The Great Coup of 1916, 7: The End Of Democracy

Lloyd George immediately accepted the King’s invitation to form a government on 7 December 1916. His own version of events dripped insincerity, giving the impression that the onerous task of leading the government was thrust upon him suddenly, as if by magic. ‘As soon as the King entrusted me with the task of forming an Administration in succession to the Ministry that had disappeared, I had to survey the tasks awaiting me …’ [1] What arrant nonsense. ‘The ministry that had disappeared.’ This was not a Harry Potter. Perhaps he was thinking more in terms of a mafia ‘disappearance’. He would have been at home with the Mafiosa.

One of Lloyd George’s first moves was to summon Maurice Hankey to the War Office to ‘have a long talk about the personnel of the new Govt., the procedure of the select War Ctee., and the future of the war.’ [2] He asked Hankey to write a memo giving his view on the state of the war and as early as 9 December, Hankey spent the whole day with the new War Cabinet. [3] How more central could he have been to all of the discussions which finally approved Lloyd George’s decisions? [4] Unlike many of his contemporaries, Maurice Hankey was not surprised to find that Milner had been appointed directly to the inner-sanctum of Britain’s war planning. Unelected, unknown to many ordinary men and women, Lord Milner appeared as if out of the ether to take his place among the political elite charged with managing the war to ultimate victory. [5] Lloyd George claimed, laughably, that ‘I neither sought nor desired the Premiership’ and explained Milner’s inclusion as representing the ‘Tory intelligentsia and Die-Hards.’ [6] What lies. Lloyd George had always exuded unbridled ambition and had been plotting the coup against Asquith with Milner’s cabal for months. [7] His premiership was conditional on their support. Lord Milner was to have a place by his side.

The myth of Lloyd George’s ‘lightening rapidity’ in assembling around him ‘all that is best in British Life’ was coined by Lord Northcliffe in an article printed by the international press on 10 December. [8] Northcliffe had been highly influential in supporting Lloyd George, largely, but not exclusively through his editor at the Times, Geoffrey Dawson.

Although he thought nothing of telephoning the new prime minister in person, [9] the owner of the Times could not stop other influences obligating Lloyd George to retain what Northcliffe called ‘has-beens’ in cabinet posts. [10] His Daily Mail and Evening News called for the removal of Arthur Balfour and his cousin, Lord Robert Cecil to no avail. Did Northcliffe not know that both men were deeply entrenched inside the Secret Elite?

Let there be no doubt, the coup was devised and executed by members and agents of the Secret Elite. Once Asquith had been replaced, they permeated the new administration with Milner’s acolytes and associates from top to bottom, and on all sides as well. [11] Let Lloyd George be the figurehead, but the Monday Night Cabal and their Secret Elite supporters were absolutely determined to place themselves and their trusted allies in all of the major offices of state. Furthermore, Lloyd George was subtly but securely scrutinised at every turn. He would not be given free rein. Thus their chosen men were placed in key positions, with a smattering of useful Conservative and Labour MPs given office in order to guarantee that the government could survive any parliamentary vote. On his return to London on 10 December, Hankey ‘had to see Lord Milner by appointment’. He noted in his diary ‘I have always hated his [Lord Milner’s] politics but found the man very attractive and possessed of personality and [we] got own like a house on fire’. [12] Of course they did. Hankey would not have survived otherwise. He was well aware of Milner’s power and influence.

Another myth still widely accepted is that Lloyd George’s very special cabinet, which literally took control of every strand in the prosecution of the war, was assembled at break-neck speed by the Welsh genius. It had taken months of deliberation and consultation before appointments and tactics were finally agreed inside the closed ranks of the Monday Night Cabal. The final selection which bore Lloyd George’s alleged stamp reflected the Secret Elite’s approval of men in whom they had faith. The War Committee initially comprised prime minister Lloyd George, who had been in the Secret Elite’s pocket since 1910, [13] Viscount Alfred Milner, the most important influence inside that secret movement [14] George Curzon of All Souls and twice Viceroy of India, [15] Andrew Bonar Law, still the formal leader of the Tories and the Labour MP Arthur Henderson, an outspoken champion of the war effort. [16] This central core took charge. They held daily meetings to better manage the war. Sometimes two and three meetings took place in a single day. These five men alone were supposedly the supreme governors of the State. [17] But they were not in any sense, equals.

The old order of senior Liberal politicians was mercilessly purged. Out went Asquith despite his years of loyal service. Sir Edward Grey had forfeited his right to office when he began to consider possibilities of peace with the Americans. He was put out to pasture. Reginald McKenna, long a thorn in Lloyd George’s side was dismissed. Lord Crewe remained loyal to Asquith and was not considered. To his great disappointment, Winston Churchill was not deemed suitable.  He had many enemies in the Tory  party. One Liberal Party stalwart, Samuel Montagu, who took over at the Ministry of Munitions when Lloyd George moved to the War Office in July 1916, had to go in order to find room for other appointees, but his patience was to be rewarded some short months later when he was made Viceroy of India. [18] This is precisely how the Secret Elite adjusts its favours and looks after its own. It still does.

The Secret Elite stamped their authority over every important level of government. With Sir Edward Carson at the Admiralty and Arthur Balfour at the Foreign Office, Lord Derby became Secretary of State for War and Lord Robert Cecil continued in his position as Minister of Blockade. Home Secretary, Sir George Cave took office barely months after he and FE Smith had successfully prosecuted Sir Roger Casement and refused his right to appeal to the House of Lords. [19] Secret Elite agents, every one.

Milner ensured that his close friends were given positions of influence and authority. Take for example the meteoric rise of Rowland Prothero. He claimed to know only two men ‘prominent in public life’. [20] It transpired that these were Lords Milner and Curzon. In 1914 Prothero was first elected to parliament as one of Oxford University’s MPs. In late 1915 he served on a Committee on Home Production of Food with Alfred Milner. In 1916, Milner’s friend was given the cabinet post of President of the Board of Agriculture. [21] It took him a mere two and a half years to move from new recruit to cabinet minister. In addition, Arthur Lee, who had accommodated many of the secret meetings which foreshadowed the coup, was appointed Director-General of food production. Other known members and supporters of the Secret Elite who shamelessly benefitted from the coup included H.A.L. Fisher, President of the Board of Education, [22] Walter Long as Colonial Secretary and Sir Henry Birchenough at the Board of Trade. [23] They were everywhere … and not just politicians.

Lloyd George had risen to high office through the unseen patronage of the Secret Elite. His performance at the Board of Trade [24] guaranteed him the benevolent approbation of leading figures in shipping and ship-building. As Chancellor he laid claim to saving the City [25], took advice from Lord Rothschild, financiers and insurance brokers, linked the British economy to America through Morgan-Grenfell and met and socialised with the great mine-owners and manufacturers of the time. In December 1916 he revolutionised government control of production by bringing businessmen into political office. Unfortunately the appointment of interested parties to posts from which their companies could reap great profit was not a success.

Sir Joseph Maclay was appointed in charge of shipping. As a Scottish ship-owner and manager, Maclay had been critical of the government’s concessions to trade unions and he opposed the nationalization of shipping. The Admiralty treated Maclay with deep hostility, and opposed his idea of convoys after the onset of Germany’s unrestricted submarine offensive in February 1917. Maclay was proved right [26] though shipowners still reaped unconscionable fortunes.

The new prime minister made Lord Devonport food controller. Chairman of the Port of London Authority (1909-25), he broke the dockers’ strike in 1912, causing great distress and hardship in East London. Imagining that his hard-man image equated to strength of character, Lloyd George appointed Minister of Food Control. [27] Not so. Devonport protected his own grocery interests and resisted the introduction of rationing until May 1917. 

Lord Rhondda, the Welsh coal magnate and industrialist was entrusted with the Local Government Board and his popularity grew when he was asked to take over the role of the incompetent Devonport as minister of food control. He grasped the nettle, by fixing food prices and ensuring government purchases of basic supplies. [28] Compared to the others, he was a shining light.

Westman Pearson, later Viscount Cowdrey, was placed in charge of the Air Board. Pearson had acquired oil concessions in Mexico through his questionable relationship with the Mexican dictator, Diaz. [29] His ownership of the Mexican Eagle Petroleum Company (which became part of Royal Dutch Shell in 1919) guaranteed Pearson vast profits throughout the war.

Sir Alfred Mond, elevated by Lloyd George in 1916 to Commissioner of Works was the managing director of the Mond Nickel Company and a director of the International Nickel Company of Canada. Nickel hardens armour and special steels. Basically it is a strategic material which came to the fore in the so-called naval race prior to 1914. [30]

The Mond companies made great profits during the prolonged war. In 1915 Britain sent twelve times the amount of nickel to Sweden that it had in 1913. [31] There, it was either manufactured into war materials and sold to Germany, or re-exported in its raw state. Incredibly, the Chairman of one of the Empire’s most important metal processing and exporting businesses, which was directly and indirectly supplying Germany, was created Commissioner of Works. Questionable deals were subsequently negotiated between the British government and the British-American Nickel Corporation which were strongly criticised in parliament [32] but Alfred Mond ended his career as Lord Melchett of Landforth. You couldn’t make this up.

In addition, Milner and his Secret Elite associates literally took over Lloyd George’s private office. As early as 10 December Hankey realised that he was not to be the only member of the new prime minister’s secretariat. At Milner’s request, Leo Amery, his loyal lieutenant in South Africa, was unaccountably placed on the staff of the War Cabinet, but not as joint Secretary. Hankey remained secure in Lloyd George’s trust in charge of the War Cabinet organisation. [33]

A curious new chapter in Downing Street’s history was created outside the prime minister’s residence. Literally. Temporary offices were constructed in the Downing Street garden to accommodate a select group of trusted administrators who monitored and directed all contact between Lloyd George and departments of government. [34] The man in charge throughout its existence was Professor W.G. S. Adams, an Oxford Professor and member of Milner’s entourage [35] who later became editor of War Cabinet Reports and Warden of All Souls in Oxford. [36] This appointment was swiftly followed by that of two former members of Milner’s famous Kindergarten; [37] Philip Kerr became Lloyd George’s private secretary and Lionel Curtis, another of Milner’s loyal acolytes, was also drafted into service. It did not stop there. Waldorf Astor and Lord Northcliffe’s younger brother, Cecil Harmsworth followed shortly afterwards.

To complete the pack, Milner insisted that Lloyd George reconsider appointing John Buchan to his staff after Haig’s apologist had been turned down for a post. In a private letter which has survived because it comes from the Lloyd George archives, rather than Milner’s much culled and carefully shredded papers, he wrote:
‘My Dear Prime Minister, Don’t think me too insistent! I wish you would not turn down John Buchan, without seeing him yourself…. I am not satisfied to have him rejected on hear-say, & ill informed hear-say at that.’ [38]
Buchan was appointed to the prime minister’s staff as Director of Information. And historians would have us believe that these were Lloyd George’s appointments.

It was as if the Monday Night Cabal had kidnapped the prime minister. Just as Alfred Milner had captured, then captivated, the nascent talent of young imperialists from Oxford University at the turn of the century and taken them to South Africa to help him govern and renovate the post Boer-War Transvaal and Cape colonies, so now, the very same men ‘guided’ Lloyd George and filtered the information which flowed to Downing Street. They were not Lloyd Georg’s men … they were Lord Milner’s. He was in charge.

To the anguish of Asquith’s political allies, this new bureaucracy had metamorphosed into an undemocratic monster fashioned by Alfred Milner. They could see it and railed against it. What we need to know is, why has this wholesale coup d’etat been studiously ignored by mainstream historians? Why do they continually write about Lloyd George’s government and Lloyd George’s secretariat when his very position was bound and controlled by Milner and his Garden Suburb minders? The radical journalist, H W Massingham published a vitriolic attack on Milner’s organisation in early 1917:

‘… A new double screen of bureaucrats is interposed between the War Directorate and the heads of [government] Departments, whose responsibility to Parliament has hitherto been direct … The first is the Cabinet Secretariat … the second is a little body of illuminati, whose residence is in the Prime Minister’s garden …These gentlemen stand in no sense for a Civil Service Cabinet. They are rather a class of travelling empirics in Empire, who came in with Lord Milner … The governing ideas are not those of Mr. Lloyd George … but of Lord Milner … Mr George has used Toryism to destroy Liberal ideas; but he has created a Monster which, for the moment, dominates both. This is the New Bureaucracy which threatens to master England …’ [39]

It was indeed. This was the Secret Elite’s most successful coup so far, accomplished by the critical silence and complicity of a compliant press. Elected parliamentary government had been purged. The Secret Elite spurned democracy because they ordained that democracy did not work. Their dictatorship was masked by Lloyd George, happy to pose and strut as the man who would win the war. Perhaps you were taught that he did? It is a self-serving myth. He operated inside a political straitjacket and fronted an undemocratic government.

And the sacrifice of youth continued.  And the profits of war grew ever larger.

[1] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 620.
[2] Hankey, Diary 10 December 1916.
[3] War Cabinet 1, CAB 23/1/1 discussed the cost of loans from America which were running at $60 million per week. Messrs. Morgan, Grenfell and Co. continued as the conduit for all American payments. Hankey also recorded in these minutes that the Press had been informed that the War cabinet would meet every weekday.
[4] Lord Vansittart recorded that Hankey ‘progressively became secretary of everything that mattered. He grew into a repository of secrets, a chief Inspector of Mines of information.’ Robert Gilbert Vansittart, The Mist Procession, p. 164.
[5] While Lloyd George spends many pages expressing his opinion on most of his colleagues, he curiously omits a pen-picture on Lord Milner. Possibly the Censor removed it. Either way it is interesting to note how carefully Milner’s contribution to Lloyd George’s ascent to the premiership has been airbrushed.
[6] Lloyd George, Memoirs, p. 596.
[7] See blog, The Great Coup of 1916: 4 The Monday Night Cabal, 3 August 2016.
[8] The Times estimated that Lord Northcliffe’s lengthy article in praise of Lloyd George had been carried in one thousand American, Australian, Canadian, South African, French, Italian and other journals. [Times 11 December, 1916]
[9] A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 329.
[10] The Times, 11 December 1916, p. 4.
[11] Gollin, Proconsul, p. 376.
[12] Ibid., p. 329.
[13] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, pp. 164-5.
[14] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 6-9 and pp. 140- 47.
[15] The place of All Souls college at Oxford as the centre of the Secret Elite intelligentsia in Britain was identified by Professor Quigley. See The Anglo-American Establishment pp. 20-26.
[16] In August 1914 Arthur Henderson had been outspoken in his objection to war, but he changed his position absolutely within weeks.
[17] Gollin, Proconsul, p. 391.
[18] E.S. Montagu was both a friend of Asquith’s and respected colleague of Lloyd George. To most observers his omission from Asquith’s cabinet in 1916 spelled the end of his political career. But this is not how the Secret Elite work. In stepping down temporarily, Montagu earned the right to be promoted to the prestigious position of Viceroy of India in 1917.
[19] Thomas S. Legg, Marie-Louise Legg, ‘Cave, George, Viscount Cave (1856–1928)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[20] Lord Ernle, Whippingham to Westminster, p. 248.
[21] Quigley, Anglo-American Establishment, p. 27.
[22] Ibid., p. 312.
[23] Ibid.
[24] President of the Board of Trade was Lloyd George’s first cabinet post in 1906. During his tenure there he became popular with the business class whose interests he often championed.
[25] Lloyd George, Memoirs, p. 61.
[26] Ibid., pp. 688-95.
[27] Richard Davenport-Hines, ‘Kearley, Hudson Ewbanke, first Viscount Devonport (1856–1934)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[28] John Williams, ‘Thomas, David Alfred, first Viscount Rhondda (1856–1918)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[29] Geoffrey Jones, Westman Pearson, 1st Viscount Cowdrey, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[30] Gordon H. Boyce, Co-operative Structures in Global Business, pp. 84-5.
[31] Rear Admiral MWWC Consett, The Triumph of Unarmed Forces, p. 201.
[32] Hansard House of Commons Debate, 14 January 1918 vol. 101 cc5-6.
[33] Maurice Hankey, Supreme Command, vol. II, p. 590.
[34] John Turner, Lloyd George’s Secretariat, p. 1.
[35] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 313.
[36] Ibid., pp. 91-93. All Souls College in Oxford has been closely associated with the Rhodes/Milner group so integral to the Secret Elite in England.
[37] The title Milner’s Kindergarten was given to the group of young Oxford University graduates whom Milner attracted to help him rebuild South Africa after the Boer War. They subsequently enjoyed stellar careers in journalism, politics, banking and finance every area of Secret Elite influence. Further reading – Walter Nimocks, Milner’s Young Men.
[38] Milner to Lloyd George 17 January 1917, in the Lloyd George Papers.
[39] H.W. Massingham, The Nation 24 February, 1917.

