NEWS OF THE CABINET SUNDAY DECISIONS does not seem to have seeped out before early arrivals trickled into Westminster on Monday morning. Backbench Liberal Francis Neilson (a Radical) was one. On his way he had seen companies of soldiers in full uniform marching towards Victoria. He found not many MPs yet at the House. Those to whom he spoke still seemed to be in the Liberal mode of confidence that, whatever was happening on the continent, it would not come to Britain. The usual remark in his circle on this Monday morning, he recalled, was, ‘There’ll be no war.’ He went along to the Commons library and read the French newspapers to try to get some idea of what was going on.1
Arthur Ponsonby wrote to his wife before he went to Westminster, ‘It is all very hideous and terrible but there is still hope.’ A later letter, describing the events in Parliament on Monday, states that he arrived early at the Commons and found ‘alarming rumours’ circulating.2
Charles Trevelyan certainly feared the worst. He wrote to his wife:
It looks very bad this morning. Unless the Prime Minister gives a satisfactory account of what they are doing, I shall have to resign. But I am unable to tell at all yet, and there is no use discussing it. Everything just now is the decision of the hour.3
Around Parliament milling crowds were on the lookout for the famous. Public figures were readily recognisable from the newspaper and magazine pictures and caricatures and from the silent cinema news-reels. No doubt some people had been to Madam Tussaud’s in Baker Street, now advertising: ‘The European Crisis: Lifelike Portrait Models’ (focussing on Austria and Serbia). A similar service was provided for ‘The Home Rule Crisis’, with Carson and Redmond in wax, but this was now yesterday’s news.4
There were cheers as Ministers were spotted. On this bank holiday the Strand and Whitehall were thronged with holiday-makers dressed for the beach who had taken a diversion to try to get a sight of the political action. The newspapers had special editions in rapid succession. They were advertised by posters in bold scrawl and there was a brisk kerbside trade. The Pall Mall Gazette had a headline ‘NOW’ It declared:
The news of this morning is decisive. The neutrality of Belgium has been invaded. This is the end of all doubt and hesitation.5
The Pall Mall was jumping the gun. Belgium had not yet been invaded. But the paper was already thinking about the Expeditionary Force. It had no doubt: ‘For many and various reasons, it ought to be placed upon the soil of France’.
On the streets miniature Union Jacks and tricolours were being sold; here and there shouts of war excitement were heard. There was also scattered ‘mob’ behaviour, to use Asquith’s word. However, the crowds were generally holiday-makers, well behaved, caught up with the excitement and tension, and rather anxious too.
There were plenty of arrivals to keep the watchers interested. Among the plentiful top hats – still the MP’s trademark – were a few wider-brimmed soft hats, chiefly on the heads of Labour Members. Keir Hardie with his familiar tam o’ shanter was one MP easily picked out.
The Times on this Monday, under the heading ‘The Travelling Season’, detailed the usual arrangements at this time of year for subscribers to have their copies sent on to the continent. Map sellers were doing well but not this year for holiday travel. An advertisement for the City Map Shop in Old Broad Street announced that it would be open on the bank holiday for the sale of ‘WAR MAPS’.6
The lead headline in The Times was ‘FIVE NATIONS AT WAR’. Readers will have been intrigued by a report headed ‘LORD KITCHENER’, under which it was stated that the famous man had postponed his return to Egypt because a journey across France was ‘no longer practicable’. The paper added that a different route would be taken later in the week ‘unless’, as the writer put it, suggestively, ‘Lord Kitchener’s services should be required in the meantime for purposes other than those originally intended’.
Eyes will have been caught by a prominent report in the paper in bold type, with a strong hint of insider information:
The Cabinet held two long sittings yesterday, both of them attended by unusual manifestations of popular interest outside.
It is understood that divisions of opinion, which still existed in the morning, were closed by the news from the Continent which reached London before the afternoon sitting. If they now take shape in any resignation from the Cabinet, it will be of a small and unimportant character.
For those who knew how to read these things, it unmistakeably meant that the Government had decided for war. But what about Parliament? The Foreign Secretary had often said that the Commons had the last word on great questions.
News which had not arrived in time for the previous evening’s Cabinet meeting was that at 7 p.m. on Sunday a German ultimatum was given to the Belgian Government. This offered friendly relations with Germany in return for the passage of German troops through Belgium. But it was an ultimatum: German troops must enter Belgian territory, to anticipate French attack. Twelve hours was given for reply. Mid-morning on Monday the information reached the British Foreign Office along with the news that the Belgian Government had rejected it. This was shortly before the Cabinet gathered again at Downing Street.
