A Brief History of Britain 1851-2010

by Jeremy Black

  Germany’s plan to deliver a knock-out blow against France in 1914 failed, but left the Germans in control of much of Belgium and part of France. This put Britain and France under the necessity to mount offensives in order to prevent a peace settlement that left Germany with gains. Another impetus to attack was provided by the wish to reduce German pressure on their ally Russia and to prevent it from being knocked out of the war. Furthermore, there was a conviction that only through mounting an offensive would it be possible for the Allies to gain the initiative and, conversely, deny it to the Germans, and that both these were prerequisites for victory. Attacking to restart a war of manoeuvre was the goal, and it was not generally appreciated that stalemate and trench warfare reflected the nature of the war once both sides had committed large numbers and lacked the ability to accomplish a break-through.

  The First World War is generally remembered in terms of the trench warfare of the Western Front in France and Belgium, where very large numbers fought and many died in battles such as Loos (1915), the Somme (1916) and Passchendaele (1917). The concentration of large forces in a relatively small area, and the defensive strength of trench positions, especially thanks to machine guns, with their range and rapidity of fire, and to quick-firing artillery, but also helped by barbed wire and concrete fortifications, ensured that, until the collapse of the German position in the last weeks of the war, the situation on the Western Front was essentially deadlocked. Yet both sides believed that attritional conflict could be successful if they could take the initiative, and thus choose both the terrain and a battlefield where they had amassed artillery. In the event, the appalling British casualties owed much to the tactical, operational and strategic difficulties of overcoming the defence, and to Germany’s military and economic resources. British battlefield deaths amounted to 58 per cent from artillery and mortar shells, and just below 39 per cent from machine gun and rifle bullets.

  In attacking German positions, it proved very difficult to translate local superiority in numbers into decisive success. It was possible, albeit at heavy cost, to break through trench lines, but hard to exploit such successes. Motor vehicles and aircraft were not effectively harnessed to help the offensive until 1918. Furthermore, once troops had advanced, it was difficult to recognize, reinforce and exploit success; until radio communications improved in late 1917, control and communications were limited. Unrolling telephone wire under fire demonstrated the fragility of the response to the challenges of the new warfare. Without major gains of territory, the war, and notably its frontal attacks, have been seen as the epitome of military futility and incompetence, a view traceable from bitter war poets who served in the trenches, such as Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) and Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), and to the savage subsequent indictment of critical dramas, such as Joan Littlewood’s (1914–2002) play Oh What a Lovely War! (1963) and the Blackadder television series (1989).

  The conflict was indeed horrific, a terrible experience for both an age and a generation. A British quartermaster sergeant in the Somme offensive of 1916 noted in his diary:

  … the whole place smells stale with the slaughter which has been going on for the past fourteen days – the smell of the dead and lachrymatory gas. The place is a very Hell with the whistling and crashing of shells, bursting shrapnel and the rattle of machine guns. The woods we had taken had not yet been cleared and there were pockets of Germans with machine guns still holding out and doing some damage. A sergeant sinks to the ground beside me with a bullet wound neatly drilled through his shoulder. Lucky man. It is not likely to prove fatal. It is too clean and it means a few months in Blighty [Britain] for him.

  The experience of the many who served is kept alive by the strong current interest in family history, much of which focuses on the world wars. Linked to the horror is added the claim that British troops were poorly led and that the war itself was pointless. This account, however, is mistaken, as the war was not without important military and political results. In the end, Germany, the aggressor in Western Europe, was defeated on the battlefield and forced to surrender. The impasse of trench warfare was broken in 1918, with the British, who ably integrated artillery with infantry advances, playing a far larger role than they were to do in 1945. In marked contrast to the Second World War, Russia was knocked out of the war by the Germans in 1917–18, while the US, which entered the war only in 1917, played a far smaller role in Germany’s defeat than was to be the case in 1945.

