The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (89 page)

Letterboxes, a school, a railway station were set on fire. The British Museum was attacked, as was the orchid house at Kew. The suffragettes even went for the Tower of London. Across England members of the society, who numbered around 40,000 women, hoisted up the long skirts that continued to be
de rigueur
in the early twentieth century and stole out after dark to cut telephone wires. They even tied themselves to the railings of 10 Downing Street. Soon several hundred suffragettes were locked up in Holloway Women’s Prison. Moreover, once the suffragettes were incarcerated they went on hunger strike. As some began to die, the anxious prison authorities turned to force feeding. But there were fears about its legality. In desperation the home secretary Reginald McKenna introduced the so-called Cat and Mouse Act, which allowed hunger strikers to be released and to be rearrested without further proceedings once they had recovered at home. One of the Pankhurst suffragettes, the forty-one-year-old Emily Davison, threw herself under George V’s horse at the 1913 Derby and died from her injuries. The WSPU’s extremism alienated many more moderate campaigners for women’s suffrage like the veteran campaigner Emily Davies, one of the founders of Girton College, Cambridge. When Christabel Pankhurst escaped to Paris after a warrant was issued for her arrest, much of the agitation died down.

Within Britain there was a growing sense of despondency. The confidence which had been so manifest in 1906 was ebbing away, chased by vague but prevalent fears about a coming conflagration. The sinking of the
Titanic
in 1912 by an iceberg underlined the frailty even of modern man and his engineering. Even more haunting to the pre-1914 imagination was the fate of Captain Scott’s expedition to the South Pole. Nature was not tamed as easily as the twentieth century thought.

At Christmas 1912 Captain Robert Scott and four others including Captain Lawrence Oates reached the South Pole, only to discover that the Norwegian Roald Amundsen had beaten them to it. When the frostbite on Oates’s feet began to endanger the expedition’s progress, Oates sacrificed himself for his friends by walking out of his tent into the blizzard. ‘I am just going outside and may be some time,’ he said. His body was never found, but his words became revered for their very British understatement. Captain Scott and the rest of the expedition failed to reach the food depot they were seeking. When an Antarctic search party at last reached them in November 1913 it was to find them dead in their tents several miles away. Beside Scott’s body was the journal in which he detailed Oates’s heroic end.

Even the Asquith government, which had taken power as the essence of probity and high-mindedness, was rocked by financial scandal. The telegraph signal company Marconi was awarded the contract to provide a radio service throughout the empire under the aegis of the Post Office. But in 1912 it was alleged that both the postmaster-general Herbert Samuel and the attorney-general Sir Rufus Isaacs held shares in the company and had not declared their interest. Both parties were cleared of insider dealing, Samuel outright and Isaacs because he had only bought shares from the American branch of the company after Marconi had won the contract. However, the secretary of the American company turned out to be Isaacs’ brother. The suspicion that Rufus Isaacs had used his influence to secure the contract for Marconi would not go away. There was a feeling that something underhand had been going on, even if it could not quite be pinned down. The affair left a cloud over the Liberals.

Above all, Asquith was unable to control the situation in Ireland. Since 1912 when preparations for the Third Home Rule Bill began, Sir Edward Carson, the formidable solicitor-general in the last Conservative government, and the MP James Craig had assembled a private Protestant army named the Ulster Volunteers to resist Home Rule in Ulster. Now that the automatic Unionist majority in the Lords could no longer prevent Home Rule, they would put their trust in force. Andrew Bonar Law, the inexperienced leader of the Conservatives and Unionists who succeeded Balfour, encouraged this lawless behaviour. In a series of astonishing speeches, he pledged the Conservatives to defend Ulster physically against the British government if it tried to enforce Home Rule. He even went to Ireland to take the salute of the Ulster Unionist troops as they paraded.

On 28 September 1912 the whole of Belfast closed down to sign the Solemn League and Covenant to resist Home Rule. The hooting sirens of the shipyards and the machines of the factories stopped as nearly 500,000 people lined up to sign the pledge by which they refused to recognize the authority of any Home Rule Parliament. Most of Ulster seemed to be armed. Many of the men signed the pledge in their own blood.