At this meeting, following the earlier announcements of intended resignation by John Burns, Sir John Simon and Lord Morley, a statement was made by the First Commissioner of Works, Earl Beauchamp that he too must go. But the ministers (except Burns) agreed to sit on the Government front benches during the Foreign Secretary’s statement. ‘Until the H. of C. had indicated its opinion’, Charles Hobhouse put it in his diary, calling this ‘not very brave conduct’. He presumably meant that if Grey’s call for war went down badly there would be no war and the ministers would not have to resign but should there be enthusiastic assent they could find themselves persuaded to stay.7
The Foreign Secretary’s speech was scheduled to follow Questions, shortly after 3.00.
An MP who, as Churchill’s PPS, probably had some idea of what to expect in Sir Edward’s speech was Freddie Whyte, whose account of the crisis days continues into Monday:
Even as late as noon on Monday, August 3rd, there were still many Liberal MPs who were shaking their heads over Grey’s policy and were still inclined to press for a neutral attitude by HMG.8
It must be said that there was no unanimity on the Conservative benches for war. Leo Amery’s diary for 1 August states that ‘except Hugh Cecil, and in a milder degree Robert Cecil’, there was no section of the Conservative Party in favour of neutrality, ‘though of course the Jewish influence generally, in so far as it affected the Daily Telegraph and some other circles in the party, looked with great aversion on the idea of war’. But it is likely that there were Conservative neutralists who were keeping their heads down.9
Philip Morrell lunched at his Bedford Square Georgian house near the British Museum, where he and Ottoline were joined by Bertrand Russell, philosopher and political writer, who was Ottoline’s former lover in the open marriage. The war occupied the conversation. Philip said that he was determined to make a speech in Parliament against British entry. He was told by Ottoline that he must not fail to do so.10
The Parliamentary Labour Party and the Ponsonby committee held their meetings before Commons proceedings began.
Ramsay MacDonald had no problem with his MPs. His diary states that he ‘communicated to party meeting what I proposed to say and received their approval without dissent’. After the weekend’s rallies and demonstrations anything other than a Labour call for Britain to keep out of the war would have been extraordinary.11
Arthur Ponsonby’s meeting was attended by twenty-five. They will have wondered how their colleagues Allen Baker and Willoughby Dickinson were faring in Germany on their peace mission. They will have imagined a nightmare; and it was. The Conference broke up prematurely on Monday morning. The returning delegates from twelve countries left by the last through train out of Germany, standing for most of the journey, without food as their luncheons were stolen by troops, and making a common pool of their gold, since this was now the only currency.12
Little detail has survived of Arthur Ponsonby’s meeting. The chairman’s papers have not much more than time and place and the attendance record. But an Arthur to Dolly letter speaks of the meeting as ‘very difficult to handle’, with ‘marked differences of opinion showing themselves’. Something had altered things since Friday.13
It was certainly Belgium. A German invasion of Belgium, as the opening phase of a war between the two big alliances, had long been a likely prediction. Now that it was actually going to happen, it was causing shock in the Liberal Party. The idea of a British role in maintaining international good behaviour had been part of Gladstone’s philosophy. Liberalism was committed to peace but there was its occasional crusading strand favouring war to impose justice. Germany was set to make an unprovoked attack on a smaller nation. If some members of the Ponsonby committee wondered whether this was a case for British intervention to assert international justice, this was to be expected.14
The Ponsonby meeting pulled in two of the most combative backbench Liberals, Josiah Wedgwood and Leonard Outhwaite. Both sat for Staffordshire Potteries constituencies and both were ardent proponents of the campaign for taxation of land values.
Tall, balding and moustached, Leonard Outhwaite, forty-five, originated from Tasmania where he had been a farmer before becoming a journalist and migrating with his family to Britain. A spell in South Africa as the correspondent of five British Liberal papers had been a formative experience. Outhwaite’s passion was to find a means of enabling the population to enjoy fair shares in the benefits of the land, not just in rural areas but in the industrial cities too. In 1912 he contested a by-election for the Liberals in Hanley, near Stoke on Trent. He proclaimed the land tax cause. Three meetings went on non-stop in the town centre, while a gramophone blared out ‘The Land Song’. Labour, which had previously held the seat, sent in big-hitters Keir Hardie and George Lansbury. The two stormed around Hanley preaching socialist revolution. It backfired. The conservative-minded local potters and miners opted for the Liberals as being more moderate, a quirky outcome given that Outhwaite was a Radical on the left of his party. When the poll was declared, Outhwaite had beaten the Conservative, with Labour back in a poor third place.15
Outhwaite and his land-taxers felt in the summer of 1914 that their cause was taking off. But all social reform risked being buried by war if Britain got into a European military adventure. Outhwaite detested war. He had seen the graveyards of the Boer War fallen.16
His colleague Josiah Wedgwood had a very different history. He had once worked in naval construction and in the Boer War he had commanded a field artillery battery supplied by his firm. He was another reformer from within the social establishment. He was a prominent supporter of women’s suffrage and had been at the forefront of the protest against forced feeding of hunger-striking suffragettes. His family is listed in the 1911 Census as having a governess and five servants, including a lady’s maid – fairly usual for the upper middle class. But he proudly gave his occupation to the enumerators as ‘Radical Member of Parliament’. Philip Morrell once pondered on Wedgwood’s contradictions: ‘radical and revolutionary as he likes to think himself, he is at heart one of the most traditional of men’.17
The Ponsonby committee men completed their meeting and made their way downstairs. Noise from the streets was filtering in, adding to the buzz of the corridors and foyers. Around the Palace of Westminster many were hoping to get into the public galleries to hear Sir Edward Grey’s speech. Most were unlucky. Bertrand Russell was one of those excluded by the crush.