The Great Coup of 1916, 4: The Monday Night Cabal

Asquith’s Coalition government of May 1915 changed little in terms of Britain’s war management. It was hardly likely to given that it was a basic reshuffle of old faces and older politics. Alfred Milner was well aware that this would be the case, and as such, it suited the Secret Elite to bide their time before catapulting their leader into front-line politics. Milner was initially stirred into action over Asquith’s inability to make clear decisions, and criticised the ‘contradictions and inconsistencies which have characterised our action as a nation’. [1] He began to turn the screw on the prime minister in the House of Lords early in 1916 and Sir Edward Carson did likewise in the Commons. [2] Carson had originally been the protege of Alfred Balfour, and was a fellow member of the Secret Elite. It did not take long for the unnatural coalition of conservatives and liberals to unravel inside the Cabinet.

Within the context of 1916, the British nation had no respite from disaster. The Somme [ref] produced heavy losses made more unpalatable by negligible gains. In the War Committee, Curzon and Balfour waged a bitter and prolonged inter-departmental dispute over the future of the Air Board [3] to the detriment of other critical business. Without Kitchener, the General Staff appeared complacent and Maurice Hankey feared the generals were ‘bleeding us to death’. [4] He warned Lloyd George that the British Army was led by ‘the most conservative class in the world, forming the most powerful trades union in the world’ [5] It was an astute observation. The Staff ‘ring’ (and these were Hankey’s words) which had been brought together under the pre-war influence of Milner’s great ally, and former head of the Army, Lord Roberts, [6] was indeed a closed union of former cavalry officers, so self satisfied and complacent that they ignored the views of others. [7] Whatever the obscene consequences of their mistakes, they continued to repeat them with the arrogance of those who are convinced that they know better.

Confirmed in their view that the democratic process had failed to provide the leadership and organisation which was needed to win the war on their terms, Milner and the Secret Elite began the process of completely undermining the government and replacing it with their own agents. In January 1916 a small group of Milner’s closest friends and disciples formed a very distinctive and secret cabal to prepare the nation for a change so radical, that it was nothing less than a coup; a planned take-over of government by men who sought to impose their own rule rather than seek a mandate from the general public. [8] Having ensured that the war was prolonged, they now sought to ensure that it would be waged to the utter destruction of Germany.

The men behind the carefully constructed conspiracy were Alfred Milner, Leo Amery, Sir Edward Carson, Geoffrey Dawson, editor of The Times, F.S. Oliver the influential writer who believed that war was a necessity, [9] and Waldorf Astor, the owner of The Observer. They met regularly on Monday evenings to formulate their alternative plans for war management over dinner. These men were drawn from the inner-circle of Milner’s most trusted associates. [10] Others who were invited to join them included, Lloyd George, Sir Henry Wilson, (at that point a corps commander on the Western Front) Philip Kerr, another of Milner’s proteges from his days in South Africa, and Sir Leander Starr Jameson, the man who almost brought down the British government in 1896 in the wake of his abortive raid on the Transvaal. [11] Could anyone have anticipated that Jameson would have reemerged in London inside a very powerful conspiracy some twenty years after he had almost blown Cecil Rhode’s dream apart? [12] But then he was always the servant of the mighty South African arm of the Secret Elite.

On the rare occasions that this clique has been mentioned by historians, it is usually referred to as a ‘Ginger Group’. Yet another veneer of deception. Their objective was not to spice up the opposition to Herbert Asquith but to rule in his place. It was, as Alfred Milner’s biographer put it, a very powerful fellowship devoid of party hacks and faceless civil servants, [13] Carson, still the hero of Ulster Unionists, was the foremost of the Tory critics in the House of Commons; Dawson at The Times was probably the most influential journalist in the Empire and had the full backing of its owner, Lord Northcliffe; Astor’s Observer added hugely valuable weight to Milner’s battalions in the press; Oliver was fanatical in his disdain of grovelling peacemakers. He proposed that the whole nation rather than the armed forces must be conscripted. [14]

Alfred Milner was the undisputed leader of this ‘Monday Night Cabal’. [15] The agenda notes for one of the meetings in February demonstrated clearly that they planned to demolish the widely held notion that there was no alternative to a combination of Asquith and Bonar Law. Their solution was to repeat ‘in season and out of season’ that the current coalition was having a paralytic effect on the conduct of the war and it was absurd to believe that there was no alternative.  [16] They were the alternative.

Here we find one of the few examples of precisely how the Secret Elite worked to influence and dominate British politics. The cabal comprised the key players at the core of the opposition to Asquith. They instructed their supporters and agents to lobby both inside and outside parliament for the policies that were determined over their private dinners. The rank and file were never invited to these exclusive gatherings which remained the preserve of the select. [17] A second assault-route was through the press, whose influential leaders were also at the heart of the Monday Night Cabal. Public opinion had to be turned against the Asquith coalition. One of he most successful influences which the Secret Elite still wield is the power to make the public believe that they want the changes expounded by a corrupted press.

Geoffrey Dawson led the attack from his lofty office at The Times. Instructed in the Milnerite catechism of Coalition failure, his editorials began the campaign to champion Alfred Milner into high office without the niceties of a political mandate. On 14 April his leading article was the first salvo in that offensive:

‘Let there be no mistake about it. What the country want is leaders who are not afraid to go to all lengths or undergo also sacrifices, party or personal, in order to win the war… We believe that in Lord Milner they possess yet another leader whose courage and character are needed in a national crisis. It is a most damning indictment of the coalition, and especially of those Unionist leaders who had a free hand to strengthen its composition, that such a man should be out of harness at such a time.’ [18]

The plot which had been carefully constructed over months of detailed planning was promoted in a series of newspaper editorials which advanced Milner’s intentions. Their new mantra was that change was needed; change was vital to save the country from disaster. But not everyone would be sacrificed. No. Not at all. What was proposed was far more subtle. They proposed that the Secret Elite’s chosen men in Cabinet (Balfour etc.) needed the support of a more organised system (behind them) and there was ‘no reason whatsoever why they should not continue…’. However, those who had served their purpose, who ‘were encrusted in the old party habit, worn out … by a period of office which has lasted continuously in some cases for more than a decade … are a sheer danger to the State.’ [19] Translated into personalities their targets were Herbert Asquith, Sir Edward Grey, Lord Lansdowne, Walter Runciman and the remnants of the original Liberal government.

Dawson rampaged against the ‘weak methods’ and ‘weak men’ who were failing the country. Unresolved problems of man-power, of food control and food production, of conflict over the output of aircraft and merchant ships were attributed to a system where, according to the clique, the country was being governed by a series of debating societies. He was disgusted that the War Committee had reverted back to the old habits of ‘interminable memoranda’ and raged about the impossibility of heads of great departments having additional collective responsibility for correlating all of the work of a war government. Every design which the Monday Night Cabal had agreed was promoted by Dawson at The Times.

Popular newspapers ensured that their message was unrelenting. Tom Clarke, then editor of the Daily Mail wrote in his diaries that he was instructed by Northcliffe in December 1916 to undermine the Prime Minister. He was told to find a smiling picture of Lloyd George and underneath it put the caption, “Do it Now” and get the worst possible picture of Asquith and label it, “Wait and See”. [20] It was to be billed as if it was Action-Man against the ditherer.

The major beneficiary from the conclusions of the Monday Night Cabal was David Lloyd George. Since the day he was given his first government post as President of the Board of Trade in 1905, Lloyd George had pursued his career with the singular intention of rising to the top. His firebrand oratory which made him a champion of the people not matched by his machiavellian self interest. While basking in the credit for providing pensions in old age, he befriended the leaders of industry, the bankers and financiers in the City, the money-men in New York and newspaper owners like Northcliffe and Max Aitken. (Lord Beaverbrook) The Secret Elite had identified Lloyd George many years before [21] as the man most likely to front popular appeal for their policies, but his negotiations between the conspirators in 1916 had to be carried out well away from prying eyes.

They chose Arthur Lee [22] as the facilitator for many of the secret meetings between Lloyd George, Maurice Hankey, Alfred Milner and Geoffrey Dawson at Lee’s house in the Abbey Garden at Westminster. [23] An opponent of Lloyd George in previous times, Lee had married into the New-York financial elite and his wife Ruth inherited a substantial fortune. He was a close friend of Theodore Roosevelt with whom he corresponded frequently. [24] Lee had apparently become increasingly frustrated with the conduct of the war by the Asquith government and sought out David Lloyd George as the one member of the government whom he considered had ‘sufficient courage and dynamic energy … to insist upon things being done’ [25]. Note how Lee offered his services to Lloyd George who invited him into the Ministry of Munitions as parliamentary military secretary. Later, in his War Memoirs, Lloyd George went out of his way to praise Lee’s ‘untiring industry, great resource, and practical capacity’, [26] without mentioning his role as co-conspirator in Asquith’s removal.

On Lloyd George’s move to the War Office, Lee became his personal secretary. He was also a member of the Unionist war committee which acted as a focus of back-bench opposition to the Asquith coalition in 1916. [27] Whether he was aware of it or not, the Secret Elite ensured that Arthur Lee was well placed to watch over Lloyd George in the critical months leading up to the coup.

Safe from prying eyes, the conspirators drew an ever compliant Lloyd George to the centre of their web. His closest aide ensured that they could contact him with ease without rousing the suspicion of mere mortals. They organised their policies, decided their tactics and picked their chosen men. The Secret Elite were poised to take over the governance of the war and run it along their lines, but the old order had to be removed. As ever with Alfred Milner, he required his opponent, in this instance, Asquith, to make the first unforgivable mistake.

[1] Hansard, House of Lords Debate, 20 December 1915 vol 20 cc696-744.
[2] A.M. Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 320.
[3] Memorandum for the War Committee, Doc. 658, November 1916 and Reply to The First Report of the Air Board, Doc.658, November 1916 in Cabinet Memoranda 1905-1918, vol. IV, F.O. 899.
[4] Maurice Hankey, Diary entry 28th October 1916, quoted in Stephen Roskill, Hankey: Man of Secrets, p. 312.]
[5] Ibid.
[6] For a detailed examination of the influence which Lords Roberts exerted over the British Military Establishment see Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, chapter 15, The Roberts Academy, pp. 194-203.
[7] Gollin, Hankey, p. 313.
[8] Ibid., pp. 323-4.
[9] F.S. Oliver , Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, author, Richard Davenport-Hines.
[10] Alfred Milner, Leo Amery, Philip Kerr, Waldorf Astor and Geoffrey Dawson were specifically placed inside what Carroll Quigley called The Society of the Elect in his work, The Anglo-American Establishment, while Leander Starr Jameson was placed in the outer circle. [pp. 311-313.] We have enlarged the group under the collective title of the Secret Elite. [
[11] Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War, Prologue, pp. 1-5.
[12] Sentenced to fifteen months imprisonment for his involvement in the infamous Jameson Raid, he served barely three before being pardoned. His career flourished thereafter. From 1904-1908 Jameson was prime minister of the Cape Colony. He returned to England in 1912 and remained one of Alfred Milner’s trusted confidantes.
[13] Gollin, Hankey, p. 324.
[14] Davenport-Hines, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. See above.
[15] It is often interesting to consider the manner in which historians entitle events. In A.M. Collin’s Proconsul in Politics, he boldly christened Milner’s group as The Monday Night Cabal – which it certainly was, while Terence O’Brien, in his work, Milner, stepped away from controversy by calling it the Monday Night Group, thus omitting any hint of conspiracy. [Terence O’Brien, Milner, p. 266.]
[16] Amery Papers, “Notes for Monday’s Meeting, 19th February 1916.”
[17] Gollin, Hankey, p. 325.
[18] The Times, 14 April, 1916, p. 9.
[19] The Times, 1 December 1916, p. 9.
[20] Tom Clarke, My Northcliffe Diary, p.107.
[21] Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, chapter 12, Catch a Rising Star, pp. 161-171.
[22] Later Viscount Lee of Farnham. Typical of many Secret Elite associates, his loyalty was rewarded with political appointments including Director General of Food Production from 1917-18, President of the Board of Agriculture, 1919-21 and first Lord of the Admiralty, 1921-22. He donated Chequers, still the country residence of British prime ministers, for that purpose.
[23] Gollin, Hankey, p. 348 and p. 354.
[24] A. Clark, A Good Innings: the private papers of Viscount Lee of Fareham, p. 92.
[25] Ibid., p.140.
[26] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 346.
[27] V.W. Baddeley, ‘Lee, Arthur Hamilton, Viscount Lee of Fareham (1868–1947)’, rev. Marc Brodie, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

The Great Coup of 1916, 1: Democracy – Roots of Poison

The Secret Elite scorn democracy. They always have. The following series of blogs trace the activities through which they eventually replaced a democratically elected government with one in which they themselves took complete control of the British  government from 1916. 

In the first years of the twentieth century, their most important influence, Alfred Milner, the passionate promoter of British Imperialism, [1] and favoured heir of Cecil Rhodes’s ideals, [2] held an absolute contempt for the British Parliamentary system [3] which he condemned as an ‘absurd waste of power’. [4] His acolyte, Philip Kerr, later lord Lothian, described his mentor’s attitude to democratic government thus:

‘In every fibre of his being he loathed the slipshod compromises, the optimistic “slogans”, the vote-catching half-truths with which democracy seemed to compromise the majestic governing art …’ [5]

Before he returned to Britain in 1905, Milner, a copious letter-writer, wrote to his future wife, then Lady Violet Cecil, that the system was hopeless. With a prescience which might make the reader today shudder, he predicted that, ‘Perhaps the great charlatan – political scallywag, buffoon, liar … and in other respects popular favourite – may someday arise, who is nevertheless a statesman … and who, having gained power by popular art, may use it for the nations ends. It is an off chance …’ [6]

(Ponder these prophetic words. Though expressed in a different era, you might be forgiven for thinking that Milner’s description fitted Tony Blair or David Lloyd George. Both were loyal servants of the Secret Elite in their day, posed as a socialist, or Liberal in Lloyd George’s case, misrepresented the reasons for promoting war, popular when first in office, considered by some to be statesmen – but not buffoons or political scallywags. No. Such words are utterly inadequate to catch their devious characters.)

