Government and Armed Forces in Britain, 1856-1990 [1 ed.] 9780826418944, 9781852851446

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GOVERNMENT AND THE A R M E D FORCES IN BRITAIN 1856-1990

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G O V E R N M E N T AND THE ARMED FORCES IN BRITAIN 1856-1990

E D I T E D BY PAUL SMITH

THE

HAMBLEDON

LONDON

AND

RIO

PRESS GRANDE

Published by The Hambledon Press, 1996 102 Gloucester Avenue, London NW1 8HX (UK) P.O. Box 162, Rio Grande, Ohio 45674 (USA) ISBN 1 85285 144 9 © The contributors 1996 A description of this book is available from the British Library and from the Library of Congress

Typeset by The Midlands Book Typesetting Company, Loughborough Printed on acid-free paper and bound in Great Britain by Cambridge University Press

Contents

Preface Contributors Abbreviations Introduction Brian Bond

vii ix x xi

1

Civil-Military Relations in a Period without Major Wars, 1855-85 EdgarFeuchtwanger and William}. Philpott

2

Ruling the Waves: Government, the Service and the Cost of Naval Supremacy, 1885-99 Paul Smith

21

Adversarial Attitudes: Servicemen, Politicians and Strategic Policy, 1899-1914 John Gooch

53

'A One-Man Show'? Civil-Military Relations during the First World War David French

75

3

4

l

5

The Campaign for a Ministry of Defence, 1919-36 William J. Philpott

6

Sir Thomas Inskip as Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence, 1936-39 Sean Greenwood

155

Waltzing with Winston: Civil-Military Relations in the Second World War Alex Danchev

191

'Vested Interests and Vanished Dreams': Duncan Sandys, the Chiefs of Staff and the 1957 White Paper Martin S. Navias

217

7

8

9 10

The Ministry of Defence, 1959-70 Peter Nailor Establishing Civilian Supremacy: Influence within Britain's Ministry of Defence David K. Boren

109

235

249

vi 11

12

Government and the Armed Forces, 1856-1990 Michael Heseltine and the Reorganisation of the Ministry of Defence, 1983-84 Adrian Smith Conclusion Lawrence Freedman

Index

265 311

315

Preface

The relationship between civilian Ministers and the high command of the armed forces is a topic central to the study of British government. It is also an index of the organisation and functioning of Britain as an imperial and world power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Government and the Armed Forces in Britain, 1856-1990 provides the first broad survey of it over nearly a century and a half, illustrating its nature and operation in peace and war, as well as its evolution from the loose and ad hoc arrangements of the Palmerstonian era to the elaborate bureaucratic structures of today. This book forms one part of a collaborative project, the research for which was made possible by the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust, to which all those concerned wish to express their thanks. Members of the project have also to thank for their indispensable services the three colleagues who served successively as research assistants, and contributed substantially to the organisation and administration of the enterprise as well as to the gathering of materials. Dr Charles Esdaile, formerly Wellington Research Fellow in the University of Southampton, now Lecturer in History in the University of Liverpool, contributed especially to chapters 1 and 3. He also conducted, with Dr Rory Muir, work on the Wellington era which, excluded by the chronological limits finally adopted for the present volume, will be published elsewhere. Dr William Philpott, in addition to writing chapter 5 and co-authoring chapter 1, contributed extensively to chapters 2-4, 6 and 11. Dr David Boren, as well as writing chapter 10 and assisting with chapter 11, organised the conference held by the project at King's College, London, in March 1993. The authors are grateful to the respective custodians and owners of copyright for permission to use and to quote from the materials employed in these studies; to the respective editors and publishers for permission to reproduce matter which has appeared elsewhere; and to the staff of the numerous libraries and archives in which research has been conducted. They also wish to acknowledge the invaluable help of Martin Sheppard of Hambledon Press in bringing the work to publication. The second part of the project, undertaken by the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College, London, and the Archives and Manuscripts Section of the University of Southampton Library, consists in a comprehensive survey of the nature and location of private papers bearing on the military and naval affairs of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The aim is to bring

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Government and the Armed Forces, 1856-1990

together, on linked computerised databases in London and Southampton, information about papers held publicly and privately; and to publish a series of location guides, containing entries for all defence personnel who achieved ranks above and including Major-General, Air Vice-Marshal and Rear-Admiral, as well as their opposite numbers in the civil service, between the years 1793 and 1975. Further details can be obtained from the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King's College, London, Strand, London WC2R 2LS; and Archives and Special Collections, Hartley Library, University of Southampton, Highfield, Southampton SO17 1BJ. Paul Smith January 1996

Contributors

Brian Bond is Professor of Military History at King's College, London. David K. Boren was formerly a member of the Department of War Studies, King's College, London. Alex Danchev is Professor of International Relations at Keele University and Visiting Senior Research Fellow in War Studies at King's College, London. Edgar Feuchtwanger was formerly Reader in History in the University of Southampton. Lawrence Freedman is Professor of War Studies at King's College, London. David French is Reader in History at University College London. John Gooch is Professor of International History in the University of Leeds. Sean Greenwood is Head of the Department of History at Canterbury Christ Church College. Peter Nailor was formerly Professor of History at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich. Martin S. Navias is Lecturer in War Studies at King's College, London. William J. Philpott is Lecturer in European History at London Guildhall University. Adrian Smith is Head of the Department of Historical and Political Studies at LSU College of Higher Education, Southampton. Paul Smith is Professor of Modern History in the University of Southampton.

Abbreviations

BL CAS CDP CDS CID GIGS COS COSC CSP DGMA DOAE DOE DSWP FMI FMU FPMG HLRO MCD MOD NATO PDC PDL PRO PUS SEATO

British Library Chief of the Air Staff Chief of Defence Procurement Chief of the Defence Staff Committee of Imperial Defence Chief of the Imperial General Staff Chiefs of Staff Chiefs of Staff Committee House of Commons Sessional Papers Directorate General of Management and Audit Defence Operational Analysis Establishment Department of the Environment Defence Studies Working Party Financial Management Initiative Financial Management Unit Financial Planning and Management Group House of Lords Record Office Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence Ministry of Defence North Atlantic Treaty Organisation Parliamentary Debates: House of Commons Parliamentary Debates: House of Lords Public Record Office Permanent Under Secretary South-East Asia Treaty Organisation

Introduction Brian Bond Students familiar with the remarkable growth of the British decision-making institutions and their supporting defence bureaucracy in the later twentieth century will be astonished by the rudimentary nature of arrangements for the 'Defence of the Realm' and Britain's global strategic interests after the Napoleonic wars. One might indeed hazard the paradox that as Britain's industrial and commercial power rose to its peak during the nineteenth century, so governments' ability to co-ordinate the Armed Services' strategies, in order to formulate a national defence policy based on the participation of all the departments concerned, sank to its nadir. Then, as Britain's problems grew and its great power status was increasingly threatened, during the first half of the twentieth century, there evolved an impressive apparatus for what has been aptly named 'defence by committee', expanding after 1945 into 'defence by ministry'.1 It should not surprise British scholars, though it should cause some embarrassment, that the boldest attempt to date to survey this grand subject of imperial defence should be that of an American professor of government, Franklyn Arthur Johnson. But, invaluable though Johnson's pioneering work remains, his first volume was researched before many official documents were available under the former 'fifty year rule'; and also a great deal of research on specific periods, defence problems and individuals has been published since I960.2 The early 1990s therefore seemed an appropriate time for an interuniversity group of scholars to build on the existing foundations in the form of the related case studies which constitute the core of this volume. It proved impossible, mainly due to questions of space, to provide continuous chronological coverage from the early nineteenth century to the present, but the contributors address the main issues while indicating comparatively neglected aspects on which further work needs to be done. As a recent study has demonstrated,3 British strategy during the Napoleonic Wars was largely improvised at Cabinet level with minimal input from the Army and Navy leaders and with only spasmodic inter-Service co-operation. Certainly 1 Franklyn Arthur Johnson, Defence by Committee. The British Committee of Imperial Defence, 1885-1959 (London 1960); and the same author's Defence by Ministry (London, 1980). See also Norman H. Gibbs, The Origins of Imperial Defence', in John B. Hattendorf and Robert S.Jordan (eds), Maritime Strategy and The Balance of Power- (London, 1989), pp. 23-36. 2 Notably the completion of the British Official History series on Grand Strategy and on Intelligence in the Second World War. 3 Christopher D. Hall, British Strategy in the Napoleonic Wars, 1803-15 (Manchester, 1992).

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Government and the Armed Forces, 1856-1990

no formal or regular arrangements existed after 1815 for the discussion of strategic issues in either of the Services or for decision-making in government. Since the succeeding decades marked an era of peace and growing prosperity for Britain there was little pressure on government to remedy these deficiencies in the organisation of defence; the overwhelming concern was rather with financial economy in which the Treasury's role was dominant. As the industrial revolution began to affect military and naval technology, the Cabinet's inability to adjudicate on technical matters was exposed, but no remedy was found. No institution was created to co-ordinate the Services and even within them there was a marked absence of professional competence and efficient organisation. The Army's plethora of civil and military departments, with over-lapping and ill-defined responsibilities for such vital matters as transport, weapons and medical arrangements, contributed to its well-publicised difficulties in the Crimean War; its many weaknesses have since been exposed by historians.4 But the Royal Navy's rapid decline - in both numbers of ships and men and in efficiency - has received less notice and criticism. While the nation became the mightiest in the world, the fleet shrank to its smallest size since the 1680s. After its outstanding performance in the Napoleonic Wars the Royal Navy had 'gained an empire, and lost a role'.5 Not only was there an excessively drastic reduction of ships and sailors after 1815, but the service also suffered from a succession of mediocre political chiefs (First Lords of the Admiralty), and by the 1840s the majority of admirals were elderly and without combat experience. By this decade routine and humdrum administration had completely stifled any discussion of larger issues of policy and strategy. 'In the passage of thirty years, unnoticed by contemporaries in and out of the Service, the central direction of naval policy had almost evaporated.' Even the Cabinet, 'knew and cared little for the Navy'.6 Consequently, when he returned to the Admiralty as First Lord in 1853, Sir James Graham regarded himself as sufficiently expert to ignore professional advice and to by-pass Cabinet control in taking crucial decisions. Preoccupied with financial restraints and fear of France, he adopted a dangerous strategy against Russia and sent the Navy to war 'scandalously illprepared'.7 Despite its lack of 'a brain' to determine policy and war plans, the Royal Navy responded reasonably well to the technological revolution of the 1860s, but suffered the equivalent of a paralytic stroke in 1869 when the arrogant and 4 See, for example, Hew Strachan The Reform of the British Army, 1830-54 (Manchester, 1984); John Sweetman, War and Administration: The Significance of the Crimean War for the British Army (Edinburgh, 1984). 5 N.A.M. Rodger The Admiralty (Lavenham, Suffolk, 1979), p. 93. 6 Ibid. pp. 103-05. 7 Andrew Lambert, 'Preparing for the Russian War: British Strategic Planning, March 1853-March 1854', War and Society, 7 (1989), pp. 15-39.

Introduction

xiii

impetuous First Lord, Hugh Childers, effectively abolished the Board of Admiralty, thus leaving the Service without a policy or even the machinery for reaching one. Hence the Navy 'entered an age of unprecedented change largely unfitted to cope with it'.8 Only in the later 1880s with the emergence of new threats to Britain's command of the sea, raising the nightmarish possibility that the Royal Navy might not be able to prevent an invasion, was there a change of political mood towards naval expansion and far-reaching reforms. However even these stopped short of establishing a naval staff. As Paul Smith's contribution shows,9 in the 1880s and 1890s great improvements took place in financial control and accounting, and more generally in the development of professional competence; but at the highest level of policy-making little had changed. Hence, the Navy 'entered the new century with the engines running sweetly, and no one at the helm'.10 As for the War Office, despite the burst of reform activity after the Crimean War which effectively amalgamated the numerous political defence departments under the Secretary of State for War, it continued to be regarded as a 'citadel of mismanagement, inefficiency and administrative chaos'.11 The establishment of the Secretary of State's overall responsibility for the Army vis-à-vis Parliament did not put an end to rivalries and continuous bickering within the War Office; while the Queen's cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, put up a determined, if ultimately futile, rearguard action during his interminable tenure as Commander-in-Chief at the Horse Guards (1857-1895) in defence of the royal prerogative in matters of military appointments, discipline and command. More generally, the congeries of virtually autonomous regiments which comprised the notional 'Army', despite various anomalies such as the purchase of commissions (until 1871), seemed just about adequate to perform the routine duties of 'imperial policing' with the almost unceasing 'small wars' against poorly-armed natives. Above all, military reform was overshadowed by the overwhelming priority accorded to financial economy. One notable casualty was that the War Office had no planning staff, no regular contacts with the Admiralty and consequently nothing remotely resembling an institution for joint planning. In general terms, the form of oligarchic Cabinet government which put domestic politics and Treasury control above national defence, and possessed no strategic decision-making body or secretariat to ensure continuity of record, had somehow managed to muddle through in the comparatively stable and secure environment (for Britain and its empire) up to 1870. This transitional

8

Rodger, The Admiralty, pp. 111-12. Chapter 2, pp. 21-52. 10 Rodger, The Admiralty, p. 118. 11 Johnson Defence by Committee, p. 14. I am greatly indebted to this source for the following discussion of the period up to 1914. 9

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Government and the Armed Forces, 1856—1990

period is the subject of Edgar Feuchtwanger's admirable survey which opens this volume.12 Gradually, however, between 1870 and 1885, governments felt obliged to react to the emergent danger posed by the German empire, and the more immediate threats presented by France and Russia, singly or in combination. Despite the recurrent and over-publicised invasion scares, it was the perceived vulnerability of Britain's far-flung colonies and trading interests which initially prompted a low-key government reaction. This was to set up an ephemeral, sub-cabinet level Colonial Defence Committee in 1878 to consider immediate steps to provide some security for Colonial ports. A far more extensive enquiry was launched in 1879; namely the Carnarvon Commission which, under the eponymous Colonial Secretary, examined the defence of British possessions, coaling stations and commerce. While the Commission's reports were by far the most comprehensive to date, anti-imperialist objections entailed that two key issues were neglected: the need to co-ordinate the roles of the two Services in imperial defence; and the creation of Cabinet-level machinery to formulate imperial strategy. Renewed fears of Russian aggression led to the revival of the Colonial Defence Committee in 1885. This marked a step forward in bringing together representatives of all the main departments involved, including the two Services, but it still operated below ministerial level and was essentially a forum of discussion to advise the colonies on defence matters. Significantly no staff were provided for research and planning. Even though it lacked any executive authority, the Committee's deliberations were resented by some of the main departments involved, including the Admiralty, as a threat to their independence. In 1888 the darkening European situation, added to the anxiety already being caused by rapid technological change, prompted the setting up of the Hartington Commission which at last confronted the crucial issue; namely 'to inquire into the Civil and Professional Administration of the Naval and Military Departments, and the relation of these Departments to each other and to the Treasury, and to report what changes in the existing system would tend to efficiency and economy in the Public Service'.13

The nine-member Commission collected a mass of expert testimony which pointed to the necessity of providing both Services with 'thinking departments', and with a regular forum for the collaboration of their professional chiefs. The Commission's main recommendation was, however, the modest suggestion that a Naval and Military Council might be set up, probably to be chaired by the Prime Minister, and including the political heads of the two Services, their principal advisers and one or two eminent retired officers. The Council's 12 13

Chapter 1, pp. 1-19. Johnson, Defence by Committee, p.27.

Introduction

xv

main tasks would be to advise the Cabinet on the Service estimates in relation to each other, and authoritatively decide on unsettled questions of joint naval and military policy. Provision would be made for keeping permanent records. Although the exclusion of the Foreign Secretary and other Cabinet ministers signalled a failure or unwillingness to grasp the need for a full integration of defence and foreign policy, this was potentially a most important step towards a government-level institution for the planning, formulation and execution of a national defence policy. Several explanations may be advanced for the failure to implement the Hartington Commission's main recommendations, both as regards the individual services and a National Defence Council. But the main reason was surely that the dominant wing of the Liberal Party was vehemently opposed to any strengthening of military influence or efficiency.14 In the event it took the humiliating defeats at the outset of the South African War, and the deplorable consequences resulting from lack of inter-Service cooperation, to produce the more urgent and extensive post-war enquiry of the Elgin Commission. The final impetus for a really drastic reform of defence institutions was supplied around 1900 by ominous developments in Europe. Britain's lack of continental allies and isolation from European commitments was clearly no longer 'splendid' (if indeed it had ever been in the past), and German naval expansion constituted a new and worrying threat to the Royal Navy's dominance in home waters. In short, a few statesmen and 'defence experts' now began to 'think the unthinkable' of Britain's need to prepare for possible participation, by land and at sea, in a great European war. Between 1902 and 1904 tremendous progress was made through the establishment of the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID). There is no need to chart this institutional experiment in detail since it provides the basis for John Gooch's contribution. The chief significance of the CID lay in the following points: its only ex-officio member was the Prime Minister who would regularly bring together the political heads of the Services and other departments concerned, with the professional chiefs and other experts summoned to particular meetings. The CID's role was to advise the Cabinet whose collective responsibility remained unimpaired: executive action in defence matters rested with the departments. The responsible politicians and their professional service advisers would sit around the table as equals. Lastly, but not least important, the CID would be serviced by a Secretary and an inter-Service secretariat. Despite the undoubted improvements which the CID heralded, particularly in the informed discussion of strategic issues, serious defects and limitations also became evident in the decade before 1914. The Army, with its advantage of a newly-formed General Staff, and the increasing likelihood of a European 14

Ibid., pp. 30-31. Henry Campbell-Bannerman, a future Liberal Secretary of State for War and Prime Minister, opposed the creation of an Army Chief of Staff on the grounds that no such post was necessary since Britain had no designs upon her neighbours. A General Staff would cause mischief by making contingency plans for war. No such advance planning was necessary.

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Government and the Armed Forces, 1856-1990

role on which to focus its planning, participated more positively in the affairs of the CID than did the Royal Navy, which lacked a naval staff until 1912, and in Admiral 'Jackie' Fisher possessed a chief who was temperamentally opposed to staff work, joint planning and co-operation with the 'rival service'. John Gooch charts the bumpy course of inter-Service relations, on such important subjects as home defence and intervention on the Continent, to the complete impasse reached between 1909-1911.15 Political intervention then theoretically resolved the latter issue in the Army's favour, but the CID had by no means succeeded in healing inter-Service differences by the outbreak of the war in 1914. In Gooch's words 'civilian politicians played the role of referee in a series of hard-fought bouts in which the Army proved the stronger contestant'. In war the contest would continue as a triangular struggle 'as the civilians entered the strategic ring along with the two services'. In a masterly survey, David French discusses the unsustainable tensions which Britain's (and the Dominions') unprecedented war efforts between 1914 and 1918 created for the high level co-ordination and execution of policy and strategy.16 Essentially at the beginning of the war the Services thought that they should be permitted to conduct operations largely independent of each other and with minimal political interference. Anticipating a short war, the politicians acquiesced in a manner that mirrored the Liberal government's adherence to laissez-faire principles in domestic matters. In a similar spirit, British statesmen and service leaders assumed that the war could be won in association with, rather than in co-operation with, their allies. On both counts, French argues, the need for full co-operation had been realised by 1916, even before the advent of the Lloyd George Coalition, with all the changes that brought in the institutional arrangements for the higher conduct of the war. French, however, concludes with the reflection that the formal machinery of government provides only a partial explanation of how British civil-military relations developed during the war: the part played by the personalities of the leading dramatis personas was also immensely important. Quite apart from personal rivalries, there was a general lack of understanding and empathy between 'frocks' and 'brasshats': to make co-operation really effective politicians would have to acquire some of the knowledge of soldiers and sailors, whilst the latter had to demonstrate some of the politicians' skills, such as fluency in debate. In the First World War Churchill was exceptional in his knowledge of the Services, and General Sir Henry Wilson was unusual in his unashamed practice of the politician's wiles. The CID was revived after the First World War and remained under the firm guidance of its Secretary (since 1912), Sir Maurice Hankey, who continued in office until 1938. In the 1920s and early 1930s the CID's sub-committees proliferated to deal with various special issues of home and imperial defence: by 1936 15 16

Chapter 3, pp. 53-74. Chapter 4, pp. 75-107.

Introduction

xvii

there were approximately one hundred military and civil sub-committees.17 By far the most significant development for the co-ordination of defence at a high level was the establishment of the Chiefs of Staff sub-committee in 1923. This innovation brought the professional chiefs of the three Services into regular contact, assisted by a small inter-Service secretariat, and also entitled the chiefs to initiate enquiry into any defence matter which they considered critical. While the COS committee undoubtedly led to greater inter-Service understanding on some issues, and at least a façade of unity in response to government or CID questioning, it failed to produce a real consensus on national strategy or service priorities. This was not surprising given the intense friction that resulted from the establishment of the RAF as the third service and fierce competition for a steadily diminishing defence budget through the 1920s. Another important consideration inhibiting defence organisation at the top was that in peacetime it was most unlikely that Prime Ministers would have the time or inclination to give continuous, energetic leadership to the CID. To meet these and other obvious weaknesses in the co-ordination of the Services and the development of a unified national strategy, the answer for many critics seemed to lie in the solution adumbrated by the Hartington Commission in 1890: the creation of a Ministry of Defence. In his excellent analysis of this topic, William Philpott shows why a Ministry of Defence was not established in the inter-war period, despite strong support for it just after the First World War and on several subsequent occasions.18 Although serious constitutional and Service traditions were at issue, Philpott's research suggests that Hankey's obstructionism (or 'hanky panky') was the crucial factor in preserving his own spider-like control at the centre of the CID web. In short, while an MOD was attractive in theory, 'no one was brave enough to try it in practice given Britain's political and constitutional circumstances'. After a lengthy and sometimes bitter controversy a typically British solution was adopted (in 1936) of appointing a Minister for the Co-ordination of Defence without a ministry or the power to have any real impact on the actual working of civilmilitary relations. Sean Greenwood takes up the story of the short-lived experiment of a minister without a ministry in his illuminating account of the original occupant, Sir Thomas Inskip.19 Greenwood challenges the jibe that this was the worst appointment since the Roman emperor Caligula made his horse a consul, showing that Inskip's two reports did bring some rationality into the priorities of defence expenditure at a critical point early in 1938. Unfortunately, the rehabilitation of Inskip cannot be pushed too far because his attempt to ration and rationalise defence spending was based on the erroneous assumption that the most acute and immediate threat to Britain's security was a 'knock-out blow' 17

See Lord Ismay, The Memoirs of Lord Ismay (London, 1960), p. 78, for a diagram of the Cabinet and CID Sub-Committees. 18 Chapter 5, pp. 109-54. 19 Chapter 6, pp. 155-89.

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Government and the Armed Forces, 1856-1990

by the Luftwaffe. The fact that this myth was widely believed in the Treasury and the Cabinet can only mitigate criticism of Inskip's decision to give home defence, both in the air and on the ground, top priority, largely at the expense of an Army Field Force to support continental allies. It would be interesting to learn more about the intelligence available to Inskip and the strategic - as opposed to financial and economic - advice which he sought. On a broader view, this compromise solution of a Minister to co-ordinate defence as an adjunct to the Treasury was already seen to be inadequate by the outbreak of war. After further unsatisfactory experiments during Chamberlain's months of war-time premiership, in which his own personal distaste for conflict and strategicdecision making deprived the existing machinery of dynamic leadership, Churchill took the next great step forward by making himself Minister of Defence on assuming the premiership in May 1940. He also made arrangements to participate directly, or be represented by a trusted senior staff officer, in regular meetings with the Chiefs of Staff. Alex Danchev contributes a scintillating chapter on the main issues in British civil-military relations, and relations with her American ally, during the Second World War.20 As the tide suggests, his focal point is essentially Winston Churchill; his personality, methods of doing business and the handling of his chief military advisers, notably Dill and Brooke. Other historians, and indeed Danchev himself, have covered these matters before, so it would be unwise to expect startling revelations. None the less the treatment is fresh and lively and reinforces the emphasis noted in other contributions; namely that no matter how streamlined and efficient the institutions, the ultimate key to success or failure lay in the personalities of the leading actors. Churchill, for all his limitations and infuriating methods, was a resounding success. As Danchev concludes, Churchill retained the affection as well as the respect of his military advisers. 'Churchill and the Chiefs of Staff needed each other. But they needed him more.' After 1945 the strategic and political components of the 'Defence of the Realm' changed rapidly and drastically. Britain become an atomic, and later nuclear power, but clearly could not compete economically with the Super Powers. Her great power status was seen to have been permanently undermined by her exhausting war effort and her decline was evident in the speedy retreat from empire. Previously unthinkable sums of money were now devoted to technological research and development projects, many of which failed to deliver. The nature of defence management and administration was transformed and vastly expanded. The problems of creating, and then operating, a Ministry of Defence were central issues in post 1945 civil-military relations. They are covered from various angles in the final four contributions to this volume.

20

Chapter 7, pp. 191-216.

l Civil-Military Relations in a Period without Major Wars, 1855-85 Edgar Feuchtwanger and William J. Philpott The Crimean War turned out to be the only major war to be fought by Britain between the battle of Waterloo and the Boer War. The thirty years following the Crimea were also a period when the label 'splendid isolation' was broadly appropriate to describe the country's position within the European power system. Most of the discussion by historians of civil-military relations during this period has usually focused on the problems inherent in the professionalisation of the army's officer corps brought about by Cardwell's reforms, in particular by the abolition of purchase of commissions. At the centre of this issue was the fear expressed by Palmer s ton, when he was defending the purchase of commissions before the Committee of Inquiry in 1856, that if the connection between the army and the higher classes of society were dissolved, then the army would present a dangerous and unconstitutional appearance. It was only when the army was un-connected with those whose property gave them an interest in this country, and was commanded by unprincipled adventurers, that it ever became formidable to the liberties of the nation.1

These fears proved largely groundless, for the officer corps of the army continued to be recruited from the same classes of society as it had been before 1871. It remained true of the British Army, more than of the armies of other major powers, that it never became an alternative centre of power to that of the established government. This did not preclude harsh and fiercely fought conflicts between civilian and military office-holders, such as that between the Duke of Cambridge and successive Secretaries of State for War, discussed below. These conflicts did not, however, pose a military threat to the political order, such as was presented by, for example, General Boulanger or Count Waldersee to the political establishment in France and Germany. In Britain the conflicts were between different military schools of thought, reformers and anti-reformers. The fact that the Ministers controlling the Army were generally on the side of the reformers did not make these conflicts into civil-military ones. They took place within a context where there could not be any realistic challenge to political supremacy. The Navy could not in any case pose the kind of political threat which in other countries might emanate from the Army. jasper Ridley, Lord Palmerston (London, 1970), pp. 442-43.

2

Government and the Armed Forces, 1856-1990

Historians have had less to say about the way in which political and military personalities intermeshed in arriving at strategic decisions in this period. It is never easy to determine clearly how a national strategy is arrived at, not least for the reason that there may be no such clearly formulated overall strategy. In the twentieth century there were at any rate an increasing number of bodies, the Committee of Imperial Defence, the Chiefs of Staff, and so on, which by their very existence had to articulate from time to time the broad strategic context within which specific policy decisions had to be made. In the nineteenth century, even when there were committees or commissions working in the defence field, their concerns were almost entirely with matters of detail; how many troops or ships were required here or there; how recruiting was to be organised, how Portsmouth and other bases were to be fortified. This was particularly so in the period under review here, when, as it turned out, there was no major conflagration that might have concentrated the mind wonderfully. Contemporaries could not of course foresee that the crises they faced, in 1859,1861,1864,1870,1878,1882 or 1885, might no t turn into great conflagrations. On the whole, these crises did not go on long enough to lead to major considerations of strategy in official circles. Discussions of the overall strategic situation are therefore more easily found in the pages of the Edinburgh Review or Quarterly Review than in the records of the Admiralty or War Office or in private papers. Such public discussions of national strategy were naturally determined by the wider views taken of the world situation and of the place of Britain within it. This was controversial ground and two broad schools of thought can be distinguished.2 They can be roughly labelled Cobdenite and Palmerstonian, to be continued as Gladstonian and Disraelian. The Cobdenite-Gladstonian view was that in an industrial age major wars were becoming inappropriate and unlikely. Free trade and the decline of aristocracy were driving the world in that direction. The Palmerstonian-Disraelian view was more traditional and emphasised the unchanging predominance of national interest. There was a good deal of overlap between these views. Cobdenites were liable to take the Pax Britannica secured by British naval supremacy for granted. Both Palmerstonians and Cobdenites tended to believe in the superiority of the British liberal, commercial and industrial system. The British victory in the Crimean War had bolstered this feeling of superiority, but the set-backs in the war had also given rise to serious doubts. How to exercise naval supremacy was itself highly controversial. The traditional British position was to recognise no limit to the right, particularly in time of war, to interfere with commerce on the high seas, and to exercise the right of search and blockade, even in relation to neutral nations. There was, however, growing doubt whether this was any longer the right policy, either morally or even from the point of view of national interest. Radicals had opposed the unrestricted 2

Bernard Semmel, Liberalism and Naval Strategy: Ideology, Interest and Sea Power during the Pax Britannica (Boston, 1986), pp. 68ff.

Civil-Military Relations, 1855- 85

3

exercise of British seapower ever since the Napoleonic Wars. They were supported by commercial and shipping interests. In an age of free trade and with merchant shipping dominated by Britain it might be morally inevitable, as well as politic, to recognise the immunity of shipping on the high seas. Against this, the desire to end the slave trade, particularly strong on the Radical side of politics, as well as the need to combat piracy, supplied arguments in favour of retaining the right of search and blockade. There was yet another view, not associated with Radicalism, that naval supremacy depended on fighting decisive naval battles rather than on blockade or attacks on commercial shipping.3 The Palmerston government had, in spite of its general stance of asserting national interest, accepted the Declaration of Paris in 1856, which laid down considerable concessions to the doctrine of immunity of shipping on the high seas. The public and parliamentary debate on defence and service affairs was naturally much influenced by these issues. It was part of the wider ideological divide between the internationalism at this stage associated with Radicals like Cobden, and the believers in the primacy of national interest. It formed a seamless web with the antagonism to aristocratic government animating a great deal of middle-class opinion. Palmerstonianism always commanded a wider consensus than the pure milk of Cobdenism. Later Disraeli's assumption of the Palmerstonian mantle probably gave him the edge in terms of popular support over Gladstone. Britain's vast overseas possessions posed a separate but related issue. The trend of events made it increasingly difficult to subscribe to the 'Absence of Mind' school of the British Empire. In particular the importance of India in sustaining the status of Britain as a great power could not be denied, even by Gladstonians. Gladstone himself wrote to his newly appointed Viceroy, Lord Northbrook, in 1872: My own desires are chiefly these, that nothing may bring about a sudden, violent or discreditable severance, that we may labour steadily to promote the political training of our native fellow-subjects, and that when we go, if we are ever to go, we may leave a good name and a clean bill of account behind us.4

Such general public discussions as there were of the national situation within the international system did not often descend to the nuts and bolts of defence strategy. Even if contemporaries did not frequently put their thoughts on the strategic problems of the country on paper, we can attempt to do so in retrospect. Immediately after the Crimea France, under another Napoleon at his zenith, returned to the position of a major potential adversary, who could threaten the security of the home base. Palmerston wrote in March 1860 to Sidney Herbert, his Secretary of State for War: 'We have to deal with a man being uncertain of his conduct, wielding an immense power, and acting on his decision, when 3 4

Ibid., p. 85.

Northbrook Papers, privately deposited, 15 October 1872.

