History of England 1-6

The debate not only drew a clear dividing line between the two parties, it also split the Conservative and Liberal Unionist coalition. Many Conservatives had sympathy with the arguments of the free-trade Liberals, and even more believed that the status quo should not be disturbed. How, they asked, could such a radical idea emerge from within a Tory-dominated coalition, whose central aim was to conserve things as they were, and to perpetuate the power the party had enjoyed at Westminster for almost two decades?

The answer was simple: Joseph Chamberlain, the colonial secretary and Liberal Unionist leader, whose conversion to Tariff Reform guaranteed it would become the great issue of the day. Chamberlain, as the young Tory Winston Churchill commented, ‘was the one who made the weather’ – in the cabinet, in Westminster and in the country. The charismatic man with the monocle and the orchid in his buttonhole had been ‘Made in Birmingham’. Imbued with the confidence of a city that had experienced extraordinary material and technological progress during the industrial revolution, this former screw manufacturer was truculent, practical, energetic and ambitious. He was an emblem of Birmingham’s thriving commercial aristocracy – he had been mayor of the city in the 1870s and had improved its infrastructure through the implementation of a programme of ‘municipal socialism’.

Given Chamberlain’s character and background, it is unsurprising that not all Tories celebrated his defection to their side of the House in 1886, in protest at the Liberal government’s Irish Home Rule Bill. The old party of the landed governing class and the Anglican Church ought not, some Tories believed, to ally itself with manufacturers and dissenters, especially when they were as radical, flashy and potentially divisive as Chamberlain. Yet he proved to be a great electoral asset to what became the Unionist Alliance. His Liberal Unionist group contributed seventy-one MPs to the coalition after the 1895 election, while the policies he pursued as colonial secretary from that date had been immensely popular. Chamberlain was a zealous imperialist who believed ‘that the British race is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever seen’. His plan for the empire was the knitting together of ‘kindred races’ for ‘similar objects’; in particular, he aimed to strengthen the ‘bonds’ linking Britain, Canada and America in a ‘Greater Britain’. Yet unifying and integrating the empire were not enough to satisfy Chamberlain; he dreamed of expanding its frontiers. His aggressive policies had helped provoke the conflict with the Boers, which became known as ‘Joe’s War’. In the early days of the military campaign he had basked in the triumphs of the British troops, which helped secure a decisive electoral victory for the Unionist Alliance in 1900.

The speeches and journalism Chamberlain produced during the election campaign were peppered with slogans. ‘Every seat lost to the government,’ he had declared, ‘is a seat sold to the Boers.’ Chamberlain believed that subtlety of argument was inappropriate for the twentieth century: ‘in politics’, he would say, ‘you must paint with a broad brush’. His ability to speak directly to the voting lower middle class and the business classes, through simple language and the modern media, made Chamberlain unique among the coalition ranks. He was, in Churchill’s phrase, ‘the man the masses knew’. While some Tories, and most Liberals, accused him of lowering the standard of public life with his ‘demagoguery’, the party hierarchy was forced to tolerate him.

With jingoism apparently dead following the debacle of the Boer War, and with the Liberal opposition gaining momentum, Chamberlain needed another popular cry. Besides, he was nearing seventy and itching for one last adventure. That adventure might also advance his ultimate ambition – the leadership of a Unionist government and the country. An acute interpreter of the spirit of the age, Chamberlain sensed that businessmen and the lower middle classes were slowly coming to the conclusion that free competition was a Victorian truism. It was this intuition that inspired Chamberlain’s Tariff Reform programme.

Chamberlain presented his plans to the cabinet in 1902. Some of his colleagues were persuaded by his argument that tariffs would protect British industry from foreign competition, but others were openly hostile. Balfour decided that he could not afford to lose the support of Chamberlain’s critics by backing the plan. The government’s official position was expressed in a characteristic Balfourian equivocation – Tariff Reform was desirable but impractical at the present time. Yet Chamberlain was not a man to wait. In May 1903, he defied Balfour by publicizing his proposals in a startling speech in Birmingham, insisting that England’s free trade policies, and the tariffs imposed by other nations on English goods, were destroying the country’s industry. ‘Sugar is gone; silk has gone; iron is threatened; wool is threatened; cotton will go! How long are you going to stand it?’ Only the imposition of tariffs on goods coming into England from outside the empire could arrest the country’s economic decline and preserve English jobs: ‘Tariff Reform’, ran his new slogan, ‘Means Work for All’. Tariffs would, in addition, further the two causes closest to his heart – imperialism and social reform. They would bind the vast empire closer together, as a single economic, political and military unit, and raise government revenue which could be spent on domestic legislation. ‘The foreigner’ would thus pay for social reform, rather than the English taxpayer.

Chamberlain’s panacea for England’s difficulties was well received by his audience. Some Unionist MPs praised the programme as an ambitious bid both to revamp Disraelian ‘onenation Toryism’ and to revive the empire as a popular and party-political issue. But Balfour was dismayed. There was now intense pressure on him to join the side of either protectionism or free trade, yet his cabinet and party were divided on the issue. In the end, Balfour could not bring himself to choose sides and permitted members of his cabinet to make up their own minds. He also formulated an ambiguous piece of legislation that aimed to appease both factions within his party – ‘retaliatory’ tariffs were introduced on countries who had anti-British tariffs in place; protectionist measures would thereby promote free trade.

The only problem with this characteristic solution was that it satisfied neither faction. The prime minister’s reluctance to dictate an official line to his cabinet, meanwhile, was interpreted as a dereliction of his duty as leader. Representatives of both sides of the argument resigned from the cabinet, with Chamberlain declaring that he would leave the government in order to take his protectionist gospel to the country. Instead of confronting Chamberlain, Balfour told him that if he managed to convert the majority of the electorate, the coalition would back the Tariff Reform programme at the next election.

The episode undermined Balfour’s authority within his party and the Commons, where the Liberals were vociferous in their criticism. He believed in protectionism, they claimed, but knew the policy was unpopular, and had therefore sacrificed his most talented minister, and his own convictions, to pragmatic considerations. Balfour’s government was now bereft of an ambitious policy, as well as of its principal source of energy and ideas. Remarkably, Balfour managed to keep the plates spinning for a couple of years, but in November 1905 his fatally weakened government finally resigned. This may have been a ruse to expose divisions within the Liberal shadow cabinet, since it was now incumbent on them to form a government. If that is so, the ruse was a failure. Although he did not command the allegiance of all senior members of his party, the Liberal leader Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman succeeded in forming a Liberal government and led his party united into a general election in January 1906, from which it emerged victorious. Five years into the post-Victorian era, the indolent patrician prime minister had been exposed and forced out of Downing Street; he would never lead the country again.

5

The most powerful thing

A sense of insecurity, as well as impotence, had pervaded Balfour’s administration. This was nowhere more obvious than in foreign affairs. With its economy languishing, its empire overstretched and its population growth slowing, Britain was no longer the pre-eminent world power, capable of confronting simultaneous challenges on many fronts. Some British people even wondered whether the country was strong enough to face a single threat.

The most likely menace was believed to come from Germany. That country’s burgeoning industrial might, its vast land army, the imperialist dreams of its Kaiser and its expanding navy inspired anxiety among the English. Admiral Tirpitz’s Navy Bill of 1900 specifically aimed to establish a fleet ‘of such strength that, even for the mightiest naval power, a war with Germany would involve such risks as to jeopardise its own supremacy’. This was interpreted as a thinly veiled threat to Britain. The Foreign Office declared that Germany ‘appeared to be aiming at political hegemony and maritime ascendency, threatening the independence of her neighbours and ultimately the existence of England’.

Conservative English newspapers urged the government to respond by building bigger and better battleships, and by 1905 a large portion of the English population agreed. The navy was the pride of a country that was celebrating the centenary of the Battle of Trafalgar; by protecting trade routes and imperial borders, it guaranteed England’s prosperity as well as her security. Balfour’s government responded to popular demand by commissioning HMS Dreadnought, a vast battleship that was launched by King Edward at Portsmouth in 1906. Described by one English admiral as ‘the most powerful thing in the world’, it caused a popular sensation. But the United States, Japan and Germany soon joined in the game of battleships, and the press demanded that the government should win the international arms race.

But even if victory in that race were possible, would it secure the prize of peace? For however many dreadnoughts England stockpiled, it could no longer command the waves unaided. The country’s isolation from continental affairs had once been described by English politicians as ‘splendid’; it allowed England to concentrate on global affairs and expand its empire. But with that empire now overstretched, and with England’s economy diminished, isolation had become perilous. It was imperative that England now build European alliances, but the country had few friends on the Continent. The widespread distaste for its actions during the Boer War had further alienated potential allies. What had been the point of oppressing the free farmers of the volk apart from a lust for South African gold? The infamous conflict had lent credence to long-standing French suspicions regarding la perfide Albion; the possibility of an Anglo-French alliance seemed remote.

Nevertheless, King Edward was determined to improve relations between England and its closest neighbour. He understood the danger of England’s isolated position, and preferred the French to the Germans. His state visit to France in 1903 helped create the atmosphere in which an historic ‘Entente Cordiale’ was signed the following year. That agreement, based on mutual suspicion of Germany, marked the end of centuries of Anglo-French distrust. Meanwhile, Edward’s half-hearted attempts to forge more amicable links with the Germans came to nothing. The king soon fell out with the German emperor, and railed against ‘lying’ German officials; the Kaiser branded the English ‘degenerate’.

Germany soon put the Entente Cordiale to the test by opposing France’s bid to control Morocco. She sent a cruiser to the region, ostensibly to protect her economic interests but actually as a military challenge. To German indignation, England stood by her new partner and the Anglo-French alliance was strengthened. The Kaiser accused England of ‘pursuing an anti-German policy all over the world’, while anti-German sentiment spread in England. As H. G. Wells wrote in his novel Mr Britling Sees it Through (1916), ‘the worldwide clash of British and German interests’ became ‘facts in the consciousness of Englishmen … A whole generation was brought up in the threat of German war.’

England also looked beyond Europe’s borders for allies. Chamberlain continued to advocate the union of Britain and the United States in a ‘Greater Britain’ that would dominate the world economy and police the globe. While that appeared unlikely, a strong diplomatic friendship between the countries was a more realistic proposition. Ever since the 1890s, matches had been made between American heiresses and English aristocrats, while the historical and linguistic links that supposedly bound the two countries were celebrated. An agreement was eventually reached, involving a concession by Britain to America’s demands in Alaska and the Caribbean. England had been forced to recognize the new reality of the United States’ economic and naval pre-eminence. Yet neither these alliances, nor the manufacture of dreadnoughts, could quell concerns about England’s capacity to defend herself. Many felt that the martial might of the country was bound up with its racial and moral strength; both were now believed to be sadly lacking.

Another emblem of England’s anxiety was the Boy Scout Movement. Its founder, Lieutenant General Robert Baden-Powell, had taken part in the Boer War, and knew first-hand the alarming condition of the British troops. Convinced that the British Empire was in a state of decline, he was determined to halt the process. The shadow of imperial and racial catastrophe hangs over every page of his book Scouting for Boys, which became a bestseller in 1908. The book inspired the spontaneous creation of ‘Scout Patrols’ throughout England; there were over 100,000 scouts by 1910. The boys were organized by ‘masters’, many of whom were ex-soldiers; they encouraged the scouts to become fitter, more resilient and resourceful, through an emphasis on outdoor activities and survival skills. ‘Through Scouting, sickly, weak and barrel-chested boys would’, Baden-Powell declared, ‘be trained in the traits of manhood.’ With their army-style uniforms, ranks, flag ceremonies and troop inspections, the scouts formed an unofficial youth army. Their motto was ‘Be prepared’.

6

Demands for reform

The Liberals won the 1906 election with a huge majority. The Unionist coalition lost more than half of its 400 seats, with Balfour and many members of the cabinet among the casualties. Three hundred and ninety-seven Liberals were returned to the Commons, where the party held 241 more seats than their rivals. It was one of the most spectacular defeats in Conservative history; after twenty years of dominance, many Tories found it difficult to accept. Yet Balfour was stoical in defeat. As the election results had come in, he murmured: ‘These things will happen.’

During the election campaign, the Liberals had attacked the Unionist coalition’s record, and in particular the Boer War. They had also denounced Chamberlain’s protectionist plans, arguing that tariffs would increase the price of imported food. By accepting this argument, the electorate ensured that laissez-faire doctrine would continue to determine economic policy, perhaps to the detriment of a manufacturing sector in urgent need of reinvigoration. The 1906 election was therefore a protest vote. The electorate passed the severest possible judgement not only on the Unionist Alliance, but also on the Tories and on Toryism. Voters had decided that the party was not fit to face the challenges of the new century, and that the ‘governing class’ it represented was unworthy of power. It is suggestive that half of those returned to the Commons in 1906 were new MPs, very few of whom came from the landed gentry.

Balfour’s immediate concerns involved returning to the Commons and maintaining his own position. He achieved his first aim by means of a safe seat, but the second proved more problematic. Many Tories blamed his leadership for the election defeat. Leo Maxse, the editor of the right-wing National Review, thought Balfour had ‘fallen into complete disrepute outside the Commons’. To add to Balfour’s problems, the vast majority of Conservatives and Liberal Unionist MPs returned to the Commons in 1906 were pro-protectionist. This left him at the head of an alliance whose principal policy he did not altogether support; he was also vulnerable to a leadership challenge from Chamberlain. At the age of seventy, however, the dynamo of the Unionist Alliance was finally slowing down. Soon after the election, Chamberlain suffered a stroke and was forced to retire from public life. For the moment, Balfour was unchallenged as leader.

Balfour’s inept leadership and Chamberlain’s retirement were not the only reasons for the pessimism in the Tory party. The Conservative privy counsellor Sir James Fergusson had been defeated at the election by a workingclass trade unionist, and such losses seemed to presage a difficult time. ‘The Old Conservative Party has gone forever,’ one party veteran lamented. The Labour party was identified as the primary cause of the electoral rout, as well as the greatest cause for future concern: ‘The Labour Movement and Organisation’, one Tory politician commented, ‘has been of incomparably greater importance than anything else’. Balfour agreed, hearing in the results ‘a faint echo of the same revolutionary movement which has produced massacres in St. Petersburg, riots in Vienna and socialist processions in Berlin’.

Labour’s share of seats had increased sharply, from two to twenty-nine. Their success was facilitated by the secret Liberal–Labour pact of 1903, according to which each party allowed representatives of the other to stand unchallenged in selected constituencies. The two parties were united in their commitment to anti-militarism, free trade and social reform, though there were obvious differences in outlook. The Liberals aspired to represent the whole country, whereas Labour’s aim was to further the cause of the working class and the unions. Labour MPs also advocated far more extensive social reform than most Liberals.

By making the 1903 pact the Liberals bought the support of a small group of Labour MPs, at a time when a landslide victory for them seemed impossible. They were about the rise of Labour as an independent parliamentary force, and a party that might one day monopolize the votes of the less affluent electorate. ‘We are keenly in sympathy with the representatives of Labour,’ Campbell-Bannerman remarked. ‘We have too few of them in the House.’ It was a short-term calculation which had long-term consequences. The pact helped to establish Labour as a major party which could rival the Liberals for the anti-Tory vote among the progressive middle classes. Yet the risks were not only on the Liberals’ side. There was a danger that Labour would lose its distinct identity and eventually be absorbed into the Liberal party, whose extreme radical wing espoused views on social reform that were similar to its own.

Among the new intake of Labour MPs were the eloquent Scot Ramsay MacDonald, and the methodical Yorkshireman Philip Snowden. Both of these workingclass men had former links with the Liberal party, while MacDonald had been one of the main architects of the Lib–Lab pact. Although the pair declared their support for socialism, it was a parliamentary, Christian and nonrevolutionary variety. Like most Labour MPs, they were part of a generation of newly literate workingand lower-middle-class men. Their intellectual influences were British writers such as Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin and Charles Dickens, rather than Karl Marx. After establishing himself as one of the leaders of parliamentary Labour, MacDonald was determined that it should develop into a serious Westminster party rather than a trade union pressure group. The party might, he believed, one day displace the Liberals as the main electoral alternative to the Tories. Arthur Henderson, a self-educated Methodist and erstwhile Liberal sympathizer, joined MacDonald, Snowden and Keir Hardie in the Commons. Henderson’s rise from prominent unionist to Labour MP is emblematic of the key factor in Labour’s success: the decision of the unions to turn to politics to secure the legislative gains they had made.

The new Labour MPs were earnest, studious and often teetotal. Yet despite their distinctly un-revolutionary nature, their arrival in the Commons caused consternation among orthodox Tories. What would King Edward make of their uncouth appearance when he opened parliament? Advanced intellectuals and optimistic reformers welcomed the advent of the new men, and in doing so offered further evidence of the cultural divide in England between those who wanted to shore up the Victorian establishment and those who hoped to build a more egalitarian country from its ruins.

The success of politicians who preached socialism indicated that attitudes to state intervention were changing. Socialism implied the reorganization of society and the economy for the benefit of the whole community, rather than in the interests of an elite. Previously associated with the hated Poor Law, compulsory education and restrictions on alcohol consumption, the state was increasingly seen in a kindlier light. People gradually began to think of themselves as stakeholders in the nation.

The publication of various sociological studies into poverty showed that it could no longer be blamed on the immorality of the poor. It was seen instead as a consequence of social and economic circumstances beyond their control. The radical Edwardian intelligentsia established poverty as a fact that had to be acknowledged by the government and addressed by the state. After their interventions, few people believed that poverty could be eradicated through the efforts of individuals, municipal boards and voluntary organizations. Even The Times now spoke of the inevitability of increased reform and a degree of wealth redistribution managed by government. Many people looked to the new Liberal administration to reduce poverty, and to implement an ambitious programme of domestic legislation. But were the Liberals up to the task? After all, Victorian Liberalism had been built on a creed of noninterference.

To judge by the Liberals’ election campaign, the party was neither capable of, nor interested in, introducing extensive legislation. The Liberal leader – the portly, canny and likeable Scot Campbell-Bannerman (or C-B as he preferred to be known) – had based the campaign on the traditional Gladstonian platform of ‘peace, retrenchment and reform’. Rather than outlining an innovative and detailed programme, most Liberal electioneering had concentrated on criticizing Balfour’s government. That had also been C-B’s strong suit during his seven years as opposition leader. When he faced the subtle and patrician Balfour across the dispatch box in the Commons, it seemed, as one journalist put it, as if ‘a stout, amiable City man’ had been ‘called upon to face, with nothing better than a walking stick, a lithe fencer with a nimble rapier’. C-B was often effective and invariably imperturbable, which irritated Balfour enormously.

C-B had employed negative electioneering tactics out of necessity as well as choice. He led a fractious and disunited party, which could only come together in criticism of the opposition. When Balfour forced the Liberals to form a government at the end of 1905, the pro-imperialist faction of the party, which included such prominent MPs as Herbert Henry Asquith and Sir Edward Grey, tried to pack C-B off to the Lords, thereby assuming control in the Commons. C-B punctured the rebellion by offering the rebels key positions in his cabinet, on the condition that they drop their demands. They agreed, and backed his vague and anodyne election programme.