Milner never accepted democratic government. He was convinced that a dedicated, hand-picked and trained elite was better-equipped to run Britain’s affairs. [7] He was an unreformed disciple of the Oxford philosopher, John Ruskin, who advocated that the control of the state should be restricted to a small ruling elite. Social order was to be built on the authority of superiors who would impose on their inferiors an absolute unquestioning obedience. [8]

With that mind-set and a determination to manipulate the political system, the highest echelons inside Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government had been successfully infiltrated before he became prime minister in 1908. [9] Sir Edward Grey (Foreign Secretary from 1905-16), Richard Haldane (War Minister from 1906-10) and Asquith himself, all Secret Elite place-men, formed the triumvirate which steadfastly steered the British Empire into a predetermined war to crush Germany in 1914. [10] In this they were abetted by Winston Churchill and eventually David Lloyd George. [11] It would be ridiculous to imply that five mediocre British politicians were solely responsible for bringing about the world war.

They did not represent democracy in any shape or form. These men refused to be answerable to parliament or the people. They were, like many who have held top political positions in Britain over the century since, mere instruments of the power behind the scenes – the all-powerful, wealthy secret cabal whom we call the Secret Elite. This sham democracy was aided and abetted by the awesome power of the popular press, much of which was owned and controlled by the same men who wielded real power.

Few knew that a powerful group of newspaper editors and owners were closely associated with Milner and the Secret Elite. His personal network of journalists included George Buckle and later Geoffrey Dawson at the Times, Edmund Garrett at the Westminster Gazette, and ET Cook at the Daily News and Daily Chronicle. All were members of the Secret Elite. [12] Their greatest ally was Alfred Harmsworth, later Lord Northcliffe, whom the Secret Elite approved as owner of the Times in 1908 after he had been closely vetted on their behalf by Lord Esher. [13] As owner of the Daily Mail (1896) the Daily Mirror (1903) the Observer (1905) and the Sunday Times, amongst other publications, Northcliffe’s role in the immediate pre-war years was to stir the populace against Germany. His biographers have translated this into an apparently less threatening response to the calls of Lord Milner and Lord Roberts [14] to ‘champion the cause of national defence on land, at sea and in the air.’ [15] He was the scaremonger chosen to undermine public confidence by constantly accusing Germany and the Kaiser of ill-intentions towards Britain and her Empire.

Northcliffe unleashed a torrent of fear deliberately aimed to prepare the nation for war against Germany. The Daily Mail carried concocted half-truths and downright lies to unnerve a people who had previously considered Germany no more than a friendly rival. The unrelenting propaganda spun its rabid negativity into the fabric of the nation in similar vein to the years of fear-inducing hostile headlines which led the British working classes to believe that the Brexit option in 2016 would stop the ill-perceived ‘menace’ of immigration. Falsehood became truth; reason was poisoned. Ludicrous stories filled the pages of the popular press. Little changes. [16]

Spy mania added to the sense of paranoia so cleverly promoted by Northcliffe’s stables. Ludicrous claims were made about German intentions and by default, German residents in Britain. Typical of unfounded scaremongering was Lord Roberts’s calculation that there were ‘80,000 Germans in the United Kingdom, almost all of them trained soldiers. They work many of the hotels at some of the chief railway stations, and if a German force once got into this country it would have the advantage of help and reinforcement such as no other army on foreign soil has ever before enjoyed’. [17] It was of course, nonsense, but how often has the true charlatan abused fear of immigrants to gather public support?

Milner and his associates also had backing from finance and business. He had access to Rhodes’s money and the fortunes of his South African backers, Alfred Beit and Abe Bailey. [18] Having earned the gratitude of the Rothschild family by instigating war against the Boers in order to seize their gold mines, his standing with the armaments and shipbuilding moguls could not have been higher. As increasing numbers of financiers from both sides of the Atlantic joined in associated exclusive clubs like the Pilgrims of the United States and the Pilgrims of Great Britain, [19] Milner’s influence, and consequent power, spread.

As has been fully detailed in both our Hidden History, the Secret Origins of the First World War and over several blogs, [20] this combination of political power, media exploitation and financial backing bounced the British Empire into war with Germany in August 1914 in order to create the Anglo-American supremacy in a new world order.

Consider the awful failing of assumed democracy. Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August on the basis of a package of outrageous lies, vile deception and gross exaggeration just as she did in Iraq almost a century later. Despite the presumed responsibility of government to serve the needs of its citizens and stand accountable for its actions, every check which might have stopped the war was circumvented or ignored. War with Germany was visited upon the British people and the British Empire without consent. The people were not consulted. Ironically, the Liberal government which had been elected in 1906 won a landslide victory based on ‘peace, retrenchment and reform’. [21] Further elections in 1910 returned a government whose foreign policy had not changed; officially.

Parliament was not consulted about a declaration of war in 1914, despite several reassurances from Sir Edward Grey that it would be. Asquith did not move for a vote in cabinet because he knew that the cabinet was weighed against any decision to go to war. While the Secret Elite marshalled its forces in the press, the Church of England and the hallowed halls of Oxford, opponents were caught flat-footed, disbarred from criticism as the newspapers joined ranks to exclude their views. In Parliament the substantial anti-war lobby was practically silenced when an open debate was denied them by prime minister Asquith himself. [22] Those who thought that they could turn to Lloyd George to stand firm against the war and lead a popular opposition to it were sorely disabused of the notion. Like many since, he lead the dissenters into a cul-de-sac and left them there. The Welsh firebrand welched.

Britain was railroaded into war by a government which was neither capable of running it nor elected to do so. The belief that her naval and economic power was sufficient to defeat the Germans was one of the fundamental premises which underpinned the widely held assumption in Britain that it would be ‘business as usual’. [23] Amongst a range of disinformation put about to assuage a gullible public was that the navy would protect Britain from invasion, strangle the German economy and win a low-cost war, safe behind a decade of naval investment. There was no invasion. Never at any stage in the proceedings did Germany plan for an invasion. A much vaunted blockade [24] was secretly reduced to tokenism. It would not be ‘business as usual’. Be of no doubt, and we have repeatedly made this point in our blogs, the war could have been over by the Spring/Summer of 1915 had that been the prime objective. It was not due to incompetence, though the government merited that tag, or miscalculation, that the war was outwardly mismanaged, but by very carefully executed strategies to supply the enemy and prolong the war. [25]

In fact, the Secret Elite’s men in government did a very capable job in prolonging the war. Asquith’s dithering indecision, his failure to change the nature of decision-making in cabinet proved to be a stranglehold on progress. Lloyd George acted under the supervision of the banking and financial sectors on both sides of the Atlantic and used their backing to obtain loans and munitions through the exclusive J.P. Morgan/Rothschild portal. [26] Sir Edward Grey’s men in the Foreign Office bent double to accommodate the American interests and completely nullify the brave and tireless efforts of the navy to run an effective blockade. They also rubber-stamped the secretive and illusionary ‘Belgian Relief’ programme which was run by Herbert Hoover to supply Germany with much needed food. [27] Churchill ran amok like a headless chicken frequently abandoning his duties at the Admiralty in favour of self-serving publicity.

Victory in the field was not the objective unless it was predicated upon the complete destruction of Germany as an economic rival, and that would take time and absolute commitment. Two very different approaches were underway. Most of the liberal cabinet set out on a loosely sketched journey believing that a short war would be won at sea, and a small army would suffice for the continental struggle; the Secret Elite’s men embarked on a long debilitating war which protected their interests, guaranteed great profits, and was backed by vast resources from the United States.

Even although the Liberal majority in Asquith’s cabinet were reluctant to abandon their laissez-faire principles, Lloyd George, recognised that control of the railway network and guarantees for the shipping insurance business were absolutely necessary to the survival of social order. [28] In other words, government in times of modern warfare required direct intervention. Tellingly, Lloyd George’s first actions were to protect the banks, the money markets and the business of war. He took credit for saving the city after embracing advice from Nathaniel Rothschild and ‘a section of the business and financial world’. [29] Of course he did. He was their man.

Liberal ideology, long mocked by Milner and his followers, proved ineffectual. Do not include Asquith, Grey and Lloyd George as ‘ liberals’. The first two had long sold their souls to the imperialist race patriots; Lloyd George had simply sold his soul. They were not proponents of a political theory or party, but obedient servants of an apolitical, (in the Party sense) anti-democratic, power-obsessed oligarchy. These political place-men of the Secret Elite (then as now) were labeled liberal for public consumption. In reality they were not what the people, and even fellow members of their own party, imagined.

Prolonging the war was of course very profitable, but winning the war was everything. By 1915, the Secret Elite realised that Asquith’s approach to war-management was failing. He and his ministers were no longer dealing with the political issues for which they had been elected and could not be trusted with the unequivocal drive to crush Germany. The Secret Elite required a government focussed on the destruction of Germany and these men were not up to it.

Hundreds of thousands of young men had already been killed. Prolonging the war required men with cold, hard hearts devoid of compassion, committed to the Secret Elite’s cause. How had Milner expressed the steel required to see war through to the ultimate destruction of the enemy? His chilling advice to Richard Haldane during the Boer War was to ‘disregard the screamers’. [30] It takes a special kind of ‘strength’ to ignore humanitarian issues, ignore the utter chaos caused by the sacrifice of so many and yet be willing to sacrifice many more. Milner had such cold steel in his core.

To the Secret Elite, Milner’s deep-rooted fears were completely vindicated. Democratic liberalism, watered down as it had been since the death of Campbell-Bannerman, [31] denied Britain a co-ordinated agency to direct the war effort. In Asquith’s cabinet, only Lloyd George, increasingly the sole candidate for Secret Elite support, grasped the need to shake up the traditional approach to government. Even a pretence of democracy would not deliver ultimate victory. It was poisoning their cause.

But how could they remove the prime minister who had done their bidding?

[1] Viscount Alfred Milner was from 1902-1925 leader of the Secret Society funded and promoted originally by Cecil Rhodes. Although he spurned elected position and championed preparations for war against Germany, once the war was underway , he and his associates wanted control of the government in wartime to control the post-war settlement was they envisaged it. See Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp 4-14 and p.140.
[2] He envisaged his great purpose in life to expand the English-speaking sphere of influence until it was so powerful that no nation could challenge it. see Robin Brown, The Secret Society, p. 18.
[3] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden history, The Secret Origins of the First World War, p. 55.
[4] Thomas Packenham, The Boer War, p. 551.
[5] The Nation & Athenaeum, 23 May 1925.
[6] Milner to Lady Cecil as quoted in A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 46.
[7] Robin Brown, The Secret Society, p. 253.
[8] J.A. Hobson, John Ruskin: Social Reformer, p. 187.
[9] Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, pp. 101-2.
[11] Winston Churchill, World Crisis Vol 1, pp. 38-9.
[12] Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp. 311-2.
[13] Lord Reginald Esher was one of the original members of Rhodes’s Secret Society. He was the confidante of Kings Edward VII and George V. His full role in vetting and approving Northcliffe’s acquisition of The Times see, J Lee Thompson, Northcliffe, Press Baron in Politics, 1865-1922, pp. 151-3.
[14] Lord Fredrick Roberts had formerly been Commander-in-Chief of The Forces before his retiral. A close associate ofViscount Milner, with whom he shared many a platform, he avidly supported compulsory conscription to the armed forces.
[15] J. Lee Thompson, Forgotten Patriot, p. 159.
[16] The worst of his kind was William Le Queux, a Walter Mitty character, his ridiculous anti-German propaganda was supported by Northcliffe’s Daily Mail. see Christopher Andrews, Secret Service, pp. 37-48.
[17] Hansard, House of Lords Debate, 23 November 1908 vol 196, cc1691.
[18] Brown, The Secret Society, p. 253.
[19] The Pilgrims Society was the embodiment of the ‘special relationship’ between the United States and Great Britain. [Its centennial history was written by Anne Pimlott Baker.] Exclusive to all but the anglo-saxon elite on both sides of the Atlantic, the Pilgrims of the United States included the most pro- British and influential bankers and financiers.
[20] In particular see Blog of 17 June 2014, Secret Elite 3: Building the Network.
[21] The great Liberal philosophy which was trumpeted by their parliamentary leader, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who fought and won the landslide Liberal victory of 1906.
[22] Hansard, House of Commons Debate 03 August 1914 vol 65 cc1831-2.
[23] David French, The Rise and Fall of Business as Usual’, in Kathleen Burk, War and the State, The Transformation of the British Government, 1914-1919, p.10.
[24] see Blogs on the sham of blockade, posted from 10 December 2014 to February 2015. Also E. Keble Chatterton, The Big Blockade.
[25] Perhaps the most interesting and puzzling scandal of the First World War was Herbert Hoover’s Commission for Relief in Belgium which ensured that war was prolonged by providing supplies, especially foodstuffs, to Germany from 1914-1917.
[26] Kathleen Burk, War and the State, The Transformation of British Government 1914-18, p. 90.
[27] Michael Amara et Hubert Roland, Gouverner En Belgique Ocuppee, p. 99 and p. 214.
[28] David French, The Rise and Fall of Business as Usual’, in Kathleen Burk, War and the State, The Transformation of the British Government, 1914-1919, p. 7.
[29] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 70.
[30] J. Lee Thompson, Forgotten Patriot, p. 483.
[31] Henry Campbell-Bannerman died in 10 Downing Street on 22 April 1908 from a heart attack.

Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener 10: The Final Reckoning

The previous nine blogs have presented the reasons why the men of secret power wanted rid of Herbert Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War from 1914-1916 … but were unable to manoeuvre him from office. He had threatened the smooth running of Trans-Atlantic finance, had interfered with, and apparently delayed, the enormous growth in armaments and munitions, and did not agree that the war would be won by the nation which fired most shells across the barren pot-holes of the Western Front. His phenomenal contribution to voluntary recruitment could not go on forever. Its initial success in the early months of the war was unsustainable. Conscription had to be introduced in March 1916 when the Military Service Act came into force [1] just as the parliamentarians had wanted, and Kitchener did not trust politicians. He was justified in his mistrust of gossiping Cabinet colleagues. Prime Minister Asquith, for example, shared secret confidential information with his paramour [2] Venetia Stanley on a daily basis. [3] He famously stated that he would give Cabinet ministers all they information they sought ‘if they would only divorce their wives.’ [4] In this, as in many of his other beliefs, Kitchener was absolutely right. London society was a hotbed of unbridled war-gossip especially in the first two years of the conflict.

What Kitchener failed to understand was that neither he, nor the British Cabinet, called the tune. The elite Bankers and financiers, the owners of the military-industrial complex, the manipulators of power and influence, the newspaper moguls and the academic guardians of historical record, the establishment on both sides of the Atlantic had ordained the war to crush Germany and amass even greater fortunes in the process. The Secret Elite whom we have identified by name in Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, [5] and further expanded in previous blogs, [6] held this as their sole objective.

An early end to the war was not to be contemplated. Nor was the notion of a just and fair peace about which Kitchener had been talking. What use was a compromise which would have allowed German commerce and industry to remain intact with all of the advantages through which modern business practice thrived? It was inconceivable that they would allow the war to end before the American government joined the conflict. The United States had to be drawn into the war in order to offload the enormous private loans and debts accrued by the Morgan/Rothschild/Rockefeller empires through their monopolies on arms, munitions and international loans. Had Kitchener influenced a move for peace in 1916, the burden of debt would not have been shouldered by US taxpayers, and likewise, British and French tax-payers, but by the financial institutions. An honourable peace would have left Germany strong and independent. Germany had to be made to pay for a war they had never wanted. Lord Kitchener’s threatened intervention imperilled every aspect of the Secret Elite’s aim.

