THE LIBERAL FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE was a ginger group. It was formed in November 1911, with around eighty members. It was a response to Liberal backbench concerns after the war-threatening Agadir Crisis, which featured the Moroccan port, French troops and a German gunboat named Panther. The episode was remembered in British politics for a startling occurrence. David Lloyd George, famous opponent of the Boer War, and champion of social reform who brought in old age pensions and national insurance, made a full-bloodied jingo speech warning off Germany. Agadir gave some inkling of the reality of the unspoken military commitments between Britain and France, which had been kept from the House of Commons. Liberals were disturbed. A friend wrote to Arthur Ponsonby that, ‘Grey is hated by the Liberals and ought to go. Our foreign policy is based on an alliance with burglars.’ The backbench agitation against the concealment of Foreign Office policy from Parliament did not impress Punch. A cartoon showed a couple of scruffy MPs (Radical or Labour) demanding that Sir Edward Grey, portrayed as a suave card player, should show his hand to his opponents.1
The secret articles in the Anglo-French Entente were published by the Government after revelations in a French newspaper. The details turned out to be innocuous, but this did not put an end to the disquiet. The British Government had backed France in the two Morocco crises (the first being 1905–6) in its dispute with the Sultan of Morocco and with Germany. The unanswered question was: what British military commitment to France was implied? What were France’s expectations? The Liberal backbench group aimed to try to monitor what the Government was up to. It represented Liberal international conciliation traditions. War was inimical to the social reform which they were in politics to promote. Not all members of Arthur Ponsonby’s committee were Radicals but it generally represented that quarter of the House. On foreign policy, the Government was much closer to the Conservative Opposition than to Radical Liberal backbenchers.2
Arthur Ponsonby became chairman in 1913. He wanted to see ministers more accountable on foreign policy and the processes of the Foreign Office less secret. He felt that there should be a closer relationship between the Government and the Liberal Party which kept it in power. There were many aspects to foreign policy reform. There was the class-bound diplomatic service. Arthur Ponsonby was one of a number of MPs who wanted to see an end to the caste system of entry depending on social rank and wealth. He submitted a memorandum to the Royal Commission on the Civil Service in the early summer of 1914. More generally, he raised the question before the Select Committee on House of Commons Procedure in 1914 of undemocratic conduct of foreign policy. His campaigns struck a chord in the radical press.3
Suddenly foreign policy was a compelling issue. Arthur Ponsonby wrote in his diary: ‘War between Austria and Servia has broken out. It seems only too probable that other powers will be drawn in.’4
Ponsonby’s group had been largely inactive lately. It existed to monitor foreign affairs and in that respect 1914 so far had been relatively uneventful. Now, with the eruptions in Europe, the committee needed to declare a position on behalf of rank and file MPs of the party of Government. Ponsonby sent out invitations to a meeting to take place before dinner.5
There was now some urgency. The Times had stepped up its call for British involvement in European war should it happen. The newspaper had its usual advertisements for European hotels for when society decamped from London, but this year readers would be thinking twice about travelling as they read reports about war in the east of Europe.6
The paper conjured the horrors of general war in Europe for the first time since the Napoleonic conflict, ‘carried on by all the dreadful engines which science has since devised’. The leader writer might have elaborated on this. There had been the devastating machine guns used by the colonial powers in Africa, and in the Boer War there had been the Boers’ Mauser rifles and automatic weapons which had inflicted grievous casualties on British troops. But the paper, while urging the importance of conciliation, evidently wanted Britain to be in any general European war. Though Britain had no direct interest in the Austria–Serbia dispute, it was a member, the writer reminded readers, of the Entente with France and Russia: ‘To that Entente we shall remain faithful in the future, come what may, as we have been faithful to it in the past.’
