The Edwardians

by Roy Hattersley

  Churchill based his argument on more than an intrinsic admiration for the ‘Iron Chancellor’. William Beveridge, an Oxford academic and Morning Post journalist, had produced a report on German public policy. Twelve million German citizens were protected against sickness, disability and the poverty which comes with old age through schemes which were financed by the beneficiaries’ contributions. And the labour market was made to work more efficiently through ‘exchanges’ in which supply was matched to demand. Britain would benefit from the adoption of German attitudes and methods.

  It was not only the great swathes of German national policy which impressed and worried Britain. Germany and things German increasingly pervaded British life – usually in the form of an invention or improvement which Britain adopted. Mercedes and Benz developed reliable motor cars long before Rolls met Royce. Lister’s work – the ‘antiseptic revolution’ – was overtaken by Robert Koch who identified bacteria as the principal agent of infection. Northcliffe wrote to the government with the complaint that the High Command in Berlin, unlike the War Office in London, realised the military potential of the aeroplane. A German finer won the ‘Blue Riband of the Atlantic’, stimulating Britain’s only direct response to the growing challenge. Specific German industries pushed their way into traditional British markets. Sheffield was particularly worried about cutlery from Soligen and Birmingham complained bitterly about the low quality of the metalwork which came out of German factories. Paradoxically, the Berlin Patent Office added strength to their concerns. Many German exports were stamped DRGM – ‘Deutsches Reichs Gebrauchs Muster’, the mark of the lower grade patent, suitable for the ‘German Utility Model’. As anti-German feeling built up – incited by Northcliffe’s propaganda in the Daily Mail – little boys saw DRGM and translated it as ‘Dirty Rotten German Muck’.

  So Edwardian Britain thought of Germany as many things – shining example, dangerous competitor, admirable innovator and imminent military threat. That ambivalence was encouraged by the inability of the Kaiser and his government to steer a steady course. Contemporary observers thought Germany’s foreign policy was as capricious as it was aggressive. The violent swings in attitude towards Britain were attributed to the personal influence of the unpredictable Kaiser, but in part they were a conscious element in Berlin’s strategy. Every opportunity had to be exploited in pursuit of Germany’s greater glory and influence. Sometimes Britain was treated like an enemy and sometimes like an ally. In the absence of a steady foreign policy, Germans found it hard to maintain permanent friendships.

  In June 1900, ships of the British Navy had intercepted and boarded the Bundesrath, a German mail steamer, in the belief that it was carrying contraband (probably arms) to the Boers. The cry of ‘piracy on the high seas’ had been met by the Admiralty with an abject apology. Count von Bülow, the German Chancellor, supported by Admiral Alfred von Tirpitz, the minister of marine, seized the moment. He told the Bundestag that the threat posed by British aggression – as witness the Bundesrath’s boarding, justified an immediate increase in the naval estimates. It was agreed that the Kaiser’s fleet should expand to twice the size that had been thought necessary two years earlier. The size of the rival fleets – Britain and Germany – was to be a contentious issue in the British parliament throughout Edwards reign.

  Later that year, German and British forces fought side by side, though the Kaisers troops made a belated arrival at the field of battle. Members of a Chinese secret society opposed to foreigners living and working in their country had murdered the German minister in Peking and besieged the diplomats of every Western power in their legations. Japan, Russia, France and Britain, with forces in the region, formed a multination force to put down what came to be called the Boxer Rebellion. Germany, with troops no nearer than Europe, contributed to what amounted to a brief occupation after the revolt had been extinguished – and only then by courtesy of the British Navy’s coaling stations along the way. The Kaiser’s troops compensated for the humiliation by suppressing the few remaining Boxers with exemplary brutality.

  Germany, having thus established the right to hold a view on future relations between China and Europe, combined with Great Britain in the Anglo-German Convention to maintain an ‘open door policy’ for trade with the Far East. The month after it was concluded, President Kruger toured Europe in ‘the hope of winning support for the Boers during the second stage of the war. The Kaiser refused to receive him, but President Loubet of France honoured him with an official national welcome – and convinced Joseph Chamberlain that he was right to argue that Britain’s real friends were in Berlin, not Paris.