He knew he had enemies, clearly.

Though he himself was a very loyal servant to King and Country, Herbert Kitchener had to struggle against professional jealousy and disloyalty from his senior staff. Sir Henry Wilson, the Principal Liaison Officer between the allied forces in France, was a regular correspondent with Lord Alfred Milner, the acknowledged leader of the Secret Elite, and acted as a high level informant behind the backs of Kitchener and Asquith. The Prime Minister wrote that both he and Kitchener considered Wilson a constantly intriguing serpent [7] so there was little love lost on either side.

The Secretary of State’s enemies amongst the press included editors of the Morning Post and the National Review, but his loudest critic was Lord Northcliffe at The Times and The Mail. Ever close to the Secret Elite, The Times, through their privileged correspondent Charles Repington, had tried to bring Kitchener into public disrepute by fanning the flames of the so-called munitions crisis in 1915. [8] Far from weakening Lord Kitchener, their accusations against him damaged their reputation and underlined the strength of public support he continued to enjoy. [9] Thus Horatio Kitchener was a man with many enemies, not in the trenches, the workplace or the ordinary home, but inside the core of the Establishment. That he understood. What he could not grasp was the grand plan which had been constructed above the realm of public politics.

Asquith was obliged to shake-up his Cabinet in May 1915 and the net impact of the reorganisation was to bring more members of the Secret Elite into public office. Professor Carroll Quigley [10] identified eleven members of Asquith’s ‘coalition’ Cabinet as members of this cabal including Lords Lansdowne and Curzon, Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative Party leader, Sir Edward Carson, F.E. Smith, Walter Long, the Earl of Selborne, Robert Cecil and most importantly, Arthur J. Balfour, former Prime Minister, as First Lord of the Admiralty. The man whom they dearly wanted removed, Lord Kitchener, stood firm. Though in private they all wanted rid of him, in public he could not be criticised.

For as long as they could find reason to tolerate him, especially once his powers over munitions had been shifted wholesale into Lloyd Geoge’s court, Kitchener remained an asset both as the international figure-head for the British military and as a buffer between the Prime Minister and his detractors. However, once he began to speak privately about his role as a peace-maker at the end of the war, and share his ideals with leading figures in both the military and the government, [11] Kitchener’s days were numbered. The asset had become a liability. But how could they get rid of him? You might construct a long list of possibilities – ‘heart-attack’, ‘suicide’, a full range of ‘natural causes’ might have been actioned. Any public suggestion of his alleged homosexuality would certainly have ruined him but what possible good would have come from trashing the name and reputation of the hero of the Empire? None. Though the military and political agents of the Secret Elite schemed behind his back, it was in the interests of all to protect Kitchener’s public reputation. He had to be removed with a subtlety which brooked no backlash. What were the odds against Herbert Kitchener dying in a naval tragedy, lost at sea? No-one could have anticipated such a scenario or possibly suspect unlawful practice. Surely?

Before anyone rushes to close the account with the dismissive and entirely unfair claim that this is simply another conspiracy, re-read the volume of evidence, actual and circumstantial, which we have already presented. [12]

We have clearly established that there was no immediate need for Herbert Kitchener to visit Russia. Knowing that the Somme offensive would begin in July, he threatened to pull out of the venture as late as 2 June 1916 rather than have it postponed. [13] The central Secret Elite place-man at the Czar’s court in Petrograd (St Petersburg) was Sir John Hanbury-Williams, a close friend and associate of Alfred Milner. [14] Williams’s position as Chief of the British Military Mission to Russia from 1914-1917 was consolidated by ancestral diplomatic connections with the Empress Catherine the Great, which granted him a special place in the Czar’s more intimate circles. [15]

The Secret Elite network spun a spider’s web of influence across the globe. Hanbury-Williams had conjured the Grand Duke’s supposed appeal to the British to attack the Dardanelles [16] in 1915, and it was he who co-ordinated Kitchener’s visit to Russia in 1916. His diary shows that the Czar ‘talked over the proposed visit of Lord Kitchener with the greatest keenest and interest’ before Hanbury-Williams organised the details with the British Ambassador and the military attache, Sir Alfred Knox. [17] The plan to send Kitchener to Russia emanated from Britain, not Russia. Indeed Hanbury-Williams’s published record omitted detailed reference to the background preparations for what was transformed into ‘Kitchener’s’ visit. Allegedly, when Lord Kitchener insisted that any postponement of his visit would result in its cancellation, Hanbury-Williams took immediate steps to stress Czar Nicholas’s personal wish that the visit go ahead. [18] The plans devised by Hanbury-Williams were transposed into the Czar’s wishes. So ran the web of deceit.

Everyone personally connected with the Secret Elite whose name had been associated with the ‘mission’ to Russian withdrew. To add to this co-incidence, their reaction to the news of Kitchener’s death on HMS Hampshire was in its own right, suspicious. Lloyd George claimed that he heard the ‘startling’ news on his way to a War Council in Downing Street on 6 June. When he entered the Cabinet Room he described ‘the Prime Minister, Sir Edward Grey, Mr Balfour and Sir Maurice Hankey sitting at a table all looking stunned’. This was indeed an inner circle of powerful men who understood what had happened, yet they were unable to talk about the consequences? Remarkably, given the enormity of what had just taken place, ‘Sir Maurice and I quite forgot for the moment that had it not been for the Irish negotiations, we would have shared the same fate.’ [19] That is untrue. From the outset Hankey said he would not go, and Lloyd George’s refusal had nothing to do with Ireland. [20] How many people would have reacted with such sang-froid? He and Hankey ‘quite forgot’ that they should have been on that same ill fated ship? [21] It defied human nature.

Indeed, without breaking step or pausing for a moment to contemplate the many contributions of the now deceased Secretary of State for War, Lloyd George knew that ‘the passing of Lord Kitchener left an empty place at the War Office. I realised that this place might be offered to me.’ [22] This man of many plots, of endless carping behind the backs of others, who briefed the press, especially Northcliffe, against Kitchener, displayed an almost callous cynicism. Lloyd George did indeed accept that office on 4 July, but not before ensuring that all the powers that had been systematically stripped from Kitchener were reinvested in the new Secretary of State for War.

On hearing of Kitchener’s death, Northcliffe is reported to have burst into his sister’s drawing room declaring, ‘Providence is on the side of the British Empire’ [23] Fawning tributes dripped from the mouths of the guilty. Admiral Jellicoe solemnly declared that the navy’s grief for ‘a soldier’ whose loss ‘we deplore so deeply. It was our privilege to see him last; he died with many of our comrades’. [24] No mention was made of Admiralty culpability or unswept channels.

Look again at the depth of that culpability. HMS Hampshire was barely fit for service and its loss added little to the Navy’s post-Jutland woes. Jellicoe and his masters at the Admiralty approved the ship’s route into a known minefield. Naval intelligence at Room 40 had carefully monitored all U-Boat activity. References to the minefield and the sinking of the trawler, Laurel Rose were removed or altered to suit the cover-up ‘explanation’ when difficult questions were raised about the fate of the Hampshire. The official report was kept secret. Key documents have still never seen the light of day.

Kitchener’s murder was covered with dripping platitudes and cynically penned obituaries. In the House of Lords, Lansdowne proclaimed that Kitchener’s death ‘was a great and dignified exit from the stage upon which he had played so prominent a part during the long years of his life.’ [25] The two-faced Asquith lamented ‘his career has been cut short while still in the full tide of unexhausted powers and possibilities.’ [26] The Secret Elite’s John Buchan ordained that ‘in a sense his work was finished’ and ‘his death was a fitting conclusion to the drama of his life.’ [27] ‘Bollocks’ may not be a recognised historical assessment, but ‘bollocks’ it remains. They peddled lies as fraudsters do.

The full panoply of State and Church gathered at St Paul’s Cathedral on 13 June to hold a service of remembrance for Lord Kitchener and his staff. The King and Queen accompanied by Queen Alexandra, the Lord Mayor in his black and gold robes, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, and assorted Aldermen and Sheriffs all gathered to pay their final respects to the former Secretary of State for War and champion of the Empire. They sang ‘Abide with me’, recited the ‘De Profundis’, read from the liturgy, said Prayers for the Country at War and thanked God for a brave and courageous life. The service ended with all three verses of God Save the King. [28] Thus with a great sense of theatre, Kitchener’s memory was consigned to the annals of received history. How quintessentially British.

No-one has ever been held to account for the murder of Lord Herbert Horatio Kitchener and over 700 other men.

[1] Conscription: the First World War – UK Parliament
http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private…/conscription/
[2] Asquith’s complex relationship with the much younger Venetia Stanley has intrigued commentators over the century. Whether or not they were lovers remains unproven.
[3] Michael Brock and Eleanor Brock, H.H. Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, Oxford University Press, 1982.
[4] Viscount Hankey, The Supreme Command, Vol. 1, p. 221.
[5] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, Mainstream, 2013 pp. 12-16 onwards, Appendix 1, p. 362 and Appendix 2, pp. 363-9.
[6] Secret Elite, Blogs 1-3, posted June 15-17, 2014.
[7] Brock and Brock, H.H. Asquith, Letters, p. 342, (Asquith to Venetia Stanley 28 Dec 1914.)
[8] see blog; Munitions 6: Crisis, What Crisis? posted 8 July 2015.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Professor Carroll Quigley, author of The Anglo-American Establishment, initially identified and named the secret cabal who controlled British foreign policy from the early years of the twentieth century.
[11] Randolph Churchill, Lord Derby, King of Lancashire, pp. 209-10.
[12] previous blogs posted from 4 May, 2016 – 29 June 2016.
[13] George Arthur, Life of Lord Kitchener, Volume 3, pp. 350-1.
[14] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 56.
[15] John Hanbury-Williams, The Emperor Nicholas II, as I knew him, p. 1.
[16] See blog, Gallipoli 9, posted 20 March 2015.
[17] Hanbury-Williams, The Emperor Nicholas II, p. 94.
[18] Ibid., pp. 98-9.
[19] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, vol.1, p. 456.
[20] Stephen Roskill, Hankey, Vol. I, p. 269.
[21] Hankey Diary 6 June 1916, quoted in Roskill, Hankey Vol 1, pp. 279-80.
[22] Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 456.
[23] J Lee Thomson, Politicians, the Press and Propaganda, Lord Northcliffe & The Great War, 1914-1919, p. 101.
[24] The Times, 14 June 1914.
[25] Lord Lansdowne , Hansard, House of Lords Debate, 20 June 1916 vol 22 cc315-22.
[26] House of Commons Debate, 21 June 1916 vol 83 cc145-51.
[27] John Buchan, Episodes of the Great War, pp. 246-7.
[28] The Times 14 June 1914.

Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener 4: Immoveable Object Meets Unstoppable Force

According to official histories of the First World War there was a great shell crisis in Britain in 1915. [1] In truth, the phenomenon was universal. The French army became acutely aware of the problem caused by lack of munitions as early as 24 September 1914. By November, the German gunners around Ypres were instructed to cut their daily barrage and their commander, General Falkenhayn reckoned that there were only enough shells for four more days of German bombardment in Flanders. [2] Whatever the preparations for war in Europe, no-one had anticipated its rapid descent into a stalemate of entrenchment accompanied by wasteful daily artillery barrages whose only purpose appeared to be stultifying proof that the enemy was still there. Never in the history of warfare had so many resources been wasted on futile exchanges of explosives to such little effect, nor so much profit made by those who provided the ammunition.

There are two schools of thought governing Kitchener’s attitude to increasing the supply of munitions. The first is that he obstructed the verve and purpose shown by Lloyd George as Chancellor, to ramp up the purchase of much needed munitions. In truth, that was Lloyd George’s view, jaundiced by his antipathy towards the Secretary of State for War and bolstered by his selective use of information from the ghost-written History of the Ministry of Munitions. [3] The second is that Kitchener refused to be influenced by agencies outside the War Office because there was no crisis. His judgement was that his commanders in the field cried wolf too often and used the excuse of shell shortage to cover their own inadequacies. He was correct.

Before the ill-fated offensive at Aubers Ridge on 9 May 1915, Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief in France, had assured the War Office that he had sufficient ammunition for the assault [4] and he had written a letter to Kitchener on 2 May stating; ‘the ammunition will be all right.’ [5] But Aubers was an unmitigated disaster for the British army. No ground was won and no tactical advantage gained. On that single day, 9 May 1915, 11,000 British casualties were sustained and it took three days to process the wounded through the Field Ambulances. [6] Can you even begin to imagine the horror and excruciating pain of the men sacrificed for a cause they did not comprehend? German losses were reported to be under 1,000. After the disaster Sir John French deflected attention from his own poor leadership by telling The Times correspondent, Charles Repington, whom he had personally invited to witness what he anticipated as ‘one of he greatest battles the world has ever seen’, [7] that it had failed because of a shortage of shells. [8] This wasn’t just disloyalty; it was a miserable lie.

Kitchener had enemies outwith his military subordinates. His behaviour and style angered vested interests inside the Secret Elite, particularly the financial – armaments sector which backed Lloyd George’s free-market, unrestricted approach to enhancing their profits. When the desperate need for armaments and munitions was fully realised in the first months of the war, and steps were being taken to utilise American industrial power, Kitchener and the War Office considered it an effrontery when the Treasury set up such facilities without his knowledge or approval.

The British Cabinet Committee meeting on 21 October 1914 agreed to contact the War Office agent in America with a request for 400,000 rifles and three days later sent their representative, Captain Smyth-Pigott to New York. They did not know that Lloyd George, whom the Secret Elite had determined would have ultimate control, had already acted independently. He had sent his most able Treasury expert, Basil Blackett, to America to evaluate the logjam that had built up in military procurement. First reports insisted that the War Office and the Admiralty had to start co-ordinating their purchasing strategies because suppliers were raising prices and playing one off against the other. [9] What did they expect? It was business in time of war. Profits were there to be made.

In November 1914, the Chancellor of the Exchequer contacted his acquaintance, Edward Charles Grenfell, senior partner of Morgan-Grenfell & Co., and director of the Bank of England, to discuss whether rifle production in the United States could be increased and engineering production switched to munitions manufacture. The line of contact started in the Treasury with Lloyd-George, through Edward Grenfell to J.P. Morgan & Co., the largest investment banking firm in America and back through the same channel to London. Morgan immediately promised to liaise with two firms, Remington and Winchester, ‘friends’ of his group, and an understanding was reached. [10] Delivery would however take eleven months, [11] though considerable quantities of rifles and munitions were carried regularly by the Lusitania. [12] Trusted Secret Elite agents had created a very pro-British accord which would benefit them all.

But Kitchener would not have it. The War Office complained loudly about this civilian arrangement and Kitchener contacted J.P. Morgan directly, demanding that the order be cancelled. In his view, munition supply was War Office business and no-one else’s. Lloyd George was furious; Edward Grenfell, outraged. Kitchener had crossed swords with the Anglo-American establishment. The carefully-planned transatlantic accord would have been smothered by Kitchener’s intervention, but the Chancellor had powerful friends on both sides of the ocean. Grenfell complained bitterly that ‘the manner in which the War Office have dealt with the proposed rifles contract with Morgan, Grenfell and Co, will have a detrimental effect on public opinion in America.’ [13] It was always a good line to take. American public opinion mattered to the British government. That same day, Lloyd George smoothed Edward Grenfell’s ruffled feathers by stating that Kitchener’s communication to Morgan was based on a regrettable ‘misapprehension’ and asked for Morgan’s cooperation’. [14] Subsequent orders were placed with Morgan’s chosen men without War Office interference.

