3

The Man Who Won the War 1916–22

THE WESTERN FRONT

We often speak of the First World War to distinguish it from the Second. Yet it was as early as 1920, in a book by Colonel Charles à Court Repington, The Times war correspondent, that this term was first given currency. Repington was stressing the unprecedented worldwide dimensions of a war that spread to Africa, where the German colonies were taken; to the Middle East, where the Ottoman Empire was the enemy; and to Asia, where Japan had been Britain’s ally since 1902. Yet not only the origin but the main theatre of the war lay in Europe. It was here that most of the troops from the Dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand fought, initially as part of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF), leaving the Indian Army to play a crucial role in the Middle East.

The western front, running from the Belgian coast, between Ostend and Dunkirk, winding across Flanders and France to the Swiss border, was settled by the end of 1914 and was to change little until 1918. So stable was the line that London stationers found it worth while to stock maps showing it. The trenches symbolized this war: a stage in the development of military technology in which defence had temporarily triumphed over offence, stacking the odds against attack. To gain even a few hundred metres of ground produced casualties on a scale never before seen in Europe (though the American Civil War had given a glimpse of the future).

The term contemporaries generally used was the Great War. From an early point the recruiting propaganda projected the stance into the future, asking women: ‘When the War is over and someone asks your husband or your son what he did in the great War, is he to hang his head because you would not let him go?’ A classic poster shows a pensive father dandling his embarrassingly interlocutive offspring: ‘Daddy, what did you do in the Great War?’ This projection into the future was one indication of a self-consciously momentous, heroic posture. It was an appeal to an idea of a Great War imagined, not a reflection of the immediate experience of the trenches.

One obvious contrast is between the early and late war poetry. Rupert Brooke was not unknown before the war, as one of the new generation of ‘Georgian’ poets. If it was one irony that the name of the new King, a wonderful philistine, should bless this aesthetic endeavour, it was not the last in Brooke’s charmed, doomed life. A Cambridge undergraduate of striking good looks, he had made women swoon (as well as Lytton Strachey). No nationalistic Tory in his politics – he and his Cambridge friends, like Hugh Dalton, were Fabians – Brooke found that the elevated diction of Georgian poetry was matched by the romantic patriotism which seized him in 1914.

Now God be thanked who has matched us with His Hour,

And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping.

His was a soldier’s death foretold in his war sonnets:

If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England.

What he could not have known was that this corner was to be on a Greek island, not Flanders; the cause of death a mosquito bite, not a German bayonet or bullet. But in the spring of 1915 his England needed a war hero. His friend Edward Marsh was private secretary to Winston Churchill, and Margot Asquith had more than once made Brooke welcome at 10 Downing Street. The publication of the war sonnets posthumously transformed him into a national figure who spoke for the idealism – and idealization – of the early part of the war.

Laurence Binyon’s much-quoted poem ‘For the Fallen’ remains memorable:

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

Remarkably, this was written only seven weeks after hostilities began. It is plain that Brooke was not the first but he became the most famous of the war poets, an early casualty who did not write at first hand of the western front. Though it is a mistake to suppose that the heroic register was lost, even in some poems composed right up to the Armistice, the sordid reality of life in trenches increasingly pervades the poetry – as in Wilfred Owen’s ‘… truth untold, / The pity of war, the pity war distilled’.

There was to be an extraordinarily rich harvest of war poetry from soldiers who stuck it out in the new armies during the years to come. Some of it was published at the time, like Siegfried Sassoon’s anti-war barrage, Counterattack (1918). Other poems, notably a full edition of Owen’s arguably homo-erotic oeuvre, had to wait half a century to appease the sensibilities of bereaved relatives. Together with Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves, these are the voices that cry out from the trenches in 1917–18; and the three survivors (Owen was killed a week before the Armistice) went on to recapture their experience in prose. In particular, with Good-Bye to All That (1929) Graves caught the crest of that mighty wave of anti-war literature which reared up at the end of the 1920s.

The privileged background of Sassoon, the fox-hunting man, is sufficently signalled in his work; Graves had been subjected to a hearty public-school education at Charterhouse, bullied because his middle name was von Ranke; Blunden was a scholarship boy who got to Oxford; Owen, from a fairly similar lower middle-class background, missed university. One way or another, they were all officers and gentlemen. Though the ideal temporary officer was straight from the Officers’ Training Corps of a recognized public school, a class analysis does not indicate the essential dichotomy which the western front imprinted on the war poets as on other subalterns serving in the line. Though they spoke as officers, they spoke for the men who were with them there – and spoke against almost everyone who escaped their unique, shared, incommunicable experience.

In peacetime the total size of the armed forces was about 400,000. By 1915 the figure had reached 2½ million; by 1916, with conscription, 3½ million; and in 1917–18 it stabilized at between 4 and 4½ million. At the peak this was one in three of the entire male labour force. It was one in two of the men of normal military age (eighteen to forty-one years old) subject to conscription from 1916. It was a higher proportion still of the young single men in Great Britain (conscription was never implemented in Ireland) who were the real target successively of the moral opprobrium of the recruiting posters, of Lord Derby, and finally of conscription. (In the final British assaults in 1918 half the infantry were under nineteen.) Not all of these 4½ million were soldiers, and not all soldiers served in Flanders or France; conversely, more British soldiers served in the Army, with periods at the front, than are shown in a snapshot at any one moment. Whichever way it is added up, the western front was, for a large proportion of men born in the last decade or so of the nineteenth century, the experience of a lifetime, sometimes the ultimate experience.

The casualties were horrific. It is the sheer cumulative impact of the losses, week by week and month by month, which is staggering. Perhaps the most remarkable record of the toll of war on this highly exposed generation is that by a woman, Vera Brittain, whose Testament of Youth (1933) was to be rediscovered, undiminished in its impact, through television in the 1970s. When she interrupted her studies at Somerville College, Oxford, engaged to an undergraduate now serving in France, and became a military nurse (VAD) in 1915, she was pitched into a sickening, wearying nightmare round of clearing up in the wake of an unending trail of carnage. It was all a long way from her comfortable, constricted upbringing in the spa town of Buxton. Her own brother and her own fiancé gave up everything when they contributed their invisibly minuscule fractions to the total of British deaths, which reached three-quarters of a million.

Between the wars there was much talk of a ‘lost generation’ of young men. Demographically this is not easy to find, partly because the war had the effect of turning the torrent of emigration into a small net inward flow; in four years 1 million Britons would have been lost anyway (though of both sexes). The 1921 census was admittedly the first time that the inter-censal increase for England and Wales dropped below 1 per cent a year; but this was to be the trend of the twentieth century. There was still an increase in population during the war, albeit twice as large for women as for men. Statistically, over half a million men were missing after the war, widening the surplus of women in the population of Great Britain from 1.3 million to 1.9 million. In 1921 there were no women to every 100 men in England and Wales; but in 1911 there had already been 107. In Scotland the change was even less: 108 in 1921, up from 106 in 1911. The idea that, as a result of the war, there was an absolute shortage of men is better borne out by folklore than statistics. In considering the impact on marital prospects what matters most, to be sure, is the balance between younger people. In Great Britain in 1911, there had been 11 per cent more women in their twenties than men; and this surplus increased to 19 per cent by 1921. This would have been noticeable. Yet the difference it made to the proportion of women getting married in each age group is not very marked, since marriage rates were subject to long-term shifts of a more complex kind than simply a slight temporary shortage of eligible young men.

