by Andrew Marr
Churchill had not helped. Earlier in the crisis, he had insisted on trying to address pro-home rule Ulster Catholics in the same Belfast Hall where his father had promised to fight Gladstone on Ulster’s behalf. Despite Churchill’s increasingly pompous self-justification, it did seem a strange act of filial blasphemy. He was warned that Ulster workers were stockpiling bolts and rivets and taking revolvers out of pawn in preparation for his arrival and was eventually persuaded to speak instead in a tent at a football ground in a Catholic part of the city. Even so, he was jostled by furious crowds who managed to lift the back wheels of his car well off the ground before the police beat them away. Four battalions of infantry were needed to protect him and, after addressing a rather wet gathering, he had in effect to run away. Though Churchill was characteristically triumphalist about his adventure – ‘It was splendid, the wicked dug a pit and they tumbled into it themselves’ – he had in fact handed the Unionists a major propaganda victory. From then on he tended to use inflammatory language in public while in private looking for ways of excluding Ulster, at least for a while, from the Home Rule Bill.
That was a dangerous game. The Irish nationalists, not unnaturally, listened to Churchill’s speeches and were greatly heartened. They thought they were getting all Ireland. In Bradford Churchill had mocked the Tories for suggesting the Irish nationalist majority might be coerced to stay. ‘There you get a true insight into the Tory mind – coercion for four-fifths of Ireland is a healthful, exhilarating and salutary exercise – but lay a finger on the Tory one-fifth – sacrilege, tyranny, murder!’ Referring back to the Lords dispute, he said that ‘the veto of violence has replaced the veto of privilege’ with the Tories vying with ‘the wildest anarchists’ in their attack on the constitution. If it came to civil war, the government would not hold back. The Irish leader John Redmond expressed delight. Behind the scenes, however, Churchill was quietly talking with his old Tory friends about the exclusion of Ulster, and indeed the creation of a Belfast parliament. Churchill’s double game can be seen as wise statesmanship, yet it looks more obviously like an unhappy mix of public provocation and private pass-selling. From the Admiralty he was despatching ships to confront Carson’s preparations for a provisional government, while on various yachts and in private houses he was suggesting deal after deal.
The most significant acts of the Ulster drama happened not in the Admiralty, Downing Street or the streets of Belfast, where the columns of armed men were marching. They occurred in a cavalry barracks near Dublin, the Curragh, and then in the gloomy grandeur of the War Office in Whitehall. Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur Paget, the commander of British forces in Ireland, was not a splendid soldier. When the Liberal government decided to start putting pressure on the UVF, believing plans were afoot to seize and raid army depots, the army was told to be ready to move first, seizing strategic sites across Ulster. The suspicion grew that this was the start of a military strike against Carson’s provisional regime. Paget was summoned by the secretary of state for war, a bumptious former soldier called Sir John Seely, and warned that troops would need to be sent north. This was undoubtedly ticklish. The army included many Irish officers from Unionist families who would feel they were being sent to intimidate, and possibly kill, their own. When a British column was marching and came across UVF men by the side of the road, they saluted and turned ‘eyes right’ as they passed by.
In London, Seely told Paget and his colleagues that army officers whose families lived in Ulster could be excused – they could simply disappear while the operation was going on and return to their posts afterwards. But everyone else would be expected to carry out orders. Paget returned to Dublin. He summoned his seven most senior officers and told them not only their likely orders but about his own fears and doubts. He insisted that nobody would be asked to shoot unless they had been shot at first and sustained casualties and indeed, according to a later memorandum by Churchill, ‘that he intended himself to walk out in front and be shot down by Orangemen before any firing in reply would be ordered of the troops’. However attractive this prospect might have been, it had no effect on the senior officers around him. After a series of meetings, most officers, led by the commander of the 3rd Cavalry Brigade, General Hubert Gough, said that if the choice was to march on Ulster or resign – well then, they resigned. Paget telegraphed to the War Office. His first telegram read: ‘Officer commanding 5th Lancers states that all officers except two, and one doubtful, are resigning their commissions today. I very much fear the same conditions in the 16th Lancers. Fear men will refuse to move.’ No reply came. A second telegram went off: ‘Brigadier and 57 officers Third Cavalry Brigade prefer to accept dismissal if ordered north.’