In fact, though Kitchener had a good record of using civilian businessmen in procuring munitions, he did not move fast enough for Lloyd George. The two never acted in tandem. Kitchener set up a Armament’s Output Committee under George Booth, a director of the Bank of England, in April 1915, but at the same time Lloyd George brought together a Munitions of War Committee. Within a month, his persistence won the day. The Chancellor was determined to take control, although it was to be some time before all the relevant responsibilities were removed from the War Office. [15] Letters of complaint and detailed memoranda were sent to Asquith from Arthur Balfour [16], Winston Churchill, Edwin Montagu and others, berating Kitchener and his War Office staff for their ‘bigoted, prejudiced reluctance buy rifles or to increase the munitions of war’. [17]

Kitchener was defiant. Despite his obvious worth in correcting the public mind-set to the duration of the war and his dynamic appeal to volunteers for the rank and file in his new armies, his disdain for politicians and business devalued his standing in the eyes of the Secret Elite. Their agents in the press to begin an assault on Kitchener, and indeed on prime minister Herbert Asquith whose government they believed, had served its purpose. Consequently, Lord Northcliffe’s powerful newspaper empire unleashed an unwarranted attack on the Secretary of State for War. On 14 May, 1915, headlines in The Times screamed of the ‘Need for Shells and Lack of High Explosives’. The piece began with the blunt statement that ‘The want of an unlimited supply of high explosives was a fatal bar to our success [at Aubers].’ [18] The dam was burst. Northcliffe maintained the pressure on Kitchener through his Daily Mail which wrote of the folly of using shrapnel against the powerful German earthworks and wire entanglements, claiming that it was as effective as using a peashooter. [19]

On 21 May Northcliffe threw all caution to the wind and wrote the editorial for the Daily Mail, headlined, Lord Kitchener’s Fatal Blunder. He pulled no punches; ‘Lord Kitchener has starved the army in France of high explosive shells. The admitted fact is that Lord Kitchener ordered the wrong kind of shell – the same kind of shell which he used largely against the Boers in 1900. He persisted in sending shrapnel – a useless weapon in trench warfare. He was warned repeatedly that the kind of shell required was a violently explosive bomb which would dynamite its way through the German trenches and entanglements and enable our brave men to advance in safety. This kind of shell our poor soldiers have had has caused the death of thousands of them.’ [20] It was a salvo intended to destroy Kitchener’s reputation which exploded in Northcliffe’s face.

At the front, soldiers were ‘raised to a pitch of fury’ by the ‘perfectly monstrous’ attack on Kitchener. Major General Sir Henry Rawlinson lambasted the ‘diabolical plot’ to focus attention on high explosive shells stating that: ‘the true cause of our failures is that our tactics have been faulty, and that we have misconceived the strength and resisting power of the enemy. To turn round and say that the casualties have been due to the want of H.E. [high explosive] shells for the 18-pounders is a perversion of the truth’. [21] Instead of ruining Kitchener’s career, Northcliffe damaged his own public standing. The Services Clubs in Pall Mall barred The Times and Daily Mail from their doors. Subscriptions were cancelled; advertising slumped. Copies of the Daily Mail and The Times were burned on the floors of the London Stock Exchange, the Liverpool Provision Exchange, the Baltic Exchange in London and the Cardiff Coal and Shipping Exchange. There were ulterior motives for this public display of stockbroker indignation, [22] but it all added to Kitchener’s teflon-laced reputation

Kitchener may no longer have been an asset to the Secret Elite, but he was the public face of Britain’s fighting best. Asquith could not sack him for fear of the public back-lash and so tried to move him away from real decision-making. Kitchener was sent on a tour of inspection to Gallipoli and the Near East in the hope that he would stay there, but he did not. When he returned at the end of October 1915, the Secretary of State for War found Sir Archibald Murray had been appointed as the new Chief of Imperial Staff. His was a brief appointment for Sir William Robertson took his place in December with over all responsibility for strategy. He alone was to advise the government and issue orders to commanders in the field. Kitchener’s authority was more or less reduced to matters of manpower and recruitment.

As he himself put it, he was ‘curtailed to feeding and clothing the army’. [23] The same men who had dragged Kitchener into the War Office in 1914 had effectively stripped him of his power but did not want his resignation. Each time he offered or threatened to resign, Asquith persuaded him that it was his duty to serve the King. [24] Essentially, Kitchener provided a buffer between the prime minister and his critics. Why did he not force the issue and resign, despite Asquith’s insistence that he stayed? Kitchener was a proud man, yet he stood stripped of meaningful power like a glorified quartermaster. He had a good working relationship with Douglas Haig who had been promoted to commander in chief in France and with Robertson to whom he confided ‘I think I shall be of real use when peace comes. I have little fear as to our final victory – but many fears as to making a good peace.’ [25]

So Kitchener had good reason not to resign. He saw purpose in his holding on to office; great purpose. He imagined that he would be permitted to step back onto the centre-stage of world politics to ‘make a good peace’. That could never be allowed to happen.

[1] The full story has already been recorded in our blog Munitions 6: Crisis? What Crisis?, 8 July 2015.
[2] Hew Strachan, The First World War, pp. 993-4.
[3] Peter Fraser, The British Shells Scandal of 1915, Canadian Journal of History, Vol. 18. no.1 1983, p. 85.
[4] Hugh Cecil and Peter H Liddle, Facing Armageddon, The First World War Experienced, p. 42.
[5] Trevor Royle, The Kitchener Enigma, p. 292.
[6] http://www.1914-1918.net/bat11.htm
[7] Royle, The Kitchener Enigma, p. 290.
[8] Cecil and Liddle, Facing Armageddon, p. 42.
[9] Kathleen Burk, War and the State, The Transformation of British Government 1914-18, p. 89.
[10] Kathleen Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, p. 14.
[11] J.P. Morgan, New York, to E.C. Grenfell, 11 November 1914, PRO LG/C/1/1/32.
[12] See blog: Lusitania 8: The Anglo-American Collusion. posted 18 May 2015.
[13] Edward Grenfell to Mr Lloyd George, 13 November, 1914, PRO, LG/C/1/1/33.
[14] Lloyd George to Mr Grenfell, PRO LG/C/1/1/34.
[15] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, pp 97-127.
[16] Arthur Balfour had previously been prime minister (1902-1905) and was identified by Carroll Quigley as a member of the inner core of the Secret Elite, the Society of the Elect.
[17] Lloyd George, Memoirs, p. 109.
[18] The Times,14 May 1915, p. 8.
[19] Reginald Pound and Geoffrey Harmsworth, Northcliffe, p. 477.
[20] Daily Mail, 21 May 1915. See also Daily Mail Historical Archives at http://gale.cengage.co.uk/daily-mail-historical-archive/subjects-covered.aspx
[21] John Pollock, Kitchener, pp. 443-4.
[22] The city editor of the Daily Mail, Charles Duguid, had become so concerned about the high cost of dealing shares on the London Stock Exchange, that he decided to launch the Daily Mail’s own cut-price share service. Demand was so heavy that Duguid had to establish a small bureau to handle the administrative burdens of running a do-it-yourself stock market. The  Stockbrokers did not burn Northcliffe’s papers out of patriotic loyalty to Kitchener. Theirs was an act of spiteful revenge. But it caught the popular mood. Sales of the Daily Mail on the morning of the attack on Kitchener topped 1,386,000 copies and overnight slumped to 238,000.
[23] A.J.P. Taylor, English History, 1914-1945, p. 79.
[24] Pollock, Kitchener, p. 458.
[25] Sir George Arthur, Kitchener, Vol III, p. 299.

What, No Christmas Adverts About The Trenches In 1915?

Sainsbury’s 2014 Christmas advert based on the first noel in the Flanders trenches has not been repeated this year despite the outrageous success it registered in 2014. This year, it’s ‘let’s ignore history and get back to basics’. Marks and Spencer’s Art of Christmas advert celebrates middle-class excess; John Lewis has produced a heart-tugging mini-story with a gift-ridden solution to loneliness. Asda promises glitter and traditional nonsense, Lidl offers a School of Christmas and Waitrose jazzes up Heston Blumethal. [1] More pertinently, Sainsbury’s has abandoned the trenches in favour of a feline children’s book character called Mog. [2] The British Expeditionary Force has served its commercial purpose and can once more fade into history.

The reason for the short lived homage to the Western Front will not be analysed in our blind and biased media. Memories of Christmas 1915 are to be buried with the hundreds of thousands already sacrificed in a miserable war of attrition that raged across Europe in December of that fateful year.

Of course the Northcliffe press did their best to minimise the disaster. On Christmas Eve they rejoiced that the Royal Family would again be at Sandringham and soldiers on leave were to be found pushing ‘through civilian crowds in cheerful groups, happy in their holiday’. [3] Without the slightest trace of sarcasm the Times decided that ‘The merriest centres of entertainment in the country will be the place where the troops of the new armies are at present stationed, for it is a paradox of war that most men throw off care when they put on uniform’. Finally, in order to stress the normality of Christmas in Blighty, it reported that the display of poultry at Smithfield was a wondrous sight … with the supplies of British and Irish Turkeys described as plentiful. With just a bit of imaginative manipulation, Sainsbury’s might have made something of this. British and Irish turkeys, indeed.

The reality was frightening. In France the murderous fighting in the Vosges mountains of Alsace gave rise to claims from both sides that they possessed the strategic ridge which had been the object of so many assaults over 1915. The French attacked the summit of the Hartmannsweilerkopf from December 21-23 [4] with no thought of a seasonal peace. On Christmas Eve an official message from Berlin claimed that ‘we have completely recaptured Hartmannsweilerkopf’, while on Christmas Day a French communique insisted that the Germans had launched a violent attack … but had been everywhere repulsed.’ [5]

Flanders had already descended into a quagmire ill-fitted for celebration of humanity and hope. There were no exchanges of carols or gifts between the brotherhood of man. On Christmas Eve 1915, the order was clearly understood. ‘Our men will have no fraternising tomorrow.’ [6] The British Commanders ensured that there would not be a repeat of the dangerous nonsense of the previous year. As the Times correspondent wrote: ‘Christmas Day began with rain … the aqueous roads were crowded with the traffic of war. Screened by shrubbery, I began my Christmas in the trenches by discovering the bottom of the mud too late …’ He found the salvos from British Howitzers roaring methodically from their lairs, screaming across no-man’s land towards enemy positions,‘exhilarating’. [7] Orders from the top brass ensured that there would be footballing rematches in 1915.

In an unusually frank and compassionate ending, the Times correspondent described a view which Sainsbury’s would never have attempted to commercialise. ‘We splashed and squeezed about between those stacks of hard grey bags, and ooze was everywhere, repulsive to touch and to smell. Within dark recesses of the bags I saw recumbent figures covered with new mud, fast asleep; others jammed themselves against the muck to allow us to pass as cleanly as possible … Through the indirect eye of a cautious mirror I could make out beyond the still land, ominous in its astonishing quietude, with some fantastic ruins beyond, through which showed the forlorn light of this Christmas Day.’ [8] Not the cosy image that sells product, I’m afraid.

The disaster of the Dardanelles also hung over the British Empire towards the final months of 1915 awaiting the unkind apportioning of blame. In November, with the Russians no longer a threat to Constantinople, Kitchener gave the order to abandon Gallipoli and 93,000 troops, 200 guns and more than 5,000 animals had to be spirited away from the vulnerable shores of that ill-judged target. Another sacrifice in a miserable litany of sacrifice. [9] The evacuated Australian troops celebrated their salvation that Christmas on the island of Lemnos, far from home. One miserable irony marred their brave attempt to find solace in the seasonal act of giving and receiving.

Each man was presented with a ‘Christmas Billy’ but the picture on its exterior showed a Kangaroo on the map of Gallipoli, with his tail knocking a Turk into the sea. The words beneath said THIS BIT OF THE WORLD BELONGS TO ME. Not so, though those they left behind might have made such a claim. [10] To make such misery even worse, the entire Gallipoli strategy had been a ploy to assuage the Russians and keep them in the war. [11] The loss of tens of thousands of Australian, New Zealand, Irish, French and British troops had been but the residual cost of a greater lie. Pity the dead, but even more, the widows and families torn asunder by a prolonged war.

One particular voice from the front deserves our attention. Ben Keeling, (Frederick Hillersdon Keeling) a militant socialist in his undergraduate days at Cambridge and disciple of George Bernard Shaw wrote insightful letters to friends and family from the western front. [12] These told a far different tale from the usual tripe dished out by the propaganda machines like Northcliffe’s newspapers. Keeling was a patriot, devastated by Britain’s ‘madness’ to side with France and Russia against Germany. He had no personal quarrel with Germany and ‘firmly believed that Russia had provoked the war … These accursed barbarians, Jew-baiters and upholders of gross medieval Christianity … [Russians] may stand for culture but are the enemies of civilisation.’ [13] Wait a minute. Wasn’t Britain and the Empire fighting to save Civilisation? Isn’t this the diatribe still gushing from the mouths of contemporary warmongers and First World War co-celebrants?

At Christmas 1915 Ben Keeling told it as it was in a letter to his friend R C K Ensor [14] ‘We are in a camp of tents with a very few mud huts. By the way the Chronicle published some time ago some rot from some blithering correspondent who, I suppose, drives about in GHQ motor-cars and thinks it is a wonderful thing to come under shell-fire, to the effect that all the troops are comfortably housed for the winter in nice warm huts. That sort of thing makes men swear out here. … It is a bloody shame to deceive the public and say we are in comfortable huts when we aren’t. Till the autumn we hadn’t even got tents, but generally just our waterproof sheets as roofs for bivvy shelters … In our brigade a man is damned lucky if he gets a dozen hour’s sleep in three days in the trenches … And then people think that it is mud and wet we mind; that is nothing, absolutely nothing compared with the nerve-wracking hell of bombardment.’ [15]

Consider his words. Life at the Front at Christmas 1915 was barely tolerable, but the stories published back home devised images of comfort and warmth. This was no misrepresentation; it was a damned lie. It was a myth concocted to assure the public that all was well and the troops were content in their safe sanctuaries. And it was a lie promulgated from the pulpit. The great prelates of England struggled with the concept of Peace on Earth, interpreting the message of Christmas 1915 as a reinforcement of the propaganda about righteousness, honour and truth. The Archbishop of Canterbury peddled the promise that victory would make ‘no such fighting either necessary or possible in years to come.’ [16] A century on such words must be embarrassing; best not to ponder that Christmas message as we lay plans to rip Syria apart at Christmas 2015.

Dean Inge of St Paul’s, the Church of England’s personal military recruiter rallied his congregation with a timely reminder of the duty of sacrifice, as in – other people being sacrificed. The Church did not approve of Chaplains at the front. [17] With the certainty of a race-patriot he extolled the qualities of ‘our race at its best’ and took a swipe at the militant unions and ‘cliques, factions and classes’ who made plots against public order. Bishop Inge did not clarify whether he meant the engineering strikes, the rent strikes which protested against mothers and their children being thrown onto the streets while their men folk fought in the trenches, [18] or the conscientious objectors.