  Later attention tended to focus on explaining victory through the novelty of massed attacks by tanks, a key British development, but, in practice, they were less significant in 1918 than effective artillery–infantry coordination, in particular well-aimed heavy indirect fire, ably coordinated with rushes by infantry who avoided moving forward in vulnerable lines. Built up for the task, the Army had 440 heavy artillery batteries in November 1918, compared to six in 1914. Indeed, Britain’s role in winning the war represented one of its most significant military successes, and one achieved without the mutinies seen in the French and Russian armies.

  British naval superiority was also important to victory. The British retained control of their home waters, checking the German high sea fleet at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, and, after very heavy losses, eventually thwarting the German submarine (U-boat) assault, in part through the introduction of convoys for British merchantmen. Thanks to this naval superiority, the British were therefore able to avoid invasion, to retain trade links that permitted the mobilization of British and Allied resources around the world, and to blockade Germany. The blockade hit the German economy hard and also reduced German living standards, contributing to a war weariness that helped lead to the collapse of the German state in late 1918 once German forces had been defeated on the Western Front.

  In addition, thanks in large part to the support of imperial and Dominion forces, notably from India and Australia, the German colonies in Africa and the Pacific were overrun, the Suez Canal and oil supplies in the Persian Gulf both protected from Germany’s ally the Ottoman Empire (the basis of modern Turkey), and the Turks eventually driven from Palestine, Syria and Mesopotamia in 1917–18. However, the attempt to knock Turkey out of the war in 1915 by advancing on Constantinople (Istanbul) with a fleet and amphibious forces had been defeated at Gallipoli. The war also saw the earliest air attacks on Britain, first by Zeppelins (airships) and then by aircraft, albeit without the damage caused in the Second World War.

  The ability to mobilize and apply resources, especially men and munitions, was crucial to the war effort, and led to an expansion of the regulatory powers of the government. The Defence of the Realm Act of 1914 greatly extended the powers of the administration, for example in censoring opinion. The government also took over control of the railways (1914), the coal mines (1917) and the flour mills (1918). A powerful Ministry of Munitions, which transformed the production of battlefield materials and resources, was created in 1915. David Lloyd George left the Treasury to become its first minister and made his name as a wartime leader in this role. Responding to the need to produce more artillery shells, Lloyd George bypassed established procedures by enlisting entrepreneurs in the cause of production. Moreover, a political purpose was served, as Lloyd George used his ministry to demonstrate his belief that capital and labour could combine to patriotic purpose.

  Benefiting from a sense that the war was not being prosecuted effectively, Lloyd George replaced Asquith as Prime Minister in December 1916 and created a new coalition that encompassed Conservatives and Labour, although many Liberals followed the former leader and Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, into opposition. A War Cabinet backed by a Secretariat streamlined policymaking and also played an important role in elevating the Prime Minister’s role. New ministries were created for labour and shipping, and a food production department was established in 1917, in an attempt to reduce the dependence on trans-Atlantic imports. Also to that end, food rationing was introduced. The face of the country altered. County agricultural committees o
versaw a 30 per cent rise in national cereal production as pastureland was ploughed up.

  Not only the fields were conscripted. After initially relying on volunteering, which yielded 2.5 million men between August 1914 and December 1915, universal military service was also seen as crucial to the war effort. Conscription was introduced in 1916, helping to push the size of the armed forces up to 4.5 million in 1917–18, one in three of the male labour force. Such numbers, which were necessary to cover the heavy casualties, required a resolute populace, and attempts to rally public opinion by launching propaganda campaigns included the formation of the Department (from 1918 Ministry) of Information, while, reflecting the propaganda role of film, the War Office created a Cinematograph Committee to aid film production.