Disunity within the Liberal Party was an expression of the disparate character of the elements that comprised it. Nonconformists featured prominently, as did commercialists and industrialists; yet it also contained aristocratic Whigs, as well as radicals such as John Burns, the son of a washerwoman. The party had traditionally protected the rights of Nonconformists against attacks from the established church; it also defended commerce and industry against the landed interest. It was difficult, however, to formulate a coherent programme that might satisfy all of the factions within the party. Historically, the Liberals had preferred to advocate a series of single ‘causes’, such as Irish Home Rule, yet the danger of this tactic was that it made them seem a party of protest. The bonds linking its disparate elements might also one day be loosened, or some of those elements might switch their allegiance. Joseph Chamberlain’s defection from the Liberal benches to the Tory side of the House suggested that the party ought not, for instance, count on the undying loyalty of self-made Nonconformist businessmen.

At the beginning of 1906, however, Liberal supporters were in confident mood. Their 400 MPs took their places in the new parliament, behind a talented front bench that reflected the broad church of Liberalism. The three former ‘imperialist’ rebels sat alongside radical and Nonconformist MPs, while several cabinet members had titles. In early debates of the parliament, C-B overpowered Balfour: ‘The right honourable gentleman’, he declared, ‘has learned nothing. He comes back to this new Commons with the … same frivolous way of dealing with great questions. He little knows the temper of the new House … Let us get to business.’

‘Business’ included the implementation of social legislation that, while modest in scope and impact, represented a significant improvement on the efforts of Balfour’s administration. Free school meals were provided for every child, should local authorities apply for them; the power and legal status of the unions were reinforced by the Trade Disputes Act (1906); and the 1906 Workmen’s Compensation Act gave compensation to those injured at work. Abroad, C-B’s administration granted self-government to the Boers in the Transvaal Colony, closing an unhappy chapter of English history.

7

The Terrible Twins

On 3 April 1908, C-B stepped down as premier, exhausted by overwork and immobilized by a series of heart attacks. He died a couple of weeks afterwards, still resident in Downing Street. A competent successor was waiting in the wings, in Herbert Henry Asquith. Despite his earlier interest in rebellion, Asquith had been loyal to C-B as chancellor of the Exchequer, while also demonstrating his administrative ability. Asquith’s ‘mind’, Churchill commented, ‘opened and shut smoothly and exactly like the breech of a gun’, a portrait that captured something of Asquith’s nonchalant efficiency. His nonchalance was also suggested by his nickname ‘Squiffy’, which alluded to his habit of drinking heavily, even when there was political business to be conducted. He was in his element at a country house party, where he might enjoy cards and the companionship of attractive young women, or in a London club in the company of aristocrats.

The heart of the English establishment was a curious place to find a man of Asquith’s background. He came from a radical Nonconformist family in Yorkshire that had made its fortune in wool, and had been orphaned at an early age. Yet his difficult and puritanical middle-class upbringing, which instilled in him an unshakeable self-belief, had been complemented by an establishment education in the south of England. He had taken the traditional routes into government, via Oxford and the Inns of Court, acquiring at the first a consciousness of effortless superiority and at the second the ability to destroy the arguments of others. In the late 1880s, while his legal career flourished, Asquith became a Liberal MP and rose effortlessly within the party; in 1892 he served as home secretary under Gladstone.

Though Asquith made memorable speeches from the front bench, it was often difficult to remember the message behind his stylish rhetoric. He rivalled Balfour as a master of the art of elegant equivocation, and nor was obfuscation the only thing the pair had in common. ‘Asquith does not inspire men with great passions,’ one journalist commented, while even Asquith’s wife described him as a ‘cold hard unsympathetic man loved by none’. There was also a Balfourian indolence, dilatoriness and aloofness about the new Liberal prime minister. He rarely came to cabinet meetings fully prepared, but instead considered questions as they were raised. The aristocratic establishment was able to perpetuate itself by absorbing and fashioning members of the new, wealthy and powerful middle class who were willing to conform to its rules. Asquith would renounce his Nonconformism, for example, and convert to the Anglican tradition. He also decided to marry the daughter of a baronet, the eccentric society ‘wit’ Margot Tennant.

Asquith’s establishment views did not equip him to implement extensive and radical social reform, yet they did enable him to conciliate the diverse ideological elements in his party. In his convoluted orations, he struck a fine balance between competing Liberal creeds and factions. He would criticize the ‘misdirected and paralysing activity of the state’ in one breath, but acknowledge the ‘needs and services which could not be safely left to the unregulated forces of supply and demand’ with the next. He presided over the motley characters in his cabinet as a chairman rather than as an autocrat. The Whiggish faction of the party was represented by Reginald McKenna and a large group of earls and lords; the Gladstonian element by John Morley. The radical Liberal wing was pleased that Burns retained his position as president of the Local Government Board, while Nonconformists were delighted that the Welshman David Lloyd George had taken over from Asquith at the Exchequer. The most unexpected decision Asquith made was in appointing the former Tory MP Winston Churchill to the Board of Trade. These last two appointments of men with a passion for social reform and inordinate ambition and energy appeared promising to progressives.

Lloyd George, the son of a farmer, was brought up as a Welsh-speaker and ardent chapelgoer. It was there, as much as in the London courts he attended as a solicitor, that he learned the rhetorical tricks that established him as the greatest orator of the age. He acquired the skill of presenting complex issues as clear-cut struggles between right and wrong. He could be lofty and lyrical or pointed and precise, according to the character or mood of his audience, which made him equally persuasive in a tête-à-tête in the Commons’ smoking room, in a cabinet meeting or in front of an audience of thousands.

Lloyd George did not attend university but educated himself, reading widely in literature and political theory. He was drawn to the question of land ownership, since his links were with rural Wales. Though the landscape of his political imagination was pre-industrial, he had no arguments with industrialists, businessmen or with the accumulation of capital, and no interest in socialism. In his youth he had been attracted to Liberalism by Joseph Chamberlain’s programme of social reform. ‘Our Joe’ was an inspiration and a kindred spirit, yet the young Welshman would soon identify Chamberlain’s fatal flaws – the monomania and dogmatism that manifested themselves in his obsessive opposition to Irish Home Rule. When Chamberlain left Gladstone’s Liberal party over its Irish policy, Lloyd George remained on Gladstone’s side. It would not be the last time that his pragmatism overcame his principles.

In the Commons, Lloyd George came to public notice as the most eloquent opponent of the Boer War, attacking the ‘racial arrogance’ that sustained imperialism. It was not that he wished to disband the empire, rather that he wanted to refashion it as a federation of autonomous states. He demonstrated an affinity with C-B, who, on assuming office, rewarded his disciple by appointing him to the Board of Trade. Lloyd George’s greatest achievement in that capacity was averting a national railway strike. Drawing on all his charm and verbal dexterity, he had brokered a deal between the unions and the railway companies, who had previously been irreconcilable adversaries. Even the Daily Mail had been impressed by Lloyd George’s ministerial record, and welcomed the radical MP’s appointment as chancellor: ‘he has proved in office that he possesses in exceptional measure … practical business capacity … initiative, and large open-mindedness’. This irrepressible man of action, an eloquent Machiavelli with no establishment allegiances, would dominate Westminster politics for the next fifteen years.

Conservative journalists were not so enthusiastic about Churchill’s elevation to the presidency of the Board of Trade. A few years previously he had abandoned the Tory party, his natural political home, crossing the floor in protest against growing support for protectionism within the Unionist Alliance. According to the National Review, Churchill’s act of ‘treachery’ was typical of ‘a soldier of fortune who has never pretended to be animated by any motive beyond a desire for his own advancement’. The accusation of egotism would be repeated throughout Churchill’s career, along with the related charges of political grandstanding and of an addiction to power. Civil servants complained that Churchill was unpunctual, prey to sudden enthusiasms, and enthralled by extravagant ideas and fine phrases. He was a free and fiery spirit who inspired admiration and mistrust in equal measure. Allies hailed him as a genius, while his enemies regarded him as unbalanced and unscrupulous.

Although the Tory press highlighted Churchill’s pragmatism, he was not without principles. He was genuinely committed to social reform, just as his father, Lord Randolph, had been. He had found Balfour’s party reactionary and inhospitable; the Liberals welcomed him as one who could help them improve the conditions of the working classes. It was a shared commitment to social reform – as well as shared ambition – that brought Lloyd George and Churchill together inside Asquith’s government. The pair understood that a new period of political history had opened, in which the ‘condition of the people’ was the dominant issue. Both men were convinced that extensive reform was the context for future progress and social stability. Both also believed that domestic legislation offered the Liberals the opportunity of outmanoeuvring the Labour party and checking the spread of socialism.

‘The Terrible Twins’, as the Tory press dubbed them, were responsible for introducing a slew of social legislation and significantly increasing the portion of government expenditure devoted to social services. Churchill was instrumental in passing the Trade Boards Bill, which set down minimum wage criteria, and in setting up the labour exchanges that increased labour mobility. Lloyd George, meanwhile, was the driving force behind the 1908 Children Act, which protected minors from dangerous trades and abuse, and the Old Age Pensions Act (1908), which awarded non-contributory pensions to men over seventy who earned less than £31 a year. The 1910 Education Act, which aimed to provide youths with a choice of employment, was also Lloyd George’s proposal, as was the Mental Deficiency Act of 1913, which moved the mentally ill from poorhouses and prisons to specialized institutions. Finally, and most famously, Lloyd George introduced the National Insurance Act of 1911, the first ever piece of health and unemployment insurance legislation.

When the first groups of elderly men came to collect their pensions, one post office worker recalled that ‘tears of joy would run down the cheeks of some, and they would say … “God Bless that Lord (sic) George”’. The popular elevation of the proudly plebeian chancellor to the status of a lord suggests that the Victorian spirit of deference was not yet dead, but the new legislation represented a twentiethrather than a nineteenth-century response to England’s social ills. Promoted by politicians and civil servants with professional rather than patrician backgrounds, it laid the foundation for the future welfare state by guaranteeing minimum standards for a portion of the population. It thereby granted people their rights as citizens, and welcomed them, in the contemporary phrase, ‘to the common table of the nation’. It is hardly surprising that the programme was described as a form of socialistic ‘New Liberalism’, or that it inspired enthusiasm among students and the young intelligentsia. The rising generation believed that Lloyd George and Churchill had gone some way to satisfying their demand for social justice.

Lloyd George and Churchill probably went as far as the Tory-dominated House of Lords and the laissez-faire ideology of many Liberals would allow them. There was also Asquith’s caution to overcome. While the prime minister assented to most of their policies, he prided himself on never being ‘pushed along against [my] will … by energetic colleagues’. Whenever he regarded a proposal as too risky, Asquith’s conservative instincts prompted him to apply ‘the brake’. In private, Lloyd George complained to Churchill about his ‘aimlessness’.

Yet it was also possible that danger could come from activity. That was one of the lessons that Asquith might have drawn from the controversy provoked by the ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909. Lloyd George’s budget was informed by the principle of the redistribution of wealth, a radical notion that had been alien to most Victorians. It aimed to fund the government’s extensive social welfare programmes with a graduated tax on high incomes and by taxing land through various measures, including a 20 per cent tax on any unearned increment of land values. The chancellor justified these unprecedented peacetime demands on wealth by calling it ‘a war budget … for raising money to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness’. The proposed taxes would not affect middle-class salary earners or the majority of industrialists, whom Lloyd George identified as the Liberals’ natural constituency. Once again the chancellor was trying to quell social unrest and outflank Labour, whose MPs could only applaud him. If the price was to alienate the landed gentry, it was one Lloyd George was happy to pay.

Others were not so happy. The Liberal party grandee Lord Rosebery dismissed Lloyd George’s proposals as ‘tyrannical and socialistic’. Here was a call for the establishment to close ranks, regardless of party allegiance, and the Tory party was not slow in responding. Even the new breed of Conservative MPs, recruited from the wealthy business classes, denounced the budget as unjust. Stanley Baldwin spoke, in one of his first Commons speeches, of the excessive expenditure the aristocracy would have to undertake if the budget were passed. The atmosphere in the Commons had not been as tense since the debates on the 1832 Reform Act.

The atmosphere in the Tory-dominated Lords, meanwhile, was one of defiance mingled with dread. It threw out the People’s Budget and a constitutional impasse ensued, damaging confidence in the political system. Terrified by the possible ramifications, King Edward tried to arrange a deal behind the scenes, yet even the monarch’s efforts were in vain. The Tory peers justified their intransigence by arguing that the budget lacked an electoral mandate – an indication that Balfour believed they would win a general election.

The Terrible Twins welcomed the opportunity of taking the New Liberal case to the people, and Asquith assented to their demands for an election in early 1910. Lloyd George and Churchill directed the Liberal campaign with customary vigour. They formed the ‘Budget League’ and coordinated the activities of Liberal newspaper editors. They also used the latest technology, sending vans to remote areas of the country with speakers fixed to them so that their words could be broadcast in the highlands and lowlands. The struggle between the lower and the upper house was characterized as one of social democracy against inherited privilege. It was also cast as a war between an increasingly middle-class Commons, where the Liberals were dominant, and a patrician and Tory House of Lords. Lloyd George was determined to create a division between the middle class and the upper class; he would gain the allegiance of the former for his party, and unite every class below the aristocracy by identifying it as their common enemy. In his public speeches he described the unelected peers as ‘five hundred men chosen at random from among the unemployed’.

This language of class war appalled the establishment, with King Edward branding Lloyd George’s statements ‘improper’ and ‘insidious’. According to a Tory MP, the chancellor ‘set the fashion for attacking rich men because they were rich’. Yet the patrician Churchill was also responsible for introducing egalitarian and meritocratic ideas into Edwardian political discourse. ‘We do not only ask today, “How much have you got?”’ he declared, ‘we also ask, “How did you get it? Did you earn it by yourself, or has it just been left to you by others?”’ Churchill even advocated the abolition of the Lords, on the grounds that the Tories would always find a way of controlling the upper house.

Yet the omens were not good for Churchill and Lloyd George. The Tory party was able to mobilize its vastly superior financial and propaganda resources. The Times and the Daily Mail instructed the electorate to reject the Liberals and instead to back the Chamberlainite Tariff Reform as a means of funding social reform without raising taxes. The lower middle class seem to have been convinced by these arguments, while the suburban middle classes found Lloyd George’s class war rhetoric too socialistic. In the event, the Liberals lost 123 seats in the election, nearly all of which were taken by the Tories, but they returned to office courtesy of the support of the Irish Parliamentary Party and the burgeoning Labour party, which claimed forty seats.

The challenge of passing the ‘People’s Budget’ was now infinitely more difficult for the Liberal government; expediting the ‘wide programme of reconstruction’ that Lloyd George and Churchill had outlined during the election campaign was unthinkable for a minority administration. A friend of Asquith’s remembered how he ‘wandered about utterly wretched and restless’ in the days following the election, yet somehow the prime minister muddled through. However disappointing the election results were, he believed they gave his government a popular mandate for the budget. The best way to force the Tory peers to back down, he suggested, was for Edward to threaten to create enough new Liberal peers to ensure the budget’s safe passage. Although this proposal was not unprecedented, the king thought it ‘simply disgusting’. Like many members of the establishment, Edward believed the government was now controlled by an Irish party that planned to emasculate the upper house in order to force through a Home Rule bill. He decided to try to negotiate once again with Balfour and the Tory peers; when discussions led nowhere, however, he reluctantly acceded to Asquith’s demands with a proviso: he would threaten to create a crowd of new Liberal peers if the Lords continued to reject the budget, but only after two general elections had confirmed public opinion on the issue.

Asquith also pressed the king on a related matter – the introduction of legislation to alter the Lords’ power of veto. Once again, in the absence of a viable alternative, Edward reluctantly agreed. Asquith’s decision to pursue the reform of the Lords was no doubt instigated by pressure from the Irish MPs, yet his party had long desired to reduce the powers of the upper house. On his arrival in Downing Street in 1906, C-B had spoken of his desire to ‘clip the wings’ of the peers, and Lloyd George had been eager to carry out the threat of his old mentor for some time. To the chancellor, the upper chamber was not so much the ‘watchdog of the constitution’ as ‘Mr Balfour’s poodle’.

Edward’s willingness to create Liberal peers proved persuasive, and the Lords eventually let the People’s Budget through with a few amendments. The Tory peers remained recalcitrant, however, on the proposals to restrict their powers, and demanded another election on the issue. One was called in December 1910, but it produced a virtually identical result to the January contest. Asquith once again claimed a popular mandate for his proposals and the new king George V, who had succeeded his father in May, saw no choice but to threaten the upper house with the creation of new Liberal peers in order to force through the reforms.

The government introduced a Parliament Act, which removed the right of the Lords to veto money bills and limited its veto over other acts. It passed through the Commons and a long debate in the Lords was followed by a narrow victory for the government. Balfour and his allies in the Lords had surprised many by backing down at the last moment in the face of the king’s threat. As a result, the Tory and Unionist ‘die-hards’, an influential aristocratic faction within the alliance, accused their leader and his allies of betrayal.

The passing of the Parliament Act, and the People’s Budget before it, constituted an extraordinary victory for the Liberal party. After a two-year struggle, a radical budget and revolutionary constitutional bill had been passed, despite the opposition of the Tory party and the landed establishment. The supremacy of the lower house had been formally established, and the status of unelected hereditary peers had been diminished. One of the provisions of the Parliament Act was that MPs received a salary; politics became a career, open to men from the professional classes, rather than a gentlemanly hobby. A significant step had been taken towards full parliamentary democracy.

Yet victory had come at a price. The Liberal government had lost its majority and was dependent on Irish support for its survival. That backing was dependent on the introduction of a Home Rule bill that was bound to be controversial. Moreover, the struggle had roused the anger of the ‘die-hard’ Tories, who had much of the aristocratic establishment behind them. ‘When the king wants loyal men,’ one of them commented after the Lords vote, ‘he will find us ready to die for him. He may want us. For the House of Lords today voted for revolution.’

8

What happened to the gentry?

In the announcement of the Lords vote, the Tory ‘die-hards’ sensed the demise of the landed gentry’s political pre-eminence. After the 1906 election, neither the Commons nor the cabinet was dominated by the territorial aristocracy. The five lawyers who sat on Asquith’s front bench attested to the new power of the professional classes. Following the introduction of MPs’ salaries in 1911, their political influence would increase. In local politics, too, the power of the landed interest had diminished. While Justices of the Peace, Lords Lieutenant and high sheriffs still tended to be drawn from the gentry, they could no longer determine local government elections, and they rarely stood as candidates themselves. It was the burgeoning middle class who now dominated in the English counties. As the state extended in scope and power, country society retreated. Now that local politics demanded administrative competence, how could it be regarded as an aspect of noblesse oblige?