Bearing all this in mind, we can appreciate why Sainsbury’s have not turned to Christmas 1915 in their latest advert. Images of hellish bombardment, physical and mental deprivation or soldiers cursing those who deliberately misrepresented their plight will not sell the merchandise they so desperately need to protect their market share. So it’s back to Christmas schmaltz. Mog might just prove to be a winner. Simple economics, you see. Last years’s romanticising of the unofficial Christmas ‘truce’, was simple economics, not patriotism. It was made for profit, as was the miserably prolonged first world war.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/11970490/Watch-Waitrose-Christmas-advert-2015-why-emotion-makes-the-tills-ring.html
[2] http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/Watch-Sainsbury-s-just-beaten-John-Lewis-battle/story-28179081-detail/story.html
[3] The Times, Friday 24 December 1915, p. 3.
[4] John Howard Morrow, The Great War: An Imperial History p. 75.
[5] http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/59981658
[6] The Times, 27 December 1915, p. 7.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] firstworldwarhiddenhistory.wordpress.com Gallipoli Blogs 1-19 posted from 4/2/2015 to 24/4/2015
[10] http://www.gallipoli.gov.au/anzac-timeline/events-of-the-gallipoli-campaign/november-december-1915.php
[11] Gallipoli, The Untold Story, in New Dawn, No. 149, March-April 2015.
[12] F.H. Keeling, The Keeling Letters and Recollections, with forward by H.G. Wells, https://archive.org/details/keelinglettersre00keeliala
[13] Ibid. p. 181.
[14] Robert Ensor worked for the Daily Chronicle during the war and was later commissioned to write a volume of the Oxford History of England covering 1870-1914.
[15] Keeling, The Keeling Letters and Recollections, pp. 258-9.
[16] The Times, 27 December 1915, p.10.
[17] firstworldwarhiddenhistory.wordpress.com The Unholy Spirit, Blog posted 24/9/2014
[18] The Glasgow Rent Strikes of 1915 were an embarrassment to Asquith’s Liberal government
[https://remembermarybarbour.wordpress.com/mary-barbour-rent-strike-1915/] as were the demands from unions involved in Munitions. The prime minister had to send Lloyd George in person to try to calm the agitation amongst engineers and munitions workers on Christmas Day 1915.†

Munitions 7: The Man Who Would Control

 

The Ministry of Munitions Act, which received Royal assent on 9 June 1915, was followed by an Order in Council which transferred the main functions of the War Office in ordnance contracts, supply and inspection to a discrete department of government headed by the man who wanted it most, David Lloyd George. The Defence of the Realm Act of 1915 (No. 2 March 1915) also allowed his ministry to take over any factory and its labour force to prioritise war production. Keen to be remembered as the man who saved the day by rescuing munitions from its ‘crisis’, the egocentric Lloyd George described his task as politically, ‘ A wilderness of risks with no oasis in sight’. [1] In reality, he had the full backing of the powers that operated behind the scenes on both sides of the Atlantic. In the process of advancing his political career, the once principled Welshman comprehensively sold his soul and proved himself devoid of all moral qualities. [2] Let there be no doubt, Lloyd George was in the political ascendency and through him, the Secret Elite expanded their stranglehold on output and production. The one-time pacifist was indecently eager to give them the chance to make huge profits providing they gave him the shells. [3]

In moving from his stewardship of the nation’s finances to master of munitions, Lloyd George entered a world where he was free to spend unlimited amounts of money on provisions of war which were never subject to targets or upper limits. The public perception was that more shells equalled certain victory, and any voice contrary risked accusations of treachery. He is reputed to have estimated the shell requirement by the following proposition; ‘Take Kitchener’s maximum; square it, multiply that by two; and when you are in sight of that, double it for good luck’. [4] What he did went well beyond the wildest dreams of the Armament’s Trusts. He once again cast himself in the role of the friend of big business and the industrial-financial elite whose favour he had curried at the Board of Trade in 1906. [5]

Lloyd George gathered round him men from business and industry, including Sir Hubert Llewellyn Smith, a Ruskin-adherent and old Oxford University acquaintance of Secret Elite leader Alfred Milner. Smith had been responsible for the system of war-risk insurance to protect shipping company owners, and in 1915 played a crucial role in wresting munitions supply policy from the War Office. He later developed Lloyd George’s wartime manpower policy [6] into a shape approved by Milner. Sir Percy Giraud, managing director of the Elswick Works of armaments giant Armstrong, Whitworth, became director-general of munition supply, and was succeeded by Sir Frederick Black, Director of Naval Contracts. It was to Black that George Macaulay Booth had reported when he advised that J.P. Morgan should be appointed sole purchaser for Britain in the American market. [7] Morgan, as we have seen was a close associate of the Secret Elite. While so many names may at first be overwhelming, they demonstrate the links between influential businessmen, American bankers, trusted high ranking civil servants and Secret Elite agents who pervaded Lloyd George’s munitions department.

His supporters in the national press, especially Northcliffe’s, hailed Lloyd George’s appointment as a decision that would ‘satisfy the country’, [8] and the owner of The Times sent him a personal note dramatically claiming that he (Lloyd George) had taken on the ‘heaviest responsibility that has fallen on any Briton for 100 years.’ [9] A Punch cartoon depicted the Welshman boldly controlling the twin horses of capital and labour as he rode to the army’s rescue with a carriage full of the munitions of war, under the banner of ‘Delivering The Goods’. [10] The general perception was put about that, in terms of the provision of shells for the western front, it was, ‘War Office, Bad; Ministry of Munitions, Good’, but the legend that Lloyd George saved the day in 1915 and the early months of 1916 is preposterous. [11] Raw statistics appeared to justify this self-proclaimed achievement. He took up office on Whit-Monday 1915 and by 31 December shell deliveries totalled 16,460,501, the vast majority of which arrived late in the year. In fact 13,746,433 of these had been ordered beforehand by the War Office [12] and had nothing to do with the rush to ‘rescue the situation’ as painted by Lloyd George’s friends and sponsors. In truth, these impressive statistics were the result of the steady conversion and expansion of war industry since August 1914,[13] an expansion that was primarily set in place by Lord Kitchner.

Unquestionably Lloyd George appointed some able organisers. Sir Eric Geddes, who epitomised his ‘man for the job’ approach, became  deputy director of munitions supply, responsible for rifles, machine guns, field guns, motor lorries, field kitchens, and innumerable other items. As head of the gun ammunition department he earned undying gratitude for improving shell output in time for the opening of the Somme offensive. [14] The additional supplies of heavy artillery enabled the generals to continue their awesome wastage and ironically it was Lloyd George’s radical drive which enabled the orthodox military policies to continue. [15] Over six days almost two million shells were fired at German positions at the Somme before the doomed infantry attack.You might even believe that it was a striking victory  if viewed in terms of the profligate use of munitions rather than the awful carnage and wasteful sacrifice of mutilated armies.

Lloyd George achieved the Secret Elite ideal to replace politicians and traditional career civil-servants with businessmen who, in his own words, ‘had touched the industrial life of the country and of the Empire at every point.’ [16]  The War Office caution was cast aside in favour of business managers and innovators. The ministry of munitions conducted a national survey of engineering resources, divided the country into manageable regions and put the issuing of contracts into the hands of local boards of management. While Lloyd George appeared to nationalise the munitions industry, he did nothing of the sort. A number of state factories were established with considerable fanfare but most of the local boards opted for a system of contracts placed under the management of the major arms firms. [17] This was a clever move because the ministry’s relationship with the Armaments Trusts remained mutually positive and productive. In many cases the national factories were integrated with or attached to existing firms, and prices still remained excessively high.

The Secret Elite’s need to control went deeper and further than the issue of armaments.  Powerful trades unions had to be brought into line. Lloyd George began a campaign to convince the country that war work was second only to that of the fighting forces of the Empire. Brooking no objections and fearing no-one, he set out on a crusade to tame industrial unrest, backed as ever by Northcliffe’s newspapers. The Times naturally supported his call for a relaxation of trades union practices and the employment of women in munitions. [18] In the full glare of national publicity he rapidly visited factories and Town Halls in Manchester (3 June 1915), Liverpool (4 June), Cardiff (10 June), and Bristol (12 June), knowing full well that every word he uttered would be front page news. Sometimes, as in Liverpool, he had private and unreported meetings with employers first, before addressing the massed battalions of dockworkers and declaring that there was no room for slackers. [19] Though he was cheered to the rafters, the Times noted three days later that there were just as many absentees from work in Liverpool on the following Saturday.

Lloyd George’s repeated warnings that he had powers under the Defence of the Realm Act that he might be forced to use, presaged the action he intended to take. A special conference was convened in private on 10 June with 75 representatives from 22 major workplace unions at the new ministry, and on 16 June a second conference at the Board of Trade was held with over 40 representatives from trade union associations. Lloyd George had the courage to make it personal, to meet the workers and their leaders and, in his own words, ‘tell you the truth’. [20] The truth and Lloyd George had long been distant bedfellows, but his rhetoric appealed to the masses and thrilled the employers.

He went to Cardiff to set up a national munitions factory in South Wales and, though he always found room to warn about the necessity of compulsory powers, Lloyd George urged his audience to ‘plant the flag on your workshop; every lathe you have, recruit it.’ [21] In Bristol the exhortation was to let the men in the trenches ‘hear the ringing in the forges of Great Britain, of the hammer on the anvil…’ [22] A deputation of workers from Wm. Beardmore and Co. and the Dalmuir shipyards on the Clyde had been sent to France to visit front-line troops and returned urging ‘more shells, and more high explosive shells.’ [23] Let it be clearly understood; Lloyd George was the only national politician who could have carried off the most all-encompassing restrictions planned on personal freedom and choice in Britain since Oliver Cromwell, without a revolt. He was an invaluable operator for the Secret Elite.

The Munitions of War Act (2 July, 1915) stamped an unprecedented control over the British worker. Despite its innocuous title, the new law introduced  draconian limitations on the rights of the working man and woman. Arbitration in disputes about wages, hours and conditions of work became compulsory. Factories could be deemed ‘Controlled Establishments’ whose profits were to be limited by a munitions levy or tax and no wage increases were allowed without the consent of Lloyd George’s ministry. While apologists hailed this move as evidence of a fair-minded approach, [24] the notion that profits were henceforth restricted to just 20% more than the average of the last two years of peace missed the point that pre-war profits were already exorbitant and the orders were now so vast that enormous gains continued to be made. However, on the face of it, the law appeared to demand an equal sacrifice from capitalist and labour, [25] and that was his message.

Strikes and Lockouts were prohibited. Workers could no longer move from one part of the country to another without explicit permission, and anyone attempting to relocate had to have a ‘leaving certificate.’ The Minister himself could organise war munitions volunteers, demand the removal of labour from non-munitions work and issue or withdraw badges identifying men who should remain in armaments production rather than volunteer. Workers were obliged to take certain jobs and work overtime, paid or unpaid.  Fundamentally, workers in the munitions industries remained civilians bound by quasi military restrictions on their personal rights. Munitions Tribunals were set up in the workplace to dispense local justice, and individual rights were taken by force of law and held in abeyance for the duration of the war. Not that it all went smoothly. [26] In more than a quarter of the cases where workers appealed to the Glasgow Tribunal against their employers’ refusal to grant them a  certificate to move to another workplace, the tribunal found against the employer. Almost immediately after the passing of the Act, the South Wales miners went out on strike and it took Lloyd George’s personal intervention to persuade them to return. Three workers at Fairfield shipyard on the Clyde were given prison sentences for the non-payment of a fine which led to a strike-call. It was only avoided when a mysterious donor paid the fines. Social unrest was not dispelled by the force of Lloyd George’s personality, and by August 1917 the provision was abandoned. [27]

Towards the end of 1915 the Glasgow Rent Strike erupted into a popular protest against greedy landlords who abused the housing shortage by raising rents in seriously sub-standard tenements whilst the family breadwinners were fighting and dying on the Western Front. That landlords and their factors could treat the suffering poor with such heartless war-profiteering and widespread evictions, stirred resentment to action. Protests were widely supported by left-wing groups in and around Glasgow and Clydeside including the Labour Party and trade unions, but mainly women left to protect their own. [28] Forced by the impact the protest was having on the massive armaments workshops, engineering factories and ship-yards arrayed along the banks of the Clyde, where imminent disruption to production was threatened in favour of the women’s resistance, the government  passed a Rent Restriction Act. [29] This once liberal government was moved not by social justice, but by the threat to war production.

Lloyd George suffered the embarrassment of being summoned to Glasgow to meet with three thousand exasperated union officials and armaments workers crammed into St Andrew’s Hall on Christmas Morning 1915. Problems of labour dilution by which less skilled workers were permitted to take on more skilled work,  and  their consequent loss of status, was a serious concern throughout the engineering industry. But the Minister of Munitions was determined to drive forward his plans for 80,000 new workers in ‘state-owned, state-erected, state-controlled, state equipped factories with no profits for any capitalists.’ [30] What arrant nonsense, but it sounded good. He faced down the cat-calls and the singing of the Red Flag with typical self-assurance, and earned praise from the Northcliffe papers. What cannot be denied is that lies and propaganda from a fawning press ensured that Lloyd George emerged from his time as Minister of Munitions as a national hero, basking in the success of his business colleagues, and fortunate in his dealings with the unions. His public profile was such that he outshone everyone else in the government, including Kitchener, and his stock rose even further with the Secret Elite. It certainly propelled him from offices in Whitehall Gardens to Downing Street.

What was studiously covered up, however, was his disreputable relationship with the international arms-dealer and merchant of death, Basil Zaharoff an agent of a different kind, whose contribution we will consider in our next blogs.

[1] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs of David Lloyd George, p. 144.
[2] George H Cassar, Kitchener, Architect of Victory, p. 343.
[3] Donald McCormick, The Mask of Merlin, pp. 100-101.
[4] Hew Strachan, The First World War, Vol. 1 The Rush To Arms, p. 1077.
[5] McCormick, The Mask of Merlin, p. 102.
[6] Rodger Davidson, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/36147
[7] Kathleen Burk, Britain, America and the Sinews of War, p. 18.
[8] Daily Mail, 26 May, 1915.
[9] J. Lee Thomson, Northcliffe, Press Baron in Politics, 1865-1922, p. 242.
[10] Punch 21 April 1915.
[11] George A B Dewar and J H Boreston, Sir Douglas Haig’s Command, vol. 1, p.69.
[12] Ministry of Munitions, vol. 1 , Pt. 1 p. 150.
[13] Strachan, The First World War, Vol. 1, p. 1069.
[14] Keith Grieves, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/33360
[15] Chris Wrigley, The Ministry of Munitions: An Innovatory Department, in War and the State, edited by Kathleen Burk, p. 39.
[16] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 150.
[17] Strachan, The First World War, Vol. 1, pp. 1079-80.
[18] The Times, 1 June 1915, p. 5.
[19] Ibid., 5 June, 1915 p. 9.
[20] Ibid., 4 June, p.9.
[21] Ibid., 11 June, p. 9.
[22] Ibid., 14 June, p. 8.
[23] Ibid., 18 June, p. 5.
[24] R J Q Adams, Delivering The Goods: Reappraising the Ministry of Munitions: 1915-1916,  Albion: A Quarterly Journal Concerned with British Studies, Vol.7 no. 3 (autumn 1975) pp.232-244.
[25] Rules For The Limitation of Profits In Controlled Establishments, PRO MUN /5/100/360/13.
[26] Conciliation And Arbitration, Monthly Labour Review, Vol. 10, no. 4 (April, 1920) p. 233.
[27] Niall Ferguson, The Pity Of War, p. 273 and ref. 123, p. 519.
[28] http://sites.scran.ac.uk/redclyde/redclyde/rceve5.htm
[29] T C Smout, A Century of the Scottish People, 1830-1950, pp. 268-9.
[30] The Times, 27 December, 1915, p.3.