A debate began then, and continues in the army today, about whether this was outright mutiny. The case against is that the hapless Paget had offered his officers a choice and they had merely made it. The case for is that the British government had told the army to take an action it regarded as politically essential and senior soldiers had refused. As one MP told the Commons shortly afterwards, the implication was that if ordinary soldiers did not want to fire against strikers during disturbances, they would be allowed not to. The second phase of the army revolt happened more quietly but was in some ways more telling. Summoned to London, the rebel officers were confronted by their commander-in-chief Sir John French, and then by War Secretary Seely, and faced them down. Gough insisted he wanted a signed guarantee that his men would not be asked to enforce home rule on Ulster – a wholly unconstitutional request for a serving officer. Seely began almost to beg, saying there had been a misunderstanding and the move north was only to safeguard supplies. French said that maybe having this in writing would help Gough with his officers and Seely pretended that this made the request acceptable. A note was written, agreed by the cabinet. But it did not go quite far enough, so Seely added more in his own handwriting, promising that the government had no intention of using the army ‘to crush political opposition to the policy or principles of the Home Rule Bill’. Gough looked it over. Still not good enough, he thought. He added his own sentence, asking ‘In the event of the present Home Rule Bill becoming law, can we be called upon to enforce it on Ulster under the expression of maintaining law and order?’ and told French that unless the answer was no, he and the colonels would leave the army. French picked up his pen and wrote, ‘That is how I read it, J.F.’ Gough then pocketed this documentary evidence of the government caving in to military blackmail, and returned to his post. This was more than the government had actually agreed to and in the ensuing storm both French and Seely had to resign. Even so, the government had been humiliated, the War Office had backed down and the army rebellion had achieved its aim. They were watching in Berlin.
The King was watching too. In the south of Ireland, the Irish National Volunteers had observed the increasing militancy of the UVF and begun gun-running and training on their own account. As events moved towards a climax, Churchill had ordered a battle fleet off the Ulster coast, loaded with field guns. He was accused of preparing a ‘pogrom’ for the Ulstermen. One Unionist leader, Lord Charles Beresford, called him an unbalanced egomaniac and Carson added that he would be remembered as ‘the Belfast butcher’. Meanwhile Churchill and his colleagues were deep in debate about possible border solutions, village by village, if Ulster was excluded. A wearisome conference was going on in Buckingham Palace to try to find a compromise, which nobody by then believed possible. The cabinet, wrote Churchill later, had been toiling round the muddy byways of Fermanagh and Tyrone when he heard the quiet voice of the foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey reading a document which had just arrived. It was the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia. Initially, Churchill struggled to disengage his mind from Ulster: ‘We were all very tired, but gradually as the phrases and sentences followed one another impressions of a very different kind began to form in my mind. This note was clearly an ultimatum . . . it seemed impossible that any state in the world could accept it . . . The parishes of Fe
rmanagh and Tyrone faded back into the mists and squalls of Ireland, and a strange light began immediately, but by perceptible gradations, to fall and grow upon the map of Europe.’