4

Government and the Armed Forces, 1856-1990

it is made, with great rapidity and vigour . . .'5 This potential danger was aggravated by the fact that it coincided with several imperial emergencies, in China, in North America and, most alarming of all, in India. The Mutiny spread doom and gloom all round: 'for the present we are reduced to the condition of an insignificant Power', wrote the diarist Greville.6 In the 1860s the threat from France receded, partly because of France's own overseas entanglements, partly because of the increasing volatility of power relationships on the European Continent. This volatility also affected Britain, particularly at the time of the Schleswig-Holstein crisis in 1864.7 The major British defence problem in the 1860s was, however, posed by the United States, in the backwash from the Civil War and through the threat to Canada. Unlike France the USA could not threaten the British home base, but could stretch Britain's overall capability severely. The American threat was reduced through accommodation, disengagement and by turning over the problem to the Canadians.8 The fact that the Americans reduced their defence establishments drastically after the Civil War meant that, contrary to expectation during the war, the threat itself diminished. In Britain perceptions of the American problem gradually changed among politicians and among the military. In many ways the major shifts in the European power constellation that culminated in the French defeat of 1870 eased British defence problems at least temporarily. Even before this had happened, the first Gladstone government had started to carry out a policy of retrenchment. Gladstone had long taken the view that France could be neutralised as a potential danger by strengthening commercial ties with her. After the French defeat of 1870 he felt that it had disabled 'the only country in Europe that has the power of being formidable to us'. Others were not so sure. Disraeli concluded: 'The balance of power has been entirely destroyed, and the country which suffers most, and feels the effect of this great change most, is England.'9 Historians remain divided in their views on how the great European changes culminating in the French defeat of 1870 affected the security situation of Britain. Some stress the damaging long-term consequences of the disturbance of the balance of power, others emphasise the immediate relief derived from the collapse of a power that had but recently been regarded as a serious threat. Before long there was a recrudescence of the Russian threat which, in spite of the relative success of 1878, continued into the 1880s. It reached a climax in the middle 1880s, when Russia again posed a foreign policy problem in the Balkans and an imperial problem in Central Asia. This coincided with the serious and 5

University of Southampton, Palmerston Papers, GC/HE/63, 27 March 1860. Quoted by Ronald Hyam, Britain's Imperial Century, 1815-1914: A Study of Empire and Expansion (London, 1976), p. 71. 7 Kenneth Bourne, The Foreign Policy of Victorian England, 1830-1902 (Oxford, 1970), p. 108. 8 Kenneth Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power in North A menea, 1815-1908 (London, 1967). 9 Marvin Swartz, The Politics of British Foreign, Policy in the Era of Disraeli and Gladstone (London, 1985), pp. 24ff. 6

Civil-Military Relations, 1855-85

5

prolonged military involvement in Egypt and the Sudan. In 1885, just before the second Gladstone government fell, there was a serious Russian war scare.10 Russia could, however, hardly be a threat to the home base, though even this was occasionally envisaged when alarm about the possibilities of invasion was at its height in mid century. Nevertheless it could be maintained, gloomy contemporary prognostications to the contrary notwithstanding, that the two decades after 1870 were a period when, from a strictly defence point of view, Britain enjoyed a high degree of security, superior in many respects to that prevailing in the middle years of the century. Cutting across these considerations, which were obviously a lot less clear to contemporaries than they may seem now, was the question how these defence commitments might be met with the available resources. Naval supremacy continued to be the most important British defence asset, but there were serious doubts about the effectiveness of the Royal Navy in the middle decades of the century. These doubts arose mainly from three major technological developments, steam propulsion, the advent of rifled guns and, as an antidote, of ironclads. It was feared that the Navy could no longer guarantee the immunity of the British Isles from invasion. This appeared to throw a greater burden on land defences in the form of more manpower and better fortifications. The shuffling around of limited forces, naval and military, between overseas commitments and the security of the home base became more complicated. Palmerston wrote to Sidney Herbert amidst worries about France and China in 1859: 'Nor do I like sending even a couple of batteries away from home in the present precarious state of European politics . . .'n It seems in retrospect that the fears of an invasion of the British home base were greatly exaggerated, and that steam and ironclads did not really make an amphibious operation against the British Isles any easier. Nevertheless, as the invasion scare of 1859 shows, both informed opinion and public opinion at large were seriously alarmed. British naval supremacy was, however, swiftly restored and the set-backs experienced by Napoleon III in the early 1860s made a threat from him appear even less real than it had ever been. Even at moments of alarm, such as the war scare of 1859, the counter-pressures were strong: the persistent drive for economy, the belief in international peace based on commercial interdependence, and the deep-seated fears of a standing army. The remarkable support for the volunteer movement shows the extent of public alarm, but the volunteer movement was more of a cosmetic exercise than a real contribution to solving defence dilemmas.12 The Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of Cambridge, wrote to Lord Panmure, the Secretary of State for War, that volunteer corps 'are unmanageable bodies and would ruin our army': I dismiss from my mind all the ideas I see stated in the public prints about Volunteer 10

Bourne, Foreign Policy of Victorian England, pp. 143-44. Palmerston Papers, GC/HE/53, 7 October 1859. 12 MJ. Salevouris, 'RiflemenForm': The. War Scare of 1859-1860 in England (New York, 1982), pp. 152ff. II

6

Government and the Armed Forces, 1856-1990 Corps. If such a system were to be adopted, the spirit of the regular army would be destroyed, jealousies would at once be engendered, the Volunteers would do as much or as little as they liked, and, in fact, they would be an armed and very dangerous rabble.13

In normal times the pressures for economy put a severe limit on what could be done, particularly as far as the Army was concerned, in spite of its small size by international standards a more expensive service than the Navy. If Britain had moved any distance towards acquiring a continental-type mass army, she would have had to abandon her still almost unique characteristics as a liberal, commercial and industrial nation. It was in these characteristics that her superiority, both in reality and in sentiment, resided. When the service estimates settled down after the exceptional Crimean War expenditure, the annual cost of the Navy hovered somewhere above the £10,000,000 level, excluding the shipbuilding vote, that of the Army above the £15,000,000 level. The shipbuilding vote was closely affected by the switch to steam and ironclads in the early 1860s. Manpower in the Navy declined to below 60,000 in the early 1880s, that of the Army was usually somewhat over 130,000. The year 1878 formed a peak of expenditure, the late 1860s a low point. After 1885 expenditure and manpower in both services were on a rising trend, naval expenditure rising particularly steeply.14 Strategic issues were often publicly debated, but for those immediately concerned with providing for the defence of the country, politicians and their civilian, naval and military advisers, they were taken for granted rather than specifically applied to their problems. A Prime Minister like Palmerston, who took a close interest in defence, would from time to time call relevant Ministers and some Service Chiefs together and attach to such a meeting the label War or Defence Committee. When the Trent incident was causing a war scare with the United States in December 1861, Palmerston wrote to George Lewis, the Secretary of State for War; Some of our colleagues suggest that as in former cases of war imminent or actual, a Committee of Cabinet assisted by the Commander-in-Chief [the Duke of Cambridge] should meet from time to time to share responsibility with the Minister for War and if you see no objection such Committee might consist of Russell [Foreign Secretary], Somerset [First Lord], Newcastle [Colonies] and myself with perhaps Granville as Leader in the Lords and we might if you were to summon us meet at your office at two on Monday.15 It might not even be necessary to consult the Cabinet to 'undertake a little war', as Somerset put it to Palmerston, when two months earlier he was asking 13

The Panmure Papéis, 2 vols (London, 1908), ii, pp. 444-45, 2 October 1857. Figures based on research by Dr WJ. Philpott; see also M.S. Partridge, Military Planning for the Defence of the United Kingdom, 1814-1870 (New York, 1989), p. 16. 15 Palmerston Papers, GC/LE/239, 6 December 1861. 14

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7

about a naval expedition against Vera Cruz.16 The purpose was always to consider immediate problems, not long-term planning. The Royal Commission on National Defences appointed in 1859 was mainly concerned with fortifications. There was also a War Office Defence Committee, again a product of the invasion scare of the late 1850s, to consider 'the best means of repelling an invasion of the United Kingdom'. The two latter bodies consisted of serving officers; there was no coordination between these three bodies and they gradually drifted out of existence again.17 A Prime Minister like Gladstone, not particularly interested in defence, stumbled into major commitments like Egypt and the Sudan in the 1880s. Much was left to individual ministers or to ad hoc consultations between the Prime Minister and other Cabinet Ministers. Fortunately for Gladstone, perceptions of a threat to the home base had by this time died away. At the beginning of the period, and to a large extent right into the 1880s, the primacy of the civilians in the making of defence policy was undisputed. This arose very largely from the fact that the purely technical aspects of decisionmaking in defence, matters on which any one who was not a professional or technical specialist might find it difficult to intervene, were very limited in scope. This was more the case with the Army than it was with the Navy. The Crimean War had just shown again the extent to which the officer corps of the Army consisted of aristocratic amateurs, but a naval officer had to spend time at sea and at least know something about working a ship. But even the distribution of the Navy could be decided by the politicians with little reference to the Board of Admiralty. Corry, Derby's First Lord, told the House of Commons in 1867 that the distribution of ships, depended upon considerations with which even the Lords of the Admiralty themselves were sometimes unacquainted, and which were kept within the bosom of the Cabinet. The Admiralty implicitly obeyed the instructions they received from the Cabinet on this point.18

Palmerston as Prime Minister was still in a position to exercise a personal judgement on the relative merits of Whitworth and of Armstrong as gun-makers or about the suitability of Cannock Chase as a central arsenal. He attended test firings on the Shoeburyness gunnery range. As a man who had held the office of Secretary at War for some twenty years, he may have had a personal interest which subsequent Prime Ministers did not share. Sir John Burgoyne, InspectorGeneral of Fortifications from 1845 to 1868, came closest to being a defence expert, who in his particular field could not be gainsaid. In practice he worked closely with Palmerston. The fact remains that there was always a sufficient number on both the front- and back-benches who could fully enter into defence 16

Ibid., GC/SO/63, 6 October 1861. Partridge, Military Planning, pp. 63-64. 18 Hansard, 186, 1 April 1867.

17

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Government and the Armed Forces, 1856-1990

problems; while, on the other hand, the degree to which military or naval men could claim that they were the guardians of an arcane science was limited. This comes out clearly in the correspondence between the civilian and service officials both at the Admiralty and the War Office and in the debates on Service matters in Parliament. 'Scientific men', so Somerset confided to Palmerston, '. . . whenever they range beyond the scope of their particular . . . are not more infallible than ordinary mortals'.19 In the absence of any central machinery for making defence policy, the two separate Services went their own way from day to day, making policy by default. There were no Chinese walls between administration and the making of policy. The Navy was administered by what was on paper a logical system, the Board of Admiralty. Reforms originally instituted by Sir James Graham in the 1830s had allotted specific duties to each of the Sea Lords.20 Nevertheless the Admiralty itself was relatively impotent as an instrument for getting a grip on naval policy. Leading naval officers were scathing about in public. Admiral Sir Charles Napier, a major naval figure, but notoriously alarmist and pessimistic about the state of naval affairs, remarked in the House of Commons in 1858 'the Admiralty never did anything advantageous for the service: it commonly came from without';21 and Captain Lord Clarence Paget said 'no naval man ever went within its gates without feeling a certain amount of trepidation'.22 Naval officers thus had very limited input into the making of naval policy, for there was no official apparatus for it. Thus when Childers, on becoming First Lord in the Gladstone Ministry of 1868, decided on a policy of reducing ships on foreign stations, in order to save money, and replacing them by a flying squadron, he was putting into effect a policy he had worked out in opposition. He had consulted with his political colleagues Stansfeld, ShawLefevre and Sir John Hay, and of these only the last had any kind of naval service experience. There was a small group of naval 'experts' in Parliament, retired or serving officers, former Admiralty officials, shipowners and shipbuilders. The best known were Sir Charles Napier and later Lord Charles Beresford. Others were Admirals Walcott, Buncombe and Erskine, Sir James Elphinstone, and Captains Mackinnon and Pim. Their influence was counterbalanced by the internationalists of the Cobden school; indeed some of the shipbuilders and owners were of the latter persuasion, for example W.S. Lindsay, the MP for Tynemouth. Among Tories William Laird, the shipbuilder and MP for Birkenhead, was influential and came under consideration as a potential Parliamentary Secretary at the Admiralty. In 1861, when the scare about a French invasion had passed and Palmerston was no longer in what Bright called his most 'Rule Britannia mood',23 a concerted 19

Palmerston Papers, GC/SO/28, 16 March 1860. N.A.M. Rodger, The Admiralty (Lavenham, Suffolk, 1979), pp. 98-100. 21 Hansard, 150, 18 May 1858. 22 Ibid., 149, 12 April 1858. 23 Ibid., 163, 23 May 1861. 20

Civil-Military Relations, 1855- 85

9

effort was made to reduce the naval estimates. Lindsay tabled reductions amounting to £486,000 from the vote for naval stores (vote 10) of £3,850,000 (out of a total estimate of £12,276,000). In a sparsely attended House, 153 members voting in the largest division, Lindsay's proposals were comfortably defeated.24 Such parliamentary pressure must, however, have been useful to Gladstone in his internal Cabinet battles to contain defence expenditure. Debates on naval matters and estimates were often thinly attended. Frederick Bentinck complained in 1858 during a debate on the manning of the Navy that only fifteen Members were present on a matter 'involving not merely the honour and reputation but the very existence of this country, a very curious spectacle for the senate of the first maritime country in the world to present'.25 At the end of the day financial control by the House of Commons was a blunt instrument for influencing the government's naval policy nor could the mood of the House as a whole be characterised as hostile to the government's defence expenditure. In 1864 the prospect of intervention in SchleswigHolstein strengthened the hand again of those who argued for a powerful Navy. While earlier Disraeli had expressed some sympathy with the advocates of economy, Sir John Pakington, a former Tory First Lord, now supported the critics who claimed that the Navy had been left in an inadequate state to intervene in a European war. In the debates on the naval estimates in March 1865 Pakington returned to the attack. He asked: Is it or is it not true, as I have heard it rumoured on all sides, that at this moment, if we should become involved in a maritime war, England could not send an effective fleet to sea?26

Lack of professional advice resulting in waste of the expenditure freely voted by the House was again complained of. These parliamentary pressures and counterpressures were part of the structure of defence decision-making, but they still left the First Lord and the Cabinet a fairly free hand. As far as the Army was concerned, it accounted after the Crimean War for approximately three-fifths of defence estimates and still over half if the shipbuilding vote is included. Defence expenditure was roughly one-third of total government expenditure. Whig governments had for many years pressed for a rationalisation of army administration at the top, something that would achieve better efficiency and economy and at the same time more effective civilian control of the military. The appointment of a Minister of War on the continental model, or something along the lines of the Board of Admiralty, had been under discussion from time to time. Such developments had usually been resisted by the military, with the powerful support of the Duke of Wellington, and had never been implemented. 24

Ibid., 23 May 1861. Ibid., 150, 18 May 1858. 26 Ibid., 177, 6 March 1865.

25

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The Crimean War and its vicissitudes had at last brought about a reorganisation of the control of the Army. The office of Secretary at War was abolished at the end of 1854; its parliamentary functions were absorbed by the Secretary of State for War, whose functions of controlling the colonies had been hived off to a separate Secretary of State in June 1854. The office of Master General of the Ordnance, in the past frequently in the Cabinet, was abolished in May 1855 and the Board of Ordnance was brought under the aegis of the Secretary of State for War, who thus became responsible for the artillery, the engineers and the supply of weapons and ammunition.27 The office of Commander-inChief, the abolition of which was also under consideration, was, however, confirmed by the Royal Patent of 18 May 1855, which placed the 'administration and government' of the Army into the hands of the Secretary of State for War, excepting always so far as relates to and concerns the military command and discipline of our army and land forces, as likewise to the appointments to and promotions in the same, and so far as by our Royal Commission the military command and discipline thereof shall have been . . . committed to ... our Commander in Chief of our forces . . ,28

This meant that the Commander-in-Chief now actually took over appointments, promotions and discipline for artillery and engineers, previously under the Master General of the Ordnance. The opportunity to rationalise the administration of the Army, the cause of so much heart-searching and official inquiry over the years, was therefore not fully taken, largely because of the pressure to maintain the special relationship between the Sovereign and the Army. It was in fact strengthened by the appointment of the Queen's cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, as Commander-inChief. Whenever during the forty-year tenure of the post by the Duke friction arose between him and others, no one could afford to ignore the easy access he had to the Queen. Nevertheless, when a few years later a select committee enquired into the effects of the reorganisation of 1854-5, it was clear, and even the Duke of Cambridge himself admitted it, that the control of military affairs and strategy was firmly in the hands of civilian politicians. Sidney Herbert, the Secretary of State for War, said that the reservations of power left to the Commander-in-Chief were in practice 'inoperative', because the Secretary of State held the purse strings.29 Sidney Herbert wrote somewhat apologetically to the Duke of Cambridge about his performance before the committee: I have stated exactly what I think throughout. I attach the greatest importance to the maintenance of the just position of the Commander-in-Chief, and I am satisfied 27 John Sweetman, War and Administration: The Significance of the Crimean War for the British Army (Edinburgh, 1984), pp. 93-94. 28 Report of the Select Committee to Inquire into the Effects of Alterations in Military Organization regarding the War Office and Board of Ordnance (1860, Cmd 441, vii, p. 5). 29 Ibid., p. 447.

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that to attempt to magnify his theoretical power is the sure way practically to undermine his position. The prerogative of the Crown is also best maintained by never being strained.30

It could therefore be argued that the reorganisation had done nothing to change the balance of power between civilians and the military in defence decision-making. Much depended, however, on the interplay of personalities. Lord Hardinge, the Duke of Cambridge's predecessor, had little say in the strategy and conduct of the Crimean War. He was not even informed of the orders that were dispatched to the armies and did not expect to play a major role. On 3 June 1854 he wrote to Newcastle, the Secretary of State for War: 'I hope it is settled that you conduct the war.'31 Hardinge provided Newcastle with information on basic military organisation and on the structure that should be given to the expeditionary force, and gave the Minister his opinion on the various generals mentioned in connection with the expedition. When the question of appointing a general for the proposed expeditionary force to the Baltic came up, Newcastle asked for Hardinge's advice. The Secretary of State pointed out that Sir Charles Napier, the naval commander in the Baltic, 'is not content with being a great admiral, but thinks himself a great general'; therefore the officer appointed 'must be both able to "hold his own" and to do it without quarrelling with the Admiral'.32 The correspondence between Newcastle and Hardinge also covers many other subjects besides appointments, including military organisation, the state of readiness and armament of particular regiments, the transportation of horses to the Crimea, the replacement of officer casualties and recruitment generally. There was obviously regular verbal communication between the Secretary of State and the Commander-in-Chief. Hardinge, however, took virtually no part in the discussion of strategy. He was not a member of the special War Committee of the Cabinet set up by Palmerston in August 1855.33 Even on technical matters his authority was shared by others, for example the Inspector-General of Fortifications. The third Earl Grey, who had been Secretary at War and Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, said a few years later: 'with regard to the question as to the armament of fortresses, I find that until very lately the Commander-in-Chief had no control over it. . .' In part, Hardinge's inability or unwillingness to interpose in the decisionmaking process was the product of age and infirmity - he died in 1856. The situation was considerably transformed when the Duke of Cambridge succeeded Hardinge in July 1856. This was not only due to his close relationship with the Queen and to his determination to uphold the connection between the Throne and the Armed Forces. He was also much younger and more 30 31

Cambridge Papers, reel 9, 2707, Herbert to Cambridge, 25 May 1860. University of Nottingham, Newcastle Papers, UN.Nee 10069, Hardinge to Newcastle, 3 June

1854.

32

Ibid., UN.Nec 10781, Newcastle to Hardinge, 4 April 1854. Olive Anderson, A Liberal State at War: English Politics and Economics during the Crimean War (London, 1967), pp. 40-41. 33

12

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enthusiastic and determined to play an active part in affairs. In the early days of his long period of office we find him complaining to Panmure, the Secretary of State, in March 1857 that he had not been shown dispatches from China and the Persian Gulf, in spite of Panmure's promises: I cannot help bringing to your notice that I think it would be most desirable to make it the rule that all despatches of a decidedly military character . . . should be communicated to the Commander-in-Chief. It can hardly be thought right that the only information the Commander-in-Chief at present obtains on these matters is either by private letters or by the public journals.34

Apparently the hint is taken, for in returning the Persia papers the Duke thanks Panmure for agreeing 'with my view that the Commander-in-Chief should see all military dispatches in cases in which the Queen's troops are concerned'.35 The Duke bombarded Panmure with advice about the sending of troops, sometimes recommending the dispatch of reinforcements, sometimes warning about the dangerous state of home defence if troops were sent out of the country. In March 1857, for example, he urged the need to send reinforcements to India and China;36 in May 1857, despite the outbreak of the Mutiny, he warned that no more troops could be spared from the home base, or else there would have to be an increase in the size of the Army.37 In August, having earlier agreed that more troops could be sent after all, he wrote: As regards infantry, my most decided opinion is that so very large a force has already been sent of that item that for the moment no more is needed, whereas at home it is dreadfully wanted, and in fact till the militia are fully out and drilled it is quite impossible with safety to dispense of these four additional regiments. Bear in mind that not alone I have no troops to put in garrison and give daily duties, but what is far worse I shall have no regiments to aid me in drilling my own [second] battalions, from whence to take my non-commissioned officers, etc. In fact I shall be run so dry that the machine will not work any more. Give me only a little time more to get up the militia and a few of my second battalions, and you shall have the four regiments of infantry but do not ask for them at this moment, for I do not feel myself in a position to give them with safety to the country or the future prospects of the army.38

These views were not shared by the Cabinet. Clarendon, the Foreign Secretary, wrote to Panmure: T am ... in no fear of any danger threatening us at home, and as to our national reputation . . . the best way of maintaining that, and of

3/1

Panmure Papéis, ii, p. 365, Cambridge to Panmure, 18 March 1857. Palmerston Papers, GC/PA/164, 27 October 1857; Willoughby Verner, The Military Life of HRH George, Duke of Cambridge (London, 1905), i, p. 116. 36 Panmure Papers, ii, pp. 361, 365, 369, Cambridge to Panmure, 17, 18 and 29 March 1857. 37 Ibid., p. 386, Cambridge to Panmure, 19 May 1857. 38 Ibid., pp. 420-21, Cambridge to Panmure, 30 August 1857. 35

Civil-Military Relations, 1855- 85

13

deterring any foreign power from presuming on our supposed weakness, will be to crush the Indian revolt as soon as can be done.'39 The Duke of Cambridge regularly attended meetings of the War or Defence Committee of the Cabinet when such a body was in existence. He was in constant contact with successive Secretaries of State, with whom he had regular face-toface meetings at the War Office. Asked by the Select Committee of Enquiry on Military Organisation in 1860 as to the frequency of these meetings the Duke of Cambridge replied: Constant; there is a great deal of personal intercourse, and, indeed, I think that that is the best way of doing business . . . I suppose hardly a day passed that I did not call on him. Of course it depends to some extent what is going on; during the time that General Peel was in office there was the Indian Mutiny, and there were various matters that necessitated, perhaps, more intercourse than at any other time, but the same intercourse goes on with Mr. Herbert, and did so with Lord Panmure.40 The Duke fully recognised, however, the severe limits on his influence exerted by Cabinet and Parliament. When the Indian Mutiny started, Cambridge became convinced that the forces of the East India Company should be amalgamated with those of the crown. Panmure agreed with him, but the decision of the Cabinet was otherwise. The Secretary of State expressed his regret to Cambridge 'that you should have entered an official protest against it, as, after all, it is a decision of a collective government, taken with a full knowledge of Your Royal Highness' opinion, and to which in our individual capacities we must bow'.41 Palmerston commented: 'We cannot gag a Commander-in-Chief, nor prevent him from stating any objections which he may feel to any decision taken by the Cabinet on a military question, but we can tell him civilly that we abide by our own opinion.'42 On the other hand the Duke of Cambridge was on many occasions not above bringing into play the one constitutional element that might reinforce him, the Queen. Responsibility for Army affairs thus remained divided between the Secretary of State for War and the Commander-in-Chief, between the War Office and the Horse Guards. The constitutional supremacy of the Secretary of State and of the Cabinet was not in question. On the other hand, the Commander-inChief had to be consulted on all matters of personnel and discipline and in fact could not be left out of the execution of policy. The ultimate supremacy of the civilians and its acknowledgement by the Duke did not mean that his relations with successive Secretaries of State ran smooth, whatever the impression given to the Committee of Enquiry in 1860. The Duke's relations with most Secretaries of State, certainly from Cardwell onwards, became strained. His opposition to the Cardwell reforms and his dogged rearguard action against 39

Ibid., p. 423, Clarendon to Panmure, 31 August 1857. Minutes of Evidence, Select Committee on Military Organization, 1860, p. 293. 41 Panmure Papers, ii, p. 448, Panmure to Cambridge, 28 October 1857. 42 Ibid., p. 449, Palmerston to Panmure, 30 October 1857.

40

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them are well known. Just because a civilian politician, aided by Young Turk officers, could master the details of army organisation, the Duke had to ensconce himself behind the barricades of superior knowledge of detail. The Queen wrote in her diary on 15 August 1870: 'Saw George and found him greatly excited. He told me of all his difficulties, of the obstinacy of Mr. Cardwell and want of knowledge of military matters in detail.'43 At the end of the day the Duke could not stop the reforms from being implemented. The Gladstone government's policy of retrenchment and reform was in the meantime causing similar tensions at the Admiralty. H.C.E. Childers became First Lord and initiated a determined programme of cost and manpower reductions, fully backed by the Prime Minister, Gladstone described him as 'a Man likely to scan with a rigid Eye the civil Expenses of the Naval Service'.44 He got the naval estimates just below the psychologically important figure of £10,000,000. Childers strengthened his own position as First Lord by reducing the role of the Board of Admiralty to a purely formal one, making meetings rare and short and confining the Sea Lords rigidly to their administrative functions. These changes, although soon partially reversed, left their mark on the Admiralty for a generation. It became even more difficult for a coherent view of naval policy to emerge from the professionals. Milne, the First Sea Lord, wrote to Childers' successor: 'There is no cohesion between the N aval Element in the Board .^ Childers also cleared the back-log of over-age senior officers from the Navy List by increasing pensions. It was a necessary but unpopular move. Initially Childers had the support of the influential Controller of the Navy, Vice-Admiral Sir Spencer Robinson, but soon he and the Chief Constructor, Edward Reed, later an MP, resigned in acrimonious circumstances. The resignations were connected with the loss of HMS Captain and with the way in which Childers tried to shift responsibility for the loss on to others. HMS Captain was built with rotating gun-turrets as a result of a long campaign fuelled by public suspicion that the Admiralty was obscurantist and backward-looking in refusing to adopt such a design.46 In fact warnings from within the Navy and Admiralty about the ship's stability should have been heeded. Childers was strongly in favour of building the Captain and could therefore not escape personal responsibility for the disaster. His own son went down in the ship, as did the relatives of a number of other prominent men. The loss of HMS Captain and of HMS Megaera47 and other incidents in these years cast a shadow over the 43 44

15 August 1870, quoted in Giles St Aubyn, The Royal George (London, 1963), p. 143. P. Guedalla (ed.), The Palmerston Papers: Gladstone and Palmerston (London, 1928), 7 November

1864.

45

N.A.M. Rodger, The Dark Ages of the Admiralty, 1869-85', pt 1, 'Business Methods', Manner's Mirror, 61 (1975), p. 343. 46 Stanley Sadler, '"In Deference to Public Opinion": The Loss of HMS Captain', Mariner's Mirror, b§ (1973), p. 57. 47 Norman McCord, 'A Naval Scandal of 1871: The Loss of HMS Megaera , Manner's Mirror, 57 (1971), p. 115. See also Commission to Inquire into Case of PI MS Megaera, Report (1872, Cmd 507, xv).

Civil-Military Relations, 1855- 85

15

Admiralty's administrative and technical competence. The 1870s have been called the Admiralty's 'Dark Age'. The regime of rigid economy had become so deeply ingrained that no officer was prepared to advocate even necessary repairs and refurbishments because any expenditure was so much frowned upon. A Royal Commission brought out some of these shortcomings. The unpopularity of the Gladstone government in the early 1870s was due not only to the feeling that it had shown itself impotent in foreign policy, but also to its apparent neglect of the nation's defences. Childers was succeeded by Goschen at the Admiralty in 1871, but returned to the defence field as Secretary of State for War in Gladstone's Second Ministry in 1880. Relations between the Duke of Cambridge and Childers reached a peak of unpleasantness in 1881 over the appointment of Wolseley as AdjutantGeneral. The antagonism between the Duke and the most prominent of the military reformers had gone on for a decade. The Duke's refusal to have Wolseley as Adjutant-General could be seen as merely a matter of personal incompatibility. Harcourt remarked that the Duke and Wolseley could not live 'conjugally' together. It was not long before questions of policy arose, especially as the Duke was ill-advised enough to let the cat out of the bag that his objection to Wolseley was not just a personnel matter, but that he could not work with him as the most conspicuous exponent of military reform. Childers pointed out to the Duke that the reforms were now established policy 'unconnected with party polities'. At a later stage of what Gladstone called one of the most 'entangled' questions he had ever known 'in the region of personal matters', the issue arose how far the Duke's prerogatives in the making of appointments really extended. Childers pointed out to Gladstone that the Duke had the right of recommendation only 'for regimental appointments and even then the Secretary of State has the right of veto. He has no pretension to do so for important offices at Headquarters'. Gladstone became alarmed that any such pretensions of the Duke might be admitted; and furthermore that the Duke might veto the grant of peerages to officers who as members of the House of Lords might speak in a contrary sense to him on military matters. The Prime Minister had reason to be alarmed, for in the meantime public discussion, brought on by leaks to the press and club gossip, had raised the larger civil-military question: who governs the Army, the government or the Commander-in-Chief with his royal connections? Childers complained to his colleague Dilke about the Duke, that he 'went chattering about the place, refused to behave as a subordinate, and wrote direct to the Queen'. An unsuccessful attempt was made to trap the Duke into putting his objections to Wolseley on policy grounds into writing. In the end, however, Wolseley did become Adjutant-General and the Duke did not resign.48 Relations could be just as bad with Tory Secretaries of State. Lady Géraldine Somerset wrote in her diary on 16 January 1889: 48

Most of the information on the Wolseley case comes from box 5, 'Political Correspondence', in the Childers Papers, formerly deposited at the Royal Commonwealth Society.

16

Government and the Armed Forces, 1856-1990 [C] had the most unpleasant meeting at the War Office today! That little beast Stanhope more nasty than ever! No War Minister has yet ever assumed the insolence of tone towards him personally of this beastly little whippersnapper who might be his son. Nasty filthy little prig! Childers and Cardwell were always, at least outwardly, civil, courteous and deferential to him personally! To schoolmaster him as a chidden schoolboy was reserved for a Conservative Government to do!! He told him plainly today if it goes on it is quite impossible for him to stay.49

The difficulties which the Duke's position placed in the way of implementing the recommendations of the Hartington Commission for the appointment of a Chief of Staff are well known. It remains a moot point whether all the long drawn-out difficulties over the Duke of Cambridge are really a matter of civilmilitary relations or merely a personal problem. Wolseley had the reputation of being the Liberal Party's tame senior officer and this undoubtedly made intervention in Egypt in 1882 more tolerable for Gladstone. 'Wolseley in Cairo: Arabi a prisoner: God be praised', he wrote in his diary on 15 September 1882. In private Wolseley could be as vitriolic about the Liberal government as the Duke of Cambridge had ever been about any politician. The modus operandi in defence matters, as sketched here also led to a certain disjunction between foreign and defence policy, though it might be argued that such a distinction has little validity. Foreign policy was unequivocally a Cabinet matter on which service officers had little contribution to make, except possibly as ex post facto executants. Foreign policy was in the main concerned with relations with the other great powers. Defence policy was concerned with certain ongoing realities, particularly in the colonial and imperial sphere. It was governed by the slower rhythms of expenditure, for which parliamentary approval was necessary, by recruitment and the procurement of equipment, particularly of ships for the Navy. The potential conflicts with other major European powers that might arise out of the conduct of foreign affairs could, however, call in question the shuffling around of naval and military assets that were the normal routine of defence decision-making. The extent to which this whole system could allow foreign and defence policies to get out of step can be seen in especially acute form in the SchleswigHolstein crisis in 1863-4.50 It was a foreign policy problem involving relations with all the great powers of the European concert. The way in which Palmerston and Russell played the British hand had defence implications which were not considered until they became too obvious to be ignored. Only 20,000 men could have been mustered for a continental expedition and Somerset told Palmerston that 'if we get into a naval war with German powers we must expect that Alabamas will be fitted out in America and elsewhere to prey on our com-

49

St Aubyn, The Royal George, p. 279. Bernard Porter, Britain and the World, 1850-1986: Delusions of Grandeur (2nd edn, London, 1986), p. 19. 50

Civil-Military Relations, 1855- 85

17

merce'.51 The Schleswig-Holstein crisis came at a point when there was a downswing in both naval and military expenditure. The alarm about a French threat had declined; indeed if anything could have been done to intervene on behalf of Denmark, it would have had to be done in conjunction with France. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gladstone, was determined to bear down on defence expenditure and was still busy doing so when the crisis reached the acute stage in January 1864. When fourteen years later the Eastern Crisis reached its acute stage early in 1878, it was during a similar downward or at least static phase in the defence expenditure curve. A brief upward spasm followed; in 1864 even such a reaction was impossible. We have therefore a considerable divorce between foreign and defence policy, partly due to the discrepancy between Britain's imperial and European roles, partly to the subordinate role played by the naval and military establishment in the making of policy generally, and of foreign policy in particular. The question of Canadian defence was at the forefront of defence problems throughout the 1860s. The parameters within which it kept cropping up were: 1. The threat from the United States. 2. The feeling in Britain that to abandon Canada was dishonourable and incompatible with British prestige. 3. The contrary feeling that Canada was becoming indefensible, especially after the North had emerged victorious in 1865. 4. The constant pressure for economy in Parliament and elsewhere. 5. The claims of other areas for British defence resources, in particular the requirements arising out of Britain's involvement in the European power balance. 6. The desire to secure the maximum contribution from the Canadians. Within this framework of conflicting pressures civilian politicians and military and naval officers formed their opinions and put them forward. Until his death in October 1865 the most important and relentless pressure for a high British profile in North America came from Palmerston and the most significant counterpressure from Gladstone. The military and naval input was much less clearcut. In 1861 Palmerston pressed his case for naval intervention strongly on the First Lord of the Admiralty, but Somerset was not impressed. If it was the basic British strategy to use a naval threat against the exposed American coastline as a counter to the inevitable difficulty of defending the long and exposed Canadian land frontier, then a lot of naval officers, whose views influenced the First Lord, were distinctly cautious about such a strategy. A paper by Captain Washington, the Admiralty's hydrographer, considered a blockade feasible, but an attack on places like Boston or New York potentially disastrous. Such caution was echoed from the Army side by Sir John Burgoyne. In 1862 it was his considered opinion that, in spite of Britain's naval supremacy, 51

Palmerston Papers, GC/SO/117, 22 February 1864.

18

Government and the Armed Forces, 1856— 1990

no entirely effective defence was possible, especially if the principle of colonial self-defence was rigidly adhered to. Only a few days later, on 4 March 1862, at a moment when the greatest danger of war with the North following the Trent incident had clearly passed, the House of Commons passed unanimously a motion that 'This House, while it fully recognizes the claim of all portions of the British Empire on Imperial aid against perils arising from the consequence of Imperial policy, is of opinion that Colonies exercising the rights of selfgovernment ought to undertake the main responsibility of providing for their own internal order and security.' This resolution, passed with the support of the government, was designed to put pressure on the Canadians in particular to speed the recruitment of their own militias. A few weeks later, on 21 April 1862, Sir George Lewis, the Secretary of State for War, wrote to the Duke of Cambridge, who had sent him a speech made in Canada on the subject of her defences: Whatever abstract formulas the House of Commons may pass, the main defence of our colonies must be conducted by the mother country so long as they remain our colonies. If we involve Canada in war, Canada will look to us for defence. If we leave her to herself she will make her own bargain with the United States.52 The Duke of Cambridge was tireless in pleading the cause of Canadian defence and in corresponding with Sir Fenwick Williams, the Commander-in-Chief in Canada, about the latter's many anxieties. On the other hand again, a principal opponent of British defence commitments in Canada, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, exhibited a high level of military and strategic expertise in casting doubt upon the report on Canadian defence presented by Colonel Jervois in February 1864. This report had attempted to square the circle of viable defence and moderate expenditure by an optimistic assessment of what could be done with a modest plan of fortifications and troop concentrations. The promotion of a Canadian federation offered itself as an obvious way out of an intractable situation. In a memorandum on the defence of British North America, dated 20January 1865, Gladstone stated as item 2: 'Immense advantage to usof dealing with the "Confederation" of BNA as a whole . . .'53 By the time the first Gladstone government took office, in December 1868, the Canadian defence problem had receded. The Fenian incursions had proved temporary irritants. The British North America Federation had been formed. Although much in Anglo-American relations remained to be sorted out, it was becoming clear that the end of the civil war did not mean that America was going on the rampage. The pressures to bring the boys home were too great for that in the American democracy. The end of the Abyssinian War meant that there was no immediate imperial problem requiring expensive troop or 52

Cambridge Papers, reel 13, 3565, 21 April 1862. The Gladstone Diaries, ed. H.C.G. Matthew, vi, 1861-1868 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 327-28. For report of Colonel Jervois, see K. Bourne, Britain and the Balance of Power in North America, pp. 263ff. 53

Civil-Military Relations, 1855-85

19

naval commitment. There seemed little to stop the government from embarking on a course of reducing defence expenditure that was part and parcel of their economic and ideological orientation. When the Conservative government took office in 1874, it was plausible to take the view that England was really more an Asiatic power than a European, a view which Disraeli had expressed as early as 1866.54 To sum up, there was nothing in this period that could be dignified with the label defence planning. Perhaps the notion of defence planning is something of a chimera even in the present century, a vain attempt to anticipate events that cannot be anticipated. In the nineteenth century the extent to which military affairs were an area of specialisation requiring a high degree of technical expertise was still limited. Both politicians and serving officers shared a common set of largely unspoken assumptions. They took a high view of the country's place in the world, which conflicted with their acute awareness of the limited resources at their disposal. However much there might at times be a civil-military divide on the level of these resources, both sides knew that the limits set by parliamentary and public opinion were very strict. They were engaged in an ongoing confidence trick, but this was not something they cared to articulate. On the whole there was a consensus that Britain was a sated power that had no need to acquire territory and had every interest in peace and stability. The ultimate supremacy of the politicians was unquestioned. It applied particularly in the field of foreign policy, or perhaps more accurately great-power policy. Imperial policy was more a matter of constant shuffling around of limited resources, in which the navalmilitary establishment could make a rather bigger impact. The distances involved, only gradually reduced by the development of communications technology, gave the military greater autonomy in this arena. There could thus be a conflict between the conduct of foreign or great-power policy and the ongoing pressures of imperial commitments. At such moments civil-military tensions were aggravated. The Army was always more likely to be the focus of such tensions than the Navy. Civil-military conflicts were mostly about details, minutiae, even trivia; never, as in so many countries, over ultimate matters of power and control.

54

Robert Blake, Disraeli (London, 1966), p. 455.