The leader was entitled ‘Close the Ranks’ – a telling metaphor. The Times was calling off its followers for the moment from the great fight over Ireland. It wanted a temporary settlement: Home Rule but excluding the whole of Ulster. All the British energy and emotion currently focussed on Ireland must now be switched towards Europe. No spelling out of the message was required. The paper wanted Britain to fight with its Entente partners against Germany and its partners. The manifesto for national unity in the face of European enemies even took in cricket. The final of the three leading articles was entitled ‘Pride of County’. The Middlesex batsmen had recently been bowled out cheaply by Kent’s star bowlers Frank Woolley and Colin Blythe. The competitive passions of county against county, argued the writer, underlined pride in the nation. Sadly, Colin Blythe would be one of those who fell at Passchendaele.
At Commons Questions the Prime Minister, in reply to the Conservative Leader, was giving little away about how the Government saw the crisis:
The situation at this moment is one of extreme gravity. I can only say, usefully say, that His Majesty’s Government are not relaxing their efforts to do everything in their power to circumscribe the area of possible conflict.7
Bonar Law had no comment. This silence left the correspondent of The Times wondering. Next day’s edition commented:
One thing seemed to be wanting. In times of international crisis it is usual for the Leader of the Opposition to make it plain, if only in a single sentence, that the British Government speaks and acts for a united Parliament and country. This afternoon one waited for Mr Bonar Law to make that statement, but he chose to let it be taken for granted.8
It was a sharp nudge to the Conservative Leader. Ireland was still his agenda when it should have been set aside. Bonar Law believed firmly in a British commitment to fight with France and Russia should there be a war between the big alliances. However, he was not yet disposed to go with what The Times wanted. Of Ulster Protestant descent, he was heavily engaged with the anti-Home Rule campaign.9
What about his party? The debates and discussions among Conservative MPs around the lobbies, bars and restaurants of Westminster would be likely to generate a feeling one way or the other.
Questions today included road deaths in the London area. Home Secretary Reginald McKenna disclosed that during the first six months of the year 55 deaths here were down to horse-drawn vehicles, while 197 unfortunates were despatched by motors. Modernity on the roads exacted a toll. What, it might be wondered, would be the mortality rates of the new modes of warfare if conflagration blew across Europe?
Question Time regulars included the Foreign Affairs Committee’s Sir William Byles, Member for Salford, who was proprietor of the Bradford Observer. Byles was a ‘Lib-Lab’ Member. The Lib-Labs were the small number of working-class Liberal MPs. The Salford MP was himself middle class but he associated himself with them and with the Labour Party. Today he had a question for the Home Secretary about a boxing match:
Whether his attention has been directed to the inquest held at Maidenhead on the body of William Walter England, who received fatal injuries at a boxing match, advertised as a champion fight for £25 a side, which took place at the Maiden-head Hippodrome last Wednesday night? Whether the Home Office has the power to prohibit these exhibitions?10
McKenna was not minded to intervene. There was a parting shot from Sir William: ‘Then, the sport of cock fighting is prohibited, and the sport of man fighting is encouraged?’
Byles, seventy-five, was a veteran campaigner for social reform, his causes including full suffrage, female as well as male, the abolition of the death penalty, and an improved quality of life for the working classes. He had been active in the Inter-Parliamentary Union for Peace and Arbitration for twenty years. He was one of those who fretted about the risks of the Entente. On 24 March 1913 he had asked the Prime Minister:
. . . whether he will say if this country is under any and, if so, what obligation to France to send an armed force under certain contingencies to operate in Europe; and if so what are the limits of our agreements, whether by assurance or by treaty, to the French nation?11
There was the usual cheerful reassurance that British independence was untrammelled. Now, with the assembling clouds making fast work of Lloyd George’s blue sky, the validity of Despatch Box pledges that there was no military alliance with France might soon be put to the test.