Ireland would be soaked in blood but the cause of Ulster triumphed. It did so for the most terrible of reasons. The slaughter of the UVF men, reorganized into the 36th (Ulster) Division at the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, was so overwhelming, heroic and mesmerizing that the idea of ‘betraying’ their memory and accepting a single united Ireland disappeared from the British mind. After the suicidal attacks on German positions at Thiepval, the 700 men of the West Belfast Battalion from Shankill had been reduced to just seventy survivors. The long days of drilling in quiet, dripping fields or village halls paid off in keeping the Ulstermen together as they walked slowly into the machine-gun bullets. The blood price was paid. A century after the events which began the Ulster revolt, Northern Ireland remains part of the UK and Carson stands on his plinth outside the Stormont parliament. Yet the ironies ripple out in all directions. The gun-running heroics of the UVF were soon copied by the Irish nationalists: they were landing rifles outside Dublin a few days after the assassination of the Archduke at Sarajevo. Carson had all the trappings of a provisional government and was preparing for a besieged Ulster state. The Kaiser had shown a close interest. In the event, it was to be the provisional government of Dublin’s Easter Rising, with minor German help, that followed. And it may be that the Ulster revolt helped convince Germany that, when war came, Britain would not fight, or not effectively. German generals expected civil war in Ireland and the headquarters staff of the Austrians also discussed this as one factor which probably gave them a free hand in dealing with the Serbs. Lloyd George, speaking at a dinner party, thought the Germans ‘have been stimulated by extravagant and erroneous reports regarding the state of affairs in Ireland’. Ulster’s voice had been heard. But in all the wrong places too.
The Coming of War
Churchill’s colleagues always suspected he wanted war. It was not that he was particularly bloodthirsty, though the Marlborough blood was red enough, but rather that, since becoming First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911, his creation of an ever stronger navy had led him to want to see it in a proper fight. Always fascinated by detail, he had become embroiled in airships and seaplanes, gunnery and boilers. Always long-winded, he was the despair of the cabinet as he harangued them on the need for more Dreadnoughts. Some sense of his argument has been given earlier. Yet he became, if not monomaniac (Churchill was never that), at least obsessed. His colleagues dreaded being caught by him in corridors. From being Lloyd George’s closest political ally he became his enemy, fighting the chancellor for the money he needed. This may have been Asquith’s ruse to ensure that the dangerous radical alliance in his cabinet was weakened; but it meant that in practice Churchill had to rely on only a couple of others to keep growing the navy in its race with Germany. One was Asquith himself. The other was Sir Edward Grey, the foreign secretary who had been working hard but fruitlessly to find diplomatic solutions to the Balkan and central European tinderbox. Despite the doubts of most of the cabinet, Churchill got his way through the key years of 1912–13. Over in Germany, great warships poured from the yards – eight battleships alone. But in Britain, in the same period, thirteen were launched. Germany hailed the König Albert, Grosser Kurfürst and Markgraf: Britain hit back with the King George V, Conqueror, Ajax and Iron Duke. And on it went.
Was this a gross waste and a provocation, run by an overgrown schoolboy too in love with his toys, as Lloyd George and others were inclined to think? As ever with Churchill, vision was adulterated by glee. He knew himself. A few days before the declaration of war he wrote to his wife: ‘My darling one & beautiful, Everything tends towards catastrophe and collapse. I am interested, geared up & happy. Is it not horrible to be built like that? The preparations have a hideous fascination for me. I pray to God to forgive me for such fearful moods of levity.’ His attitude to the new craze for flying showed this character he understood so well. Germany had a world lead in the great rigid Zeppelin airships, which would later bombard London. Churchill, meanwhile, was desperately building up a Royal Naval Air Service, designing uniforms, haranguing officials about the design of engine controls and learning to fly himself, to the utter despair of his political friends and his wife. By the time he stopped because of the large number of deaths from accidents, he had been up almost 140 times. The naval pilots treated the whole thing partly as a joke – the planes were used to pick up fresh oysters and, on one occasion, to shoot wild duck from the air for the First Lord’s supper. Churchill surprised them by telling them of the coming air war, which would eventually mean the arming of aircraft, something that had not then been considered. The notion that Churchill got to grips with rearmament and the importance of fighters only in the years before the Battle of Britain is wholly wrong. He was behaving in much the same way at the close of the Edwardian age. The naval build-up has been forgotten, by comparison with the heroics of the RAF in 1940. But Churchill was tactically right in 1911–14 too. Had the German Imperial Navy been strong enough to defeat Britain’s home fleet, as it very nearly was, then the Channel would have been closed and the war would have been over.