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2 Ruling the Waves: Government, the Service and the Cost of Naval Supremacy, 1885—99 Paul Smith

It has been estimated that by 1910, whereas in France and Germany incomes per capita amounted to at least 70 per cent of British levels, military expenditures reached only 48 per cent.1 Beneath the carefully tended image of the most civilian and least militaristic of the great powers lay the inexorable costs of defending the greatest empire in the world. The 'righteous and aggressive Protestant nationalism',2 on which Palmerston had so cheerfully traded in the middle of the nineteenth century, had counted on getting its Podsnappish satisfactions on the cheap, maintaining a Cobdenite taste for economy in military and naval establishments while at the same time indulging a most unCobdenite taste for bluster and bullying, which, however, stopped prudently short of provoking the sort of confrontation with a major power that might prove expensive as well as humiliating. If unheroic, the technique worked well enough so long as it was backed by unquestioned industrial and financial supremacy and a navy capable both of protecting Britain's world-wide empire and commerce and of guaranteeing her insular security. These necessary conditions were already being eroded before Palmerston died. Steam power so severely reduced the navy's capacity to make certain of barring the Channel to an invader that, with the invasion scare of 1859, the emphasis in national defence swung towards land forces and fortifications. In face of an aroused public opinion, Palmerston was obliged to conclude that 'in the activity . . . and scale of our defensive arrangements . . . we must not be overreached by financial economy', while a Gladstone striving, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, to restrict expenditure and taxation to what he thought compatible not only with national prosperity but with political stability and social harmony was roundly told by his old Peelite associate, Graham: 'The will of the nation is in favour of military preparation, quite regardless of expense . . . the attempt to struggle against it is in vain'.3 Within thirty years of Tennyson's 'Riflemen, form!', the rise of new industrial and military powers, developing their strength behind protectionist barriers 1

See P.K. O'Brien, The Costs and Benefits of British Imperialism, 1846-1914', Past and Present, 120 (1988), p. 188. 2 The phrase is E.D. Steele's, in Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855-1865 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 56. 3 Palmerston to Russell, 4 November 1859, and Graham to Gladstone, 2 June 1860, quoted in Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, pp. 98, 99.

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Government and the Armed Forces, 1856-1990

and embarking upon competitive imperial expansion with all the weapons afforded by the increasingly rapid refinement of military and naval technology, was offering a formidable challenge both to British economic might and to the imperial mastery which it underpinned. The balance between the desire for low taxes and the need for improved means of national and imperial defence could hardly fail to be further affected. It seemed to some observers that this must be especially so when the character of the political nation that had to endorse the relevant decisions was itself undergoing a metamorphosis, with the arrival, as a result of the Reform Acts of 1867 and 1884, of what contemporaries often chose to term 'democracy' - though the vagaries of the electoral system still tended at any given moment to exclude about 40 per cent of adult males, as well as all women, from the vote. If, as Lord Salisbury had always believed,4 a mass electorate was likely to be more febrile and belligerent than its predecessor, not least because composed in the overwhelming majority of men who were relatively little affected by the great engine of direct taxation through which the cost of adventures in policy would be met, the old, parsimonious prudence which had controlled defence expenditure in peacetime (except at moments of unusual alarm), might no longer be sustainable. It was a question by the 1880s whether government - still largely at the highest level the government of the aristocracy and the landed classes - would be able much longer to exercise a judicious and efficient control of national defence and the Services' claims when subjected to the almost continuous pressure of external threat and to the demands which it aroused, on the one hand from the service 'experts' whom Salisbury so much dreaded,5 on the other from a public opinion goaded and sometimes inflamed by a press frequently possessing links to those experts and - still worse - self-appointed experts of its own. Ministers could not necessarily rely on the calm and unfettered judgement of the nation's representatives to back them when defence 'scares' blew up: Lord George Hamilton, who was admirably placed to observe, found a marked change in Parliament's attitude to defence expenditure in the mid 1880s, when, he declared, the domination of middle-class parsimony was overcome by the influence of newly enfranchised voters who favoured large defence establishments.6 The eighties and the nineties were a watershed, when the relations between government and the Services were being recast as civilian and economical control of the Armed Forces was challenged by the emergence of defence policy driven by external threats, technological imperatives, service demands and public alarms which no minister could easily resist. At the heart of the shifting balance of power between government and the 4

See, for example, Quarterly Review, 115 (1864), p. 239. 'The experts - the pedants - have too much power' (at the Admiralty), he told Goschen in a letter of 10 February 1892. Lady Gwendolen Cecil, Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury (4 vols, London, 1921-32), iv, p. 189. 6 Lord George Hamilton, Parliamentary Reminiscences and Reflections, 1886-1906 (London, 1922), p. 60. 5

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23

defence establishment was the Navy. The Navy's preeminent position in the sphere of national defence was readily explained by the nature of an insular world power, dependent on ships for communications with, and policing of, its empire, safeguard of its commerce, and protection of its shores. Yet there was more to the nation's estimation of its Navy than was defined merely by strategical considerations. There was something about a sailor that seemed to typify the spirit of a self-confident people that liked to see itself as entrusted by Providence with the mission of extending across the oceans the benefits of freedom, Christianity and trade. Even Radicals of the Cobden and Bright school, alert to pare down expenditure and apt to regard warlike preparations as part of (in Bright's famous phrase) 'a gigantic system of out-door relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain', 7 tended to have a sneaking sympathy for the Navy, as not only the cheapest means of defence (and one incapable of employment for purposes of internal repression) but the spiritual ally of the 'mercantile' and progressive, as opposed to the 'military' and reactionary elements in society, national and international. John Stuart Mill, in 1867, went a good deal further, vigorously attacking the 1856 Declaration of Paris and the abandonment of Britain's old belligerent rights on the high seas as weakening the 'essentially defensive' naval powers, the 'cradle and the home of liberty', as against the 'aggressive' and despotic military nations.8 The Navy was enfolded much more easily than the Army in the complacent self-image of John Bull as bluff, hearty and hail-fellow. Palmerston, himself an adept at meeting the requirements of that specification, told the Queen: 'it may be said that there is less of vanity and more of simplicity of character belonging to the naval than to the military profession'.9 Yet, at the same time as the Navy fitted into the popular liberal culture of mid-Victorian Britain, it was also, in its upper ranks, even if not quite as much as the Army, a stronghold of the landed social elite.10 Even without the agitator tactics of the 'navalism' that appeared in the eighties and nineties, an institution so strongly rooted both in popular esteem and in social prestige was well placed to hold its own with government. None the less, it needed the wind of external threat to fill its sails. Reconstructed after the invasion scare of 1859, the Navy was comparatively forgotten in the economical 1870s, at least until its use as a weapon of great-power diplomacy in the Eastern Crisis in 1878 both projected it into the limelight and revealed some of the barnacles that had attached themselves to it in the long years of peace. Investigating the deficiencies revealed in the mobilisation of that year, 7

Speech on foreign policy at Birmingham, 29 October 1858. House of Commons, 5 August 1867, quoted in B. Semmel, Liberalism and Naval Strategy: Ideology, Interest and Sea Power during the Pax Britannica (Boston, 1986), p. 63. 9 4 September 1865, in B. Connell, Regina v. Palmerston: The Correspondence between Queen Victoria and her Foreign, and Prime Minister, 1837-1865 (London, 1962), p. 358. 10 For an overview of the 'aristocratic' connections of the services, see D. Cannadine, TheDecline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven, 1990), pp. 264-80. R. Williams, Defending the Empire: The Conservative Party and British Defence Policy, 1899-1915 (New Haven, 1991), p. 68, refers to the Edwardian Naw as '"Societv" afloat'. 8

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Government and the Armed Forces, 1856— 1990

the Carnarvon Commission of 1879-82 concluded that the Navy was too small to carry out the tasks that would be required of it in war and called for an immediate and substantial programme of warship construction with the aid of a considerable increase in taxation.11 Little notice was taken. Though the Colomb brothers had already begun to lay the theoretical foundations of the 'bluewater school', with its insistence on the primacy of sea power for offensive as well as defensive purposes, it was not until W.T. Stead, prompted by the young Tory politician H.O. Arnold-Förster and helped by Captain John Arbuthnot Fisher, published 'The Truth about the Navy' in the Pall Mall Gazettem September 1884 that a convincing public demand for an increase in naval strength was generated. French and Russian naval building, at a time when Britain's relations with both powers were increasingly strained, with the former over Egypt and with the latter over the threat supposedly offered by her central Asian advance to the security of India, together with British slowness to respond to improvements in armament and construction, made it highly plausible to represent the navy as dangerously under strength. Gladstone's First Lord of the Admiralty, Northbrook, urged by his First Naval Lord as well as by the press, rather reluctantly introduced an extraordinary £5,500,000, five-year programme for ships, ordnance and coaling stations.12 'There is no doubt', Gladstone's private secretary, E.W. Hamilton had noted, 'that there are many Radicals, though deadly opposed to increased armaments, who would submit to a good deal for the sake of the Navy if the alarmists can prove their case'.13 By 1887, the First Lord of the Admiralty was confident that, after three years of the Northbrook programme, 'it would be possible for some years to come to associate a reduction of expenditure with an increase of naval efficiency and strength'. But as the construction vote fell back again in 1887-88 and new battleships once more ceased to be laid down, French building activity, by contrast, surged, the doctrines of the so-called Jeune Ecole of French naval strategists posed the threat of all all-out assault on British maritime commerce by torpedo boats and fast cruisers, and the alarmists prepared for a renewed bout of vehemence.14 When aroused by the prospect of European war, public concern tended very naturally to centre on the most obvious and available index of Britain's naval 11

The full report of the Royal Commission on the Defence of British Possessions and Commerce Abroad was never made public, but extracts were appended to the proceedings of the 1887 Colonial Conference (1887, Cmd 5091, Ivi, 899-942). 12 For the Navy scare of 1884, see AJ. Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power: A Plistory of British Naval Policy in the Pie-Dreadnought Era, 1880-1905 (New York, 1940),pp. 120-23; R.F. Mackay, Fisher of Kilvei-stone (Oxford, 1973), pp. 179-82. 13 Diary, 25 September 1884, in D.W.R. Bahlman (ed.), TheDiary of Sir Edward Walter Hamilton, 1880-1885, 2 vols (Oxford, 1972), ii, p. 690. 14 Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power, ch. 6 and p. 123. See also for the background, B. Ranft, 'The Protection of British Seaborne Trade and the Development of Systematic Planning for War, 1860-1906', in B. Ranft (ed.), Technical Change and British Naval Policy, 1860-1939 (London, 1977), pp. 1-22; idem, 'Parliamentary Debate, Economic Vulnerability and British Naval Expansion, 1860-1905', in L. Freedman, P. Hayes and R. O'Neill (eds), War, Strategy and International Politics: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard (Oxford, 1992), pp. 75-93.

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25

strength, the size of her fleet relative to those of foreign powers, though the calculation was not a straightforward one, and the argument between the 'navalists' and their moderate opponents was obscured by much fancy arithmetic. Yet the type, design, speed and armament of ships, the adequacy of their personnel and their supporting shore stations, and the efficiency of planning for their mobilisation and use in emergency were factors far more critical than mere numbers. If adequate financial provision for a fleet of the necessary size depended on the ability of the service to impress its case on government, the efficient specification, organisation and employment ofthat fleet depended a good deal in the 1880s on the ability of government to impress sound business and planning practices on the service. The Admiralty Board of the period was signally ill-equipped to direct an effective fighting force. The four Naval Lords (the term 'Sea Lord', though often used, was not officially prescribed until 1904), had become in the course of the nineteenth century departmental administrators, buried by paper and incapable of acting as a collective naval cabinet to advise the First Lord of the Admiralty on questions of general policy. For the most part there was no policy, not even a considered calculation of what size and type of fleet was required to cover all the duties that the Navy might have to perform. A Navy that had not been involved in serious conflict for thirty years or in major fleet action for eighty had largely forgotten about war, as it got on with the routine duties of imperial police. Its Admiralty Board possessed no machinery for remedying the deficiency. Admiral Hornby, a Second Naval Lord of reformist zeal, noted grimly in 1876: 'there is no time or staff to enable fitting arrangements to be made for war, and thus the outbreak of one will go far to ruin our naval reputation'.15 The want of organisation revealed in 1878 made it clear that this situation was intolerable, but ten years after Hornby, in a confidential memorandum for the Board of Admiralty which promptly appeared in the Pall Mall Gazette, that rumbustious sailor-politician Captain Lord Charles Beresford, in his capacity of Fourth Naval Lord, was saying much the same thing.16 The urging of men like Hornby and Beresford helped to generate a degree of reform from within. The latter's memorandum was instrumental in bringing about the conversion of the Foreign Intelligence Committee which had been set up in 1882 into a Naval Intelligence Division which supplied the rudiments of a planning staff. Much, however, depended on the will and ability of government not simply to supply the financial resources with which a sufficient fighting force could be created and maintained but to help promote the improved organisation and adaptation to technological change without which its millions were quite likely, in the event of conflict, to end at the bottom of the sea. 15 Quoted in N.A.M. Rodger, The Dark Ages of the Admiralty, 1869-85', pt 2, 'Change and Decay, 1874-80', Manner's Mirror, 62 (1976), p. 35. 16 The memorandum on 'War Organisation' is reproduced from the Pall Mall Gazette, 13 October 1886, in Sir J.H. Briggs, Naval Administrations 1827 to 1892: The Expedience of 65 Years (London, 1897), pp. 229-38.

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The First Lord who received Beresford's memorandum was his former schoolfellow Lord George Hamilton, who took over the Admiralty in the first Salisbury Ministry of 1885-86 and resumed the post in the second of 1886-92. A younger son of the Duke of Abercorn, elected to Parliament in 1868 as a twenty-two-year-old ensign in the Coldstream Guards, he was an aristocratic politician of conventional type but substantial parliamentary ability, with previous ministerial experience at the India Office and Education. That he was not by nature a minister of strong reforming appetite is suggested by his own account of his appointment in 1885. Salisbury had intended that he should go to the War Office and that W.H. Smith should return to the Admiralty, where he had been First Lord in 1877-80, but on Hamilton's baulking at the prospect of having to try to implement much-needed army reforms in face of the immovable bulk of the Commander-in-Chief, the Duke of Cambridge, the positions were reversed, and Lord George went off happily clutching 'the blue ribbon of office'.17 That there was at least equal need for reform in his preferred billet he soon realised. He and the new Parliamentary and Financial Secretary, Charles Ritchie, 'found the Admiralty in a state of administrative chaos', immediately unearthing - much to the chagrin of Gladstone, whose late government was responsible - 'a miscalculation of a million in the expenditure of one branch of the Department alone'. They were faced with an uninspiring set of Naval Lords, whose individual responsibility for and control of their departments had to be redefined and reasserted, 'an almost inexplicable variety of battleships and cruisers uncompleted or building', their ordnance neglected by the War Office whose responsibility it then was, dockyards greatly in need of reorganisation and a chief constructor (though he quickly resigned) whose circle 'so hated war that they did not believe in its likelihood -1 might even say, in its possibility'.18 At least there was no Duke of Cambridge, and Hamilton buckled to work. His first step, guided by W.H. Smith, was to replace the three existing Naval Lords - not without hurt - and bring in his own men, headed by an exceptionally able administrator, Admiral Sir Arthur Hood; his second to acquire from Armstrongs a first-class constructor in W.H. White.19 His political team, consisting at first of Ritchie and, as Civil Lord responsible for works and buildings, the oafish Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, underwent an important change at the start of Salisbury's second administration, when Ritchie was succeeded as Parliamentary and Financial Secretary by Arthur Bower Forwood. Hamilton's memoirs represent Ashmead-Bartlett and Forwood as being pressed on him 17 Lord George Hamilton, Parliamentary Reminiscences and Reflections, 1868 to 1885 (London, 1916), pp. 276-77. 18 Ibid., pp. 290ff.; BL, Balfour Papers, Add. MS 49778, fos 29-30, Hamilton to A.J. Balfour, 2 November 1895. The problems of Admiralty organisation at this period featured prominently in the report of the Hartington Commission on Civil and Professional Administration of the Naval and Military Departments (1890, Cmd 5979, xix, 1). 19 Hamilton, Reminiscences, 1868-1885, pp. 290-91, 296-97.

Ruling the Waves, 1885- 99

27

by Salisbury somewhat against his will, and he clearly found running them in harmonious tandem with his naval advisers difficult.20 Ashmead-Bartlett was of no great significance, but Forwood represented a challenge that the naval men had seldom, if ever, had to face in the history of the Admiralty, a civilian Minister with great knowledge of shipping and every faith in his technical expertise. Leader of Liverpool's Tories and a former mayor of the city, Forwood had little or nothing in common socially either with his political chief or with the more aristocratic of the service hierarchy, but he had thirty-five years of successful business experience and the self-confidence that came with it. 'Your commercial knowledge and experience would be of great value', wrote Salisbury, in offering him the post,21 and it may be that the Prime Minister had concluded that, for the task of running the Admiralty, Hamilton's political skills needed to be supported by a technical grasp that would ensure that the arguments of the naval experts did not automatically impose themselves on lay opinion. As government moved into an era in which, under pressure of growing external competition, rapid technological change and easily aroused public opinion, defence policy would be driven less by the dictates of economical finance and more by the assessed needs of the Services, so it became essential to ensure that the nation's representatives secured the fullest value for money expended. The obverse of a stronger service claim on government's resources must be a closer governmental scrutiny of service efficiency. It was in those terms that Forwood understood his task, and his work at the Admiralty under Hamilton was to contribute to that emerging shift in the balance of power between civilian Ministers and Service Chiefs in which both sides found that significant surrenders were the price of necessary gains. Hamilton's first, brief encounter with the Admiralty had shown him how much needed to be done. In welcoming his new colleague, Forwood, at the start of his second term, he expressed the hope that 'if our tenure of office is of any length we shall be able to effect considerable reforms'.22 There were two immediate priorities, he told Forwood in December: Tn view of the probability of a European War we are bound to press on the completion of all ships in hand as rapidly as we can, and . . . on the other hand we have to lay down general principles for adoption to improve the somewhat lax administration of the past'.23 The first of these objects took precedence. In reviewing his administration of the Admiralty Hamilton was to pride himself and his colleagues on the extensive work of dockyard reorganisation undertaken in their first two years, expediting and cheapening the building of ships, and taking 20 Hamilton, Reminiscences 1886-1906, p. 35. Ashmead-Bartlett, he says, 'though a very good fellow and very amusing, was not a peacemaker'. 21 Hampshire County Record Office, Forwood Papers, 19M62/22, Salisbury to Forwood, 1 August 1886. 22 Ibid., 19M62/25, Hamilton to Forwood, 4 August 1886. Cf. Hamilton, Reminiscences, 1886-1906, p. 35. 23 Forwood Papers, 19M62/25, Hamilton to Forwood, 31 December 1886.

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over the supply of their ordnance from the War Office, which made it possible to wipe off accumulated arrears of construction and prepare the way for future enlargements of the fleet, while at the same time enabling the Navy estimates to be kept down and so establishing in the public mind a confidence in the Admiralty's power of performance that might render subsequent financial demands more palatable.24 This was in the first instance a policy of efficiency and economy, not expansion. When the government's volatile Chancellor departed in dudgeon over (ostensibly) the service estimates, in December 1886, Hamilton might write cheerfully to Forwood: 'As Churchill has resigned in consequence of our extravagance we may as well be extravagant', and command an increase in the supplementary vote;25 but he was not looking to embark on expensive new building programmes, especially when the speed of technological development made it hard to know what to build that would not become almost immediately obsolescent.26 In the promotion of efficiency, Forwood was Hamilton's bull terrier, sometimes more snappish than his master would have wished, but a very effective threat to the vulnerable parts of naval administration. His notion of the duties of the Parliamentary and Financial Secretary was simple and decided. He told Hamilton in November 1886: . . . I see great difficulty in that official properly discharging his functions unless he is allowed to review all propositions involving expenditure. It is not as I understand for him to say whether the money for a certain service has been provided, or act as head accountant, but his rightful province is to advise you whether in his judgement the service will obtain value for the proposed expenditure. If I rightly interpret the duties of the office, scarcely a question arises that does not involve pecuniary considerations, and which ought [sic] as a matter of course to pass before him. Then he must of course exercise discretion. Many are pro forma and are better understood by professional advisers than by him, and, if wise, he will be loth to interfere without grave cause. I quite appreciate that I may have departed from the course of my predecessors in dealing with some questions that have been before me in considerable detail. For a business life of thirty-five years I have been in the practical management of ships and steamers, and with the knowledge thus acquired I cannot refrain from commenting on the papers that come before me. It may be that having this knowledge was a reason for placing me in my present position.27 Forwood was writing in order to secure his chief's backing for an approach that had brought him into instant collision with naval and civilian officers of the Admiralty unaccustomed to stand minute scrutiny of their departmental proceedings from a Minister, still less one with a distressing degree of specialist knowledge and a determination to use it in the public interest. 24

Hamilton, Reminiscences, 1868-1885, pp. 292-95, 302; Reminiscences, 1886-1906, pp. 85-86, 96-101. 25 Forwood Papers, 19M62/25, Hamilton to Forwood, 23 December 1886. 26 See his private reply, in August 1885, to Admiral Symonds's call for a doubling of the fleet, in Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power, p. 126. 27 Forwood Papers, 19M62/45, Forwood to Hamilton (copy), 17 November 1886.

Ruling the Waves, 1885-99

29

The immediate battleground was Forwood's intervention in the dockyard programme for 1887-88, in opposition to the proposal of the Controller of the Navy (the Third Naval Lord, responsible for matériel) to construct three small gunboats of a type which Forwood regarded as a waste of money. 'We are', he told Hamilton, 'building police boats which cannot fight or escape in imitation and on the basis of the cost of a man-of-war' - and he believed them incapable of facing heavy weather as well, though he was helpfully ready with detailed proposals to improve their seagoing qualities. The Navy's most pressing need, he argued, perhaps with the French threat of a guerre de course and the interests of Liverpool's trade in mind, was for 'a fast seagoing and sea keeping, fairly armed, but unarmoured cruiser' for the protection of commerce, without which there would be a panic among the merchant fleet in the event of war.28 At the same time, he was inspecting vessels under construction with a view to cutting out wasteful expenditure, and finding fault with the allocation of contracts for ships' engines, on which, as something of an expert, he felt impelled to make up for 'the want of competency apparent in our engineering establishment'.29 It is hardly surprising that this bustling and opinionated activity raised the hackles of the Controller of the Navy, Admiral Graham, and the permanent officials under him, or that they tried to fend it off, either by keeping matters from Forwood's sight, or by going straight to Hamilton with their ripostes to Forwood's views in order to obtain a decision without the latter's further participation.30 Already, in November 1886, Forwood was having to assure his chief that he had not intended anything like personal criticism of Graham in his remarks on the skeleton dockyard programme, while at the same time firmly maintaining his right and duty to speak his mind: 'Probably, accustomed all my life to business matters, I approach questions in a more direct way, and use less circumlocutory language than is usual in public offices - but it shortens work, saves time, and I think, perfect candour conduces in the long run to a better understanding amongst all concerned'.31 A few weeks later, having gleaned from The Times that he had been circumvented in the matter of some engine contracts, he was issuing a veiled threat to resign unless he received Hamilton's backing. The Financial Secretary, he wrote, was 'looked upon somewhat askance by the professional man, and his observations upon expenditure from the "payers' " point of view regarded somewhat as an intrusion upon the domains of the naval element. I feel oppressed at times at the vastness of the task, to make my impression upon that inert mass the Admiralty and the streams of 28

Ibid.; Forwood Papers, 19M62/25, notes by Forwood, 12 December 1886; 19M62/40, notes on the 1887-88 building programme. 29 Forwood Papers, 19M62/25, Hamilton to Forwood, 15 October and 31 December 1886; Forwood to Hamilton (copy), 30 December 1886. 30 For complaints about these practices, see Forwood Papers, 19M62/45, Forwood to Hamilton (copies), 17 November 1886, 25 March and 18 July 1887; 19M62/25, Forwood to Hamilton (copy), 30 December 1886. 31 Forwood Papers, 19M62/45, Forwood to Hamilton (copy), 17 November 1886.

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taxpayers gold that pass through its portals'.32 The sense of oppression deepened considerably in May 1887, when Forwood's protest at the Admiralty Board against approval of new fast cruisers without the designs for them having been circulated was met by the Controller with the suggestion 'that I was not a member of the Board responsible for designs of ships, and that he was not responsible to the Board for such designs, only to the First Lord'. For Forwood, this raised the whole question of the public accountability of the service. If, he told Hamilton, the Financial Secretary was not given the fullest information upon all propositions involving expenditure, he could not discharge his responsibility to his superior and to Parliament for the financial administration of the Service, and 'must inevitably become the mere speaking tube for permanent officials or for those who have no responsibility to Parliament'. What was wanted was that all propositions leading to expenditure, and arrangements affecting expenditure in shore departments, should pass through the hands of the Financial Secretary, who should be able to present his views in person to the First Lord, should the latter propose to disagree with his minute on any matter of consequence.33 Forwood's letter to Hamilton was followed up at the beginning of July by a seven-page printed minute on 'Naval Administration' setting out in detail his grounds of discontent with the existing state of affairs. From the question of parliamentary accountability through the Financial Secretary in particular, and the knowledge of departmental business which that required, Forwood moved quickly to the whole character of Admiralty administration as he had experienced it. The Admiralty should be regarded essentially as a business institution, and if this proposition be allowed, and we build up the administration on this basis, I feel sure we should place the Service in a much sounder position, and maintain it at a much less annual cost than at present. A man in business, whether he be a Merchant or Manufacturer, forms an estimate of the probable extent and character of the demand for the article in which he deals. His plant, his work, and the extent of the labour he employs are arranged accordingly. No such forethought is exercised at the Admiralty. I do not blame any one for its absence. The ever-changing nature of the responsible administration, and the exigencies of party considerations, specially in regard to financial matters, have induced this state of things. I submit, however, that a wholesome change may be made, and that there is no insuperable difficulty in the Board laying down a scheme which shall, in a large measure, insure a continuous policy, irrespective of the political proclivities of those for the time being at the head of affairs. 32 Forwood Papers, 19M62/25, Forwood to Hamilton (copy), 30 December 1886; 19M62/45, Forwood to W.L.Jackson [Treasury] (copy), 17January 1887. 33 Forwood Papers, 19M62/45, Forwood to Hamilton (copy), 7 May 1887.

Ruling the Waves, 1885- 99

31

To achieve this result we must set before ourselves some scheme based upon what is demanded from the service, and how this want is to be met. There can be no difficulty in determining the number and general character of the vessels required and best adapted for service on each of our naval stations, for the ordinary protective duties of the nation. From these high principles, Forwood then descended into the detail of his ideas for covering foreign stations with a smaller number of ships, of more mobile (cruiser) type, and of the system of precise budgeting by which he hoped to end the evil of departments putting in exaggerated estimates in the expectation that they would undergo arbitrary reductions, before finally returning to the central question of what distribution of responsibilities and powers within the Admiralty would best achieve his objects. The independent administrative sphere of the Admiralty departments should, he thought, be limited to 'the engagement, employment, and disciplinary control over the officers and men required to perform such work as the Board may determine should be undertaken', in which he included 'the direction of the movements of the ships for drill, strategic, and political purposes, and their personnel generally'. Elsewhere, not only the framing of estimates (the format of which he proposed to improve) but the expenditure of votes in detail must come under the scrutiny of the Parliamentary and Financial Secretary, whose job it would be to insist that estimates were to be regarded as 'the maximum allowance and not the authorised', in contradistinction to 'the traditional service view'. Such a division, he recognised, could not be absolute, and it was essential that all members of the board had the fullest information across the whole field of its business.34 Hamilton had supported Forwood in what he recognised to be a necessary work of administrative tightening-up, while at the same time attempting to ease the friction between his blunt and forceful junior and the admirals and their officials. At the end of 1886, he had written emolliently: T find from personal communication with members of the board that your knowledge and energy are every day more and more appreciated by your naval colleagues . . . In any conflict of opinion between yourself and the professional officers of the Admiralty you may rely on my support. . . Without your help I should be utterly incompetent to make reforms in many directions'.35 The management of his subordinate was, however, far from easy. 'Forwood was a hustler of the first order', he was to remember. 'His ideas and schemes, which were big and continuous, were generally sound, but he was very maladroit with his pen'.36 Though Forwood steadily and no doubt sincerely denied that any personal animosities influenced his relations with the admirals, by November 1887 the dislike of him felt by the Controller reached the point at which Hamilton, in face of the latter's threat 34

Ibid., printed minute on 'Naval Administration', dated 23 June 1887, corrected by hand and annotated 'Last revise 1 July'. 35 Forwood Papers, 19M62/25, Hamilton to Forwood, 31 December 1886. 36 Hamilton, Reminiscences, 1886-1906, p. 87.

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of resignation, felt obliged to intervene with a request for greater tact in the Financial Secretary's minutes.37 The reply was conciliatory, but unrepentant on the score of the surveillance that was required for the public service. Forwood explained his view of what was happening and what was at stake. The Controller, he told Hamilton, overworked and overanxious to monitor every detail, was too much under the influence of his departmental officials. Hitherto the Department has gone on its way practically unquestioned as long as it kept within its vote. How the money went was a secondary consideration. Gradually since you took office the reins have been tightening. Yourself, the Controller and myself have not accepted the mere ipse dixit of the Department - the reasons for everything have been asked. No official has been able to pose to the world as the personification of the Admiralty For once the Board has been an actuality not a mere figment. All this has not been, could not be done, and cannot be continued, without hurting the amour-propre of the hitherto autocrats of the establishment. They are not likely to surrender their former attitude of disguised power without an effort. Up to Graham's time they have ruled as I understand. Now they cannot rule, but they hope to influence and to lead. They have at hand the old traditional policy that the Service exists for the Service, and support the naval as against the civil control which so excites service feeling when called into action. The question of civil control of expenditure is more or less at stake. If the result of the past year's contest, with its welcome surplus, is to end in the success of the Department, Civil Control has gone for ever. To me it has not been in any sense a labour of love to question Departmental propositions, but it had to be done. I believe my action and your support have gone far to strengthen the Controller in the much good work he has done. The reformer of abuse must be prepared to suffer for his temerity. Such a gigantic affair as the Admiralty cannot be reached with gloved hands and gentle coaxings, but there is a medium, and that happy line I have tried to follow, not always successfully very possibly. . ..38 Hamilton again stood by his man, whose definition of his duties he accepted as 'just and unanswerable'.39 Forwood's pursuit of 'business exactitude' was necessary. His technical opinions were often correct, as in the case of his scepticism of the seaworthiness of the small gunboats he so much despised - the loss of the Wasp proved his point, as he told Hamilton, cheerfully admitting at the same time: 'The most unpleasant fellow in the world is he who after an accident says "Oh, I told you so and so"'.40 He could not, however, be prevented 37

1887.

Forwood Papers, 19M62/45, Hamilton to Forwood (copies), two letters of 22 November

38 Ibid., Forwood to Hamilton (copy), 24 November 1887. There is in the same place a more formal reply of the same date, in which Forwood cites, on the tendency of the professional departments to escape independent financial control, the first report of the Royal Commission on the Civil Establishments of the Different Offices of State at Home and Abroad (1887, Cmd 5226, xix, 1). 39 Ibid., Forwood to Hamilton (copy), 25 November 1887. 40 Forwood Papers, 19M62/40, Forwood to Hamilton (copy), 19 November 1887. This vindication of his views against those of the Controller's department probably contributed to the crisis of their relations.

