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Great Contemporaries: Churchill in the Age of Lloyd George (Part 3)
- By RAYMOND A. CALLAHAN
- | June 9, 2022
- Category: Churchill Between the Wars Explore Great Contemporaries
“Great Contemporaries: David Lloyd George,” continued from Part 2.
Postwar Prime Minister
Well might Andrew Bonar Law say that Lloyd George could be prime minister for life. But the end of the Great War brought the enormous challenge of coping with a shattered Europe. Now Lloyd George had to govern a drastically altered Britain, and an Empire developing stress fractures. Unlike Churchill in 1945, the electorate gave him a chance. But the political adjustments he faced proved his undoing.9
The 1918 “Coupon Election” was named for the letter or “coupon of endorsement” Lloyd George and Bonar Law sent to their supporters. It returned a landslide victory for the Lloyd George Coalition. But within that victory lurked a danger from which the Prime Minister would not escape. In the House of Commons, most Coalition supporters were Conservative MPs. Lloyd George Liberals were outnumbered three to one by their Tory colleagues.
The Welshman had always been a prime minister without a firm political base. The war had hitherto, to some extent, masked that. Now a staggering array of domestic, imperial, and foreign problems constrained his freedom of action. The old Liberal Party had nearly vanished; even H.H. Asquith lost his seat. The Labour Party, strengthening its financial and voter base by the wartime growth of Trade Unions, surged to second place.
The Conservatives, according to one of them, were “hard faced men who looked as if they had done well out of the war.” They were obsessed with the specter of revolution—the menace of Bolshevism they saw lurking behind Labour’s rise. This gave an edge to postwar British politics that had been largely absent before 1914 (except when Irish issues arose). In those days both leading parties had been broadly similar in social class composition.
The electorate
Crucially, the gender base of British politics was transformed. The Representation of the People Act had been passed as a bipartisan measure. Becoming effective at the first postwar general election, it tripled the British electorate. Hitherto voteless Britons were now enfranchised: all males (who by 1916 made up much of the British Army) and women over 30 (massively represented in the Ministry of Munitions labor force). Virtually all men and 43% of women could vote (and women could sit in Parliament, although few did for decades). This strengthened, obviously, pressure for domestic social reform.
Lloyd George recognized this, promising “homes fit for heroes.” The reality however was that absent Tory support, there could be no sweeping social reform legislation such as had characterized the prewar Liberal government, although some advances were made, building on those earlier accomplishments. Because the domestic policy arena was now so limited, Lloyd George tended to concentrate on foreign and imperial issues.
The stricken world
The shaping of the Versailles settlement is of course the most remembered of Lloyd George’s postwar activities. John Maynard Keynes’s angry pamphlet, The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), still heavily influences the popular memory of Versailles as short-sighted and vindictive, laying the foundation for future calamity. Scholarly opinion has, however, become more nuanced. Lloyd George was under enormous pressure. He had to satisfy clamant allies whose mood was either deeply angry (France) or unrealistically messianic (America). He had simultaneously to mind his composite political base at home, where the Tories also wanted a harsh peace. Churchill, still a Liberal and characteristically magnanimous, argued vainly for generous treatment of Germany.
Then there were the self-governing Dominions. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa had suffered no physical damage but had made large manpower contributions. Jan Smuts of South Africa suggested that service pensions be included in the reparations bill, which would provide the Dominions some compensation. The Dominions were by 1919 effectively independent (de jure recognition would come in 1931). Thanks to the war, they carried more weight in London now than they had in 1914. So, soldier pensions were included.
Versailles was certainly far from the best settlement that could have been reached but it was perhaps the best that Lloyd George could do in the circumstances.10 Much the same verdict could apply to the international issues that crowded in on Downing Street after the Armistice. The Russian Civil War, pressure for more Indian self-government, and unrest in Ireland and Egypt were prominent problems. In every case Lloyd George had to balance the right course with the politically feasible for Coalition power-base. Russia was a good example of this.11
Churchill, Lloyd George and the Russian upheaval
British intervention in Russia began during the war, as the Czarist regime crumbled, the Provisional Government was overthrown, and the Bolsheviks moved to extricate Russia from the war. If Russia collapsed, British military supplies at north Russian ports had to be kept from the Germans. Before Lenin’s coup there was hope that the Provisional Government would keep tying down much of the German Army. When that hope vanished, anger at the new Bolshevik regime’s desertion of the Allied cause spread. With it came a growing fear of Bolshevism (the most commonly used term at the time). Support grew for a limited commitment to the “White” counterrevolutionaries.
