Joined-up fighting: the road to a unified Ministry of Defence, part 2
The First World War exposed the gaps between the armed services, but it took nearly half a century to bring the fighting forces together under unified control
Great War to modest reform: slow progress to 1923
The end of the First World War in 1918 did not quite see the end of the experiments in streamlined and efficient control of military matters, but the direction of travel was still towards the status quo ante. The five-man war cabinet, introduced in 1916 to make control of strategy more effective and remove distractions, met for the last time in October 1919, and government returned to the hands of a conventional cabinet of 21 men, headed by Lloyd George. The team was dominated by Unionists, who had won 379 seats at the December 1918 general election, compared to 127 for their Coalition Liberal allies and a measly 36 for the rump of the official Liberal Party under H.H. Asquith, now into his mid-60s, who lost his own seat in East Fife.
The armed forces were once again under the control of their respective service ministries, the Admiralty, the War Office and the Air Ministry; Walter Long (Unionist, Westminster St George’s), formerly leader of the Irish Unionist Alliance, was first lord of the Admiralty, while Winston Churchill (Lib, Dundee) was both secretary of state for war and for air in a personal union (they would return to separate political heads in 1921). Each service had its own chief of staff—the first sea lord (also chief of the Naval Staff), the chief of the Imperial General Staff and the chief of the Air Staff—though one should remember that the professional heads of the Royal Air Force were originally army officers; it would be 1950 before a native RAF officer would head the service.
The service chiefs retained the whiff of the Great War. The first sea lord was Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, who was the senior UK representative at the armistice “negotiations”, and he would be replaced by Admiral Sir David Beatty, commander of the battlecruiser force at Jutland in 1916; the CIGS was General Sir Henry Wilson, promoted to field marshal in 1919; while the RAF went through a succession of leaders, the first CAS, Major General Sir Hugh Trenchard, had lasted only 100 days after the creation of the service before falling out with the secretary of state, Viscount Rothermere, but his successor, Major General Sir Frederick Sykes, did not see out a full year. In March 1919, Trenchard would return at the behest of Churchill, and served another 11 years as chief of the Air Staff.
The only substantial body which encompassed defence policy as a whole was now the Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), founded in 1902. It replaced a weak and little-used cabinet defence committee and was the brainchild of the Earl of Elgin, a former viceroy of India who from 1902 to 1903 had chaired a commission into the conduct of the Second Boer War. The CID was innovative in two ways: firstly, it existed to coordinate strategy and research across the (then) two services; second, it had a small permanent secretariat, which, in 1916, would be the inspiration and source of the War Cabinet Secretariat. The secretary of the CID from 1912 was Maurice Hankey, a Royal Marines officer who in 1916 became the first secretary of the war cabinet. After the war cabinet was wound down in 1919, Hankey remained secretary of its larger civilian counterpart and of the CID—he would retain both posts until 1938—and provided a key link, albeit a personal rather than institutional one, across the field of government policy and between the services.
The tale of military coordination between the wars can be a frustrating one. The government took a great deal of time to take actions which, in retrospect, seem very obvious. But opinions and amours propres were deeply entrenched, the armed services prized their independence almost above everything (the RAF had only gained its separate status in 1918 after the merger of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service and was the first and largest independent air force in the world) and there was very little precedent for close formal coordination, save for the war cabinet.
The first major proposal which might have led to some kind of centralised ministerial control of the armed forces began in July 1917. Lloyd George appointed a committee under Viscount Haldane, the former lord chancellor, to “enquire into the responsibilities of the various Departments of the central executive Government and to advise in what manner the exercise and distribution by the Government of its functions should be improved”. It was under the supervision of the new Ministry of Reconstruction, headed by Dr Christopher Addison MP (Lib, Hoxton). Haldane was joined by six colleagues: Edwin Montagu MP (Lib, Chesterton), secretary of state for India; Sir Robert Morant, chairman of the National Health Insurance Commission; Sir George Murray, former permanent secretary to the Treasury; Colonel Sir Alan Sykes MP (Con, Knutsford); J.H. Thomas MP (Lab, Derby), general secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen; and Mrs Sidney Webb, a co-founder of The New Statesman. The secretary to the committee was a young Oxford classicist from the National Health Insurance Commission, the amusingly named Michael Heseltine.