Ruling the Waves, 1885-99

33

from provoking colleagues only too willing to resent his interference. A second crisis quickly arrived when, in April 1888, he delivered a speech to his constituents at Prescott, in which he dilated on the obstacles in the way of satisfying the public's desire to get value for money in naval administration, including 'vested ,rights and professional idiosyncracies', and attributed excessive expenditure on the refitting of the troopship Tyne to 'the traditions of the dockyards and service, and to the absence in the official heads of departments of a sufficient knowledge how to manage large bodies of workmen'.41 Not surprisingly, the Director of Dockyards, Elgar, considered this damaging to the reputation of his department, and his superior, the Controller, protested in a minute to the First Lord. 'The tendency of the statements', Admiral Graham complained, is hostile to Naval Administration and the evident intention is to exemplify the difficulty which Mr Forwood experiences in opposing wasteful expenditure and the obstruction he has met with in his endeavour to simplify and render intelligible the Navy estimates . . . the new form of estimates for which Mr Forwood claims so much credit in public was initiated by one officer of the Controller's Department and carried into effect chiefly by two other officers of the same department . . . I ask an equal right to publish in the press my version of the subjects he deals with.42

It is possible that Forwood had deliberately chosen to try to reinforce his position inside the Admiralty by appealing for the approbation of public opinion outside. Hamilton, however, could hardly allow the Third Naval Lord to carry the defence of his department before the same tribunal. He found that Graham, in any case, was now bent on resignation on the ground of 'incompatibility of temperament' with Forwood, and that Elgar threatened to go too. The latter departure, at least, he was determined to prevent, advising Forwood that it was in his interest that Elgar should remain, for a reputation of being difficult to work with would stop his further political advancement.43 Forwood, however, was more concerned for salutary frankness in official business than for prospects of future office, denied that his opponents had anything to complain of, and placed his office at Hamilton's disposal.44 Next day, 10 April 1888, Graham having already resigned, he defended his speech against the anger of the remaining Naval Lords in one of the more remarkable Admiralty Boards of the nineteenth century. According to his notes of the occasion,45 Hoskins and Hood objected to what they saw as his censure of colleagues, especially Graham, and Hotham 'complained of "sneering tone" in which I spoke of the Profession, and that he spoke for the service who would look to him to uphold their position'. While Hamilton endeavoured to mediate, 'The naval element', Forwood felt, 'evidently combined to be as objectionable as possible, probably 1

Forwood Papers, 19M62/45, cutting from Liverpool Daily Post [?5 April 1888]. Ibid., F. Elgar to Sir W. Graham (copy), 5 April 1888; minute by Graham (copy), same date. 3 Ibid., Hamilton to Forwood (copy), 7 April 1888. 4 Ibid., Forwood to Hamilton (copy), 9 April 1888. 5 Ibid. 2

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egged on by the U[nited] S[ervices] Club sentiment. To resign would give a practical victory to the service and for long to give it that sway that they so urgently seek'. Forwood stayed put: business and municipal politics in Liverpool had been a tough enough school to enable him to withstand the wellbred displeasure of a set of admirals. The victory he had won for civilian control was a qualified one and needed constant vigilance to sustain it. The problems with the professionals rumbled on. Forwood seems to have found Hoskins as difficult as he had Graham.46 He immediately returned to the subject of efficient financial controls with Hamilton, citing his minute of the previous June, and advocating the establishment of a Permanent Assistant Financial Secretary at the Admiralty,47 but the structural difficulties of the civil-naval relationship could not be made to disappear by any machinery. Still at the beginning of 1891 Forwood was complaining to his chief about 'the difficulty, nay almost impossibility of control on my part over expenditure, especially that proposed by the officers under the Controller'. The two of them, he suggested, were alone against the departmental officers and experts, who continued to circumvent the scrutiny of the Financial Secretary by going direct to the First Lord, and they needed to give each other better mutual support.48 Forwood never seems to have felt that he was receiving quite the degree of backing that he had a right to expect from Hamilton. Yet he stayed at his post, as Hamilton evidently hoped he would, when, admittedly late in the Parliament, his financial pertinacity brought him the offer of the Secretaryship of the Treasury.49 The impact that he had made on Admiralty administration was of fundamental importance and its benefits for the efficiency of the Navy were not lost even on those naval officers who had sometimes found expert civilian intrusion into their professional domain hard to accept, still less on those who had grasped the need for improvement from the outset. When the government went out in 1892, Hotham, who, as Fourth Naval Lord, had been Forwood's fierce critic in the clash of April 1888, paid tribute to his services in a ministry which, he felt, had done more to support the Navy than any since 1812.50 Other former Naval Lords were still more forthcoming in their praise. Admiral J.O. Hopkins wrote from the Canada station: Never in my experience has the Navy had such a lift as during the period of the last administration and the thanks of all us naval officers are due to Lord George and yourself for the intelligent interest you have evinced in even technical details and the absolute benefit that every department] has derived from your efforts to put matters on a proper business policy, and to ensure efficiency in all branches. Your untiring industry has been the admiration of all those who have witnessed it 46

Forwood Papers, 19M62/25, Hamilton to Forwood, 29 August 1891. Forwood Papers, 19M62/45, Forwood to Hamilton (copy), 3 May 1888. 48 Ibid., Forwood to Hamilton (copies), 6 and 11 January 1891. 49 Forwood Papers, 19M62/25, Hamilton to Forwood, 29 August 1891. Hamilton suggested that he was not likely to find the Chancellor, Goschen, easier to deal with than Admiral Hoskins. 50 Forwood Papers, 19M62/44, Hotham to Forwood, 3 September 1892. 47

Ruling the Waves, 1885-99

35

and when to that is added the improvements made in all directions under your advice (notably the bigger boilers) the debt of gratitude the service owes you is very great.51

J.A. Fisher was characteristically more downright and concise: 'We shall never see your like again here [the Admiralty]. That's my sincere opinion! And I firmly believe it is a universal opinion . . .'52 It was not, however, only for bigger and better boilers that the service was offering its gratitude to Forwood and Hamilton. If the first two years of their term at the Admiralty were dominated by Forwood's drive for efficiency, the main theme of their latter period was the expansion of the Navy to meet the ever-growing challenges to imperial and national security. By 1888, the growth of the French naval construction programme and the prospect of the emergence of a Franco-Russian combination in opposition to the Triple Alliance, with which Britain had become loosely associated in the Mediterranean agreements of the previous year, prompted fresh questioning of the adequacy of British naval strength. This was not at first a concern strongly felt by the Admiralty, to judge by the complacent testimony of Hamilton and of the First and Second Sea Lords to a House of Commons select committee on the Navy estimates in the summer of 1888.53 From May onwards, however, following a public meeting convened by the London Chamber of Commerce, a substantial agitation was underway in the press, fuelled from service sources, especially Admiral Hornby, and endorsed behind the scenes by the anxiety of the Queen, who thought Hamilton not up to his job. Beresford, having resigned from the Admiralty Board, was again prominent, making full use of his social connections. In 1886, he had taken his memorandum on organisation for war to Salisbury, when rebuffed by the Board. Now, staying at Wilton, the home of his cousin, Lady Pembroke, he seized the opportunity to press on the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a fellow guest, his scheme of seventy new ships at a cost of £20 million. Goschen, he remembered, dismissed it as 'preposterous', but AJ. Balfour was apparently to prove more sympathetic.54 Hamilton and Forwood were forced out of the vital but narrow groove of administrative improvement into the broad sphere of national defence policy. The way in which they and the ministry as a whole responded created a fundamental shift in the relationship between government and the Services which their successors would not be able to reverse. 51

Forwood Papers, 19M62/31, Hopkins to Forwood, 5 August [1892]. Forwood Papers, 19M62/44, Fisher to Forwood, 13 August 1892. 53 First report of Select Committee on Navy Estimates, 1888 Cmd 142, xii, 537-92 (Hoskins); fourth report, 1888, Cmd 328, xiii, 228-73 (Hood), 275-87 (Hamilton). 54 Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power, pp. 131-32; S.R.B. Smith, 'Public Opinion, the Navy and the City of London: The Drive for British Naval Expansion in the Late Nineteenth Century', War and Society, 9 (1991), pp. 36-42; Queen Victoria to Salisbury, 8 June 1888, in G.E. Buckle (ed.), The Letters of Queen Victoria, 3rd series (3 vols, London, 1930-32), i, p. 413; Lord Charles Beresford, The Memoirs of Admiral Lord Charles Beresford Written by Himself^ vols, London, 1914), ii, pp. 345-47, 359; Balfour Papers, Add. MS 49713, fos 6-12, 39-40, Beresford to Balfour, 15 May 1890, 4 Mav 1896. 52

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Government and the Armed Forces, 1856-1990

There were two essential facets to this response: a more or less complete acceptance of public and service demands and a new system of meeting them that greatly weakened immediate parliamentary control. Speaking on naval defences at Liverpool in December 1893, Forwood described thus the proceedings of the government of which he had been a member, once its initial task of completing the vessels building when it took office had been accomplished: The next step taken was to refer to naval officers holding the highest positions in her Majesty's service, requesting information as to what force of new vessels England ought to possess to enable her to hold the supremacy of the seas against any reasonable combination of foreign powers. He believed it was the first time within living memory that any Board of Admiralty had dared to submit such a question to the opinion of naval advisers. The reason for not adopting so commonsense a procedure was obvious. The strength of the navy had been regulated by the exigencies of the budget, and not by the wants of the Empire. Had the opinion of naval men been sought, and they had recommended a large extension of the fleet, the responsibility of any Government which refused the necessary means to provide this additional strength would have been so great that every previous administration had shirked the question. For the Salisbury administration, he took the credit not only of facing the need to place imperial ahead of budgetary considerations, but of setting up a longterm programme, by the Naval Defence Act of 1889, in such a way as to 'remove from any future Chancellor of the Exchequer the temptation to introduce a popular budget by delaying the completion of war vessels'.55 Hamilton's subsequent recollection and justification ran along similar lines. He says in his memoirs that the statement of the first Naval Lord, Hood, to the select committee of 1888, that he could not say that the Navy was adequate to protect British commerce and the empire unless told who were the enemies they had to be protected against, prompted the adoption of a standard of strength designed to enable Britain to cope with the fleets of France and Russia together. His talks with Salisbury and the chancellor, Goschen, brought unanimous agreement that the Navy should equal the next two largest navies in the world combined, and the necessary programme -which Hood offered to draw up in half-an-hour once told the powers in question - was approved by a small committee of Ministers. It was then, according to Hamilton, Salisbury who decided that the programme should be implemented, not by annually increasing the naval estimates until the required establishment had been reached, but by fixing the establishment at the start and funding the necessary construction partly by increasing the estimates and partly by borrowing, Goschen giving 'tentative approval'.56 The Chancellor might well have felt tentative, for the fixed pro55

Speech at Liverpool, 6 December 1893, report from unidentified newspaper in Forwood Papers, 19M62/40. 56 Hamilton, Reminiscences, 1886-1906, pp. 105-7. The basis of the programme was a memorandum by the Naval Lords of July 1888 (Smith, 'Public Opinion', p. 39), and the committee which finally

Ruling the Waves, 1885-99

37

gramme procedure effectively evaded the normal Treasury control of expenditure. As Hamilton put it to Forwood, in October 1888, the peculiarity of our programme is that it is fixed or regulated by the quantity of ships to be built, and the time in which they are to be finished. If time and quantity are to govern our shipbuilding policy we must fix it regardless of any rise or fall in prices within the time named. I will take every opportunity of educating Goschen up to the necessary point'.57

Goschen was not initially convinced that the sixty-five new vessels which the admirals were calling for were really necessary, and his education might have proved more difficult had the demand not arrived at a particularly propitious moment in British public finance. In the relatively peaceful later 1880s, substantial budget surpluses had been achieved, that of 1887-88, at £2,165,000, being the largest since 1873-74. As he approached his 1889 budget Goschen could count on a saving of nearly £1,500,000 in annual charges from his conversion in the previous year of the greater part of the national debt from an interest rate of 3 per cent to one (initially) of 2.75 per cent. In these circumstances, it was possible to meet the costs both of local taxation reform and of largely increased defence expenditure without undue strain, though death duties on estates of over £10,000 went up by one per cent. The immediate cost of the government's naval programme, however, was perhaps less significant than the mechanics of its implementation.58 The Naval Defence Bill introduced in March 1889 provided for the building over a five-year period of 10 battleships, forty-two cruisers and eighteen torpedo gunboats - the Naval Lords' proposal of the previous July plus five more cruisers - at a total cost of £21,500,000. The £11,500,000 required for the thirty-eight vessels that were to be built in the government dockyards, and an additional £4,750,000 to complete vessels already building, were to be supplied from the shipbuilding and armaments votes of the regular navy estimates, in five annual instalments of £3,250,000. Funds unspent at the end of each year, instead of going back to the Treasury, would be placed in a special accantinued

approved it comprised Salisbury, Goschen, W.H. Smith, Hamilton and E. Stanhope (Salisbury to Queen Victoria, 11 December 1888, in Letters of Queen Victoria, 3rd series, i, p. 456). For Salisbury's support for embodying it in statute, see his letter of 10 January 1889 to Balfour (Balfour Papers, Add. MS 49689, fos 92-94). On the adoption and interpretation of the two-power standard, which was not in itself a novelty, see A.L. Friedberg, The Weary Titan, Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895-1905 (Princeton, 1988), pp. 147-52. 57 Forwood Papers, 19M62/40, Hamilton to Forwood, 22 October 1888. 58 On which, seeJ.T. Sumida, In Defence of Naval Supremacy: Finance, Technology and British Naval Policy, 1889-1914 (Boston, 1989), pp. 13-16, whose exposition of the financial details is followed here. On the fiscal problems of providing for increased defence expenditure, see Friedberg, The Weary Titan, ch. 3. The Principal Clerk of the Finance Division of the Treasury, E.W. Hamilton, formally remonstrated against borrowing for extraordinary naval expenditure in time of peace, and saw the higher death duty as 'the thin end of the wedge to a graduated system of taxation'. D.W.R. Bahlman (ed.), The Diary of Sir Edward Walter Hamilton, 1885-1906 (Hull, 1993), pp. 91, 93 (24 February, 16 April 1889).

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count for use later in the programme, or, if the year's expenditure overran, the Treasury might advance money from the next year's allocation, found from the consolidated fund or from borrowing. The £10,000,000 for the thirty-two vessels to be contracted out to private yards were to be paid into the special account in seven equal annual instalments from the consolidated fund, the Treasury being authorised to advance from that fund or from borrowing the monies needed to ensure completion within the five-year term of the programme, so long as the advances were repaid by the end of the seven-year term of the special account. This remarkable example of financial ingenuity meant that, of an average annual increase in expenditure on warship construction of about £2,600,000 over the five years of the measure, less than a quarter fell upon the navy estimates, the rest (for the contract vessels) coming from other sources and amounting, when spread over the seven years of the special account, to very little more than the annual saving from Goschen's debt conversion. Both its machinery and the fact of the government's choosing to embody it in an Act of Parliament meant that, for the five-year term of the programme or the seven-year term of the account, the ordinary routines of Treasury and parliamentary control of expenditure were set aside, and the hands of the government's successors were tied. The system of the Act was the work just as much of the Treasury as of the Admiralty, if we are to believe Hamilton's vigorous defence when the implementation of the scheme led to some critical scrutiny by the Chancellor and by the First Lord of the Treasury, W.H. Smith, of expenditure overruns necessitated by adoption of the latest improvements in design and construction, with the consequent need for borrowing. In August 1891, he told Forwood of the line he had taken with Smith and Goschen. I pointed out that during our administration a better return had been obtained, tested by result, than in any previous Board, that we had incurred no excess estimates, and our estimates of shipbuilding had been adhered to. That their criticisms were mainly directed against the Naval Defence Act, and that it was not the administration of the act that was to be blamed, but the principle by which the Admiralty was forced to build so many ships at once. That the scheme was not ours, but theirs, and that we assented to an unbusinesslike arrangement, because the political and financial (parliamentary) objections to our course of procedure were strong. It was therefore not fair for them to put responsibilities entirely on our shoulders, which they as joint authors of the act shared equally with the Admiralty .... My contention on this point is unanswerable, and I hope has had some effect on them.59

The inference, supported by Hamilton's memoirs, is that, while the Admiralty had defined the extent of the need, it was the Treasury that had devised the mechanism to supply it, establishing a fixed programme and circumventing 59 Forwood Papers, 19M62/44, Hamilton to Forwood, 7 August 1891. For Forwood's resentment of Treasury criticism earlier in the year, see ibid., Goschen to Forwood, 17 April 1891, Forwood to Goschen, 18 April 1891.

70Ruling the Waves, 1885-

39

the ordinary procedure of annual budgeting in a way that Forwood and Hamilton had not recommended and found difficult to reconcile with the tight financial control that they had been trying to achieve. 'What you say as to the difficulty of checking the estimates of the Controllers officers', Hamilton told Forwood in the same letter, 'applies with especial force to the Naval Defence Act as we have not one but seventy ships to deal with'. The Act required amendment in 1893, to authorise additional expenditure and extend the time allowed to complete the programme, and the experience of working it proved difficult enough for its methods to be avoided in the future, but it came very close to meeting its targets, at an average expenditure overrun for each vessel of only 3 per cent.60 Whatever the friction between the Admiralty and the Treasury, the government as a whole had taken, as Forwood claimed, an unprecedented step in peacetime, in determining its naval expenditure by what the professionals thought needful in a given frame of national policy, and in protecting that expenditure from parliamentary and political vicissitudes. The efficient civilian control of expenditure and administration by the application of sound business methods which Forwood had pursued, and in some measure had achieved, at the Admiralty became the handmaiden of policy dictated by the requirements not of economy but of imperial and national security. Under Lord Salisbury's second administration, the decisive and irreversible shift had been made from policy driven by finance to policy driven by defence needs, and the relationship between government and its service chiefs was modified accordingly. It can also be argued that the Salisbury administration had begun, with the Naval Defence Act, the competition in naval armament programmes that was to continue up to the First World War.61 Hamilton had justified his programme to the House of Commons partly on the ground that foreign nations would not be able to match the level of building that Britain's resources allowed her to undertake, but that proposition already looked dubious by 1891, when the French initiated the Gervais programme and took the first steps of formal alliance with Russia. In any case, continued technological development meant that the maintenance of whatever predominance Britain might achieve required constant renewal of her fleet. The government was preparing a new construction programme before it left office in 1892, and its successor was unlikely to be able to stand still. There was bound to be pressure for economy in service estimates when the fourth Gladstone administration took office in August 1892, given the wellknown financial rigour of the Prime Minister and traditional Liberal suspicion of inflated service demands. That, according to Hamilton, was precisely what Goschen had anticipated and sought to frustrate by the Naval Defence Act.62 On the completion of the 1889 programme, the new government's hands were tied by its predecessor's legislation. How far it would renew the impetus of 60

Sumida, In Defence of Naval Supremacy, pp. 15-16. Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power, p. 162. G2 Hamilton, Reminiscences, 1886-1906, p. 205.

61

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construction as that programme reached its term was a different matter. The political direction of the Admiralty now rested with Earl Spencer. The son of an admiral and delighted to find himself in a post which his grandfather had held in Nelson's day, Spencer was one of the few grand Whigs still adhering to Gladstone and his policy of Irish Home Rule, though his grandeur was suffering rapid erosion as the agricultural depression ate into his rent rolls.63 Under him, as Parliamentary and Financial Secretary- a position of much enhanced importance when the First Lord was a peer and its holder therefore spoke for the Admiralty in the Commons - served Sir Ughtred Kay-Shuttleworth. Continuity was little threatened at the start of their regime. Spencer set a precedent by retaining the Naval Lords appointed by his predecessor, a step which tended to increase their influence. Kay-Shuttleworth, coached by Forwood, was inclined to follow in the latter's businesslike footsteps in many administrative and financial questions, where, he thought, Forwood had taken 'a strong and useful line'. 64 In 1892-93, they substantially followed the building programme drawn up by the previous government. As questions of future policy came into focus, with the preparation of the 1893 Navy estimates, it was clear to Kay-Shuttleworth that the legacy of the Salisbury administration left them small room for manoeuvre.65 Estimates, however, brought into action the heaviest of the ministry's heavy guns, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir William Vernon Harcourt. From an Admiralty point of view, Harcourt possessed the double demerit of being a stickler for economy and for effective Treasury control and of having a keen amateur interest in naval questions. The first holder of the Whewell Chair of International Law at Cambridge, he had written on the maritime rights of belligerents and neutrals, and he believed himself to be an informed critic of current arguments about British naval strength. Ominously, in November 1892, he was scrutinising lists of the comparative strengths of the British, French and Russian fleets, arguing about the relativities they demonstrated, and alleging that the admirals were deliberately distorting the comparison by including a large number of foreign vessels not yet launched: 'to me', he told Spencer, 'this is a favourite pursuit which I have followed for many years'. He readily convinced himself that the British Navy was, in armour-clads and first-class cruisers, a match 'not only for any two powers but for all the powers of the World', and Spencer had to dissuade him from circulating his own paper on the subject to the Cabinet.66 Wintering in Biarritz, the eighty-three-year-old Gladstone was 63 P. Gordon (ed.), The Red Earl: The Papers of the Fifth Earl Spencer, 1835-1910, 2 vols (Northampton, 1981-86), ii, pp. 20-22, 36-37. 64 BL, Althorp Papers, K457, Kay-Shuttleworth to Spencer, 16 September 1892. 65 Ibid., Kay-Shuttleworth to Spencer, 29 October 1892. 66 Althorp Papers, K19, Harcourt to Spencer, 29 November and 16 December 1892; Bodleian Library, Harcourt Papers, box 46, fo. 35, Spencer to Harcourt, 6 December 1892, partly printed in A.G. Gardiner, The Life of Sir William Harcourt, 2 vols (London, 1923), ii, pp. 201-2; Spencer to Kimberley, 5 December 1892, to Harcourt, 9 December 1892, and Harcourt to Spencer, 19 December 1892, in Gordon, Red Earl, ii, nos 635-36, 639.

Ruling the Waves, 1885-99

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prompt to reinforce the economical instincts of his Chancellor, writing on New Year's Day 1893 of the 'horror' with which he had reflected on 'the menacing prospects of the estimates' (Army and Navy) and suggesting to Harcourt that both Spencer and Campbell-Bannerman (at the War Office) 'might not dislike being supported against professional oppressors'. 'Unfortunately', Harcourt complained in return, 'new ministers in these days think only of gaining credit in their departments by large expenditures', an observation he repeated in conveying Gladstone's feelings to Spencer, adding that he had told Gladstone that he doubted whether he and the heads of the service departments 'had the smallest influence or control on the professional oppressors who were absolute masters of the situation'.67 By now enjoying himself, Harcourt wrangled with the Admiralty over the calculation of French and British naval strength, gleefully telling the Foreign Secretary, Rosebery, in February that he had crossexamined at the Admiralty 'the whole Board in their cocked hats' to vindicate his conviction of overwhelming British superiority: 'I have', he wrote, only one scruple in sending you this paper, and that is lest you should draw the natural inference that the wisest and most prudent thing you could possibly do is to go to war at once when you can easily destroy all the navies in existence'.68 Spencer kept his temper in face of Harcourt's mixture of geniality and aggression. The navy estimates for 1893-94 were held at an unexceptionable figure, but Harcourt had all the same to raise the income tax by a penny to cope with a looming deficit of £1,500,000, and the struggle over service expenditure was only temporarily suspended. Tension with France over her advance in Siam, the news that a Russian squadron was to cement Franco-Russian friendship by visiting Toulon, and the concern prompted by the ramming of one British battleship, the Victoria, by another, the Camperdoiun, in the Mediterranean, helped in the summer and autumn of 1893 to create a fresh 'scare' over the adequacy of British naval power, in which publicists like Stead and papers including The Times whipped up apprehension, in part by ignoring the drawbacks, lack of homogeneity especially, which the French and Russian fleets would experience in any encounter with the British.69 The issue was recognised by the Opposition as a suitable one on which to challenge a government with a small and insecure majority. Hamilton had struck an attitude of friendly cooperation with his opposite numbers, telling Kay-Shuttleworth, for example, the line he proposed to take on the estimates, but Balfour, the Conservative leader in the Commons, and Joseph Chamberlain persuaded him to put down in December 1893 a motion effectively censuring the ministry's naval policy.70 A City of London 67 Harcourt Papers, box 13, fos 1-2, 3-4, Gladstone to Harcourt, 1 January 1893, Harcourt to Gladstone (copy), 4 January 1893; Althorp Papers, K19, Harcourt to Spencer, 4 January 1893, partly printed in Gardiner, The Life of Sir William Harcourt, ii, p. 227. 68 Harcourt Papers, box 56, fos 40-41, Harcourt to Rosebery (copy), 18 February 1893; Gardiner, The Life of Sir William Harcourt, ii, pp. 229-30. 69 For the naval scare of 1893, see Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power, ch. 10. 70 Althorp Papers, K458, Kay-Shuttleworth to Spencer, 2, 7 and 14 March, 21 June and 14 November 1893; Hamilton, Reminiscences, 1886-1906, p. 219.

42

Govern men t and the A rmed Forces, 1856-1990

meeting at the Mansion House on the state of naval defences reinforced the pressure. It was now for Spencer and Kay-Shuttleworth to formulate the Admiralty's response to the agitation, and therefore to decide whether they would follow their predecessors in taking the demands of their professional advisers as their starting-point. The difficulties involved in either sifting and criticising those demands or taking the responsibility of disregarding them at a time of supposed national danger were no less than they had been in 1888-89. On the level of administrative and financial control, Kay-Shuttleworth was finding as much cause as Forwood had done to worry that the advice and action of the Naval Lords did not always receive the kind of close civilian scrutiny that the public interest required. In April 1893, he expressed to Spencer his lack of faith in the ability of the Permanent Secretary at the Admiralty, MacGregor, to impose a civilian check on the sailors. It appears to me that the Secretary ought to bring in (as in other departments) the civil element, in his advice, action, and judgement, and to be ever watchful that the professional views of the Naval Members of the Board undergo the criticisms and (if need be) the modifications and corrections of the civil members, and especially of the First Lord. Also that both the Parliamentary and the financial aspect of no question is overlooked . . . we should secure a strong able man with the ideas of an experienced civil servant, who will not be in the pocket of the Sea Lords, and yet will know how to show urbanity and tact in his dealings with them.71

In the sphere of policy, where responsibility fell more directly on the shoulders of the First Lord and his Parliamentary and Financial Secretary, it was just as hard to gainsay professional expertise. The admirals began to make themselves felt at least as early as July, when the board provisionally decided to build five new battleships and to increase the new construction vote by a million pounds. The Controller, Fisher, following the wishes of the Second Naval Lord, Sir Frederick Richards, pressed Kay-Shuttleworth to put the current and prospective building programmes on a new footing by starting nearly fifty more of the new type of torpedo-boat destroyer that many experts thought essential to deal with the menace of the swarms of torpedo vessels thought to be lurking on the French side of the Channel.72 As the preparation of the 1894-95 estimates began in earnest in October, however, the Naval Lords were not necessarily intent on the scale of expansion for which popular agitation might seem to have given them a wind. At the beginning of the year, the government had concurred in the view of Sir Anthony Hoskins (and of Lord George Hamilton) that it was manning requirements that were for the time being most crucial to naval effectiveness. Kay-Shuttleworth, while recommending a comprehensive report on the comparative strength of the British, French and Russian forces, 71

Althorp Papers, K458, Kay-Shuttleworth to Spencer, 11-12 April 1893. Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power, p. 190; Althorp Papers, K458, Kay-Shuttleworth to Spencer, 28 July 1893, printed in Gordon, The Red Earl, ii, no. 646. 72

Ruling the Waves, 1885- 99

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now remarked that he thought the problem of manning made Richards 'disagree with some of the extravagant proposals for extensive ship building, in papers, parliament, etc'.73 When Hamilton prepared to question the government's naval policy, in November, Kay-Shuttleworth 'told him that our opinion (shared by our Admirals) is that his action is embarrassing instead of helping us', and received the retort that 'the Admirals are not good judges ofthat'. 74 Within days, however, Kay-Shuttleworth was looking over the precedent of 1884 for an early declaration of intent in face of public clamour, considering with the Controller how a new warship programme with construction charges equalised over a four- or five-year term might be devised, and asking Spencer what he would provisionally be prepared to approve. If the admirals had not been making much steam in October, now, in mid November, Fisher was pressing for an early board meeting and telling Kay-Shuttleworth that the Naval Lords were likely to ask for £22,000,000 worth of new building over four years. In addition, Kay-Shuttleworth warned Spencer that the 1894-95 estimates were likely to exceed those of 1893-94 by £2,500,000.75 With the whole burden of defending the government's naval policy in the Commons on his shoulders, he was now very anxious about his ability to reply effectively to the parliamentary challenges he could see immediately ahead, and began to urge strongly on Spencer the need to settle Admiralty policy and to obtain at least general Cabinet approval for higher estimates and a large building programme before any storm broke. 'If, on a sudden debate', he wrote on 20 November, we of the Admiralty were found tongue-tied (for want of authority to say that the Govt had such and such intentions) and Harcourt or W G[ladstone] himself were to commit us to any optimist views, the Admiralty coach would be upset - possibly the Govt coach also . . . . Feeling that, till these preliminaries are settled with the Cabinet and Ch. of Exchequer we are sitting on a Parliamentary volcano, I make no apology for suggesting that they be pushed on promptly and persistently.76

Now they were. On 21 November, the new First Naval Lord and the Controller, Richards and Fisher, discussed with the Director of Naval Intelligence and the Director of Naval Construction their 'desirable' and 'minimum' five-year programmes to maintain British strength relative to French and Russian, the first providing for ten first-class battleships and forty-two cruisers, the second for only seven battleships and thirty cruisers, with seventy-four destroyers and thirty torpedo boats added in each case. Two days later, the 'minimum' programme was considered by the Admiralty Board, with the Directors of Naval Intelligence and Naval Construction, the total cost over five years being estimated 73

Althorp Papers, K458, Kay-Shuttleworth to Spencer, 27 January and 11 October 1893. Ibid., Kay-Shuttleworth to Spencer, 14 November 1893. 75 Ibid., Kay-Shuttleworth to Spencer, 16 and 18 November 1893; latter printed in Gordon, The Red Earl, ii, no. 654. 76 Althorp Papers, K458, Kay-Shuttleworth to Spencer, 20 November 1893; and see, in similar vein, same to same, 1 December 1893. 74

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at about £31,000,000.77 It was now for Spencer to see at what point of expenditure the views of the Naval Lords and the requirements of government finance could be reconciled. Kay-Shuttleworth's need to mount a plausible parliamentary defence against any critical motion necessarily pushed him into the arms of the admirals, since it was essential to be able to assert that the government's plans would satisfy the requirements of its professional advisers. In that sense, he and Spencer were in a similar position to that occupied by Forwood and Hamilton in 1888, but, where their predecessors had found allies in the Prime Minister and Chancellor, they found obstacles in Gladstone and Harcourt. Having warned Spencer off 'new programmes' in May, the Chancellor responded to the scare later in the year by thundering back into the argument about relative naval strengths, as before taking figures of capital ships to demonstrate overwhelming British superiority, and pressing Spencer to oblige the Naval Lords to answer his case.78 Always ready to attribute disagreement with his views to insincerity, and exasperated by the unfolding size of the Admiralty's demands, Harcourt persistently accused the admirals of lending themselves to scare-mongering and promoting excessive expenditure by withholding the true facts of naval strengths, which he threatened to proclaim independently of the Admiralty, thus provoking even from Spencer's resolute mildness a hint of resignation.79 The threat none the less was executed. When Hamilton's motion censuring the government's naval policy came on, on 19 December 1893, Harcourt, reviewing the naval situation in Europe, denied that the facts justified public disquiet, and went so far as to cite 'the opinion of the responsible professional advisers' of the Admiralty as authority for his contention that the existing state of the British navy was satisfactory.80 To Rosebery next day, Spencer endorsed the line Harcourt had taken, writing: 'I cannot regret his outburst as to the present strength of our battleships. Surely it is very wrong to show a weak front when we are really strong'.81 But he had grasped that 'his Admirals might kick at

77 Harcourt Papers, box 183, fos 139-40, 136-8, 'Memorandum of Meeting to Discuss Programme of New Construction, April 1, 1894, to April 1, 1899' (21 November 1893), and note of conference of 23 November 1893, both printed as appendices to Spencer's memorandum on the Navy estimates for 1894-95. The admirals were vising a formula devised by the Naval Intelligence Department in 1892, which calculated Britain's naval needs as the strength required to match France and Russia plus the additional ships necessitated by her much more extensive maritime interests (Ranft, 'Protection', pp. 9-10). 78 Althorp Papers, K19, Harcourt to Spencer, 8 May 1893; Harcourt to Spencer, 23 September 1893, in Gardiner, The Life of Sir William Harcourt, ii, p. 246. 79 Althorp Papers, K19, Harcourt to Spencer, 9 December 1893, partly printed in Gardiner, The Life of Sir William Harcourt, ii, p. 249 and Gordon, The Red Earl, ii, no. 655; Harcourt Papers, box 46, fos 99-102, Spencer to Harcourt, 10 December 1893, printed in Gordon, The Red Earl, ii, no. 656. 80 Parliamentary Debates, 4th series, 19, cols 1877-78. 81 Spencer to Rosebery, 20 December 1893, in Gordon, The Red Earl, ii, no. 659.

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being so prominently quoted',82 and can hardly have been surprised to receive on the same day a memorandum from the four Naval Lords, Richards, Kerr, Fisher and Noel, angrily referring to Harcourt's presence at a meeting in the First Lord's room on 22 November to discuss the relative strengths of the British, French and Russian fleets, at which Richards, 'in clear and unmistakeable terms', had expressed the admirals' conviction that even if, as they urged, at least seven first-class battleships were laid down in 1894, British battleship strength would be inadequate by 1896-97. 'The Right Honorable gentleman', they declared, 'talks of experts! Well who are the experts if they are not the professional sailors who advise one Government and another?'.83 It is not clear whether the Naval Lords threatened resignation, as Fisher later stated but Spencer denied.84 Harcourt slid out of the embarrassment by denying that he had ever heard any suggestion of laying down seven battleships in 1894 and insisting that his remarks had touched only the existing relative strength of the Navy in first-class battleships, but the personal statement, approved by the Admiralty, which he was obliged to make constituted a public check, though it barely mollified Fisher, who was, Kay-Shuttleworth reported to Spencer, 'very sore . . . and disposed to accept H's explanation only out of feeling for you.85 The soreness was perhaps natural, but glee might have been more appropriate, for in citing publicly the views of the Naval Lords, Harcourt had enhanced the pressure they could exert, by giving them the occasion to level against the government the threat that they would equally publicly dissent if its policy fell too far short of their demands. The Chancellor was never more than momentarily abashed. He took next the tack of criticising the way in which naval policy was being formulated, as he saw it, in excessive concealment from the Cabinet's view and control. In preparing the Naval Defence Act programme, he grumbled to Spencer, the last government had not 'come forward with a sudden panic stricken plan without consideration or information as to the facts on which it was founded. The First Lord of the Admiralty did not settle the plan in camera with the Admirals and present it like a pistol with a demand for our money or our lives'. It had been 82

3.

Lewis Harcourt's journal, 19 December 1893, quoted in Gordon, The Red Earl, ii, no. 658, n.

83 Althorp Papers, K19, memorandum for Spencer, 20 December 1893, printed in Gordon, The Red Earl, ii, no. 658. 84 See Gordon, The Red Earl, ii, pp. 29-30; Fisher to Austen Chamberlain, 22 December 1893, in A.J. Marder (ed.), Fear God and Dread Nought: The Correspondence of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher of Kilverstone (3 vols, London, 1952-59), i, pp. 119-20; Fisher, Records (London, 1919), p. 51. That the government had been coerced by a threat of resignation was the belief of Beresford, who contended that the responsibility of Ministers could be properly enforced only if Parliament and the public knew what advice the professional experts were giving them. Beresford, Memoirs, ii, pp. 355-56, 389-90; Balfour Papers, Add. MS 49713, fos 49-52, Beresford to Balfour, 25 December 1899. 85 Althorp Papers, K19, Harcourt to Spencer, three letters of 20 December 1893; Harcourt Papers, box 46, fos 117-19, Spencer to Harcourt and note by L.V. Harcourt, 21 December 1893; Althorp Papers, K458, Kay-Shuttleworth to Spencer, 23 December 1893.

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discussed and debated by a Cabinet committee in consultation with the professional experts, 'who were aware that they were dealing at every point, not with a single Minister, but with the Cabinet'. By contrast, the present Cabinet had been kept in the dark about the large increases in expenditure which were to be proposed and had had no opportunity of examining them until the First Lord (as Harcourt understood it) had committed himself to the greater part of them.86 Harcourt had some ground for feeling that effective civilian control of Service expenditure, at a moment of public excitement, could hardly be achieved unless the united force of aroused public opinion, Opposition pressure and unanimous professional advice was met at the point of policy formulation by the government as a whole, rather than by a single pair of Ministers bound to some degree to represent the needs of their department. It is not surprising, however, that Spencer responded with a defence of the initiatory role of the responsible Minister and of his own conduct of business. At Gladstone's request, he was able to retort, he had sought to concert plans with Harcourt, but their interview had been wrecked by the latter's unwillingness to listen to what was said to him. As Spencer explained, Harcourt's criticisms were the less deserved in that he had been struggling with the admirals behind the scenes to get them to accept their 'minimum' rather than their 'desirable' programme, and even, though without success, to obtain their assent to reductions in the former.87 Harcourt's son had already noted his reporting in mid December that he was 'at loggerheads with his Board of Admirals, whose demands for new ships etc. are far in excess of what he is prepared to make',88 and only reluctantly did he fall in with something close to the minimum programme. The result of his negotiations was embodied in the memorandum on the estimates for 1894-95 which came before the Cabinet at the beginning of January 1894. From detailed tables of ships, Spencer argued that, on current building programmes, the decided margin of superiority enjoyed by Britain over France and Russia combined would be eliminated in respect of ironclads in European waters by 1895-96. The British advantage in modern battleships in particular would be lost. To maintain parity in battleships, it was necessary to lay down at least seven by 1897, as envisaged by the minimum programme. In cruisers, however, Spencer rejected the Naval Lords' recommendation to build a minimum of thirty or a maximum of forty-two in five years, considering twenty sufficient, at a saving of £4,000,000 or £8,000,000 respectively. The menace of French torpedo boats was to be met by building forty more destroyers, and thirty British torpedo boats were requested. Spencer calculated that his programme, extending over five years, would cost £18,763,000, compared to £22,755,000 for the Naval Lords' minimum programme as defined in his paper. Adding in ships in progress, the 86

87

Althorp Papers, K19, Harcourt to Spencer, 28 December 1893.

Harcourt Papers, box 46, fos 138-45, Spencer to Harcourt, 28 December 1893. See, on Spencer's negotiation with the admirals, Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power, pp. 192-93, 201. 88 Gordon, The Red Earl, ii, p. 29, citing Lewis Harcourt's journal for 13 December 1893.

