Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Some MPs believed that even that was not enough, and wanted such sentences substituted for short prison sentences that youths would serve in adult jails. There was a shortage of probation officers because of men serving in the Army, though it was suggested as an ideal occupation for soldiers too badly wounded to return to the front. Yet for all the lack of discipline these youths had, they also possessed an unprecedented value. Boys aged between fourteen and eighteen – having left school but too young to join the Army – were snapped up by businesses and, given the shortage of male labour, could earn sums undreamt of before the war for lads their age. If they went wrong it was not because of economic deprivation. And the male of the species was not alone in offending: the number of girls sent to borstal in 1917 was one hundred and nine, compared with forty-nine in 1913.165 It was notable that in two English cities – Leicester and Bradford – where social work was actively used with young children, offences remained the same in the former and decreased in the latter. The use of youth clubs and other organisations from early 1917 coincided with a fall in the total number of offences, which suggested that punitive measures alone were not the answer.

  VIII

  By the end of 1917 the almost unrelieved gloom was pierced by small shafts of light, in the form of people thinking ahead for the challenges of peace that, however distant, it was still believed must surely come. The government had the previous summer set up a Commission on Industrial Unrest to investigate the causes of unhappiness among the working class in South Wales: in an enlightened approach it blamed ‘the monotonous housing, in valleys hemmed in by high mountains’, and the absence of ‘dignified municipal buildings … the scarcity of recreation grounds and of land suitable for gardens and allotments; and the general isolation of the coalfield from the large centres of population.’166 There was ‘an absence of social solidarity’ in the region that encouraged political activity and, with it, militancy and hatred of capitalism, and a suggestion that the government might start ‘combing out’ men from the pits to join the Army was potentially the last straw.167

  The commissioners urged radical measures after the war to prevent matters worsening: not just better housing and working conditions, but compulsory union membership, with one union per industry, better education, and job security based on no worker being dismissed without the agreement of his colleagues as well as of his employers. It envisaged tax reform to reduce duties on working-class entertainments, and the confiscation of ‘excess profits’. Lloyd George dealt with another recurring demand of the labour movement, for the universal application of the national health insurance that applied to around 12 million workers, when he met a deputation led by J. H. Thomas, general secretary of the NUR, on 11 October. Thomas asked Lloyd George to set up a Ministry of Health, mainly to safeguard the well-being of overworked women. Lloyd George countered that the existing insurance system was being exploited by some women and required better supervision: Thomas admitted there were ‘isolated cases of malingering’ but claimed most women pulled their weight.168 The prime minister said that until the war was won the money required for a health ministry and improved insurance coverage was devoted to the pursuit of victory. However, he promised a health ministry as a means of repairing ‘the ravages of war’ once the conflict ended; the War Cabinet had discussed this, and agreed on its necessity the previous spring, having endorsed a memorandum drawn up by Lord Rhondda that began with the statement: ‘Public opinion is now keenly aroused on the existing deficiency and inefficiency of our public medical services … there is a widespread insistent demand for improvement.’169

  With a view to calming industrial relations for the long term – and accepting that a large measure of state intervention in the private sector should continue after the war – the government established a committee under the chairmanship of J. H. Whitley, Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons, to design a new framework for the relationship between masters and men. He devised formal consultative bodies in which both sides would meet regularly to discuss grievances, and could seek arbitration if there was no agreement. The annual meeting of the TUC in September welcomed this, not least because of the input the bodies would give workers. Employers found them preferable to the variant of workers’ control in revolutionary Russia. When they began in 1919 they were known as Whitley Councils, and they still survive in the public sector.

  It was recognised, too, that Britain’s housing stock would require an overhaul after the war. The Garden City Societies, largely moribund since 1914, held conferences to discuss how they would expand such settlements once the building trade resumed normal service. The Ministry of Reconstruction began to draw up plans for the numbers of houses required – estimated at 300,000 by the end of 1918 – and to obtain the supplies necessary for such a huge construction programme, not just of the housing, but of the infrastructure to support it: and to control the prices of those materials, to make the programme feasible.

  Plans also began to be made to ensure the welfare of discharged and disabled soldiers. Lloyd George made George Barnes, the minister of pensions, responsible for the care of these men once they left military hospitals. Institutions were established for their rehabilitation, where psychological therapy as well as physiotherapy could be applied. The Red Cross and the Order of St John played a significant part in rehabilitative work, and Sir Arthur Pearson, founder of the Daily Express (who had begun to go blind a decade earlier), established a new charity – which became known as St Dunstan’s – to support blinded ex-servicemen. The government knew it would be judged by its treatment of those disabled in defence of their country. Pearson had a revolutionary aim for St Dunstan’s: that it would train blind men to work rather than simply offer them charitable support. Other charities would take the same approach to men with different disabilities.

