The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  For Lloyd George, the immediate effect of Asquith’s coalition government was that he was handed the hardest job of anyone then in politics: he was put in charge of munitions. It sounds almost humdrum. But during Britain’s first industrial war it meant revolutionary action throughout much of the realm of labour and capital. He would have to deal with the industrial disputes that were erupting across the country, as trade unionists fought the idea of bringing in less qualified or experienced workers to fill the gaps left by recruitment – ‘dilution’, as it was called. That would mean more training of new workers, new pay agreements and more labour-saving machines. He would have to speed up the particularly sensitive employment of women in factories. He would have to bring together the haphazard network of small industrial concerns into a single efficient production system for guns, shells, vehicles, aircraft, ships and engines. He would have to shake up the transport system. He would have to find ways to make munitions employees work harder and better. He would have to deal with their food and housing. And he would have to do all of this when things were at their bleakest, cheering, and inspiring, and leading in a way the nominal leader, Asquith, could not manage.

  None of this was easy, and it did not go smoothly. When Lloyd George went to the Clyde, where socialists, including some genuine revolutionaries, were influential among shipyard workers, and where rent strikes against greedy private landlords had inflamed feelings, he had a very rough time. He ended up arresting and imprisoning leaders of the Clyde Workers Committee. But he learned and, under the influence of Seebohm Rowntree once more, began to extend the welfare help for munitions workers and their families further and further, until his new department became a far more ambitious social-reform machine than anything dreamed of in pre-war politics. It built more than 11,500 houses and flats and provided double the number of hostel places. It set up 900 canteens for factories, in which a million people could eat. The government’s official history lists some of the things considered by his department’s welfare section. They include providing cows to produce milk for explosives workers, deciding ‘the relative merits of cocoa and milk as beverage for such workers; the energy value contained in suet puddings; the cost of hockey sticks and boxing gloves; the erection of swings; the purchase of flower seeds; the establishment of play centres for children . . . the requirements of a boys’ holiday camp . . . the area of washing trough required per worker . . . the overcrowding of tramcars and the supply of ferry boats; the equipment, down to the last saucepan and floormat, of hostels’ and much, much more. Lloyd George himself ruminated on the odd fact that the making of weapons of mass destruction had led to a humanizing of industry, and if one searches for the real origins of the modern welfare state they can be found most clearly in what he was up to in 1916.

  He was in the job for only a little more than a year. But by the time he left, the manufacture of heavy guns, for instance, was up by 1,200 per cent and deliveries of them to the army were at ninety-four times the previous rate.80 The number of medium shells which had taken a year to produce when he took charge was being turned out every eleven days by July 1916, and the rate for heavy shells was even faster. When told that Kitchener thought four machine guns for each British battalion would be enough, Lloyd George replied: ‘Take Kitchener’s maximum . . . square it, multiply the result by two; and when you are in sight of that double it again for good luck.’ That was an exaggeration of what was actually achieved, but the army got all the machine guns it needed. New ways were found of filling shells; new trench mortars, which had been rejected by the War Office, were ordered (and proved highly effective). Though strikes continued throughout the war, new deals were struck with union and labour leaders. By the end of the war the ministry had 3 million workers under its direct control. This was a kind of Liberal Stalinism, except that profits continued to be made and it was rather more effective than its successor. By no means all the credit was Lloyd George’s. He had hired and encouraged some excellent business people, and some of the improvement would have happened anyway. But this was Britain’s first experience of a war economy. It was the polar opposite of the laissez-faire economic thinking the Liberals had once championed. It showed what could be done by energetic leaders prepared to break the old rules. And it made Lloyd George the hero not of Welsh nonconformists, or of the left, but of the fire-eating war party he increasingly seemed to be leading.

  Asquith could have survived Lloyd George’s frantic energy had the war been going better, but these were among the worst months for Britain. The Czar’s armies were in terrible trouble. The Battle of Loos had been another scene of butchery for little gain, which led to Sir John French being replaced by Sir Douglas Haig in December 1915. Conscription finally arrived, though in a bungled form which led to much anger, since married men were called up before many single men. In February 1916 the German assault on the French fortress of Verdun began. It would continue for most of the year, a deliberate attempt to suck the French army into a battle which would ‘bleed them white’: it nearly succeeded. Carson resigned from the government in protest at its lackadaisical approach. Then came the Easter Rising in Dublin, an utter shock to London. The news continued to be terrible, not just from the Dardanelles but from the Balkans, where a British army landed at Salonika in Greece became trapped and useless because of the defeat of her allies Serbia and Romania. Then came the meat-grinder days of the Somme, a direct consequence of Verdun but very hard to sell as victory. As Asquith’s power dwindled – other ministers remarked on his shaking hands, pendulous cheeks, watery eyes and twitching face – Lloyd George’s stock was rising.