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total for new construction would be £22,325,000, implying over a five-year period that new construction expenditure would rise by an annual average of £1,934,000 in the Navy estimates and of £135,000 when the contract ships of the Naval Defence Act were brought into the calculation. Armaments added £4,790,000. Spencer rejected the Goschen technique of spreading the expenditure over a longer period than the building, which the Liberal Party had denounced, and proposed not to make public the number of ships to be built in the period of the programme, but to announce the first year's proposals and state the average annual sum to be spent on new construction for the succeeding years. Essential expenditure on manning and docks would bring the probable increase in the 1894-95 estimates compared with those of 1893-94 to £3,000,000.89 Spencer submitted his programme with some trepidation to a cabinet where both the Prime Minister and the Chancellor were alarmed by its size, but he had less of a struggle than might have been expected. The drama which culminated in Gladstone's resignation and withdrawal from public life on 1 March 1894, ostensibly because of failing powers, but really because of his inability to accept Navy estimates which ran against the principles on which his whole political career had been based, merely points up the fact that the Prime Minister eventually found himself almost alone among colleagues who saw no practical possibility of resisting the demand for largely increased naval armaments, especially since rejection of his proposals would probably have entailed Spencer's resignation, along with that of his Admiralty Board, with the probable collapse of the government and a very unfavourable prospect for the Liberals in an ensuing general election. For Gladstone, the problem was not so much expenditure as that a constitutional impropriety was leading towards an intensification of the arms race and a European catastrophe. It was, he said, 'the first time that Admirals have dictated terms to the Executive Government of the day': the 'alarming aggression of the professionals' was inducing 'an act of militarism which will be found to involve a policy, and which excuses thus the militarism of Germany, France or Russia'. He was vulnerable, however, on the score of his own role in the increase of estimates to meet the invasion scare of 1859-60, and found the Chancellor seeking to demonstrate that the addition to the Service votes in the early 1860s was about double what was now proposed.90 Already on 26 December, Kay-Shuttleworth had reported of Harcourt: 'He is in excellent humour (bar an occasional rap at us) and told me how he should provide the money etc. . . . I gather that he has explained his 89 Harcourt Papers, box 183, fos 127-43, confidential printed memorandum, 'Navy Estimates, 1894-95'. While the memorandum is dated 13 December 1893, some of the appendices were printed only on 30 December. 90 Gladstone's remarks on the admirals in E.W. Hamilton's Diary, 1885-1906, p. 237 (17 February 1894; and see in general on this crisis the entries for January-March); memorandum of 20 January 1894 in H.C.G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1875-1898 (Oxford, 1995), p. 351; Gardiner, The Life of Sir William Harcourt, ii, pp. 252-53; J. Morley, The Life of William Eiuart Gladstone, 3 vols (London, 1903), iii, p. 508 and memorandum by Gladstone, p. 563; Harcourt Papers, box 14, fos 1-2, Harcourt to Gladstone (copy), 10 Januar y 1894.

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intentions to Mr G. and will now go in for our plan quite cheerfully'.91 Though his interview with Harcourt next day hardly seemed to Spencer to bear out that impression, Harcourt's son noted after it that his father felt 'the impossibility of resisting Spencer'.92 By earlyjanuary, the Chancellor's line with Gladstone was that 'he was as strongly opposed to Spencer's proposals as Gladstone himself, but that unfortunately Spencer, by his weakness, had irrevocably committed himself to his admirals, and as no other Board of Admiralty or First Lord could be got, we had to make the best of a bad job'.93 'The real mischief, Harcourt told Campbell-Bannerman, 'is the powerlessness of governments, until the country smarting under an intolerable load of taxation takes the matter out of their hands and insists that a bit should be put in the mouths of the generals and admirals. We are actually in the condition of a householder whose weekly bills are at the mercy of a French chef, over whom he has no control'.94 Another consideration may have reinforced Harcourt's conviction of the futility of resistance. At Sandringham in December he had, he told Spencer, found the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York 'very well satisfied with the superiority of our present position'; but he had soon received abrupt notification that their still formidable mother 'trusts that she will before long be assured by you that some bold measures are immediately forthcoming'.95 Gladstone's hold on the premiership was visibly tenuous, and Harcourt, a prime candidate to take over from him, had reason not to alienate the woman who would send for his successor. Whatever his motives, Harcourt's disinclination to die in a Treasury last ditch removed any chance of success for the kind and degree of civilian and economical control over the Admiralty that he and Gladstone had seemed determined to exert. It was not they but Spencer who in the end persuaded the naval lords to accept something a little below their minimum, thus helping the Cabinet, under the new Prime Minister, Rosebery, to approve his programme on 8 March, with an option to build more battleships than the seven envisaged, if an acceleration of French or Russian construction justified it. Liberal financial purism forbade Harcourt to meet his chefs bill as Goschen had done, by mortgaging future finances. Indeed he revoked the procedure of the Naval Defence Act by paying off the annual charges due under that measure from the new sinking fund. To meet the highest ever peacetime estimates and a prospective deficit of £4,624,000, he relied on increased duties on beer and spirits, a penny on the income tax, and a revision of the death duties which 91

Althorp Papers, K458, Kay-Shuttleworth to Spencer, 26 December 1893. Gordon, The Red Earl, ii, p. 30. 93 L.V. Harcourt's journal, 6 January 1894, in Gardiner, The Life of Sir William Harcourt, ii, p. 253. 94 Ibid., p. 252. 95 Althorp Papers, K19, Harcourt to Spencer, 12 December 1893; Ponsonby to Harcourt, 29 December 1893, in Gardiner, The Life of Sir William Harcourt, ii, p. 251; Victoria had pressed her views on her acquiescent Foreign Secretary, Rosebery, in November (Marquess of Crewe, Lord Rosebeiy, 2 vols, London, 1931, ii, pp. 436-37) and obliged her Prime Minister to read them to the Cabinet on 14 December (Matthew, Gladstone,^. 348-49). 92

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taxed realty and personalty alike on a graduated scale.96 All the same, the pressure of naval needs continued to strain the seams of conventional finance and to impose ways of circumventing the estimates. To fund the building or improvement of naval shore facilities, Spencer proposed a separate naval works account financed from the consolidated fund or, if necessary, through borrowing. The Naval Works Act of 1895 provided as a first instalment for a million pounds to be spent in 1895-96 above the sum allocated under the Navy estimates, the Treasury being authorised to borrow all or part in terminable annuities, the principal and interest of which were to be repaid from the Navy estimates within thirty years.97 At the same time, Harcourt found a further £2,000,000 for the estimates in his 1895 budget, grumbling about 'preposterous demands', and having reluctantly to sacrifice his financial integrity by pledging part of the following year's supplementary estimates. Perhaps in answer to his objections to the Naval Lords' levelling their force against a single Minister rather than the Cabinet as a whole, there was now a cabinet committee on naval expenditure, but it was less a support than a safety valve for the Chancellor: his colleagues 'allowed him to blow off steam ad libitum , but gave Spencer what he needed to keep his admirals quiet.98 Spencer and Kay-Shuttleworth were members of a government weaker than that in which their predecessors had served and perhaps more suspect on the score of its commitment to national defence. They consequently had somewhat less power of resistance to professional and public opinion, despite the initial anxiety of Gladstone and Harcourt to stiffen their backbone, than had been at the disposal of Hamilton and Forwood, but the course of affairs in 1893-94 was not markedly different from that of 1888-89. Both cases showed the tendency of a more threatening international situation and a rapid development of naval technology to force upon government a response that inevitably shifted its relationship with its senior commanders, since both it and they quickly grasped that only measures seen to satisfy the essential requirements of the professional advisers could put the ministry of the day right with a public opinion more sedulously agitated than ever before. The reign of prudent finance around which Gladstone's memories clustered could not survive the era of imperialistic competition. Disraeli's truism that 'expenditure depends on policy' had been uttered in an era when the relative absence of international dangers and democratic pressures had made it possible largely to ignore or even to reverse it.99 In the 1880s and 1890s it came into its own. It would be too much to say that, with the Naval Defence Act and the Spencer programme, finance and policy, more especially defence policy, entered into 96

On Harcourt's 1894 budget, see especially D. Brooks (ed.), The Destruction of Lord Rosebery: From the Diary of Sir Edward Waltet Hamilton, 1894-1895 (London, 1986), pp. 16-36. 97 Sumida, In Defence of Naval Supremacy, p. 17. 98 Brooks, The Destruction of Lord Rosebery, pp. 65, 204-5 (Edward Hamilton's diary, 11 January 1895); cf. Bahlman's edition, p. 285, for a slightly different transcript. 99 Parliamentary Debates, 3rd series, 155, col. 172, 21 July 1859.

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an irreconcilable conflict which resulted in the latter riding roughshod over all the canons of the former. The British economy was still one of the strongest in the world and the British government's means of tapping its citizens' wealth were among the most effective in the world. Goschen and Harcourt financed the Naval Defence Act and the Spencer programme with relative ease, and the buoyant revenue of the mid 1890s allowed the Unionist administration which took office in the middle of 1895 to add five battleships to the Spencer programme and to pass a larger Naval Works Act without recourse to borrowing provisions, in addition to which building bottlenecks resulted in a series of unexpended balances for warship construction.100 If the pressure of naval expenditure soon became more severe, Britain was still able before the First World War to meet the cost of both dreadnoughts and old-age pensions. Yet the recourse to novel financial expedients of the Naval Defence and Naval Works Acts showed plainly enough the way in which the primacy of defence policy needs was eroding the rule of financial orthodoxy even in peacetime. Harcourt might declare to the Assistant Financial Secretary at the Treasury, Edward Hamilton, in November 1894, that 'nothing would induce him to impose additional taxation again to meet those [the Admiralty's] demands. He thinks (& rightly so) that we have come to the end of our taxation tether in times of peace'.101 In practice, however, he recognised that, one way or another, what the professional advisers certified to be necessary would have to be found. Even in the Liberal Party, the defence of public parsimony was unable to withstand the defence of the realm: the Liberal Imperialist Haldane considered in July 1895 that one of the major achievements of the brief Rosebery administration was that a strong Navy had become 'an accepted item in the Radical programme'.102 Lord Randolph Churchill complained to Goschen in 1888 that 'the civilian management of the Services has completely broken down and has landed us in heavy expenditure without giving us any approach to efficiency or preparedness'. For the civilian management which had failed, he desired to substitute a direct parliamentary control.103 Within the succeeding decade, in the case of the Admiralty, civilian management, not least through Forwood's efforts, had repaired some of its deficiencies, but parliamentary and governmental control had receded rather than advanced in face of the weight which specialist opinion could bring to bear in an era of growing international competition, technological change and public concern. When Hicks Beach warned the Cabinet in October 1901 that continuing growth in naval expenditure would lead to 'financial ruin', he met from the First Lord, Selborne, the assertion that the 100

Sumida, In Defence of N aval Supremacy, pp. 17-18. Hamilton's diary, 13 November 1894, in Brooks, The Destruction of Lord Rosebery, p. 189, Bahlman, Hamilton Diary, 1885-1906, p. 281. 102 Hamilton's diary, 1 July 1895, in Brooks, The Destruction of Lord Rosebery, p. 264. 103 Churchill to Goschen, 4 March 1888, in A.D. Elliot, The Life of George Joachim Goschen, First Viscount Goschen, 1831-1907, 2 vols (London, 1911), ii, pp. 149-50. 101

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country's expenditure on maintaining its credit and its navy stood on 'a different plane' to any other expenditure.104 Once the centrality to the national interest of a Navy built to a two-power standard became a bipartisan assumption, the First Lord easily turned into a spokesman of the admirals and the Admiralty into a near-independent power within the government as a whole. The Naval Lords were learning to exert an influence that they had not possessed in the mid Victorian era. Sir Frederick Richards, the First Naval Lord who in 1895, with Goschen as First Lord in support, smartly checked Salisbury's plans to hazard (as he saw it) the Mediterranean fleet in order to put pressure on the Sultan for Armenian reforms, was no doubt unusual in the extent of his willingness and ability to intervene forcibly in political decisionmaking,105 but the state of the Navy as well as its employment as an instrument of policy was by this time a sensitive political question, and it did not take Fisher's sharp political sensibilities to grasp the advantages which that fact gave the admirals in dealing with governments beset by a watchful press and public. Once under way, the race of naval armaments which the Naval Defence Act had arguably initiated almost guaranteed them a progressive expansion of establishments. It is not surprising that they soon came to see it as an inevitable natural phenomenon. Advising the Foreign Office on the Russian circular to the powers which preceded the first Hague peace conference, in May 1899, the Admiralty wrote: As regards the proposals to limit the naval forces their Lordships are of opinion that it will be found to be quite impracticable to come to any agreement as to the meaning of the term 'effectifs actuels , or to ensure that the terms of any agreement arrived at would be carried out. . . With reference to the proposal to restrict improvements in weapons . . . any such restriction would favour the interests of savage nations and be against those of the more highly civilised. It would be a retrograde step . . . It is further observed that the proposal to limit the use of new explosives is believed to be impracticable unless the several Powers are prepared to make known to the Conference the nature and composition of those which they now use and which are at present secret. Their Lordships believe that none of the Great Powers would be prepared to do this. As to the various proposals to regulate the conduct of war . . . their Lordships are averse to binding this country in this manner, as such an arrangement would be almost certain to lead to mutual recrimination.106

Their lordships' political masters were not inclined to dissent from this fatalistic outlook on international relations. In little more than a decade, a country unready for war at sea and unwilling to pay for it had turned into one where war was a 104

Sumida, In Defence of Naval Supremacy, p. 23. See Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power, pp. 242-45, 266-68. 106 Admiralty to Foreign Office, 16 May 1899, in G.P. Gooch and H. Temperley (eds), British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898-1914, 11 vols (London, 1926-38), i, no. 274. 105

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constant preoccupation and the cost of preparing for it a first charge on national income. The hand of the Navy's chiefs could not fail to be strengthened. 'A tendency to increase expenditure', Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman noted in February 1904, 'was more likely to meet with approval in respect of the Navy than in respect of almost any other department of the public service'.107 The hand, however, could not be overplayed. In the long run, successful pressure on government to meet the Navy's needs depended on a certain sensitivity among the admirals to the government's. The summit of influence would be reached by a Naval Lord who could promise increased efficiency and economy at the same time: that was to be Fisher's secret.

107

Quoted in Williams, Defending the Empire, p. 61.

3

Adversarial Attitudes: Servicemen, Politicians and Strategic Policy in Edwardian England, 1899-1914 John Gooch

As the nineteenth century drew to a close, two events symbolised the success of the defence policies of late Victorian Britain. At the naval review in honour of the Queen's Silver Jubilee in 1897, the fleet was drawn up in lines thirty-two miles long, the visible manifestation of the work of a succession of Boards of Admiralty which, since 1889, had been overseeing the first modern British defence programme. One year later, General Kitchener's victory at Omdurman set him alongside Wolseley and Roberts in the pantheon of popular Victorian military heroes and demonstrated that a professional army could still comfortably meet its main obligation of defending the empire against disruptive natives. Behind both these events lay a settled and successful pattern of civil-military relations. During the course of the century, the political functions and social construction of the armed forces had been established with little friction or discontent. In the cat's-cradle of relationships through which power was exercised and influence exerted in shaping the two Services to their tasks, the power of Parliament was clearly established and that of the crown was on the wane.1 Queen Victoria was not above interfering in defence matters - once blocking the appointment of a Secretary of State for War - but could do little directly to alter policy. Inside the Navy, the balance between the civilian Minister and his Naval Lords was long settled. The War Office was coming to the end of a period of some thirty years during which the powers of the Secretary of State for War and the extent of his authority over the soldiers were periodically readjusted.2 The creation of the Colonial Defence Committee (1885), the Joint Naval and Military Committee (1891) and the Standing Defence Committee of the Cabinet (1895) reflected the gradual evolution of a pattern of partnership in civilmilitary relations in which Cabinet government sought to encourage the development of collaborative solutions to the problems of imperial defence.3 During the Edwardian era, a combination of external and internal pressures changed both the structures and the methods of British civil-military relations. Externally, the German Naval Laws of 1898 and 1900, the failure of attempts to reach diplomatic agreement with Germany, and the creation of the Anglo1

J.S. Omond, Parliament and the Army, 1602-1904 (Cambridge, 1933). W.S. Hamer, The British Army: Civil Military Relations, 1885-1905 (Oxford, 1970). 3 John Ehrman, Cabinet Government and War, 1890-1940 (Cambridge, 1958).

2

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Japanese Alliance in 1902 and the Anglo-French Entente in 1904 were the manifestations of forces which began rapidly to reshape Britain's international position, forcing her to construct a new global security policy which would permit her to concentrate, for the first time in a century, on the prospect of involvement in a general continental war, as they necessitated not only strategic policies but strategic plans. External threats and their implications drew politicians onto ground hitherto reserved largely or entirely to admirals and generals. Internally, the need to maximise the efficiency first of the Army and then of the Navy led to closer civilian scrutiny of the organisation and management of both services. The Army, shaken by the second Boer War (1899-1902), during which it had proved scarcely a match for a few thousand rebellious farmers, underwent a rapid structural and organisational upheaval. The Navy, facing a new enemy rather than a new task, revolutionised the structure of the fleet and redistributed it to concentrate in the Mediterranean and home waters. These activities were necessary preliminaries to the development of strategic plans for war on the Continent. This task, which exposed major shortcomings in the Admiralty, was to be the commanding one in the arena of Edwardian civil-military relations. It was all the more politically sensitive because of Salisbury's recognition in May 1901 that no British government could henceforth go to war without the approval and support of the electorate, a view with which Grey, Campbell-Bannerman and others fully concurred.4 The War Office embarked upon the Boer War secure in the belief that the army had not been in a higher state of efficiency since 1815, and that sending sufficient men and supplies to South Africa and replacing them at home would present no difficulty.5 The defeats of 'Black Week' and the ever-mounting need for troops soon denuded the home base and suggested that the War Office had both greatly underestimated the enemy and neglected to take elementary precautions. Above and beyond flaws in tactics, training and weaponry which were becoming evident, these failures pointed to fundamental deficiencies in the machinery of civil-military relations. Although well enough designed for peacetime use, Victorian Cabinet government, with its clutch of military committees, appeared clearly inadequate for war. As the Marquess of Salisbury told Parliament on 30 January 1900, 'It is evident there is something in your machinery that is wrong. '6 Unless it was reformed and revitalised, Britain might be incapable of defending her interests and her empire against the far more formidable threats posed by the great powers. The new Secretary of State for War, St John Brodrick, proposed that the 4

J.A.S. Grenville, Lord Salisbury and Foreign Policy: The Close of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1970), p. 354; Keith Robbins, Sir Edward Grey: A Biography of Lord Grey of Falloden (London, 1971), p. 252. For a contrary view of the significance of public opinion, see Keith Wilson, The Policy of the Entente: Essays on the Determinants of Biitish Foreign Policy, 1904-1914 (Cambridge, 1985), esp. p. 95. 5 George Wyndham to Guy Wyndham, 27 October 1899; quoted in J.W. Mackail and Guy Wyndham, Life and Letters of George Wyndham (London, n.d. [1925]), i, p. 368. 6 Quoted in FA. Johnson, Defence, by Committee: The Biitish Committee of Impejial Defence, 1885-1959 (London, 1960), p. 44.

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Standing Defence Committee of the Cabinet be used as a tool to reorganise the Army. This development, which would have changed the shape of civilmilitary relations by displacing the War Office and its Minister from their central position in the formulation and administration of army policy, was checked by AJ. Balfour, who warned Brodrick against such a step; the future of the Standing Defence Committee, he suggested, lay in its acting as a Cabinet committee examining schemes which were more or less matured.7 Once put on a permanent basis in 1902, and under Balfour's initial guidance, this was indeed the role undertaken by the Committee of Imperial Defence, at whose meetings the strategic proposals and policies of the two Services were tested by agnostic ministerial critics. The immediate government response to public anxiety about military matters was to set up a select committee of the House of Commons to enquire into the administration of the War Office. However, the issues were too great and concern too intense for this to suffice and Balfour, now Prime Minister, could not avoid accepting a Royal Commission of Enquiry into the South African War, which reported in the summer of 1903. Meanwhile Balfour's difficulties were multiplied and defence matters further projected into the foreground of political life by Brodrick's activities at the War Office. Both he and his successor, H.O. Arnold Forster, were men in a hurry who tried to force hastilyconstructed or ill-devised schemes of army reorganisation down the throats of their military officials. Brodrick's goals were three-year service and a mixed army of regulars, militia and yeomanry formed into six large army corps.8 Unwilling to delay army reform until the war was over, Brodrick sought to rush his scheme through, against the advice of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, because he believed that in two years' time 'the public will be sick of expenditure'.9 His proposals threatened both to increase army estimates and simultaneously to cut the much-cherished militia. Balfour now came under intense party pressure as the Conservative whips' office was pushed to the limit to control dissentient Tory MPs who distrusted the War Office administration, disliked Brodrick's scheme and feared that the Navy might suffer in consequence.10 The published evidence which accompanied the report of the Elgin Commission into the South African War revealed both the compartmentalisation of the Victorian defence planning machinery and the apparent ineptitude with which the War Office had used the instruments it had to hand, thereby simultaneously intensifying and focusing political anxieties about military mat7

Bodleian Library, MS C. 732, Sandars Papers, Brodrick to Balfour, 28 October 1900; Balfour to Brodrick, 31 October 1900. 8 Lowell J. Satre, 'St John Brodrick and Army Reform, 1901-1903', Journal of British Studies, 15 (1976), pp. 117-39. For an insider's sketch of Brodrick, see A Privy Councillor [J.A. Sanders], Studies of Yesterday (London, 1928), pp. 54-55. 9 PRO, 30/67/7, 30/67/8, Brodrick Papers, Brodrick to Hicks Beach, 30 January 1901; Brodrick to Roberts, n.d. [December 1901/January 1902]. 10 Bodleian Library, MS C. 738, Sandars Papers, Acland Hood to Balfour, 25 February; 1 March 1903.

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ters thereby. A gap in civil-military relations yawned when the Director of Military Intelligence, General W.G. Nicholson, admitted that he knew nothing about the Defence Committee of the Cabinet other than that the Duke of Devonshire was its chairman, that he had never been invited to attend its meetings, and that 'nobody attends it, so far as I am aware'.11 The situation inside the War Office was little better. Further questioning revealed that although both an Army Board and a War Office Council existed, their roles were limited and their powers far from clear to members. A senior civil servant at the War Office, Sir Guy Fleetwood Wilson, announced authoritatively that members of the War Office Council had no right to put an item on its agenda and then had to listen while the chairman read out an Army order demonstrating exactly the opposite.12 Not surprisingly after such revelations, the suggestion that the War Office be reorganised along the lines of the Board of Admiralty, which accompanied the Elgin Report, met with considerable public support. The government had no choice but to respond to the pressure generated by the press in the aftermath of the publication of the Elgin Report. In particular, it had to improve appearances at the War Office.13 Balfour therefore cast around for a new Secretary of State for War, one of whose immediate tasks would be to implement the Elgin Commission's recommendation that the War Office be administered by means of a new board. Eventually the choice settled on H.O. Arnold Forster. Warned by the Prime Minister that a board system must be tried, the new Secretary of State signalled shoals ahead by announcing that he would not take kindly to a board of equals and that at the Admiralty, of which he had some experience, the civilian First Lord prevailed.14 The problems Balfour faced in settling the machinery of civil-military relations on an even keel were multiplied by intensifying hostility between the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, Lord Roberts, and the Secretary of State. Determined to maintain his power and authority, Roberts resented Brodrick's interference in what he regarded as internal matters of army organisation and discipline. The dispute intensified as the two parties crossed swords over control of the Somaliland campaign in the early summer of 1903. Both men claimed a common goal - the efficiency of the Army - but each regarded the other as an obstacle in his path.15 Roberts, who felt that he was 'being throttled, as it were, by the system in force', claimed to welcome the proposed board.16 Brodrick 11 Cmd 1790, Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Royal Commission on the War in South Africa (London, 1903), i, questions 120, 121, 123. 12 Ibid., questions 4494-95, 4504, 4547, 6097-98, 6099. 13 Bodleian Library, Selborne Papers, box l, Sandars to Selborne, 21 September 1903; Bodleian Library, MSS C. 741, 742, Sandars Papers, Acland Hood to Sandars, 20 and 22 September 1903. 14 Bodleian Library MS C. 744, Sandars Papers, Balfour to Arnold Forster, 4 October 1903; Arnold Forster to Balfour, 5 October 1903. 15 PRO, 30/67/10, Brodrick Papers, Brodrick to Roberts, 10 September 1902; Roberts to Brodrick, 15 November 1902; 30/67/11, Brodrick to Roberts, 19 June 1903; Roberts to Brodrick, 20 June 1903; Brodrick to Roberts, 21 June 1903; Roberts to Brodrick, 5 September 1903. 16 Bodleian Library, MS C. 741, Sandars Papers, Roberts to Brodrick, 30 August 1903.

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believed that a board would only serve to reduce the Commander-in-Chief's powers, while not having 'the slightest effect on any of the delays, confusions, and overlapping duties which you deplore' and blamed the soldiers for the prolonged discussions, interminable minutes and unwillingness to accept decisions which he saw as characterising their side of civil-military relations inside the War Office.17 Balfour had by now created the overall framework within which Edwardian civil-military relations would be enacted, having overseen the transformation of the Standing Defence Committee of the Cabinet into the CID in 1902. In so doing, he had deflected a proposal from Winston Churchill for a select committee of the House of Commons on Government expenditure.18 Carried to its logical conclusion, Churchill's suggestion might well have led to the development of parliamentary committees on the Army and Navy such as existed on the Continent; by blocking it, Balfour prevented an expansion of the role of Parliament which would have made it a more powerful factor in the play of civil-military relations, and thus ensured that defence strategy remained a preserve of the Cabinet. The importance of the CID in defence matters was not lost on the King, who soon requested précis of its meetings, offering Prince Louis of Battenberg as a willing taker of notes.19 Denied semi-official access to its deliberations, he had instead to rely on Lord Esher, who became a member of the CID, for inside information. Turning the confused situation in the autumn of 1903 to great advantage, Balfour allowed Esher to chair a small committee on the reorganisation of the War Office. Thé resulting report, which recommended the formation of an Army Council along the lines of the Board of Admiralty, the abolition of the post of Commander-in-Chief, and the creation of a continental-style Chief of the General Staff, changed the nature of civil-military relations by revolutionising the higher structure of army administration. Esher's trio followed up their structural proposals by recommending new men to occupy the new posts they had created. There was more than a little truth in Kitchener's observation that the imposition of a council on the Army by 'a Civilian and Naval Commission, without a military man of any experience on it' was evidence of the extent to which 'the military authorities have been discredited by what has happened in recent years'.20 However, Esher and his colleagues had done the Army good service, strengthening its hand in its dealings with the civilian authorities by improving its capacity to perform the many tasks now required of high-level Service planners, and making it a more effective instrument for strategic planning than the Admiralty - although this was not to become apparent for some time. 17

National Army Museum, 7101-23-13/339, Roberts Papers, Brodrick to Roberts, 4 September

1903. 18 19 20

BL, MS Add. 49694, Balfour Papers, Balfour to Churchill, 15 May 1902. Bodleian Library, MS C. 719, Sandars Papers, Knollys to Sandars, 7 March 1903. PRO, 30/67/20, Brodrick Papers, Kitchener to Brodrick, 19 May 1904.

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The Board of Admiralty, which Esher and Balfour took as a model design for achieving functional efficiency, had been created in 1830. Its success in managing the naval affairs of the state for over seventy years stood out all the more strongly when the heavy going at the War Office was compared with the smooth progress achieved by the Lords of the Admiralty. Lord Curzon's explanation of the difference between the two institutions reflected an impatience with failure which many shared: 'You are fortunate', he told the First Lord, Earl Selborne, 'in having to deal with sailors, some of whom have brains and all of whom (bar Charlie Beresford) understand discipline, instead of soldiers who seldom have the one and usually ignore the other.'21 In the better informed view of a former First Lord, GJ. Goschen, 'The Admiralty succeeds where the WO fails when the civilian head and all the naval men pull thoroughly and loyally together.'22 In fact, Lord Selborne's conspicuous success at the Admiralty between 1900 and 1905 was chiefly the result of his shrewdly combining control and direction with consultation and collaboration. Offering the mercurial 'Jackie' Fisher the post of Second Naval Lord in 1902, Selborne laid down clear conditions: he was prepared to tolerate private disagreements but would never allow public differences, which must result in resignation. 'But as long as we do not resign, our solidarity to the service and world outside must be resolute.'23 He was no less careful in his approach to reform, waiting until he had been two years in office and had his board fully behind him before launching his revolutionary scheme to unify officer education - in stark contrast to both Brodrick and Arnold Forster. At the War Office, after 1903, new men worked new machinery; at the Admiralty, new men worked old machinery. Within only a few years, the underlying weaknesses of the structure over which Selborne presided so effectively were to become clearly apparent. Although far from unimportant, the machinery of civil-military relations was but a means to an end. It was the business of both Services to make themselves efficient for war, to identify and assess probable enemies, and to create strategies and devise plans to defend national interests and defeat potential opponents. The rapid transposition by which Germany replaced France as Great Britain's most threatening rival, and the impact of swift technological change on the likely shape of war at sea and on land, served to make the Edwardian era one heavily preoccupied with defence questions. Both Services were accustomed to sporadic public anxiety about naval and military issues; now they found themselves more or less permanently engaged in debate not only with politicians but with civilian experts such as Spenser Wilkinson and J.R. Thursfield, defence journalists like Charles à Court Repington and Archibald Kurd,

21

Bodleian Library, Selborne Papers, box 10, Curzon to Selborne, 9 August 1901. BL, MS Add. 49706, Balfour Papers, Goschen to Balfour, 1 January 1901. 23 Bodleian Library, Selborne Papers, box 22, Selborne to Fisher, 9 February 1902. 22

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and influential amateurs, preeminently the ubiquitous Viscount Esher.24 The stage on which civil-military relations were acted out was a crowded one. The King's wish to take a central position upon it added a further dimension to the drama. Along with Edward VII's well-known foibles about medal ribbons and military tailoring went an acute appetite for playing a part in politics. Energetically abetted by Esher, he interested himself particularly in naval and military policy. All senior service appointments had to be submitted for his assent; the naval list included the names of Sea Lords, senior officers in coastal commands, and station and squadron commanders. He was given fleet orders which involved major changes in naval dispositions. He expected all schemes for organic change in both services to be submitted in writing for his approval, commented on them when they were, and complained vigorously when they were not.25 From time to time he sought to influence promotions from colonel to majorgeneral. Occasionally he blocked higher appointments, as when successfully objecting to the proposal that Roberts be appointed Inspector General of the Forces in 1904, and on at least one occasion he maintained them: in 1908, agreeing to Reginald McKenna succeeding Tweedmouth as First Lord of the Admiralty, he stipulated that Fisher must remain First Sea Lord. The role of the crown as one of Fisher's buttresses in the troubles which were shortly to descend on the First Sea Lord was of no small importance; and on at least one occasion Prince Louis of Battenberg offered to ensure that the King did not interfere in Fisher's relations with Selborne to the admiral's detriment.26 Behind these actions lay a wish to assert a right to a role in civil-military relations and to establish a position as a major contributor to policy formulation, albeit only as yet indirectly. This was evident in the King's insistence on having his name publicly coupled with the creation of Esher's War Office Reconstitution Committee despite Balfour's demurral, and in his attempt to exert a non-existent right periodically to approve appointments to the Committee of Imperial Defence, a move which foundered on the fact that its constitution allowed for only a single permanent member — the Prime Minister.27 In September 1903, at a particularly difficult moment for the government, the suggestion even began to circulate that the King be given the nominal title of Commander-in-Chief. It came to nothing; had it done so, relations between the Army and the government might have become very much more delicate. Despite the failure of what was probably a campaign orchestrated by Esher to extend its formal authority in service politics, the crown nevertheless played a significant role in Edwardian civil-military relations. Although it never interfered 24 See AJ.A. Morris, The Scaremongers: The Advocacy of War and Rearmament, 1896-1914 (London, 1984). 25 BL, MS Add. 49707, Balfour Papers, Selborne to Balfour, 28 January 1904. 26 Southampton University, MS T.93, Battenberg Papers, Battenberg to Fisher, 18 May 1904. 27 Bodleian Library, MS C. 719, Sandars Papers, Knollys to Sandars, 6 November 1903; BL, MS Add. 49762, Balfour Papers, Sandars to Balfour, 16 February 1904.

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directly in relations between the government and the armed forces, it threw its weight behind its favourites and against its bêtes noires: Brodrick's departure from the War Office in 1903 was in part the consequence of the 'perpetual intrigues' against him between Buckingham Palace and the military side of the War Office.28 Secondly, it represented a higher form of authority than the government and as such it could potentially divide loyalties: officers received the King's Commission, and in extreme circumstances (such as briefly threatened to transpire during the Curragh Incident in March 1914) might have followed other calls than those of a government in office with whose policies they felt no sympathy. Finally, the influence upon civil-military relations which the crown maintained had a potential which would become clearly apparent in the First World War, when George V backed Haig and the generals against Lloyd George and some of the politicians.29 The upheavals of the years between 1900 and 1904 resulted in the emergence of different planning mechanisms in the Army and Navy. The existence of a new forum for the inner conduct of civil-military relations at the strategic level - the CID - made that difference much more evident, and ultimately much more significant, than would have been the case in the 1890s. The Army Council certainly had teething problems, not the least among them being the person of the new Chief of the General Staff, General Sir Neville Lyttelton. A victim of what his wife gently described as 'non-self-assertiveness', Lyttelton was soon regretting having taken the post and looked forward to leaving it.30 Nevertheless, thanks to the work of an able group of subordinates and of his successor, Sir William Nicholson, military planning swiftly developed along clear and coherent lines. At the Admiralty, the legacy of the nineteenth century was a board in which no one had specific responsibility for strategic planning; instead, the Navy had developed a system of 'devolved planning' in which fleet and station commanders were given War Orders indicating the broad outlines of policy and the reinforcements they might expect, and left to draw up their own plans. Public calls for a naval Moltke had no effect.31 Once the government began to use the new central defence machinery to settle the great strategic problems of the day, however, the deficiencies of naval planning became increasingly apparent. The tasks facing the policy-makers in the Navy and the Army at the close of the Boer War differed very considerably. The Navy's main concern was the global balance of sea power, the conditioning factor within which all other strategic plans and calculations must be set. Since Great Britain could not out28

Bodleian Library, MS C. 742, Sandars Papers, Balfour to Devonshire, 26 September 1903. David Cannadine, 'The Last Hanoverian Sovereign? The Victorian Monarchy in Historical Perspective, 1688-1988', in A.L. Beier, D. Cannadine andJ.R. Rosenheim (eds), Essays in English History in Honour of Lawrence Stone (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 127-165. 30 Westfield College, MSS KL/NGL/705, NGL/FAM/429, 431, Lyttelton Papers, Katherine Lyttelton to Neville Lyttelton, 6 November 1906; Neville Lyttelton to Talbot, 28 December 1904, 30 January 1907. 31 Spenser Wilkinson, The Brain of the Navy (London, 1895). 29

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build all her potential rivals, the problem of securing the most favourable national position was preeminently a political one; therefore in the scales of civilmilitary relations, the First Lord greatly outweighed his professional advisers. Seeking a favourable local balance in different quarters of the globe involved reaching agreements such as the Anglo-Japanese alliance which augmented British naval power.32 Selborne persuaded the cabinet to accept the logic of the rise of naval competition: the abandonment of the idea of worldwide sea control, the exclusion of the United States from a two-power standard which now sought to provide a reasonable certainty of success in a conflict with France and Russia, and the redistribution of the fleet to the Mediterranean and home waters.33 The rise of the German threat reinforced the policy of naval concentration. The broad lines of naval policy were a political imposition which the Board of Admiralty had little choice but to accept. However, a cleavage between politicians and professionals swiftly opened up when Selborne turned to consider the naval and military action which might be taken in war. Discovering that the Russian Empire was apparently invulnerable, he suggested the formation of a special, temporary combined planning group drawn from the military and naval intelligence departments to examine all possible points of access. This drew from the First Sea Lord the reply that 'Russia is very unassailable to a sea power with a small army', and the observation that 'the Cabinet as advised by the Admiralty and War Office must first decide what operations are prima facie possible and politic and then let the Military Intelligence Department and Naval Intelligence Department work out details and show what is required to meet the views of the Government'.34 This view of the relationship of sailors and civilians in the planning process remained deeply rooted in the naval mind.35 It failed to mollify Selborne, who insisted that the Admiralty 'must work out plans of campaigns in every possible war'.36 Beneath these exchanges lay the Navy's settled view that strategic planning involved two sets of separate activities: the distribution of ships by the Admiralty and plans for combat which were prepared by local commanders. In an attempt to define its planning parameters, the Army at first took a similar tack to the Navy. Early in 1902 it sought from the Foreign Office a list of Great Britain's treaty obligations. The reply was less than helpful. Although Great Britain had a number of guarantees outstanding, a future theatre of war would 'virtually extend all over the world' since the powers would almost certainly be ranged against one another in groups. Rather than sending small expedi32

G.E. Monger, The End of Isolation: British Foreign Policy, 1900-1907 (London, 1963). A.L. Friedberg, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Expedience of Relative Decline, 1895-1905 (Princeton, 1988). 34 BL, MS Add. 49707, Balfour Papers, Selborne to Kerr, 1 April 1904; Kerr to Selborne, 2 April 1904. 35 Bodleian Library, MS C. 759, Sandars Papers, Bridgeman to Sandars, 22 September 1909. 36 Carmarthen Record Office, Cawdor Papers, box 294, memorandum by Selborne, 9 June 1904. 33

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tions to assist allies, assailants would have to be struck wherever there was a weak point in their armour.37 This response was of little assistance to the Army; but the resolution of the planning problem was provided by the Committee of Imperial Defence, in which civilians and servicemen pooled their expertise to produce decisions which - if not always based on shared views - were commonly reached. The revelation of the weaknesses of naval planning which occurred in the course of this activity produced severe perturbations in the Admiralty and tilted the balance in favour of the Army. The CID's first task was to investigate the dangers of an invasion of the United Kingdom. The enquiry convened in February 1903, and the proceedings soon demonstrated that a spectre which had haunted the Victorian mind since 1846 was unlikely to materialise. To succeed, any expedition must number at least 70,000 troops; such a force would require 200 boats and need at least seventy-two hours to cross the Channel and disembark, offering ample time for the attempt to be discovered and disrupted by the navy.38 This finding released the Army from any obligation to accept the primacy of home defence in its ordering of military priorities and freed it to consider operations overseas. Shortly afterwards, the first Moroccan Crisis (1905-6) added the possibility of continental European warfare to a menu which already included the defence of India, Canada and South Africa as major items. For a brief moment it seemed that Army and Navy might collaborate harmoniously in a common strategy to meet the new threat. By 1905 many of the 'new men' in the War Office had identified Germany as Great Britain's most likely and most dangerous potential enemy. When, in August 1905, the Secretary of the CID raised questions about the likelihood and effects of a German violation of Belgium, to whom Great Britain had a treaty commitment, the Army was already in possession of some preliminary answers.39 A war game played earlier in the year, on the assumption that Belgian neutrality would not be violated by Germany at the outset of a war, had revealed that it would take a month to land 50,000 British troops in Antwerp and move them up into line alongside the Belgian army. Time, which now made its first appearance in strategic calculations, was to become one of the determining factors in choosing a national strategy. As yet, however, the paths of the Admiralty and the War Office had not begun to diverge; indeed, there was still the possibility of harmonious co-operation. Collaborative strategy in the shape of amphibious operations had gained some currency in military circles.40 At the Admiralty, the First Sea Lord, Admiral 37 BL, MS Add. 49727, Balfour Papers, minute by Lansdowne, 13 March 1902. See Valerie Cromwell, 'Great Britain's European Treaty Obligations in March 1902', Historical Journal, 6 (1963), pp. 272-79. 38 PRO, CAB 3/1/18A 'Draft Report on the Possibilities of Serious Invasion: Home Defence', 11 November 1903. 39 BL, MS Add. 49702, Balfour Papers, Clarke to Balfour, 1 August 1905. 40 See C.E. Callwell, The Effect of Maritime Command on Land Campaigns since Waterloo (Edinburgh and London, 1897); idem, Military Operations and Maritime Preponderance: Their Relations and Interdependence (Edinburgh and London, 1905).