It is not the demographic but the human impact of the losses which burned so deep. Bereavement was a more common experience anyway in the early twentieth century, but that does not rationalize away the poignancy of parents burying sons, or of wives and lovers losing young men in their prime. Women at home bore this special burden, dreading the arrival of a telegraph boy on his bicycle – in working-class streets telegrams were only received from the War Office, with their invariable bad news. ‘Futility’ is the title of Owen’s classic poem: ‘Was it for this the clay grew tall?’ The ‘comrades’ of ‘the fallen’, in the elevated diction which became conventional, felt a special pang. The ‘lost generation’ was an emotional and psychological reality which made a lifelong impact on its surviving members. Politicians from this generation who achieved fame later – first Oswald Mosley and later Anthony Eden, Clement Attlee, Hugh Dalton and Harold Macmillan – took with them an abiding sense of admired contemporaries lost, especially in two battles, the Somme and Passchendaele.

The British sector of the front was muddy. Whether the mud of Flanders around Ypres (‘Wipers’) was worse than the mud of the Somme valley around Albert (‘Bert’) was a hotly disputed, finally unresolved question. ‘In Flanders field the poppies blow / Between the crosses, row on row,’ wrote the Canadian John McRae, in what became the most popular poem of the war, published posthumously in Punch in December 1915. The ‘Roses of Picardy’, celebrated in the popular song, likewise symbolized the Somme valley. Such songs, memorably performed beneath a rattling scoreboard showing the running total of war dead, in Joan Littlewood’s Oh What a Lovely War (1963), have gone down to posterity. The banal lyric of ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, or the false cheer of ‘So, pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag, / And smile, smile, smile,’ are evocatively redeemed by the context. The mere words, from cloying sentiment to cynical ribaldry, stand in ironic juxtaposition to the grim fate of the troops who sang them. Who knows with what mixture of emotions they sang: ‘The bells of hell go ting-a-ling a-ling / For you but not for me’?

Back at headquarters, it was decided to launch a major offensive on the Somme, where the French and British lines joined, in the summer of 1916. The new British commander-in-chief, Sir Douglas Haig, planned a frontal assault, piercing the German wire, letting his massed cavalry through, and thus bringing the war to a victorious conclusion. It was unfortunate – for the British troops at any rate – that the bloody and protracted defence of Verdun scaled down the French participation. Kitchener’s new armies filled the breach. The ‘pals’ battalions’, Lord Derby’s brainchild, had joined together and now served together, formed through the networks of local communities. The great conurbations of Liverpool, Manchester and, above all, Tyneside, were home to recently recruited battalions, the deficiencies in their training matched by the inadequacy in their equipment.

On the first day of the Somme, 1 July 1916, the casualties of the British forces were 60,000 – half the total size of the British Expeditionary Force which had been shipped to France two years previously. Of these, 21,000 were killed, most within an hour. These were the heaviest losses any army ever sustained in a single day.

Once Verdun had sapped the French army, the responsibility for any further offensive would have to fall on the British sector of the front. With Lloyd George as prime minister, committed to the policy of fighting on to ‘a knockout’, previous limitations of the British commitment were cast aside. Haig was now given more or less what he demanded. This was the logic of Passchendaele in the summer of 1917. Again the bombardment was immense: its intention to cut the German wire, its effect to make the terrain, which was already difficult, pretty well impassable. And the mud, the mud …

British soldiers met death by water when they escaped German fire. The British army was literally bogged down in Flanders at just the time when the Russian collapse meant that the Germans were now able to give the western front their full attention. In hindsight, Haig’s failure to appreciate the possibilities of the tank, which the British had developed, as a means of superseding trench warfare, seems blinkered. There is no need to suppose that there was some easy way for the Allies to win this war to take a dim view of the strategy pursued by the British general staff.

So it seemed in the sodden trenches. Staff officers, identified by their scarlet tabs, received the routine contempt of those who served in the front line, officers and men alike, who had to endure conditions far removed from those enjoyed by ‘chateau generals’. Sassoon said it all:

If I were fierce, and bald, and short of breath,

I’d live with scarlet majors at the Base,

And speed glum heroes up the line to death.

The politicians, too, were cocooned, though it would be a vulgar error to suppose that they had no personal stake in averting bloodshed: the leader of each political party at Westminster (Asquith, Law, Henderson, Redmond) lost a son in the war; Law lost two. Rudyard Kipling, no kind of conscientious objector to a war in which he lost his son, spoke mordantly for his generation in the gnomic epitaph:

If any question why we died,

Tell them, because our fathers lied.

The face of war, however, was now far different from the heroic stereotypes which had been evoked at the outset and were still being purveyed to an anxious public at home, seemingly many thousand rather than a few hundred miles away. Back for medical treatment in 1916, Graves found Britain a strange land: ‘The civilians talked a foreign language; and it was newspaper language.’ Yet when he heard Lloyd George – ‘The power of his rhetoric amazed me’ – he admitted that he ‘had to fight hard against abandoning myself with the rest of his audience’.

The visual image of this war was created by the impact of first-hand impressions upon a distinctively twentieth-century aesthetic sensibility. The work of the post-impressionists had already been brought to London in 1910. British painters like Percy Wyndham Lewis began experimenting in a new, Vorticist style, forsaking the fidelity of representational conventions for a stark creation of violent images – an adumbration of the western front before war was ever declared. Their magazine was called Blast. Institutionally what gave the war artists their chance was the inception of a government-sponsored scheme for commissioning them to work at the front.

The young Canadian millionaire Max Aitken, as avid a Tariff Reformer as his friend Bonar Law, found that the war presented him with a unique opportunity to hustle his way into the top echelon of British political life. One of Lloyd George’s first acts as prime minister was to give Aitken a peerage, as Lord Beaverbrook. No great connoisseur himself, Beaverbrook relied on artistic advice from experts; but the dynamic behind commemorating the war in this way came from him. The Canadian War Memorials Fund became the model for a similar British scheme (and it was to be replicated under Kenneth Clark, the art historian, in the Second World War). In fact, since Beaverbrook used British as well as Canadian artists from the outset, these were overlapping projects, both in personnel and achievement.

War artists no less than war poets found the stereotypes, whether of military valour or English pastoral, challenged and subverted by the evidence of their own eyes. It was soon apparent that, as one artist put it, ‘the old heroics, the death and glory stuff were obsolete’. What replaced portraits of high-ranking generals or canvases of colourful cavalry charges were images of the land. Nothing came to epitomize the war like the pock-marked terrain strewn with bleached bones and all the refuse of modern warfare. Perhaps the most successful artist in capturing this was Paul Nash. In Void (1917) Nash abandoned his earlier lyrical style and thrust the viewer into a landscape of shell-blasted trees, broken shafts of Very lights, and the incongruous rise and fall of broken earth.

In A Battery Shell (1918) Wyndham Lewis kept his distance, putting his mechanical soldiers into a no man’s land which he recognized as consonant with the austerity of his own ‘abstract vision’. C. R. W. Nevinson, too, easily bridged the transition from peacetime to wartime painting. His Marching Men (1916) are not just uniformed but uniform, expressing the brutalizing violence of their emotional response. William Roberts’s The First German Gas Attack at Ypres (1918) is a rare attempt to portray combat. A former gunner in the Royal Field Artillery, Roberts seized on an incident during the battle when the Canadians push through the African colonial troops to take their place in the line. A less imaginative artist might have shown the Canadians gallantly moving forward. But Roberts chose to depict the moment of truth when every soldier makes his choice between self-preservation and duty. Some are moving forward; one seems to be joining the gassed troops in their retreat. The work of the official war artists, which was only fully displayed after the Armistice, thus helped to create a new perception of war. It achieved an aesthetic success, opening a window to a modernist style of painting – though the window was subsequently closed again, even by some painters like Nevinson who had been more experimental in wartime.

