War and the State (RLE The First World War)

The Transformation of British Government, 1914-1919

Kathleen Burk

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138018396
• eBook ISBN: 9781317700326
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

This volume gives students and researchers an insight into British central government in 1914, how and why it altered during the war years and what permanent changes remained when the war was over. The war saw the scope of governmental intervention widened in an unprecedented manner. The contributors to this book analyse the reasons for this expansion and describe how the changes affected the government machine and the lives of the citizens. They consider why some innovations did not survive the coming of peace while others permanently transformed the duties and procedures of government.

1

The Rise and Fall of ‘Business as Usual’

The economic plans and policies for war of Asquith’s Liberal government have received scant attention from historians. The little work which has been done on them has tended to be highly critical of the government’s supposed unpreparedness to meet the economic problems the war produced. The government’s failure to make adequate preparations has been attributed to their adherence to laissez-faire principles. It has been argued that these principles made them reluctant to plan for widespread state controls over economic resources and manpower. Writing in 1924 E. M. H. Lloyd, formerly a senior civil servant at the War Office and the Ministry of Food, argued that the Liberals had been too deeply committed to the doctrines of free trade and individualism to make proper economic plans for war or to take decisive action during the first few months of the conflict. ‘It is not surprising [he wrote] that the necessity of State intervention was only gradually admitted by Ministers who had spent the greater part of their political careers in exploding the fallacies of Protectionism on the one hand and Socialism on the other.’¹

Lloyd’s interpretation of the government’s inability to cope with the problems the war created at home has now become an orthodoxy. It is the purpose of this essay to show that this explanation requires serious qualification. The government’s policies were not determined solely, or even in large part, by an economic ideology. Most planners recognised that the outbreak of war would dislocate the economy and if total collapse was to be averted the government would have to interfere in parts of it. By 1914 it was recognised that unless the government took control of the entire railway network and supported the shipping insurance market the economy would collapse and social order would be endangered because the populations of the great conurbations would be starving. More important than ideology in determining the government’s courses of action and inaction was their decision about the correct strategy to pursue in a war against Germany. Largely for political reasons, before 1914 they rejected the idea of raising and dispatching a continental-size army to France. Instead they intended to fight the war using the existing small volunteer army and the Royal Navy. This decision had important results for the government’s economic policy. It meant that there was no need to draw on and, therefore, to organise manpower and factories normally devoted to civilian consumption to support the war effort. ‘Business (almost) as usual’ was possible.

However, Kitchener’s decision to raise and equip an army numbered in millions upset all prewar calculations. Within a few months of it having been taken it was becoming increasingly apparent that the economy could no longer be left largely to run itself. Shortages of men, machines and raw materials and production bottlenecks meant that the government was eventually compelled to intervene to determine the proper distribution of increasingly scarce resources. By May 1915 a growing number of ministers accepted the need in principle for such intervention. But effective action was delayed, especially in the vital engineering industry, because Kitchener and Lloyd George could not agree on how the process should be organised.

Naval and military plans for a war with Germany had been formulated in outline by the time of the Agadir crisis in the summer of 1911. The result was two incompatible plans. For their part the soldiers had firmly embraced the continental commitment. They were determined that the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) should be sent to France to co-operate with the left wing of the French army on the Franco-Belgian frontier. The British General Staff hoped that the six divisions of the BEF would be just enough to tip the scales of the land war in the Entente’s favour and stop the German advance through Belgium and northern France. Then the Germans would be faced by a stalemate and so would be forced to sue for peace.² The Admiralty, however, rejected the continental commitment in favour of their own maritime strategy. Their war plans had been prepared by the Ballard Committee in the winter of 1906–7. This committee had recommended that Britain could best bring about the defeat of Germany by means of a naval blockade. The German merchant marine could be swept from the seas and her Baltic coastal towns could be bombarded. This would bring about the collapse of her economy and so she would be unable to continue fighting. To assist them in this plan the Admiralty wanted the War Office to lend them part of the BEF so that they could employ it to seize islands off the German coast for use as advanced destroyer bases. The Ballard Committee were tremendously impressed by Germany’s supposed vulnerability to a naval blockade, although in their report they merely asserted this fact and produced no evidence to support it.³

