Asquith

by Roy Jenkins

  1 Even unusual delicacy and quietness might have left it an unappealing one to Lloyd George.

  2 After French resigned as C.I.G.S. after the Curragh incident he was reappointed to the post of Inspector-General of the Forces, which he had previously held from 1907-11. Then in August he was given command of the Expeditionary Force.

  The optimism did not appear to be as well-founded as the pessimism. In February he was surprised by the inadequacy and lack of order of an important despatch of French’s, and on March 18th, he passed on, without adverse comment, Kitchener’s damning summing up of the qualities and limitations of French:

  K. spoke to me very confidentially about French. He says he is not a really scientific soldier: a good and capable leader in the field; but without adequate equipment of expert knowledge for the huge task of commanding 450,000 men. K. is going out there at the end of the week to confer with Joffre, and to put things on a solid basis.

  Throughout this first period of the war, therefore, Kitchener— the only politically alien element within the Cabinet—held the substantial confidence of the Prime Minister. Asquith saw him, not as an infallible demi-god, but as a most valuable addition to the Government. At this stage he would not have subscribed to Margot’s view that Kitchener was more of a great poster than a great man.5

  The pattern of Asquith’s life during these first nine months of the war did not undergo any great change. He had a new range of problems with which to deal, of course, as well as some of the old ones which continued, with inconsiderate persistence, to create political bitterness at home. Ireland, despite the show of all-round goodwill in the first days of August, took six weeks to put into cold storage. During this time Asquith was subjected to all the old pressures. Bonar Law and Lansdowne were constantly accusing him of breaches of faith; the King was appealing for more concessions from the Irish; and Redmond was complaining that Nationalist goodwill was already strained beyond the bonds of endurance. The bitterness could not be kept under the political carpet. On September 15th, (with the Battle of the Aisne in full progress), after a violent attack upon the Prime Minister by Law, the Unionist Party staged a mass exodus of the House of Commons “ by way of washing their hands of responsibility for our wicked ways.” “ Bonar Law never sunk so low in his gutter as today,” Asquith wrote later that evening.

  The Welsh Disestablishment Bill, with the Archbishop of Canterbury stirring up as much trouble as possible, provided an even longer wartime hangover. As late as March, 1915 Asquith was complaining that “ McKenna (of all people) has let us in for a terrible mess in this Welsh Church business.”1 Nevertheless, it was exceptional, at least after the first six weeks of the war, for such traditional controversies to obtrude on to Asquith’s agenda. Parliamentary business as a whole occupied substantially less of his time. The House of Commons, when in session, continued to sit at normal hours and to meet five days a week. But there was rarely need for the Prime Minister to be there late in the evening, and there were frequent and long recesses. In addition, nearly all outside political activity had come to a stop. In late September and early October Asquith addressed four meetings organised by the Lord Mayors of each of the capital cities—London, Edinburgh, Dublin and Cardiff. Apart from an appeal for more munitions, delivered at Newcastle in April, 1915, these were the only speeches of any importance which he made outside the House of Commons during the first nine months of the war. He did not visit his constituency during this period.

  1 By then it was the Welsh M.P.s, “ moutons enrages,” as Asquith described them, “ . . . (who) baa-ed and bleated and tossed their crinkled horns as if they were in a gale on one of their native mountainsides,” who were after the blood of the Government. The Archbishop, never Asquith’s favourite prelate, had done his worst in the autumn.

  2 These meetings were often concerned with surprisingly detailed questions of troop movements. Another “ war ” subject, which caused acute controversy and occupied two full meetings was the amount of pension for childless army widows. The King had written before the first meeting urging greater generosity, and somewhat unexpectedly praying in aid the views of George Bernard Shaw. Eventually Asquith took a vote on the matter (some members wanted a secret ballot but he overruled that). The date was October 13th and the result was as follows:

  The time so released was more than taken up with Cabinet, War Council and other committee meetings. At first the Cabinet met almost daily. There were sixteen meetings between August 10th, 1914 and the end of that month. This degree of frequency continued almost unabated throughout September and October.2 There were also occasional meetings of the Committee of Imperial Defence as well as more frequent informal gatherings, sometimes late at night, of the ministers intimately concerned with the progress of the war.

  During November the pattern changed. A War Council (the term had sometimes been used before to describe meetings of the Committee of Imperial Defence) was set up. It was formally a committee of the Cabinet, with the Prime Minister in the chair and Kitchener, Grey, Crewe, Lloyd George and Churchill as the representatives of the parent body. Balfour was a permanent member from outside, and Haldane was added in January. In addition, the Chiefs of Staff attended regularly and other service experts were called in as required. Colonel Hankey was secretary. This body normally met several times a week. With its formation the Committee of Imperial Defence ceased to function as such, and the Cabinet reverted nearer to a peacetime pattern of meetings. For the remainder of 1914 twice weekly meetings were the rule. In the first months of 1915, more than one meeting a week was unusual. There were also occasional ad hoc Cabinet committees, although the Prime Minister did not habitually participate in these. In early 1915 he made an exception and acted as chairman of one on food prices—of which the secretary was “ a clever young Cambridge don called Keynes.”