Outside the political sphere, the territorial aristocracy had been declining for decades. In 1873 the publication of an official inquiry into English landownership had revealed that all of England was owned by less than 5 per cent of its population. This finding appalled the increasingly powerful middle classes, and landed privilege was attacked on several fronts. The gentry’s patronage in the professions was significantly reduced when the purchasing of army positions and ecclesiastical benefices was prohibited by law, and examinations were made compulsory. Open competition for places in the legal professions and the civil service soon followed; the amateurish aristocratic ethos that pervaded these occupations had been dispelled by the beginning of the new century.

The late-nineteenth-century agricultural depression further weakened the gentry. The value of land was the same in 1910 as it had been in 1880, during which period rents had fallen by around 40 per cent in the south and east of England. And then there were the death duties imposed by Liberal governments, and denounced by Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895): ‘Between the duties expected of one during one’s lifetime, and the duties exacted from one after one’s death,’ she declared, ‘land has ceased to be either a profit or a pleasure. It gives one position, and prevents one from keeping it up.’ Many of the gentry decided to sell off their estates as a result. The additional land taxes that were introduced as part of the ‘People’s Budget’ led to the closure of even more country houses – an unprecedented 800,000 estates were put on the market between 1909 and 1914. Yet even before this surge in sales, the age in which the ‘great house’ had dominated the countryside had come to an end.

The demise of the landed gentry did not eliminate the aristocracy as a whole. After 1890, spectacularly wealthy members of the middle class had been permitted to enter the peerage. In the late nineteenth century the amalgamation of small, family-owned businesses had created corporations whose owners became almost unimaginably rich. Brewers, cotton and metal magnates were now as wealthy as landowners, and they demanded recognition from the establishment. Among the new Edwardian peers, representatives of finance, industry and commerce were dominant.

Many older aristocrats disapproved of the arrival of the new men, with some dismissing them as ‘plutocrats’. They had, it was said, made their money as a result of Victorian commercial and imperial expansion, and now had no other interest than in spending it ostentatiously. Punch magazine caricatured the group as vulgar, ignorant, greedy and obsessed with golf and motor cars. The gentry feared the plutocrats might ‘adulterate’ their caste, fears that were sometimes informed by anti-Semitism; the Tory ‘die-hard’ Lord Willoughby de Broke lamented the ‘contamination’ of old English stock by ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘Levantine’ finance. The anxiety, however, was prompted largely by unadulterated snobbery. ‘The rushing flood of ill-gotten gold has overflown its banks and polluted the crystal river of unreproved enjoyment,’ remarked a member of the Russell family. Existing members of the elite criticized new recruits as a means of displaying their pedigree, and disguising the fact their ancestors had also once been social climbers. Other aristocrats believed that upper-class society had been shrewd in swallowing the new millionaires, just as it had assimilated middle-class politicians such as Asquith and Baldwin. Had society not done so, these ‘keen-witted, pushing, clever and energetic’ men might, in Lady Dorothy Nevill’s view, have overthrown the social order.

The recently minted nobles, however, had no intention of dismantling the gentry. They acquired the landed estates that were coming onto the market, married into the gentry and supported the Tories. The nouveau riche press barons all sided with the old party of land, the crown and the Church, and that party’s power in the country was vastly extended through newspapers such as the Daily Mail. As one historian of the aristocracy, F. M. L. Thompson, observed, ‘The old order concentrated on the preservation of the power of property, manipulating the machinery of political democracy through mass ignorance, prejudice and apathy to delay the spread of social equality … for as long as possible.’

Like the Tory party, the City of London became an emblem of the marriage of convenience between the old and new aristocracies. Many of the gentry invested the money they had made from the sale of their lands in stocks and shares, sometimes following the advice of recently ennobled financiers. Over the Edwardian era, the value of their investments rose much faster than inflation. Younger members of the older aristocratic families even entered the City as stockbrokers, conferring ‘respectability’ on a profession previously regarded as middle class. Here was a thoroughly English revolution – a great change had taken place in society so that its fundamental structure might remain the same.

9

Car crazy

‘On Sunday morning, along the Kennington Road,’ Charlie Chaplin recalled of his early-twentieth-century adolescence, ‘one could see a smart pony and trap outside a house, ready to take a vaudevillian for a ten-mile drive as far as Merton or Norwood.’ In 1900 horses were the most common means of travel and the roads were relatively uncrowded, with railways carrying livestock as well as long-distance travellers. Within a decade, however, transport had changed rapidly, in every sense of the word.

The horses were first overtaken by bicycles with inflated tyres, which had been invented in the late 1880s by John Boyd Dunlop. The new tyres made bicycles far more comfortable to ride, and by 1900 ‘cyclemania’ was everywhere. Its leading lights were seen riding in the parks, the men in suits and boaters, the ladies sporting loose knickerbockers under their billowy dresses. At first cyclists were barred from Hyde Park, and confined to the less fashionable public gardens. Conservative aristocrats objected to the sight of unchaperoned ladies racing up and down Rotten Row in revealing knickerbockers, yet soon cyclists infiltrated every part of the city.

The press spread fears about the effects of prolonged cycling. Overenthusiastic cyclists might develop ‘bicycle hump’ by leaning too long over the handlebars; acute cases of ‘bicycle foot’ and even ‘bicycle face’ were reported. Since some of the cheaper bicycles were difficult to steer and had only rudimentary brakes, falling off was a more tangible danger, yet this did not stop intrepid cyclists from speeding around, regardless of safety.

In 1901 bicycles were the fastest means of transport on the roads, but they enjoyed supremacy for only the shortest of spells. Both bikes and horses were soon surpassed by motor cars, which could travel over 20 miles per hour by 1903. These petrol-driven automobiles had replaced the slow and unreliable steam-powered vehicles of the late nineteenth century. The driver of the early Edwardian motor car sat on a high box, just like a coachman, behind a windscreen if that optional extra had been purchased. If there was no windscreen, he or she ran the risk of being propelled forward over the front of the car whenever they braked too abruptly. Sometimes mischievous children would try to provoke an accident by throwing their caps into the path of oncoming vehicles. The motor car travelled on the left side of the road and overtook bicycles by pulling out to the right, a manoeuvre often accompanied by accidents and arguments. As only the wealthiest could afford automobiles – which cost hundreds of pounds to buy and hundreds per year to run – early drivers often looked down on cyclists, referring to them as ‘cads on casters’.

Some aristocratic motorists had an equally condescending attitude to the law. When Lord Portsmouth was stopped for exceeding the speed limit, he was belligerent: ‘I have been one of the chief magistrates of the county for some years,’ he told the constable, ‘and I have never heard of such an absurd thing as speeding. If I were you I should not take this any further.’ Other members of the old caste declined to pay the steep fines on the grounds that restricted speed limits were ‘un-English’. Drivers stopped by the police usually claimed to have been travelling under the speed limit; others tried to bribe the representatives of the law. When these tactics failed, the motorist would be hauled before the local magistrate. Among those charged with speeding in the period was the prime minister, Arthur Balfour. Such was Balfour’s notoriety on the roads that, when the Motor Car Act of 1903 was discussed in parliament, one humorous MP proposed that the 20-mile-per-hour speed limit in the legislation should not apply to him.

Motor cars became a symbol of the threat the urban world posed to the countryside. At weekends, the automobiles of affluent city dwellers piled up beside wayside inns. To local villagers, motorists looked like people from another world. They wore heavy leather or fur-lined suits and coats, cloth caps with ear flaps and rubber ‘ponchos’ in inclement weather. They were startling manifestations of the new spirit of the age.

In a country where class antagonism was increasing, it is not surprising that cars were seen as an emblem of England’s ‘idle rich’. During the debates over the 1903 Motor Car Act, one MP described driving as ‘an amusement which is indulged in principally by wealthy people’ and urged the Balfour administration to prove that it was not ‘a government of the rich, for the rich and by the rich’ by punishing aristocratic lawbreakers. Wealthy drivers ought to be taxed and made to contribute to the maintenance of country roads, and they should be forced to pass a test.

Such drivers may have been an unpopular minority but they were a formidable one. Lord Northcliffe, a fanatical early motorist, furthered the drivers’ cause in his newspapers. The Times described motor cars as ‘no mere article of luxury or amusement for a small minority’; they were instead a means of transport with potential to ‘serve the public’ and to become a ‘key English industry’ in the future. As part of its pro-motorist initiative, the newspaper attempted to distinguish blue-blooded drivers from the nouveau riche whose behaviour was blamed for the public outcry. ‘The number of owners and drivers of motor cars who are not gentlemen,’ the paper commented, ‘would seem to be unduly large. There is no turning a cad into a gentleman.’ The debate surrounding motorists was informed by contemporary anxieties concerning the ‘dilution’ of the gentry. The irony was that Northcliffe, the man responsible for this anti-plutocrat propaganda, had himself only recently been ennobled.

Those who supported the motorists claimed that reports concerning the number of accidents caused by vehicles were wildly exaggerated. They were part of a nationwide ‘motor car panic’, which was in part an attack on wealth and privilege. Yet the criticisms of dangerous drivers continued, largely because the facts supported the critics. In 1909 motor cars caused 373 accidents in Britain, but in 1914 there were 1,329 – though the rise was largely owing to the increasing use of the vehicles.

As they became an increasingly familiar sight on English roads, the ‘motor car panic’ died down. The press no longer exaggerated the incidence of minor accidents, and the government welcomed automobiles as a new source of revenue. Motor cars gradually became accepted in the same way that bicycles had been. Private cars were joined on the streets of London by taxis or ‘hackney carriages’, and jostled for space with hansoms, bicycles, electric and horse-drawn trams, and open-topped omnibuses. It is hard to think of another period of English history when so many different types of vehicle sped along the capital’s roads, or when London’s streets witnessed such mayhem.

The absence of transport management was partially remedied when the Liberal government introduced its Town Planning Act in 1909. Yet the pandemonium on the streets could no more be restrained by legislation than could suburban sprawl. The proliferation of motor cars and the sudden expansion of the suburbs were both expressions of the spirit of a speed-obsessed and restless age. The same spirit informed the numerous social reforms passed in quick succession by the Liberal government, as well as England’s breathless participation in an international arms race. Everything seemed faster following the death of Victoria and the decline of Victorianism, including thought and perhaps even time itself. The culture of the period might be compared to a new motor car, uncertain of its destination but intent on arriving in record time.

10

Little hammers in their muffs

King Edward VII had died unexpectedly, in the middle of the constitutional crisis and after a mere nine years on the throne. The apparently hearty sixty-eight-year-old had been ill for months, and a life of overindulgence had weakened his constitution. Yet as his ailments had not been widely reported, his death in May 1910 seemed sudden.

Asquith spoke for many of his countrymen when he described himself as ‘stunned’ by the news of Edward’s death. Outside Buckingham Palace the crowds stood silent, and 400,000 people visited the king’s coffin in Westminster Hall in two days. The organizers of the funeral wanted the proceedings to be as democratic as possible, so the wealthier classes were forced to queue along with everyone else to pay their last respects. Here was testimony to how England had changed since Victoria’s funeral less than a decade before; the tolerant and relaxed Edward had seemed far more accessible to his subjects than his mother had been. The newspapers celebrated the late king as ‘a very average typical Englishman in his tastes and habits’, while omitting to mention that he was not at all average in his indulgence of those tastes. Edward was the first English monarch to be presented to his subjects as ‘ordinary’. He was also one of the first stars of an emerging personality culture, created by the increasingly influential popular press. This may explain why, in the words of one cabinet member, ‘the feeling of grief and sense of personal loss’ in the country were ‘deeper and keener than when the Queen died’. Yet the public outpouring of emotion was an expression of fear for the future as well as of sadness. ‘At home things seemed to be going from bad to worse,’ remarked one Tory MP.

The new king, George, was ‘heart-broken and overwhelmed’ by the death of the man whom he called ‘the best of fathers’. As a youth, Edward’s second son had trained as a naval officer, but on the death of his elder brother towards the end of Victoria’s reign he had become second in line to the throne, and his naval career had come to an abrupt end. Marriage, children, a crash course in constitutional history and tours of the empire followed, though George did not enjoy either of the latter pursuits, being as averse to foreign food as he was uninterested in books.

Short in stature and knock-kneed, George was a modest and devoted family man. His naval training had moulded his character. Although he lived like a conservative country squire, he thought and talked like a naval officer, with a booming gruff voice and a fondness for salty humour. He had inherited his father’s blue eyes and fair hair but lacked Edward’s Falstaffian figure, energy and bonhomie, as well as his passionate interest in high society and continental diplomacy. Within weeks of his ascent to the throne, George had the luxurious decor of Buckingham Palace toned down; he also decided to keep lavish public banquets to a minimum, since they did not agree with his poor digestion. George was intent on restoring the atmosphere of simplicity, earnestness and domesticity that had characterized the English court in the reign of his grandmother. While the king’s air of melancholy was sometimes dissipated on public occasions and while he could be explosive in private, he never acted impulsively. To the outside world, it seemed that the private and reserved king dedicated his time to hunting and stamp collecting. Yet his passion for those pursuits revealed a singlemindedness as well as a desire for order.

The history lessons George had received in his youth could not have prepared him for the political crisis that he faced after his coronation. Asquith had urged the new king to threaten the Tory-dominated Lords with the creation of new Liberal peers if they did not pass the bill that would restrict their powers. If George refused to do so, the prime minister would resign and go to the country. As a natural Tory, George had an instinctive dislike of the Liberal government; he hated that ‘damned fellow’ Lloyd George and regarded Asquith as ‘not quite a gentleman’. Yet against his instincts, he acceded to his prime minister’s demand; siding with ‘the peers against the people’ had seemed too dangerous in a nation increasingly exercised by inequality. In retrospect, George believed he had made a grave error, and blamed Asquith for exploiting his inexperience.

The early years of George’s reign would be both testing and fiery. Between 1910 and 1914, England’s society and economy seemed to be on the point of collapse, while the population was described as seething with unrest. The minority Liberal government – and the political system as a whole – appeared impotent in the face of new challenges and progressive demands. ‘In 1910,’ wrote the historian George Dangerfield in The Strange Death of Liberal England (1935), ‘the fires long smouldering in the English spirit suddenly flared up, so that by the end of 1913 Liberal England was reduced to ashes.’

The first of the social and political conflagrations identified by Dangerfield came in the form of industrial action, which spread across the country after 1910. The Times described the strikes as ‘of an unexampled character’ in their extent and intensity. Throughout England, groups of workers downed tools. Most were protesting for better working conditions, while some were demanding an increase in wages, which had declined sharply in real terms. The failure of the ‘New Liberal’ social reforms to substantially reduce the incidence of poverty was also a source of discontent. ‘Some magical allurement,’ commented Ramsay MacDonald, seemed to ‘seize the Labour world’ as 1910 progressed. Without warning, hundreds of women factory workers in London stopped work and poured onto the streets. There the strikers shouted, sang and encouraged other workers to join the protest.

In 1911 the strikes proliferated and intensified. Protests overwhelmed the ports, the mines and the railways. ‘More works are being closed down every day,’ wrote Austen Chamberlain, son of Joseph and leader of the protectionist wing of the Unionist Alliance. ‘More trains are being taken off the railways. The whole machinery of national life is slowly stopping.’ Asquith used a similar metaphor when he spoke of the ‘severe strain upon the whole social and political machine’. It seemed that society and the economy, which in normal times worked independently of government control, were in danger of breaking down. The vast majority of trade unionists and Labour MPs did not want to replace the machine with another, socialist model, but they did want the government to ensure it apportioned a higher percentage of profits to the workers. State intervention should, MacDonald argued, be in the interest of the general community. Yet many Liberals felt this would represent a categorical rejection of laissez-faire politics and economics; it would also encourage the idea that wealth ought to be redistributed along with profits, through increased progressive taxation on incomes, on property and on assets, or even through direct redistributive socialist legislation. While the ‘People’s Budget’ had made steps in a reformist direction, Lloyd George had intended it as a defence against socialism, rather than as a promotion of that ‘illiberal’ ideology.

Asquith’s government had to improvise a response to the strikes, and without the benefit of a parliamentary majority. They tried various strategies, which enjoyed varying degrees of failure. Churchill, who had been promoted to home secretary in 1910, tried to force the strikers back to work by sending in the army to confront them. In Liverpool, riots broke out and the troops fired on protesters, killing two men. King George thought the situation ‘more like revolution than a strike’ and felt the government’s response should be more draconian. The English establishment was beginning to panic.

When Labour MPs attacked government coercion, Asquith tried passing legislation. One government-sponsored bill guaranteed a minimum wage to the miners, while another granted unions the right to establish funds for political purposes. Yet it was not enough to appease the strikers, including those who worked on the railways. In 1911 the government decided to play its best card and sent Lloyd George to broker a deal between the railway workers and their employers. The chancellor was famous as a ‘man of the people’, and posed as their ‘champion’. ‘He plays upon men round a table,’ Asquith’s secretary wrote, ‘like the chords of a musical instrument … until a real harmony is struck.’ Lloyd George’s verbal dexterity had its effect and an agreement was reached, though he could not repeat his success the following year, when he was unable to reconcile the striking dockers and their employers. After that failure, the government retreated from direct involvement in industrial disputes, and the strikes continued with increasing intensity. More than a thousand protests now took place annually, and involved over a million and a half workers – eight times the number who had gone on strike in each year of Edward’s reign.

In the long term, the consequences of these strikes were beneficial for both the unions and for the working class generally. Union membership swelled, becoming twice as high in 1914 as it had been in 1906, while workingclass consciousness was encouraged. Along with the rise of the Labour party, the strikes gave a clear indication to the government and ruling class that the low place allotted to workers in Victorian England was unacceptable to the labourers of the new century. They demanded a greater share of the fruits of their labour, and were prepared to take action if denied it.

The second social and political fire of the period was ignited by women campaigning for the right to vote. Ever since the middle of the nineteenth century, women’s suffrage movements had demanded an extension of the franchise, in the hope that this would lead to an improvement in their parlous situation. Middle-class women could not take degrees or practise professions in Victorian England, while pay in the few occupations they were permitted to enter was grossly unequal. Workingclass women were either employed in factories as manual labourers with limited rights or stayed at home, where they might bear as many as ten children.

Demands for the female vote were denied by a late-Victorian establishment that feared the beginning of the end of male hegemony. The Edwardian establishment was equally unsympathetic to the suffragist cause. Nevertheless, women’s participation in the political process did increase in the early twentieth century. Women were now permitted to serve on local councils, vote in local elections and even become mayors. The rationale for allowing women to participate in local government was that it dealt with purely domestic affairs, women’s ‘natural sphere’. By the end of Edward’s reign, middle-class women also had much better access to higher education (despite still being unable to graduate) and to certain categories of employment, such as teaching and nursing.

Many so-called ‘go-ahead women’ began to complain about their limited professional opportunities, as well as unequal marriage rights and their lack of sexual freedom. Burgeoning female confidence was expressed through their widespread pursuit of dynamic new sports such as tennis, roller skating and cycling, and through new female fashions. Angles and curves were ‘out’, while loose-hanging and straighter garments were ‘in’; violent colours replaced demurer shades. One male journalist remarked: ‘In Victorian England woman was a symbol of innocence, a creature with pretty, kitten-like ways, but having no relevance to the business of the world. Today she is emerging into sex consciousness and beating at the bars of circumstance.’