Down the corridor in the chamber of the red benches, a viscount was being promoted to earl. Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, of Khartoum and Boer War fame, was on leave from his post as British Consul-General in Egypt. Kitchener was a hero. The fact that he originated the term ‘concentration camp’ – in the Boer War (with the strategic driving of civilians including women and children into disease-ridden enclosures, with heavy mortality) had seemingly not sullied his role-model status. His title derived from the 1898 Battle of Omdurman (Khartoum) which secured the British re-conquest of Sudan. Winston Churchill, there as a young subaltern, witnessed the machine guns of the British wreaking butcher’s shop slaughter on the hapless Dervishes, killing 10,000 and wounding many more of their bigger but poorly equipped army, with the loss of less than fifty. He saw ‘brave men destroyed, not conquered, by machinery’. He was shocked by Kitchener’s instruction for the desecration of the tomb and the body of the Mahdi, Muhammad Ahmad, in revenge for the slaughter of the garrison and the killing of General Gordon in 1885. This had prompted Liberal protests in Parliament, but Churchill noted that, ‘All the Tories thought it rather a lark.’ Now Kitchener was in London. He would be available should he be needed. It was felicitous or ominous depending on perspective.12
Several years before, Kitchener had predicted that Germany could ‘walk through the French army like partridges’. Would Britain be expected to bolster the French Army against the Germans? There had been big developments in British Army organisation in the last decade, which had caused some MPs to wonder whether European military involvement was in prospect.13
One of these was Sir William Byles. His un-military appearance provoked sport among the Tory wags when he spoke on military issues. His attitude to the arms race was expressed in a debate on defence estimates on 28 February 1907:
I think the whole conception of our military system – the whole scale of the military defences – is out of all proportion to what is really necessary if only we cultivate a friendly policy with the nations of the earth instead of destroying one another.14
Byles was one of those whose voices were raised when War Minister Richard Haldane instituted an Expeditionary Force of 160,000 men (six divisions of infantry and one of cavalry). It was supposed to be a ‘striking force’ for Empire purposes, but the Salford MP wanted to know why, since the Empire did not need a strike force. The Expeditionary Force, though modest by the standards of the conscripted continental war states with their armies of millions, still seemed enormous. The MP commented on 4 March 1908: ‘To be asked in the House for an expeditionary force of such magnitude is certainly depressing to the friends of peace.’15
The creation of the Expeditionary Force was in reality with a view to Britain going to the help of France in a European war and there was detailed planning for this in the ‘conversations’. Parliament was fobbed off with Empire policing as the reason, but backbenchers like Sir William Byles went on probing.
As the day’s debates began, with Scottish Agriculture, eleven MPs made their way upstairs to the committee corridor. The Ponsonby group turn-out was hardly a great demonstration of Liberal backbenchers’ determination to keep Britain at peace. MPs were not used to Europe as an urgent concern.
Among those who appeared was Arnold Rowntree. During the morning the York MP wrote to his wife that the meeting was ‘important’ and that the European situation was ‘very grave’.16
Also present was the previous chairman. Philip Morrell, forty-four, sat for Burnley. At Eton and Balliol he had overlapped with Arthur Ponsonby (Morrell being one year older) but his was a very different story from Ponsonby’s. He had three unhappy years at Balliol, culminating in a nervous breakdown. Philip’s wife, Lady Ottoline, was one of the Bloomsbury Group of avant-gardes. Bloomsbury writers, poets and artists frequented the Morrell Bedford Square home. Philip was another upper class radical identifying with the interests of the disadvantaged. His area of specialism in the Foreign Affairs group was one which Ponsonby himself shared, Persia and Russia.17
For some years Persia had been a touchstone cause. Persia in British progressive protest was somewhat akin to South Africa and Chile in the 1970s. In 1906 the Shah had agreed to a constitutional monarchy and a parliament had been elected. But the big powers moved in to squash the hopes. Britain had abandoned Persia’s democrats. Oil had much to do with it. Philip Morrell had spoken in a debate on Persia on 17 June on the British Government’s proposed acquisition of share capital in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. He and his friends were opposed to Britain’s involvement in Persia with its Russian Triple Entente partner. They saw heavy international dangers. Morrell argued that it ‘seriously threatened the independence and integrity’ of Persia.18