  Arguably, however, it was the improvement in the status of women that suggested the most significant social change for the future. The role and importance of working-class women had been transformed because of the almost insatiable need for their service. There was a glimmer of light further up the professional ladder for women’s opportunities, too. The Bar Council, for example, debated a report to admit women to the Bar. The Times backed the idea, arguing there was no reason why if a woman could be a journalist or a doctor she could not be a barrister. However, it contended that ‘the bulk of womankind are less well-equipped by nature than a corresponding number of men with the logical qualities of mind and the great physical strength demanded by the highest work of the legal profession.’170 It was ironic that men of the highest intelligence should have been among the slowest to recognise the relentlessness of the momentum, and the unanswerable nature of the case, for the empowerment of women, though the first would not be called to the Bar until 1922.

  By 1917 only a fool or a bigot could fail to appreciate the reliance of the war effort on women, and the inevitability, therefore, of extending civil rights to them in the way some of them had demanded since the 1860s. In late March 1917 the Commons voted to prolong its life again, to 30 November 1917, almost seven years after it was first elected. Even if an election were held then, it would be on a register compiled according to qualifications for the suffrage in 1913, and with millions of men displaced because of military service or war work; but the general recognition that women had to have the vote before any election could be held rendered the register doubly useless. As Asquith, who supported the prolongation, argued, any election on such a register would be regarded as lacking ‘representative authority’.171 He had been instrumental, the previous October, in setting up a Speaker’s Conference to discuss franchise reforms; Lloyd George wanted the process to continue, and twenty-six meetings had been held. The conference proposed thirty-seven resolutions, with thirty-four passed unanimously. They included, effectively, universal manhood suffrage: anyone with a roof over his head (owned or rented) or with a business could vote. Those with a business address had a second vote, as did university graduates; but no man w
ould be allowed to cast more than two votes. To avoid corruption election expenses would be restricted, and a redistribution of seats would ensure each MP represented around 70,000 people.

  The most far-reaching proposal, though, was that women should have the vote. Asquith, having advertised his conversion to the cause of female suffrage the previous autumn, outlined how it might happen: they would not have the vote at twenty-one like men, but at thirty or thirty-five; and it would be confined to those who occupied a house, owned land with an annual value of £5 or who had a husband on the electoral register. Some women had felt the age barrier should be for older women rather than younger ones, as the younger had played the bigger part in the war and therefore deserved the vote more.

  Asquith explained the reasons for his conversion:

  My opposition to woman suffrage has always been based, and based solely, on considerations of public expediency. I think that some years ago I ventured to use the expression, ‘Let the women work out their own salvation.’ Well, Sir, they have worked it out during this War. How could we have carried on the War without them? Short of actually bearing arms in the field, there is hardly a service which has contributed, or is contributing, to the maintenance of our cause in which women have not been at least as active and as efficient as men, and wherever we turn we see them doing, with zeal and success, and without any detriment to the prerogatives of their sex, work which three years ago would have been regarded as falling exclusively within the province of men. This is not a merely sentimental argument, though it appeals to our feelings as well as our judgment.172

  He also foresaw a new post-war order, during the ‘reconstruction’ of the country; and in that new order it would be ‘impossible’ not to let women’s voices be ‘directly heard’.173 Another consideration made it possible to extend the franchise; the suspension by Mrs Pankhurst of the militant suffragette campaign in 1914 meant the decision to enfranchise women could not be seen as a response to violence. Because of the impracticability of drawing up a new register, the hope was that no election would take place until after the war. Lloyd George said there could not be an election on the old register ‘because by taking the old register you would be excluding the men that had made the new Britain possible.’174 An MP shouted out ‘and women!’ and the prime minister corrected himself: ‘men and women’.

  Lloyd George was alert to what the ‘new order’ would entail. ‘When we come to settle the conditions of labour with hundreds of thousands, running now into millions, of women in work in which they were never engaged before,’ he said, ‘when we come to recast the whole of our industrial system, are we going to fling them out without giving them a voice in determining the conditions? All I can say is it is an outrage, it is ungrateful, unjust, inequitable. I do not believe that the people of this country will do it.’175 The government had decided to leave to a free vote of the Commons whether women should be enfranchised, but he said he had no doubt what the outcome would be – and that the reforms could be settled ‘without the bitterness of political controversy.’176

  On 29 March he received a deputation of women suffragists at Downing Street, led by Mrs Fawcett, but including other titans of the pre-war movement such as Mrs Pankhurst and Mrs Despard.177 He stated that ‘from the moment the legislature started to interfere in the home, to interfere with the health of the people, with the education of their children and their upbringing … it was inconceivable that half the population, and especially that half of the population which was most concerned with the home and with the health and upbringing of children, should have absolutely no voice at all with what was to be done.’178 The war would ensure ‘that women must be admitted to a complete partnership in the government of the nation,’ and a Franchise Bill would be drafted at once. Nonetheless, there were still dissenters in the Commons, with one MP demanding a referendum.