It is unsurprising that the suffragist movement grew in the Edwardian era or that it became more radical in character. In 1903 the accomplished orator Emmeline Pankhurst, along with her daughters Christabel and Sylvia, established the Women’s Social and Political Union. The WSPU differed from previous suffragist organizations. ‘We resolved to limit our membership exclusively to women,’ Pankhurst declared, ‘to keep ourselves absolutely free from party affiliation, and to be satisfied with nothing but action. “Deeds, not words” was our motto.’ When the Daily Mail derisively dubbed WSPU members ‘suffragettes’, they confidently appropriated and altered the term, pronouncing it ‘suffragets’, to emphasize their determination to obtain the vote. What the suffragettes wanted to ‘get’ was not a vote for every woman, regardless of class and property, since this was also denied to men. Instead they demanded that their sex ceased to be a disqualification for the franchise. Votes on the same terms as men would enfranchise only middle-class female householders, but establishing the principle of votes for women was the key issue.

By the time of George’s coronation in 1910, the resources of the WSPU had grown rapidly, while the number of sister suffrage societies had proliferated. Yet the growing strength of the movement did not result in greater parliamentary influence. A succession of private member’s bills relating to female enfranchisement were introduced around this time but failed to make their way through the Commons. Some backbenchers openly mocked the idea of women voting, while the leading politicians of the day were divided on the issue. Asquith believed that women’s ‘sphere was not the turmoil and dust of politics, but the circle of social and domestic life’. His wife and daughter, who as aristocrats did not require the vote to wield political influence, shared his contempt for ‘petticoat politics’, and physically restrained suffragette protesters who attempted to approach him. The king, too, dismissed the suffragettes as ‘dreadful women’. On the other hand, Balfour and Lloyd George expressed guarded sympathy for the cause, while some Labour MPs championed it – despite the ambivalent official response of their party.

Since the members of the Commons were unresponsive to their cause, the suffragettes decided to challenge them directly. They began interrupting political meetings with questions, and they attempted to disrupt sittings of parliament. On 18 November 1910, thousands of suffragettes marched on Parliament Square, where they were met with police resistance. Churchill had instructed officers to keep the protesters away from parliament by any means, an order that led to scores of women being hit, pushed and arrested. The Pankhursts were put on trial for incitement to riot, but ended up turning the proceedings into a dissection of the government’s incoherent opposition to women’s suffrage. The events of ‘Black Friday’ and its aftermath inspired support for the campaigners throughout the country.

From 1911 onwards, the suffragette movement became more militant. Activists set postboxes alight, chained themselves to railings, broke the windows of shops and male clubs, destroyed public flower beds and slashed cushions on trains. They also wrote graffiti on public buildings and vandalized paintings that depicted women as objects of male desire. Not all suffragists advocated these tactics, yet Pankhurst was convinced that violence was the only option. From 1913 suffragettes also carried out arson attacks, setting light to some 350 buildings over eighteen months in a carefully organized campaign. Leading suffragettes supplied instructions and flammable material to the incendiaries, who manufactured crude bombs and left them in prominent public places. Some of the devices failed to explode, but others damaged buildings, including Lloyd George’s house.

On 4 June 1913, Emily Davison provided the campaign with its most potent symbol. Striding out onto the race track during the Epsom Derby, she was knocked down by an oncoming horse belonging to King George and died in hospital four days later. Some historians suggest that Davison intended to pin a suffragette banner onto the animal, but there is a strong possibility that she was intent on martyrdom. ‘To re-enact the tragedy of Calvary for generations yet unborn,’ Davison had written in a newspaper article, ‘is the last consummate sacrifice of the Militant.’ Immediately after Davison’s death, the suffragettes claimed her as a martyr; over 50,000 sympathizers attended her funeral.

The weak Liberal government once again found itself in unknown territory; as before, its instinct was to respond with coercion. Asquith imprisoned approximately one thousand suffragettes, while denying them the status of political prisoners. This prompted many of the incarcerated women to go on hunger strike. Fearing that they might die in prison and be applauded as martyrs, the government insisted they be strapped to chairs and fed via tubes inserted into the nose and throat before reaching the stomach.

The treatment of the suffragette prisoners caused public outrage. In the Commons the recently elected Labour MP George Lansbury told Asquith: ‘You are beneath contempt … you will go down in history as the man who tortured innocent women.’ The prime minister responded to criticism with legislation, just as he had done during the recent strikes. He introduced a bill which put an end to force-feeding in prison, and allowed enfeebled hunger strikers to be temporarily released in order to recover their health at home, before resuming their sentences. The bill became known as the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’, after the cat’s fondness of toying with its prey, and the Liberals accompanied it with a counter-propaganda campaign. They caricatured the suffragettes as a small group of wealthy and unbalanced eccentrics intent on subverting law and order, rather than a mass movement with a popular political agenda.

Some historians argue that the government’s response was effective in the short term: the suffragette campaign decreased in militancy in the early months of 1914. Yet government repression had undoubtedly roused public sympathy for the suffragettes; it also gave their cause invaluable publicity. From a modern perspective, it is the brutality of the Liberal government that is conspicuous, along with its myopia. ‘Those who read the history of the movement,’ Emmeline Pankhurst predicted, ‘will wonder at the blindness that led the Government to obstinately resist so simple and so obvious a measure of justice.’

11

The Orange card

Male supremacism informed the government’s repressive response to the suffragette movement. Yet it may have also been prompted by the fact that the campaign took place at a time of unprecedented social chaos, during which Asquith’s minority administration felt under siege. Between 1910 and 1914, industrial action was evident throughout the country, and in 1912 the third political fire of the period broke out in Ireland.

Ireland was nominally amalgamated with England in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, yet it had been treated as a de facto colony by Britain for centuries. A union between the countries had been established in 1800, after the United Irishmen Rebellion against British overlordship had been brutally suppressed, with members of Ireland’s independent parliament bribed to support the Act of Union. The parliament in Dublin was dissolved, and thereafter Ireland’s elected politicians sat in Westminster. The British continued to govern the country through the Lord Lieutenant in Dublin Castle.

Neither the 1800 Act of Union nor the British colonial administration rested on popular Irish consent, and nor was the British government’s record in Ireland in the nineteenth century by any measure exemplary. It took Britain three decades to fulfil its promise of repealing the penal laws that discriminated against the majority Catholic population. The government’s response to the Irish potato blight of the 1840s, which caused around 1 million Irish people to die of starvation or disease and another million to emigrate, was incompetent and indifferent when it was not cruel. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the majority of the Irish population had supported Daniel O’Connell’s movement to repeal the union, and in its second half they had consistently returned to Westminster MPs who campaigned for Irish Home Rule.

After the 1910 election, the minority Asquith government was dependent on the votes of the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), led by John Redmond. As a price for the party’s support, Redmond insisted on autonomy for Ireland within the Union through the establishment of a Dublin parliament to deal with ‘local’ matters. The Liberal government agreed to the proposal, for principled as well as pragmatic reasons. The party had been committed to granting Home Rule to the Irish ever since its leader Gladstone had been converted to the cause in 1885 and allied his party with the IPP. Gladstone’s two attempts to pass Home Rule legislation in 1886 and 1893 had been sabotaged by the Tory-dominated Lords, but as the 1911 Parliament Act had deprived the House of Lords of its power of veto, implementing Home Rule might now be easier. In 1912 Asquith announced the government’s plan to introduce a third Home Rule Bill.

Yet Protestant Unionists in Ireland, along with a handful of Unionist Alliance MPs at Westminster, strenuously opposed the proposed legislation, arguing that Home Rule would allow Ireland’s Catholic majority to oppress them. Resistance was especially strong in the four north-eastern counties of Ulster that had majority-Protestant populations. These Ulster Protestants defended the Union, which maintained their hold on local economic and political power, and informed their cultural and religious identity. Some of them were descended from the English and Scottish settlers who had come to Ulster following the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century British colonization of the region, when land had been appropriated in order to establish a Protestant Ascendancy.

The Ulster Unionist MPs had a forceful and charismatic leader in Edward Carson, whose hatred of Home Rule was fanatical. Yet what gave Protestant Unionism influence at Westminster was support from the Tory party. The alliance of Toryism and Ulster Unionism dated back to 1886 when the Tories had opposed Gladstonian Home Rule, despite having previously favoured self-government for Ireland. In order to bring down the Liberal government, the Tories had decided, in the words of Randolph Churchill, that ‘The Orange card was the one to play’, a reference to the ‘Orange Order’ that had been founded in Ulster in 1795 to defend the region’s Protestant Ascendancy. The Tories had played that card repeatedly in the years that followed. In the 1890s they had opposed Gladstone’s second Home Rule Bill and established an official alliance with Ulster Unionist MPs and peers. In the early twentieth century, the association had been strengthened. Amidst fears of imperial decline provoked by the Boer War, the idea of granting Ireland any degree of autonomy had become abhorrent to many Tories: the ‘root objection’, as Austen Chamberlain put it, was the idea that Ireland as a nation might one day leave the Union and the empire, thereby undermining them. The Tories were, moreover, in a fragile political position after defeat at the 1906 election and the 1911 Parliament Act. Divided over Tariff Reform, bereft of compelling ideas and deprived of the Lords’ veto, they were eager for a popular cry behind which to unite. Once more the temptation to play the Orange card proved irresistible, though the consequence was the increase of sectarian division in Ireland.

It is no coincidence that a staunch Unionist of Ulster Scots ancestry had around this time become prominent within the Tory party. The rapid ascent of the self-educated and self-made businessman Andrew Bonar Law can be attributed in part to his fervent Unionism, yet it was also a reward for his striking interventions in the Commons. According to one Tory MP, Law’s forthright parliamentary style was ‘like the hammering of a skilled riveter, every blow hitting the nail on the head’. It was, as Asquith noted, also an entirely new style in its use of insults and sarcasm: Law dismissed the Liberal cabinet as a ‘gaggle of gamblers’ and ‘swine’. Such combative rhetoric identified him as heir to Joseph Chamberlain, as did his protectionist views and enthusiasm for the empire, of which he believed Ireland to be an integral part.

The middle-class Law was himself the target of insults. Asquith referred to him as ‘the gilded tradesman’, while some aristocratic Tories found his manner disconcerting: ‘I felt,’ remarked one, ‘as if I were being addressed by my highly educated carpenter.’ In this new era, wealthy businessmen – even those who, like Law, had no English roots and adhered to Nonconformist beliefs – became the leading figures in the party of old England. Joseph Chamberlain had been the ‘trailblazer’, to use a contemporary term, with Law and others following in his path. The new era for the party began in earnest in 1911, when a beleaguered Balfour resigned the Tory leadership and Law replaced him. The witty English patrician had been superseded by a tough-talking, middle-class and teetotal Ulster Scot. If the appointment caused dismay among Tory aristocrats, it also provoked anxiety on the Liberal front bench: ‘The fools,’ remarked Lloyd George, ‘have stumbled on their best man by accident.’

Law’s elevation to the Tory leadership hardened the party’s opposition to Irish Home Rule. The new leader’s father had been a Presbyterian minister in Ulster, and he was proud of his membership of the Protestant denomination that held power in the four north-eastern counties of Ulster. They were a ‘homogeneous people’, he declared, who had a ‘right’ to participate in the Union. One of his first acts as leader was to rename the Conservative and Liberal Unionist party as the ‘Unionists’, an indication that Ulster Unionism was now integral to the party’s identity. He also struck up a close relationship with Edward Carson, who ensured that his Unionist MPs and peers took the Tory whip. While Law and Carson were zealots in the Ulster Protestant cause, the marriage of their groups was one of convenience. The Tory party offered the Ulster Unionists help in maintaining their ascendancy in north-east Ulster, while the Ulster Unionists were a weapon the Tories could employ against the Liberals and their proposed Third Home Rule Bill.

Law opposed Asquith’s Home Rule proposals with characteristic vigour. He declared that forcing a Home Rule bill ‘through the back door’ of the 1911 Parliament Act had no popular mandate – an election on the issue must be called. Law believed the Tories could win that contest against a fragile Liberal government by appealing to the traditionally anti-Irish British electorate. Asquith had no appetite for another election, so he ignored Law and introduced his Home Rule Bill, without making any special provision for the north-eastern Protestant minority. If the bill reached the statute book the Ulster Protestants would have to participate in an autonomous Dublin parliament, which would replace some of the old British colonial administration. The absence of any clause in the bill relating to the Ulster Protestants suggested that Asquith and Redmond underestimated the ferocity of Ulster Unionist and Tory opposition.

After the bill was introduced, Law excited popular Unionist anger outside parliament. In a series of public speeches in England and north-east Ireland, he declared that he could ‘imagine no length of resistance to which Ulster will not go, in which I shall not be ready to support them’. If that was not clear enough, he added: ‘We shall use any means … Even if the Home Rule Bill passes through the Commons … there are things stronger than parliamentary majorities.’ This was fighting talk. For the first time since the seventeenth century, a British politician was openly inciting extra-parliamentary violence against the elected government of the United Kingdom. Nor was Law alone in making incendiary statements. Carson vowed that Unionists would ‘break every law’ if the bill were passed, while Tory MPs and ‘die-hard’ peers spoke of Ulster’s ‘moral right to resist’. Such inflammatory rhetoric provoked consternation among the Liberals. Asquith condemned Law’s statements as ‘a complete grammar of anarchy’, while Churchill said the Tories were determined ‘to govern the country whether in office or in opposition’; as they now lacked the Lords’ ‘veto of privilege’, they would do so through the ‘veto of violence’. Law attempted to use the royal veto, by which the English monarch could refuse royal assent to parliamentary bills. But King George, annoyed by Unionist intransigence, declined to exercise the veto, and nor would he dissolve parliament to force an election.

In truth, the Unionists in north-east Ulster needed little incitement from Law to rebel against Asquith’s bill. In 1912 the paramilitary Ulster Volunteers were established, and the following year these volunteers were organized into the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). Membership was limited to 100,000 men prepared to ‘defend’ the four north-eastern counties from Home Rule, with force if necessary. In 1914 they collaborated with the Ulster Unionist Council in an operation which saw 25,000 rifles smuggled into the north-east of Ireland from the German Empire. The British government did nothing to stop the gunrunning, and a new, militaristic chapter opened in Irish politics.

In response to the establishment of the Ulster Volunteers, Irish nationalists from organizations such as the Gaelic League, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, the political party Sinn Féin and the Irish Republican Brotherhood formed the Irish Volunteers. While some Protestants joined, the majority of recruits were Catholic. Irish nationalism, and even Irish separatism, had flourished in the previous two decades among people disenchanted by the failure of conventional politicians to deliver Home Rule. The principal aim of the Volunteers was ‘to secure and maintain the rights and liberties common to the whole people of Ireland … without distinction of creed, politics or social grade’. Their manifesto implied that, if all else failed, those rights and liberties could be maintained by arms. In July 1914, 1,500 rifles were brought from Germany into Howth, near Dublin, for the Irish Volunteers, whose membership had swelled to 200,000 people.

In the meantime, the Third Home Rule Bill slowly worked its way through the Commons, but was then rejected by the Lords. According to the 1911 Parliament Act, a bill could only become law without the consent of the Lords if it passed three times through the Commons in successive parliaments. This guaranteed its passage would be prolonged, and Law made sure there would be many additional delays along the way. Law and Carson also used the interval to foment Unionist rebellion, and to threaten the Liberal government with armed rebellion once again. ‘Do you plan to hurl the full majesty and power of the law,’ Law asked Asquith, ‘supported on the bayonets of the British Army, against a million Ulstermen marching under the Union Flag and singing ‘God Save The King’? Would the Army hold? Would the British people – would the Crown – stand for such a slaughter?’

While Asquith was not prepared to send the army into the north-east of Ireland to impose Home Rule, he did look to the armed forces for help in opposing the UVF. In March 1914, British intelligence reported that the Ulster Protestant organization was about to seize ammunition from various army buildings; there were even rumours of an imminent coup in Ulster and of a march on Dublin. The Liberal government issued an order for partial mobilization to the officers at the Curragh Camp in Kildare, the largest British army base in Ireland, yet many of them refused and threatened to resign in protest. Some soldiers believed that Irish Home Rule might undermine Britain’s Protestant empire, while others acted on the instigation of military officials in London with links to Law. The Unionist leader approved of their rebellion, arguing that all British citizens had the right to choose sides in what was effectively a civil war.

The so-called ‘Curragh Mutiny’ was the first time the British army had refused to follow a government order since the seventeenth century. An appalled King George thought the reputation of his army tarnished; the entire system of British governance in Ireland seemed on the point of collapse. The Liberal administration chose not to reprimand the mutineers, preferring to pretend that the affair had never happened. It was now obvious that Home Rule would not be implemented in the four north-eastern counties. The Ulster Unionists drew the moral that they were untouchable, while the Irish Volunteers concluded that they needed more weapons, since the British army would defend neither them nor the Liberal government’s Home Rule Bill.

Asquith and Redmond finally realized that the Tory-backed Unionists in Ulster were not bluffing. They would have to seek a compromise over the terms of Home Rule. Behind-the-scenes negotiations took place between Law, Carson, Asquith and Redmond. The prime minister raised the possible exclusion of the four Protestant-majority counties of north-east Ulster from the Home Rule Bill, but Carson insisted that the two Ulster counties with small nationalist majorities should also be exempt. Redmond rejected this notion and threatened to remove the IPP’s support from the government if it were pursued. A stalemate followed. With the Home Rule Bill almost on the statute book, Ireland was on the brink of bloody civil war.

But even though the Home Rule Bill did become law in the summer of 1914, no rifles were fired in Ulster. The sudden outbreak of war on the Continent drew the attention of all parties away from Ireland. The implementation of the bill was officially postponed until the end of the European conflict, with Asquith assuring the Unionists that he would consider amending it before it went into full effect. In return the Unionists agreed to postpone arguments over Ireland in the interests of national unity. The prime minister congratulated himself on his narrow escape: ‘the one bright spot,’ he commented in the summer of 1914, ‘was the settlement of Irish civil strife’. But strife in Ireland had merely been postponed.

12

The black sun

To many Liberals, the summer of 1914 seemed gloomy and forbidding. ‘I see not a patch of blue sky,’ the MP John Morley commented, alluding to the gloomy clouds over Ireland. To the east, the prospect of international strife had been growing steadily. After 1906 England had grown closer to France, with mutual fear and envy of Germany strengthening the entente. Germany, the Continent’s flourishing economic and military power, responded by investing so heavily in her navy that she almost caught up with Britain. Portions of the right-wing English press and population demanded the construction of yet more dreadnought battleships: ‘We want eight, and we won’t wait!’ was their rallying cry. Lloyd George argued that building a further four dreadnoughts would be sufficient, but the foreign secretary Edward Grey disagreed and Asquith commissioned a further eight battleships.