  Was he plotting? Of course he was plotting. He could no sooner stop than a hare can restrain itself from leaping. He had become something of a favourite of Harmsworth, which helped, but more generally the papers were boosting him – and in ways which got under Asquith’s apparently impermeable skin. In a letter to Venetia he wrote about a gloomy walk back to Downing Street: ‘I sometimes think that Northcliffe and his obscene crew may perhaps be right – that, whatever the rest of the world may say, I am, if not an imposter, at any rate a failure, & au fond a fool. What is the real test?’ Meanwhile Lloyd George was convinced things could not go on this way. He would need the full support of the opposition Unionists if a more efficient coalition regime was to take over, and he was forming a steadily stronger relationship – though they had been golf partners for some time – with Bonar Law. After Kitchener’s drowning, something Northcliffe described as the greatest luck the British Empire had had in its history, the Unionist leader and Lloyd George debated which of them should become War Minister. Bonar Law, characteristically, gave way, so when Asquith was confronted by their done deal he duly offered it to Lloyd George. He in turn had been on the edge of resigning but took the new promotion, though it gave him little real power.

  The final confrontation which finished off Asquith in the winter of 1916 was on the central issue of how modern politicians should fight a modern war. His War Council was too big and unwieldy. He himself persisted in his old ways: the long country-house weekends, the lengthy letters to women friends, the unabashed enjoyment of cards and gossip. He was still a formidably clever man and in many ways a far more attractive one than Lloyd George – certainly deeper and richer in his understanding of life. Yet he was out of time. Lloyd George wanted the whole conduct of the fighting put in the hands of a tiny team, to give the kind of focus and direction British politics had never before thrust at a war, or indeed anything else. Bonar Law agreed. Asquith did not. He was badly hit by the death of his eldest son Raymond in yet another murderous attack in September 1916. (It is sometimes suggested that those running the war were removed from the reality it brought to tens of thousands of homes by letter or telegram, but Asquith was ordinary in the loss of a son. Bonar Law lost both his eldest and second sons, Jim and Charlie. His friend Kipling famously lost his boy Jack. Lloyd George had been nervous about his children fighting but was so horrified by visiting the brain-damaged
son of a friend in France, shot through the head and dying in agony, that he came close to a nervous breakdown. The Northcliffe family lost several boys. Aristocrats, tycoons and politicians who tried to keep their sons out of the fighting were shunned.)

  It was the press baron who first plunged in the knife. He told his Daily Mail editor: ‘Get a smiling picture of Lloyd George and underneath it put the caption “Do it now” and get the worst possible picture of Asquith and label it “Wait and see”.’ He then ordered that from now on, the word government must only be used with inverted commas round it and penned an editorial chastising ‘government’ by ‘some 23 men who can never make up their minds’. To crown it all he wrote a headline, reading simply ‘Asquith – A Limpet’. Politicians today who complain about being roughed up by the press should try a little history. The Tory leader Bonar Law realized, after a rather obscure parliamentary revolt, that his own MPs were growing restive about his leadership, and would not put up with the Asquith style much longer. Bonar Law, with the future press baron Sir Max Aitken acting as go-between, was now ready to join hands with Lloyd George. It would be clear that not only a bruised and bitter Asquith, but also most of the old clique of Edwardian Liberals who had served with him, would have to go. In their place would come a government of a few Lloyd George-supporting Liberals, the odd Labour man and, in the majority, the Unionists and Tories who had been out of real power since 1906. With no election, this was a wartime parliamentary coup. Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary that Britain was getting ‘a brilliant improvisation – reactionary in composition and undemocratic in form’, the first dictatorship since Oliver Cromwell, created by ‘a powerful combination of newspaper proprietors’. Lloyd George himself seemed unbothered by the dictatorship assertion – which of course did not then have its darkest meaning – asking what a government was for, if not to dictate? From both radical right and radical Liberal, it was a coalition of the raw and edgy, all the impatient men together. Against them were the embittered Liberal majority and the Irish nationalists, plus a few pacifists. This was a national government, though nothing like as broad as Churchill’s would be in 1940.

  Speaking of whom – what had happened to Churchill, the one impatient man still outside in the cold? He had been to the front, serving briefly with the Foot Guards, during which time he escaped death only by chance, being called back to see a general at the very time his dugout was destroyed by a shell. He then commanded a battalion of the Royal Scots Fusiliers, serving in the trenches for only five weeks in early 1917 before returning to politicking in London when his battalion was amalgamated. During his time in France he became friendly with Max Aitken, Bonar Law’s friend, the Canadian tycoon and go-between. It would be a highly significant and lifelong relationship. Churchill did not take part in any battles and, of another man, one might wonder whether his return to the capital was cowardly. Churchill, however, was always physically brave. In this case he was bored and deeply frustrated. He was sure he should be helping command not some soldiers but the British Empire. By the time his friend Lloyd George was in the final stages of manoeuvring to replace Asquith, Churchill had good reason to hope that his time had come again. But it had not, not yet. Churchill heard the bad news after spending time steaming with his Tory friend F. E. Smith in the Turkish baths at the RAC Club in Pall Mall, during which he was invited to dinner with Smith, Aitken and Lloyd George. After Lloyd George had left, Aitken, who knew Churchill would not be asked back into the cabinet because of the hostility of the Tories, hinted as much, telling him: ‘The new Government will be very well disposed towards you. All your friends will be there.’ Churchill instantly realized what was happening and flew into a terrible temper. ‘Smith,’ he told his friend, ‘this man knows that I am not to be included in the new Government.’ Then he stormed out into the street carrying his hat and coat and shrugging off Smith’s attempts to calm him down.