  Germany was defeated on the front line, not ‘stabbed in the back’ by domestic opposition, as German nationalists later claimed; but, although the conviction that the war was a noble struggle remained widely held to the end, euphoria in Britain was limited. The numerous war memorials erected after the conflict were eloquent testimonials to the heavy cost, which included the loss of a tenth of male Scots between sixteen and fifty. The war also exhausted the economy, public finances and society. These factors helped ensure that British policymakers sought to avoid any similar conflict, an attitude that affected their response to Hitler in the 1930s.

  The Empire 1918–31

  Nevertheless, victory in 1918 carried Britain to the apex of empire. Britain played a leading role in the peace conferences held in Paris that resulted in the Paris peace settlements, notably the Treaty of Versailles. Britain gained parts of the German and Ottoman empires, including Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq from the latter, and Tanganyika (most of modern Tanzania) from the former. Britain’s position in Palestine was pregnant with future possibilities as in 1917 the government had issued the Balfour Declaration promising to support the establishment there of a homeland for the Jewish people. Australia, New Zealand and South Africa also gained German colonies. Moreover, British influence increased in both Persia (Iran) and Turkey, while British forces, operating against the Communists in the Russian Civil War that followed their revolution in 1917, moved into the Caucasus, Central Asia, and the White Sea region, and were deployed in the Baltic and the Black Sea.

  Such ambitions, however, could not be sustained and the high tide of empire was to ebb very fast. The strain of the war was heavy enough, and it left a burdensome debt, but, in addition, the expansion of imperial rule and of Britain’s international commitments involved intractable problems. Armed intervention in Russia was a failure and was abandoned in 1919. It had been opposed by British left-wingers sympathetic to the Communists and by conscripts eager for demobilization, but failed, essentially, because of the intractability of the task, an intractability not appreciated by supporters such as Churchill.

  In the Middle East, prefiguring British problems in the 2000s, revolts in Egypt (1919) and Iraq (1920–1) led to Britain granting their independence in 1922 and 1924 respectively; although it maintained considerable influence in both, in what was to be a successful exercise in informal empire. Moreover, the Third Afghan War in 1919 underlined the difficult situation on the ‘North-West Frontier’ of India. British influence collapsed in Persia in 1921, and, in the Chanak Crisis of 1922, the British backed down in their confrontation with nationalist forces in Turkey, the last being a crucial factor in Lloyd George’s fall. Furthermore, most of Ireland was lost as a result of nationalist opposition, which had led to a guerrilla insurrection, and this loss in 1922 was a major blow to imperial self-confidence: the empire began at home.

  There was a lack of resources and will to sustain schemes for imperial expansion. These were expensive: it had cost £40 million to suppress the Iraq rising, and the garrison there cost £25 million a year. Retrenchment and having to judge between commitments were increasingly the order of the day. It had always been so, but the very extension of empire made the issue more serious.

  The global and imperial context for Britain was more difficult than it had been in the 1850s. Soviet Communism was a threat to the entire idea of imperial rule, as was the American support for national self-determination, although, as yet, neither was a real challenge to the practice of control. However, by 1931, nationalist pressure in India for a new political dispensation was growing. The Amritsar massacre of 13 April 1919, when General Dyer ordered (Gurkha) troops during a serious public order crisis to fire on a demonstrating crowd, killing 379, had dented British authority in India by suggesting that it had an inherently repressive nature.

  Yet, the British were not without resources. That same year, a Government of India Act established the principle of dyarchy, that is responsible self-government in certain areas. Moreover, imperial federation was a more influential idea than straightforward rule. The development of the notion of a Commonwealth – unity in independence – proved useful in maintaining the support of the Dominions. An imperial conference in 1926 defined the Commonwealth as ‘the group of self-governing communities composed of Great Britain and the Dominions’. This formed the basis of the Statute of Westminster (1931), which determined that Commonwealth countries could now amend or repeal ‘any existing or future act of the United Kingdom Parliament … in so far as the same is part of the law of this dominion’.