Germany’s allies, Austria-Hungary and Italy, also increased their spending on armaments. The Italians threatened British ascendancy in the Mediterranean by building a fleet of new battleships. England now faced an uninviting choice between falling behind in the arms race, bankrupting herself by constructing more dreadnoughts, negotiating a non-aggression pact with Germany, or agreeing to French requests for the coordination of a continental defence strategy. She chose the last option, drawing up military plans with her entente partner that included their response to aggression from an unnamed third power, which could only be Germany. Anglo-German relations, meanwhile, failed to improve even after the death of the anti-German King Edward. The problem was that most people in the English government and ruling class shared the prejudices of their former king: Grey called Germany ‘our worst enemy and our greatest danger’. The Kaiser and the German establishment had similar views of the English, and it is unsurprising that talks between the two countries broke down. Germany wanted England to agree to the expansion of its navy and to promise neutrality in the case of a continental conflict, whereas England was only prepared to offer colonial concessions.

Britain, which still thought of itself primarily as a global power, became increasingly embroiled in the European argument, in large part out of fear that her empire was overstretched. Although Britain was part of an island off the Continent, it could not remain aloof from it because of its proximity; besides, the country now lacked the military and economic resources to maintain her empire without French assistance. After the Boer War, where the British army’s strength was uncertain and its navy no longer supreme, diplomatic isolation from the Continent would be perilous.

The 1907 Anglo-Russian convention was further acknowledgement of this reality. Since Russia was, like Britain, already allied with France, the three empires now formed a Triple Alliance, a counterweight to the alliance between Germany and Austria-Hungary. But the Kaiser dismissed this talk of balance as a smokescreen for a traditional anti-German Franco-British policy; in his mind, the Triple Alliance was simply another attempt to encircle Germany. Some English people questioned the anti-German premise of Britain’s balance of power strategy, and thought Grey was being too aggressive. Others regarded it as an inherently unstable tactic that might entangle Britain in a continental war.

The balance of power would only succeed, critics said, if there was a genuine equilibrium between the two sides, and if all the parties involved were committed to maintaining it. This was a remote possibility. The Ottoman Empire was crumbling; European nationalism was on the rise, particularly in the Balkans; Germany was determined to rival Britain as a naval as well as imperial power; and there was the constant possibility of international disagreements breaking out along the colonial borders of the European nations. Africa had provided a release valve for potential antagonism in the late nineteenth century, its vast lands and resources affording all the continental powers the chance to satisfy their economic and military ambitions. But Africa had been almost entirely carved up and plundered by Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Italy and Portugal, and the colonizers now stared at each other suspiciously across the continent’s internal frontiers.

The hardest test of the balance of power came on 28 June 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo by a nationalist Bosnian Serb. There had been assassinations of equally powerful figures before; this time none of those involved seemed determined to resolve the situation. Austria-Hungary felt threatened by Balkan nationalism and Russian ambitions in the area. Too weak to stand alone, they asked the Germans if they would support a declaration of war against Serbia, even if Russia were to stand by its Serbian allies. The Germans, who also feared Russian influence in the Balkans, were convinced that they would have to confront Russia at some point; it would be easier to do so sooner rather than later, given Russia’s long-term rearmament plans. So Germany offered Austria-Hungary a blank cheque, and war on Serbia was declared. Now the other pieces fell into place. The Russians, calculating that France would support them, mobilized their forces against Austria-Hungary in support of Serbia; Germany responded by declaring war against Russia. France, which had been fearful of a German invasion ever since its 1871 conquest of French territory, now mobilized in support of Russia.

Britain was the only major European power yet to make a move. Germany was convinced the British would not enter the struggle, and the mood of the Liberal cabinet was, according to Churchill, ‘overwhelmingly pacific’. In contrast, Law, leader of the Unionist opposition, was in a belligerent mood. He warned Asquith that ‘it would be fatal to the honour and security’ of the country ‘to hesitate in supporting France and Russia.’ Imperceptibly, yet inevitably, the cabinet came round to Law’s view; the momentum of events seemed to be moving Britain inexorably towards continental war. ‘We are all adrift,’ Churchill commented, ‘in a kind of dull cataleptic trance.’

On 3 August 1914, Germany declared war on France; the following day, Germany invaded Belgium. The Liberal administration condemned the violation of the neutrality of a continental country, and declared war on Germany in support of Belgium, and in order to aid her French and Russian allies. The government now believed it had little choice but to confront the country that Britain had identified as the greatest threat to her security and prosperity. Germany had to be stopped.

The government’s declaration was made in the confidence that war would be over in a matter of weeks, an optimism shared by all the belligerents. Britain’s fleet, which stood ready in the North Sea, was still superior to that of Germany, and it was believed that the Triple Alliance troops would sandwich Germany and Austria-Hungary with quick assaults from west and east. The extensive territories of the British Empire would, it was thought, provide an almost limitless supply of soldiers. For these reasons, Grey assured the Commons: ‘we shall suffer little more in war than if we [stood] aside.’ Churchill was certain the effects of the conflict would not be felt in England itself, where it would be ‘business as usual’.

Grey and Churchill were not the only politicians buoyed up by optimism. Only weeks previously, Lansbury, Hardie and Henderson had publicly denounced all ‘capitalist’ and ‘imperialist’ wars; yet now the Labour leadership followed the government line, with the exception of MacDonald, who resigned the chairmanship of the party on pacifist principle. Law and the Unionists offered Asquith’s government unhesitating support for the declaration of war and announced the end of active opposition in the Commons, as well as in Unionist Ulster. King George was also cheered by the declaration of war, and would become strongly anti-German over the coming months, despite his numerous German titles and family ties. In fact, he would soon disguise the Teutonic ancestry of the royal family by changing its name from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor.

A mood of patriotism swept through England for the first time since the early months of the Boer War. It was mingled with relief that the country was defending a neutral neighbouring country from unprovoked aggression, rather than attacking farmers for gain. When the newspaper boys announced that war had been declared, people rushed out of shops and houses to cheer. Horatio Bottomley’s popular magazine John Bull set the tone, with its headline ‘The Dawn of Britain’s Greatest Glory’. Radical intellectuals were enthusiastic about an ideological crusade against ‘Prussian militarism’. Many progressives hoped the conflict would offer an opportunity to bury the failed political, economic and social culture of the nineteenth century, and to build something better. Was it the end of one age and the beginning of another? The politicians, the people and the intelligentsia displayed the naivety of a generation with no experience of European war. For those born in the second half of the nineteenth century, conflict meant engagements at a safe distance from Britain’s shores against significantly weaker forces. The last time the country had fought on the Continent had been during the Napoleonic era, a period that belonged to ancient history. Thus blindly, and with overweening confidence and eagerness, England entered a conflict that would become the first ever world war.

On one side stood Germany and Austria-Hungary, the ‘Central Powers’, which were eventually supported by the Ottoman Empire. On the other was the Triple Alliance of Britain, France and Russia, who were dubbed ‘the Allies’ and who were joined by the Italians. As the combatants moved towards Belgium, many sang their national anthems, the patriotism and optimism of the moment blending to produce a euphoric mood. Those who lived through the following years of agony and terror would remember the songs of the men who marched to the Western Front; some died with those songs still on their lips.

Countless British soldiers would be among the dead. In the first week of August, an Expeditionary Force of six British infantry divisions and one cavalry division was assembled. The plan was to send them to Belgium to support the French army. The newly appointed secretary of war, Lord Kitchener, a veteran of the anti-Boer campaign, believed that Belgium was too dangerous as a theatre of war. The French staff officers, and their allies among the British military hierarchy, overcame Kitchener’s concerns, but events would bear out his view. The decision to send its forces to Belgium deprived Britain of its tactical independence, committing the country to fight side by side with its French ally for the duration of the war.

Kitchener was even more concerned about troop numbers than he was about strategy. Being a great naval power, and the landlord of a vast and vastly populated empire, Britain did not believe it required anything like as large a standing army as other European nations. ‘Did you consider when you went headlong into a war like this,’ Kitchener asked the cabinet, ‘that you were without an army? Did you not realize the war was likely to last for years and require tens of thousands of soldiers?’ He was soon permitted to ask for volunteers among the male adult population.

Buoyed up by the feeling ‘that war was a glorious affair and the British always won’, as one soldier put it, a million men made their way to English recruiting stations, some of them walking for miles through the night. The slogans on the recruitment posters urged the population to respond to Kitchener’s call: ‘Your Country needs YOU’, ‘Women of England! Do your duty! Send your man Today to join our Glorious Army’ and ‘Daddy, what did you do in the war?’ After being given a few weeks’ training, the volunteers would line up in villages and towns and then march to the nearest train station, cheered along the way by those who remained. The train would take the men to military centres in England, from which they would soon be dispatched to the Western Front.

The fighting in that area, which became known as ‘The Battle of the Frontiers’, provided a salutary lesson. On 23 August 1914, the British engaged in their first major action, alongside the French at Mons in Belgium. The jubilant German army, which had just conquered Brussels, outnumbered the Allies three to one. In these difficult circumstances the British fought well, but they could not halt the German advance. The news of the Allied retreat, according to The Times, ‘broke like a thunderbolt’ back home in England. Questions were asked about the preparedness of the troops. The soldiers had been trained and equipped for an old-style imperial campaign, but were they ready for modern continental warfare? They had plenty of rifles but what about machine guns, hand grenades and telephones?

The Germans drove the Franco-British back mile after mile, a manoeuvre that became known as the ‘Great Retreat’. As the Allies withdrew from the towns and villages of northern France, they left behind them piles of dead bodies. The corpses of their own men were left behind, the retreating armies having no time to bury them. The conquering Germans killed or deported thousands of French and Belgian civilians, countless women and children among them, sometimes hanging the naked corpses up in butcher’s shops. Their conduct inspired the ‘great terror’ among civilians and prompted relentless anti-German propaganda in England. As a result, Germans were attacked on English streets and German shops and homes were looted, while many Germans were interned in camps for enemy aliens.

Well-executed Franco-British rearguard actions slowed the advance of the Germans, who halted east of Paris. When the belligerents confronted each other again at the Battle of the Marne in early September, the Allies emerged victorious. It was now the turn of the Germans to retreat, in the so-called ‘Race to the Sea’. The two sides engaged in offensives and counteroffensives as they moved through Picardy, Artois and Flanders. Ypres was recaptured by the Allies, who hoped to push the Germans back further, but their advance was halted. A decisive victory now appeared unlikely for either side. Their aim became to retreat no further, rather than to overwhelm the enemy.

The visible symbols of the stalemate were the elaborate rows of trenches the antagonists now dug opposite each other; they zigzagged down France from the Channel to the border with neutral Switzerland. These trench systems would eventually reach a total length of 25,000 miles. In between the opposing trenches lay a mine-filled ‘no man’s land’, an area exposed to machine-gun fire, mortars, flame-throwers, shells and a new weapon of death, the poison-gas canister. The killing was done at a distance by high-tech weapons, as the waves of men were fed to a vast killing machine. Any attempt to attack the enemy’s trenches was doomed to failure. If advancing soldiers miraculously managed to dodge the bullets, the mines and the gas canisters, they would have to breach a wall of barbed wire before confronting an enemy of vast numerical superiority.

When they were not engaging in futile attacks, the opposing forces sheltered in their trenches, exhausted and depressed by battle, disease, the falling temperatures of autumn and the death of their comrades. Some soldiers also suffered from ‘shell shock’ which left them in a state of helpless panic, unable to walk or talk, and prey to hysteria and insomnia. In the early months of the conflict, army doctors said such men were suffering from nerves or had weak constitutions, yet the disease became part of a new pathology of war. Life in the trenches was uncomfortable, anxious and restless. The noise of the constant gunfire and heavy shelling, mingled with the cries of maimed or dying men, was unbearable.

The soldiers realized that it was now a war of attrition, to use a coined phrase. ‘We have got to stick it longer than the other side,’ as one captain put it, ‘and go on producing men, and material until they cry quits.’ But who knew how long and how many deaths it might take to grind out a bloody victory? Given the type of warfare in which the antagonists were now engaged, and the huge industrial resources commanded by the Germans, it was likely the struggle would be prolonged and the death toll unprecedented. What had happened to the short, sweet war the government had predicted?

To make matters worse, the expected war at sea had not begun, since the Germans refused to engage the British navy and preferred to pick off British cruisers with their U-boats. When a German mine destroyed a British battleship, the commander-in-chief ordered the British fleet to retreat out of danger to the coast of Ireland. There was little progress either on the Eastern Front, where the battle was far more mobile than in the cratered killing fields of the west. The Russians quickly invaded East Prussia, while Austria-Hungary lost almost a million men in an offensive in the Carpathians. But the mood of optimism among the Allies stalled when the Germans forced the Russians back over their own borders, and Turkey decided to support the Central Powers.

English enthusiasm for war was further dampened as autumn turned to winter. Newspaper reports of deaths and casualties at first provoked pity and fear, then numb resignation. Soon so many soldiers were dying that there was no room in the papers to list all of the names. Across England, women and children dressed in mourning. Soldiers on crutches or in wheelchairs, returned from the front, became a common sight. As the optimism of the early days of the war evaporated, many intellectuals began to fear a German victory. Where was England’s legendary strength and pluck? By Christmas few believed the war would soon be over, and there was little surprise among the population when Kitchener requested further volunteers. Over the coming months, an additional million and a half men would enlist.

Kitchener had correctly predicted the difficulty and duration of the war; yet he was often wrong about military tactics. The commander of the British Expeditionary Force, Sir John French, thought the secretary of war incompetent and sometimes ‘mad’; few now had faith in his Western Front tactics. In early 1915 the First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, made a proposal which was intended to revitalize Britain’s strategy. Waging war on an entirely new front, far from Germany’s sphere of influence, would, Churchill told the cabinet, open up the war. And if the new front were to be at sea, then the horrific casualties of trench warfare would be avoided. Churchill suggested an ‘amphibious operation’, using ships and soldiers, on a strip of water called the Dardanelles, which separated Europe from Asia and which was under Ottoman control. If the straits were secured, reinforcements could be sent by the British and French to the Russians; Allied troops could also land in the area and capture Constantinople. The defeat of the Ottomans would materially weaken the Central Powers and in addition would help to protect the British Suez Canal.

Lloyd George liked the proposal, but Asquith was sceptical; Kitchener wavered, then agreed. Many of the plan’s supporters laboured under the illusion that the Turks were constitutionally weak. Churchill initially regarded the attack as a difficult operation, requiring a large force on the ground, yet Kitchener convinced him the navy could succeed virtually alone. But when the British and French began their assault on the Dardanelles in mid-March, Churchill received one of the greatest shocks of his career. The Allied navy was scuppered by Turkish mines, and the Turks repulsed its efforts to invade their territory. Another landing of British, French and colonial troops was attempted at the end of April, with the same result. While the Allied soldiers remained on the beaches, the Turks dug trenches that were as impenetrable as those of their German allies. When the Allied ammunition ran low, the attack was called off. One hundred and twenty thousand British soldiers had died, were wounded or went missing. When Churchill heard the news, he was distraught at the failure and loss of life.

After the debacle, the English press turned on the Liberal government and the British military high command. The war was being mismanaged; the troops needed reinforcements, different tactics and better equipment. Above all, greater supplies of high-explosive heavy artillery should immediately be sent to the Western Front. The Times and the Daily Mail campaigned for more shells. Lord Northcliffe, who owned both papers, backed up Lloyd George’s call for the establishment of a munitions department with himself at its head.

Meanwhile, opposition in the Commons was unconstrained over the ‘shells scandal’. Law openly attacked the government for the first time since the declaration of war. For its part, the Irish Parliamentary Party saw little reason to sustain the Liberal administration, now that Home Rule had reached the statute book. When Redmond withdrew his support, Asquith’s government was at the point of collapse. Grey had been proved wrong about the duration of the conflict, Churchill about the navy’s strength during the Dardanelles campaign and Kitchener about strategy. The only cabinet minister to have emerged with credit was Lloyd George, who had brokered a deal between the trade unions and business leaders. The unions had agreed to the dilution of labour through the introduction of a quarter of a million women, as well as unskilled or semi-skilled men, into factories and offices. In return, the chancellor had assured the unions that this would be a temporary wartime measure; he also promised that industrial profits would be controlled, an unprecedented concession to secure union support. In other ways, too, Lloyd George had shown a willingness to intervene in the wartime economy, in contradiction of his Liberal principles. He had imposed import duties, increased taxes, shored up the City banks, allowed the national debt to grow, and taken over factories that failed to meet their munitions quotas.

As the chancellor’s reputation rose, Asquith’s fell. Lloyd George seemed to display the initiative the prime minister lacked, and the chancellor’s friends in the press emphasized the contrast. The papers criticized Asquith’s reluctance to wield the considerable powers the war had bestowed on the state and mentioned his addiction to brandy. Friends claimed the drink cleared Asquith’s mind, yet the sight of a prime minister supine and sodden in the House did not inspire confidence, in either Fleet Street or the country. To journalists ‘Squiffy’ seemed as though he had survived into an age in which his skills of conciliation and his instinctive caution were no longer relevant. A twentiethcentury world war demanded a different kind of statesman. The future belonged to men like Lloyd George who were capable of decisive, improvised action as well as striking public gestures, and who could reach a vast public through the press. With Northcliffe on his side, the chancellor appeared irresistible.

After consulting Northcliffe and his potential partners on the opposition benches, Lloyd George declared, ‘We must have a coalition.’ As a pragmatist, he saw the advantages of a government based on a loose affiliation of parties, personalities and ideas. It would give him freedom for manoeuvre, without the constraints of the Liberal party’s hierarchy or its traditional creed. He was rooted in Nonconformist Liberalism, but sensed that it was a dwindling political force. Law’s Unionists, for their part, had no desire to assume sole responsibility for the military failures abroad, or for the hardship of the population at home. It seemed likely that conscription and food rationing might soon have to be introduced, and they believed that the people were more likely to accept these measures from a coalition than a Tory-Unionist government.

Lloyd George’s timing was impeccable. The public was weary of the stories of endless, senseless slaughter and martial failures, and close to hysteria after the recent appearance of German Zeppelins in the sky over London. With the population anxious for a change of fortune and direction, and with support in the Commons and Fleet Street for a Liberal administration wearing thin, Asquith reluctantly assented to the proposal for a coalition and the Liberal government came to an end in May 1915.

Asquith would lead the coalition, but he was leader in name only. He came to cabinet meetings with few proposals, and usually concluded them by postponing a decision. Lloyd George, the real leader, was given sole responsibility for the home front, coordinating all aspects of social and economic policy as minister of munitions. The influence of Asquith’s friends in the cabinet was diluted by the presence of the leading Unionists – Law, Balfour, Austen Chamberlain and Edward Carson. Arthur Henderson, who had taken over as Labour leader from MacDonald, became minister for education, and two other Labour MPs joined the coalition in the coming months. The presence of the Labour men gave the cabinet a genuinely ‘national’ appearance and also changed its social composition. The appointments suggested that Labour was no longer merely a protest party but a movement which was ready for office. Within the military hierarchy there was also a change of personnel. Churchill was demoted to chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, partly because of the Dardanelles fiasco but also to appease Law, who regarded the Tory renegade as an unbalanced maverick.