  An attempt at proportional representation was defeated in the Lords, and the government had no appetite to force the issue. On the same day as the Commons debate, as if to reinforce the point, the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps was founded. There was still anger that Lloyd George attended the Commons so rarely, and the other members of his War Cabinet hardly more often. Swift MacNeill, an Irish MP, complained that ‘all these proceedings may tend to make a Colossus of the Prime Minister, but certainly they most surely tend to make pigmies of the House of Commons and of popular rights and liberties.’179 There was also a school of thought that, despite the difficulties of compiling a new register in wartime, the government was deliberately not doing so to prolong its life. However, the Franchise Bill had its third reading in the Commons on 18 April by 203 votes to 42; many of the opponents were Irish, and seeking to punish the government for failing to end rule from Dublin Castle.

  During June the Franchise Bill went into committee in the Commons. All men would have the vote at twenty-one; women would, supposedly on the advice of a Speaker’s Conference, need to wait until thirty. Some members of the conference, however, denied they had agreed such a limit. It was argued that women took longer to form a fixed view of politics and therefore needed more time to mature – a view with which by no means all MPs agreed, with some arguing about the obvious intellectual superiority of women graduates aged under thirty compared with men of the same age who lacked their educational advantages. As Lord Hugh Cecil, a strong supporter of an equal franchise, argued: ‘Can there be a more foolish, a more unsound, and a more unstable condition than the condition of age? It is not merely illogical; it has no rational bearing on the problem at all. You might as well give votes to women who have red hair and make hair-dyeing a corrupt practice. It is not commonsense.’180

  But another consideration was that Parliament was prepared to give women the vote; it was not prepared to give them the whip hand. On pre-war figures, it was estimated that if women received the vote on the same basis as men there would be 12 million of them compared with 10 million men in the electorate: the disparity was partly because of the birth rate, partly because of women’s greater longevity. The numbers of men killed in the war had made the imbalance even greater.181 However, to enfranchise the number of women some MPs would accept – 7 million – the age would have had to be forty.

  Once the Commons had agreed to the principle of women’s suffrage – which it did overwhelmingly, by a majority of 330 with just 55 MPs against – the most vocal advocates of an equal voting age were found among the opponents. They argued that it was neither rational nor logical to restrict the age, as their principal objection was one of gender: having lost that argument, they could see no point quibbling about an age barrier. They remained in a minority; on 6 February 1918 the Representation of the People Act finally enfranchised women over thirty, the restriction pertaining until 1928 when women were granted the vote at twenty-one. It removed the property qualifications for men over twenty-one and confined elections to one day. In 1914 only two-thirds of men had had the vote: now every man would have it, Parliament recognising how the working class, of both genders, had kept Britain afloat in the worst crisis since the Napoleonic Wars.

  IX

  If in 1917 two of the great difficulties that faced the Asquith administration immediately before the war had been brought to some kind of resolution – the incipient industrial unrest (thanks to a willingness to bribe workers with pay rises), and the call for women’s suffrage – the third and perhaps most destabilising, Ireland, remained an unwelcome distraction, diverting time, effort and resources from the fight against Germany. Henry Duke, the chief secretary for Ireland, attended the War Cabinet on 19 February 1917 and requested authority to deport from Ireland thirty-one men previously imprisoned after the Rising, because ‘a situation of some danger’ now prevailed there.182 It was granted, but Duke was told not to arrest Laurence Ginnell, a Nationalist MP, the newly elected Count George Plunkett or a priest, Father Michael O’Flanagan, accused of ‘promoting sedition’. On 7 March T. P. O’Connor, in the Commons since 1880, pleaded ‘for a united and genui
ne effort to settle the Irish question.’183 He was keen to avoid controversy because he realised, as most Irish did, the creeping annihilation of the Nationalist vote by Sinn Féin. The question was playing badly around the world, not just in America, but in Canada and Australia. But as the Unionists and Nationalists still could not settle a way forward – and Unionists continued to claim there were 200,000 fit men of military age in Ireland who had failed to volunteer, and that half the 100,000 who had joined were from Ulster – the government rejected immediate constitutional change.

  In the 7 March debate Lloyd George affirmed that the Irish question should be settled, ‘not merely for the sake of Ireland, but for the sake of the Empire.’184 All he lacked was the means. Britain had offered ‘centuries of ruthless and often brutal injustice’ and ‘of insolence and of insult [that] have driven hatred of British rule into the very marrow of the Irish race.’185 This had created ‘the greatest blot’ on Britain’s international reputation: although he described the land, educational and economic reforms in Ireland since the 1880s that had transformed it for the better. Yet ‘after all this great record of beneficent legislation, in spite of the fact that Ireland is more materially prosperous than she has ever been, there remains the one invincible fact to-day that she is no more reconciled to British rule than she was in the days of Cromwell. It proves that the grievance is not a material one. It is something which has to do with the pride and self-respect of the people.’186 At the same time he acknowledged that ‘the other fact is that in the north-eastern portion of Ireland you have a population as hostile to Irish rule as the rest of Ireland is to British rule, yea, and as ready to rebel against this as the rest of Ireland is against British rule.’