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Fisher, was much taken with joint naval and military manoeuvres, happily envisaging the Regular Army as 'a projectile to be fired by the Navy!'41 In June 1905, Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, upon whose opinion Fisher set much store, regarded amphibious operations as the best and only strategy in a Franco-British war against Germany; and when, in July, the CID discussed the creation of a permanent sub-committee to prepare amphibious schemes, Fisher enthused that the new body was 'going to be a very first rate thing and . . . the first step in the formation of a new Army and Navy Cooperative Society'.42 For a short period in August and early September 1905, it appeared that strategic harmony between the War Office and the Admiralty might become the order of the day. An enquiry by the Naval Intelligence Department as to the feasibility of operations on the North German coast received a favourable response from the War Office. 43 However, closer analysis soon revealed both the technical and navigational problems of operating there and the strength of the Baltic coast defences. At the same time the Army concluded that, in an Anglo-French war against Germany, decisive encounters would have occurred before any significant force could be landed on the North German coast. By the end of September, therefore, the War Office decided that use of the expeditionary force in the main theatre of operations alongside France would have the most decisive influence on the campaign.44 Then, in December 1905, as the first Moroccan Crisis reached its climax, the question of British support for France in case of war urgently raised its head. The unusual domestic political circumstances - the Conservatives had just left office and the new Liberal government faced an imminent general election - contributed to a situation in which a complex set of discussions were conducted over the next six weeks by several parties. The key strategic decisions were taken by a small informal group of the CID. Examining all the possible options, it decided on grounds of speed that the Army could best be deployed via the Channel Ports and, as French preferences became clear, concentrated increasingly on the deployment of an independent British force in France rather than in Belgium.45 Much has been made of the unique features of the Anglo-French military conversations, the only occasion before 1914 on which the CID played an active part in staff conversations with France and on which its Secretary intervened to forward a particular strategy.46 In terms of civil-military relations, what was more important was that a few senior members of the Cabinet had necessarily 41

Churchill College Cambridge, ESR10/41, Esher Papers, Fisher to Esher, 19 November 1903. Carmarthen Record Office, Cawdor Papers, box 293, Fisher to Cawdor, 10 July 1905. 43 PRO, WO 106/46/E2.10, 'British Military Action in Case of War with Germany', 28 August 1905. 44 PRO, CAB 4/1/65B, 'Violation of the Neutrality of Belgium during a Franco-German War', 29 November 1905. 45 PRO, CAB 18/24, 'Notes on Conferences Held at 3 Whitehall Gardens, on December 19 1905, January 6 1906, January 12 1906 and January 19 1906'. 46 S.R. Williamson Jr, The Politics of Grand Strategy: Britain and France Prepare for War, 1904-1914 (Cambridge, MA, 1969), pp. 79-80. 42

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been drawn into the heart of strategic debate. Repington, the military correspondent of The Times who acted as go-between, kept Grey fully informed of his conversations with the French. Grey encouraged Haldane, as incoming Secretary of State for War, to prepare some ideas on military intervention on the Continent and gave formal approval for both military and naval conversations.47 Finally, over the week-end of 27-29 January 1906, Grey, CampbellBannerman and King Edward VII took the decision to conceal the existence of the talks from the Cabinet. Thus a pattern was set in which civilian participation in the most delicate strategic policies was restricted to a political 'inner circle', while the full CID operated on a less restricted plane. Also, necessarily but perhaps not consciously, ministers who were 'in the know' were starting to take sides in the strategic debate by giving the Army's strategic preferences their general imprimatur. The direction taken by the Anglo-French staff talks had another more immediate and no less significant consequence. As the group's mind moved away from amphibious landings and towards directly shipping two army corps to France, Fisher grew hostile to the direction in which strategic planning was moving in the new forum of collective civil-military strategy. In an acrimonious meeting with the Secretary of the CID on 13 January, he flatly refused to be a party to military co-operation with France on French territory.48 Three days later the Director of Naval Intelligence, Rear-Admiral C.L. Ottley, told Clarke that Fisher had ordered him to withdraw from the joint planning committee.49 With the solution of the first Moroccan Crisis at Algeciras, immediate anxieties died down. However, an important point had been reached in the planning process for, although imperial matters still had a place on the defence agenda, the focus on Europe had sharpened. Also, the likely array of participants was easier to discern. In the face of these developments, the ideas of the War Office and the Admiralty now diverged ever more sharply until a crisis in naval affairs in 1909 required a CID enquiry, and two years later civilian politicians had to make a choice between two sets of strategic proposals for war with Germany. Many of the Navy's problems over the next four years flowed from the mercurial personality of its First Sea Lord. A natural rebel who had not hesitated to use every channel at his disposal to challenge the Board of Admiralty when not a member, Fisher became a natural authoritarian when its Service head. The prolonged illness of Selborne's successor, Lord Cawdor, during 1905 allowed him to assume a position of greater power and exaggerated his dictatorial tendencies. Almost every one of Fisher's policies aroused hostility within the Navy, but especially his attachment to the line of battle to the apparent 47 National Library of Scotland, MS 5907, Haldane Papers, Grey to Haldane, 8 January 1906. PRO, FO 800/87, Grey to Tweedmouth, 16 January 1906. 48 Churchill College, Cambridge, MS ESR 10/38, Esher Papers, Clarke to Esher, 13 January 1906. 49 R.F. Mackay, Fisher ofKilverstone (Oxford, 1973), pp. 350-55.

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detriment of trade protection. One of the charges against him -which was not without substance -was that his knowledge of naval strategy was weak.50 Although the fault was not entirely his, the deficiencies in naval strategic planning were to become increasingly plain in the years that followed his 'withdrawal' from the CID. Fisher and his admirals were at something of a loss in the new market-place for strategic ideas where powerful and independent civilian members of the CID sought assurances about national security which went beyond what they had previously had to provide. Traditionally, naval strategic planning meant arranging the worldwide distribution of warships so that they would be in an advantageous position when trouble came. Going much further meant 'drifting into conjecture and all that', and the First Sea Lord was not alone in his suspicion of such activities.51 Now the requirement to make much more precise proposals meant that the Admiralty had to indicate exactly what the fleet could do against a major land power, and how long it would take to do it. Behind this, as Fisher well knew, lay questions about the very raison d'être of the Royal Navy. In February 1905, replying to Selborne's demand eight months earlier that plans of campaign be worked out for every possible naval war, the Director of Naval Intelligence had declared that 'In general terms it may be said that our plans for war with most of the Great Powers are more or less complete . . .' The planner's object, he continued, 'must perpetually be to see that no new developments of the art of war, or in the dispositions of our possible enemies, ever escapes us'.52 Later that summer, Sir Arthur Wilson proposed using the whole of the country's military forces to create a diversion in a war with Germany by seizing the mouth of the Elbe or the Weser or, if Denmark were on Britain's side, by assisting her to seize Schleswig and Holstein.53 The notion of closing up Germany's North Sea exits soon became a strategic idée fixeat the Admiralty. Expanding on it in 1906, Wilson proposed using obsolete ships to destroy the forts at Cuxhaven while modern ships of his own Channel Fleet lay offshore ready to render assistance. The German fleet could then be destroyed at its anchorages and, once in possession of the canal, British forces could lay siege to Kiel and threaten Hamburg.54 Wilson stuck by his scheme a year later, adding to it feints by British and French troops and threats to Stettin and Kiel.55 Fisher endorsed Wilson's strategic proposals, although they had never been tested in war games or manoeuvres and despite the fact that they ran counter

50

National Maritime Museum, Noel Papers, box 4A, Custance to Noel, 21 September [?1905]. National Maritime Museum, MRF 39/3, Slade Papers, diary, 26 May 1908. 52 Carmarthen Record Office, Cawdor Papers, box 294, memorandum by Ottley, 20 February 1905. 53 A J. Marder, The Anatomy of British Sea Power: A History of British Naval Policy in the PreDreadnoughtEra, 1880-1905 (Hamden, CT, 1964), pp. 404-5. 54 Churchill College, Cambridge, FISR 1/5/195, Fisher Papers, Wilson to Fisher, 9 April 1906. 55 PRO, ADM, 116/3486, 'Remarks on War Plans', 5 June 1907. 51

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to other ideas produced by his ad hoc group of planners (the Ballard Committee) which he also endorsed. A second option nursed by the Navy was the traditional strategy of blockade. In 1903 the Admiralty began to reverse its sensitivity to the vulnerability of British trade and consider that of Germany. By 1905 figures available to it showed that 60 per cent of Germany's imports and exports were seaborne; in these circumstances, it seemed entirely possible to cut off this trade in the event of a war between the two powers while Germany would be unable to retaliate.56 The operational issue of whether a 'close' blockade was still feasible in an age of mines, submarines and torpedoes was the subject of continued debate until 1912, when the idea was finally abandoned. On the more general issue of the vulnerability of the German economy to disruption, studies carried out by Captain H.H. Hall of the Trade Division after August 1906 led to the conclusion that if the sea carriage of food and raw materials could be prevented, then land transport would be of no avail - economic pressure would erode the German national will to a point at which it could not carry on.57 In December 1908 the former Director of Naval Intelligence, Sir Charles Ottley, told the First Lord of the Admiralty, Reginald McKenna, that Great Britain's geographical position and preponderant sea power 'combine to give us a certain and simple means of strangling Germany at sea'.58 However, the blockade strategy had drawbacks which would shortly be revealed when the CID enquired into strategic plans for war with Germany. It is not untypical of the Admiralty's shortcomings that it was also contradicted by another aspect of trade protection and defence, on which Ottley himself had reached conclusions which undercut his statement to McKenna. In May 1906, preparing for the forthcoming Hague conference on neutrality, Ottley had concluded that immunity for neutral ships was a necessary means of protecting Great Britain's supply position in wartime. Wide definitions of contraband would not prevent Germany from using railways to obtain the requisite goods across her land frontiers; and conveying contraband in neutral ships and landing it in neutral ports would place the weight of justifying intervention and seizure squarely on Great Britain. Blockade was therefore likely to be both undesirable and inefficient.59 Nevertheless, the notion that Great Britain could within a few months drive German trade off the seas, and that the consequent loss of over 60 per cent of her total trade would make it improbable that she would be able to continue the war for very long, lingered in Admiralty minds.60 Even to attempt 56

Carmarthen Record Office, Cawdor Papers, box 293, Ottley to Cawdor, 6 July 1905. A. Offer, The Working Classes, British Naval Plans and the Coming of the Great War', Past and Present, 107 (1985), pp. 213-15. 58 Ottley to McKenna, 5 December 1908; quoted in AJ. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Floiu, i, The Road to War, 1904-1914 (London, 1966), p. 379. 59 A. Offer, 'Morality and Admiralty: "Jacky" Fisher, Economic Warfare and the Laws of War', Journal of Contemporary History, 23 (1988), p. 103. 60 National Maritime Museum, MS MRF 39/3/A2, Slade Papers, 'Imperial Defence', 16 September 1912, p. 11. 57

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such a blockade would have entailed breaking the very international agreements Great Britain had supported. Although he had withdrawn from joint naval and military planning in January 1906, Fisher still had to attend the CID and offer naval views on the major strategic questions of the day. He thus grew increasingly conscious of the need - as much political as strategic - for naval war plans against Germany, and in the winter of 1907-8 he set up a special committee at the War College in Portsmouth under Captain Ballard to prepare some. The plans which resulted accurately reflected the confusion in naval thinking by simultaneously proffering obeisance to the notion that the enemy's fleet was the prime objective of naval warfare and proposing that the stoppage of trade was 'a true ultimate objective', for the attainment of which blockade would be the prime weapon. The plans proposed by the Ballard Committee were for the close blockade of the German North Sea coast, the seizure of a German island (Borkum or Sylt), the bombardment of selected German ports and coastal forts, the blocking of the Elbe and the approaches to the Kiel Canal, and - if Germany had occupied parts of Denmark - the occupation of the main islands of the Danish archipelago.61 Fisher was careful to send a copy of the Foreword to the Ballard Committee's report, which justified all his major policies, to King Edward VII.62 To the plans themselves he added in August 1907 his own proposal to land an expeditionary force of 70,000 on the North German coast. The idea of landings around the German coast - but especially in the Baltic - was something to which Fisher remained indissolubly wedded: 'a mere fleabite!' he chortled over an expedition of 5500 men, 'but a collection of these fleabites would make Wilhelm scratch himself with fury'. 63 The Admiralty's self-imposed isolation meant that its plans were becoming increasingly unrealistic - and, so far as amphibious operations went, unrealisable. Fisher also adopted an increasingly secretive attitude to the communication of such plans as he had. In 1908 he declared that he would not consent to any war plan being discussed with any admiral afloat.64 He did, however, trust his war plans with Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson, whose familiarity with such state secrets was acceptable because 'he's as close as wax'.65 At bottom, Fisher believed that plans were potentially highly dangerous: no ships of war should ever be locked to fixed points by any policy decision, but instead the Navy must be free to mass its strength anywhere. Yet plans had to be produced to defend the 61 P.K. Kemp, The Papers oj SirJohn Fisher, ii (London, 1964); Paul Haggle, 'The Royal Navy and War Planning in the Fisher Er^, Journal of Contemporary History, 8 (1973), pp. 113-132; Paul M. Hayes, 'Britain, Germany and the Admiralty's Plans for Attacking German Territory, 1906-1915', in L. Freedman, P. Hayes and R. O'Neill (eds), War, Strategy and International Politics: Essays in Honour of Sir Michael Howard (Oxford, 1992), pp. 95-116. 62 Royal Archives, W. 58/68-77, War Plans: Preface: Some Principles of Naval Warfare, 9 April 1907. 63 Churchill College, Cambridge, ESR 10/43, Esher Papers, Fisher to Esher, 15 March 1909. 64 National Maritime Museum, MRF 39/3, Slade Papers, diary, 8 January 1908. 65 Churchill College, Cambridge, ESR 10/43, Esher Papers, Fisher to Esher, 25 December 1909.

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Navy's position in the CID. The pressures on his primitive planning system intensified as the Admiralty was required not merely to respond to new enquiries but to reexamine old issues which resurfaced for fresh assessment - a practice which Balfour commended to Asquith.66 Ever hostile to a naval war staff- even though, in 1902, he had been in favour of the Director of Naval Intelligence acting as a 'naval Moltke' - Fisher turned to the War Course at Portsmouth as an ad hoc staff. Strategically, he was living from hand to mouth: to meet the needs of the CID invasion enquiry of 1908, he had to take Admiral Fremantle off the War Course to preside over another ad hoc committee.67 War Office planning moved ahead after January 1906 on an altogether more coherent basis in which key issues in a continental strategy were methodically identified and explored. The Belgian option was pursued in the spring of 1906 by means of joint staff talks, a process which underlined the problem of time involved in getting enough British troops to the Belgian Meuse fast enough to influence the outcome of the initial clash between the German and French forces. Exploring variations on the basic war scenario, the General Staff changed its mind and arrived at the view that Germany would violate Belgian neutrality immediately war broke out, adding urgency to the need for a speedy British deployment.68 Doubts about the value of the Belgian field army, derived from observers' reports of Belgian manoeuvres, helped to crystallise the view that the best way to rid Belgium of invaders might be to co-operate closely with France. Undecided as yet as to the better course, the War Office held its strategic options open on the grounds that the same railway lines from Calais, Boulogne and Le Havre would allow either deployment.69 In focusing on the FrenchBelgian theatre, the War Office did not make the mistake of neglecting the wider strategic horizons raised by naval planning. Its analysis suggested that command of the sea could not sufficiently weaken the German economy to win a war, that the time factor ruled out the Navy's option of military operations in Denmark, and that moral, political and strategic factors all pointed to a military concentration in France to prolong the French left wing, whether or not Belgian neutrality was violated.70 Underpinning the army's strategic analyses of the problem of continental war at this time lay an attitude towards European affairs which set it alongside the Liberal Imperialists and far apart from the Navy. In the view of the Director of Military Operations, Major-General J.S. Ewart (1906-10), the Entente had to be the cornerstone of British policy if Europe was not to fall under German dictatorship. This carried an inescapable strategic corollary: Tf the Entente is to last, we must be ready to help France on land as well as on sea.'71 66

BL, MS Add. 49692, Balfour Papers, Balfour to Asquith, 5 November 1908. Admiral Sir Sydney Fremantle, My Naval Career, 1880-1928 (London, n.d. [1949]), p. 126. 68 PRO, WO 106/46/E2.8, War with Germany in Defence of Belgian Neutrality, 4January 1907. 69 PRO, WO 106/46/E2.13, Our Position as Regards the Low Countries, 16 April 1907. 70 PRO, WO 106/46/E2.2, Military Policy in a War with Germany, 2 July 1908. 71 Scottish Record Office, Ewart Papers, diary, 7 February 1908. 67

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Ewart personally favoured an Anglo-French-Russian alliance, which put him several steps ahead of even the most fervently anti-German members of the Foreign Office. He was careful to secure Foreign Office permission to keep the French up to date with proposals for mobilising a British force and transporting it across the Channel, and careful also to reiterate to the French that the joint military conversations did not bind the British government to act with France in the event of a crisis. Seizing the chance afforded by the outcome of the second CID invasion enquiry in 1908, which reconfirmed the Navy's primacy as guardian against any large-scale incursions into the United Kingdom, Ewart pressed for an examination of the competing continental strategies. Another Moroccan flare-up over Casablanca provided a timely stimulus. A large sub-committee chaired by the Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith, heard presentations of the War Office and Admiralty strategies and of an ingenious but unconvincing compromise by Esher which involved closing the Elbe and the Baltic to damage German trade, threatening amphibious operations and shipping 12,000 mounted infantry to France. Fisher lost a political battle at the outset. He had wanted a full Cabinet discussion of the main issue: whether British forces were to fight on the Continent in the event of war or to be used in raids. In such a milieu, Radical suspicions about continental entanglements would have won him the day; as it was, Ministers were able to assess strategic issues free from the heat of political controversy. He lost the main strategic battle as the sub-committee, led by the General Staff, focused on the decisive importance of the first battles in France and concluded that British forces must concentrate on the French left even if Belgian neutrality were not violated. The time factor played a major part in this decision: the committee accepted the proposition that because blockade would work too slowly, it was therefore likely to be a very much less satisfactory strategy. Although Fisher's shortcomings as a strategist and planner were to lead to an unprecedented enquiry by the CID into the internal workings of the Admiralty in 1909, his political position became increasingly delicate with the advent of the Liberal government in 1906. Opposition to the Selborne scheme and the dreadnought on the government benches forced him to look for defence to Balfour and the Conservative Party. When it became apparent in July 1906 that Fisher had agreed to a cut-back in the dreadnought construction programme, and when he then placed the Home Fleet on a reserve basis, apparently threatening national security, Tory opposition mounted.72 Balfour came to Fisher's defence in the Commons in March 1907, doing much to stave off an enquiry into Fisher's reforms and defeating a back-bench motion of no confidence.73 Nevertheless, with the Navy now at the centre of the political 72 The Cawdor Memorandum, drawn up in 1905 with Fisher's active support, committed the government to building four capital ships a year. Fisher reduced Dreadnought construction to three in 1906/7 and 1907/8, and planned for two in 1908/9. 78 R. Williams, 'Arthur James Balfour, Sir John Fisher and the Politics of Naval Reform, 1904-1910', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 60 (1987), pp. 85-90.

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stage, the arena of civil-military relations both widened and became of central importance for the Admiralty. Fisher worked hard to maintain political support. His links with the King, whom he frequently accompanied to continental spas, were never closer than during these years. One officer was told off to liaise with Fleet Street editors and another kept tabs on the CID, while Fisher himself was frequently absent from his office from lunchtime onwards, which did not improve the Admiralty's functioning. He sought to keep Conservative support by arguing that attacks on the Admiralty would force the revelation of how great Britain's margin of superiority really was, thereby handing a knife to the Radicals. However, the German Naval Law amendment in November 1907 increased political anxieties that, as British construction slowed, Germany might outpace her.74 The bipartisan consensus carefully created by Balfour to support the Liberal Imperialists against the Radicals, and thereby protect Fisher and the Navy, proved insufficiently robust when faced in 1909 with both external and internal assaults on Fisher's regime. The public crisis of 1909 was triggered by the increased pace of German naval building: in autumn 1908, Germany laid down four battleships of her 1908/9 programme and also began work on four more from her 1909/10 programme, raising the spectre of eight German battleships a year coming down the slipways. Misled by Fisher's complex manoeuvrings, Balfour failed to get the expected support from the Liberal Imperialists for a major expansion of the British programme. The Conservatives then set about deliberately mobilising public opinion to force Asquith's hand; it was in the course of this campaign that, on 27 March 1909, George Wyndham coined the slogan: 'We want eight and we won't wait' Four months later, admitting defeat, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Reginald McKenna, announced the decision to build eight battleships and not the four the government had initially proposed. Already uncomfortably in the political and public eye, Fisher simultaneously became the centrepiece in an increasingly public feud with Admiral Lord Charles Beresford over what Beresford believed to be an unwise concentration on building capital ships at the cost of a balanced fleet and over Fisher's inadequate war planning. Beresford had strong views about the staff question. He believed that the First Sea Lord 'should undertake nothing else but organisation for war'; as it was, that officer (then Admiral Lord Walter Kerr) was 'mixed up with every sort of thing, trousers, buttons and countless papers that a commander might do'.75 As Commander-in-Chief of the Channel Fleet, Beresford suspected that the newly-created Home Fleet was designed by Fisher to whittle down his position. By January 1908 Fisher had drawn up his battle lines, refusing a request by Grey to come to terms with Beresford, seeking a parliamentary

74

R. Williams, The Conservative Party and British Defence Policy, 1899-1915 (New Haven, 1991),

ch. 7. 75

BL, MS Add. 49713, Balfour Papers, Beresford to Sandars, 8 April 1900.

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statement of support and determined not to countenance any form of enquiry into his running of the Navy.76 Balfour, who privately believed that the state of the Navy was 'unsatisfactory' , sought to avoid a scandal 'which must hurt Fisher and possibly the Government but certainly cannot benefit the fleet'.77 He persuaded Fisher to allow Beresford to appear before the CID invasion enquiry in 1908 so that he could not claim to have been gagged, and prevented senior members of his party from encouraging Beresford to extremes. Fisher weathered the immediate crisis, but not the storm which followed in 1909. Discontent over his building policy was intensified when Beresford hauled down his flag in March - one year early as a result of the amalgamation of the Channel Fleet with the Home Fleet and set about attacking Fisher's policies. This time Balfour did not feel justified in trying to keep Beresford quiet, but did warn him that he might be tilting at something more solid than a windmill: 'I am quite confident. . .' he wrote, 'that the Admiralty conceive themselves to be much better supplied with war plans than you seem to think. Whether their war plans are sound, I know not, but do not assume too hastily they are non-existent.'78 Balfour's criticisms of naval policy- of inadequate numbers of cruisers, destroyers and dreadnoughts - he regarded as being directed at the government. The only area where an investigation might usefully be conducted was in 'the adequacy of the Admiralty organisation for doing that part of its work which in the army is entrusted to the General Staff.79 Asquith agreed, and the enquiry into Fisher's regime was undertaken by a sub-committee of the CID between 27 April and 13 July 1909. The state of war planning formed one of three subjects of investigation, and the sub-committee heard sufficiently disparate views about the subject for it to draw attention in its report to the lack of unanimity among senior officers on the principles of naval strategy and tactics. Sir Arthur Wilson, shortly to succeed Fisher as First Sea Lord, revealed that he regarded definite plans drawn up in peacetime as impractical and undesirable: their secrecy could never be guaranteed, and they would be difficult to change if actual circumstances turned out to be different from those envisaged. Indeed, Wilson was 'perfectly certain that any plan drawn up in peace would not be carried out in war'.80 For the second time in a year, the stark contrast between naval and military planning was paraded before concerned politicians. The CID report found generally in Fisher's favour but sounded a distinct note of criticism about the Admiralty planning process. Fisher's reply to being accused of being 'wanting in strategical thought' was to point to the Naval War College and the visible evidence of 'practical strategy in effecting the concentra-

76

Churchill College, Cambridge, ESR 10/42, Esher Papers, Fisher to Esher, 31 January 1908. Bodleian Library, MS C. 756, Sandars Papers, Balfour to Cawdor, 9 January 1908. 78 BL, MS Add. 49713, Balfour Papers, Balfour to Beresford, 29 March 1909. 79 Bodleian Library, MS C. 758, Sandars Papers, Balfour to Esher, 16 April 1909. 80 Marder, The Road to War, i, p. 198. 77

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tion of our fleets instead of the previous state of dispersion'.81 This response revealed how little he understood the need for - and the needs of- contingency planning in the modern age. His supporters were disappointed at Asquith's moral weakness in failing to take a stand against Beresford on grounds of naval discipline; but within six months of the publication of the report, Fisher was gone, a barony (but not the hoped-for viscountcy) his royal compensation. The end of the Fisher regime did not much improve matters at the Admiralty. Sir Arthur Wilson proved to be a fairly pliant First Sea Lord, but also a secretive and costive one. Despite the recommendation of the Beresford subcommittee, no naval war staff appeared. Doubt about naval strategy intensified: at the Foreign Office, Sir Eyre Crowe for one felt that, in a war with Germany, 'sea pressure' would not be as effective a weapon as the sailors imagined.82 Nor was Wilson minded to co-operate in forwarding the military strategy; pressed from February 1910 to devise detailed cross-Channel transportation schedules, the Admiralty was twice sent revised mobilisation timetables (in February and May 1911) but did not respond. Then, in August 1911, the Agadir Crisis produced another unique occurrence — the CID's 'only excursion before 1914 into the realm of grand strategy and overall strategic co-ordination'.83 Although Sir Arthur Wilson took a sanguine view, feeling that a surprise German attack was highly improbable, the War Office took the opportunity in early August to press that, in the event of war, Great Britain must join France and move all six regular divisions alongside the French as soon as possible. The Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, took up the gauntlet, proposing that British intervention should occur later rather than sooner. Sir Arthur Wilson reiterated his position of 1907: the German fleet must be the main object of naval activity, and the Army should be used either in coastal raids or as decoys. A settled strategic policy was evidently necessary and so, uncharacteristically but understandably in view of the international tension, Asquith called a truncated CID together on 23 August to weigh the merits of the naval and military strategies and reach a decision. The contrast between the two strategies as revealed at the meeting was so great that, with hindsight, one of the by-standers saw the outcome of the day as the defeat of the Navy's grand strategy and the victory of the Army's.84 In the morning Henry Wilson laid out the Army's plans for direct assistance to France, with the aid of a large map of the frontier region. His presentation was clear, concise and focused. He did not get away untouched, however: Churchill raised the question of what would happen if the French armies were beaten on the 81

Churchill College, Cambridge, ESR 10/43, Esher Papers, Fisher to Esher, 27 August 1909. Churchill College, Cambridge, ACDF 2/1, Grant Duff Papers, diary, 8 March 1911. 83 Williamson, The Politics of Grand Strategy, p. 191. 84 Lord Hankey, The Supreme Command, /914-1918 (London, 1961), i, pp. 81-82. At the time, Hankey felt differently: 'The great point is that no decision was arrived at - this means, in my opinion, defeat of our opponents [i.e. the army] '. Churchill College, Cambridge, FISR l/10/530a, Hankey to Fisher, 24 August 1911. For the best account of the occasion, see Williamson, The Politics of Grand Strategy, pp. 187-91. 82

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Meuse; and McKenna queried whether French resistance would turn on the arrival at the front of six British divisions. In the afternoon, Sir Arthur Wilson presented a confused naval scenario involving landings at the mouths of the Jade, Weser, and Elbe rivers, a close blockade of the North German coast, the seizure of Heligoland and operations in the Baltic. Imprecision and strategic self-contradiction were the chief features of the Navy's case against the strategy of continental military intervention. One eyewitness reported Churchill's expression of surprise at the naval operations outlined by the First Sea Lord. 'I hope says A[rthur] W[ilson] the enemy will be as much surprised as you are to which Winston retorted I hope they may be filled with as much misgiving as I am.'85 Asquith shared Churchill's apprehension. Sir Arthur Wilson's plan he judged to be 'puerile', which meant that 'in principle, the General Staff scheme is the only alternative'.86 All was not yet settled, however. In the course of the strategic debate, Lloyd George raised the possibility of a large British force operating not in France but in Belgium, based on Antwerp and threatening the German flank. Churchill at once took up the scenario, added to it a triple alliance of Great Britain, France and Russia to guarantee the independence of Belgium, Holland and Denmark and pressed it upon Grey and Henry Wilson.87 The Director of Military Operations took enthusiastically to both propositions, despite the opposition of the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir William Nicholson, and when Asquith learned of the Belgian plan in November he asked for it to be worked through. Wilson accordingly opened staff discussions with Brussels in the spring of 1912, but Belgian suspicions of Britain and France, and a determination not to compromise their neutrality in anyway, closed the alternative avenue through which British troops might have met the German field armies. The CID meeting of 23 August had important institutional consequences. Churchill replaced McKenna at the Admiralty in late October, brought in to overhaul the now labouring board system and institute a naval war staff to bring Admiralty planning into the modern age - although its youth and the strategic enthusiasms of its civilian master meant that it had not rooted itself in naval practice before war came. Sir Arthur Wilson was sacked - curtly refusing the peerage Churchill offered as recompense; his successor lasted a year before being tipped out no less unceremoniously. Under Churchill, the Admiralty co-operated much more fully with the War Office in preparing to convey the bulk of the Expeditionary Force to France, whilst Henry Wilson now concentrated on refining the details of mobilisation, transportation and development. 85 86

Churchill College, Cambridge, ACDF 2/1, Grant Duff Papers, diary, 25 August 1911. National Library of Scotland, MS 5909, Haldane Papers, Asquith to Haldane, 31 August

1911.

87

Churchill to Grey, 30 August 1911, Churchill to Lloyd George, 31 August 1911, quoted in Randolph Churchill, Young Statesman: Winston S. Churchill, 1901-1914 (London, 1967), pp. 529-31. For the correspondence between Wilson and Nicholson (GIGS), see Imperial War Museum, Wilson Papers, HHW 2/70/8-16; for the correspondence between Churchill and Wilson, PRO, ADM, 116/3474.

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The greatest significance lay, however, in the fact that the essentials of British strategy in a war with Germany had at last been decided. In bringing this about, civil-military relations had turned not on an idealised collegialism in which the Committee of Imperial Defence had acted as matchmaker in reconciling the two Services to a commonly accepted strategic partnership; instead, civilian politicians played the role of referee in a series of hard-fought bouts in which the Army proved the stronger contestant When war came in 1914, the pattern would be extended into a triangular struggle as the civilians entered the strategic ring along with the two Services.