The new government was faced with the old problems – the absence of a convincing military strategy, the lack of manpower and equipment at the front, and the need to reorganize the economy and society in accordance with the demands of war. These last two challenges were ably met by Lloyd George, who hired a staff of businessmen to ensure that ever-increasing quantities of shells, tanks and machine guns were sent to the soldiers. During Lloyd George’s command of the ministry, the production of medium guns rose by 380 per cent and of heavy guns by 1,200 per cent. The munitions minister also appointed ‘controllers’ of shipping, food production, coal and labour, all of whom were experts in these sectors. His new breed of administrators extended the role of the state to all spheres of the economy and to countless aspects of civilian life. They took over factories, imposing strict regulations and new production procedures; they introduced industrial conscription and increased labour mobility. At the same time they placated the unions by reducing working hours, improving working conditions and keeping wages high. Lloyd George had no difficulty in convincing the Unionists in the cabinet that such concessions were necessary; Law understood that the unions were ‘the only thing between us and anarchy’.

Lloyd George and his men controlled the production and distribution of food, metals and chemical products. They also directed large amounts of state money to scientific and technological research, and to the study of management and production processes. Central government now seemed to control everything. Bureaucracy was expanded, with efficiency the aim; public expenditure increased rapidly, together with the amount of money collected from direct taxation. The number of citizens who paid income tax rose from 1 million to 8 million, while those who earned more paid more, with steeply progressive taxation imposed and accepted.

Here was an economic, social and political revolution. The newspapers spoke of ‘war socialism’ and a transformation in government, with businessmen and professionals supplanting wealthy, privately educated public servants. For the first time in history, many members of the lower middle and working classes felt appreciated and rewarded: wages rose, poverty was reduced, and the Labour movement was recognized as a vital part of the economy and society. And what was true for men was equally true for women, who entered the workforce in large numbers, especially in the newly created munitions factories. English women felt that they were participating not only in a great patriotic struggle but also in a national enterprise that was more egalitarian than anything they had previously experienced. The nation was starting to resemble a genuine community, based on the principle of the general good. ‘England has broken with her past,’ commented the historian W. H. Dawson, ‘and when the day of peace arrives we shall be confronted by an altogether altered situation.’

13

Forced to fight

Coalition policies produced positive results on the home front, but there were only failures abroad. After the Dardanelles debacle, plans to open up a new Eastern Front were abandoned; with no prospect of a naval engagement imminent, the government and the military command saw the Western Front as the only viable option – except that it was not viable at all. Since the French had aided the British in the Dardanelles, Kitchener felt bound to support them in their plans for an autumn advance against the Germans. The Battle of Loos was the biggest British attack of 1915, and one of the least successful. Little or no ground was gained, at the cost of the lives of 50,000 British men. The only evidence that ‘some of the divisions actually reached the enemy’s trenches’, reported one official during the battle, was that ‘their bodies can be seen on the barbed wire’.

After the carnage, Kitchener’s calls for volunteers became more frequent and hysterical. Yet when his appeals failed to inspire an enthusiastic response, Asquith was forced to contemplate the introduction of conscription. Both he and Balfour loathed the idea, while Lloyd George and Law favoured it – a vivid illustration of the division between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ men inside the cabinet. The new men thought conscription would show Britain’s allies and enemies that they ‘meant business’. ‘The fight must be to the finish,’ declared Lloyd George, whose primary war aim was to destroy the ‘German menace’. Yet Asquith, who hated the ‘horrible’ war and whose eldest son was fighting in the trenches, appeared intent on an accommodation with Germany.

The dearth of volunteers, and pressure from members of the cabinet, eventually compelled Asquith into action over conscription. Yet even now he acted with customary circumspection. His Military Service Bill of January 1916 imposed compulsory service on bachelors and childless widowers, while excluding married men. By taking this middle course, Asquith managed to conciliate most of his divided cabinet. A few months later, however, events dictated that compulsory service be extended to married men, and Asquith altered the Military Service Bill accordingly. Through the extension of conscription the state assumed control over the life and death of the entire male adult population; ‘Kitchener’s Army’ of volunteers was replaced by men forced to fight. It also resulted in the removal of able-bodied men from the factories at home and their replacement by women and less sturdy men.

Conscription was not extended to Ireland, a clear indication of that country’s uncertain status within the United Kingdom. The government realized that the Irish would not accept the forced recruitment of all adult males to defend either the Union or the British Empire; while the irony of conscripting Irishmen to liberate the ‘small Catholic nation’ of Belgium from a militaristic aggressor was obvious. An overwhelming majority of Irish Parliamentary Party MPs at Westminster had, in fact, voted against the Military Service Bill. Thousands of Irishmen, Catholics as well as Protestants, had come forward to fight following the declaration of war in August 1914; but volunteering for a ‘short and glorious’ war in 1914 was one thing, conscription imposed by the British government in 1916 another.

The IPP leader John Redmond had encouraged members of the Irish Volunteers to enlist in 1914, with the argument that their sacrifice would make the implementation of the Liberal Home Rule Bill more likely. While the majority of Volunteers had answered Redmond’s call to arms, around 12,000 refused. These men had lost faith in the British government’s willingness, or ability, to deliver on its promises of Irish self-government; in any case, they wanted far more autonomy than had been pledged in the Home Rule Bill. They believed that the world war offered them a unique opportunity of realizing their dream of an independent Irish Republic: ‘England’s difficulty’, they said, ‘is Ireland’s opportunity.’

On Monday, 24 April 1916, a small group of these Irish Volunteers, along with some soldiers of the Irish Citizen Army, staged an uprising in Dublin. They captured a number of official buildings, including the General Post Office, over which they raised the flag of the Irish Republic. Patrick Pearse, one of the rebel leaders, read out a ‘Proclamation of the Irish Republic’ to passing Dubliners. He declared ‘the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland’, and added that the new republic would ‘guarantee religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities’.

Pearse called for his fellow Irishmen and women to rise up, yet very few Dubliners showed any interest in doing so. Some felt the rebellion unnecessary with the Home Rule Bill already on the statute book, however uncertain its implementation date. Others considered it an act of questionable opportunism when almost 200,000 Irishmen were fighting at the front. Nearly everyone in Dublin thought the insurrection was doomed to failure. Differences of opinion among the Irish Volunteers had resulted in the participation of just 1,500 men, and the abandonment of plans for a nationwide uprising in favour of one confined to Dublin. The rebels also lacked an adequate supply of arms, after the British navy intercepted a ship carrying German weapons to Dublin.

The British government decided that bullets and bombs would be more effective than a blockade of the Dublin GPO. Heavy artillery was fired from a battery in Trinity College and from a patrol vessel on the Liffey, reducing the square mile around the Post Office to rubble. After a few days of bombardment and bloody street fighting, which saw the death of 200 combatants and 250 civilians, the rebels surrendered. Westminster’s rule in Ireland was restored and martial law was introduced, with military personnel taking control of the government of the country. Almost 200 rebels faced courts martial that were later deemed illegal, because they were held in secret and conducted by men who had suppressed the uprising. Ninety insurgents were sentenced to death; fifteen of these men had their sentences confirmed, including several men who had neither led the uprising nor been responsible for any deaths. The executions were carried out by firing squad in the first weeks of May 1916.

Edward Carson applauded the government’s draconian response. He told the Commons the rebellion ‘ought to be put down with courage and determination, and with an example which would prevent a revival’. Redmond also initially supported the executions, though he later became concerned that they would undermine popular support for constitutional nationalism and urged Asquith to stop the shooting. The prime minister eventually agreed that a ‘large number’ of executions might ‘sow the seeds of lasting trouble’ and ordered that they should cease.

Yet the damage had been done. Nationalist opinion in Ireland was becoming radicalized. ‘Changed, changed utterly,’ wrote the poet W. B. Yeats in his poem ‘Easter, 1916’. ‘A terrible beauty is born.’ The executed men were elevated to the status of martyrs by an Irish population that had been indifferent, ambivalent or hostile to the uprising itself. Some Irish people were stirred by the inhumanity of the executions, others by the rebels’ ‘sacrifice’. The bombardment of Dublin, news of atrocities committed by the British troops during the uprising and the summary justice of British officials after it, inspired aversion to British colonial rule in Ireland. The spectre of conscription also roused nationalist opinion. An unpopular, apparently futile and largely symbolic revolution had succeeded in awakening Irish opinion. The ultranationalist political party Sinn Féin would soon reap the electoral benefits of radicalization; they, rather than the IPP, now represented the nationalist cause.

The executions also outraged progressive opinion in England. One Liberal MP demanded that no more Irish people be put to death without a civic trial; another called for the prosecution of those who first imported arms to Ireland – the Ulster Unionists, with the tacit consent of the Tory Unionists, since it was the arrival of guns that had prompted the Irish Volunteers to arm in 1914. Asquith responded to the criticism by asking Lloyd George to arrange a deal between the Unionists and the IPP that would lead to the immediate implementation of Home Rule. Using all his charm and cunning, Lloyd George succeeded in persuading Redmond, Carson and Balfour to sign up to a plan that would exclude six counties of Ulster for the duration of war, with the promise to review the situation after hostilities had ceased. But the deal broke down when the ‘die-hard’ Tories in the cabinet demanded the permanent exclusion of the six counties, and Law withdrew from the negotiations. In the absence of a compromise in his cabinet, Asquith felt powerless to do anything; nothing, therefore, was done. Ireland was still ruled from Westminster, and nationalist feeling in the country continued to increase.

During the Easter Rising, word reached England that the eastern offensive of the Russians had collapsed. News from elsewhere was no better. At the end of May, German warships attacked the British Grand Fleet off the North Sea coast of Denmark’s Jutland Peninsula. Although the German ship Lützow received twenty-four direct hits, it still managed to sink British ships including HMS Invincible, killing over 6,000 British seamen. When news of the deaths reached England, people were shocked and bewildered. In the immediate aftermath of the battle, the Kaiser boasted that ‘the spell of Trafalgar is broken’, yet it was not as simple as that. A full analysis of the battle revealed that the Germans had also sustained serious losses; moreover, they had failed to achieve the twin aims of their mission – access to the United Kingdom and the Atlantic, and the crippling of the British fleet. Henceforth Germany would concentrate on submarine attacks against shipping in, or close to, British waters, a strategy that would have momentous consequences for the outcome of the war.

Meanwhile, on the Western Front, relentless inconclusive battles undermined the belligerents. The number of dead and wounded could not be comprehended, let alone endured. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme (1 July 1916), there were nearly 60,000 British casualties, with almost 20,000 men killed – the heaviest losses for a single combat in the army’s history. ‘By the end of the day,’ wrote the poet Edmund Blunden, ‘both sides had seen, in a sad scrawl of broken earth and murdered men, no road. No thoroughfare. Neither had won, nor could win, the War.’ The battle, lasting for more than four months, achieved nothing. The Allies advanced about six miles into German-occupied territory, but the Germans dug in and defended their new position. The price of the meagre advance? Over 350,000 British casualties, and over a million on all sides, in what was the bloodiest battle in history. No wonder the Somme became a symbol of the mud, blood and futility that characterized war in the West, or that English troops referred to it as ‘The Great F*** Up’.

The endless slaughter prompted English soldiers to ask why they were fighting. The French were defending their homeland, but that wasn’t the case for the British. Combatants also questioned the competence of Britain’s military hierarchy. Were their current tactics productive of anything other than carnage, as German machine guns mowed down row after row of attacking British privates?

Criticism of the army elite was sometimes couched in the language of intergenerational antagonism, but more often it was informed by class conflict. The author J. B. Priestley, who was shot, bombed and poisoned by gas on the Western Front, deplored the fact that ‘The British Army never saw itself as a citizens’ army [but] behaved as if a small gentlemanly officer class still had to make soldiers out of under-gardener’s runaway sons and slum lads … The traditions of an officer class killed most of my friends.’ The class antagonism experienced by the soldiers would be a prominent feature in the post-war political and social environment.

The writings of authors of the lieutenant and captain class contain powerful criticisms of the war, as well as vivid evocations of life on the Western Front. In Wilfred Owen’s verse innocent soldiers die, ‘guttering’ and ‘choking’, for empty patriotic slogans such as Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori (‘How sweet and honourable it is to die for one’s country’). In the pages of Robert Graves’s autobiography Good-Bye to All That (1929), the voices of the privates rise up again from no man’s land: ‘Not cowards, sir. Willing enough. But we’re all f—ing dead.’

Lloyd George was appalled by the lack of military progress and determined to take a more prominent role in deciding strategy. His opportunity came in the summer of 1916, when HMS Hampshire was sunk by a German mine and Kitchener was among the drowned soldiers. On taking over as war secretary he fired off countless directives to the generals, in defiance of their objection to ‘civilian interference’; he also dismissed his Liberal colleagues’ proposal for a negotiated peace. Despite his new responsibilities, Lloyd George had energy left over to plot behind the scenes, frequently briefing the press about Asquith’s lack of vision, energy and flair.

In the autumn of 1916 the war secretary informed his political allies that reorganization was essential. He proposed a small war council ‘free from the “dead hand” of Asquith’s inertia’, which he would lead himself. The prime minister was dismayed, and rejected the plan. Before making his next move, Lloyd George consulted Law and Carson, who appeared inclined to support him rather than Asquith; their reaction emboldened him to resign. Over the coming weeks, there was much discussion between Lloyd George, Asquith and the Unionists, but when no compromise could be found, Asquith saw no alternative but to resign. Law was asked to form a government but declined to do so since the Liberals would not serve in it. The king then turned to Lloyd George.

The king accused Lloyd George of behaving like a blackmailer during the controversy, while Churchill said he effectively seized power. While these are exaggerations, Lloyd George undoubtedly displayed ruthlessness and certainly bears the main responsibility for forcing out Asquith. On leaving Downing Street, Asquith compared himself to Job, the Old Testament patriarch who endures appalling suffering through no fault of his own. The English public’s reaction was sympathetic to a departing prime minister who had recently lost his eldest son in the war. Yet most people probably shared the view of Douglas Haig, the commander of the British forces: ‘I am personally very sorry for poor old Squiff. However, I expect more action and less talk is needed now.’

Most Liberal MPs tried to comfort Asquith in his distress, as did the party’s rank and file in London and the south of England. The Liberals now became the official opposition to Lloyd George’s coalition, though they were reluctant to oppose the conduct of a war which they themselves had begun. They were united only by a devotion to laissez-faire economics and a dislike, in Asquith’s phrase, of the new prime minister’s ‘incurable defects of character’. The Nonconformist and provincial sections of the Liberal membership, however, supported Lloyd George, as did a handful of Liberal MPs, including Churchill. More Liberal MPs would join the coalition in time.

The Liberal party thus split, just as it had done thirty years previously over Irish Home Rule. On this occasion, however, the schism would be fatal. Unlike Gladstone’s party of the 1880s, Asquith’s Liberals lacked a coherent political credo and a secure social base. Nonconformism no longer provided a popular political ideology, and the causes of free trade, laissez-faire economics and Irish Home Rule were now immaterial. The key economic and social struggle of the first half of the twentieth century was between capital and labour, and neither side looked to the Liberal party as its champion. For the workers, Labour was the new lodestar, while the representatives of capital and industrial wealth increasingly looked to the Tories. But the party of old England was also changing in response to the changing times, absorbing and promoting new men with new ideas, such as Law and Baldwin. They had far greater financial resources than the Liberals, too, and better links with the social elite and the press. Moreover, the British electoral system encouraged division between two main parties with contrasting creeds. A third, smaller party, with a more fluid identity, would always be under-represented in parliament.

With the exception of Lloyd George himself, Liberals did not appear in the new coalition’s war cabinet. The Unionists also dominated the wider administration, with Balfour at the Foreign Office and Carson at the Admiralty. Law now led the Commons, and the veteran Tory Lord Curzon the Lords. Lloyd George aside, the only indication the government was a ‘national coalition’, rather than a Unionist administration, was the presence of Labour’s Henderson in the war cabinet. Lloyd George was now, in effect, a president without a party. He deftly presided over the cabinet and oversaw the various ministries of government, to which he appointed his friends from the business world.

This system gave Lloyd George absolute control over home affairs, and considerable influence over the conduct of the war. ‘He pulled the levers,’ one government official wrote, ‘and the traffic moved in Westminster, in Fleet Street, in party offices, in town and village halls, in polling booths.’ Churchill, who joined the government as minister of munitions, was enthusiastic about Lloyd George’s despotism, while leading Unionists accepted the situation because it gave them influence without responsibility. ‘If the remarkable, unscrupulous little man wants to be a dictator,’ commented Balfour, ‘let him be.’ Over the ensuing months, Law and Lloyd George would form a successful working partnership, despite the striking contrast in their characters.

The king was among the many people who accused Lloyd George of mendacity, and nor was that the monarch’s only complaint about his new prime minister. Lloyd George regularly neglected to reply to his letters and often failed to appear when summoned to Buckingham Palace. The man who had risen in politics through his own merits had nothing but contempt for hereditary monarchy; he took pleasure in treating the king ‘abominably’, to use George V’s own term. Here was another wartime revolution – a middle-class politician intimidating the king. Lloyd George’s reputation as a ‘man of the people’ was also enhanced when he recruited three ministers from the Labour party to the coalition.

Lloyd George described his government as a ‘win the war’ coalition. He used the terrors on the battlefields of France as an argument for continuing the conflict, declaring that the ‘perpetrators’ must be ‘punished’. His message was faithfully broadcast by his old ally Lord Northcliffe and by Max Aitken, the owner of the Daily Express. Aitken, who had been instrumental in the removal of Asquith from office, would soon be elevated to the peerage as Lord Beaverbrook and appointed the coalition’s minister of information. Lloyd George’s propaganda efforts largely ensured that the country, however uneasily, still supported the war.

The prime minister, however, was eager to increase the war’s popularity by delivering a ‘knock-out blow’. He believed no mission was impossible – British troops could capture Jerusalem, help the Italians defeat Austria-Hungary or even gain the elusive breakthrough in France. In order to achieve that last aim, Lloyd George removed Britain’s largely incompetent military high command and placed the army under the authority of Robert Nivelle, a French general. Yet the next major engagement, at Arras in April 1917, was no more decisive and no less bloody than the battles preceding it.

In the same month, however, an incident took place that was to prove decisive in determining the outcome of the war. Over the previous few months Germany had conducted indiscriminate submarine attacks on any ships entering British waters, in an attempt to blockade Britain and starve her population into submission. The strategy resulted in the sinking of several vessels from the United States. The Americans were so incensed by the attacks that, on 16 April, they declared war on Germany. It was hoped that the United States might tip the scales in the Allies’ favour, though it would be months before American men and supplies reached the Western Front.

But as one ally was gained, another was lost. In Russia, the starved and weary population brought down Tsar Nicholas II, in what became known as the February Revolution, and a provisional government assumed power in his place. At first, Lloyd George welcomed the fall of the House of Romanov, and the opportunity to present the war as a moral struggle between the liberal ‘democratic’ Allies and the autocratic Central Powers. Yet Russia’s new government turned out to be unenthusiastic about a military crusade and proposed a peace with no annexations and indemnities.