  To some imperialists, these and other changes were welcome as a sign of new ways to sustain imperial links, and, by the late 1920s, the empire appeared far more powerful and far less under threat than was to be the case a decade later. Others were less enthusiastic. For Churchill, out of government office from 1929, liberal policies on India were more than a tactical step, instead being a signpost on the route to the end of empire, a disastrous prospect; a view also taken by diehards such as John, Viscount Sumner (1859–1934), President of the India Defence League, who had to face what he saw as successive betrayals over Ireland, Egypt and India. Churchill and Sumner, however, offered an apocalyptic vision that appeared out of place to many. The Viceroy of India described Churchill in 1929 as an ‘Imperialist in the 1890–1900 sense of the word’, and that world now appeared less relevant.

  These changes occurred not only in the colonies but also in Britain itself. They were part of an altering culture of power and ideological drive, one that affected Britain before the inroads of the Second World War were to cause a crisis of national and imperial survival. As an instructive indication of new assumptions, American influence in British life and culture was growing. In July 1939, Philip Kerr, 11th Marquess of Lothian, en route to take up the embassy in Washington, spoke of ‘the extent to which we in Britain have become Americanized, in the best sense of that word, in the last twenty-five years – not merely in the mechanization of our private lives but in our social and democratic life’. The sway of America was also increasing in part of the British empire, notably in Canada, and in the areas of British influence, especially South America. Yet, in 1931, the consequences of these changes in Britain and the empire were unclear, and the impact of the Second World War was to bear much of the responsibility for the collapse of empire.

  PART TWO:

  1931–2010

  5

  CHANGING COUNTRY

  A ‘quiet social revolution’, was how V.F. Soothill (1887–1956), the Medical Officer for Norwich, described the spread of suburbia in 1935. More bluntly, the novelist D.H. Lawrence (1885–1930) had earlier referred to ‘little red rat-traps’, while the poet John Betjeman condescendingly thought Swindon’s houses ‘brick-built breeding boxes of new souls’. To begin this part, as with Part 1, with the changing country is to be reminded again of the scale and importance of the human impact on the landscape. This choice also underlines the extent to which this human impact has had a lasting character, unlike many (though certainly not all) of the more ephemeral issues and events in economic and political history, and notably the doings of politicians that tend to dominate accounts of the past.

  A principal driver of change in Britain has be
en the major growth in its population, matched as it has been by rapidly rising expectations of lifestyle, as affluence has become the norm and consumerism its means. Individuals have come to express themselves, rather than simply live, through the creation of their own material worlds, their stuff, which is at once individualistic and, as a result of pressures from advertising and pricing, conformist. In the shape of demands for mobility (cars) and space (houses), this lifestyle has ensured the transfer of land from agriculture and the wild to roads and housing, with immense consequences for wildlife and for the human experience of the country.

  The 1930s

  If the changes seen in, and from, the 1930s were far from new – notably the large-scale expansion of housing and roads – the pressure of development only increased thereafter, as the population rose to unprecedented figures, rising with each successive year. Moreover, the context was different; first, as a result of greater public concern about environmental issues and, secondly, as a consequence of a more assertive regulatory environment, especially on housing. The focus was very much on urban Britain. Agriculture attracted government attention, especially during the Second World War when about 6 million acres (2.4 million hectares) were moved from grassland to plough, but, other than in wartime, was generally a low priority. There was an assumption that food could be imported, and the rural interest was far weaker than in the nineteenth century. County councils ceased to be dominated by landowners and farmers, while the Conservative Party was no longer as close to agriculture as had hitherto been the case and by the late 1960s was very much a businessman’s rather than a landowners’ party in its senior ranks and was led by Edward Heath (1916–2005) rather than the Earl of Home (1903–95). Protectionism was largely discussed in the 1930s as a means to protect industry and imperial links, and not British farming. More generally, land ownership became a less totemic issue in terms of national identity and, instead, was seen largely as a resource for development, which, increasingly, meant housing.