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Jack Pease Insights on the 1911-15 Liberal Government
Cameron Hazlehurst and Christine Woodland, eds., A Liberal Chronicle in Peace and War: The Journals and Papers of J.A. Pease, 1st Lord Gainford, 1911-1915, Oxford University Press, 2023, 608 pages, $245, Amazon $183.70, Kindle $174.51. Currently available from the publisher at $171.50. Using promotion code AAFLYG6, order from https://global.oup. com/academic/
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In 1935 George Dangerfield published The Strange Death of Liberal England, a highly readable account (still in print) of the half dozen years before 1914 when Britain’s last Liberal government faced multiple challenges. There was increasingly militant labor movement, and an equally militant demand for women’s suffrage. Perhaps most militant of all was the quarrel between dramatically opposed groups of Irishmen.
Dangerfield left hanging the question of whether the First World War saved Britain from a civil war. By and large, historians have discounted that argument, but the period remains fascinating. Prime Minister H.H. Asquith’s government was grappling with issues—workers’ and women’s rights, Northern Ireland—that resonate still.
The Liberal galaxy of talent was one of the most glittering in modern British history. It included two figures who would lead Britain to victory in two world wars: David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill. This splendid piece of scholarly editing by Hazlehurst and Woodland will be prized for its illumination of the last years of Liberal administration. (The book follows an earlier volume of Pease papers for 1908-10, published in 1994.)
Not “trade,” but “office”
J.A. (“Jack”) Pease was the scion of a successful Quaker business and manufacturing family in Northern England. However, his father had managed the family’s finances badly, so Pease could never coast on family wealth. Asquith later referred to him as experiencing the “pinch of poverty.” This is of course, relative to the standards of his class. His income would have seemed very comfortable to most Britons.
Nonetheless, Pease needed a job consonant with the attitude of his class. Not “trade” of course, but “office” (salaried), which was perfectly compatible with gentlemanly status. And so, Jack Pease became a career politician. He was Liberal Chief Whip and then President of the Board of Education. And he was deeply admiring of Asquith.
Jack Pease also was, by his own admission, not in the least intellectual. In fact, he rather scorned sharp minds, saying, “I don’t admire brains as much as some people do.” His favored activities were the outdoor pursuits of his class—cricket, fox hunting, shooting. His view on intellectual acuity explains why no one seems to have been dazzled by his brainpower. Asquith told an intimate that he was a “solid” of the “second class.”
And that is perhaps the secret of his success in attaining cabinet rank in a government full of driving, ambitious, much more talented individuals. He was reliable, loyal, able to manage his job competently and utterly unlikely to rock boats or cause embarrassment. Prime ministers (and presidents) always need such people (even if they are condescending about them in private). Jack Pease was close to the heart of government—and often a bridge partner at Number 10—during the four crucial years 1911-1915.
Pease was not a born diarist like Harold Nicolson—perhaps no one scornful of matters intellectual could be. So, his diaries and papers are rather pedestrian. But here is the real strength of this book: Virtually every entry is accompanied by a superb editorial gloss that not only fills in the context but acts as a review of all recent scholarship on the subject covered, or alluded to, in the diary entry. The result is a comprehensive account of many of the issues Asquith’s government confronted in the tumultuous pre-war years, and then as war began to change Britain radically and permanently.
Early entries cover the anxious weeks in 1911 before the House of Lords accepted the Parliament Act. That legislation ended, not before time, the House of Lords’ absolute veto over the House of Commons. This is the most revelatory part of the book. The constant head counting and ever-shifting totals of titled diehards and compromisers make it clear how close-run the issue was. In retrospect, of course, the amazing thing is that the Lords’ veto had survived so long. Its overdue demise removed a massive roadblock to modernization.
A rare insight to wartime decisions
The section that may attract the most interest, however, is the opening of the First World War. For long months, as Asquith’s government tried to wage war, it was full of people, like the conflicted Quaker Pease, temperamentally ill-suited to conflict. Nonetheless, they tried.
Cameron Hazlehurst has traversed this ground before. His now-standard work, Politicians at War: July 1914 to 1915 (1971), drew upon Pease’s diary. In his introduction to that book Hazlehurst pointed out that Jack Pease’s notes offered one of the few records of Cabinet decisions during the war’s opening months. Official records of Cabinet proceedings were not, rather amazingly, maintained. Not until 1915 did that dynamic Royal Marine and formidable bureaucratic warrior, Maurice Hankey, begin building the Cabinet Office machine.
It is startling to realize that the best record of early Cabinet deliberations is the skein of gossipy letters Asquith wrote, during cabinet meetings, to Venetia Stanley, a young society beauty who had captured his affections. Pease’s calm diary very considerably enhances our understanding of those critical months. They are a solid justification for making his diary widely available.
Reflections on Churchill
For those interested in Churchill’s career, there are several points of particular interest. Pease’s account of Churchill’s attempt to prolong the defense of Antwerp in October 1914 is one of these. WSC offered to resign from the Cabinet to take command of Antwerp’s defenses. It was supposedly greeted with laughter around the Cabinet table. But Pease’s diary makes no mention of this. He notes simply that the Cabinet found the request “extraordinary”—as it certainly was. Perhaps it seemed less risible to his colleagues then as it came to seem after. Churchill’s actions prolonged Antwerp’s stand, slowing the German advance, and prevented them from turning the Allied flank.
The diary also reveals how normal social customs—at least in Pease’s class—hung on in the war’s early stages. He records several shooting parties with enormous game bags on aristocratic estates. Pease was one of those ministers progressively excluded from key strategy meetings. Yet he records very little anti-Churchill gossip—and he was very much embedded in the gossip network
We are accustomed to considering these months as prelude to Churchill’s fall over the Dardanelles in May 1915. So, it is useful to have someone well connected bearing witness to the fact that he was functioning effectively (if colorfully) in the Cabinet during this fraught period. His fall over the Dardanelles was by no means foreordained.
If anything was inevitable, it was the necessity to replace Asquith’s rather casual methods of running total war. More was needed than the unflappable, bridge loving, heavy drinking Prime Minister, quietly penning letters to Venetia Stanley during Cabinet meetings. The political and administrative machinery Lloyd George would create in 1916-17 was imperative if Britain was to win through. Pease was a valuable witness to the slightly shambolic early stages of Britain’s transformation by total war. It is here that this book makes its greatest contribution.
A very stiff price
Churchill once said, “This Treasury paper, by its very length, defends itself against the risk of being read.” Correspondingly, the price of this book defends it from being read by the audience it deserves. One cannot imagine that it will sell well except to large university libraries. And indeed, with budget shortfalls facing those libraries, even they may resist buying copies.
It is hard to fathom why academic publishers set such prices, unless they expect that several hundred sales at this price are profitable. More likely, such practices will force anything online that does not have great popular appeal. I like holding books in my hand. It is a shame publishing houses now seem staffed by those who don’t! (Fit commentary: used copies of the first volume (1908-10) are selling for $30.)
The author
Dr. Callahan is Professor Emeritus of History at the University of Delaware and a leading scholar of the Indian Army in the two World Wars. He taught at the University for 38 years and was director of the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program, where an annual student prize bears his name. Among his books are Churchill and His Generals (2007) and Churchill: Retreat from Empire (1997).
Related articles by Dr. Callahan
“Great Contemporaries: Asquith, the Last Victorian Liberal,” Part 1, 2023.
“Asquith,” Part 2, 2023.