4

'A One-Man Show'? Civil-Military Relations in Britain during the First World War David French

The First World War confronted the British government with the most basic conundrum of civil-military relations, how best to co-ordinate naval and military policy at the highest level and at the same time to bring politicians responsible ultimately to Parliament into meaningful co-operation with the naval and military experts.1 The Edwardian 'solution', the Committee of Imperial Defence operating in an advisory capacity alongside the Cabinet, did have certain advantages. It was more in accordance with existing constitutional practice than the ofttouted alternative of appointing a single professional 'expert' without any responsibility to Parliament. The CID's purely advisory powers calmed the fears of those who were afraid that it might destroy Cabinet government. But this system also had certain disadvantages which only became fully apparent once the war had begun.2 The full Cabinet was a purely political committee, meeting on average only once every nine days and concerned only with the general supervision of government business. Its only contact with the administration of its decisions was through individual ministers. Meetings of the full CID had dwindled to a handful by 1913-14 and most of its work had been devolved onto a number of sub-committees.3 1 The phrase 'one-man show' comes from Robertson to Murray, 30 November 1915, Robertson Papers, 1/15/7.1 am grateful to the following for permission to quote from material to which they hold the copyright: Lord Bonham-Carter and the Bodleian Library (Asquith Papers); the Earl of Derby and the City of Liverpool Record Office (Papers of the seventeenth Earl of Derby); the Earl of Selborne and the Bodleian Library (Papers of the second Earl of Selborne); the Warden and Fellows, New College, Oxford (Milner Papers); the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives and the Depositor of the Robertson Papers (Robertson Papers, Maurice Papers, Clive Papers, Kiggell Papers, Spears Papers); the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland and Lord Haig (Haig Papers); the Keeper of the Records, the House of Lords Record Office (Lloyd George Papers, Bonar Law Papers and St Loe Strachey Papers); the Trustees of the Imperial War Museum and Lady Patricia Kingsley (French Papers, Fitzgerald Papers and Wilson Papers); Mrs Joan Simon (Emmott Papers); the Master and Fellows of Churchill College, Cambridge (Hankey Papers and Wester-Wemyss Papers). 2 G.R. Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: A Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899-1914 (Oxford, 1971), pp. 216-35. 3 J. Turner, 'Cabinets, Committees and Secretariats: The Higher Direction of War', in K. Burk (ed.), War and the State: The Transformation of British Government 1914-1918 (London, 1982), pp. 56-83.

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Even more significant was the fact that the CID's founders had never intended it would have a wartime function: in August 1914 it closed its doors and all of the members of its secretariat, except Maurice Hankey, assumed active service appointments. Ministers did not allow this to happen because they expected a short war. In March 1912 they had been advised by the General Staff that, 'it would not be safe to calculate on the war lasting less than six months'. 4 But they did anticipate a war in which Britain's contribution would be strictly limited to its existing Army and Navy. The role of the civilian population would be to suffer the hardships of war in silence.5 But the failure of the British blockade, and the French and Russian armies, to contain the Central Powers and to cause the rapid collapse of their economies, meant that by Christmas 1914 the British were confronted by the unexpected and unwelcome vista of a protracted coalition war for which they had made few plans. Britain's response to these problems was an enormous essay in improvisation as, with no pre-war plans to guide them, the government mobilised civilian resources to support the war and tried to harmonise their efforts with those of their allies. This task was made difficult by two factors. S.E. Finer has suggested that in 1914 Britain enjoyed a mature political culture.6 In Britain, although arguably not in Ireland, Parliament was recognised as the legitimate source of political authority and there was wide public approval for the procedures for transferring power from government to government, a fact demonstrated by the high turnout figures for the 1910 elections.7 However, widespread respect for the general framework of the political system did not inevitably translate itself into acceptance of the legitimacy of the government in power. On the outbreak of war the Liberal government was only sustained in office because of the support of Labour and the Irish Nationalists and its electoral mandate was due to expire in December 1915. Neither the Asquith nor the Lloyd George coalition ever presented itself to the electorate. In addition Lloyd George's only claim to govern was that he was more likely than Asquith to win the war. This left him vulnerable to the criticism that, by ignoring the advice of his professional advisers, he was postponing rather than hastening victory. With the benefit of hindsight it is now apparent that after December 1916 Lloyd George was the only possible Prime Minister capable of mustering a majority in the Commons. But, bereft of his own secure power base in either the country or the Commons, Lloyd George was understandably reluctant in 1917-18 to press matters to a crisis and to test the exact extent of his support. Having screwed his courage to sticking point to dismiss Robertson in February 1918, he told one of his aides

4

PRO, CAB 16/18B. Standing Committee of the Committee of Imperial Defence. Enquiry regarding trading with the enemy. Note by the General Staff, 14 March 1912. 5 D. French, British Economic and Strategic Planning, 1905-1915 (London, 1982),pp. 1-97. 6 S.E. Finer, The Man on Horseback: The Rok of the Military in Politics (London, 1988), p. 78. 7 R. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880-1950 (Oxford, 1990), pp. 20-23.

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that, 'we may be out next week'.8 In addition to the doubts they entertained about their mandate to govern, most political decision-makers, with the exception of Kitchener and Churchill, had no experience of war and were strangers to the private world of the armed forces. This gave their service advisers a profound moral advantage when they clashed with their political masters, for even their severest critic, Lloyd George, sometime harboured a sneaking suspicion that they might be right. Burdened by such doubts both Prime Ministers followed their natural bent towards creating consensus. In doing so they prolonged the life of their governments but the price they paid was their inability sometimes to impose their own wishes on their professional advisers.9 Front-bencher's doubts about their mandate to govern were shared by their back-benchers and were reflected to some extent in their attitude to the executive. In 1914 the Commons tamely surrendered its right to undertake a detailed scrutiny of the Army and Navy estimates and thus effectively abdicated most of its power to scrutinise the effectiveness of the executive in wartime.10 When the war became a prolonged and expensive stalemate backbench frustrations occasionally erupted. This was graphically illustrated by one MP who, in July 1917, brought an unexploded anti-aircraft shell into the Commons to draw attention to his views on air-raids.11 Both government and opposition backbenchers were reduced to gleaning most of their information concerning the conduct of the war from the press. They were isolated from their constituents thanks to the suspension of normal party activities, the enlistment of many of their party agents and the population movements which accompanied the war. Operating very much in the dark when they attempted to gauge public opinion, it was hardly surprising that the strikes of May 1917 led many MPs to doubt the level of popular support for the war. But there were occasions when backbench opinion compelled the executive to trim or alter its policy so as to contain parliamentary criticisms. In April 1916 back-benchers compelled the Cabinet to abandon its own compromise measure for conscription and introduce a form of general compulsion.12 In November 1916 pressure from the Unionist 8

Lord Riddell, Lord Ridd ell's War Diary (London, 1933), p. 314. The best accounts of wartime domestic politics are J. Turner, British Politics and the Great War: Coalition and Conflict, 1915-1918 (London, 1992); and C. Hazlehurst, Politicians at War July 1914 to May 1915: A Prologue to the Triumph of Lloyd George (London, 1971). See also B. McGill, 'Asquith's Predicament, 1914-1918', Journal of Modern History, 39 (1967), pp. 283-303; M.D. Pugh, 'Asquith, Bonar Law and the First Coalition', Historical Journal, 17 (1974), pp. 813-36; E. David, The Liberal Party Divided, 1916-1918', Historical Journal, 13, (1970), pp. 509-33J.M. McEwen, 'Lloyd George's Liberal Supporters in December 1916', Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 53 (1980), pp. 265-72; J. Turner, 'British Politics and the Great War', inj. Turner (ed.), Britain and the First World War (London , 1988), pp. 117-32; K.O. Morgan, 'Lloyd George's Premiership: A Study in "Prime Ministerial" Government', Historical Journal, 13, (1970), pp. 130-57. 10 PRO, T 170/86, Bradbury to Asquith, 4 February 1915. 11 J. Turner, 'The House of Commons and the Executive in the First World War', Parliamentary History, 10 (1991), p. 307. I am most grateful to Prof Turner for allowing me to see a draft of his article before it was published. 12 J. Barnes and D. Nicolson (eds.), The Leo Amery Diaries (London, 1981), i, pp. 128-29; Samuel to 9

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War Committee was instrumental in persuading Bonar Law to support Lloyd George in what became the coup which toppled Asquith.13 In June 1917 backbench pressure forced the War Cabinet to establish a Select Committee on the Military Service (Review of Exemptions) Act which recommended that the organisation of recruiting medical boards should be removed from War Office control and placed in the hands of civilians. This eventually led to the whole of the recruiting machinery being taken away from the War Office.14 Ultimately, however, as the Maurice Debate in May 1918 showed, the Commons was powerless to throw out the Lloyd George government. The alternatives were even more unpalatable, a general election on a register which was five years out of date or a government led by Asquith.15 Doubts about the legitimacy of the government's mandate also enabled the press to wield a sometimes extraordinary influence. It was the only mass medium and many politicians accepted that it reflected public opinion. It would be wrong to suggest that the most powerful organs of the press always gave unstinting support to the professionals but they did start from the premise that the service chiefs knew best. Press barons like Northcliffe could not make or break governments but the press could create a climate of opinion in which politicians and service personnel recognised that some decisions would bring down criticisms upon their heads and others would boost their reputations.16 Thus in September 1917 Lord Milner feared that if Lloyd George's wish to send artillery from the BEF to Italy leaked, 'there would be an outcry against the politicians for overriding military opinion.'17 Public expectations of what the Royal Naval ought to do in wartime were very high and when in the spring and summer of 1917 the U-boat campaign appeared to threaten national survival, the Admiralty was subject to sustained newspaper criticism.18 It was that campaign which created the political climate which enabled Lloyd George gradually to force through the change in the senior political and professional leadership of the Admiralty in July and December 1917. Almost the first thing Sir Eric Geddes did on becoming First Lord was to give a confidential briefing to the chairco-ntinued

wife, 26 April 1916, HLRO, Samuel Papers A/157/815. Proposal made by Asquith at the secret session of the Commons on 25 April 1916, Asquith Papers, vol. 30, fol. 62; P. Williamson (ed.), The. Modernization of Conservative Politics: The Diaries and Letters of William Bridgeman, 1904-1935 (London, 1988), p. 100. 13 R. Blake, The Unknown Prime Minister: The Life and Times of Andrew Bonar Law, 1858-1923 (London, 1955), pp. 298-99, 302-8; HLRO, Asquith to Law, 26 November 1916, Bonar Law Papers, 53/4/24. 14 K. Grieves, The Politics of Manpower, 1914-1918 (Manchester, 1988), pp. 130-37. 15 Sir P. Sassoon to Maurice, 21 May 1918, Maurice Papers 4/4/2/20; C.R. Burns to Maurice, 31 May 1918, Maurice Papers 4/5/44; Turner, British Politics and the Great War, pp. 298-301. 16 j.M. McEwen, 'Lloyd George and Northcliffe at War, 1914-1918', HistoricalJournal, 24 (1981), pp. 651-72. 17 Thornton diary, 3 September 1917, Milner Papers, dep. 23/1. 18 Beatty to wife, 25 April 1917 in B. McL. Ranft (ed.), The Beatty Papers: Selections from the Private and Official Correspondence of Admiral of the Fket Earl Beatly (London, 1989), i, p. 417.

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man of the Newspaper Proprietors Association explaining the scope of his projected reforms and promising to leave naval strategy to his professional advisers.19 Both the professionals and the politicians were adept at using the press for their own ends. Robertson and Haig were not above inciting them to render Lloyd George a public rebuke if he threatened to interfere in their business. In July 1916 Derby urged St Loe Strachey, editor of the Spectator, to, 'back Haig for all you are worth'.20 In November and December 1917 Lloyd George 'inspired' press criticisms of GHQ as a way of moving against Haig and Robertson.21 The major structural development in civil-military relations during the First World War was the transformation of Cabinet government. It is tempting to argue that in December 1916, nineteenth-century Cabinet government came to an end, and twentieth-century Cabinet government began. A once widely accepted view suggested that, whereas in 1914 it was little more than a political debating society, thanks to the reforms introduced by Lloyd George when he established the War Cabinet in December 1916, by 1918 the Cabinet had become a highly centralised and efficient executive authority controlling all major aspects of British strategic policy. It has also been suggested that the crisis of December 1916 saw the end of the 'squashiness' said to characterise the Asquithian regime and its replacement by the dynamic purposefulness of the Lloyd George government.22 But in reality the elaborate bureaucratic apparatus established by Lloyd George was not a revolutionary development. It grew out of developments begun by Asquith and the actual functioning of the Cabinet under Lloyd George was often not so very different from what had gone before. The first major structural change in Cabinet government took place in November 1914 when it was apparent that Britain would have to make an effort of a much greater magnitude than had been expected and by when it was clear that the full Cabinet, meeting without a proper written record of its proceedings, was too cumbersome to direct this process. Asquith established the first of a series of Cabinet committees charged with the oversight of strategic policy, the War Council. But, like its successors under the Asquith coalition, the Dardanelles Committee and the War Committee, it suffered from fundamental 19

PRO, ADM 116/1804. Masterton Smith to Riddell, 11 August 1917. Derby to St Loe Strachey, 22 July 1916, HLRO, St Loe Strachey Papers, S/5/2/4. 21 J.M. McEwen, ' "Brass-Hats" and the British Press during the First World War', Canadian Journal of History, 18 (1983), pp. 43-67; D.R. Woodward, Lloyd George and the Generals (London, 1983), pp. 98-113; Lieutenant-Colonel à Court Repington, TheFirst World War (London, 1920), ii, pp. 151-52; McEwen, 'Lloyd George and Northcliffe', passim; T. Wilson, (ed.), The Political Diaries ofC.P. Scott, 1911-1918 (London, 1970), pp. 311-12, 319-21; Hankey diary, 12 November 1917, Hankey Papers, HNKY1/4; V. Bonham-Carter, Soldier True: The Life and Times of Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson, 1860-1933 (London, 1963), pp. 339-40, 346. 22 Milner to Lady E. Cecil, 3 December 1916, Milner Papers, 353; J.P. Mackintosh, The British Cabinet (London, 1977), p. 376; K.O. Morgan, 'David Lloyd George', in J.P. Mackintosh (ed.), British Prime Ministers in the Twentieth Century (London, 1977), pp. 118-28. 20

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weaknesses. In theory these committees ought to have expedited decisionmaking. In practice they did not because they became too large, they lacked executive authority and any policies they recommended had to be discussed and ratified by the full Cabinet, where, according to one critic, 'there has been no cohesion, no initiative, no decision, and that each Minister has been left to his own view'.23 The War Committee established in November 1915 was accompanied by two significant innovations. For the first time a committee assumed the oversight of military operations in all theatres. Hankey was always present to draft its 'Conclusions' and to circulate them to all departments concerned.24 By meeting far more frequently then either of its predecessors (it held 143 meetings between November 1915 and December 1916) it was able to act as a court of appeal between different departments. But too often its deliberations became, 'a mere rambling conversation . . . '25 Nor did it assume untrammelled responsibility for the conduct of the war. On at least two issues of overriding importance the full Cabinet was able to exercise its still considerable powers. In December 1915 the War Committee recommended the evacuation of the Dardanelles, only to see the implementation of its decision delayed by a group of antievacuationists in the Cabinet.26 A few days later the issue of military conscription threatened to tear both the War Committee and the Cabinet apart. Asquith had used two procedural devices to delay a decision on this issue. In August 1915 he had established the War Policy Committee to determine British and Allied resources until the end of 1916 in order to discover if conscription was necessary. When the committee's majority report insisted that it was, he hoped that the balance between conscriptionists and anti-conscriptionists on the War Committee would further delay the issue.27 That it did not was due to the fact that the conscriptionists, led by Lloyd George and Bonar Law, promptly took 23

HLRO, Long to Bonar Law, 30 May 1915, Bonar Law Papers, 50/3/69; Montagu to Hankey, 22 March 1915, Hankey Papers, HNKY4/7; PRO, CAB 41/36/45 and /51. Asquith to HM the King, 23 September and 11 November 1915; PRO, CAB 37/136/30, Selborne to Cabinet, 18 October 1915; PRO, FO 800/95, Cecil to Grey, 20 September 1915; HLRO, Carson to Bonar Law, 7 September 1915, Bonar Law Papers, 51/3/7; Cecil to Asquith, 22 October 1915, Asquith Papers, vol. 15, fos 46-50; PRO, CAB 41/36/49, Crewe to HM the King, 22 October 1915; Jackson to de Robeck, 7 November 1915, in N A.M. Rodger (ed.), The Naval Miscellany, vol. 5 (London, 1984), p. 480. 24 Its minutes can be found in PRO, CAR 42/5-26. 25 Jellicoe to Jackson, 5 March 1916, in A. Temple Patterson (ed.), The Jellicoe Papers (London, 1968), i, p. 225. 26 PRO, CAB 42/5/20, Minutes of the War Committee, 16 November 1915; PRO, CAB 41/36/52, Asquith to HM the King, 24 November 1915; PRO, CAB 37/138/12, Curzon, The Evacuation of Gallipoli', 25 November 1915; PRO, CAB 37/139/2, Bonar Law, memorandum, 4 December 1915; R.R.James, Gallipoli (London, 1965), p. 337. 27 PRO, CAB 41/36/38, Asquith to HM the King, 11 August 1915; PRO, CAB 34/134/2, Ashley, Memorandum on the Relations between the Economic Position of the United Kingdom and Military Service, 1 September 1915; PRO, CAB 37/134/9, War Policy Committee, report, 8 September 1915; PRO, CAB 37/134/7, War Policy Committee: Supplementary Memorandum, 7 September 1915; RJ.Q. Adams, and P.P. Poirier, The Conscription Controversy in Great Britain, 1900-1918 (London, 1987), pp. 104-16.

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the argument to the full Cabinet. When the Derby scheme also failed to resolve the matter Asquith temporarily defused the crisis by conceding a preliminary measure of conscription for unmarried men. He then bought more time with a committee on the co-ordination of military and financial effort, within which the leading protagonists could debate the necessity and practicality of the policy.28 Other important issues, like Sir John French's dismissal and replacement by Haig, were taken by the Prime Minister after discussing the matter with the King and Kitchener and were not considered by either the full Cabinet or the War Committee.29 Asquith recognised that rapidity of decision-making was vital in war and that such a goal could most easily be achieved by concentrating authority in a small committee.30 In October 1915 he went even further, telling Hankey that in wartime the only really effective executive was a dictatorship.31 But the domestic political configuration within which he was forced to operate made it impossible to achieve this aim. If a sub-committee was made too small and given real executive powers it could only be done at the cost of offending one or more of the competing factions within his government. Lloyd George's task was made a little easier for the coup which brought him to power also enabled him to jettison Liberal Ministers like McKenna and Runciman who, in 1915-16, had conducted a running argument with him about strategic policy. But the coup also made him the prisoner of Unionist politicians like Derby, Cecil, Long and Carson. They may have been excluded from the War Cabinet, but they still retained sufficient political power to insist that he retain Haig and Jellicoe.32 The Lloyd George War Cabinet was only a marginal improvement on its predecessor. It sometimes met more than once a day and for the first time an agenda was circulated before each meeting and minutes were kept of its discussions. At the conclusion of each meeting these were promptly sent to the departments concerned for information or action. But Lloyd George's propensity to scrap the agenda at a moment's notice was not conducive to the orderly conduct of business and meetings were not always conducted in a businesslike manner.33 One outsider who attended a meeting in October 1917 wrote that 28 D. French, British Strategy and War Aims, 1914-1916 (London, 1986), pp. 116-35, 169-73; Chamberlain to Bonar Law, 2 and 3 November 1915, HLRO, Bonar Law Papers 51/5/3; Selborne to Asquith, 6 August 1915, Selborne Papers, file 80, fos 34-38; Long to Bonar Law, 12 October 1915, HLRO Bonar Law Papers, 51/4/7; PRO, CAB 41/36/55, Asquith to HM the King, 15 December 1915; PRO, CAB 41/37/1, Asquith to HM the King, 1 January 1916; PRO, CAB 37/139/41, Derby, Memorandum on Recruiting , 20 December 1915; PRO, CAB 27/4, Report of the Cabinet Committee on the Co-ordination of Military and Financial Effort, 4 February 1916. 29 Repington, First World War, i, p. 90; R. Jenkins, Asquith (London, 1964), pp. 382-83; R. Holmes The Link Field Marshal: SirJohn French (London, 1981), p. 310. 30 Asquith to Lloyd George, 1 December 1916, HLRO, Lloyd George Papers, E/2/23/10. 31 Hankey diary, 16 October 1915, Hankey Papers, HNKY1/1. 32 J. Gooch, The Plans of War: The Geneial Staff and British Military Strategy, c. 1900-1916 (London, 1974), pp. 321-23;J. Grigg, Lloyd George: From Peace to War, 1912-1916 (London, 1985), pp. 480-81, 498; Blake, The Unknown Prime Minister, p. 340. 33 K. Middlemas (ed.), Thomas Jones: Whitehall Diary, i, 1916-1925 (London, 1969), p. 22.

82

Government and the Armed Forces, 1856-1990 The War Cabinet was not edifying. They could not concentrate on a subject for more than two minutes, wandered from French operations to the calibre of American guns. LI. George made one or two little speeches, Arthur Balfour seemed to wake up once or twice, and said 'I tell you what, I will write to Col. House about it', although no one wanted him to. Curzon talked so loud to his neighbour on other subjects that he had to be asked to stop, Carson standing with his back to the fire made the most extraordinary faces, - W.R. [Robertson] brought them back to their point by asking me again 'How did you say Gen. Pétain intended to end the war?' Apparently they were all really thinking of the meeting of Parliament tomorrow. Afterwards I said to W.R. that I should not think it a very good show and he said 'They were very good today. You should see them after an air raid.'34

To insiders the Lloyd George War Cabinet was not noticeably more purposeful than its predecessor. After ten months as a minister under Lloyd George, Churchill admitted that, 'the War Cabinet never do anything until forced by circumstances to do it'.35 It was an undoubted fact that an aura of purposefulness and efficiency surrounded the Lloyd George War Cabinet which had never surrounded its predecessors. This was in no small part due to the work of Hankey's War Cabinet secretariat. This organisation had its roots in the secretariat of the CID and the secretariat which Hankey had organised to service the various Cabinet committees Asquith had established.36 Beginning on Christmas Day 1914 Hankey had submitted a series of papers to the War Council and Dardanelles Committee. Their cogency, together with a report he presented to the Dardanelles Committee in August 1915 after a personal reconnaissance of the Allied position at Gallipoli, so raised his status that henceforth he served not only as the head of the Cabinet committees' secretariat but also as the personal adviser to the Prime Minister.37 Indeed, before the re-establishment of the General Staff in London in September 1915, Hankey had been one of the few sources of professional military advice to the Asquith Cabinet. He also had an impact on the party politics of the war, for in December 1915 he did more than anyone to find a compromise between the pro- and anti-conscriptionists and so prevented the Asquith coalition from 34

Clive diary, 15 October 1917, Clive Papers, II/4. Derby diary, 4 June 1918, Derby Papers, 920 DER (17) 28/1/1. 36 PRO, GAB 23/1/WC1 and WC10, War Cabinet, 9 and 18 December 1916; J.F. Naylor, The Establishment of the Cabinet Secretariat', HistmicalJournal, 14 (1971), pp. 783-804; Turner, 'Cabinets, Committees and Secretariats', pp. 69-76; Grigg, Lloyd George, pp. 488-90; Lord Hankey, The Supreme Command, 1914-1918 (London, I960), ii, pp. 589-91; Hankey diary, 12 December 1916, Hankey Papers, HNKY1/1; Hankey to Lloyd George, 14 December 1916, HLRO, Lloyd George Papers F/23/1; R. Adelson, Mark Sykes: Portrait oj an Amateur (London, 1975), pp. 106-23, 175-216. 37 Gooch, Plans of War, pp. 309, 315; S. Roskill, Ilankey: Man of Secrets (London, 1970), i, p. 211; PRO, CAB, 37/122/194, Hankey, memorandum, 28 December 1914; PRO, CAB 42/1/8, Hankey, 'The War: Attack on the Dardanelles', 2 February 1915; PRO, CAB 42/2/1, Hankey, 'After the Dardanelles', 1 March 1915; PRO, CAB 42/3/19/G-19, Hankey, The Dardanelles. Memorandum on the Situation', 30 August 1915; PRO, CAB 42/3/26, Hankey, The Position in the Balkans: Note by the Secretary, Prepared by Direction of the Prime Minister', 21 September 1915. 35

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collapsing.38 Although he owed his earlier advancement to Asquith, he found no difficulty in shifting his loyalty to Lloyd George. His influence grew under Lloyd George when he held a post at the very centre of the government. He saw the Prime Minister more frequently than any Cabinet Minister, he attended every important Cabinet and Cabinet committee and he kept the minutes of all the most secret meetings.39 Not only was Hankey immensely industrious but he was also the soul of discretion, always careful to avoid arousing the jealousy of existing departments by seeming to encroach on their responsibilities. This danger became even more acute in 1917-18 when Lloyd George repeatedly turned to him for expert advice on military matters but he managed to maintain the trust of all parties, a fact which sometimes enabled him to act as a mediator between them when tempers had become frayed.40 The War Cabinet secretariat existed to, 'secure full communication between the executive authority vested in the War Cabinet and the departments, which were charged with carrying out Cabinet decisions'.41 Its minutes, when they had been initialled by the Prime Minister and printed, were circulated to relevant departments and a handful of senior ministers and had the force of War Cabinet orders.42 The minutes of a handful of meetings at which especially sensitive issues concerned with forthcoming military operations or diplomatic policy were discussed, were not printed. These 'A' series minutes were kept in manuscript by Hankey and a single copy was retained in his office for future reference.43 Even Hankey's legendary energy could not prevent War Cabinet business from becoming periodically congested as in the days of Asquith. The solution which Lloyd George adopted was not new. By March 1915 the Asquith Cabinet had already spawned thirty-eight committees to oversee the conduct of particular areas of business created by the war.44 Lloyd George merely adopted the same expedient only on a larger scale. In theory departmental ministers ran the war under the War Cabinet's aegis and were supposed to bring to its attention only the most vital questions. But the institutional framework which Lloyd George created, and especially the multiplication of new ministries, provided ample scope for ministers and their officials to bicker over policy options. T spent 38 Hankey to McKenna, 28 December 1915, McKenna Papers, MCKN 5/9; Hankey diary entries 29 and 30 December 1915, Hankey Papers, HNKY1/1. 39 Turner, 'Cabinets, Committees and Secretariats', pp. 69-76. 40 Roskill, Hankey, i, passim. 41 J.F. Naylor, A Man and an Institution: Sir Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretariat and the Custody of Cabinet Secrecy (Cambridge, 1984), p. 16. 42 PRO, CAB 37/161/14, War Cabinet, Revised Draft for Consideration, 11 December 1916. Those Ministers outside the War Cabinet who received complete copies of the War Cabinet's minutes were the Secretaries of State for Foreign Affairs, Colonies, India and War, the Ministers of Blockade and Munitions, and the President of the Board of Trade. The GIGS and the First Sea Lord were similarly privileged. (Naylor, A Man and an Institution, p. 38.) 43 Thornton diary, 11 June 1917, Milner Papers, dep. 23/1. Copies of these minutes can be found in PRO, CAB 23/13 and 14 44 PRO, CAB 42/2/2, CID Paper 214B. List of committees appointed to consider questions arising during the present war, 1 March 1915.

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from 10.30am til 6.15pm on the War Council [sic] yesterday and decided nothing Jellicoe informed Beatty on 28 December 1916.45 In 1917, to avoid being swamped by business, the War Cabinet devolved an increasing amount of its work to sub-committees and itself came to act more as a supervisor regulating their decisions than as a plenary body taking decisions itself.46 Sometimes individual War Cabinet ministers were given charge of particular areas of policy. In February 1917 Curzon was placed in charge of a committee of civil servants to regulate imports, in August Milner and Barnes were given charge of settling labour disputes and in September Smuts chaired another committee to allocate resources between manufacturing departments. On other occasions particularly momentous and sensitive issues were remitted to ad hoc subcommittees of War Cabinet Ministers. Between June and July 1917 the War Policy Cabinet Committee deliberated on whether to mount an offensive in Flanders, or switch resources to Italy, or await the arrival of the Americans in France; whilst in December 1917 the Cabinet Committee on Manpower considered not just the manpower budget for 1918 but the whole strategy Britain should pursue in the coming year.47 Finally, in 1918 a number of permanent standing sub-committees were established to oversee major areas of policy. The most important of these were the Eastern Committee, presided over by Curzon, which determined British policy in Palestine, Mesopotamia and Persia, and the X-committee of Lloyd George, Milner and Sir Henry Wilson, created in May 1918 to have daily control of military policy.48 Each new committee further detracted from the War Cabinet's claim to concentrate all important decisions in its own hands. There was one major respect in which the Lloyd George regime did mark a break with that of its predecessor. The war witnessed a significant alteration in the relationship between the dominions and the imperial government. Before 1914 Asquith and the Colonial Office had agreed that, whatever other concessions they had to make to colonial autonomy, the imperial government would retain control of the empire's foreign and defence policy. In 1914 the July crisis burst upon the government in London too rapidly to enable them to consult the dominion governments even had they wished to do so. They correctly assumed that Britain's declaration of war on Germany would automatically pledge India and the dominions. The white English-speaking peoples of the empire were drawn into the war not only by sentimental ties of kith and kin but also by the realisation that if Germany won the war they would be amongst

45

Temple Patterson (ed.), Jellicoe Papers, ii, p. 127. Tvirner, 'Cabinets, Committees and Secretariats', pp. 63-67. 47 PRO, CAB 27/6, Report of the War Policy Cabinet Committee, 10 August 1917; PRO, CAB 24/4/G-185, Report of the Cabinet Committee on Manpower, 9 January 1918. 48 PRO, CAB 23/5/WC363 and WC369, Minutes of the War Cabinet 11 and 21 March 1918; PRO, CAB 24/45/GT3905, Curzon, Eastern Committee, 13 March 1918; PRO, CAB 23/5/WC411, War Cabinet, 14 May 1918. The papers of the Eastern Committee will be found in PRO, CAB 27/22-39 and the minutes of the X-committee are in PRO, CAB 23/17. 46

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the spoils of its victory.49 Only amongst the Boers of South Africa and the francophone population of Canada were serious doubts expressed about whether they should fight on Britain's side. However, by late 1916 the heavy losses their forces had suffered at Gallipoli and on the Somme made even Anglophile colonial leaders anxious for an opportunity to have some say in directing the empire's strategic policy. At the same time, the entry of the Milnerite imperialists into the inner recesses of government in December 1916 meant that there were leaders in London anxious to invite them. Even before the war the Milnerites had insisted that Britain's survival as a great power would depend upon establishing a closer union with the self-governing portions of the empire. As part of this process they wanted to establish a new imperial Cabinet and Parliament in London to control the empire's foreign and defence policy. They had their opportunity when Lloyd George called two sessions of the new Imperial War Cabinet between February and May 1917 and June and November 1918. The Milnerities hoped that the establishment of an Imperial War Cabinet might be the first step in transforming their dream of a politically consolidated and autarkic empire into reality. But the political leaders of the dominions had different agendas. Massey of New Zealand and Hughes of Australia (who only attended the 1918 sessions) came determined to lambast the War Office for their generalship and the British government for their failure to defend their own Pacific interests against the Japanese. Sir Robert Borden, the Canadian premier, was equally determined that the dominions ought to be given some share in the formulation of imperial strategy and, like General Jan Smuts, the South African Defence Minister who attended the meetings of the Imperial War Cabinet in place of his premier Louis Botha, was determined to resist any attempts by the British government towards imposing closer imperial unity upon them.50 On balance the dominions gained at least as much from the meetings as the British. The meetings of the Imperial War Cabinet did enable the home government to squeeze more resources from the dominions and India, but only at the cost of allowing the former to assert themselves. In July 1918 the dominion Prime Ministers won the right to circumvent the Colonial Office and communicate directly with Lloyd George.51 The result, as Derby explained to Haig, was that, 'we must look upon them in the light in which they wish to be looked upon rather than the light in which we should wish to do so. They look upon themselves not as part and parcel of the English army 49

R. Hyam, 'The Colonial Office Mind, 1900-1914', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 8 (1979), pp. 31-55; P. Hayes, 'British Foreign Policy and the Influence of Empire, 1870-1920', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 12 (1984), pp. 112-13. 50 D.C. Watt, 'Imperial Defence Policy and Imperial Foreign Policy, 1911-1939: A Neglected Paradox?', Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies, 1 (1961-63), p. 268; J. Turner, Lloyd George's Secretariat (Cambridge, 1980), p. 127; N. Mansergh, The Commonwealth Expedience, i, The Durham Report to the Anglo-Irish Treaty (London, 1969/82), pp. 195-98; K. Inghamjan Christian Smuts: The Conscience of South Africa (London, 1986), pp. 90-91. 51 PRO, CAB 23/41/IWC26, IWC 27 and IWC28, Minutes of the Imperial War Cabinet, 23, 25 and 30 July 1918.

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but as allies beside us'.52 By the end of the war the dominions could not be taken for granted any more, a fact symbolised in 1919 when each of them acceded to the peace treaties as a separate nation.53 This was the administrative framework within which the two main areas of conflict in civil-military relations were fought out. They were how to determine the proper spheres of competence of the civil authorities on the one hand and their naval and military advisers on the other, and how best to harmonise British policy with that of her allies. Asquith's critics disparaged him as, 'a callous cynical blackguard - and a liar -who is physically and mentally incapable of action . . ,'54 Lloyd George's critics frequently damned him as an amateur strategist. Both charges were wide of the mark. Asquith was temperamentally ill-suited to play the role of a populist war leader. The war filled him with sadness and he had no sympathy for the jingoistic excesses which produced phenomena like the 'spy-fever' of 1914-15. The war did nothing to alter his preference for the time-consuming process of creating consensus within his party and Cabinet rather than leading from the front.55 As the war progressed he became increasingly tired. He had been in high office since 1906 and was badly shaken by the death of his eldest son on the Somme in September 1916.56 Public disquiet with his style of war leadership was reflected by one society hostess who asked him, 'Do you take an interest in the War?'57 When Asquith confessed to Sir John French that, 'he knew nothing of strategy', he did not mean that he was blind to the relationship between military and naval means and political ends, only that he knew nothing of the technical problems involved in moving soldiers and ships across the globe.58 Most policymakers made a clear distinction between 'policy' - the political ends which the government was seeking to achieve, 'diplomacy' — the arts of persuading foreign 52

R. Blake (ed.), The Private Papéis of Douglas Haig, 1914-1919 (London, 1952), p. 266; D. Morton, 'Junior but Sovereign Allies: The Transformation of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, 1914-1918', in N. Hilmer and P. Wigley (eds), The First British Commonwealth: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Mansergh (London, 1980), pp. 56-64. 53 R.C. Snelling, 'Peacemaking, 1919: Australia, New Zealand and the British Empire Delegation at Versailles', Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 4 (1975), pp. 15-16. 54 Henry Wilson to Milner, 22 March 1916, Milner Papers, dep. 352; see also Barnes and Nicholson (eds), The Leo Amej-y Diaries, i, p. 123; G.A. Craig, The Political Leader as Strategist' in P. Paret (ed.), Makers of Modern Strategy from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age (Oxford, 1986), pp. 485-86; Jenkins, Asquith, p. 387. 55 M. and E. Brock (eds), H.H. Asquith: Letters to Venetia Stanley (Oxford, 1982), pp. 151, 162, 163, 277, 302; PRO, 30/57/76/WR/34, Asquith to Kitchener, 10 January 1916. 5f ' Asquith to Haig, 8 October 1916, Haig Papers, Ace. 3155/108;J. Vincent (ed.), The Crawford Papéis: The Journals of David Lindsay, Tiüenty-Sevmth Earl of Crawford and Tenth Earl of Balcanes, 1870-1940, during the years 1892-1940 (Manchester, 1984), p. 360; A.S. Link (ed.), The Papers ofWoodrow Wilson (Princeton, 1982), xxxviii, p. 256. 57 Brock (eds), H.H. Asquith, p. 395. 58 French diary, 8 July 1915, French Papers, vol. 50.