But, although half of Ulster, the Protestants, was against Home Rule, the other half was Catholic and in favour of it. Moreover the head of the Irish Nationalist MPs, John Redmond, could not give up Ulster and Irish unity. By going for Home Rule instead of independence, Redmond had already sacrificed much. For the past few years his leadership had been challenged by Sinn Fein, the total-independence movement in Ireland, which had become notably popular in southern Ireland among blue-collar workers politicized during a series of strikes in 1912 and 1913. In Dublin an army of strikers called the Irish Volunteers had grown up under two leaders, James Connolly and James Larkin, who had none of Redmond’s scruples about violence. The Irish Volunteers started drilling like the Ulster Volunteers. By 1914 they were 100,000 strong, and a third of them were in the north.

As the situation in northern and southern Ireland became more intemperate, with both sides plotting to import arms, the Home Rule Bill was passed twice by the House of Commons and thrown out twice by the House of Lords. But, by the autumn of 1913 as Home Rule came closer to implementation, the government was becoming increasingly uneasy at the idea of imposing Home Rule on Ulster. Perhaps it would be impossible to coerce Ulster; in any case it was very un Liberal to coerce anyone.

Under George V’s aegis, discussions were opened between all parties at Balmoral to discuss the possibility of excluding Ulster. Redmond reluctantly agreed to partition, angering many of the Sinn Feiners and further weakening his position with the Irish Volunteers. The question was, where should the exclusion line run? The talks continued throughout the winter of 1913–14, while the two illegal armies of southern and northern Irish drilled regardless.

The apparent favouring of the Unionist side was epitomized by the government turning a blind eye to what was called the Larne gun-running in April 1914 when the Ulstermen landed 30,000 rifles and a million rounds of ammunition. The police and coastguards made no real attempt to stop the operation. But in July that year, when the Irish Volunteers landed guns at Howth near Dublin, troops were called out to stop them. Protesters threw things at troops in Dublin, provoking the soldiers to fire into the crowds, killing three and wounding forty more. This more than ever aggravated relations between Dublin and Westminster, and between Redmond and the Irish Volunteers.

Meanwhile the very loyalty of the army in Ireland had been called into question. The commander-in-chief of the army in Ireland, Sir Arthur Paget, who had strong Unionist sympathies, had chosen to ignore the tradition that the British army was apolitical and that its first duty was to obey the civilian government. In an episode known as the Curragh ‘mutiny’ after the area where the army was based, in March 1914 Paget told officers that he could not order those who disapproved of Home Rule, especially if their homes were in the north, to impose it on Ulster. He recommended that those who did not wish to coerce Ulster should resign from the army. No fewer than fifty officers out of seventy said they would resign if ordered north.

The secretary for war who had encouraged Paget’s extraordinary dereliction of duty was sacked after this became public. Nevertheless the officers concerned could not be court-martialled, as there was an increasing anxiety at top government levels that some kind of war was not far off. The atmosphere in Europe in late May 1914 to an American observer Colonel House was ‘militarism run stark mad’. The French had vastly added to their conscripts. There were constant rumours that the German army was the real force behind its country’s foreign policy, that it had insisted on a war tax and had called in all foreign loans.

May and June passed. In May it seemed that a way out of the Irish impasse had been found. It was a typical piece of Lloyd George cunning: there would be an amendment to the Home Rule Bill that any county, if a majority of its voters agreed, could vote itself out of Home Rule for six years. The Nationalists concurred, but the House of Lords insisted on changing the amendment: the whole of Ulster must be excluded from Home Rule without a time limit. However, when the altered bill returned to the Commons on 14 July, the government’s attention was shifting away from the passions of Ireland to the wider world.

For on 28 June the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the archduke Franz Ferdinand, had been assassinated by a Bosnian Serb in Sarajevo. Austria–Hungary had long been wanting to crush the Serbs. With her military establishment hot to strike, she was using the excuse to reach the brink of war. The question was, would she drag all the other allied nations of Europe in with her? Anxious telegrams flew between the chancelleries of Europe.

