Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  The urge for demobilisation had other propellants. In mid-January 5,000 soldiers had been held at Southampton pending demobilisation, or so they were told. They then heard that they were being sent back to France for the army of occupation, and mutinied. They took over part of the docks, making their headquarters in a large customs shed, and refused to obey orders. Robertson, as head of the Home Forces, asked Trenchard, who had witnessed mutinies among French troops, to put down the attempted revolt, the officer notionally in charge of the men having proved incapable. Trenchard tried reason, summoning the men and telling them their grievances would be heard, but only once they accepted military discipline; they heckled and jostled him to the point where he was almost knocked down.

  He retreated, and decided that only the threat of force would do. He asked for 250 soldiers and military policemen, which prompted the General Officer Commanding Southern Command to tell him he was not to shoot the mutineers. Trenchard replied that he was informing him of his intentions, not inviting his approval. The troops were issued with ammunition and surrounded the customs shed; Trenchard ordered them to load their weapons. He demanded that the mutineers surrender, prompting a sergeant to shout abuse at him; the military police arrested him and the other mutineers gave in. Some who would not surrender elsewhere in the docks did so after a dowsing with freezing water from a fire hose. Trenchard interviewed many men personally and gave a conditional discharge to any who expressed a willingness to return to France: but was horrified to learn that they had been lied to about the Army’s intentions, a further sign of the incompetence with which the process was being handled.

  Exercising his authority, Geddes started, with Milner’s support, to release men en bloc, and by 28 January the rate of men being discharged was 35,000 a day – so fast that the government began to worry it would have too few troops for the 1.15-million-strong army it estimated would be needed until peace was settled. Churchill was angry that the statistics Geddes had given to the War Office were largely wrong, and sometimes enormously so: having been told there were 558,000 officers on the payroll at the Armistice the figure turned out to be 170,000, and there were in fact 3,350,000 NCOs and other ranks, not the 5,350,000 Geddes’s office had claimed.69 When Churchill realised the true figures he sought drastically to slow down demobilisation, careless of the effect it would have on morale. Haig too was concerned that the Army was ‘disappearing’ and there would soon be insufficient men for a proper army of occupation – which might mean ‘the Germans would be in a position to negotiate another kind of peace’.70 However, the government’s election promise to end compulsory service meant men could not be pressed to join an army of occupation. Churchill’s scheme to release only ‘pivotal’ men was also causing controversy, being deemed by many long-serving, non-pivotal men to be unfair.

  Churchill and Wilson went to Paris and saw Lloyd George.71 They convinced him to swallow their plan more or less whole. When Law learned this, he wrote to Lloyd George expressing concern about the timing of an announcement that so many men would be kept in the Army, which would entail a new Act of Parliament. Law believed the numbers needed might be raised from volunteers: Churchill doubted this, and wanted the government to be frank with Parliament, and the public, from the outset. Haig assured Wilson that any discipline problems among those retained would be solved by an announcement of greatly increased pay. Churchill urged Lloyd George not to allow Law’s ‘vague fears’ to ‘paralyse necessary action’.72

  On 28 January Churchill, having at last received War Cabinet approval, and having carefully briefed Northcliffe – ‘I ask you to do the utmost to further the measures that are necessary’ – slowed down the rate of discharge, limiting it to men over thirty-seven and those in the rank of corporal or above; the rest were told they would be released as their skills were needed in industry.73 Geddes, around whom by now Churchill was running rings, surrendered his responsibilities to his brother Auckland, taking instead a new commission to overhaul Britain’s transport infrastructure, something to which he was by experience far more suited. Northcliffe instructed his editors to support Churchill’s proposals, and 200,000 copies of the Daily Mail in which the plans were praised were handed out to soldiers in France.74

  Those who had refused to become soldiers also impatiently awaited news of their fate. In late February 1919 there were still 1,500 conscientious objectors in prison, many serving consecutive sentences. The government had ignored a petition on 1 January by prominent public figures who had supported the war, arguing that the continued imprisonment of these men served no useful purpose. Among the signatories were three former Lord Chancellors – Loreburn, Haldane and Buckmaster – and other former ministers including Crewe, Morley and Bryce. Some MPs petitioned that those who had served their sentences be immediately discharged from any military obligation; but the government refused while men who had fought for King and country remained mobilised. Advocates for the imprisoned pacifists, such as Josiah Wedgwood, ridiculed this argument. ‘I venture to say,’ he told the Commons on 5 March, ‘that it will not find support from any of the rank and file of the Army. To continue the imprisonment of people who have been in prison for two and a half years is not the sort of thing which the British Tommy would ask the Government to do for him.’75 He said there could be no doubt of their sincerity as conscientious objectors, because they had been repeatedly sent to prison for refusing to fight, and many had been locked up for two and a half years. He was angry that some who had gone on hunger strike were being force-fed, and accused medical staff of being ‘callous’ and using ‘the maximum amount of force and violence’.76

  He claimed the new governor of Wandsworth prison had shouted out that ‘I will not have these stinking COs mixed up with respectable men.’77 A Quaker prisoner who had thanked the governor sarcastically had been clapped in irons; the governor had addressed others as ‘bloody swine’ and threatened them with a bread-and-water diet. Wedgwood claimed that ‘many of the conscientious objectors have died already, and many more have gone insane, and are we in England in the twentieth century to tolerate a Home Secretary and a governor who torture men in prison and drive them insane?’78 Sir Donald Maclean, the leader of the Asquithian Liberals, who blamed the government for not having arranged non-combatant National Service for such men – such as the spoilt types on Morrell’s farm at Garsington had supposedly done – supported him. Conscientious objectors with connections had sometimes managed a rather cushy war; a far cry from the fates of those, often infinitely more sincere in their determination not to take life and endowed with far more courage, who ended up being repeatedly sentenced to terms in prison each time they refused to fight.