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governments to work to support British policy, and 'strategy' - the use of naval and military force to achieve that policy.59 Nor did Asquith's reluctance to give a clear lead in formulating strategy mean he was without preferences. On 30 December 1914 the fact that he was, 'profoundly dissatisfied with the immediate prospect - an enormous waste of life and money day after day with no appreciable progress' opened the way for the members of the War Council to suggest alternatives to fighting on the Western Front and culminated in the Gallipoli campaign.60 In January and February 1915 he supported the Dardanelles campaign because at one stroke he believed it would assist Russia, persuade the Balkan states to join the Entente and give the western powers access to Russian wheat.61 In June 1915, following a visit to GHQ, he inaugurated a review of British strategy in France which led to the first Anglo-French summit conference of the war.62 In the summer and autumn of 1915 he deliberately prevaricated over conscription because he shared the widespread fear that if too many men were placed in uniform Britain might go bankrupt before Germany was defeated, and because he was afraid it would shatter national unity.63 In March 1916 he rejected out of hand the public agitation that Fisher should return to the Admiralty. A month later he insisted that France be given a loan lest their government should fall and in June he sanctioned an attempt by Basil Zaharoff to bribe the Young Turks to make peace.64 Despite the fears of his political enemies, and tired as he was by late 1916, he remained opposed to any acceptance of a compromise peace with Germany.65 As a war leader Asquith was a facilitator, someone who enabled others to take the initiative. He thus stood on a different plane to his successor. Lloyd George was not only a master of the political arts of persuasion and intrigue, he also tried to be a strong executive and he relished debate, frankly admitting to Robertson that, 'you must not ask me to play the part of a mere dummy. I am not in the least suited for the part'.66 But he also possessed the defects of these strengths. He had little time for colleagues who lacked his mental nimbleness in debate. Once he had made up his mind he could only see one side of a question and he was sometimes dangerously prone to wishful thinking.67 He aroused a quite extraordinary degree of animus in some of his service advis59

See, for example, Robertson to Repington, 31 October 1916, Robertson Papers, 1/33/73. Brock (eds), H.H. Asquith, p. 346. 61 PRO, CAB 19/33. Dardanelles Commission: Minutes of Evidence, question. 5793. (Asquith). 62 Asquith, Note Prepared after Visit to SirJ. French, [2 June 1915]. Asquith Papers 27, fol. 266. 63 PRO, FO 800/100, Asquith to Grey, 21 July 1915; Hankey diary, 18 September 1915, Hankey Papers, HNKY1/1; Asquith to Balfour, 18 September 1915, Asquith Papers, 28, fos 162-67. 64 Haig diary, 14 April 1916, Haig Papers, Ace. 3155/105; Hankey diary 2 June 1916, Hankey Papers, HNKY1/1. 65 Haig diary 6 and 7 September 1916, Haig Papers, Ace. 3155/108. 66 D.R. Woodward (ed.), The Military Correspondence of Field-Marshal Sir William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, December 1915 to February 1918 (London, 1989), p. 96. G7 J.M. McEwen (ed.), TheRiddellDiaries, 1908-1923 (London, 1986), pp. 238-39. 60

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ers. Beatty referred to him as a 'dirty dog', Robertson once privately dismissed him as, 'an under-bred swine'.68 Even Hankey privately thought that he was less than totally honest when it suited him. His apparent inability to, 'give systematic attention to anything unless kept up to it by his colleagues', imposed an added and unwanted burden on them.69 Whilst Lloyd George was pitifully ignorant of most things concerned with geography and logistics, he was not an amateur strategist nor did he begin the war with an instinctive animus against professional soldiers.70 However, after nearly two years of war he had begun to suspect that the higher echelons of the army were filled by jobbery rather than by merit. The five months he spent in the summer and autumn of 1916 as a reluctant Secretary of State for War convinced him that Robertson's refusal to relinquish the powers he had enjoyed under Kitchener had left the Secretary impotent, but still responsible to Parliament.71 In October 1916 he exclaimed to the military correspondent of The Times that, 'we were all asked to keep silent and bow the knee to this military Moloch, but that he was responsible, and as he would have to take the blame, he meant to have his own way'.72 Lloyd George's understanding of the scope of strategy extended beyond that of many of his professional advisers. Even before the Somme he exhibited a keener appreciation than most ministers of the bond between domestic morale and military victory. As early as January 1915 he had recognised that the New Armies, unlike the pre-war regulars, were deeply rooted in the community. Heavy casualties which secured no apparent gains would soon sap popular support for continuing the war. As a politician who prided himself on interpreting the wishes of the people, he was, throughout the war, keenly aware that the public would demand tangible victories as justification for the sacrifices they were undergoing.73 Privately by late 1916 he feared that a strong peace party might emerge in Britain if losses on the scale of the Somme were repeated in 1917.74 In February 1917 he was enraged by comments Haig was reported to have made to the French press that the forthcoming Allied offensive would 68

Robertson to Kiggell, 9 August 1917, Kiggell Papers, IV/9; Beatty to wife, 15 December 1915, in Ranft (ed.), Beatty Papers, i, p. 386. 69 Thornton diary, 24 April and 7 July 1917, Milner Papers, dep. 23/1. 70 Riddell, Lord Rtdddl's War Diary, p. 146; Lloyd George to Haig, 8 February 1916, Haig Papers, Ace. 3155/104. 71 T. Wilson (ed.), The Political Diaries o/C.P. Scott, 1911-1918 (London, 1970), p. 219; HLRO, Lloyd George to Asquith, 17 June 1916, Lloyd George Papers, D/18/2/19; Robertson to Lloyd George, 24 June 1916, Robertson Papers, 1/19/1; Lloyd George to Robertson, 26June 1916, Robertson Papers, 1/19/3; Grigg, Lloyd George, pp. 356-60. 72 Repington, The First World War, i, p. 374; Hankey diary 28 October 1916, Hankey Papers, HNKY1/1. 73 PRO, CAB 41/1/8, Lloyd George, The War: Suggestions as to the Military Position, 1 January 1915. 74 PRO, CAB 28/1, Statement Drafted by Mr Lloyd George as a Basis for the Prime Minister's Statement at the Paris Conference on November 15 1916; Riddell, Lord Riddell's War Diary, pp. 219-20.

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lead to certain victory. He feared that if Haig's prediction did not come true the public would be plunged into despondency.75 The First World War was one of the few occasions when the allocation of money between the services was not a major bone of contention. In January 1915 the Treasury decided that celerity in securing the delivery of munitions must take priority over considerations of economy.76 By the time Lloyd George became Prime Minister the distribution of manpower rather than money between the services and essential civilian functions had become the major flash-point in civil-military relations. Lloyd George recognised the need to strike a balance between their competing demands but it was one of his greatest failures as a war leader that he never persuaded his military colleagues of that fact. Robertson avoided these hard issues by fulminating at the War Cabinet's apparent lack of moral courage when the Army's full demands were not met.77 The senior soldiers and sailors who acted with their political colleagues to devise British strategy occupied an ambiguous position in the First World War. Their predecessors had once been able to justify their elevated status by claiming that they provided models of heroic leadership. But now the man on a white horse had to give way to the man who sat at a desk. Even the flamboyant Beatty could not escape being, 'glued to desk'.78 This was a cause of regret for many officers and some generals symbolically rebelled against the transformation by continuing to wear spurs and riding breeches.79 They tried to justify their power by insisting that they were the possessors of particular professional skills which were so arcane that no civilian could hope to understand them; given their suspicion that 'politicians only do things to retain popularity and votes', no civilian should have the right to question their skills.80Jellicoe lamented the amount of time he had to spend, 'in endeavouring to show amateur strategists the impossibility of their ideas', and Wemyss wrote of, 'the politicians and their ignorance of affairs naval'.81 Jellicoe expressed disquiet about the First Lord, Sir Eric Geddes, in December 1917 because he, 'is of course profoundly ignorant of the navy though good at railways'.82 In October 1916 Robertson explained the terms upon which he believed soldiers and statesmen could best

75

Derby to Lloyd George, 19 and 20 February 1917, Derby Papers, 920 DER (17) 27/2. French, British Economic and Strategic Planning, 1905-1915, p. 134. 77 Robertson to Milner, 27 September 1917, Milner Papers, 45. 78 Beatty to wife, 15 December 1916, quoted in Ranft (ed.), Beatty Papers, i, p. 386. 79 See the photographs of Haig at the Doullens Conference in April 1918, printed opposite page 191 of J. Terraine, Douglas Haig: The Educated Soldier (London, 1963), and of Robertson leaving the Hôtel Grillon in Paris after a conference in 1917, printed opposite page 203 in BonhamCarter, Soldier True. 80 Beatty to wife, 4 February 1918, in Ranft (ed.), Beatty Papers, i, p. 430. 81 Wemyss to Beatty, 30 March 1918, in Ranft (ed.), Beatty Papers, i, p. 524; Temple Patterson (ed.), Jellicoe Papers, ii, p. 181. 82 Temple Patterson (ed.), Jellicoe Papers, ii, p. 241 ; K. Grieves, Sir Eñe Geddes: Business and Government in War and Peace (Manchester, 1989), p. 52. 76

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co-operate, insisting that, 'politicians and soldiers must each keep within their respective sphere', and that Where the politician goes wrong is in wanting to know the why and the wherefore of the soldier's proposals, and of making the latter the subject of debate and argument across a table. You then have the man who knows but who cannot talk discussing important questions with the man who can talk but does not know, with the result that the man who knows usually gets defeated in argument and things are done which his instinct tells him are bad.83

It was the professionals' claim to possess expertise which the politicians had no right to question which was the cause of so much of the tension in civil-military relations. It was the absence of sufficient mutual respect between so many of them, especially during the Lloyd George regime, which made those tensions so difficult to resolve. Senior officers tried to distance themselves from political interference by maintaining that they were servants of the monarch not of the politicians. In this they were aided and abetted by George V. When Haig became Commanderin-Chief of the BEF the King wrote promising him his support and hoping that, 'you will from time to time write to me quite freely'.84 The King believed he had a duty to help protect senior officers from meddlesome politicians and retained certain prerogative powers, described by Asquith only half seriously as, 'a sort of "divine right of King's prerogative"', to be consulted about senior military and naval appointments.85 The royal household became a conduit for the exchange of information about the talents of senior officers. It was that function, rather than the role of plotter in chief, which George V played in the events which led to the dismissal of Sir John French in December 1915.86 His was only one voice amongst a veritable cacophony calling for French's dismissal. When opinion in the political world about the merits of a particular commander was divided, as i t was about Haig in March 1917, the King tried hard to avoid becoming involved in contentious political issues, recognising that if he did, 'The King's position would then be very difficult'.87 The King's influence did not go beyond the right to be consulted, to advise and to warn. In private Asquith patronised him, writing that, 'I don't know a better reflection than his talk of what one imagines to be for the moment the average opinion of the man in the tube'.88 He appointed Fisher as First Sea Lord in October 1914 despite the King's expressed misgivings and in May 1915 he hardly needed to be told by George V that Fisher's behaviour made it impos83 Robertson to Repington, 31 October 1916, Robertson Papers, 1/33/73; see also PRO, CAB 17/150, Hankey to Lloyd George, 22 May 1916. 84 J. de Groot, Douglas Haig, 1861-1928 (London, 1988), p. 213. 85

Brock (eds.), Hll. Asquith, p. 297. Holmes, The LittkField Marshal, pp. 299, 308, 310-12. 87 De Groot, Haig, p. 308. 88 Brock (eds), H.H. Asquith, p. 487. 86

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sible for him to remain at the Admiralty.89 In December 1917 Geddes sought the King's approval to dismiss Jellicoe, but only after Lloyd George and Bonar Law had agreed to his departure.90 In February 1918 George V could not save Robertson from Lloyd George's manoeuvres to force him into resignation. When Lloyd George threatened to resign if King George did not agree to Robertson's dismissal, the King quickly assured the Prime Minister through Lord Stamfordham that he had no such wish.91 The King learnt of Trenchard's removal in April 1918 from the press.92 George V had even less influence over political appointments. In November 1915 Asquith delayed informing the King for six days of the composition of the new War Committee and in June 1916 George V had to accept Lloyd George at the War Office instead of his own choice, Austen Chamberlain.93 The King regretted the exchange of Lloyd George for Asquith in December 1916 but could do nothing to prevent it.94 As Prime Minister Lloyd George recognised the King's readiness to side with Haig and Robertson against him and therefore tried to keep him as much as possible in the dark about decisions likely to displease him. Thus he took care to inform him of the Calais agreement subordinating the BEF to the French general Nivelle only after the War Cabinet had agreed to it.95 Haig's survival as Commanderin-Chief in 1917-18 owed little to royal patronage and far more to Lloyd George's inability to find a plausible replacement.96 As specialists in the management of violence, senior soldiers and sailors believed that they alone were competent to judge such matters as the size, organisation and equipment needs of the army and navy.97 Their political colleagues were content to accept their claims until they manifestly failed in their performance. Then, like Milner, they bewailed, 'the fact that the Allies had no really great General' and tried to put matters to rights themselves.98 The first nine months of the war represented the closest the British came to running the war as a 'one-man show', for the control of strategic policy fell into the hands of just three men, Kitchener, Churchill and Fisher. In August 1914 Asquith neatly tried to sidestep the issue of the proper relationship between the professionals and the politicians by appointing Lord Kitchener, the empire's most distinguished 89 AJ. Marder, From the Dreadnought to ScapaFlow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era, 1904-1919, ii, The War Years: To the Eve of Jutland (Oxford, 1965), p. 286; Brock (eds), H.H. Asquith, p. 298. 90 Grieves, Sir Eric Geddes, p. 50. 91 Lord Beaverbrook, Men ami Power, 1917-18 (London, 1956), p. 412; Hankey diary, 16 February 1918, Hankey Papers, HNKY1/3. 92 K. Rose, King George V(London, 1983), pp. 205-6, 207; Hankey diary, 15 April 1918, Hankey Papers, HNKY1/3. 93 Hankey diary, 10 June 1916, Hankey Papers, HNKY 1/1; PRO, CAB 41/36/51, Asquith to HM the King, 11 November 1915. 94 Rose, George V, pp. 197-98. 95 Ibid., pp. 202-3. 96 Hankey diary, 8 April 1918, Hankey Papers, HNKY 1/3; Hankey diary, 23 July 1918, Hankey Papers, HNKY 1/5; PRO, CAB 23/17/X-21, Minutes of the X-committee, 16 July 1918. 97 Finer, Man on Horseback, p. 23. 98 Thornton diary, 11 December 1916 and 15 January 1917, Milner Papers, dep. 23/1.

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serving soldier other than Lord Roberts, as Secretary of State for War. His experiment met with mixed success. Kitchener was naturally autocratic and secretive and his ministerial colleagues soon found that, 'Were it not for Winston and L.G. asking Kitchener questions we should have precious little enlightenment on military questions.'99 It was Kitchener's failure to live up to his role as a latter-day Napoleon and Fisher's failure to be a second Nelson that created the first major debates on where the role of professional soldiers and sailors ended and that of their political masters began. When the 'shell crisis' of May 1915 showed that the War Office could not provide the munitions the expanding army needed, the Asquith Coalition took control of munitions production out of the hands of the War Office and gave it to a new civilian organisation, the Ministry of Munitions. The ministry marked the first major intrusion of civilian businessmen and managers into an area of administration which hitherto had been within the sphere of competence of the professionals and it evoked mixed reactions from them.100 Both Kitchener and the Master-General of the Ordnance, Sir Stanley Von Donop, resented the way in which they had been treated, especially after the latter was pilloried in the Commons in July 1915 and Lloyd George pointedly refused to defend him.101 By contrast soldiers in the field looked upon the new creation more benignly for, after considerable teething troubles in 1915-16, it began to deliver munitions in massive quantities.102 When disaster beckoned at the Dardanelles and in the Balkans in the autumn of 1915 and pressure on him to disgorge more information grew, Kitchener reacted by ordering Hamilton not to telegraph his plans to London lest ministers might learn from them. He also suppressed at least one paper written by the General Staff on a possible German attack in Serbia.103 As a consequence he lost the confidence of most of his colleagues but, as he was still held in awe by the public, Asquith dared not dismiss him. Instead he removed him from London

99 Emmott diary, 4January 1915, Emmott Papers. HNKYSee also Hankey to Esher, 20 November 1914, Hankey Papers HNKY4/7; Sir C.E. Callwell, Expediences of a Dug-Out, 1914-1918 (London, 1920), pp. 49-50; Naylor, A Man and an Institution, pp. 10-11; Hankey diary, 11 September 1915, Hankey Papers, HNKY1/1; PRO, 30/57/76/WR/18, Kitchener to Asquith, 22 August 1915. 100 Grieves, Sir Eñe Geddes, p. 5; D. French, The Military Background to the "Shell Crisis" of May 1915', Journal of Strategic Studies, 2 (1979), pp. 192-205; RJ.Q. Adams, Arms and the Wizard: Lloyd George and the Ministry of Munitions (London, 1978), passim; CJ. Wrigley, 'The Ministry of Munitions: An Innovatory Department', in K. Burk (ed.), War and the State: The Transformation of British Government, 1914-1919 (London, 1982), pp. 32-40; HMSO, History of the Ministry of Munitions (London, n.d.), ii, part 2, pp. 3-13, 25. 101 G.H. Cassar, Kitchener: Architect of Victory (London, 1977), pp. 384-86; Asquith to Crewe, 4 July 1915, Asquith Papers, 46, fol. 214. 102 Blake (ed.), The Private Papers of Douglas Haig, p. 307. 103 Hankey diary 11 September 1915, Hankey Papers, HNKY1/1; Percy to Wilson, 14September 1915, Wilson Papers, 73/1/19.

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by sending him on a personal reconnaissance of the Mediterranean whilst himself temporarily filling the War Office.104 At the same time as the War Office was beginning to shed its responsibilities for munitions production, the Admiralty was torn apart by the inability of Churchill and Fisher to work in harmony. The Naval War Staff was only two years old when the war broke out and the Admiralty never overcame the handicap that, unlike the Army, it lacked even a cadre of pre-war trained staff officers. This enabled Churchill to impose his own notions of command and control on the Admiralty by establishing a small war staff group, consisting of himself, the First and Second Sea Lords, the Chief of the War Staff and the Secretary of the Admiralty, to control naval operations. In October 1914 the First Sea Lord, Prince Louis of Battenberg, was hounded from office and replaced by the elderly but still redoubtable Lord Fisher. Like Kitchener, Fisher little understood the need for a proper staff, claiming that, Tn the history of the world a Junta has never won! You want one man'.105 Although he saw one of his functions as being to prevent the impetuous Churchill from mounting dangerously unsound operations, he did not think to do so by organising the staff and using it to check the First Lord.106 The formation of the War Group meant that the junior Sea Lords had little influence over strategic policy. In the winter and spring of 1914-15 the War Group became a focus for discussions about possible naval offensive operations against Germany, but its members failed to produce a single proposal upon which they could all agree.107 Temperamentally both Fisher and Churchill were too autocratic to be able to work happily in harness. Churchill insisted that, as he alone was responsible to Parliament for the conduct of Admiralty business, so he had the right to intervene in the daily conduct of operations. He even went further and issued operational orders before consulting the First Sea Lord.108 There was nothing unconstitutional in his behaviour but it did run contrary to the accepted practice and Fisher increasingly resented his interference, especially as, unlike Churchill, he had little time for a large-scale and purely naval operation at the Dardanelles. But he was now both a tired man and one whose professionalism decreed that he ought not to contradict his political superior in front of other politicians. Consequently, Asquith was hardly aware of his growing fears that the operation might lead to the dangerous deple104 Hankey diary, 9 and 16 October and 1 November 1915, Hankey Papers, HNKY1/1; PRO, CAB 41/36/51, Asquith to HM the King, 11 November 1915. 105 Fisher to Churchill, 3 January 1915, in AJ. Marder (ed.), Fear God and DreadNought: The Correspondence ofAdmíralo/the Fleet Lord Fisher of Kilverstone, iii, Restoration, Abdication and Last Years, 1914-1920 (London, 1959), p. 117. 106 R.F. Mackay, Fisher of Kilverstone (Oxford, 1973), pp. 457-58. 107 Ibid., pp. 473, 493. For the worries of the junior Sea Lords that the Dardanelles might dangerously deplete the Grand Fleet in the North Sea, see Gilbert (ed.), Winston S. Churchill, iii, Companion, Part 1 (London, 1971), pp. 782-83. 108 Fisher to Jellicoe, 20 December 1914 in AJ. Marder (ed.), Fear God and Dread Nought, iii, p. 99; Marder, From the Dreadnought to ScapaFlow, ii, pp. 268-72.

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tion of the Grand Fleet in the North Sea until Fisher's dramatic resignation in May 1915.109 The middle years of the war saw attempts to run the war by political committees advised by professional soldiers and sailors. These attempts were less than completely successful because the professional soldiers involved still hankered after semi-dictatorial powers; and the professional sailors were out of their depth in Whitehall. The General Staff was reconstituted in London in September 1915 when the Dardanelles Committee, having presided over a series of failures, decided it was sorely in need of professional military advice.110 Its second head, Sir William Robertson, took office in December 1915 after his predecessor had proven incapable of standing up to Kitchener.111 Robertson was a man of strong will-power and no little political guile. His notorious inarticulateness was deceptive for, unlike Haig, who was genuinely inarticulate, Robertson sometimes pretended to be in order to stifle the machinations of people whom he regarded as amateur strategists.112 In committees, after stating his preferred plan, he refused to be 'led into no more argument, and especially into no verbal argument, as to other plans'. This was a preference he shared with Jellicoe.113 Robertson believed that the Cabinet should choose professional advisers in whom they had confidence and follow their advice without question until they lost that confidence. 'War', he wrote in November 1915, 'is a one-man show, and that it is quite impossible for you or anyone else to conduct this war unless you are allowed to conduct it in your own way'.114 Before becoming CIGS Robertson insisted that henceforth the War Committee was to receive military advice only from the CIGS, and it was the CIGS, rather than the Secretary of State, who should sign all operational directives issued under the authority of the

109 pRQ QYB 19/33. Dardanelles Commission. Minutes of Evidence, question 5788 (Asquith); Mackay, Fisher o/Kilverstone, pp. 481-89, 493-97; Gilbert (ed.), Winston S. Churchill, iii, Companion, Part 1, pp. 429-30, 451-53, 460, 700-1, 754, 781-84. 110 Wilson diary, 20 May 1915, Wilson Papers, microfilm reel 6; French diary, 23 May 1915, French Papers, vol. K; Haig diary, 26 June 1915, Haig Papers, Ace. 3155/101; Haig to Rothschilds, 30 June 1915, Haig Papers, Ace. 3155/214B; Haig to Kiggell, 1 July 1915, Kiggell Papers, II/2; Carson to Bonar Law, 5 September 1915, HLRO, Bonar Law Papers, 51/3/5; PRO, CAB 19/33, Minutes of the Dardanelles Commission, questions 23181-83 (Curzon); PRO, CAB 41/36/45, Asquith to HM the King, 22 September 1915; PRO, 30/57/76/WR21, Asquith to Kitchener, 23 September 1915. 111 PRO, CAB 42/4/2, Murray, Appreciation by the General Staff of the Actual and Prospective Situation in the Various Theatres of War, 2 October 1915; PRO, CAB 42/4/4, Murray, Appreciation by the General Staff of the Balkans and Dardanelles Situation, 6 October 1915; Gooch, Plans of War, pp. 324-26; Haig diary 17 October and 14, 23, 24 November 1915, Haig Papers Ace. 3155/103; Howell to Haig, 23 October 1915, Haig Papers, Ace. 3155/103; Callwell to Wilson, 10 December 1915, Wilson Papers, 73/1/18; Wilson (ed.), Political Diaries o/C.P. Scott, pp. 163-64. 112 Repington, TheFirst World War, i, p. 449. 113 Robertson to Murray, 30 November 1915, Robertson Papers, 1/15/7; Robertson to the Duke of Connaught, 5 April 1916, Robertson Papers, 1/35/12; Admiral Viscount Jellicoe of Scapa, The GrandFket, 1914-1916: Its Creation, Development and Work (London, 1919), p. 422. 114 Robertson to Murray, 30 November 1915, Robertson Papers, 1/15/7.

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War Committee.115 Robertson stipulated that it was the function of the War Committee, 'to formulate policy, decide on the theatres in which military operations are to be conducted, and to determine the relative importance of those theatres'. His function was to act as the War Committee's sole channel of military advice and to, 'present to the War Committee his reasoned opinion as to the military effect of the policy which they propose, and as to the means of putting this approved policy into execution'.116 Whilst Asquith was generally content to give Robertson his head in 1916, Lloyd George chafed bitterly when the CIGS sought to assert himself and looked around with increasing impatience for a way to curb his powers. The Admiralty suffered from precisely the opposite problem in 1916-17. Under the Jackson andjellicoe regimes there was a collective lack of drive at the top of the Admiralty. Jackson, damned by Robertson as 'a good mathematician', lacked both Fisher's imagination and energy and could behave tactlessly at the War Committee, although one subordinate said that he 'is a delightful man to have dealings with' .l 17 He allowed himself to become swamped by paper work and admitted that it, 'give[s] me no time for thought'.118 A flavour of his regime can be deduced from a letter he sent to Jellicoe, gently reproving him for complaining about failures in the Admiralty's construction policy. He asked him to stop because, 'it may set an example to others, and we or you may have juniors setting forth the inadequacies of their ships and complaining of their tools, instead of trying to make the most of what they have got, in the spirit of the true seamen of old'.119 Jellicoe became First Sea Lord in November 1916 after nearly two years as Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet. Balfour claimed that he gave him the job on the extraordinary grounds that, 'he was a tired man'.120 He was cautious, over centralised authority in his own hands, became immersed in detail and lacked the debating skills to prosper in Whitehall.121 Lloyd George eventually came to find his pessimism concerning the outcome of the U-boat war intolerable. His comment to the War Cabinet on 27 April that the Navy no longer enjoyed command of the seas opened the way for a major reorganisation of the higher administration of the Admiralty.122 A civilian manager, Sir 115

Kitchener to Robertson, 7 December 1915, Robertson Papers, 1/13/31; Robertson to Wigram, 11 December 1915, Robertson Papers 1/12/29; Sir W.R. Robertson, From Private to Field Marshal (London, 1921), pp. 236-43. 116 Robertson to Lloyd George 24 June 1916, HLRO, Lloyd George Papers, D/18/8/18. 117 Repington, The First World War, i, p. 392; Wemyss to Keyes, 17 July 1916, quoted in P.G. Halpern (ed.), The Keyes Papers: Selections from the Private and Official Correspondence of Admiral of the Fleet Baron Keyes ofZeebrugge (London, 1972), i, p. 365. 118 Jackson to Jellicoe, 2 September 1915, in Temple Patterson (ed.), Jellicoe Papers, i, p. 183, 119 Jackson to Jellicoe, 2 March 1916, quoted in Temple Patterson (ed.), Jellicoe Papers, i, p. 225. 120 Repington, The First World War, i, p. 394. 121 Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, iv, pp. 56-8; Temple Patterson, Jellicoe, passim; Wemyss, memoirs [n.d.], Wemyss Papers, WMYS 11. 122 PRO, CAB 24/12/GT611, Jellicoe, Submarine Danger: Naval Situation as Regards, 27 April 1917.

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Eric Geddes, was made Controller of the Navy with authority over all naval and merchantile shipbuilding. In an attempt to reduce over-centralisation and to freejellicoe from too much administration, the First Sea Lord was given a Deputy Chief of Naval Staff and Assistant Chief of Naval Staff to help him.123 But Beatty was right to suspect that the result would be, 'the same as before but with new labels', for Jellicoe still refused to delegate executive authority to his assistants and Carson refused to make him do so.124 Lloyd George therefore appointed Geddes to replace Carson and in September the new First Lord divided the Admiralty Board into two committees, Operations and Maintenance. The former consisted of the First Sea Lord, who became the Chief of Naval Staff and, like the CIGS, had powers to issue executive orders. He was assisted by the Deputy and Assistant Chiefs of Naval Staff and the Naval Staff was strengthened by establishing a new Plans Division.125 However, in practice Jellicoe still refused to delegate executive authority to his subordinates. Thus intelligence material had first to be passed from the Director of the Intelligence Division to the Director of the Operations Division and then to the Deputy Chief of Naval Staff who then showed it to Jellicoe who finally decided if, and how much of, it could be transmitted to Beatty.126 This impasse was not cleared untiljellicoe's dismissal in December 1917.127 The defects of the First Sea Lords of the middle years of the war were not compensated for by the strengths of their political masters. After Churchill's departure the First Lords were content to supervise Admiralty business without imposing their own ideas on their subordinates. Jellicoe welcomed Balfour because, 'he is absolutely sound in his views', meaning that he would not interfere in the daily conduct of naval operations.128 His hopes were justified. Balfour admitted that the operational conduct of the war at sea was, 'beyond my competence'.129 Carson was a clever lawyer with a powerful personality but admitted that he lacked technical knowledge of the navy and had no intention of interfering in questions of strategy or tactics. Geddes told Beatty in October 1917 that T hold the view very strongly that it is for the Naval Officers to deal

123 PRO, CAB 24/12/GT651. Shipbuilding: Note by the Shipping Controller, 4 May 1917; Hankey diary, entry 11 May 1917, Hankey Papers, HNKY1/3; Wemyss, Memoirs [n.d.], Wemyss Papers, WMYS11. 124 Beatty to Tyrwhitt, 30 May 1917, quoted S. Roskill, Admiral of the Fleet Earl Beatty: The Last Naval Hero. An Intimate Biography (New York, 1982), p. 216. 125 PRO, ADM 116/1804, Geddes, Memorandum on Admiralty Organisation, 10 September 1917; PRO, GAB 23/3/WC231, War Cabinet, 12 September 1917. 126 Notes on Visit of Director of Intelligence Division to Beatty, 19 December 1917, in Ranft (ed.), Beatty Papers, i, p. 454; See also Wemyss, Memoirs [n.d.], Wemyss Papers, WMYS 11. 127 Wemyss, Memoirs [n.d.], Wemyss Papers, WMYS 11; S.W. Roskill, The Dismissal of Admiral ]e\\icoe', Journal ofContemporary History, 1, (1966), pp. 69-93; Marder, From the Dreadnought toScapa Flow, iv, pp. 224, 323-342. 128 Marder, From the Dreadnought to ScapaFlow, ii, p. 289; see also Tyrwhitt to Keyes, n.d., but c. June 1915, quoted in Halpern (ed.), The Keyes Papers, i, p. 145. 129 Balfour to Jellicoe, 4July 1915, in Temple Patterson (ed.), Jellicoe Papers, i, p. 171.

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with questions of naval policy and tactics'.130 All three First Lords saw one of their major tasks as being to defend their ministry against political attacks.131 The professionals were able to wield so much power in the early and middle years of the war because there was a powerful lobby within both the Asquith and Lloyd George governments which was willing to defer to them. These ministers believed that although the Cabinet must be responsible for all acts of the executive, including those by the armed services, it would be disastrous, in Milner and Cecil's words, 'if it attempted to control the details of naval and military proceedings'.132 The obvious lessons of the Dardanelles, hammered home by the report of the Dardanelles commission in 1917 which pilloried the Asquith War Council, were constantly at the forefront of politician's minds when they grappled with the conundrum of what constituted larger policy decisions and what constituted the, 'details of naval and military proceedings'.133 Cecil's own rough rule of thumb was that in the first instance, as the Dardanelles had all too clearly demonstrated, it was wrong to force naval and military commanders to, 'carry out operations of which they really disapprove, though they may have given a formal assent to them'. If the Cabinet found that its commanders did disapprove of a particular operation, the operation should be cancelled or new commanders who did approve of the operation should be appointed.134 It would be too much to argue that in 1918 the Wilson and Wemyss regimes marked a total break with those of their predecessors or that complete understanding reigned between the professionals and their political masters. Sir Henry Wilson's relations with Lloyd George were more harmonious than those the Prime Minister had enjoyed with Robertson. This was partly because Wilson assumed office with the reduced powers that the CIGS had exercised before the Kitchener-Robertson compact and also because his quickwittedness appealed to the Prime Minister. Even so, by July 1918 Lloyd George was complaining that Wilson was 'Wully redivivus,135 A dispute over strategy between Wilson and Lloyd George in the summer of 1918 was perhaps only avoided thanks to the visible gains made by the BEF in the last hundred days of 130

PRO, ADM 116/1805, Geddes to Beatty, 9 October 1917. PRO, CAB 42/9/1, Minutes of the War Committee, 17 February 1916; PRO, CAB 42/10/8, Minutes of the War Committee, 8 March 1916; PRO, CAB 42/11/12, Balfour, Growth of our Fleets in Home Waters, 31 March 1916; R.F. Mackay, Balfour: Intellectual Statesman (Oxford, 1985), pp. 274-75; PRO, CAB 42/21/2, Balfour, Report on Recent Naval Affairs, 14 October 1916; A. Temple Patterson, Jellicoe (London, 1969), p. 156; AJ. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow, iv, pp. 54-55. 132 PRO, FO 800/196/57, Cecil to Bonar Law, 10 September 1917; Milner to Bonar Law, 10 September 1917, Milner Papers, dep 354. 133 Cmd, 8490, Dardanelles Commission: First Report, 1917. 134 PRO, FO 800/196/57, Cecil to Bonar Law, 10 September 1917; Milner to Bonar Law, 10 September 1917, Milner Papers, dep. 354; Derby to Lloyd George [unsent], 13 August 1917, Derby Papers, 920 DER (17) 27/6. 135 Hankey, The Supreme Command, ii, p. 830. The cause of their argument was Wilson's memorandum, PRO, CAB 27/8/WP70, British Military Policy, 1918-1919, 25 July 1918. 131

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the war. At the Admiralty under the Wemyss-Geddes regime the First Sea Lord was finally freed from administrative chores and could concentrate on the operational conduct of the war. Geddes knew how to work with a staff, protected his advisers from political interference and supported their preference for postponing a fleet action in the North Sea.136 Wemyss rejoiced that he, 'will back me up to the last'.137 Wemyss maintained excellent relations with Beatty and was willing to delegate to his subordinates. 'The results', he later claimed, 'were better and quicker even than I had hoped for, and decisions were now reached quickly and with everybody's knowledge, whereas before the rage for secrecy had resulted in confusion, overlapping and clumsy work.'138 Even Wemyss' critics conceded that Admiralty staff work was now conducted more efficiently but the Admiralty staff remained riven with departmental jealousies.139 In March 1918 it was still possible for the Plans and Anti-Submarine Divisions both to prepare papers on the U-boat war without any consultation. By July 1918 nearly half the studies which the Plans Division had produced had been either rejected or ignored.140 One staff officer characterised a staff meeting as consisting of 'Talk and plenty of it. Wemyss, who should hear the arguments and decide, sits talking, his methods being to call the other members by their Christian names, put in chatty remarks and decide nothing.'141 In his War Memoirs Lloyd George claimed that there had existed a cabal led by Robertson which had plotted to oust his government and replace it with an administration which would have been no more than a tool of the generals.142 There is ample evidence to suggest that some officers indulged in a variety of underhand practices to circumvent their political superiors. In 1915 Henry Wilson used private letters, the good offices of a Unionist MP serving at GHQ and the editor of the Morning Post to impress on Bonar Law and other Unionist leaders the futility of the Dardanelles campaign, the need for conscription and the desirability of removing Asquith from office.143 In any bureaucracy 136 PRO ADM 116/1806, Discussion at Admiralty on occasion of visit by Commander-in-Chief Grand Fleet, 2January 1918; PRO, CAB 23/5/WC325, War Cabinet, 18January 1918; Richmond diary, 15 April 1918, in AJ. Marder (ed.), Portrait of an Admiral: The Life and Papers of Sir Herbert Richmond (London, 1952), p. 310. 137 Wemyss to Beatty, 30 March 1918, in Ranft (ed.), Beatty Papers, i, p. 524. 138 Wemyss, Memoirs [n.d.], Wemyss Papers, WMYS 11, p. 61; Marder, From the Dreadnought to ScapaFlow, v, pp. 3-12; Roskill, Admiral of the Fleet Earl Beatty, pp. 261-62. 13