  These changes, and the circumstances from which they sprang, meant that Asquith could no longer be away from Downing Street for more than a few days at a time. The long autumn holidays and the substantial Christmas, Easter and Whitsun breaks of pre-war days became impossible. But during any single week of normal activity the demands on his time were not vastly greater than they had been before. He continued with his habit of frequent informal dinner parties followed by a few rubbers of bridge. He continued to read voluminously and developed a new practice of retreating, in the late afternoons when the House of Commons was not sitting, to the Athenaeum library. He found it the only place where he could avoid constant interruption. Thus, on January 21st, 1915, he wrote to Miss Stanley:

  After writing to you, and writing my Cabinet letter, and disposing of a lot of smaller things, I walked across after 6 to the Athenaeum, & took up a novel, “ Sir Perryworm's Wife ” (a good title), wh. with judicious skipping I read from cover to cover.... I found it readable & rather soothing.

  His reading (often more serious than this) did not interfere with the vast flow of his correspondence. He was quick and meticulous in replying to his official letters, as he was in dealing with all papers, and he had a wide range of private correspondents as well. But to Miss Stanley the tide continued to mount. By the outbreak of the war he was already writing an average of almost a letter a day to her. For August, 1914 the total was twenty-six. And they were very substantial letters. Few were under 500 words in length; many ran to a thousand.

  This volume of communication continued until the end of 1914, and then became even greater. Miss Stanley, who had spent most of the autumn in Cheshire, came to London to undergo a course of training as a nurse at the London Hospital in Whitechapel. Her proximity, aided by the extraordinarily good posts of those days, was an incentive to still more frequent letters. During the first three months of 1915 Asquith wrote to her on 141 separate occasions. On one day— Tuesday, March 30th—he wrote her four letters of a combined length of just over 3000 words. The convenience of Sunday deliveries (for payment of an extra ½d.) avoided any large gaps in the flow, and the speed of the week-day ones (letters posted in Wh
itehall at about 6 p.m. arrived at the hospital the same evening) kept it almost even throughout the twenty-four hours.

  During this period Asquith saw Miss Stanley only about once a week. On Friday afternoons he often took a rather time-restricted motor drive with her. When it was over he would drop her back at the London Hospital and then endeavour, for he had again taken to going to the country for week-ends, to get through the City and Embankment traffic in time to catch the 5 o’clock train from Victoria Station. Sometimes he succeeded, but sometimes, despite the station master waiting hopefully outside to escort him hurriedly in, he missed it. The journey then took several hours longer.

  His destination on these occasions was Walmer Castle, beyond Dover. Tills battlemented residence, commanding a fine view of the Straits and, on a clear day, of the occupied coast of Belgium and the Pas-de-Calais, was (as it is today) the perquisite of the Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports. When that office had fallen vacant in the autumn of 1913, Asquith had been tempted to take it for himself. It was an appropriate enough office for a Prime Minister, particularly for a wartime one as he was soon to become. He would have followed Pitt and Palmerston and preceded Churchill. But the King wrote discouraging-ly, suggesting that he might find the expense excessive. The result of Asquith’s own enquiries pointed in the same direction. He found that the gardens alone would cost ^800 a year to maintain. His mind then turned away from the plan, and he appointed Lord Beauchamp in his place.

  With the outbreak of war he was again drawn to the south-eastern comer of Kent. His first war-time week-end away from London was at Lympne on August 30th and 31st. “ I always think the view here across the Marsh when there is a real play of light and shade one of the most fascinating in England,” he wrote. On the Sunday he motored to Folkestone and Dover and visited the Belgian refugees and some of the first of the British wounded. That autumn he went very little to the Wharf. It was open and available, but he seemed to think it was in the wrong direction, and in December he persuaded Beauchamp to let him have Walmer for three or four months. It was a convenient half-way house to the front. French and his staff officers could easily be brought there for consultation; Kitchener was available from Broome; and Churchill, either using his own destroyers to make mostly unauthorised visits to the B.E.F. or arranging for others to be transported by them, was frequently passing through. Several notable conferences were organised in the library of the house which was at once the most and the least insular in England. Its position gave Asquith a sense—almost entirely appropriate—of detached participation in the war which he was called upon to direct.

  “ Mr. Asquith, do you take an interest in the War? ” Lady Tree asked him after one drive from Walmer. And he passed the remark on, commenting that she had “ a good tho’ often disguised sense of humour.” To Ncrthcliffe and other critics the question would have seemed a shrewd thrust. To Asquith it was a joke, and not even a dangerous one. Of course his life was dominated by the fighting and his letters were full both of the sweep of events and of the personal tragedies which they brought in their train. The battles had to be fought and the suffering had to be endured, but he was too eclectic to fill his mind with any single subject and too fastidious to pretend to an enthusiasm which he did not feel.

  5

  Margot Asquith, although she most uncharacteristically concealed this in her Autobiography, had a deep-seated anti-Kitchener prejudice. As long ago as May 18th, 1910, she had written to Lord Crewe: “ I wanted so much to talk to you about Kitchener last night. Just one word—I know him very well. He is a natural cad, tho’ he is remarkably clever. I know if you and Henry. . . send him to India you will regret it all your days. Hardinge is the man to send and he is younger and straight and a great gentleman. Never have dealings with a liar however clever.” (Asquith Papers, box 46, f. 126).