There is dispute over the parentage of the Haldane Committee. In his memoirs, Haldane himself claims to have suggested its creation, but a paper by UK Research and Innovation cites a 30 April 1917 memorandum, though it claims the memo to have been in the name of Montagu, as financial secretary to the Treasury, whereas he had held that office 1914-15 and 1915-16. Lord Bridges, former cabinet secretary, wrote in 1959 that Montagu had suggested the Privy Council be the centre for all government research and that Haldane had demurred, saying the lord president would be too busy.
Whoever sired the committee, it was almost perfectly timed. The machinery of government had already been radically reformed by 1917, principally by the creation of a secretariat for the war cabinet, and Haldane, a brilliant scholar and lawyer, formerly war secretary and lord chancellor, who had been forced to resign in 1915 because of supposed pro-German sympathies, was ideally placed to think innovatively and broadly about the subject.
Haldane presented his report in December 1918. In its second part, it proposed that departments and ministries were divided by function, and listed ten groups of functions, of which II was “National Defence” and III was “External Affairs”. To an extent, on the former, it pulled its punches.
We do not propose to make any observations of a detailed character on the Admiralty, the War Office, or the Air Ministry. It is impossible to examine the conditions of these services as they are at present. They are on a war footing, and their dimensions and objectives in the future may be profoundly affected by the character of the peace made.
The committee assumed—an extraordinary piece of thinking which essentially nullified this section of the report—that the three service ministries would remain and continue to be independent political fiefs. They should, in the view of the committee, be supervised by the prime minister through his chairmanship of the CID.
Given the radicalism of some of the other recommendations, including almost wholly anticipating Tony Blair’s ham-fisted transformation of the post of lord chancellor in 2003, the approach to the service ministries and to defence policy was dismal and timorous. It was essentially a confirmation that the existing arrangements were working well, a view which few others held. It crept close to suggesting that each service should have a better resourced general staff, but otherwise said nothing new about administrative reform or political coordination.
Where the Haldane Committee did discover some fortitude and imagination, though in exactly the wrong direction, was in the area of materiel. This had been a running sore since the Shell Crisis of 1915 which had seen the passage of the Munitions of War Act 1915 and the establishment of a cabinet-level Ministry of Munitions (at first headed by Lloyd George). The new department soon became the largest buyer, seller and employer in the UK, by 1918 having a staff of 65,000 overseeing three million workers in 20,000 factories. The committee stressed its inexpertise heavily, but made not-very-veiled criticisms of the Ministry of Munitions, recommending that “the War Office, and similarly the Admiralty and the Air Ministry, be free to determine the quality, quantity and use” of supplies.
This was not at all what the war cabinet was thinking. A month before the Haldane Committee delivered its report, Bonar Law, the Unionist leader who was chancellor of the exchequer and effectively deputy to Lloyd George, urged his colleagues that they must achieve “coordination and uniformity of practice in disposing” the vast amount of military equipment which was suddenly surplus to requirements (there was estimated to be a billion pounds’ worth of equipment in France alone). The Ministry of Munitions had been created explicitly as a wartime measure, as General Jan Smuts, the South African leader who was minister without portfolio, reminded his colleagues, so the plan began to develop to create a Ministry of Supply from the foundation of the Ministry of Munitions.
The proposal was greeted with suspicion and caution. It would be difficult, said ministers, to create a new department of state (though this was one of the most active times in constitutional history in that regard), and the imposition of a Ministry of Supply during peacetime would be unpopular and unnecessarily autocratic (this much might have been true). In the government’s defence, there were enough major issues facing it already: not only was there the matter of returning the armed forces to a peacetime footing and demobilising millions of men, the economy would have to be transformed significantly after its wartime focus, women had spent four years having their social and professional horizons hugely expanded, the peace treaties with the Central Powers had to be negotiated and agreed, and there was the not-insubstantial matter of Ireland, to which devolved government had been promised (from 1919 to 1921, both the lord lieutenant of Ireland and the chief secretary, head of the Dublin Castle administration, were full members of the cabinet).
