject failure, Lloyd George had shown he was no better a judge of strategy than Asquith. Between 9 and 14 April 1917 the Battle of Arras caused 140,000 British casualties (including Edward Thomas, the poet, shot through the chest on the first day), against 85,000 German. Although the Canadians took Vimy Ridge, Haig and Robertson saw the failure of the offensive as proving Lloyd George’s stupidity in putting the BEF, even temporarily, under French command. The French were highly sceptical about whether the offensive would work; Lloyd George’s advocacy had been crucial; the political blame rested largely with him. It was a poor start to his stewardship of the British war effort. However, while the generals blamed him, he blamed them for supporting a Western Front offensive. The relationship would never detoxify.