Lloyd George’s strategy suffered a further blow in April, when the revolutionary Bolshevik leader Lenin arrived in Petrograd, in a train laid on by the Germans, to denounce the imperialist war. ‘The war,’ he declared, ‘is being waged for the division of colonies and the robbery of foreign territory; thieves have fallen out … to identify the interests of the thieves with the interests of the nation is an unconscionable bourgeois lie.’ It was a view that won wide acceptance in Russia, and also among the hungry working classes of Europe. Lenin’s Bolsheviks would become increasingly powerful over the coming months, and in November they would storm Petrograd’s Winter Palace, the seat of Russia’s government, and establish a ‘Soviet republic’. As head of the first ever socialist state, Lenin would end Russia’s involvement in the war by signing a treaty with Germany.

As the revolution unfolded in Russia there was no change on the Western Front. While the imminent arrival of thousands of American soldiers appeared to increase Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig’s confidence, it also prompted him to attempt to finish the job before the Americans reached France, no doubt in order to claim more glory for himself. Haig now believed the British could retake Ypres, march on to the Belgian coast and precipitate the fall of the German front. Lloyd George cautioned him against hubris and hastiness, but Haig silenced the doubters in the government and another bloody battle began, this time at Passchendaele, in July 1917. When the first British assault failed, Haig did not call off the operation, as he had promised; he remained convinced of a ‘tremendous’ breakthrough.

The battle persisted through August, September and October, with no breakthrough. The unseasonably early rains, and the volume of weapons and horses dragged over the terrain, turned the battlefield into a deadly morass in which thousands of soldiers drowned. During the ‘Battle of the Mud’ there were around 300,000 casualties on both sides, and once more the sacrifice of the Allied soldiers achieved little or nothing. Although Passchendaele was eventually taken in November, by a Canadian corps, there was no decisive victory.

By the closing months of 1917 there was no prospect of victory in sight. Because of the German submarine blockade, supplies of wheat in England were running low and compulsory rationing was introduced. The terrifying Zeppelins once more appeared in the London skies, where they were joined by Gotha aeroplanes. As the German aircraft rained down bombs on the English capital, 300,000 of its inhabitants took refuge in the Underground every night. Calls for a negotiated settlement with Germany could now be heard among the people; the campaigners for peace were now as vociferous as the propagandists for war. Numerous Labour supporters wanted to follow Soviet Russia and sign a treaty with the Germans, while Henderson resigned from the coalition in protest at its lack of engagement with European socialism. Even Unionist support for the war appeared to be waning; one leading light of the party warned that ‘prolongation will spell ruin for the civilised world’.

As the war entered its fourth calendar year, there was no enthusiasm for it in England. Events in the spring of 1918 only darkened the mood. The German army, reinforced by soldiers transferred from the Eastern Front as a result of its treaty with Russia, decided to embark on a major offensive to take advantage of its numerical superiority before soldiers from the United States joined the Allies. General Ludendorff’s plan was to break through the opposition and then attack its trenches from behind. It enjoyed an excellent start, when the Germans overwhelmed the British at the Somme and advanced forty miles towards Paris. For the retreating Allies, the situation was desperate.

With American reinforcements still some weeks away, Lloyd George urgently needed more men. His war cabinet decided to impose conscription on Ireland, promising the nationalists the immediate implementation of Home Rule in return. But few Irish people believed Lloyd George’s promise, and many were outraged that he had made Home Rule dependent on the acceptance of compulsory military service. Nationalist opinion was inflamed: leading Sinn Féin politicians, along with the hierarchy of the Irish Catholic Church, pledged themselves ‘to one another to resist conscription by the most effective means at our disposal’. Undaunted, Lloyd George passed the new conscription law, and arrested many of the Sinn Féin politicians on trumped-up charges of collusion with Germany. The arrests only served to further galvanize support for nationalism in Ireland, while attempts by the British administration to implement the conscription law were unsuccessful.

Although there were no reinforcements from Ireland, the Allies managed to survive on the Western Front until the American soldiers started to arrive in the early summer of 1918. Around one and a half million United States troops landed in France, with 10,000 men sent to the Allied front every day. Reinforced by the American contingents, the Allies began a counteroffensive which would see the Germans retreat over all the ground they had taken in the spring. On the first day of the Battle of Amiens in August, a day Ludendorff called ‘the black day of the German Army’, the Allied forces advanced seven miles.

As the Germans were pressed back across France, news reached them that Turkish forces had collapsed in the east, giving the Allies an open road into Austria-Hungary. German soldiers began to surrender and desert en masse, while a German population facing starvation called for the end of the war. Politicians in Germany realized the war was lost. The German generals also reluctantly admitted defeat, but refused to take responsibility for it, thereby propagating the myth that the politicians had ‘stabbed them in the back’ by forcing them to sue for peace. The Kaiser abdicated and a German Republic was proclaimed, while Austria-Hungary disintegrated into numerous individual states.

On 11 November 1918, the German generals signed the Armistice. This agreement ended a global conflict that had lasted over four years, claimed around 18 million lives and left 23 million people seriously wounded, with millions more ill and homeless. The war also put unprecedented strain on the economic, social and cultural fabric of participating countries, as the example of Russia demonstrated. One English soldier, who was lucky enough to return from the front, described the war as ‘the suicide of Western civilization’.

14

The regiment of women

The war had offered abundant evidence that women were neither naturally passive nor destined by their sex to be ‘angels in the house’. During the conflict they had also demonstrated their fitness for ‘men’s work’ – by 1918 female workers were visible in shops and offices, on trams and trains, and in banks and schools. Women now went down mines, drove vehicles and worked on the land. They were employed in the civil service as well as in factories, while hundreds of thousands worked in government-run armaments plants. Many female munitions workers had left their family homes to live in lodgings or purpose-built hostels near the factories, becoming physically and economically independent from their parents or employers. While their earnings lagged far behind those of their male counterparts, women now earned on average twice as much as they had before the war period. For the first time in history, lower-middle-class and workingclass women – the unmarried as well as the married – had money in their pockets.

During the war almost 60,000 women also volunteered to serve in the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. They were employed as clerks, mechanics, nurses and munitions workers at home, or sent to the Western Front to work as cooks and medical personnel. The Corps was directed by the physician Mona Chalmers Watson, who believed it represented ‘an advance of the women’s movement’ that softened the frontiers of gender. The ‘war-working type of woman’ appeared on the home front, sporting cropped hair, overalls and boots. Given the nature of their work, and the wartime fabric shortages, their attire had to be plain and practical. Frilly Edwardian dresses were replaced by short skirts, trousers or shorts. Along with the new jobs, clothes and freedom came a new confidence, which bred a determination never to return to the old dispensation.

The male establishment was fulsome in its praise of the women’s war effort. ‘How could we have carried on the war without them?’ Asquith remarked. ‘Short of actually bearing arms in the field, there is hardly a service … in which women have not been as active and as efficient as men.’ The former prime minister now declared himself a convert to the cause of women’s enfranchisement. As the fighting came to an end, many politicians agreed that granting women the vote might be a ‘fitting recognition’ of their contribution to the war. In private they admitted to other, more pragmatic reasons for extending the franchise: ‘As the atmosphere after the conclusion of the war cannot be calm,’ remarked one Liberal peer, there might be a return to pre-war suffragette agitation ‘if the grant of the vote is refused’. When a law conceding the vote to women over thirty reached the statute book in 1918, the victory belonged to the suffragettes who had campaigned before the war as well as to the women who had served during it.

The 1918 Representation of the People Act enfranchised over 8 million women, yet it was hardly a fitting recognition of women’s great wartime contribution, let alone an adequate response to suffragette calls for electoral equality. Under the terms of the act younger women were still denied the vote. As for parity with men, it preserved the gender gap by enfranchising all men over twenty-one years of age and all servicemen over nineteen, regardless of property qualification. In contrast, women over thirty received the vote only if they were either a member or married to a member of the Local Government Register, a property owner or a graduate voting in a university constituency. The extension of the male franchise added over 5 million men to the electorate, and meant that women accounted for approximately 35 per cent of all voters, despite outnumbering men by almost 2 million.

The 1918 Representation of the People Act set the tone of post-war legislation relating to women. New laws promised great steps forward, but equality remained distant. As a result of the 1919 Sexual Disqualification Act and the Employment of Women, Young Persons, and Children Act 1920, women could no longer be sacked because of their sex, while they were also permitted to become MPs, university students, architects and lawyers. Yet they were still barred from Cambridge University and the Stock Exchange, while their entry into medical professions was severely restricted.

One of the biggest blows to the cause of female equality was the dismissal of 750,000 women who had worked in factories on the home front, which left the proportion of females in employment lower than it had been before the war. The 1918 Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act effectively re-established women as second-class workers, much to the relief of the overwhelmingly male trade unions who were anxious to secure work for male members returning from the front. Many on the left preached equality, but only for men. Labour was still a masculine party, despite the fact that work was no longer an exclusively male preserve. Some Labour MPs joined Unionists and right-wing male journalists in blaming the widespread male unemployment of the early Twenties on women. Few now spoke of women as the ‘saviours of the nation’.

During the Twenties, the attacks on women’s independence continued. Legislation specifically aimed at women tended to identify them as wives and mothers by concentrating on maternity or widowhood. A marriage bar was also introduced in professions such as the civil service and teaching, which meant that the many women who had been employed in these sectors in wartime now had to choose between work and marriage, with the implicit encouragement to select the latter.

Yet veteran feminists were on hand to protect the younger generation of women from the propaganda. The British author Rebecca West explained to her young ‘sisters’ that ‘the woman who does not realize that by reason of her sex she lives in a beleaguered city, is a fool who deserves to lose (as she certainly will) all the privileges that have been won for her by her more robustly minded sisters’. Guided by the old guard, many young women were able to lead confident and independent lives, despite the male establishment. The self-assurance of the young women of the decade seemed so radical to contemporaries that they were given a new name: ‘flappers’. In the Victorian era, a flapper had been a child prostitute; in Edwardian England it was applied to young women who enjoyed the latest dances. The post-war flapper came to denote a young, zesty and sexually confident girl. By the early Twenties the term would imply all of these elements, and more – youth, unconventionality, impetuousness, independence, sexual heterodoxy, hedonism, confidence, high-spiritedness, a passion for fashion and the mimicking of masculinity.

The word ‘flapper’ was uttered by middle-aged men in a tone of stern disapproval. In a public lecture, one physician, Dr R. Murray-Leslie, condemned ‘the social butterfly type … the frivolous, irresponsible, undisciplined, scantily clad, jazzing “flapper”’. Yet demographics were against these male critics, since women now outnumbered men, especially among the younger sections of the population. The spirit of the age also favoured the flappers. In the Twenties young people were determined to drink and dance away the searing memories of war, while the old men who had brought about the carnage were to be laughed at, lambasted or ignored. Young women proudly appropriated the word flapper, using it to describe themselves and their sisters.

Some flappers came from the lower middle classes. Secretaries, waitresses, journalists, receptionists, teachers and shop assistants worked hard by day and caroused by night. Many of these ‘career girls’ were able to maintain independence from their families. Even if most could not afford to live away from their parents, they insisted on having a key to let themselves in after a ‘night on the tiles’. Yet it was mainly upper-middle-class or upper-class flappers who attracted the eye of novelists and journalists in the Twenties. Nina Blount, the daughter of a wealthy colonel in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Vile Bodies (1930), offers a glorious archetype. On being asked if she’d ‘mind’ being seduced, she replies ‘not as much as all that’. The sexual experience following this exchange was probably unsatisfactory, to judge by a comment Nina makes later in the novel: ‘All this fuss about sleeping together. For physical pleasure, I’d sooner go to my dentist any day.’

Sex was a favourite topic of conversation among flappers. ‘We talk of everything,’ wrote a young woman in Eve magazine, ‘we do not rule out one single emotion or experience as being impossible or improper.’ Feminism informed and animated such behaviour. In the Twenties feminists encouraged their sisters to use birth control as a way to obtain freedom from birthing, domestic responsibility and lack of money. Contraceptives also offered women the chance to explore their impulses, tastes and capacity for pleasure. The intellectual Dora Russell described sex as ‘a thing of dignity, beauty and delight’ for women – ‘even without children, even without marriage’, physical satisfaction was possible for all. The most influential propagandist of the period was Marie Stopes. She established a birth control clinic in London, and disseminated knowledge of contraception through her book Married Love, a bestseller on its publication in 1918. Stopes encouraged women to see themselves as more than ‘the passive instrument of man’s need’, and to explore sexual pleasure as something of ‘supreme value in itself’.

This was a revolution without an articulated aim or ideology, yet the flappers were, in their own style, practical feminists. It was absolutely outrageous, according to some journalists, that a young, unchaperoned woman should be seen in public with a young man, let alone meet him in private. Meanwhile, the consequences of liaisons among the unmarried were too horrifying to be named: the newspapers referred to the increasing numbers of unmarried women who became pregnant as being in ‘a certain condition’. Fathers lectured their daughters on the dangers of lechery, drunkenness and stopping out late. Girls were warned that a quarter of London taxis participated in the slave trade; they had no handles on the inside, so passengers could not escape.

Ignoring the propaganda, the flappers strutted on the nocturnal streets of England’s cities, looking for places to dance. Upper-and upper-middle-class girls would be dropped off at classes in hotels or private houses by a chaperone or chauffeur, while those lower down the social scale would walk or take the tram or bus to lessons at the town hall. To a piano accompaniment, the teacher would help them master the steps of the dance currently in vogue. The jive, the one-step, the Black Bottom, the Lindy Hop, the shimmy, the Varsity Drag and the fast foxtrot all enjoyed brief popularity during the decade; from 1925 everyone was doing the Charleston, described by an outraged newspaper as ‘freakish, degenerate, negroid’.

Most of the new dances came from the United States, and were characterized by vigour, gaiety and informality. Unlike the pre-war waltzes, everyone could do the Black Bottom, however they were dressed and wherever they happened to be. They were democratic dances for an age of burgeoning democracy. Some of the new steps had been imported by American soldiers, who had stayed in England after the end of the war; others featured in the American films that were shown in cinemas across the country. They were known as ‘rag dances’ because they were accompanied by ragtime piano tunes, or by the music that would come to define the decade – jazz. The word ‘jazz’ – a Creole euphemism for sex – covered a multitude of musical forms with syncopated rhythm, intermittent improvisation and an air of freedom and exultation. From its opening in 1919, the Palais de Danse in London’s Hammersmith hosted American jazz groups such as the Original Dixieland Jazz Band. Outside of London, the purpose-built dance halls would arrive a little later.

Flappers also danced the night away at private parties. An upper-class hostess would invite friends round, often at only a few hours’ notice, and after dinner the guests danced to ragtime music. If there were no musicians available a gramophone would suffice, since they had become much cheaper and more compact; in the absence of a gramophone, a wireless would do. Chaperones, known as ‘dancing mothers’, or more colloquially as ‘alarm clocks’ and ‘fire extinguishers’, would keep an eye on proceedings.

The other great dancing venues of the period were the nightclubs, which opened across London despite being regularly persecuted under the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act. The act, which had given wartime government extensive powers over society and culture, allowed the government to shut down places of entertainment should they be used for ‘immoral’ purposes. This gave nightclubs an air of illegality, which was enhanced by reports of the drug-fuelled orgies that supposedly took place inside them. The flappers who congregated at underground clubs such as the frequently raided ‘43’ on Soho’s Gerrard Street would mingle with aristocratic bohemians, the criminal elite, Oxbridge undergraduates and sports personalities. This establishment was run by the redoubtable Irishwoman Kate Meyrick, until she was caught serving intoxicating liquor without a licence and sent to prison for six months. Undaunted, she opened the Silver Slipper after her release, a club famous for its glass dance floor.

Other forms of pleasure available to flappers at clubs included cocktails and cigarettes. It was the first time women had smoked cigarettes in public, and the flappers flaunted their freedom by using ostentatiously long cigarette holders. Cocktails were regarded by many as the most romantic expression of modern life; Martinis, Manhattans, Bronxes and White Ladies all took their turn as the drink of choice. Some nightclubs also offered a new form of entertainment called ‘cabaret’, which consisted of floor shows featuring music, dance and song, with the performers either on stage or moving between the tables.

It would have been impossible to perform the dances favoured by the flappers, or to engage in other pursuits such as tennis, cycling and riding pillion on a motorcycle, in the laces, buttons and hoops that had impeded women’s breathing and movement before the war. Simplicity, lightness and comfort were all, with Coco Chanel’s ‘little black dress’ of 1926 emblematic of the period. Along with simplicity came inexpensiveness: dresses could be sewn at home from a single yard of fabric, and if the fabric was rayon, or ‘artificial silk’, the saving was all the greater.

For the first time in history, women aspired to boyish figures, with straight waists, flat chests and slender thighs, hips and buttocks. Achieving the desired androgynous physique was not easy for some, and many flappers turned to diets, massage, swimming and exercises, while others relied on clothes to suggest boyish slenderness. Where corsets had once accentuated the bust, breasts were now flattened by tight bodices or brassieres. Waists were eliminated, along with hips, by dresses that were straight, loose and cylindrical, and by baggy trousers. In donning trousers, some flappers wanted to allude to the uniforms factory women had worn during the war; it was a way of celebrating social and political emancipation. They also used clothes to proclaim their pleasure in sex and fleshliness. Flapper dresses, often dipping low at the front and back, were sleeveless and short; their skirts inched up the legs as the decade progressed.

‘In times of war and social upheaval,’ commented one fashion expert, ‘the tendency for women to cut off their hair seems almost to be irresistible.’ The bobs and the crops were often topped by the fashion sensation of the decade – the cloche hat spawned scores of imitations, and helmet-like hats appeared in shops everywhere. Some flappers preferred to wear them so low that the brim covered their eyebrows, but those who put on make-up raised the brims to show off the kohl and mascara around their eyes. Through such cosmetic means these women would achieve the desired look for a particular evening: ‘ethereal’ and ‘starved’ were among the most popular. Flappers who preferred a mischievous ‘little-girl’ pose painted their lips in a ‘cupid’s bow’ shape. Their widespread application of make-up was another audacious gesture; before the war cosmetics had been generally associated with whores and actresses.

Along with fashions in clothes came fashions in language. To express approval, a flapper might call something ‘jazz’, ‘the bee’s knees’ or ‘the cat’s meow’; disapprobation was indicated by epithets such as ‘Victorian’, ‘stuffy’ and ‘junk’. Boring men were ‘pillow cases’, and young men any girl could ‘borrow’ for the evening were ‘umbrellas’. Women eager for experience were admiringly known as ‘biscuits’, but if a girl stole a friend’s boyfriend she became a ‘strike-breaker’. In such epithets and phrases, we can hear an echo of the confidence and irreverence of the young women of post-war England.

15

The clock stops

Failure to grant electoral equality to women was not the only limitation of the 1918 Representation of the People Act. It also stopped short of establishing the principle of ‘one man, one vote’ in the constituency of residence – around one and a half million middle-class men enjoyed an extra vote, because of their ability to vote in university constituencies or in constituencies where their businesses operated. Neither did it introduce any proportional representation into the electoral system, but instead maintained the first-past-the-post formula, which strongly favoured the more established parties. The continued use of this system created widespread disillusionment among English voters. What was the point of voting for one’s preferred party in a constituency where it had no chance of winning?