If the project failed as a war memorial, it was because the popular instinct for commemoration was channelled into totally different forms, which people could invest with their own meanings. On the second anniversary of the Armistice, 11 November 1920, the King unveiled the Cenotaph war memorial in Whitehall, in a simple but moving ceremony, culminating in the playing of the last post. These arrangements were improvised under the direction of Lord Curzon, the former Viceroy of India, drawing on his experience in organizing the Coronation durbar of 1903. The Cenotaph was designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens, the architect of New Delhi. But whereas both Curzon and Lutyens opted for grandeur in promoting the Raj, the idiom of Remembrance was that of stark simplicity. This set the tone for an annual commemoration of Armistice Day, with the widespread observance of a two-minute silence proving eloquent enough for the survivors and the bereaved. The symbolism of the poppy, chosen by the British Legion, likewise provided a spare but sufficient evocation of the western front.

LLOYD GEORGE AND THE WAR

Lloyd George became prime minister in December 1916 because he was widely thought to offer the best chance of bringing this seemingly interminable war to a victorious conclusion. This gathered him support from the Conservative leaders, with the exception of Lansdowne who was now toying with the possibility of a negotiated peace. The Liberal members of the cabinet, almost to a man, followed Asquith out of office; Grey left the Foreign Office after eleven years. It was, however, possible for Dr Christopher Addison, a junior minister of firmly progressive views, to rally sufficient support on the Liberal backbenches to make the new Government a genuine coalition. Addison took over his chief’s former post as Minister of Munitions for six months until he was succeeded by Churchill, the only former member of the pre-war Liberal cabinet to join a Government that was undeniably Conservative in balance. Lloyd George did, however, secure the support of the Labour Party under Arthur Henderson, who joined the new war cabinet.

Here was Lloyd George’s first innovation. The structure of government was rebuilt around the necessities of waging war. It was one of the weaknesses of Asquith’s administration that his cabinet was neither ready, willing nor able to exercise effective control over the direction of the war effort. Not only was a cabinet of twenty-odd unwieldy when it came to taking quick decisions: it had no record of its decisions other than a letter after each meeting from the prime minister to the King. All this was changed when the secretariat which Hankey had first established at the Committee of Imperial Defence, and transferred to the War Council, was now brought in to serve a war cabinet of only five members.

The leaders of the Labour and Conservative Parties had to be there; but Lloyd George sidestepped the party hierarchy in picking as the other members the two pro-consuls, Curzon and Milner, the former High Commissioner in South Africa. Law, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, was the only member of the war cabinet with departmental responsibilities. This was a compact group of strong ministers, meeting every other day, articulating its decisions, through official cabinet minutes, to the departments in Whitehall responsible for carrying them out. Lloyd George, the bad correspondent, thus got out of the historic prime ministerial chore of writing to the King. He also made sure that the prime minister was better serviced. He looked for indispensable support, emotional and political alike, to Frances Stevenson, his mistress since 1912; she occupied a key role as his personal secretary. New office accommodation was constructed at the back of 10 Downing Street to house a ‘garden suburb’ of personal aides. Philip Kerr was one who was recruited from the staff which had served Milner in South Africa; and the irony of members of this ‘kindergarten’ ending up as lieutenants of the former pro-Boer did not go unnoticed.

Another administrative reform was to parallel the Ministry of Munitions – the first time the French-sounding term ‘ministry’ had been used – with other new Ministries, responsible for Labour, Shipping and Food. There was some extension of Government control here, especially in the introduction of food rationing, but also a better public-relations exercise for measures that had been in train under Asquith. Lloyd George made new appointments from outside party politics, bringing in businessmen, sometimes in ways that suggest the development of a rather cosy corporate ethos. The Minister of Shipping was a shipowner. Likewise the Minister of Labour was a trade unionist.

Everywhere Lloyd George brought a conspicuous new vigour to the conduct of the war. His courage and vitality were less in doubt than his strategy. It was all very well to run the British war machine flat out – maybe that was the only way to feed the insatiable appetite of the western front. But was that really what Lloyd George wanted? He had never been a resolute ‘Westerner’, even though he had (correctly) been sceptical about Gallipoli, and his mind always sought ways of avoiding the frontal attack by finding a way round. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Robertson, was a man of few words. He would not or could not argue out the available options with Lloyd George, who reciprocated with instinctive distrust of him and Haig.

Lloyd George plotted against Robertson and Haig, as he had been accused of plotting against Asquith, whose supporters were accordingly inclined to side with the soldiers. Robertson and Haig had the War Secretary, Lord Derby, in their pocket, and Haig had a private line to the King, which he exploited to protect his position. This sort of politico-military trench warfare reduced Lloyd George to the expedient of backing the French rather than his own general staff; but since the French generals, notably Nivelle, proved no better able to achieve a breakthrough, Lloyd George eventually acquiesced in the British plans for another assault in Flanders – what became Passchendaele. It was Passchendaele which highlighted Lloyd George’s dilemma: how to squeeze all possible resources out of the British war machine without letting Haig squander blood and treasure in the mud.

The immediate crisis in 1917 was at sea. The British naval blockade of the Central Powers was highly effective, possibly the most effective means by which the ultimate outcome of the war was determined. The submarine, however, enabled Germany to strike back at Allied merchant shipping, and the steady losses in 1916 already threatened Britain’s capacity to last out for more than a matter of months. In February 1917 Germany raised the stakes, in a desperate gamble, by adopting the policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. The attitude of the USA was crucial. Following his re-election as President in November 1916, Woodrow Wilson had sought to bring the war to an early end, calling for a ‘peace without victory’. Back in 1915, however, the sinking of the Cunard liner Lusitania, which had been carrying American citizens (as well as war materials), had led the US Government to take a firm stand against such provocation. When the U-boat policy duly led to the sinking of American ships, Wilson declared war on Germany in April 1917.

The ultimate gains to Britain were immense since, apart from military supplies and troops, which were inevitably slow to arrive, the impending crisis in war finance was averted as the USA took over as the Allies’ lender of last resort. But the immediate losses – of merchant shipping – might meanwhile have been fatal. The German calculation depended on their ability to sink 40 per cent of Allied shipping capacity, and to reduce wheat imports proportionately, within six months. In fact their target for ships sunk was almost met. In 1917 over 6 million tons, 30 per cent of the British merchant fleet, were sunk. But the grain still got through. Though the American wheat harvest was short in 1917, nearly three-quarters of the Canadian crop was exported. Stocks in Britain actually rose, and only in March 1917 did sinkings reduce supplies of wheat by more than 10 per cent – far short of German expectations. Improvisation and the enforcement of new priorities by Government saved the day. This is a story which shows Lloyd George at his incomparable best, at least as told in his War Memoirs, striding into the Admiralty and imposing the convoy system upon the barnacled admirals. Maybe he was pushing at an already open door when he got there, but the importance he gave to convoys was well justified since it succeeded in staunching, though not stopping, the haemorrhage of losses by the autumn of 1917.

The case for a negotiated peace, however, was cogent, the more so if the USA’s combatant status gave it more muscle in imposing terms acceptable to the Allies. This was a policy which went begging in the political muddle of 1917. In opposition, as he now clearly was, Asquith gave little leadership. It was left to Lansdowne to make a public statement in November 1917 of a plea he had privately made twelve months previously for an exploration of peace terms.

Labour was now sympathetic, the more so since Henderson’s resignation from the war cabinet in August 1917. No one could have been a more loyal supporter of a war for democracy, which was what everyone now claimed it was. But when Henderson visited Russia, where revolution had deposed the Tsar in February, he judged that it could only be kept in the war if the social-democratic forces among the Allies stirred themselves more conspicuously. Henderson therefore favoured sending Labour delegates to a conference in Stockholm at which German Social Democrats would be represented. After being kept, as he put it, ‘on the doormat’ while his colleagues in the war cabinet discussed the propriety of his conduct, he eventually resigned, amid sharp personal exchanges with Lloyd George. Though replaced in the war cabinet by another Labour minister (G. N. Barnes), Henderson remained, more than ever, the leader of the Labour Party. ‘Labour and Lansdowne’, an improbable combination if there ever was one, filled a political vacuum at the end of 1917 since Asquith offered no coherent alternative to the Lloyd George coalition.