Of a staunchly Conservative family, Morrell was a solicitor before he entered politics. Literature and history were more his natural field than the knockabout of the Commons but his wife encouraged him to seek a Liberal seat. Money came from the Liberal League, a quirky circumstance given that Morrell turned out to be left-wing and anti-war. Philip was never comfortable with the public spotlight. But sometimes a compulsive inner drive to speak out overrode inhibition. Afterwards there could be mental turmoil. The June debate on Persian oil seems to have been one of these occasions. Ottoline, in a letter to Bertrand Russell, related that her husband had arrived home after ‘a horrible and awful experience’. In making a speech in the Commons he had ‘said all sorts of things he had not meant to say’. It ‘upset him too dreadfully’.19
Arthur Ponsonby also spoke in this debate. In his speech he likened the Persian oil policy to storing ‘gunpowder near some furnace’: ‘The furnace for the present is smouldering and does not show any sign of activity but at any moment it may blaze up.’20 Morrell, however, probably did not know that Ponsonby was also self-critical about his performance:
Spoke on Persian oil yesterday. I very much doubt the wisdom of this step – fresh obligations, fresh responsibilities in one of the most dangerous corners of the world. I was allowed only ¼ hr and spoke badly.21
What Morrell said at Arthur Ponsonby’s committee meeting is not known. Its outcome was a letter to Sir Edward Grey, which Ponsonby composed. After a fulsome assurance of confidence in the Foreign Secretary, he commented on press coverage of the European crisis:
The tone of some of the newspapers and the somewhat alarmist reports of the mobilisation of our forces have very much upset Liberal members and grave fear was expressed lest public opinion become inflamed . . .22
Then there was a statement of the meeting’s feeling:
It was decided that everything possible should be done to counteract the influences which already seem to be working for our participation in what may prove to be a general European conflict. It was the feeling of the meeting that we could not support the Government in any military or naval operations which would carry this country beyond its existing treaty obligations. It was felt that if both France and Russia were informed that on no account would we be drawn into war even though they and other European powers were involved it would have a moderating effect on their policy.
What were Britain’s ‘existing treaty obligations’? If Germany moved against France, invasion through Belgium was overwhelmingly probable, given the heavily fortified border between France and Germany. There was a multi-power 1839 treaty on Belgium, to which Britain was a signatory. Was Britain committed by this to fight an army trying to pass through Belgium in a war between the big powers? Arthur Ponsonby and probably the majority of his group would say No, since the treaties were about the neutrality of Belgium, and Germany’s purpose would be getting at France rather than taking over Belgium. The autobiography of Sir Edward Grey recalled an argument with an unnamed Liberal MP about the middle of the week. Grey asked, ‘Suppose Germany violates the neutrality of Belgium?’ The MP replied, ‘She won’t do it’. This was head in the sand. The Ponsonby group had no such illusions. In a general European war a German invasion of Belgium as its opening move was standard military theory. It was going to be a big problem for the British neutralist cause.23
Arthur Ponsonby’s letter to the Foreign Secretary floated the idea of a full meeting of the party. However, there was stress on a desire not to embarrass the Government with premature publicity. The committee’s resolution was enclosed:
That this meeting having had its attention drawn to statements in The Times and other organs of the press that this country may be involved in the war which has broken out in the east, desires to express its view that Great Britain in no conceivable circumstances should depart from a position of strict neutrality and appeals to His Majesty’s government to give effect to this view while continuing to offer its good offices in every promising way to secure the restoration of peace.24
Arthur Ponsonby had included Sir Edward Grey in a 1913 Cabinet ‘report’: ‘His House of Commons manner has been a great service to him. It is very simple, very sincere, dignified and direct . . .’ What follows inspires less confidence:
He is out of touch with the party. I don’t suppose he knows more than a score of them by name. He has a great reputation in the country especially among Tories . . . He is rather aloof and unapproachable which makes a certain mystery that attracts. He trusts the opinion of his permanent officials more than his own judgement and is therefore capable of making serious mistakes.25
The permanent officials were the likes of Sir Arthur Nicolson, the Permanent Under-Secretary and the Assistant Under-Secretary, Sir Eyre Crowe.