Munitions 6: Crisis, What Crisis?

Rumours about military set-backs circulated in Fleet Street and lists of casualties grew by the day through the spring of 1915. Blame was not laid at the feet of those in the field, and certainly not on their commanders in France. Months of propaganda had reinforced an expectation that ‘our lads’ would sweep all before them and what better reason to explain failure than the accusation that the government had not provided sufficient armaments? There were localised shortages, an imbalance between high explosives and shrapnel and, as we have shown, the navy claimed and received a priority in explosive shells over the army. [1] The impression from those at the front was that, if anything, British artillery fire on German trenches was increasing, and in February 1915 Captain James Jack of the Cameronians recorded his great joy in watching British shells smash through German parapets on he western front, adding that ‘these days we shell the Germans more than they do us.’ [2] Yet history would have it that in May 1915, there was a shell crisis. But how real was this ‘crisis’ and to what extent were events driven by other political objectives?

The Northcliffe-dominated press, in particular The Times and the Daily Mail, began a very personal attack on Lord Kitchener after the ill-fated offensive at Aubers Ridge on 9 May. [3] Aubers was an unmitigated disaster for the British army. No ground was won and no tactical advantage gained. On that single day, 9 May 1915, 11,000 British casualties were sustained and it took three days to process the wounded through the Field Ambulances. [4] German losses were reported to be under 1,000.

This dreadful failure has been blamed on Kitchener’s inability to provide high explosive shells. But, was that really the case? Prior to the attack, Sir John French, Commander-in-Chief in France, had assured the War Office that he had sufficient ammunition [5] and he had written a letter to Kitchener on 2 May stating; ‘the ammunition will be all right.’ [6] After the disaster Sir John French deflected attention from his own poor leadership by telling The Times correspondent, whom he had personally invited to witness what he anticipated as ‘one of he greatest battles the world has ever seen’, [7] that it had failed because of a shortage of shells. [8] This wasn’t just disloyalty; it was a lie. The attack at Aubers was preceded by an intense and prolonged artillery barrage which those present thought heralded ‘the complete destruction of the enemy’s lines’. [9] It did not.

The ‘crisis’ of the shell ‘shortage’ was blown into a furore to address political objectives. Observe its origins. Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Repington, The Times war correspondent, played a major role in creating the ‘crisis’ in conjunction with Lord Northcliffe, and The Times editor, Geoffrey Dawson, a Secret Elite inner-core member. [10] They planned to release Repington’s exclusive story behind the failure of Aubers in order to bring down the Asquith government and discredit Lord Kitchener and the War Office. If the general public could be turned against Kitchener and his ability to run the war, then control of armaments would be wrested from him and given to the trusted Lloyd George.

The Secret Elite organised and supported the attack on Kitchener. Geoffrey Dawson shared the plan with Lord Milner, their undisputed leader, [11] who was equally determined to bring down Asquith’s liberal government. This deeply contrived ‘shell shortage’ added to the problems the government was facing over Gallipoli and riots in the streets after the sinking of the Lusitania. Milner told his close friend, and member of the Secret Elite’s inner core, Sir Harry Birchenough [12] that the ‘chickens are indeed, coming home to roost.’ [13] But there was a major stumbling block. The conditions imposed through the Defence of the Realm Act meant that before any news from the front was published, it had to be given formal approval by the censor. On 11 May, Repington sent a private letter to Geoffrey Dawson with the curious message that his report would be stamped ‘passed by the censor’, though he (the censor) would not have seen it. [14] In other words an un-named source was about to fabricate official permission from the censor so that The Times could print French’s lie. It was a criminal act dressed as a duty to expose the ‘truth’ in order to undermine Kitchener and Asquith.

On 14 May, 1915, headlines in The Times screamed of Need for Shells and Lack of High Explosives. The piece began with the blunt statement that ‘the want of an unlimited supply of high explosives was a fatal bar to our success [at Aubers].’ [15] The dam was burst. Northcliffe maintained the pressure on Kitchener through his Daily Mail which wrote of the folly of using shrapnel against the powerful German earthworks and wire entanglements, claiming that it was as effective as using a peashooter. [16] On 21 May Northcliffe threw all caution to the wind and wrote the editorial for the Daily Mail with the headline, Kitchener’s Fatal Blunder. He pulled no punches; ‘Lord Kitchener has starved the army in France of high explosive shells. The admitted fact is that Lord Kitchener ordered the wrong kind of shell – the same kind of shell which he used largely against the Boers in 1900. He persisted in sending shrapnel – a useless weapon in trench warfare. He was warned repeatedly that the kind of shell required was a violently explosive bomb which would dynamite its way through the German trenches and entanglements and enable our brave men to advance in safety. This kind of shell our poor soldiers have had has caused the death of thousands of them.’ [17]

At the front, soldiers were ‘raised to a pitch of fury’ by the ‘perfectly monstrous’ attack on Kitchener. Major General Sir Henry Rawlinson lambasted the ‘diabolical plot’ to focus attention on high explosive shells stating that: ‘the true cause of our failures is that our tactics have been faulty, and that we have misconceived the strength and resisting power of the enemy. To turn round and say that the casualties have been due to the want of H.E. shells for the 18-pounders is a perversion of the truth’. [18] In the trenches, soldiers were likewise disgusted by the press attack at a time when everyone should have been working against the enemy. Douglas Haig made nothing of shell shortages, advocating that heavier guns be tried in the future. He stressed that accurate observation of the effect of a bombardment should be made before an infantry attack was launched. [19]

Instead of stirring public outrage against Kitchener, Northcliffe’s tirade provoked a torrent of loathing against him and his newspapers. ‘It shocked the public, shook Whitehall and threw Northcliffe’s critics into paroxysms of rage.’ [20] Reaction was swift. The Services Clubs in Pall Mall barred The Times and Daily Mail from their doors. Subscriptions were cancelled; advertising slumped. Copies of the Daily Mail and The Times were burned on the floors of the London Stock Exchange, the Liverpool Provision Exchange, the Baltic Exchange in London and the Cardiff Coal and Shipping Exchange. Though the Westminster Gazette praised ‘the manly and honourable impulse’ of the stockbrokers who cheered for Kitchener and booed Northcliffe, [21] there was more than just a whiff of payback about this allegedly impulsive demonstration.

Three years earlier, the city editor of the Daily Mail, Charles Duguid, had become so concerned about the high cost of dealing shares on the London Stock Exchange, that he decided, with Northcliffe’s blessing, to launch the Daily Mail’s own cut-price share service. Readers with stock to sell would write to the City Editor who then printed a small ‘ad’ that matched-up the buyers and sellers. Demand was so heavy that Duguid had to establish a small bureau to handle the administrative burdens of running a do-it-yourself stock market. When the London Stock Exchange closed its doors to trading on 31 July 1914, the Daily Mail Exchange took out half-page adverts in the Financial Times and the Financial News declaring it was open for business. [22] The Stockbrokers did not burn Northcliffe’s papers out of patriotism. Theirs was an act of spiteful revenge. But it caught the popular mood. Kitchener was an untouchable; a national icon whom the masses still revered. And, neither he nor Asquith resigned. Sales of the Daily Mail on the morning of the attack on Kitchener topped 1,386,000 copies and overnight slumped to 238,000. [23] This was not the effect that Northcliffe expected, but he did not desist or retract.

What makes this turn of events even more significant is that, in rejecting Northcliffe’s claims, the public refused to treat shell shortage as a ‘crisis’, though the supply of armaments remained a high priority. Official historians later adopted Northcliffe’s line and consequently the concept of a ‘crisis’ took root.

There were however, important consequences. Herbert Asquith was unable to hold together a government that had been elected in 1910 with no inkling of war, no experience of managing a war, and increasing tensions between ministers on how best to achieve victory in that war. Had there been a general election, Liberals feared that the Conservatives would be swept into power, and Asquith surrendered to a multitude of pressures from outside parliament to agree a swift and dramatic coalition [24] We have examined the pressures on Asquith in previous blogs, [25] but the Secret Elite were reminded that public opinion had to be carefully manipulated to achieve major change. It could not be taken for granted. They did have one outstanding success. Overall control of munitions was taken away from the still popular, Lord Kitchener.

A Ministry of Munitions was created as a discrete department inside the coalition government of 1915, and it was headed by their worthy agent, David Lloyd George. It may have looked like a side-ways step for the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but it was not. In many ways it was the most important post he could have held. The Secret Elite sought complete control of all war production to maximise their profits under the guise of sustaining the war effort. Lloyd George had proved his worth to them at the Board of Trade where his business-friendly approach was very profitable. [26] Once a committed pacifist who had preached arms-control, the popular Welsh MP was the one man who could have led a successful concerted opposition to war in August 1914, but sold-out to the Money Power.

His access went beyond the political realm and his association with businessmen and financiers in Britain and America gave him power and status greater even than the prime minister. Lloyd George had developed close relationships with men who should have been political enemies. He regularly consulted Arthur Balfour, the former conservative party leader and prime minister, and through him had the confidence of Bonar Law who fronted the opposition party in 1915. Milner, consumed by the certainty that national conscription was the only way forward, considered Lloyd George the most able man in the government. [27] Knowing full well how to manipulate the Welshman, Milner noted; ‘if properly handled, [he] will end up going for it [conscription] and he is the only man who could carry it, if he could be induced to try.’ [28]

How well the Secret Elite played Lloyd George, pandered to his ambitions, and understood his public value. Together, they had plotted a complete take over of Asquith’s Liberal government in 1915, but had only a partial success. Asquith did not surrender the key posts in his Cabinet to the men who would strangle Laissez-faire and impose the kind of conditions that the Secret Elite knew were essential to their ultimate aim, the crushing of Germany and the Anglo-American domination of the civilised world. They would have to prepare the ground more carefully.

[1] See previous blog.
[2] John Terraine, General Jack’s Diary, War on the Western Front, 1914-1918, p. 99.
[3] The battle is variously known as Festubert, Givenchy and Fromelles. See A M Gollin, Freedom or Control in the First World War, Historical Reflections, 1976, p. 148.
[4] http://www.1914-1918.net/bat11.htm
[5] Hugh Cecil and Peter H. Liddle, Facing Armageddon, The First World War Experienced, p. 42.
[6] Trevor Royle, The Kitchener Enigma, p. 292.
[7] Ibid., p. 290.
[8] Cecil and Liddle, Facing Armageddon, p. 42.
[9] Royle, The Kitchener Enigma, p. 290.
[10] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 312. and pp.101-106.
[11] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, p. 50.
[12] Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 13.
[13] Milner Papers, Milner to Birchenough, 13 May, 1915.
[14] A.M. Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 253.
[15] The Times,14 May 1915, p.8.
[16] Reginald Pound and Geoffrey Harmsworth, Northcliffe, p. 477.
[17] Daily Mail, 21 May 1915. See also Daily Mail Historical Archives at http://gale.cengage.co.uk/daily-mail-historical-archive/subjects-covered.aspx
[18] John Pollock, Kitchener, pp. 443-4.
[19] Haig, Private Papers, 11 May 1915. as cited in http://www.1914-1918.net/bat11.htm
[20] Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, p. 478.
[21] Ibid.
[22] Alex Brummer, Daily Mail, 28 Dec 2012, citing research from Professor Richard Roberts, Kings College, London.
[23] Pound and Harmsworth, Northcliffe, p. 479.
[24] Edward David, Inside Asquith’s Cabinet, p. 242.
[25] See blogs, 25 and 27 May 2015.
[26] Donald McCormick, The Mask Of Merlin, p. 102.
[27] J. Lee Thompson, Forgotten Patriot, p. 315.
[28] Milner to Gwynne, 10 May 1915; in Thompson, Forgotten Patriot, p. 315.

The Bryce Enquiry … But You Cannot Speak To The Witnesses

Of the milestones in the Propaganda war aimed at the heart of America, arguably the most devastating was the Bryce Report, the Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages [1] which examined the conduct of German troops in Belgium, the breaches in the rules of war, and the inhumanity perpetrated against the civilian population. Lurid stories of German atrocities came first hand from the many Belgian refugees who fled to Britain in August and September 1914 and filled newspapers of every political hue. None howled louder than the Northcliffe stable. On 12 and 17 August the Daily Mail railed against ‘German Brutality’, including the murder of five civilians corroborated by sworn statements from ‘witnesses’. Coming as it did when news from the front was scarce, such damning stories caught the public imagination and set it on fire. On 21 August, Hamilton Fyfe, a Northcliffe journalist who had served on The Times, wrote of ‘sins against civilisation’ [2] A sensational list of accusations filled the columns of The Times and the Daily Mail including the maiming of women and children, the bayoneting of wounded soldiers, women with their breast cut off, nuns raped, and with sickening surety on 18 September a photograph was published purporting to be that of an innocent Belgian father holding the charred stub of his daughter’s foot. [3] Backed by the evidence of civilian Belgian refugees and of British servicemen, these stories were spread across the world and did enormous damage to the German cause. Members of Parliament called for an official enquiry and a committee of the most eminent men in the realm was appointed on 15 December 194 by prime minister Asquith.

Belgian resistance to the German invasion in August 1914 was stubborn and brave. The Garde Civique (Civilian police) was certainly deployed in Louvain; innocent people lost their lives. [4] The Daily Mail correspondent, A.T. Dawe followed the German army in its drive from Aix-la-Chapelle to Brussels and reported that some of the civil population, urged on by the Mayor and Belgian officials, rained machine gun bullets on the German trains as they approached the station, and the church of St. Pierre, which overlooked the railway, was turned into a veritable fortress. [5] Sharp-shooters fired on German infantry from upper-floor windows and the street by street defence of towns and villages seriously threatened the invasion timetable. Reprisals followed, of that there was no question, but British newspapers outdid each other in reporting these as gross atrocities with mutilated and murdered children, ravished innocent women, executed priests and nuns and indiscriminate heinous crimes against nature itself.

Let us be absolutely clear. There were atrocities. The burning of Louvain, Andenne and Dinant was brutal. When they invaded Belgium in 1914, the German high command expected to sweep through the country with very little opposition. The German army was many times larger and stronger than the Belgian army, and the Germans thought that any resistance by Belgium would be futile. The strength of Belgian resistance came as a surprise, and disrupted the German timetable for advancing into France [6] This in turn led to exaggerated suspicions among German commanders of Belgian civilian resistance. The Germans responded harshly to all perceived acts of resistance. By the time that the German army marched through Brussels on 20 August, its progress had been disgraced by a savage and at times indiscriminate severity against the civil population. In several villages and towns, hundreds of civilians had been executed. Many buildings were put to the torch. Priests thought guilty of encouraging the resistance were killed. The essential German objective was to insure that they did not have to leave a strong force to guard their lines of communication or an exposed rear by a policy of Schrecklichkeit, [7] literally, terror. The atrocities were shocking and cannot be excused, but the manner in which they were grossly exaggerated beyond credibility stands testament to the power of propaganda.