In March 1918 the German armies, reinvigorated under Ludendorff’s leadership, now that the eastern front had been closed down, broke through on the western front. The British position on the Somme, maintained for so long at such cost, crumbled in days, and the collapse was as much in morale as anything else. Lloyd George’s nerve did not crack. He strode into the War Office, as he had into the Admiralty the previous year; he ordered troops on leave back to France, he demanded the commitment of American forces. The desperation of the position was indicated by Haig’s order of the day on 12 April: ‘With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause each one of us must fight to the end.’ This received wide publicity at home, if no great respect among the troops. The overtones were of Captain Scott’s fatal expedition to the South Pole six years earlier.

In the aftermath, Asquith made his one faltering bid as a real leader of the Opposition. Robertson had been deposed before the German offensive; his aggrieved deputy, Sir Frederick Maurice, who was also dismissed, now decided to create a public fuss. Stung by Lloyd George’s denials that he had starved Haig of troops, Maurice challenged the figures given by the prime minister. There is little doubt that Maurice was correct and that Lloyd George destroyed the relevant evidence. But when Asquith demanded a debate, the issue was politicized in the starkest way as a vote of confidence in Lloyd George. While over 70 Liberal MPs supported the Government, nearly 100 voted with Asquith; the remaining 85 or so did not vote. Lloyd George survived with massive Conservative support.

The vote in the Maurice debate revealed the polarization of the Liberal Party which had taken place over the previous eighteen months. When it came to a general election later that year, virtually every Liberal MP who had voted against the Government was denied the coalition ‘coupon’ of approval and most of them lost their seats. The Asquithian legend is that this shows the retributive vengeance which Lloyd George wreaked upon his old colleagues. In fact what it shows is that, once Lloyd George had opted to fight in coalition with the Conservatives, he was able to secure a high degree of protection for a limited number of his own supporters; and naturally, in rationing his patronage, the Maurice debate was one indication of past loyalty and future allegiance. Coalition Liberals were among the recipients of the formal endorsement by himself and Law but it was not this ‘coupon’ – so called from the rationing analogy – which saved them: it was the absence of Conservative opposition.

The break-up of the Liberal Party was the main consequence of the Maurice debate. Lloyd George’s position as war leader was confirmed; his commitment to continuing the struggle, through thick and thin, was underlined. The switchback course which the war took in its final stages dramatized his leadership and gripped public attention as never before. Well into the summer of 1918 the Allies were on the defensive: in June the Germans stood on the Marne, within 100 kilometres Paris. This needs to be remembered in order to appreciate the intense surge of relief at the turn of the tide in August. After the collapse of one ally, Russia, in 1917, it had been a close race as to which belligerent power would be next; in fact it was to be Austria-Hungary, then Germany – leaving France exhausted, and Britain stunned with an unanticipated plenitude of success when an armistice was negotiated for 11 a.m. on 11 November 1918.

Little wonder that Lloyd George was hailed as ‘the man who won the war’. Little wonder that he decided to cash in his political chips as soon as possible. On 14 November he called a general election. Polling took place a month later. The coalition which Lloyd George had put together for war purposes two years previously now addressed the problems of peace. Feeling against Germany was naturally running hot; demands for reparations were common; so was the demand to bring the Kaiser to trial. But there was also a coalitionist programme of domestic reform, for which Addison, as Minister of Reconstruction during the previous sixteen months, had a particular responsibility. The coalition platform thus addressed the future as well as the past in its professed aspiration for ‘a fit land for heroes to live in’. The verdict of the electorate was much like that of the House of Commons in the Maurice debate: to endorse Lloyd George, with all his faults, for want of a better alternative.

WOMEN AND LABOUR

In a double sense one could say that women and organized labour won the war. Their contributions to the war effort were difficult to ignore, either socially or economically. Their gains from the war, especially politically, were equally conspicuous – the 1918 Reform Act went almost all the way to full adult suffrage and the Labour Party quickly emerged as the official Opposition. These were all highly significant developments, though the relation between them is not altogether straightforward.

Most married women filled traditional roles as wives and mothers, conventionally described in the census as ‘unoccupied’, though hardly lacking unpaid occupation in the household. The statistics about women’s employment and earnings, of course, conceal as much as they reveal. In an age when such activities as home-baking and home-brewing had been commonplace, but naturally performed without recompense, a busy housewife who took a job might instead start buying her family’s bread and beer – thus boosting the economic indicators for earnings and consumer expenditure out of all proportion to any real change in the amount of work or consumption which took place.

Married women often found their lives dominated by childbearing and child-rearing. At the beginning of the twentieth century the wife of a manual labourer could expect to have half a dozen pregnancies, producing four or five live births. Children took their toll; women were far more likely to die in childbirth than later in the century. The great killer, however, especially for young women, was tuberculosis, a disease linked, in ways that are still less than fully clear, with poor living conditions and poor diet. Access to medical attention was difficult and Health Insurance only provided a panel doctor for a worker paying contributions. In practice this meant the male head of the household; wives and children were not covered, despite the fact that their medical needs were usually greater. The small but significant exceptions were a maternity grant and the provision of sanatorium care for the treatment of tuberculosis.

There was a crude economic rationality to the hierarchy of the male-dominated household. In the early twentieth century, many British families bought meat once a week and it was often fed primarily to the man of the house, as the breadwinner. Women and children last was the watchword in apportioning the working-class diet. Girls growing up in working-class households were systematically undernourished (one reason for their proneness to tuberculosis) and when they became mothers they would often stint themselves in later life.

Deprivation was thus engendered in the family as well as institutionalized in the wider society. Even in parts of the country where weekly wages were ‘tipped up’ on the kitchen table, to be counted up by the housewife as family treasurer, a man was generally allowed his pocket money, if only as his beer money. More beer was drunk per head before the war than in the middle of the century, and mainly by men. The matey environment of the British pub was male-centred. Drink was the prime example of luxurious expenditure by the working class, as moralistic Liberals had never failed to point out. For many family men beer was a luxury which they enjoyed when they could, and forewent when money was tight. Precisely because it was not a fixed commitment, as mortgage payments would have been, it could act as an inbuilt stabilizer of the working-class budget. But over-indulgence by the breadwinner, especially in spirits, could easily put the rest of the family on to short rations. The sight of underfed children waiting at the pub door for the emergence of their errant father was not just temperance propaganda but expressed a grim struggle of domestic priorities. The wartime and post-war fall in the consumption of alcohol marked a victory for the family home over the public house.

The household, then, was polarized around two gender-based roles: that of the breadwinner, the head of the household, who was in paid employment; and that of the housewife, who was not.

There was a political dimension to this separation of spheres. Since 1867 in the towns, and since 1884–5 elsewhere, the parliamentary franchise had been founded on household suffrage. There were other ways of qualifying for a vote, through the ownership of real property, which gave rise to about half a million plural votes in 1915, the last year in which a register was compiled. But the other 6¼ million names stood there as householders. Why so few out of an adult population of 20 million? Because only the male head of the household qualified for the parliamentary vote. Thus women were excluded, even if they happened to be householders in their own right; and so were other adult men, notably sons living in the parental home. The net result was that only two-thirds of adult men were registered to vote before the war.

Though this was not what we would nowadays regard as democratic, contemporaries innocently commended the British system as ‘democracy’, especially when fighting wars on its behalf. This claim was not absurd. The fact is that, whatever its other flaws, the male franchise did not produce a strong bias against the working class, for the obvious reason that sons of wealthier parents were excluded as much as other, poorer sons. On a conventional definition of the working class as manual workers, they comprised 80 per cent of the population. By this definition, in 1915, 70 per cent of the electorate was working class. In urban and industrial areas the working class already dominated the electorate, even though half of them might not be on the register. And household suffrage had plainly not prevented Labour from establishing itself at Westminster.