The Coalition’s Tory base (and many Liberals) were strongly anti-Bolshevik, although the Labour Party opposed intervention. Leading the charge in support of the Whites was Lloyd George’s Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill (moved from Munitions in late 1918 to manage the tricky issue of demobilization). Churchill was not wrong in his assessment of the menacing potential of the Russian Revolution. He was however quite wrong about the Whites, who proved to be a very weak reed to lean upon. As the Whites failed, Lloyd George was able to wind down intervention without too many tremors in his Cabinet.
Lloyd George, Churchill and Ireland
Over Ireland, the Prime Minister used his technique of allowing a flawed policy to prove itself a failure.12 Once the Lords’ veto power had been broken, a Home Rule Bill passed, but was then suspended until after the war. The Irish Nationalists had won, but nothing changed. Into the space opened by that sense of frustration moved a new group of militant nationalists, who rejected the compromise embodied in the Home Rule Bill (chiefly special treatment for Ulster). They wanted, not Dominion status, but a republic compromising the whole of Ireland.
This group was responsible for the 1916 Easter Rising. A military fiasco, it was a political success, thanks to the Asquith government’s clumsy handling. The Rising’s leaders were executed, enraging militants. By 1918, the old “gradualist” Irish Nationalists had lost their hold on the country. Militant separatists embodied by Sinn Fein swept the Irish seats outside Ulster. Refusing to take their place at Westminster, they assembled in Dublin, calling themselves the Parliament of the Irish Republic. Meanwhile, their military arm, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) launched a campaign to make Ireland ungovernable. It targeted policemen, civil servants, and other symbols of British authority. The reaction from London was to crush what was becoming an insurgency.
The Tories had always supported Ulster and forcefully confronting militant Irish nationalism. Churchill, while supporting Home Rule, was willing vigorously to face down challenges to government authority. Before the war he’d argued against concessions to militant Ulster. Now, as Secretary of State for War, he launched a counterinsurgency campaign in Ireland. Here he was strongly supported by his Chief of Imperial General Staff General Sir Henry Wilson, a determined Ulsterman.
Collins and the IRA
Led by Michael Collins, the IRA presented challenges for which the British Army was unprepared. Its recent experiences on the western front were no guide to counterinsurgency tactics. By targeting the police, Collins crippled local sources of intelligence for the army. It was fighting blind, new formations hastily cobbled together to reinforce the crumbling police. Among these was a paramilitary organization, the Black and Tans. Churchill, while not creating it, supported it far too long. Its outrages exacerbated rather than solved the problem, becoming a public relations disaster.
As bloodshed and futility deepened, Lloyd George became as skeptical of counterinsurgency in Ireland as of intervention in Russia. He above all knew what a burden it imposed on Anglo-American relations. Hoping for a negotiated settlement, he preserved a “back channel” to the militants, seeking negotiations. Coupled with growing effectiveness of British Army counterinsurgency tactics, a truce was declared in July 1921. Six months later came the Anglo-Irish Treaty, a grand compromise. It embodied both an Irish Free State and Northern Ireland as autonomous entities: one a Dominion, one still part of the United Kingdom.
Lloyd George succeeded because a war-weary British public was turning against the costs and embarrassments of the counterinsurgency effort. Exercising his negotiating legerdemain, he convinced the Irish nationalists that the border between the two Irelands would so tightly confine the northern statelet that it would not be viable. Simultaneously he assured Ulster leaders that Northern Ireland’s boundaries were generous enough to ensure its viability. Once again, the Prime Minister’s legendary skills in maneuver and negotiation had created a path out of an apparently intractable situation. But unease with him among the Conservatives was growing.
Concluded in Part 4.
Endnotes and further reading
9 The best account of the 1918-22 Lloyd George Coalition is by the great Welsh historian Kenneth O. Morgan, Consensus and Disunity: The Lloyd George Coalition Government 1918-1922 (Oxford, 1979).
10 The best account of the shaping of the Versailles settlement is Margaret Macmillan’s Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York, 2002). The author is Lloyd George’s great granddaughter.
11 An excellent detailed study of the twists and turns of British policy towards Russia is Richard Ullman’s Anglo-Soviet Relations 1917-1921, 3 vols., (Princeton, 1961-1972). See also “A Million Soldiers to Fight for the White Russians,” 2019.
12 The Anglo-Irish war (known also, euphemistically, as “the Troubles”) can be followed in Roy Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (1988). Charles Townshend’s The British Campaign in Ireland 1919-1921 (Oxford, 1975) is an excellent account of an episode all too often obscured by the swirling mists of yesterday’s nationalist propaganda. See also “Rapscallions? What Churchill Really Said and Thought about the Irish,” 2021; and “Churchill and the Myths of Ireland,” 2019.
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).