  Shortt, the home secretary, said that if any man in jail would volunteer to do war work he could leave at once; but some had refused even to go to Belgium to help repair war damage. He said the behaviour of the governor of Wandsworth had been investigated, and he had denied everything; yet Shortt had to concede it had not been an independent inquiry, but one run by a Home Office official. He also denied that all the men concerned were religious, claiming that ‘I myself have letters from conscientious objectors, men of the highest possible character, who repudiate any connection whatever with men in the same prison because of their conduct and the kind of men they are.’79

  The Commons was against him, and Shortt was barracked: his defence that the men were subject to military discipline until demobilised, and could not be demobilised before those who had agreed to fight, did not impress. Lord Hugh Cecil demanded a change in the law so the men could be released, but Shortt refused to contemplate it; ‘the absolute surrender of the government’ was, he thought, all these men would accept. He claimed that even when conscientious objectors were released on health grounds – as some had been – it outraged men awaiting demobilisation, and their families. With the government seeking to avoid further provocation of a volatile citizenry, a policy of populism rather than common sense seemed likely. However, so embarrassed was the g
overnment that it announced an independent inquiry, under Sir Albion Richardson, a coalition Liberal MP and barrister who had chaired the conscientious objectors’ appeal tribunal for the County of London.

  On 3 April the Lords debated the subject. Whereas Liberal grandees had usually led demands for the release of pacifists, now Lansdowne added his voice. The government had run out of arguments, as the War Cabinet realised that morning when it discussed the matter: and so Viscount Peel, on its behalf, announced that ‘the Government have decided that these men, who are looked upon as soldiers and who are in prison, shall be now discharged from the Army, and further, that those who have served, whether conscientious objectors or others, for two years or more in the aggregate in prison, shall be released from prison.’80 Of the ‘absolutists’, seventy-one died in prison either from illness, the results of force-feeding or abusive treatment. When ‘absolutists’ were released, the War Cabinet agreed ‘it was undesirable that men so discharged should receive unemployment benefit.’81

  Soldiers, however, were not aggrieved only by sympathy for ‘conchies’. At the end of January, at the time of the disturbances in Glasgow, a mutiny occurred at Calais among men angry at the slowness of their demobilisation, and at conditions in the camp; the last straw was the arrest of a private soldier for making a speech deemed to be seditious; his comrades rose up and got him out of jail. On 4–5 March Canadian troops at the Kinmel Park dispersal camp in North Wales rioted because of delays in their repatriation, due to a shortage of shipping; having been told they would be there for days they had stayed for weeks. Matters were aggravated by the sending home of men who had seen no fighting, while those who had were told to wait. The riot began at 9.30 p.m. on the evening of the 4th with, it was reported, a cry of ‘Come on, Bolsheviks’ shortly before the officers’ quarters were looted in a search for drink.82 The stores were then ransacked for cigarettes and cigars.

  The men broke into quarters occupied by female canteen staff and stole their overalls, with the bizarre result that some rioters paraded around the camp next day dressed as women. They then looted a brewer’s dray carrying four dozen barrels of beer, after which shooting broke out. With the fear that around 600 men (the riotous portion of the 17,000 in the camp) might go into nearby Rhyl to wreck the town, troops were sent in to put the mutiny down. It ended with five dead and twenty-eight injured, and twenty-five were subsequently convicted of mutiny. This did not deter the Canadians from further riots at Epsom on 17 June, after two compatriots were arrested for being drunk and disorderly. An estimated 400 to 500 men from a nearby convalescent camp marched on the town’s police station, tore up iron railings outside, threw bricks through windows and smashed down doors. They released one prisoner and the police, fearing for their lives, released the other. Most policemen were injured and one, a sergeant named Green, died of his injuries. Having liberated their comrades, the soldiers returned to camp. The incident provoked outrage, and contrition from the Canadian high command: over 1,000 people attended Green’s funeral, and a fund, led by Lord Rosebery, was set up to provide for his wife and children.

  The government was not proving equal to its task of directing to useful work those men who had managed to get out of uniform. It claimed to be shocked in the winter of 1919 when it was reported that 57 per cent of the 3,887 men who had reported to the Holloway labour exchange a fortnight earlier had been ex-servicemen. Matters did not improve rapidly; in the last week of May a demonstration of between 10,000 and 15,000 discharged servicemen marched on Westminster to draw attention to the large numbers still unemployed, and especially to the numerous disabled ex-soldiers with no work. The government promised to set up factories where light manufacturing suitable for disabled men could be undertaken; but that, like promises to establish training schemes for soldiers, or to ensure that men who had been told their jobs would be kept open for them had the promise honoured, had yet to happen.