Sir Arthur Nicolson was deep in the conservative establishment. In conversation with Paul Cambon, the French ambassador, in 1912 he lambasted the Government as ‘this radical–socialist Cabinet’ which he thought could not possibly last. He was married to the sister-in-law of the Marquess of Dufferin, one of the big Ulster landlords, and the Government’s Irish Home Rule programme was anathema to him.26
Sir Eyre Crowe, Nicolson’s deputy, had been born in Leipzig. He still had traces of a German accent. He was an admirer of much in German life but a vigorous proponent of vigilance over German military ambition and the vital needs of the Triple Entente and of keeping up British naval strength. Recently, in the light of Germany’s shifting of priorities towards its land armies to face Russian expansion, he had been coming round to a view of possible realignment of Britain and Germany. But any rapprochement with Germany was now being overtaken by events. In this crisis Crowe was arguing strenuously for standing with France against Germany.
Would Sir Edward Grey keep Britain clear of war? One who had doubts was Charles Trevelyan, who wrote to his wife during this day:
I find at the bottom of my heart that I distrust Grey, though I am sure he will do his best to keep peace. But I don’t think he sees the utter wickedness of our being drawn in under any conditions and therefore may get dragged along by circumstances. A man is not to be trusted who does not at least say to himself whatever others may do we cannot go to war. If any overt act of military preparation took place, I should have to consider resigning at once.27
An entry in the diary of Cabinet minister Charles Hobhouse (Postmaster General) indicates that at this time the Foreign Secretary was convinced by the German Ambassador, Lichnowsky (who was an Anglophile), that Germany, and especially the Kaiser, was working hard for peace. On that basis Grey was inclined to remain neutral. But the Ambassador was being kept in the dark by his Government. Grey was incensed when he discovered.28
Usually it was Grey and his staff deciding Foreign Office matters, subject to being responsible to the Prime Minister. But now the European crisis had brought in the wider Cabinet with its radical elements like Lloyd George. If great decisions should need to be taken, it remained to be seen whether the regular circle would get its way. Grey was working every sinew this week to avert a terrible clash of the big European alliances. But would the Triple Entente manoeuvrings which he had kept from Parliament land Britain in the big war anyway? Back in 1906 Grey had written, ‘If there is war between France and Germany, it will be very difficult for us to keep out of it.’29
In the chamber the agriculture debate was opened by Glasgow Liberal Member, Alexander MacCallum Scott. A youngish barrister, Scott was the son of a clergyman. On 12 February he had set out in his journal, as the new session began, a list of nine topics from which he aimed to get ‘6 good speeches’. There was no comment in his diary yet about the European crisis. This MP was hardly likely to want Britain to get drawn in. He had been a leading figure in the League of Liberals Against Aggression and Militarism.30
We were absolutely free and working for peace.
The movements of the fleet were only necessary moves and in no way preparatory.31
Grey had been at a Cabinet meeting in the morning, which had looked at the prospective situation of Belgium in a European war. In the 1839 Treaty of London, guaranteeing Belgium’s neutrality and independence, the signatories were Britain, France, Austria, Russia and Prussia. Germany had taken over from Prussia. On what Britain should do if the crisis did turn into a general European war including a German invasion of Belgium, opinions were divided. No decisions were made except that the French and German ambassadors would be told by the Foreign Secretary that Britain was unable to give any advance pledge either on standing aside or on joining in.
Arthur Ponsonby and his colleagues desired a statement of British neutrality but they were not going to get this. Grey’s argument was that such a statement would be counter-productive for keeping Russia and France pacific: it would help negotiations to keep them in doubt. But he did say that he would show the Ponsonby committee’s communication to the Prime Minister.
What of the just under forty Labour MPs? They had been at the fore-front of the objections to increases in military expenditure, and Labour MPs had been among those interrogating Ministers about the military implications of the Entente. Missing from Parliament today was Labour’s most famous Member. James Keir Hardie, MP for Merthyr Tydfil, was in Brussels as a British representative at a meeting of the International Socialist Bureau. The ISB was the central committee of the worker solidarity Second International, founded in 1889, whose greatest challenge might now be approaching.