Ottoline Morrell fared better. As an MP’s wife she was in the Ladies’ Gallery. Today the viewing areas were heaving. Squashed in among the reporters in the small press gallery were the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chief Justice. Everyone wanted to be there. Arthur Ponsonby was as usual among the Radicals below the gangway. If the Foreign Secretary showed signs of going for British entry into the European war he could expect trouble from here. It was an area that the reporters would be watching closely.18
The debating chamber had nothing like the capacity to take 670 Members comfortably if all turned up. It was thought that overcrowding was good for charging the atmosphere on big occasions. On this day extra chairs had to be shoehorned into the aisle and the gangways, for the first time since Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill of 1886. The chamber was a jam of solid seating with not a space anywhere.
Asquith and Lloyd George had needed the police to clear a way through the crowds for them to get to the House. Now they were here on the Government front bench, Asquith sitting by his Foreign Secretary. Among the junior ministers behind the Government front bench was Charles Trevelyan.
Trevelyan had lunched with his brother George at Victoria Station. With them was Edmond Dene Morel, prospective Liberal candidate for Birkenhead, famous for his Congo Reform Association campaigns against the brutal fiefdom of the Belgian King Leopold II in the Congo. The death toll of forced labour in the collection of rubber amounted to millions. The Morel group’s protests were instrumental in having the Congo territory transferred to the jurisdiction of the Belgian government on Leopold’s death in 1909. With the Congo campaign completed, Morel switched his publicity machine to exposure of the secret arrangements of the Anglo-French Entente.19
Charles Trevelyan put his brother and E. D. Morel in his office below the ‘No’ Lobby. Then he then went up to the chamber, and took his place. He was prepared for bad news.20
Presiding was Mr Speaker, James Lowther. He was a Conservative of the landed classes. The office which he held embodied ancient traditions of liberty and respect for dissent. The Radicals and socialists on the backbenches who were opposed to war entry had to hope that Lowther would remember the history of his great office and allow them to be heard.
Proceedings began as usual at 2.45 p.m. As always, even today, it was Questions first. Two were in the name of Joseph King about Belgium. It was not expected that the answers would provide much illumination. Most people just wanted Questions out of the way so that Sir Edward could put everyone out of their agony of suspense.
Grey’s Under-Secretary, Francis Acland, answering King, declined to furnish the details of three Treaties of London (1831, 1839 and 1870) and other documents of relevance to Belgium’s status as a neutral state. He said that a statement was going to be made, a fact of which no Member could be unaware.
In this period most questions were put orally but there were some written ones. On this day one stands out. It was from Charles Bathurst, Conservative Member for South Wiltshire:
MR C. BATHURST: Asked the Prime Minister whether, in view of the present European crisis and the desirability of absolute solidarity among the classes and political parties in this country, he will consider the advantage of adjourning, for the present, this Session of Parliament, and so rendering impossible the continuance or development of acute party controversy with a consequent suggestion of internal discord to the minds of the subjects of Foreign Powers?
THE PRIME MINISTER: The matter referred to is receiving full consideration.21
The questioner evidently thought that politics, and therefore democracy, should be put into abeyance when the country was facing possible war. This shows why MPs like Edmund Harvey were so perturbed about Conservative backbench conversations. Britain was not even in the war yet, but here was an MP calling for Parliament to be shut down while the Government got on with hostilities. The question foreshadowed a four-year fight to keep democracy open in wartime.
Question Time was shortened. Lloyd George then presented the Moratorium Bill. It was through its Commons stages in minutes. The decks were cleared for the Foreign Secretary. The Commons would now learn whether or not the Government wanted to take the country to war.
Just after 3 p.m. Grey stood up. Arthur Ponsonby, who was scheduled to chair a second meeting of his committee afterwards, hoped that he would be expressing his satisfaction and relief that Britain would be staying out of the war. It was not a confident hope.