The bigger question is whether he was right about the need for war at all. On 1 August 1914, one of the darkest days in European history, Lloyd George and Churchill spent part of the cabinet meeting throwing hastily scribbled notes to and fro. Lloyd George tore most of them up but they were gathered up and saved by his mistress (and later wife) Frances Stevenson. They show Churchill exerting all his cajoling charm and eloquence on the older man, still unsure about war. If Lloyd George was for resigning rather than fighting, ‘All the rest of our lives we shall be opposed. I am deeply attached to you & have followed your instinct & guidance for nearly 10 years’ and ‘Please God – It is our whole future – comrades – or opponents. The march of events will be dominating.’ The replies from Lloyd George are fewer than the blizzard of Churchill notes, and almost coquettish in their brevity. But he was coming round. Less than a fortnight earlier, after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, he had been telling a City audience that, although ‘you never get a perfectly blue sky in foreign affairs’, and though there were clouds ‘even now’, things were better than in 1913. Lloyd George had never been a pacifist. He was strongly pro-French and felt that, in the end, Britain and France, the two democracies, had to stand together.
Because we know how the cabinet debates ended, and we have the images of cheering, bellicose crowds lining the London streets – as they were in Paris, Berlin, Vienna and Moscow too – it is easy to pass over the argument about whether or not Britain would fight. Yet Asquith himself thought three-quarters of his own party in the Commons were against intervention. Had it been a straight cabinet vote at the beginning of August, there was almost certainly a majority against declaring war, even if Germany violated Belgian neutrality. So the arguments of Churchill, Grey and Asquith were of great importance. Once Lloyd George had come over, that was effectively that: whatever the numbers game, if the prime minister, chancellor, foreign secretary and leading war minister had agreed, it was hard to see a cabinet cabal of lesser creatures overcoming them. Those who thought war was inevitable were, Churchill apart, deeply depressed. Grey is remembered today for what he apparently said while standing in his Commons office looking at the lamplighters at work in the streets below: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe and I doubt we shall see them lit again in our lifetime.’ More eloquent still were the thoughts he jotted down in July 1914 when he predicted that ‘a great European war under modern conditions would be a catastrophe for which previous wars afforded no precedent. In old days nations could collect only portions of their men and resources at a time and dribble them out by degrees. Under modern conditions whole nations could be mobilized at once and their whole life-blood and resources poured out in a torrent. Instead of a few hundreds of thousands of men meeting each other in
war, millions would now meet, and modern weapons would multiply manifold the power of destruction.’60
Right to the end Britain was making attempts at peace. At 1.30 on the morning of 1 August, three days before war was declared, Asquith had driven to Buckingham Palace, where ‘the poor King was hauled out of his bed’ to appeal to the Czar to stop Russian mobilization, and therefore perhaps halt the German plan too. The prime minister described King George ‘in a brown dressing gown over his nightshirt & with copious signs of having been aroused from his first “beauty sleep” – while I read the message’. After the King had topped and tailed the appeal with ‘My Dear Nicky’ and ‘Georgie’, the message was sent and the prime minister returned to Downing Street. Grey was doing his best with the German ambassador, who in turn was still trying to persuade the British government that Germany was the victim, terrified of being crushed between Russia and France. So why did the argument for war become so apparently irresistible? Grey’s explanation to the American ambassador on the day war was declared was as plain as any. If Germany won, he said, she would dominate France. The independence of Belgium, Holland, Denmark and perhaps Norway and Sweden would be ‘a mere shadow’. Their separate existence as nations would be a fiction, Germany would have their harbours and would dominate the whole of western Europe. ‘We could not exist as a first-class state under such circumstances.’ Lord Kitchener, the famously handlebar-moustached imperial soldier, appointed war minister by Asquith, and who had actually fought with the French in the last war against the Germans in 1871, said the Germans would ‘walk through the French army like partridges’ and if Britain failed to support France, she would never exercise real power in the world again.