It was not seen that way. There would be dangers, it was thought, but the new Balkan war would be contained as had the previous ones. There was, however, no holding of breath that in Austria and Serbia workers would magnificently down tools to halt the wars of the capitalist rulers. The last month had given no fillip to worker solidarity against war. The delegates from the conflict zone reported glumly that there was nothing which could be done against the patriotic flag-waving and that anti-war demonstrations would bring risk to life. Nothing had been possible in the previous Balkan Wars. Now it was the same. Preparing for an international strike as a weapon against war was a longer-term project. Keir Hardie was one of its strongest promoters. The celebrated French socialist Jean Jaurès another. But the Germans had been less keen. The grand scheme was awaiting discussion and possible ratification at a big ISB Congress scheduled for Vienna. This was now brought forward to 9 August and the venue moved to Paris. Hardie had not wanted the date interfered with. To him, ratification of the anti-war strike principle was more important than a demonstration against the Austria-Serbia war, which might pass.32
Keir Hardie was the delegate of the Independent Labour Party. The ILP pre-dated the Parliamentary Labour Party and had seven MPs within the Labour group. Hardie’s story could already fill a book of Labour history, but these days he was rather an isolated figure in the Commons and no longer held the House when he spoke. Lately he looked more to the socialist movement in the country and to international socialism than to the House of Commons. But, with his shock of white hair, he was still capable of rousing passions.
Back in the House of Commons the agriculture discussions dragged on. Supply debates could be stamina-sapping, giving rise to the ‘Bores of Supply’.33 Tonight the real story was taking shape outside the chamber – in the lobbies, the dining rooms and the bars – where the conversations of MPs were determining rank and file feeling on European war.
Next there was a debate on naturalisation of aliens. It was 1 a.m. when the last clause of the bill in question was reached. Consideration was heard of a proposal by Willoughby Dickinson, Liberal, St Pancras North, who had earlier been at Arthur Ponsonby’s meeting. Dickinson, a lawyer, was a House of Commons champion of women’s suffrage. He belonged to a British–German inter-church body and he was the founder of a journal called The Peacemaker. In this debate he asked for the removal of the words which deemed a wife to be a British citizen if her husband opted so to be (or an alien if that was what her husband decided). Why should women not have the right to choose for themselves? In support, another Liberal remarked that some Members were prepared to fight a civil war against Irish Home Rule and yet were happy to refuse women the right of choice on nationality. But the move was seen off heavily at the vote.34
In the war, Austrian gunboats on the Danube were shelling Belgrade. By the end of the day there had been time for MPs to digest the implications of a potential clash of the big European alliances. Where were Conservative emotions? Resistance to Home Rule had occupied passions on this side of the House recently. But would imperial and military-minded Conservatives now be switching their campaigning energies to push for Britain to seize the opportunity to take on Germany and remove it as an imperial competitor?
There was still another debate – on an Inebriates Bill clause which would see persons brought before the courts for drunkenness liable to be committed to a reformatory for two years if they breached an undertaking to abstain from any intoxicating liquor, sedative, narcotic or stimulant drug. The proposal was slammed by Josiah Wedgwood, Liberal Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme.
The fact is I hate this bill. It is one of a trio of Bills, the others being the Mental Deficiency Bill and the Criminal Justice Administration Bill, all being directed to take in the unfits and misfits – those who do not fit into our civilisation – and put them into institutions in order to turn them into more useful citizens to the possessing classes.35
The bills were part of the eugenics culture. Josiah Wedgwood, a member of Arthur Ponsonby’s committee, loathed this. In 1912 he had successfully led the opposition to a proposed bill to incarcerate ‘mentally defective’ people, supposedly for their own good and to prevent them from breeding. The Mental Deficiency Act of 1913 was less sweeping but it still had powers to detain and in certain cases to control procreation. Wedgwood turned his familiar scorn on the breach of conditions provision of this bill, observing that the expression ‘intoxicant’ was wide enough to include consumption of Mother Siegel’s Soothing Syrup as grounds for confinement in an institution. The present bill received its Second Reading, with not many joining Wedgwood’s opposition, but the Home Secretary did later agree to meet the MP. In the event the bill was one of those which would be knocked out by events.36