The premises of household suffrage, however, were under increasing challenge in Edwardian Britain. The Liberal Government had tried to abolish plural voting in 1906 – one of the bills thrown out by the Lords. What really made the suffrage a hot issue, however, was the agitation by women – not just the ‘suffragettes’, who grabbed the headlines with their militant tactics, but the much greater number of ‘suffragists’, organized in the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies under Mrs Millicent Garrett Fawcett. By and large progressives were sympathetic (though Asquith was not) while Conservatives were hostile (though Balfour was not). What prevented a settlement was the way the women’s claim intermeshed with other aspects of electoral reform. Conservative suffragists were more likely to support a simple removal of the sex disqualification; progressives were suspicious of this minimalist approach since they assumed that it would add female property-owners to a franchise already biased enough through the plural vote.

Two private members’ bills in 1910 and 1911 failed to find a compromise along minimalist lines, and in 1912 the Government brought in its own Electoral Reform bill. This broadened the issue by proposing universal suffrage for men – and women too, if the Commons should so decide on a free vote. What happened, quite unexpectedly, was that the Speaker ruled the woman suffrage amendment out of order, which caused the collapse of the whole measure. Suffragettes responded by accusing Asquith of treachery; though why he should have wanted to sabotage such an exquisitely Asquithian manoeuvre, designed to get the Government off the hook, is difficult to say. To be sure, his slowness to perceive the merits of the women’s case was partly to blame for his difficulties; but, better late than never, in 1914 he signalled that woman suffrage would become Government policy in its next attempt at electoral reform.

This impasse was overtaken by the outbreak of war. The suffragette campaign, organized by the Women’s Social and Political Union, was called off. By the end of 1914 Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, its leader, and her favourite daughter, Christabel, had made the transition from militants to super-patriots. (Sylvia Pankhurst, by contrast, with her Labour commitment, was a critic of the war.) Since the militant campaign (employing arson) had been increasingly counter-productive in generating support for its avowed objective, while the Government response (employing forcible feeding) had also aroused distaste, both sides were ready for a truce – in order to wage war. When the issue was reopened, it was in a wartime context much more favourable to women, subduing all but the most bigoted opponents.

The pressing new problem of manpower shortage had one manifest answer: woman-power. The munitions factories were the most obvious way in which young single women were mobilized for war production. There were already 200,000 women employed in the metal and chemical trades in July 1914; by the Armistice there were nearly a million. A quarter of them were directly employed by the Ministry of Munitions; no fewer than 11,000 women worked at the national cordite factory at Gretna, on the Scottish border. With the increasing demands of the Army, moreover, women took over jobs in traditionally male occupations. They were highly visible on the tramways and railways, generally acting as ticket collectors or conductresses.

The most emotive example of women responding to the call was in care for the wounded. The Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs), of which Vera Brittain wrote, were in origin an extension of the Territorial Army; they contained over 40,000 women in 1914, over 80,000 in 1920, often serving under conditions as unpleasant as those of any troops. Dr Flora Murray and Dr Louisa Garrett Anderson formed their Women’s Hospital Corps in 1915; it became a lever for fuller professional recognition of women doctors, of whom there were three times as many by 1921 as ten years earlier. The Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) was officially established by the Army Council in 1917, with four sections (Cookery, Mechanical, Clerical and Miscellaneous), serving under a woman director; by the time of the Armistice it had a strength of 40,000, 20 per cent serving abroad.

These numbers, however, are tiny when set against the mass of women in paid work. In July 1914 there were 1.65 million women in domestic service, traditionally the greatest source of employment, but the least loved because of its confining nature. When girls could find an alternative, by and large they did. By 1918, despite four years of unparalleled sacrifice by the employing classes, saturating the pages of Punch with tearful jokes about the servant crisis, there were still 1.25 million domestic servants. In the United Kingdom as a whole women’s employment seems to have increased by nearly 1½ million during the war. The most significant change came in commercial and clerical posts; the number of women office workers practically doubled. The ‘lady typewriter’ had arrived – and was to stay. The 1921 census for Great Britain disclosed over 1 million women engaged either in commerce or in typing or clerical tasks, rising to 1.35 million by 1931.

The total size of the female workforce in 1921, however, showed virtually no net change since 1911. Despite the wartime bulge, it was still around 5.7 million, compared with 13.7 million men. It is apparent that much wartime employment was a transient phenomenon, especially in fields where the intrusion of women had been most shocking and had attracted most publicity. Photographs of women driving trams, buses or ambulances became well known, not because of their typicality but because of their novelty. In 1921 as in 1911 there were only 3,000 women employed on the railways, less than 1 per cent of the total. During the war the workforce was diluted with women, only to be purposefully undiluted afterwards, just as the Treasury Agreements had specified. The process was reinforced by the post-war slump, which likewise helped solve the servant problem. The 1921 census showed 1.85 million women in ‘personal service’; this was a more elastic definition than just domestic servants and represented a fall from the figure of 2.13 million recorded in 1911. By 1931, however, it was back at 2.13 million, exactly the same as twenty years previously, in Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s prime. Despite all the fuss, the war had not created vast new opportunities for women, just photo-opportunities.

Wartime manpower shortage also explains a lot about the changed position of organized labour. At the beginning of the war the immediate worry was about workers who lost their jobs through dislocation of trade. Relief funds were set up. Equally, there was an economic explanation for the flood of military enlistment just as there had been for emigration. For many men in marginal employment, the Army meant a guaranteed wage and a better diet. Soon, however, the logic of mobilization turned the material advantage in favour of civilian workers at home. The simple fact is that the war economy meant a continuous boom, with high Government spending and inflationary pressure, soaking up surplus labour in a way that seems more obvious to us than it did to contemporaries.

Before the war began, unemployment was already well under half its peak level of 1908–9, running at around 3 per cent of the labour force. From 1915 to 1918 1 per cent unemployment was a high figure.¹ The tight labour market, especially for skilled workers like engineers, had the effect of bidding up wages. The rate for the job rose most in occupations where the war increased demand for goods or services in short supply at home: food and coal, new buildings and transport. By July 1918, wage rates for agricultural workers, coal miners, bricklayers’ labourers, dock labourers and railwaymen had all increased by 90 per cent in four years.

The increase for cotton operatives, by contrast, was less than 60 per cent, reflecting the wartime decline of the export trade. Even if the markets were still there, shipping space was at a premium – even more so for imports, which included war materials for the Allies. Allowing for price changes, imports had dropped to 70 per cent of their 1913 volume by 1918; exports had dropped to below 40 per cent. In this Free Trader’s nightmare, import substitution was encouraged by market forces and Government intervention alike.

In 1918 British wheat production was back at a level not seen for a generation and imports were likewise the lowest since the 1880s. But increased demand for home-grown food, as well as giving Hodge a decent wage, inevitably meant price rises to the consumer, as did the increased freight costs caused by the shipping emergency. The cost of food in the average working-class diet was double its pre-war level by 1917 and still rising. The overall cost of living likewise doubled in four years. Since the general rise in wage rates was slightly less than this, the real improvement of the standard of living went to those workers who were able to put in more overtime in meeting war production targets.

There were also important differences within particular trades, between skilled men, whose pay rates stood still in real terms, and their labourers, who often did better out of the war. In engineering, for example, where the rate for a fitter was 75 per cent above the pre-war level in 1918, a labourer had meanwhile more than doubled his wage rate. Here was ample cause for resentment among workers with deeply entrenched notions about differentials. The war had the effect of eroding the traditional status of the skilled workers, organized in craft unions to maintain the rigour of the apprenticeship system. The labour disputes on ‘Red Clydeside’ which erupted in 1916 owed as much to such considerations as to ideology.