  IV

  The unrest among soldiers was mirrored in industry. With the war over and thus with accusations of lack of patriotism a thing of the past, trade after trade went on strike in the winter of 1919. George Lansbury, editor of the socialist Daily Herald and a future leader of the Labour Party, had used the Herald in 1917 to welcome the Russian revolution and would, in 1920, be an honoured guest of Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders in Russia. As the new government took office he wrote that:

  I see in every industrial centre of our country a growing mass of men and women becoming imbued with wrath and hatred, settling down to parasitical lives of indolence and ignorance, and I see the classes who wax richer and fatter each day by living on the labour of those workers who are permitted to toil. I see those rich and powerful ones engaged in the infamous business of driving those who work deeper and deeper into the bog of poverty – poverty that is of the mind as well as of body – and over it all is the spectre of another and early war which once again will call forth all the bitterness and hatred of which man is capable.83

  He did not speak just for himself.

  There was fear of a general strike, just as reconstruction became urgent, and calls to found a volunteer force to keep the country moving if it happened – as would occur in the General Strike of May 1926. The most disruptive dispute was of workers on the London Underground in early February, which paralysed the capital. But shipworkers on the Clyde, in London and in Belfast also came out, as did engineers and electricians, despite each trade’s having set up its own Whitley Council; most disputes were over a reduction in working hours to forty a week. The government started to prepare for food shortages, as if the U-boat war were still on; and coal, in the depths of winter, was scarce even before a threat of strikes by rail and dockyard workers in South Wales, with whom miners came out in sympathy. Scottish miners went on strike separately, demanding a thirty-hour week and wages of £5. Even hotel workers came out, demanding an eight-hour day, and there was a threat to shut down London’s power stations. That prompted the government to say it would be an offence under DORA, punishable by a £100 fine and six months in prison, for electricians to strike. Chamberlain, however, made the shrewd observation that ‘unfortunately in recent years there had been an increasing reliance placed on the Government as the ultimate arbiter in Labour disputes’. He said this caused both sides to hold out in the expectation of that intervention: but it also dragged the government into a potentially damaging area.

  By far the worst unrest was in Glasgow, caused by complaints over working hours – they too sought a forty-hour week – and also the level of rents. Behind this was an organisation of militant leftists deeply in sympathy with the Russian revolution, and seen by the Establishment as hell-bent on class war. Protests lasted several days, alerting the War Cabinet that firm action might be required. Churchill, usually belligerent, advised that ‘we should wait until some glaring excess had been committed’, but was ready to move in troops.84 The casus belli occurred the next day, with what became known as the Battle of George Square on 31 January. A mass meeting in front of the City Chambers in the square was told the government had no intention of acceding to the strike committee’s demands and intervening in the dispute between them and their employers. Strikers threw bottles at the police; the Sheriff Principal read the Riot Act, and was hit by flying glass as he did; the chief constable, standing next to him, was hit by a bottle; mounted police and constables on foot charged the mob.

  Two strike leaders were arrested for incitement to riot. One was Willie Gallacher, who had led the shop stewards’ movement on Clydeside during the war and served a jail sentence for violating DORA. Gallacher led the call for a forty-hour week, not least to help mitigate unemployment caused by men returning from the war; but he had wider and more strategic aims, as his membership of the Communist Party from 1921 showed. In the interests of restoring order he and his comrade David Kirkwood were allowed to address the crowd, and urged them to go to the city’s traditional meeting place, Glasgow Green; they did, but more rioting broke out and trams wer
e overturned, followed by police baton charges. Shops were smashed and looted, and gangs of youths roamed the streets as night fell. A third strikers’ leader, Emmanuel Shinwell – who would sit in the Attlee cabinet and become notorious for his manipulation of policy to spite what he considered the ruling class – was also arrested. He ended up in the House of Lords, as did Kirkwood.

  With Germany apparently on the verge of a Bolshevik takeover, the British authorities took nothing for granted. Thousands of soldiers in steel helmets filled Glasgow’s streets the next day. Rising to this challenge the strikers, while not encouraging more rioting, promised to spread their action throughout Scotland. The strike committee claimed 100,000 men were out on the Clyde, but such was the force of intimidation and saturation picketing that there were doubts about how many were willingly on strike. In the succeeding days, according to The Times’s report, ‘soldiers with fixed bayonets continue to guard the railway stations, the Post Office, the electric power station, and other vulnerable points, and platoons of kilted men, headed by pipers, who have paraded through the streets, serve to remind the malcontents that the authorities are prepared to deal with any attempts to provoke disturbances.’85 Such was the fear of riots that five tanks arrived in Glasgow on 3 February. Speaking of the strikers, The Times said ‘they did their best, but failed, to prevent us from winning the war. They are now scheming to prevent us from making a just and enduring peace.’86 Kirkwood was acquitted; but Gallacher and Shinwell went to prison for five months.