  It was not until his overtures were rebuffed for a third time that Chamberlain abandoned his hopes of negotiating an Anglo-German convention. His attempts to promote an alliance between Berlin and London illustrate what a strange position he occupied within both Salisbury’s and Balfour’s governments. Chamberlain was Colonial Secretary and foreign treaties were none of his business. Yet he was allowed to work away at arranging an Anglo-German alliance while Lansdowne, the Foreign Secretary, looked on and the Prime Minister wrote notes to other members of the Cabinet drawing their attention to the weakness of Chamberlain’s plan.

  There was a good deal of rejoicing – between enemies of Chamberlain as well as friends of France – when his final attempt at a convention ended in the Colonial Secretary’s personal embarrassment. In an attempt to reconcile German opinion to the war in South Africa – and in particular to the tactics which Kitchener had employed to beat the Boers – he made what he thought was a flattering comparison of the British and German armies. He meant to say that British troops had behaved with the same gallantry and courage that the German soldiers had displayed in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, but German newspapers accused him of saying that Germany had treated the French as brutally as Britain had treated the Boers. Von Bülow denounced him in the Bundestag.

  While Chamberlain hoped in vain for friendship with Germany, Lansdowne forged closer links with France by settling differences about the two countries’ rival interests in Egypt. During the King’s visit to Kiel in 1904, the Kaiser made clear – much to the relief of British diplomats – that he had no territorial interests in North Africa. But in March 1905 Wilhelm visited Tangiers and announced that all the powers had ‘equal rights’ in an ‘absolutely free’ country and his presence in the capital signified Germany’s intention of exerting its ‘great and growing interest in Morocco’.

  The purpose of the declaration was to test the strength of the agreement in the hope that Britain would be exposed as an unreliable ally. There was a difference of opinion about how the German démarche should be treated. France, unlike Britain, accepted the demand for an international conference to determine which of the powers could regard the Magreb as within the sphere of its influence. Delegates assembled at Algeciras in January 1906. Grey, the new Liberal Foreign Secretary, stood firm behind France and the result was humiliation for the Kaiser. Only the Austro-Hungarian Empire supported Germany’s claims to ‘equal rights’ in Morocco. Italy, Spain, Russia and Great Britain (with support from the United States) were all determined to keep Germany out of the Mediterranean. Morocco remained under the influence of France and Spain.

  The Kaiser’s mischief was not, however, quite finished. In May 1911, he visited London for the unveiling of Queen Victoria’s memorial in the Mall. Within weeks of his return to Berlin, the Kaiser announced his interest in North Africa. Moroccan tribesmen had risen up against the Sultan, and French troops had occupied Tangiers ‘to protect life and property’. That, Germany said, amounted to full annexation, for which she must be compensated. A gunboat was sent to Agadir and German troops landed. The Berlin newspapers demanded that the Kaiser announce the annexation of at least part of Morocco, and the German Ambassador in London, pressed to explain his government’s intentions, replied that he had no instructions on the subject. Fearful that Germany was about to achieve its long-desired foothold in the Mediterran
ean, Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, changed the text of his Mansion House speech.

  I would make great sacrifices to preserve peace … But if a situation were to be forced upon us, in which peace could only be preserved by the surrender of the great and benevolent position Britain has won by centuries of heroism and achievement, by allowing Britain to be treated, where her interests were vitally affected as if she were of no account in the Cabinet of Nations then I say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure.9

  Germany, realising that Britain had, in effect, issued an ultimatum, withdrew. But the policy which most perturbed the British government continued. Germany was expanding its navy to a size which would enable it to challenge Britannia’s rule of the waves. Britain began to worry about her martial strength.