Yet despite these defects, the 1918 Representation of the People Act was a revolutionary piece of legislation, tripling the electorate to around 21 million. It gave the majority of workingclass men a stake in society by granting them the vote for the first time. Like the enfranchisement of women over the age of thirty, the granting of the vote to workingclass men was regarded by some politicians as a reward for the enormous contribution these men had made to the war effort, both at home and on the Western Front. It was also an acknowledgement of the status and power that Labour and the unions had achieved during the war, and a pragmatic concession from a political establishment that feared a return to pre-war industrial unrest.

The consequences of enfranchising 14 million women and workingclass men would soon be evident; Lloyd George called a general election immediately after the armistice. Officially he sought a popular mandate to negotiate a lasting post-war international settlement, and to implement a programme of social and economic reconstruction. Yet there were also political reasons for calling an election. Lloyd George wanted to capitalize on his reputation as ‘The Man Who Won the War’ and as the prime minister who could, in Churchill’s phrase, ‘get things done’. The only problem was that he no longer had a strong and united party behind him. Only half of the Liberal MPs in the 1918 Commons backed him, the others standing by Asquith in principled but hopeless opposition. The prime minister also lacked a coherent political credo – traditional Liberalism had been exploded by the experience of war.

But the celebrated political fixer soon came up with a solution: a continuation of the national coalition, in peacetime, under his leadership. Lloyd George believed the traditional battle lines between the parties had become obscured during the war, events having blunted the divisiveness of debates surrounding free trade and protection, jingoism and anti-imperialism, state intervention and private enterprise. He hoped that consensus politics had replaced the old tribal and class-or interest-based politics and that he would emerge as a presidential figure with cross-party appeal. The Unionists signed up to his plan, partly because Lloyd George was unassailable. The party lacked a leader with the prime minister’s popular appeal and doubted its ability to appeal to newly enfranchised workingclass voters. Moreover, some Tories sensed the opportunity of destroying the Liberal party by driving a wedge between the coalition Liberals and the ‘Squiffites’.

The Labour party declined the invitation to remain in the coalition, preferring to work alone. The addition of a great swathe of the working class to the electorate gave them confidence, as did the doubling of the party membership to 3 million during the war, and the enhanced status and size of the unions, which now comprised 8 million members. The increase in subscriptions gave the party the resources to expand its National Executive and establish a network of branches throughout the country. The party’s recent experience of government, together with the demise of the Liberals, inspired optimism throughout its ranks, as did the fact that a socialist economy had been established during the war and accepted by the population.

Labour also believed it could exploit the radicalism that was sweeping across England after the war. People wanted to build a new and better society, and were determined that a capitalist or imperialistic conflict should never break out again. According to George Orwell: ‘After that unspeakable idiotic mess you couldn’t go on regarding society as something eternal and unquestionable … You knew it was just a balls-up.’ A similar attitude may have prompted people to protest and riot during the 1919 Peace Day celebrations, which had been organized by the government to encourage national unity. In Luton a crowd stormed and burned down the town hall. The leaders of the nation were perturbed. As one senior courtier, Lord Esher, remarked, ‘The Monarchy and its cost will now have to be justified in the eyes of a war-worn and hungry proletariat, endowed with a huge preponderance of voting power.’

Labour felt emboldened to formulate radical policy proposals, including the nationalization of the railways, the workers’ control of industry and a capital levy to eliminate the national debt. Since workingclass men had been conscripted to fight the war, trade unionists and Labour MPs argued that the ‘accumulated wealth’ of the middle and upper classes should be ‘conscripted to defray the financial liability incurred by the conflict’. The party also decided to adopt an overtly socialist creed, which would clearly distinguish it from its Liberal rivals. In its revised constitution of 1918, it pledged ‘to the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof … upon the basis of common ownership of the means of production and control of each industry and service’.

The reference to ‘workers by brain’ suggests an attempt by Labour to attract the middle classes and the intelligentsia that had been drawn to the reforming Liberal administrations before the war. The adoption of socialism as the official Labour doctrine manifests a desire to distance the party from the unions and to broaden its social appeal; socialism was an international, supra-class creed rather than a workingclass or trade unionist one. Ramsay MacDonald advocated nebulous and gradualist socialism that was tailored to appeal to ‘the middle section’ radicalized by the war, whose ‘nucleus is the intelligent artisan and the intellectual well-to-do’. Yet Labour’s espousal of socialism, however cautious, left it open to attack from the centre and the right. In the run-up to the 1918 election, Lloyd George’s friends in the conservative press raised the spectre of a Labour-sponsored socialist revolution, while the prime minister claimed that ‘The Labour Party is being run by the extreme pacifist, Bolshevik group.’ But Labour was not intimidated into abandoning its endorsement of socialism; it was convinced that the centre ground of politics had shifted to the left.

The national coalition won the election by an enormous margin, with Unionist and Liberal candidates who received a letter of endorsement from Lloyd George and Law claiming over 500 seats out of 700. To add to the prime minister’s delight, MacDonald lost his seat – evidence that Lloyd George’s anti-pacifist jibes had been effective. The result was an expression of the population’s overwhelming gratitude for his wartime heroics and an endorsement of his plans to rebuild the country. The election had been won through promises of a better future, and the electorate’s belief that Lloyd George and his Unionist allies could fulfil them. Young Unionist candidates, such as Neville Chamberlain (the second son of Joseph, and half-brother of Austen), secured their seats with the pledge to ‘show gratitude to those who have fought and died for England, by making it a better place to live in’.

Although the results were a cause of celebration for Lloyd George, they might also have given him cause for concern. Labour had attracted strong support among the newly enfranchised working classes, increasing its share of the popular vote from 6 per cent to 21 per cent and polling almost two and a half million votes, but the first-past-the-post system ensured that this failed to translate into parliamentary gains. Nevertheless sixty MPs represented a significant increase on the forty the party had returned in 1910. Labour was now a powerful national force, and the largest single British party of opposition. Meanwhile, virtually all the Irish constituencies outside the four Protestant-majority counties in north-east Ulster were won by the ultranationalist party Sinn Féin, which replaced the IPP as the official political voice of Ireland. Many of the elected Sinn Féin politicians were serving jail sentences; all the party’s MPs declined to take up their seats in Westminster, refusing to take the oath to the British monarch or to recognize the right of a British parliament to intervene in Irish affairs. Instead the politicians set up their own parliament, the Dáil Éireann, in Dublin. Lloyd George’s government would now have to answer an even more urgent ‘Irish question’ than the one with which Asquith’s administration had grappled before the war.

The demise of the IPP also deprived the Liberals of their traditional support from the Irish benches, one of the reasons why the 1918 election results represented a death sentence for the Liberal party. The official ‘Squiffite’ Liberals won a mere thirty-six seats, with Asquith himself losing in East Fife, while the coalition Liberals amassed only 127 seats, making them the junior partner in a Unionist-dominated coalition. The Unionists, with 382 seats, had such a large majority in the Commons that they could, in theory, form a government without Lloyd George whenever they wished. Their dominance was reflected in the cabinet Lloyd George assembled: Law was Lord Privy Seal and leader of the House of Commons, Austen Chamberlain was chancellor, and Balfour was foreign secretary.

The Unionists had performed a brilliant manoeuvre. Under the aegis of a resplendent Liberal war hero, they had appealed to the new workingclass electorate. They had also attracted a fair share of the women’s vote, thereby establishing a strong relationship with the female electorate that would last throughout the twentieth century. The party had, moreover, exploited and exacerbated divisions in the Liberal party, while replacing it as the unofficial representative of business. Many of the 260 new MPs were self-made businessmen, and the overwhelming majority sat on Unionist benches. These new arrivals, who were famously described by Stanley Baldwin as ‘hard-faced men who looked as if they had done very well out of the war’, effectively replaced the aristocracy as the lifeblood of the Tory party. Only a dozen heirs to the peerage were elected at the 1918 election, while there were four aristocrats in the coalition’s twenty-two-man cabinet. Lloyd George had hoped the election would herald the arrival of a new consensual coalition politics, but the parliament which assembled at the beginning of 1919 was as divided as ever. When the prime minister rose to address it, he saw ‘the TUC on the one side and the Associated Chambers of Commerce on the other’ – Labour represented the former, while the Unionists represented the latter. Who did the Liberals on the other benches represent?

Although he was now isolated at the head of a Unionist-dominated administration, things went well for Lloyd George at first. He established hegemony over his Unionist colleagues in the cabinet through a characteristic combination of flattery and bullying, and bypassed many of his ministers as he had done during the war. He also ignored parliament, preferring to deal with issues directly as they arose.

The battle to win the peace on the home front began well. An influenza epidemic, which had claimed over 200,000 British lives since the armistice, gradually abated. The English larder was slowly ‘demobilized’, with meat, sugar and butter coupons phased out. The political, social and industrial unrest feared by many in the government failed to materialize – the 1918 Representation of the People Act had satisfied the popular appetite for reform and the post-war economy was buoyant. The war had created a boom, with high government spending and inflation stimulating the manufacturing and agricultural sectors. The army of workers expanded with the return of men from the front, but they were absorbed into the growing economy, and unemployment rarely exceeded 1 million (though the 750,000 women dismissed from their positions to make way for the returning men were not included in the figures). The boom continued after the war, sustained by the lavish spending of people who had saved money during the conflict, and by the ‘new men’ who had made vast fortunes out of it. An insufficient supply of goods caused a rise in both prices and wages, which encouraged people to spend more, which further boosted wages and profits.

The extravagant spending of the population was matched by Lloyd George’s government as it attempted to inaugurate its reconstruction projects. In 1918 it introduced an Education Act which raised the school leaving age to fourteen. The following year it passed a Housing Act, through which the state accepted responsibility for housing the working classes. So long as the economy was booming and neither business nor wealth felt oppressed by taxation, the Unionists allowed the prime minister to keep public spending high.

Lloyd George was optimistic that he could also succeed in international affairs. In January 1919, he went to Versailles, where the victorious Allies would dictate peace terms to the defeated Central Powers. The prime minister was confident that he could help orchestrate an enduring peace settlement that would be favourable to Britain. His aim was to remove the possibility of future German aggression without undermining her capacity to act as a counterweight to Soviet Russia on the Continent. So far as Britain’s specific aims were concerned, much had been achieved prior to the conference. The German navy had been destroyed following the armistice, and the Allies had tacitly agreed to deprive Germany of her colonies and divide them up amongst themselves. In the event the British Empire would be extended by almost 2 million square miles in Africa, Palestine and Mesopotamia, incorporating 13 million new subjects. Lloyd George could afford to be magnanimous at Versailles.

He also aimed to maintain the close alliance with the United States formed during the latter stages of the war. To further that objective, he endorsed President Woodrow Wilson’s fourteen-point plan as the basis for the peace settlement. One point of Wilson’s proposal was national self-determination for European peoples who had formerly been part of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. Wilson and Lloyd George hoped that the emerging nation states would become harmonious liberal democracies, strong enough to resist the economic and political influence of Russia and Germany. Two other points of Wilson’s plan aimed to remove the potential causes of a future war. Armament reduction for all countries was proposed, along with the establishment of a ‘general association of nations’ for ‘the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small nations alike’. It was hoped that this association would replace the inherently unstable balance of power diplomacy.

On the German question, Lloyd George supported American attempts to curb France’s appetite for vengeance. The French were determined to reduce Germany’s frontiers and make the country pay onerous reparations, while Britain and the United States insisted that Germany should be diminished but not devastated, lest this create the conditions for future international discord. When the French proposed taking the Rhineland from Germany and establishing it as an independent state they were rebuffed; and when they suggested an exorbitant figure for German reparations, Lloyd George forced them to accept that the final amount of compensation would be decided at a later date.

Britain and the United States may have acted as a brake over these issues, but the French exacted revenge on Germany in other ways. The peace settlement of June 1919, which became known as the Versailles Treaty, restored to France the Alsace-Lorraine region which had been lost to Germany forty years previously, and permitted French soldiers to occupy the mineral-rich Saar region of Germany. It also declared the German city of Danzig a free state. Under the terms of the treaty, Germany lost 13 per cent of its pre-war European territory and 10 per cent of its pre-war population, while the German army was reduced to 100,000 men and the navy to 15,000. Germany was also forced to sign a ‘war guilt clause’, accepting responsibility for all the loss and damage of the war. The German government regarded this clause as a violation of honour and a lie, while one German official called the treaty ‘the continuation of the war by other means’. Over the next decade, the treaty’s punitive terms would provide a focus for popular anger in Germany, which would be expressed in support for the ultranationalist Nazi party.

It was not only the Germans who regarded the Versailles Treaty as harsh. The Cambridge economist and Treasury representative John Maynard Keynes argued that reparations were unwise because European harmony and prosperity were dependent on a strong Germany. Lloyd George agreed, but he was unable to convince the French that a powerful Germany was compatible with their security. Press and public opinion in Britain were also against him, with the right-wing newspapers conducting a ‘Make Germany Pay’ and ‘Hate the Huns’ campaign, supported by the Unionists. As a result Lloyd George was compelled to sign a treaty which he knew to be ‘greedy’ and ‘vindictive’ in its treatment of Germany, and unlikely to lay the foundations for a lasting European peace.

Neither did the treaty’s other clauses inspire much optimism among experienced observers. The numerous independent countries that emerged after the dismantling of the empires of the Central Powers, such as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, had no democratic traditions of their own; they also contained various, and often antagonistic, ethnic nationalities with historical links to the great continental powers. As for universal disarmament, none of the Allies was serious about reducing its arsenals and nor did the treaty clarify how many weapons should be decommissioned. Meanwhile, the forty-eight-member League of Nations, which was established to uphold peace, lacked an army and a navy. In their absence how could it police Europe effectively? The authority of the association was also undermined when the United States decided against joining, a retreat into isolation that was also a blow to Lloyd George’s diplomatic strategy. Since Britain lacked the military and economic capacity to supervise the globe alone, it required the assistance of the world’s emerging superpower. In the absence of a transatlantic alliance, Britain would be weaker and more isolated. It is unsurprising that English diplomats returned from Versailles in pessimistic mood. ‘If this was a war to make the world safe for democracy, it has failed,’ commented Lord Eustace Percy. ‘If it was a war to end war, it has left the future of the world more uncertain and more contentious.’

After signing the Versailles Treaty in June 1919, Lloyd George returned to an England barely recognizable from the one he had left. In the six months it had taken the Allies to share out the spoils of war, England’s economic boom had lost its momentum. ‘The whole thing came to an end, like the stopping of a clock,’ remembered Charles Masterman. The underlying cause of the recession was the international competition faced by Britain’s heavily indebted and technologically antiquated shipbuilding, coal and cotton industries. Meanwhile, the United States was enjoying the benefits of a technological revolution, based on automated machinery and new methods of management which ensured low-cost mass production. The native industries of India, Canada and South Africa were also flourishing. As British imports had not reached these imperial territories during the war, they had become self-sufficient. Engineering projects within the empire could now be carried out by local companies, and their products were more competitively priced. International demand for British produce was also affected by economic chaos on the Continent. How could the German people afford expensive British goods during the hyperinflation of the early Twenties?

Britain’s staple industries had received substantial investment during the war, and this was followed by an avalanche of orders in the immediate post-armistice period. Eight million tons of shipping lost in the conflict had to be replaced, and the shipbuilding, steel and iron giants had expanded to meet the demand. Yet wartime investment and post-war demand disguised the inherent weakness of these industries, as well as the serious damage done to the economy by the conflict. The country’s preoccupation with war had also offered the United States – which had been neutral from 1914 to 1917 – the opportunity to take over many of her customers. When government investment stopped, and the rush of post-war orders ended, Britain’s industries found themselves with a stockpile of expensive goods that no one wanted to buy. Total British exports were 20 per cent lower than they had been before the war, and Britain’s share of the world export market fell to 11 per cent, below that of the United States. To compound these problems, lavish post-war spending had stimulated inflation, and the government raised interest rates to keep prices under control. This discouraged borrowing and spending, and so reduced internal demand; it also meant that money borrowed in the lowinterest boom time would have to be paid back at higher rates. In consequence, many banks were overextended and many businesses collapsed.

Britain’s industrial activity and gross domestic product fell precipitately in 1920–21 and there was a sudden rise in unemployment. By the summer of 1921, unemployment in Britain exceeded 2 million (around 20 per cent of the working population). Long queues of men outside labour exchanges became a familiar sight in the old industrial centres of northern England. Among those waiting in line were many ex-soldiers, who came to the conclusion that the country they had fought for neither needed nor wanted them. ‘If they’d told me in France that I should come back to this,’ commented one former private, ‘I wouldn’t have believed it. Sometimes I wish to God the Germans had knocked me out.’

In a bid to avoid industrial and political unrest Lloyd George acted quickly, extending unemployment insurance in 1920 to all those who earned under five pounds per week. The following year he allowed the unemployed to continue to draw benefit beyond the maximum period allowed under the insurance scheme, as long as they could prove that they were genuinely seeking employment. The extension was necessary because people were now out of work for long periods. Yet Lloyd George’s decisiveness could not prevent protests and industrial action. In 1921 the first Hunger March from London to Brighton was organized by the recently formed National Unemployed Workers’ Movement. In 1920 and 1921 engineers, miners, railway workers, cotton spinners, shipyard workers and even the police went on strike for better job security and the maintenance of wages. In 1921 alone, 85 million working days were lost to industrial action.

The government feared that strikes might coalesce into one general strike that would bring the economy to a standstill. Lloyd George drew up plans for such an eventuality, which included the creation of a Defence Force of 75,000 men that would police the protests, run public transport and distribute food. The authorities were anxious. ‘The people grow discontented,’ remarked King George. ‘Riot begets revolt and possibly revolution.’ The elite had good reason to be fearful. The Soviet Workers’ State inspired sympathy in the left-wing press, and communist movements seemed on the verge of achieving power in Italy and Germany. In 1920 a British Communist party was established, its very existence encouraging the belief that capitalism was on the verge of collapse. Most economists did not share this view, but many had lost faith in the system’s power to improve living standards and reduce inequality.

Yet as the crisis continued into 1921, the prospect of a revolution receded. At the beginning of the year, the resolve of the strikers appeared to weaken; the government enfeebled it further through a combination of threats, empty promises and the offer of slightly higher wages and shorter hours. Lloyd George was in a strong bargaining position; high unemployment meant that no alternative employment was available to the striking workers – the choice was between accepting the employers’ terms or semi-starvation on the dole. The prime minister had strengthened his position further at the end of 1920 by introducing an Emergency Powers Act: the coalition was now empowered to govern by decree should there be the threat of industrial action. In the circumstances, the strikers had little choice but to back down, and a general strike in support of the miners planned for 15 April was called off. The date became known as ‘Black Friday’, because many on the left regarded it as the last day on which a war against the capitalists and the government might have been fought and won.