46 HISTORY TODAY MAY 2014
ASQUITH
FURTHER READING
Michael Brock, Eleanor Brock (eds.), H.H. Asquith:
Letters to Venetia Stanley (Oxford University Press, 1982).
George Cassar, Asquith as War Leader (Hambledon, 1994).
Roy Jenkins, Asquith (Macmillan, 1986).
Chris Wrigley, Arthur Henderson (University of Wales, 1990).
self-esteem – perhaps too much so. But he had to work with the generals as he found them and he knew that there was no easy way of winning the war. His oversight of the war im-pressed Maurice Hankey, secretary of the CID and the War Council, who dedicated his war memoir to ‘three supreme commanders’: Balfour who created the CID, Asquith who developed it both in peace and war and Lloyd George.
Nevertheless Asquith’s reputation as a war leader has suffered by comparison with that of Lloyd George. The former’s tenure was marked by military failures and stalemate, the latter’s was crowned by eventual victory.
Yet such a simplistic contrast is misleading. When Asquith left office the war was far from won but some of the seeds of victory were already present. On the Western Front the Allies had numerical ascendancy and the toll on German manpower had been great. Thanks largely to British efforts, the Allies enjoyed a dominant position
both at sea and outside Europe.
L
LOYD GEORGE, LIKE ASQUITH, accepted the advice of the military on almost all major strategic questions and recog-nised, albeit belatedly, the primacy of the Western Front. The Passchendaele offensive in October 1917 was almost as expensive and as limited in its gains as the Somme had been. It was only from August 1918 that the tide of war turned. By then the US was beginning to play a significant role; they had been neutral during Asquith’s premiership.Lloyd George’s dynamism was not always well directed. His insistence that conscription should be applied to Ireland provoked more nationalist animosity than that generated by the suppression of the Easter Rising. His
failure to maintain troop levels on the Western Front in the spring of 1918 gave rise to the ‘Maurice’ debate in Parlia-ment, when Asquith and his followers called for a commit-tee of enquiry. The motion was defeated but those who had voted for the enquiry were denied endorsement by Lloyd George at the 1918 General Election. It was Lloyd George, not Asquith, who was responsible for the division and disin-tegration of the Liberal Party. Lloyd George’s private life in wartime echoed that of Asquith. He, too, had a relationship with a much younger woman – his secretary Frances Ste-venson – and he frequently spent weekends at his country home at Walton Heath, where he regularly played golf.
Asquith’s war premiership also stands comparison with that of Chamberlain and Churchill during the Second World War. Chamberlain was premier only during the eight months of the ‘phoney war’, whereas Asquith was prime minister for 28 months during which time there was continuous conflict on the Western Front. The first 28 months of Churchill’s war premiership were also marked by a signal lack of military success. Churchill, moreover, also shared Asquith’s partiality for alcohol and country house weekends. During the Blitz, for example, Churchill usually spent three nights a week either at Chequers or at Ditchley Park, where war talk was mixed with recreation, notably film shows.
Asquith examines an early bomber on the Western Front, 1915.
From the Archive The Genesis of the Western Front John Terraine on how the Allied Powers became committed to fighting on the Western Front.
www.historytoday.
com/archive
Asquith’s leadership left a clear imprint on the course of the war. By making Belgium the casus belli he united the nation. His prompt despatch of the BEF to the Continent helped to prevent the Germans breaking through on the Western Front and winning the war in the opening months. He then ensured the creation of a mass volunteer army, later supplemented by partial conscription. Through-out the conflict Asquith was committed to the total defeat of Germany and to securing what he called ‘adequate rep-aration for the past and adequate security for the future’.
His contribution deserves far greater recognition than it has received.
Kitchener, in charge of recruitment, tells Asquith and Churchill that things are not as bad as they look.
Cartoon from the German magazine Simplicissimus, May 1915.
Roland Quinault is the author of British Prime Ministers and Democracy:
From Disraeli to Blair (Bloomsbury Academic, 2012).
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CHRISTCHURCHChurch of England settlement in the South Island of New Zealand. The scheme, intended to relieve unemployment and poverty in England, attracted a number of heavyweight supporters: bishops and archbishops, Members of Parliament, aristocrats and landed gentry.
Godley sailed for New Zealand in December 1849 to act as resident agent for the Association. On September 1st, 1850 the first emigrants, known as the ‘Canterbury Pilgrims’, were blessed by the Arch-bishop of Canterbury in St Paul’s Cathedral. Three days later, four ships, with almost 800 passengers on board, left Gravesend for New Zealand, arriving in Lyttelton harbour (the port for the future city of Christchurch) in December.
Preparations had been underway in Lyttelton for 15 months and the little town boasted several houses, an immigration barracks, two hotels (‘no more than small grogshops’), three commercial stores and a few warehouses. Godley and his wife Charlotte lived in the only two-storey building, a gabled wooden house with a deep verandah. It was, according to Charlotte, ‘tolerably furnished but rather short of chairs’.
Behind Lyttelton, the Port Hills (the rim of an extinct volcano) rose steeply above the harbour to a height of some 1,500 feet. Patches of low bush grew in the folds of the hills and a track, ‘almost as steep as the roof of a house’, wound its way to the top and down the other side. As the settlers built cabins and shelters, roofing them with bundles of toetoe (a native shrub) and fern, the slopes came alive with huts and other temporary dwellings. The men enjoyed themselves – ‘who can ever forget that delightful and exciting time’ wrote one – but some of the women were less enthusiastic: ‘It is only colo-nists who have any idea what rough is. It is ill-suited for any but the young, strong and active. I could make you cry with a recital of the various shifts and difficulties that colonists have to encounter.’
Hundreds of men, women and children toiled to the top of the Port Hills carrying bundles of luggage and with pots and pans strung around their necks.
Having reached the summit, they scrambled down the other side through a wilderness of tussock grass, then walked five miles over swampy ground, often wading knee deep in the marsh, to the site of Christchurch, the future city on the plains.
During the next few weeks, the embryo city sprouted with ‘habitations of every variety: tents, houses of reeds, grass, sods, lath and plaster, boards, mud, and dry clay … and some consisting of sheets and blankets hung on poles’. There were food shops and stores and the streets were ‘busy with bullock drays, horses and innumerable dogs of every con-ceivable breed’.
During the first year of the settlement 19 ships carrying 3,000 immigrants arrived in Lyttelton harbour. Until the New Zealand Constitution Act