These plans were mutually exclusive: the BEF was just too small to be committed to northern France and to the Baltic coast at the same time. But when the plans were discussed by a Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) sub-committee investigating the military needs of the Empire in 1908–9 the sub-committee was unable to decide between them. It simply concluded its report by saying that ‘In the event of an attack on France by Germany, the expediency of sending a military force abroad, or of relying on naval means, is a matter of policy which can only be determined, when the occasion arises, by the Government of the day.’⁴

The reason why the sub-committee was unable to resolve these conflicting plans was made explicit in the late summer of 1911. On 23 August a carefully selected group of ministers assembled at the CID. They were treated to a full exposition of the General Staff’s plans and a much more vague and ‘puerile’ account of the Admiralty’s.⁵ But although the former was accompanied by much well-reasoned argument Asquith recognised that it would still be extremely difficult to persuade the majority of his Cabinet colleagues to accept the army’s ideas.⁶ Only Asquith, Grey, Haldane, Lloyd George and Churchill knew anything of the army’s plans to send troops to France. The rest of the Cabinet had not been told of them in the expectation that they would not agree to them. This small group thought that even if Britain did go to war with Germany their colleagues would insist that only the navy and not the army should be sent to aid the French. Their fears were well founded. Writing only a few days after this meeting Walter Runciman, the President of the Board of Education, told Lewis Harcourt, the Colonial Secretary, that ‘The sea is our natural element and the sooner they [that is, the French] realise that we are not going to land troops the better will be the chances of preserving Europe’s peace.’⁷

In writing this Runciman was only echoing ideas which were common currency in the Liberal Party both within and without the Cabinet.⁸ Most Liberals, however reluctantly, were prepared to go to war, but they were not prepared to fight a major land war. Like the Admiralty they wanted to avoid committing a large army to the Continent and to fight the Germans by attacking their trade.

Reliance on the navy was, therefore, fundamental to the success of ‘business as usual’. It would protect Britain from invasion, it would strangle the German economy and thus by obviating the need to send a large army to the Continent, it would ensure that Britain would win the war at the least possible cost to herself. Even more than this, safe behind her Dreadnoughts, Britain’s economy could continue to function smoothly and this in itself could become a potent weapon in defeating Germany. This argument was expressed most cogently by the secretary of the CID, M. P. A. Hankey, in a memorandum he sent to the Secretary of State for War, Colonel J. E. B. Seely, in March 1913. Hankey, previously the secretary of the Ballard Committee, was an uncompromising navalist. In his memorandum he rehearsed the usual navalist arguments in favour of relying on the fleet and then began to develop a powerful new line of argument. He stated that if imports continued to come into Britain her industries would continue to function and she would thus be able to supply her allies with all the supplies they needed to fight the Germans on land. But the sine qua non of Britain becoming the economic powerhouse and paymaster of the Entente was that the economy must not be deprived of manpower by futile attempts to raise a large army. If that were attempted the economy would be ruined and Britain would be pitched into a costly land war. At home, ‘The transport services would be demoralised, [and] the mills, mines and agriculture would all be short of labour at a time when it was specially required.’⁹ The burden of this argument was that there was simply no point in Britain paying the blood tax of a land war if the navy and the French and Russian armies, equipped with British-made supplies, could win the war alone. Indeed it might be disastrous for Britain and her partners if large numbers of men were taken from the factories and put into uniform, because ‘This might result in a general and universal destitution and starvation and the Government would be subjected to heavy pressure to bring the war to an end at all costs.’¹⁰