The idea of a Ministry of Supply died in 1920. In April of that year, an MP asked Bonar Law, by then lord privy seal and leader of the Commons:
Whether the Cabinet have vetoed the scheme for the merging of the Ministry of Munitions into a permanent Ministry of Supply; on what grounds this decision has been arrived at; and can it be taken as evidence of the determination of the Government ruthlessly to reduce unnecessary public Departments and to economise in public expenditure.
Law did not waste words: “His Majesty’s Government, after very careful consideration, have decided that the Ministry of Munitions should not continue beyond the period now provided for.” The doubters had won. There would be no Ministry of Supply.
However, the idea of a unified political control of the armed forces would not die. A Ministry of Defence, to take one concept bandied about, seemed a simple solution to a problem most accepted as existing but met deep resistance within the political community. The Admiralty was particularly opposed. It was, after all, a venerable institution: the modern Admiralty had been founded from the English and Scots naval establishments in 1707, but the office of Admiral of England (later Lord Admiral, then Lord High Admiral) dated to around 1400, and the Navy Board (which would merge with the Board of Admiralty under William IV) could be traced to the Council of the Marine, set up by Henry VIII in 1546. The Royal Navy was the Senior Service, and had links with the crown much stronger than those of the Army as a whole, though individual regiments might have potent royal connections. The Royal Scots Navy was perhaps even older; there are mentions of fleets in the 13th century, the office of Lord High Admiral of Scotland was roughly as old as that of England, and when James IV’s carrack the Great Michael launched in 1512, she was the largest ship in Europe.
This resistance was no secret. There were widespread concerns that all of the can-do flexibility and innovation of the war would dissipate and such progress as had been made would be lost and institutions revert to their pre-1914 arrangements. In December 1919, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu opened a debate in the House of Lords focused on the Royal Air Force. There were fears that the newly independent service might not have a long life. He rose:
To inquire whether there is any intention on the part of the Government to revert to the former system—a bad system—by which the Air Force was separately under the Admiralty and War Office. The principle involved is as to whether there should be an independent Air Force.
Montagu observed that a section of the cabinet had always opposed an independent air force, but stressed that when the House had considered the Air Force Constitution Bill in 1917, both the leader of the Lords, the Earl Curzon, and the eccentric lord privy seal, the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, who introduced the bill into the Lords, “were of opinion that it was not only a war measure but a post-war measure”.
(Crawford was an extraordinary man. Conservative MP for Chorley from 1895 until he inherited his clutch of titles in 1913, he spent his last two years in the Commons as opposition chief whip. In 1915, aged 43 and therefore too old for military service, he volunteered as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps, working at a casualty clearing station at Hazebrouck in Flanders. In July 1916, he was tempted back to London and became president of the Board of Agriculture and Fisheries, having earlier that year been offered the viceroyalty of India. He would say of himself that he was publicly known as the premier Scots earl, whereas in reality, he was a Lancashire coal merchant.)
In March 1920, just as the idea of the Ministry of Supply was gasping its last breaths, Major General Jack Seely (Lib, Ilkeston) opened a debate in the House of Commons on the Navy Estimates. He was a former war secretary who had resigned over the Curragh Incident in 1914 and served throughout the First World War as a staff officer and a cavalryman, then returned to junior ministerial office in 1918 and 1919. Seely had resigned as president of the Air Council only the previous November, frustrated by the government’s unwillingness to create a separate secretary of state for air. The title had been created in January 1919 but was held by the war secretary, Seely’s old friend Winston Churchill. He homed in straight away on the issue of coordinated command.
The First Lord of the Admiralty referred in one phrase only to the possibility of there being one Minister responsible for Defence, and he said with emphasis that it was a proposal which the Board of Admiralty would resist by every means in their power. That is a definite declaration of policy which I hope does not mean that the right hon. Gentleman and the Board of Admiralty are going to oppose what seems to be of the most urgent necessity in the matter of defence, namely, some form of co-ordination between the three Services.
Seely dismissed the idea that one minister should combine the headships of the three service ministries (to his chagrin, Churchill, of course, already combined the War Office and the Air Ministry), because “it would be a ridiculous plan. The Navy would never stand it, and the country would never stand it.”
Walter Long, first lord of the Admiralty, replying to Seely, made his views and those of his department quite clear, but specified that he opposed the precise proposal of a single Minister of Defence of cabinet rank.