  The early defeats of the Boer War – and the obvious inadequacies in the British Army which it revealed – made military reform inevitable. St John Brodrick, the Unionist Secretary of State for War, had proposed the reorganisation of the Army into six corps, three in fighting readiness at full strength, the others in the form of cadres which could be expanded into complete units on mobilisation. The plan was never implemented. Brodrick’s time was taken up with two other inquiries – one into the Boer War itself (which amounted to very little), the other into the Army medical service.

  A second enquiry did make radical recommendations. In 1903, Hugh Arnold Forster – the orphan son of Matthew Arnold’s sister who had been adopted by W. E. Forster, the pioneer of the 1870 Education Act – became the Secretary of State for War. He appointed a three-man committee – Esher, Sir John Fisher (the First Sea Lord) and Colonel Sir George Clarke, included because of the controversy surrounding other names – to examine the Army’s command structures. It recommended the abolition of the post of Commander-in-Chief, and the creation of an Army Council on the lines of the Board of Admiralty – one beneficial consequence of the decision (extraordinary by the standards of the time) to invite an admiral to judge the efficiency of the Army. Unfortunately it ignored the most pressing need – the creation of a general staff.

  In early 1905, Earl Cawdor, the Chairman of the Great Western Railway, became First Lord of the Admiralty. He remained in post for only nine months, but during that time his partnership with ‘Jacky’ Fisher reorganised and revitalised the Navy. Fisher had a record of reform. As Second Sea Lord he had revolutionised officer training by replacing the Britannia training ship with the naval college at Dartmouth. When he was promoted to the head of his profession, his first recommendation to Cawdor was the redeployment of the whole fleet – a proposal which, when made by a new First Sea Lord, was irresistible.

  The smaller stations were reduced to token size and the best of their ships concentrated in three European commands. The Mediterranean Fleet was to be based in Malta, the Atlantic Fleet in Gibraltar and the Channel Fleet in the home ports. Fisher, the man who had suggested ‘Copenhagening’ the German navy, had no doubt about the nature of the threat or the nationality of the enemy.

  Much of the existing fleet was, in Fisher’s opinion, antiquated. He had no doubt how he should deal with them. ‘The first duty of the navy is to be instantly ready to strike the enemy and this can only be accomplished by concentrating our strength into ships of undoubted fighting value, ruthlessly discarding those that have become obsolete.’10 More than 150 ships were condemned as unfit for active service. Ninety of them were offered for sale to various minor powers. The rest were laid up – without guns or crew.

  Fisher was determined that the obsolete ships’ replacements should embody both the essential ingredients of modern naval warfare – maximum firepower and maximum speed. Many of the traditional precepts were abandoned. Heavy plate was rejected. ‘Hitting the thing, not armour’ was what Fisher had in mind. ‘The most powerfully arranged armaments have been the first consideration’, he told the Prime Minister. ‘Absolutely nothing has been allowed to stand in the way of the power and scope of the guns … Being a battleship she will have to fight other battleships. Having speed, she can choose the range at which she will fight.’11 Fisher was creating a whole new class of warship. It took its name from the prototype and paradigm – the Dreadnought.

  History has given Fisher personal credit for the Dreadnought revolution, but there is no doubt that the idea originated with Vittorio Cumberti, an Italian designer who, having had his plans for a ‘big battleship’ rejected by Rome, described the virtues of size and speed in the 1903 annual edition of Jane’s Fighting Ships. Fisher, by force of personality, ensured that Drake’s precept was respected. The true glory lay not in setting out on an adventure, but in its completion. Fisher made sure that the Dreadnought was built to his exacting specifications.