Labour shortage put trade unions in a strong bargaining position. Their membership had been rising before 1914; from 2.5 million in 1910 it had bounded up to 4 million in three years before slackening off. It was the later years of the war, however, which saw a sustained growth, to 5.5 million in 1917, 6.5 million in 1918, and a brief peak of around 8 million in 1919–20. Most of them were men, though the fact that there were 1¼ million women trade unionists by the end of the war was significant. Previously women had accounted for only one out of ten trade unionists, with few outside the cotton industry; in 1918 this proportion was more like two out of ten. Affiliation to the TUC and to the Labour Party ran behind these totals; but the fact that Labour’s natural constituency had doubled in size, not to mention confidence, was a fact of unmistakable political significance. It was a fact not overlooked by President Wilson, who took British Labour very seriously in 1917–18.

It was at this opportune moment that the intractable suffrage issue was at last settled – on terms highly favourable to Labour and women alike. Indeed, a big measure which could satisfy everyone was the only way of cutting through the difficulties; and it was the war which made a big measure possible. An all-party conference under the Speaker of the House of Commons helped to formulate proposals which were knocked into shape in 1917, when the flame of idealism about reconstruction was burning at its brightest. What made the claim for universal male suffrage irresistible was the record of the new armies. Conservatives who had their doubts about democracy if it meant enfranchising the proletariat had no such qualms about our soldier lads. In 1918 there were 5.3 million men in the trade unions; 4.4 million in the armed forces. All men over twenty-one got the vote, and all soldiers regardless of age.

This increased the male electorate to over 12 million. Had the suffrage been given on the same terms to women, there would, of course, have been more of them. This was too much for the Commons to swallow. But there was still plenty of room for a large measure of woman suffrage without the (rather unreal) risk of ‘swamping’ the male electorate. The solution adopted was to give parliamentary votes to women over the age of thirty – on the condition that they were local-government electors or the wives of local-government electors. As householders, some women had for years qualified for the local-government franchise, since an outright gender bar had not been in force, and they were now joined by the wives of other householders.

Under the Reform Act of 1918, then, women got the parliamentary vote in a ghostly perpetuation of household suffrage. One implication is that the women who were excluded after 1918 were much like the men who had been excluded before 1918. They were young and single, for the most part still living with their parents. In short, they were the very sort of women who had so conspicuously shown that ‘women can do it’. The Minister of Munitions, Edwin Montagu, had rhetorically asked the Commons: ‘Where is the man who now would deny to women the civil rights which she has earned by her hard work?’ As it turned out, the logic here was as faulty as the syntax, and household suffrage was now buttressed by housewife suffrage.

LLOYD GEORGE AND THE PEACE

Arguably, the strength and prestige of Lloyd George’s position at the end of 1918 were unrivalled in British history. In the general election his coalition swept the board. In the new House it had the support of well over 500 MPs – an exact figure is difficult to give since not all of them had received the ‘coupon’. No fewer than 380 of the Coalitionists were Conservatives, which meant that they alone held a majority of the seats in the Commons. At the time many of them were full of gratitude to Lloyd George; conversely he was held responsible by the Asquithians for delivering the Liberals’ former majority into the hands of the enemy. The reality of the position was that a substantial swing to the Conservatives was in the offing anyway; by fighting in coalition with them Lloyd George ensured that a block of his Liberal supporters were saved; but in the process he became the prisoner of the Conservative Party.

Lloyd George’s obvious strategy was to institutionalize his position by merging the two wings of the coalition into a new centre party, of which he would be the undisputed leader. When he made moves in this direction at the beginning of 1920, he cleared the high hurdle of securing Conservative endorsement for the idea; but he stumbled on an unforeseen obstacle – the stubborn Liberal loyalties of his own supporters. Though a number of Liberal businessmen, like Sir Alfred Mond, head of the chemicals conglomerate Brunner Mond (later part of ICI), were to find the Coalition a bridge to an ultimate destination in the Conservative Party, the Lloyd George Liberal Party (now with its own organization) retained authentic Liberal credentials. Called ‘Coaly Liberals’ by the Asquithians, they were not as black as they were painted, and it was their input which gave social reform a prominent place in the Coalition manifesto. In particular, state responsibility for housing – the unfinished agenda of Lloyd George’s land campaign – underpinned the promise of ‘homes for heroes’.

One reason why the split in the Liberal Party was so damaging was that it was so equal. Both factions claimed legitimacy; each had a powerful leader, trailing the authority of the premiership; neither was a mere rump, destined to disappear quickly. The division was sharper at Westminster than in the country, where ordinary members often pined for a ‘prefixless’ Liberal candidate to heal and unify them. This reflected the fact that the sort of split which had always been on the cards – between the left and right wings of the party – was not the one that occurred from 1916. Lloyd George, the former Radical, was now working with the Tories; Asquith, the erstwhile Liberal Imperialist, was now the champion of left-wing progressives who remained close to Labour on many issues. The election results in 1918, distorted by the coalitionist pact, exaggerated the disparity between the two factions. Just as the strength of the Lloyd George Liberals was flattered by their 130 seats, so the Asquithians were under-represented with their thirty or so. Still, it was a miserable showing; Asquith lost the East Fife constituency which had returned him since 1886 and was temporarily out of the House.

Labour did better, though not as well as had been expected in 1917. It was now fighting as a fully fledged independent party, no longer a pressure group within a progressive alliance. Henderson had used his time well since the ‘doormat’ incident, building a Labour organization throughout the country, albeit on trade-union foundations. A new constitution had been adopted in 1918, with its famous Clause IV committing the party to ‘the common ownership of the means of production’, which gave it a distinctive stance. There was now a Labour view on more immediate aspects of policy, even on foreign policy, where ex-Liberals recruited through the Union of Democratic Control were influential. It became possible for individual members to join the Labour Party directly, rather than through affiliated organizations like the ILP or, above all, the trade unions, though the block vote of the big unions continued to control the party. All this was gain. The disappointment was that, with manhood suffrage, and with nearly 400 candidates in Great Britain, Labour did not poll much over 20 per cent. With about sixty seats, this was a significant but not dramatic improvement on the forty it had won in 1910.

Ireland went its own way in 1918. In the north, of course, the usual twenty or so Ulster Unionists were returned to Westminster. But in the south, the old Nationalist Party was reduced to a handful of six, and 72 Sinn Feiners (including the first woman) were elected. The victorious Sinn Fein candidates refused to go to Westminster and instead met in Dublin as an Irish parliament, the Dáil. It proclaimed independence in January 1919 with an appeal to the peace conference, now assembling in Paris, on the Wilsonian formula of national ‘self-determination’.

Here was Lloyd George’s first problem. He had inherited it from a long line of British statesmen, some of whom had tried to make it better, all of whom had made it worse. Lloyd George had had several tries at fixing up a deal over Home Rule: after the Easter Rising in 1916 by offering to combine Home Rule with partition, in March 1918 by simultaneously offering Home Rule to please the Nationalists and conscription to satisfy the Unionists. The package deals which he tried to bundle together (hastily, in his spare moments from winning the war) fell apart before they were wrapped up. Home Rule was now a dead letter and the plan for Irish conscription had been a fatal blow for old-fashioned Nationalists.

The Coalition Government, with its Unionist majority, could hardly be expected to adopt a conciliatory line, faced with a challenge to its authority from the Dublin Dáil, with its pretensions to establishing its own system of administration. Throughout 1919 and 1920 the situation went from bad to worse, with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) now engaged in a guerrilla struggle, to which the British response was the recruitment of an equally deadly paramilitary force, the ‘Black and Tans’. What really alienated liberal opinion in Britain from Lloyd George was the policy of reprisals which his Government now sanctioned. He tried, as ever, to find a carrot as well as a stick. This was the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, which established separate devolved parliaments for the north and south, with reduced representation at Westminster. This suited the Protestants of Ulster, and was to define relations with Northern Ireland for the next half century.