  FROM LIBERALISM TO COALITION

  1915

  By the end of 1914 there was widespread discontent with the conduct of the war. The public was disappointed by the absence of quick victories. The generals, the Press and the politicians were on terms of mutual irritation. Within the Cabinet, the most questing minds were looking for some alternative to the bloody stalemate in France which had settled in with the Battle of the Aisne.

  On December 29th Churchill wrote to Asquith transmitting Lord Fisher’s scheme for forcing open the Baltic and landing on the flat shore 90 miles north of Berlin. This was certainly preferable, he commented, to sending more armies “ to chew barbed wire in Flanders.” Two days later he wrote again, raising the possibility of an attack on Gallipoli as well as the Baltic landing, and urging a series of daily meetings of the War Council for a thorough review of the whole range of strategic possibilities. “ No topic can be pressed to any fruitful result at weekly intervals,”a he concluded.

  Lloyd George also sent a New Year’s Eve letter. He, too, wanted more frequent War Council meetings and the opening up of a new theatre—preferably from Salonika; but he was also full of criticism of the military leaders (including Kitchener) for their incompetence about the supply of ammunition: “Had I not been a witness of their deplorable lack of provision I should not have thought it possible that men so responsibly placed could have displayed so little foresight.” b

  Asquith did not treat these communications defensively. “ I have also received today two long memoranda—one from Winston, the other from Lloyd George (quite good, the latter) as to the public conduct of the war,” he wrote to Miss Stanley.... “I am summoning our little ‘ War Council ’ for Thursday and Friday to review the whole situation....” At these meetings (on January 7th and 8th) and at a subsequent one on January 13 th a more comprehensive piece of forward planning than anything hitherto known was attempted. Unfortunately for our knowledge of Asquith’s state of mind on these occasions, he saw Miss Stanley very quickly after two of them. As a result he communicated most of his impressions verbally instead of by letter. On January 13th, he wrote: “A most interesting discussion, but so confidential and secret that I won’t put anything down on paper, but I will talk fully to you tomorrow. ...” He did however record some comments about personalities:

  I maintained an almost unbroken silence until the end, when I intervened with my (four) conclusions. . . . French sat next to me on one side and A.J.B. on the other; next to French, K(itchener), then old Jacky Fisher, Winston and Sir A. Wilson (the Naval Trinity); and beyond them Crewe, Grey and Ll. George. You won’t often see a stranger collection of men at one table. Of the lay disputants the best were A.J.B. and Ll. George. French and K. were polite and almost mealy-mouthed to one another. Happily the great question upon which they are nearly at daggers-drawn (how the new ‘ K ’ armies are to be organised—as separate entities, or intermingled with the old units) tho’ broached, was tacitly postponed to a later and more convenient date. Winston (if such a phrase is possible) showed a good deal of rugged fluency.

  Asquith’s four conclusions were sensibly worked out compromises between conflicting views. But these compromises contained the seeds of destruction of the Liberal Government. The great conflict was between “ Easterners ” and “ Westerners,” those on the one hand who were constantly seeking an escape from the Flanders impasse, and those on the other who thought that the decisive battles must inevitably be fought in the West and who were consequently hostile to any deflection of resources from the vital theatre. Asquith stood between the two schools, but appreciably nearer to the “ Westerners.” In consequence, while he did not resist the demands of Churchill and Lloyd George for some diversion which would help both ourselves and the Russians, he did not force the military leaders to disgorge from France the men and materials which might have given it a high chance of success.

  This was not only because Asquith was tom in his own mind. It was also because he never thought it his duty to impose strategic decisions upon the service chiefs. They were the experts. When they disagreed his duty was to coax them towards agreement. But he would no more have thought it right to issue a d
irective which ran counter to their united voices than to tell the Lord Chief Justice what judgments he should deliver.

  As a result, the caution of the military leaders—and of Kitchener in particular—led to a somewhat half-hearted mounting of the Dardanelles expedition. The original plan was to force the Narrows and to capture both the Gallipoli Peninsula and Constantinople by a purely naval force composed of a large number of semi-obsolete battleships. This plan commanded the support of Kitchener, because it might help Russia without the employment of any British troops, and of Churchill (although he would have liked a more complete commitment), because it offered the prospect of a world-shaking naval victory. It did not command the support of Fisher. The First Sea Lord was never much attracted by the idea of a foray in the Eastern Mediterranean. If any amphibious move was to be attempted he preferred his own plan for a Baltic landing. Still more was he influenced by a naval version of the extreme “ Western ” theory. The great task of the Royal Navy was to defeat the German Grand Fleet in pitched battle. Until that had been accomplished any diversion was dangerous. But if, in spite of the risks, a diversion was to be attempted, it was essential that the army should be involved in the enterprise. Fisher, like the Dardanelles Commission when it came to report in 1917, did not believe that a fleet could capture a peninsula; and his views here were fortified by a growing jealousy of Kitchener’s position.