  Lloyd George would have liked to include Churchill, and would bring him back later. But in early 1917, with Britain facing defeat in the war, the Germans still in the stronger position in France, Russia collapsing and the Balkan allies fallen, he had more important things on his mind. It has been plausibly argued that Britain was closer to national defeat when Lloyd George took over than she was in 1940. To cope, he resolved to radically reshape British government. His biographer John Grigg described his solution as being nearer to the Committee of Public Safety in the French Revolution than to a conventional British cabinet. In charge of the fighting would be a War Cabinet of just five men – Lloyd George, the Tory leader Bonar Law, the Labour leader Arthur Henderson, and two right-wing Tory imperialist peers: the grand Lord Curzon and South Africa’s former ruler, the part-German Lord Milner. Bonar Law would be leader of the Commons, but for the rest of the war Lloyd George did his best to ignore ordinary parliamentary business entirely. He made rousing speeches – before broadcasting, speeches which were then reported by newspapers were really the only way a war leader could reach the population. He occupied himself increasingly with high-level diplomacy, what a later age would call summits. Not all were happy or successful, as when he conspired to downgrade Haig, whom he distrusted, by making the unsuccessful Frenchman General Nivelle supreme commander. But the whirlwind which had been promised duly appeared.

  So we have had this new regime compared to Cromwell’s and to Robespierre. What was the truth? It was a wartime expedient, scooping up the most vigorous people, pushing Parliament mostly aside and using an improvised national leadership which brought in experts and military leaders when necessary. The War Cabinet was not only small and free to concentrate on what mattered, it was also hyperactive, meeting at least once a day. More mistakes would be made. Decisions would be made – about Palestine and Iraq as well as the shape of Europe – which would resound into the twenty-first century. And when the war was over, with the czarist regime toppled by revolution and the Kaiser in exile as Germany seethed, it would not seem such a wild innovation. In due course, in the conditions of peacetime, MPs would rouse themselves and shrug off both Lloyd George and his Whitehall revolution. But for now, at last, Britain had her first modern leadership for her first modern war. The Edwardian Age finally ended, not with the death of King Edward VII or even with the declaration of war in 1914, but with the formation of the Lloyd George dictatorship.

  The War at Sea: Titans and Logic

  The First World War at sea has made too small a splash. It is mostly reduced to a couple of items. After the great story of the Dreadnought race before the war comes the Battle of Jutland, described boringly as a draw, and then the final Wagnerian act by the Imperial German Navy, which scuttles itself at Scapa Flow. Our tales of great sea-fights between the Royal Navy and the Germans all come from the Second World War – the desperate struggle against the U-boats, the Arctic convoys and the chasing, then sinking of the Bismarck. Had it perhaps been pointless, that massive Edwardian effort to build ever greater oil-fuelled steel-plated armadas? The answer is no. Had the Royal Navy not bottled up the German fleet, or had it been defeated in a confrontation at sea, then Britain would not have been able to feed and fuel herself through the war, and would soon have been unable to sustain her armies in France. Lloyd George and Churchill had looked for swifter, less bloody ways of beating Germany by attacking from the Balkans or knocking over Turkey. Similarly, the German high command hoped that by seizing control of the seas they could starve Britain out very quickly. That was part of the point of the Kaiser’s pre-war naval expansion. It nearly worked. The greatest danger to Britain from U-boats came in 1917, not in the next war, while Jutland was a far greater, more tragic and important event than the pursuit of a single battleship, however glamorous.

  In the early stages of the war, the Royal Navy had not been the great success the average Briton had expected. Ships were lost in small engagements, German cruisers slipped through its fingers, and great British ships were lost to mines and torpedoes. Yet a British blockade of Germany became steadily more effective a
nd the German response, using U-boats to sink merchant shipping, was a big factor in bringing the United States into the war. The senior British admiral, John Jellicoe, was well described as being the only man who could lose the war in an afternoon. If the Germans lost their fleet, it would be a national disaster but they would be able to continue fighting on land almost as before. If Jellicoe lost his, Britain would have to sue for peace. Knowing this, he and his great ships spent much of the war at Scapa Flow, in the Orkney Islands, with other concentrations in the Firth of Forth and the Cromarty Firth, waiting. It was frustrating, despite the many opportunities for golf and fishing, particularly as the grim news from the trenches came in. The German admirals did little more, being in a weaker position, until the arrival in February 1916 of the brilliant, aggressive Admiral Scheer, a cool, cheerful and popular leader who was determined to draw the British into battle on his terms. That meant ruthless U-boat warfare and sending German ships on raiding missions designed to lure out the fleets of Jellicoe and his junior rival, Admiral David Beatty. At the end of May 1916, Scheer’s strategy finally worked.