It was not, of course, enough to satisfy the Dáil. A further deterioration in the Irish situation prompted a final initiative on the British side. The King was wheeled into action; his appeal for peace, delivered in Belfast, brought a truce in July 1921; negotiations began in earnest for an Irish treaty. This brought out the best and the worst in Lloyd George, as he bargained with the irreconcilable factions, telling each as much as he judged it prudent for its partisans to hear, and finally threatening the Irish delegation with renewed war unless they signed. For Ireland it was a shotgun divorce, severing six of the counties of Ulster from the twenty-six in the south, which became the Irish Free State. This was a constitutional hybrid, maintaining the fiction that Ireland enjoyed a peculiar sort of Dominion status, while ceding the substance of autonomy (as shown by the subsequent proclamation of sovereignty in 1937). It was a solution which was only accepted in the south at the expense of a bitterly divisive civil war in 1922–3, but it marked the moment at which the history of Ireland formally parted company with that of the now disunited United Kingdom.

Lloyd George had thus persuaded the Unionists to end the Union. He liked to think of his Government as one in which the Liberal yeast had worked a powerful effect upon its doughy Conservatism. Yet whatever he touched, his Liberal critics impugned his Liberal credentials. This was as clear over the peace settlement as over Ireland. When Lloyd George went to Paris in January 1919 it was as one of the Big Four who called the shots. If he was not so big as Wilson, exercising the new hegemony of the USA, he was at least bigger than the French premier, Clemenceau, and a lot bigger than Orlando of Italy. This was personal diplomacy at the summit in a style which suited Lloyd George so nicely that he took to attending a whole string of post-war conferences in the watering places of Europe. He lost touch with the House of Commons in the process, and subordinated his Foreign Secretary, Curzon, into a role which Sir Edward Grey would never have contemplated but which later Foreign Secretaries were to find customary.

All Lloyd George’s instincts were for a just post-war settlement rather than vindictive retribution, especially if justice consorted with British interests. One problem was war debts. Britain had run up vast debts to the USA on behalf of its Allies, who were now clearly unable to pay. The British, who were owed about as much as they in turn owed the Americans, suggested that these debts were surely on a par with reparations, to be scaled down correspondingly, or waived altogether as between allies in a common cause. Not so, according to the USA.

In practice Lloyd George’s aspiration for a just peace became a quest for a deal that would stick. Moreover, he was not altogether a free agent. He found himself bound in three ways. Clearly, he was bound to his own coalitionist supporters. In the most famous account of the conference, Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), there is a description (which we now know came from Stanley Baldwin) of the new House of Commons as ‘hard-faced men who look as if they had done very well out of the war’. Keynes suggested that here was the influence which made for an unjust peace, exacting disproportionate reparations from Germany. His message was to be relayed not only by his friends in the Asquithian Liberal Party but by Labour and a wide swathe of liberal opinion.

What it omitted to say, however, was that Lloyd George was bound also by his own utterances, in a style which Liberals had themselves fostered. ‘Hang the Kaiser’ is the election cry that has been remembered; but behind it was a demand to put him on trial, couched in the same idiom of law and morality which had justified the war effort all along. This came to nothing in Paris. However, the argument over reparations, also justified on the basis of Germany’s war guilt, proved vexatious.

At this point Lloyd George found himself bound by the ties of Empire. The fact was that the Empire had played an indispensable part in the war effort, mobilizing 3 million men (half of them in the Indian Army). For the Dominions, this served the function of a war of independence, assuming a central part in the mythology of national self-assertion. For Australians the formative experience was Gallipoli, for Canadians it was Vimy Ridge: heroic, bloody battles in which the chief gains, perhaps, were of national self-respect and pride, tinged with a rueful sense that their troops had been left to pull Britain’s chestnuts out of the fire. One makeshift expedient, recognizing the Dominions’ contribution, had been the constitution of an Imperial War Cabinet: a forum in which Smuts of South Africa assumed a notable role. Whereas in 1914 the King had simply declared war on behalf of the colonies, in 1919 – at Canada’s insistence and despite US reluctance – there was separate representation at the peace conference for Canada, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and India, albeit within the British delegation. This was an important step in itself, and had the effect of giving an imperial twist to the issue of reparations.

The British on the whole wanted to keep down the total demanded in reparations, realizing that the Germans’ ability to pay was limited by their productive resources (in line with the advice which Keynes had given before his resignation as the Treasury’s representative). This implied limiting Germany’s liability to the direct damage suffered by the belligerents (excluding Russia). Since this had been inflicted overwhelmingly along the western front, it implied that France would receive the lion’s share of reparations, and Australia, for example, virtually nothing. To the prime minister of Australia, the populist Labour leader Billy Hughes, this was intolerable. Egged on by Hughes, therefore, Lloyd George demanded that indirect costs be assessed, inflating the total bill to a wildly unrealistic figure, but enhancing the share due to the British Empire.

Keynes may have been right to insist that the reparations in the Versailles Treaty were uncollectable except on the unrealistic assumption of a self-denying German economic miracle; but Lloyd George secured the best deal available at the time and reckoned on the terms being revised later – as in fact happened. Other provisions of the peace treaties were similarly flawed in using the high rhetoric of liberal internationalism and self-determination, its prose polished up by Wilson from an old draft by Gladstone, to justify compromises brokered between the cynicism of Clemenceau and the opportunism of Lloyd George. This was the fate of the League of Nations, intended as the linchpin of Wilson’s new world order. Though hobbled by the failure to secure US participation, the League promised conciliation of international disputes, sanctions instead of war, collective security instead of great armaments. It was seized upon by liberal opinion in Britain as the embodiment of hopes which had not emerged unscathed through the transition from war to peace. Lloyd George became a convenient whipping boy for disappointments of which he was not the sole author.

Lloyd George found that his diplomatic finesse was, as often before, needed on the industrial front as much as in international affairs. Demobilization was not easy. Faced with the problem of reintegrating 4 million men into the civilian workforce, the Government proposed to give priority to those with jobs awaiting them, often those whose enlistment was most recent. Economically rational, this was emotionally insupportable for troops who had sweated it out in the trenches. The British Army had been virtually alone in avoiding large-scale mutiny; but now it threatened. Churchill, with his own eight months of experience on the western front in 1916, stepped in as the new War Secretary and ordered that long-serving soldiers be demobilized first. This was one ad hoc remedy. Another was to give ex-servicemen an ‘out-of-work donation’ while they were unemployed, rather than designate heroes as paupers.

This was a decision with serious repercussions. In the course of the war, Unemployment Insurance had been extended to cover new groups of workers, notably those in munitions. In 1920 the major step was taken of including almost all manual occupations, except those with little incidence of unemployment (agriculture, railways, domestic service). Thus more than 11 million workers were to be covered by a scheme that seemed to have worked well since its experimental beginnings in 1911. So sound were its finances, during these years of high employment, that the actuarial assumptions on which it was based were now relaxed – just at the moment when the boom suddenly came to an end. In 1921 nearly 17 per cent of insured workers suddenly found themselves unemployed and in danger of exhausting the entitlement to benefit which their contributions had earned.

Again, the Government flinched from simply letting the Poor Law take the strain, faced with unemployment on a scale not seen since the 1880s. Instead it improvised arrangements for workers to go on drawing an ‘uncovenanted’ benefit, notionally covered by future rather than past contributions. In acknowledging that mass unemployment could not be met by mass reliance on the Poor Law, the Coalition Government thus inadvertently invented ‘the dole’.