The chairman of prime minister Asquith’s official enquiry, Viscount Bryce, had from 1907-13 been Britain’s most popular Ambassador to the United States, a personal friend of President Wilson, twice the principle guest of the Pilgrims of America and from 1915-17, President of the British branch of the Pilgrims. He was assisted by three eminent lawyers and H.A.L. Fisher, the historian and member of the inner-circle of the Secret Elite, [8] who at that point was Vice-chancellor of the University of Sheffield. His connections to Milner dated back to South Africa and the Kindergarten and H A L Fisher enjoyed a stellar career linked intrinsically to his Oxford/Milner connections. The final member, Harold Cox was editor of the Edinburgh Review and proved somewhat difficult to control. He was not one of the ‘group’.

The Committee was specifically asked ‘to consider and advise on the evidence collected…as to outrages alleged to have been committed by German troops during the present war’ and to prepare a report for the government on the conclusions they drew from the evidence. [9] The impression given was that this illustrious committee of very experienced and trustworthy gentlemen had examined 1,200 witnesses from whose evidence around 500 statements had been included in the report along with extracts from 37 diaries taken from dead German soldiers and eye witness reports from British soldiers. This was simply not the case. They spoke to no member of the Commission.

The process was as follows. In September 1914 the prime minister requested that the Home Secretary and the Attorney General collect evidence of accusations of inhumanity and outrage carried out by German troops in Belgium. Most of the accusations came from Belgian witnesses, some military, but most civilians from the towns and villages through which the German army had advanced towards the French border. More than 1,200 depositions had been taken, not by, but under the supervision of the Director of Public Prosecution. The work involved ‘a good many examiners’ who had some legal knowledge but no authority to administer an oath. This had been going on for ‘three or four months’ before the committee was appointed. [10] The task they were given was to sift through thousands of pages of testimony, given freely, but not under oath, and decide what should or should not be included in a final report. While they were able to speak with and ‘interrogate’ the ‘lawyers’ who took down evidence from the witnesses, [11] they were not allowed contact with any witnesses themselves.

Harold Cox was particularly displeased with the arrangement. He wanted to re-examine some of the witnesses and forced Bryce to allow the committee to question the legal teams involved in taking the depositions. Indeed, without his intervention, the preface to the report would not have mentioned the fact that they had not spoken to a single witness in person. Almost every account that was put on record had already appeared in the national newspapers but by being included in the final report, they gained authenticity. The esteemed gentlemen had read the ‘evidence’ and confirmed its veracity. The quasi legal nature of the Committee, the trappings of procedure and due process, the presence of an eminent Judge, Sir Frederick Pollock, the wording which talked of corroboration of evidence, lawyers, cross-examination, testimony, the Courts of England, the British Overseas Dominions and the United States, witnesses and conviction [12] allowed the report to assume the status of a profound judgement from the High Court of Judiciary. It was nothing of the sort.

The conclusion read as the charge sheet of ultimate villainy. It was designed to. The decision of the pseudo-court to which Germany had no appeal, was that in many parts of Belgium deliberate and systematically organized massacres of the civil population, accompanied by many isolated murders and other outrages had taken place. That in the conduct of the war innocent civilians, both men and women, were slaughtered in large numbers, women violated, and children murdered. Looting and the wanton destruction of property were deemed to have been ordered by the officers of the German Army and they determined that elaborate provisions had been made for the systematic burning and destruction of towns and villages at the very outbreak of the war.

They pronounced that this destruction had no military purpose. They asserted that the international rules of war were frequently broken, particularly by the using of civilians, including woman and children, as a shield for advancing forces exposed to the fire, to a less degree by killing the wounded and prisoners, and in the frequent abuse of the Red Cross and the White Flag. Every charge was ‘proven’ guilty. In the penultimate paragraph the committee declared that all the charges were ‘fully established by the evidence’. [13] The only trapping that was missing from this judicial pantomime was the black cap. And the world believed, though not one word was actually heard from the witnesses.

[1] http://www.gwpda.org/wwi-www/BryceReport/bryce_r.html
[2] The Daily Mail, 28 August 1914.
[3] J Lee Thompson, Northcliffe, Press Baron in Politics, 1865-1922, p.231.
[4] Verax, Truth, A Path to Justice and Reconciliation, p.151.
[5] Ibid., pp.151-2.
[6] Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August, pp. 130-132.
[7] C R M F Cruttwell, A History of the Great War, p.16.
[8] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p 24.
[9] Warrant of Appointment, Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages, 1915, p2.
[10] Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages, 1915, pp. 3-4.
[11] Ibid., p. 7.
[12] Ibid., pp. 4-7.
[13] Ibid., pp. 60-1.

Kitchener: Secretary Of State For Prolonged War

A further curious enigma, which was solved in those opening days of August 1914, was the vacant position of Secretary of State for War. Indeed the position had been covered by Asquith since the embarrassing resignation of John Seely on 30 March, [1] which meant that in the run up to a World War, he served as both Prime Minister and head of the War Office. One consequence was that in all of the Cabinet discussions about Belgium, France and Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary, and the growing possibility of war in Europe, the War Office had no singular dedicated voice. Why had Asquith failed to appoint a successor to John Seely? Clearly his Secret Elite advisors had approved his decision, which on the face of things, appears to be quite strange. No other Cabinet post had been left unfilled during his period in office.

Asquith’s problem was embarrassing in that there was no member of his Cabinet who could be trusted with the War Office. He confessed so in writing to his beloved Venetia Stanley on 5 August. [2] Everyone who knew that war had been ordained against Germany already held key Cabinet Posts. Churchill at the Admiralty could not be moved. Neither could Sir Edward Grey from the Foreign Office nor Lloyd George from the Treasury. Richard Haldane, Asquith’s life-long personal friend and former incumbent, would have been a perfect choice, but Haldane had been unfairly tainted by the press as a pro-German, and his appointment would have caused disquiet. [3] Any in-comer would have had to be briefed about the preparations for war, the work of the Committee of Imperial Defence and the military ‘discussions’ that had been agreed with France. His dilemma was that there was no politician in his government whom Asquith dared trust with such knowledge, and certainly no back-bencher.

On the positive side of this equation, a vacant post suggested that Britain was completely unready for war. If, in the aftermath of the near revolt of the army over its possible involvement in Ulster, it appeared that the War Office had been downgraded, then Germany would see it as positive proof that Britain was unlikely to go to war.

Although Asquith was tempted to defy public opinion and reappoint Richard Haldane, the Secret Elite inner-core was not. Whatever their previous difficulties over the ending of the Boer War, [4] Alfred Milner considered Field Marshal Herbert Kitchener as the only man with enough driving force for the job. [5] Kitchener should have been at his post in Egypt, but ‘happened’ to be in England in July 1914 to be created Earl of Khartoum and Broome in the county of Kent by King George V. [6] This too was no chance happening. Asquith had approved Kitchener’s membership of the Committee of Imperial Defence some years before, [7] and Winston Churchill was regularly in contact with him. They discussed the plans that emerged from the CID, and in the week before the outbreak of war Kitchener and Churchill lunched and dined together ‘two or three times’. [8] Yet Asquith hesitated to break with tradition and appoint a Field Marshal to his Cabinet. Sir Henry Wilson reported the prime minister’s hesitations to Alfred Milner and his Secret Elite colleagues who were dismayed that Asquith had failed to immediately dispatch the British Expeditionary Force to France. Fearing a weakness that might mortally wound their plans, they approached Kitchener directly and convinced him to go in person to 10 Downing Street and demand a definite appointment. [9]

A newspaper campaign in favour of Kitchener’s appointment at the War Office gathered quick momentum. Horatio Bottomley’s highly popular and patriotic one penny weekly, John Bull magazine, first suggested that Lord Kitchener be given the post of Secretary of State for War in April 1914, but little more was discussed in public until the morning of 3 August when The Times carried an article by Colonel Repington [10] making the same suggestion [11] On the following day the clamour for Kitchener’s appointment was championed by a Times Editorial which trumpeted public confidence in him and pressed the prime minister to make a formal appointment ‘at least for the term of the war’. [12] The Westminster Gazette and Northcliffe’s Daily Express insisted on Kitchener’s appointment. Rumours that Asquith intended to return Haldane to the War Office were later denied by him with a caustic parliamentary swing at the critical press;

‘The only person—and I should like this to be put on record—whom I ever thought of as my successor was Lord Kitchener, who happened, by a stroke of good fortune, to be at that moment in this country, on the point of returning to Egypt. I mentioned the suggestion to one or two of my colleagues, and I think it right to say that the one who most strongly urged the propriety, and even the necessity of that appointment, was my Noble and learned Friend Lord Haldane, who was then Lord Chancellor. Lord Kitchener’s appointment was received with universal acclamation, so much so indeed that it. was represented as having been forced upon a reluctant Cabinet by the overwhelming pressure of an intelligent and prescient Press’ [13]

Asquith’s bold claims do not hold true in the light of later memoirs. Leopold Amery revealed that Milner had gone so far as to put Kitchener into a taxi to Downing Street to confront Asquith into a decision. Kitchener was instructed to tell the prime minister that he would return immediately to Egypt unless Asquith gave him more important work. [14] As ever the Secret Elite got their man and Asquith was left to reconcile his Cabinet colleagues to the highly unusual idea of a Field Marshal in a Liberal Cabinet. A War Council was held on 5 August. It comprised select politicians and the top men from the ‘Roberts’ Academy’. [15] Lord Roberts himself was present with Kitchener, Sir John French, Douglas Haig, Haldane, Grey, Asquith and, since it was essentially an extension of the Committee of Imperial Defence, Maurice Hankey [16] Why Lord Roberts, who had retired ten years earlier, was present, has never been explained. Indeed, he was so intimately involved with the Secret Elite that the question was never even asked.  This was the Secret Elite War Council, an exclusive cabal of men who had planned the outbreak war, prepared the nation for war and proposed to run the war. Their task was to crush Germany. Many thought that it would all be over by Christmas.

Student volunteers at Cambridge in August, expected to be back for the restart of term-time on 7 October. Even serving officers who were stationed abroad in Gibraltar feared that they would miss the war because they were not part of the British Expeditionary Force. [17] But the assumed simplicity of that task withered before their eyes within two short weeks. The theory that the war would be a brief affair was shot down immediately by Lord Kitchener. At his first Cabinet meeting he dominated the room and spoke a truth some found difficult to believe. In staccato sentences, Kitchener was never an orator, nor a politician, he bluntly told the Cabinet that the war would not be short, that it would not be resolved by sea-power and that millions of men would have to be involved in the conflict for several years. [18] The Cabinet sat in silence. Most were stunned by his unexpected prediction and we can only wonder at what point they began to fear the consequences of their inability to stop the warmongers three days before.

When he delivered his first speech in the House of Lords as Secretary of State for War, Kitchener quashed any notion of a quick-fix solution. His terms of service were the same as every man who stepped forward to the colours, for the duration of the war, or if that lasted for more than three years, then for three years, so that ‘if this disastrous war be prolonged’, others ‘fresh and fully prepared’ could step forward and ‘see this matter through’. [19] Kitchener was the inspired choice for whom the empty Cabinet chair had been specially reserved; but his inspiration had limitations and unforeseen consequences. Though he did not foresee trench warfare, Asquith, Grey and Balfour all talked of Kitchener having ‘flashes of genius’ or ‘instinct’ [20]

Kitchener’s prediction that the war would be prolonged has been recorded in history as an inspired insight, as though this was the first time that such a possibility had been considered. How could it have been? Kitchener had attended the Committee of Imperial Defence, discussed war with Churchill on several occasions and had been specifically chosen by the Secret Elite. They well knew that it would take a prolonged war to destroy Germany. As far as the Secret Elite was concerned, he was decidedly on-message. Three years or more of warfare promised rich and extravagant profits, which, coming from the mouth of the national hero, spoken in Cabinet, repeated in the House of Lords and carried solemnly in the press, meant that long term investment in the instruments of war could begin at once, and would be unquestioned.

Though he had detractors, Kitchener’s immediate impact on the British war effort was electric. His immense prestige with the public galvanised the nation in a manner that no other could have contemplated. Margot Asquith reputedly remarked that ‘if Kitchener was not a great man, he was at least a great poster, and there is absolutely no doubt that in those first weeks of war, it was Kitchener’s imposing posture pointing directly at the man in the street, which inspired hundreds of thousands of volunteers to join the army. [21]

But Kitchener was dictatorial by nature, distrusting of politicians and schooled in foreign wars far from Europe. He was dismissive of Haldane’s Territorial Army which had been previously hailed as a great achievement, and his ‘bull-in-a-china shop manners and methods’ at the War Office caused Asquith concern.  The first bursts of enthusiasm for war encouraged Kitchener. He was the great magnet, and his hypnotic presence on billboards across the nation won the day. In the first eighteen months of the war, 1,741,000 volunteers joined Kitchener’s army, and a further 726,000 were added to the Territorials. [22]. But an immediate problem soon became evident. How would the weapons of war, the rifles, the heavy guns and shells, the uniforms and the provisions for huge armies, be provided?

Asquith grasped the moment on 6 August by seeking Parliamentary approval for a grant of £100,000,000 ‘for all measures that may be taken for the security of the country, for the conduct of Naval and military operations, for assisting the food supply, for promoting the continuance of trade, industry and business communications …and generally for all expenses arising out of the existence of a state of war.’ [23] He shamelessly intoned a litany of solemn obligations, of duty, honour, and the prospects of European Civilisation. His claim that ‘we are fighting to vindicate the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed, in defiance of international good faith, by the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power’, sat ill at ease with Britain’s conduct towards the Boer Republics, but did not stop Asquith from eloquently asserting that the principles for which Britain had entered the war were ‘vital to the civilisation of the world’ [24]. Naturally, his appeal for unprecedented funding was approved by the ‘opposition’ benches, even though the  granting of £100,000,000 meant that the government had no reason to seek parliamentary approval for expenditure for months to come, and consequently was freed from democratic accountability.

[1] After the embarrassment of the ‘Curragh Mutiny’ in 1914, John Seeley resigned from his post as Secretary of State for War. Asquith failed to appoint anyone in his Cabinet to the post and took over of both the government and the war office. See Hidden History, the Secret Origins of the First World War pp. 309-11
[2] Michael and Eleanor Brock, HH Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, p. 157.
[3] Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-Five Years vol.II, pp286-287.
[4] Milner had been very annoyed by Kitchener’s willingness to accept compromises with the Boer leaders in 1901.
[5] J. Lee Thomson, Forgotten Patriot, p.309.
[6] Tony Heathcote, The British Field Marshals 1736–1997. p.195.
[7] Stephen Roskill, Hankey, 1877-1918, p. 134.
[8] Winston Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911-1918,  p190.
[9] A.M. Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 240.
[10] He was the military correspondent for the Secret Elite’s Times newspaper. He had his own desk at the War Office.
[11] Brock, H.H. Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, p. 152.
[12] The Times, 4 August, 1914, p.5.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Leopold Amery, My Political Life, Vol. II, pp. 21-23.
[15] Brock, H.H. Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, pp. 157-8
[16] CAB 21/ 1/ 1.
[17] Max Arthur, Forgotten Voices of the Great War, p. 16.
[18] Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911-1918, p.191.
[19] Hansard, HL Deb 25 Aug 1914 vol. 17 cc501-4.
[20] Brock, HH Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, p.154 and Grey of Fallodon, Twenty-Five Years, vol. II p. 279.
[21] Arthur, Forgotten Voices of the Great War, p. 9.
[22] Brock, H.H. Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, p. 154.
[23] Hansard, HC Deb 06 August 1914 vol.65 cc2073-100.
[24] Ibid.