  Fisher wanted the Dreadnought to be capable of twenty-one knots, a third as fast again as the standard British warship could steam for any substantial period. That could only be provided by turbine engines – still, according to the conservative standards of the Admiralty, too unreliable for the largest fighting ships. Powerful voices argued in favour of the tried and tested, but Phillip Watts, Director of Naval Construction, was adamant. Without turbine engines ‘these ships will be out of date within five years’.12

  The Royal Naval Dockyard at Portsmouth had built a battleship in thirty-one months – the shortest construction time on record. Fisher wanted the Dreadnought in a year. Sea trials were completed on 11 December 1906, three weeks ahead of schedule. During the annual naval review in 1907, the King, Queen Alexandra and the Prince of Wales (accompanied by carefully selected journalists) were invited on board both to experience the smooth speed generated by the turbines and to marvel at the quality of the gunnery which the stability made possible. The Queen was so impressed by the Dreadnought’s marksmanship that she commanded that the targets be towed in and hung – perforated with direct hits – from the ship’s fantail. One rival captain described the gesture as ‘cheap swagger’. His description was undeniably accurate, but the boasting was very near to being justified. British-built ships were the best in the world.

  The Dreadnought embodied Fishers concept of the ideal battleship – a floating gun platform with maximum firepower and maximum range. Her main armament was the twelve-inch guns, each one capable of firing 850-pound shells. A Dreadnought broadside fired a barrage of 6,800 pounds of high explosive. The standard battleship, before the Dreadnought was designed, carried four twelve-inch guns and a variety of smaller guns.13 As well as possessing heavier firepower, the Dreadnought had longer range. It could therefore avoid, or at least reduce, the danger from the latest innovation in naval warfare – the torpedo.

  Traditional naval warfare – as well as depending on the luck, courage and judgement of sailors – is, like a motor race, profoundly influenced by the quality of the competing equipment. So the completion of Dreadnought – at the huge size of 17,900 tons and with its unique firepower – required that the rival navies of the world built comparable battleships. At least that was necessary if they intended to compete with Britain, either in the battle for prestige or in a real naval war. Nobody doubted that Germany would rise to the challenge. But Germany had a problem. A battleship the size of Dreadnought could not pass through the Kiel Canal into the North Sea. On the day that the Dreadnought was launched, work began on deepening and widening it.

  Dreadnoughts are expensive and Liberal administrations, by their nature, prefer peace negotiations to rearmament programmes. It was the misfortune of the new Campbell-Bannerman government to be confronted not simply by the apparent need to increase the naval budget but also by an imminent obligation to come to the aid of France. On 10 January 1906, the French ambassador to London told Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, that French intelligence confirmed that Count Schlieffen, the German Chief of Staff, had urged the Kaiser to embark on ‘the fundamental clearing up of relations with France by a prompt war’.14 Grey would not promise that, in the event of invasion,
Britain would come to France’s aid, but he did agree to representatives of the two armies holding secret talks about how they might co-operate in the face of German aggression. Eight years later, when Germany invaded Belgium as the opening move in the Schlieffen Plan, Britain and France at least understood each other’s military capability.

  With the tension at its height in 1906, the Germans accepted the judgement of the Algeciras Conference. Better still from the point of view of Campbell-Bannerman and the new Liberal government, German ministers agreed to attend a conference in The Hague at which the powers discussed détente and disarmament. It was at least possible that France had misunderstood Germany’s intention. The sudden switch from fear to hope encouraged the Liberals to believe that they could revise the Dreadnought programme. A second battleship, of the same class, was dropped from the 1906 naval estimates.

  That was not the only economy in the détente budget. Haldane cut three million pounds from the Army estimates and, at the same time, created a more efficient military capability. The idea of two complementary forces was resuscitated, but in a different form. The regular Army would be made up of 160,000 men organised in six divisions. Four divisions of part-time soldiers – called Territorials because they were not committed to serve outside the territory of the United Kingdom – were to act as a permanent reserve. By comparison with Haldane’s savings, the reduction made in the estimates by postponing the building of a second Dreadnought was small beer. Fisher had kept the price of his floating gun platform to an absolute minimum in order to reduce parliamentary criticism – the total cost was established at £1,850,000,15 only about £181,000 more than would be spent on a Lord Nelson- or Agamemnon-class battleship.16 But postponing the building of a Dreadnought was a positive sign of peaceful intentions. Campbell-Bannerman was pleased to make it.