Perhaps it is not surprising that Lloyd George trod warily, with the example of Kerensky before him. The spectre of Bolshevism in Britain, however, was mainly just that: a phantasm. The Communist Party of Great Britain, set up in 1920, was tiny; and the fact that it took its orders from Moscow was not so much sinister as inhibiting. The representatives of ‘Red Clydeside’, briefly arrested in 1919, when a red flag flew over Glasgow City Chambers, included men like James Maxton, who could put on a passable impression of Robespierre as a parliamentary turn, and the young Emanuel Shinwell, who was to end his days as a centenarian peer. Guild Socialism, with the young Oxford don G. D. H. Cole as its prophet, inspired a short-lived interest in syndicalism, with cries like ‘The Mines for the Miners’. And the security forces naturally had a professional interest in providing spine-chilling reports on other examples of subversion. Though the significance of such activities was largely in inflating the red menace, for theatrical effect and political advantage, Lloyd George took a serious view of industrial disputes.

The pre-war ‘labour unrest’ was put in the shade by the record under the coalition. Every year was another 1912:

1919 35 million days lost in industrial disputes

1920 27 million

1921 86 million

1922 20 million

The underlying reason was the instability of prices. Until the end of the war wages had chased prices quite closely, so that both stood at roughly double their 1914 level. By 1920 the cost of living had increased by another 25 per cent; wages responded more unevenly. It was natural that the trade unions, now 8-million strong, should engage in a scramble for competitive advantage, if only to relieve their members’ apprehensions about falling behind.

The so-called Triple Alliance of miners, railwaymen and transport workers huffed and puffed to some effect in 1919. Their grievances had a directly political aspect since during the war the Government had assumed a large degree of control over the mines and the railways, two industries poised on the cusp of decline and increasingly dependent on state subsidy. The Miners Federation had strong political leverage through the Labour Party – half the Labour MPs were from the coalfields – and its insistent demand was for nationalization. The Government set up a commission to report on the matter, and the casting vote of its chairman, Mr Justice Sankey, came down in favour of public ownership. When Lloyd George reneged on his half-promises of action – a specie in which he often traded – the miners were incensed. They were bought off temporarily by wage increases. Then, with the state having shed its direct responsibility for the mines, in 1920, the miners looked again to the Triple Alliance for support when they went over the top in April 1921.

It was like the Somme, where not a few of them had fought. J. H. Thomas of the Railway Servants was a corpulent Labour MP with no stomach for this kind of frontal assault; the rising star of the trade-union movement, Ernest Bevin, likewise had no ambition to play Haig in the Transport and General Workers’ Union. The miners were left stranded on the barbed wire, bitter and bloody but unbowed.

Disputes about pay were complicated by another factor. The end of the war saw one of the greatest changes of the twentieth century in the pattern of work. For forty years before the war the average working week had been 56 hours; after the war it stabilized at 48 hours. This made the ‘eight-hour day’ a normal expectation; and demands for a 40-hour week soon looked ahead to a normal five-day week. The implications for unit costs of labour in industry were to be less happy.

Until 1920 the Government might as well have been running a war economy. Its own expenditure remained at levels unprecedented in peacetime. Lloyd George’s 1914 Budget had been thought shocking for edging towards a total of £200 million; but in 1917 the Budget exceeded £2,000 million. Public spending in the first post-war Budget in 1919 was hardly less than that of, 1918, at over £2,500 million. Admittedly, inflation distorts these comparisons, since the relevant price level had doubled by 1917 and was to touch three times its pre-war level in 1920. When the inflationary bubble was pricked in 1920, the Government was forced to declare its priorities. Interest rates were put up; spending was cut back; social reform became a dispensable luxury which the country could no longer afford.

The prime victim was the housing programme, which was at the centre of the ambitious plans for reconstruction which Christopher Addison had hatched in the idealistic mood of 1917–18. He had become Minister of Health in 1919, with responsibility for state promotion of a programme of housebuilding. This operated at one remove, through the local authorities, to whom Exchequer grants were made available as a subsidy. In the overheated conditions of 1920–21 this made the houses a very expensive investment, though around 170,000 council houses were under construction by the time the subsidy was withdrawn. Addison was left to carry the can. He left the Government in 1921, alienated from the man whom he had helped become prime minister five years previously.

Though other coalition Liberal ministers, like the historian H. A. L. Fisher at the Board of Education, fought their corner, the Government’s priorities were now clear. Faced with a populist ‘Anti-Waste’ campaign, which notched up a couple of by-election victories in June 1921, Lloyd George decided to throw it a sop by appointing a committee of businessmen to report on possible economies. It sat under the chairmanship of Sir Eric Geddes, a former coalition minister, and worked closely with the Treasury in deciding on its targets. Lloyd George’s own instincts were to seek an alternative to deflation, perhaps through interventionist measures to stimulate employment; but Treasury orthodoxy prevailed and, having fashioned the ‘Geddes Axe’, the Government had to use it. The committee’s recommendations became the basis of a new round of cuts in 1922, although they were somewhat scaled down after representations from the Navy and the teachers, both of whom escaped the full rigour of the exercise. Increasingly, however, the Government was discovering its centre of gravity in the Conservative majority which had always been its mainstay.

If the Government was Conservative in drift, why not Conservative too in name and personnel? This was a question which had surfaced in the minds of many of its backbenchers by 1922. At the top, the Government was united in mutual admiration of its own brilliance. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Birkenhead, had as F. E. Smith been a hard-hitting Tory polemicist; now he was a hard-drinking comrade of Winston Churchill, unable to imagine what had ever divided them politically. The Coalition reeked of cronyism; hence the catch: ‘Lloyd George knows my father, / Father knows Lloyd George.’

This is why the honours scandal was so serious for Lloyd George. An aura of sharp practice had hung around him since the pre-war Marconi affair, in which he and other ministers had been accused of abusing their position for financial gain (and their cause had been pleaded in the courts by none other than F. E. Smith). Yet every Government, the Liberals under Gladstone as much as the Tories under Salisbury, had been guilty of what so shocked all decent people when it was revealed in 1922: that the Honours List included men who had made major contributions to party funds. One part of the trouble was that the Coalition had become crude, with a tariff showing the price of a peerage, a baronetcy or a knighthood. Another part of the trouble arose from Lloyd George pocketing the proceeds when, so the Tory whips felt, they should have been shared. The Lloyd George Fund was to finance him, and dog him, for twenty years.

Only a Government already in trouble would have been so damaged by a side issue that seemed to symbolize its flaws. A Coalition which relied for defence upon Birkenhead’s arrogant homilies seemed to have degenerated into a coterie motivated by mutual admiration rather than any other principle. An inner ring of ministers perpetuated the methods of the war cabinet; the full cabinet of twenty rarely met. Law had withdrawn from the Government on health grounds in 1921, to be succeeded as Conservative leader by Austen Chamberlain. But the new leader, a true Coalitionist, did not have the same hold over the party and was unable to restrain it when it became restive, as it did in October 1922.

When Chamberlain called a party meeting at the Carlton Club, it provided an opportunity for revolt not reconciliation. News of a by-election at Newport, showing that an independent Conservative had beaten the Coalition candidate, was on the ticker-tapes as the meeting assembled. For the first time, Stanley Baldwin, appointed President of the Board of Trade in the previous year, caught the ear of his party with an almost conversational intervention. He acknowledged that Lloyd George was, as Birkenhead claimed, ‘a dynamic force’, only to throw the words back in the faces of the Coalitionists: ‘A dynamic force is a very terrible thing; it may crush you, but it is not necessarily right.’ Above all, Law had turned up, and now spoke up, restored in more ways than one. His advice to fight the next election as an independent party was accepted by a two-to-one majority. Lloyd George resigned the same afternoon.