The internal logic of these arguments was quite sound. The notion behind them was not. Hankey never contemplated what would happen to the Entente if the French and the Russians were not strong enough to checkmate the Central Powers and bring them to the peace-table quickly. Nor did he ask himself how long Britain’s allies would be prepared to fight alone whilst Britain enriched herself supplying them with arms. A cash nexus was not a stable basis for a wartime alliance. Navalists like Hankey were fond of looking back to the Royal Navy’s successes during the Napoleonic War, but they had forgotten or misunderstood one of the lessons of the war. In a war with a great continental power British naval and economic strength alone had not been enough to ensure victory. She also needed powerful military allies. Between 1793 and 1815 Britain spent nearly £66m. subsidising various continental allies but money alone could not give them the will to resist the French. Only in 1813, when they had found that will from within themselves, could they make effective use of British aid and it was only when Napoleon had been defeated on land that he surrendered.¹¹

The belief that naval and economic power would suffice to defeat the Germans was one of the fundamental premises on which ‘business as usual’ was based. The other was that raising a continental-scale army was impossible. Before the war voluntary recruiting left even the small British regular army undermanned, and political prejudices against conscription were such that the government never seriously contemplated introducing it. In August 1910 Lloyd George frankly recognised that compulsory training even for home defence was beyond the bounds of practical politics ‘because of the violent prejudices which would be excited even if it were suspected that a Government contemplated the possibility of establishing anything of the kind’.¹² The truth behind the Chancellor’s remarks was made evident by the hostile reception given to a bill of March 1913 introducing compulsory service for the Territorial Army. So hostile was the opposition from the Liberal and Labour benches that its sponsors withdrew it before it was put to a vote.¹³ One of the consequences of this was that the War Office did not think they would be able to raise many more men on the outbreak of war and so made no plans to do so.¹⁴

Thus the rejection of the continental commitment by all except the General Staff and a handful of ministers and a belief in the efficacy of a maritime strategy were the fundamental premises on which ‘business as usual’ rested. As long as they were put into practice ‘business as usual’ could survive. If they perished ‘business as usual’ would perish too. The implications of this for economic planning were crucial. Britain planned to rely on the navy to do most of her fighting and the Cabinet refused to contemplate raising an army numbered in millions. Hence there was no need to plan for the kinds of collectivist measures which the government increasingly adopted after 1915. Nor was there any need to set up the elaborate administrative apparatus to run the war at home which was established piecemeal during the war. Adherence to laissez-faire principles seem to have played little or no part in deterring the government from making plans to mobilise the economy in wartime. Because, for the time being, they shunned the continental commitment, the government failed to recognise that there was any need for them to organise the redistribution of resources between the needs generated by the war and the normal requirements of the civilian population.

This argument can most easily be illustrated in detail by examining the engineering industry. During the war it underwent considerable redirection. But before the outbreak of war in 1914 the government’s policy had stemmed directly from the experience of the Boer War. Early in that war the inability of the Royal Ordnance Factories and the handful of specialised munitions manufacturers to supply enough shells for the army in South Africa had meant that Britain had been denuded of nearly all stocks of artillery ammunition. The Unionist government then tried to rectify this dangerous situation by increasing reserve stocks of ammunition. By 1914 each field gun had 1,500 rounds compared to only 300 in 1899. Five hundred rounds per gun were kept in a reserve at home, ready to be sent abroad when required. By all previous standards this represented a prodigal supply of ammunition and Haldane, the Secretary of State for War in 1910, believ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Editor’s Introduction
• 1. The Rise and Fall of ‘Business as Usual’
• 2. The Ministry of Munitions: an Innovatory Department
• 3. Cabinets, Committees and Secretariats: the Higher Direction of War
• 4. The Treasury: from Impotence to Power
• 5. The Ministry of Labour, 1916–19: a Still, Small Voice?
• 6. Bureaucrats and Businessmen in British Food Control, 1916–19
• 7. Winding Down the War Economy: British Plans for Peacetime Recovery, 1916–19
• Index