While the world once more held its breath, discussions on the Irish Home Rule Bill pressed on. The bill could not be accepted by the Commons in its amended state, but there had to be a resolution to the crisis. So uncompromising was the atmosphere that at Asquith’s instigation on 18 July another round-table conference was called at Buckingham Palace. Redmond and the Nationalists accepted the exclusion of Ulster, and the Unionists agreed to Home Rule for the rest of Ireland. But the conference broke down over the counties of Fermanagh and Tyrone. With their equally mixed Catholic and Protestant populations, should they be part of northern or southern Ireland? The drilling continued in both parts of the country. Though there was as yet no civil war, the threat remained. However, the whole matter was overtaken by events in the outside world. The conference broke up without conclusion, to reconvene in the autumn. Just as its members were rising from their seats, the foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey came in, carrying the ultimatum which Austria–Hungary had sent to Serbia on 24 July. Although Serbia replied in the most abject manner, Austria–Hungary broke off relations and began to bombard her capital, Belgrade. It was the beginning of the First World War.

In September 1914, when Parliament returned after Britain had declared war in August, the position of the Irish Home Rule Bill was still fraught with confusion. The bill was meant to become law, as was a bill disestablishing the Welsh Church, because they had both successfully passed three times through the House of Commons. Although no agreement over Ulster had been reached, Asquith at first announced that the exclusion of Ulster should be added to the bill. When the Irish Home Rulers, whose seats the Liberals continued to rely on for their majority, refused to countenance this, Asquith said that the bill would have to go on to the statute book in its original form. At this the Unionists left the House of Commons in protest. Irish Home Rule and the disestablishment of the Welsh Church went on to the statute book, but with another act tacked on to them suspending both bills from coming into operation until six months after the end of the war. The issue was thus shelved.

But now we must return to the outbreak of the First World War, or the Great War as it was originally known–or, as the Fabian writer H. G. Wells and its more hopeful participants called it, the War that Will End War. Before 1914 the peace in Europe had been fragile, but it had held, partly because a great deal was done to placate Germany, partly because Germany herself refrained from hostilities. She had made herself extremely unpopular with France and Britain by continually threatening war, but she had not actually brought it about.

Despite Britain’s distrust of German intentions, she continued until 1913 to try to convince Germany of her friendliness. That year another attempt had been made at calming down the atmosphere by offering a twelve-month ‘naval holiday’ between the two countries, but that was turned down. By 1914 Lloyd George had made the speech warning off the
Panther
, and three-quarters of the government had reverted to their old radical pacifist colours. They believed that the best hope of peace was for Britain to reduce the number of ships built.

Agreements were reached in Germany’s favour about longstanding disputes over colonies in Africa, the Baghdad railway and the Persian Gulf. Despite the close relationship between the French and British military, Britain still would not enter into an official alliance with France and Russia because Grey did not want to inflame the situation with Germany. This would later be criticized on the ground that, if Britain had shown she intended to fight for France, Germany would never have gone to war.

However, in 1913 there was a tremendous upset in the Balkans which completely altered the power structure there in Russia’s favour. When under Russian auspices the Balkan League Wars reduced European Turkey to a tiny corner thirty miles wide, and made Russia’s influence paramount at Constantinople, some kind of war over the Balkans looked unavoidable. Kept out of central Asia and the Persian Gulf by the Entente with Britain, and out of China after her defeat by Japan in 1904, Russia had been forced back on her old stamping ground, the Balkans. She was the Slav nationalities’ traditional champion. She decided to concentrate once more on her old objective of being the favoured power at Constantinople and controlling the Dardanelles, that vital conduit between her ships and ports on the Black Sea and the Aegean–Mediterranean.

But this threatened both the ambitions of Germany to expand into the Middle East, because it put in doubt the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway which was projected to run straight through Constantinople, and the very existence of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. What made war in the near future imperative for that empire was the imminent threat to her from Serbia. In 1908 the Serbs had been prevented from attacking Austria–Hungary by Russia’s weakness and Germany’s strength. They had sulkily obeyed German diplomats’ warning to put an end to the Serbian propaganda in government-sponsored newspapers and disarmed their gathering troops. But after Serbia’s victories in 1913, which had doubled her size, all the Serb areas of the Habsburg Empire were in a fever of nationalist excitement.