In regard to a Minister of Defence, I should explain that I was referring solely to the proposal which the right hon. and gallant Member knows has been made in many quarters, that there should be one Minister of Cabinet rank who should represent the three fighting departments, having under him the First Lord of the Admiralty and the other heads. That proposal, I said, would meet from the whole Navy the most strenuous opposition, not from any feeling of loss of dignity or jealousy, but because the whole machinery and control of the Navy, the Air Force, and the land forces are so totally different that we do not believe it will be possible to place them in the hands of one man who should be responsible for the three.
Having stated that it was not a matter of “loss of dignity or jealousy” (which was obviously in fact a very significant consideration), he confirmed that this was indeed a concern:
You can never approach the three Ministers who are responsible for these forces and ask them to subordinate themselves to one Minister of Cabinet rank. I am afraid that would be to offer an insult to the heads of these great historical Departments.
This, it seemed, was his objection to a single cabinet minister to control defence policy and the administration of the Royal Navy, the Army and the Royal Air Force. One can, I think, be forgiven for finding it sentimentally understandable but functionally irrelevant. Long argued that he had no operative view on the “restoration” of the CID (it had not been abolished but had given place to the war cabinet from December 1916 to October 1919) but that, in principle, he would support its restitution. (Long talks as if he were a casual bystander: remember that he was first lord of the Admiralty and ministerial head of the Royal Navy.)
I have said that is a matter for the Prime Minister to decide, and we should no doubt be consulted if it were being set up again. I think the suggestion that it should be set up is one of the greatest value. I do not know what the Prime Minister will say about it.
The leader of the Liberal rump of fewer than 40 MPs, Henry Asquith, who had himself been defeated at the general election and had only the previous month returned the Commons as Member for Paisley, was as excoriating as Long. He was officially leader of the opposition, having been replaced temporarily by Sir Donald Maclean (Lib, Peebles and South Midlothian) for the 14 months of his absence. The Labour Party had no formal leader, and Sinn Féin had not taken their seats but set up Dáil Éireann in Dublin in January 1919. Asquith’s fierce attack on the idea of a Minister of Defence may have reflected his sensitivities about how he was gradually edged out and then defenestrated in 1916 (see part 1 of this series), but he was in his late sixties, worried about money and still drinking heavily.
Asquith’s victory in Paisley had been a surprise and owed much to an unexpected vigour on the candidate’s part; he had left Scotland amid cheering crowds and found a similar reception at Euston when he arrived in the capital. But it was not repeated in the House. He was not lazy in his revived role: he spoke more frequently in the chamber than he ever had when not holding ministerial office. But the old magic had gone, apparently forever.
It must have been tragic for his diminishing band of friends and supporters to watch; Asquith had once been a brilliantly calm and forensic barrister, taking silk at 38, a year after acting as junior counsel on the Parnell commission and demolishing the manager of The Times, J.C. Macdonald, in a dazzlingly polished cross-examination. He had been an impressive young home secretary between 1892 and 1895, and had burnished his reputation in the Commons after 1902 by repeatedly savaging the great Joseph Chamberlain over tariff reform. Asquith is the first prime minister whose voice we can hear clearly to have some sense of how he would have performed (early recordings exist of Gladstone but they are muffled and scratchy).
Perhaps I am being unfair, however. He had taken the emotional blows. In 1915, the object of his romantic obsession (though they probably did not consummate the relationship), the 27-year-old Venetia Stanley, finally accepted a proposal from Edwin Montagu (see above), Asquith’s then cabinet colleague. Asquith was devastated. He wrote to her, “As you know well, this breaks my heart. I couldn't bear to come and see you. I can only pray God to bless you—and help me.” In truth she had at last accepted Montagu’s suit, even converting to Judaism, not least because Asquith had become over-reliant on her for his whole emotional world. He was in his sixties, she was not yet 30, and it was inevitably going to end in disaster.
In September 1916 came a worse blow. His eldest son, Raymond, a fellow of All Souls’ College, Oxford, a promising barrister and a lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards, was fatally wounded at the Battle of Flers-Courcelette. His death came with almost a parody of courage and aristocratic nonchalance. Shot in the chest, he wanted to reassure his men and encourage them to press home the attack, so he stopped to light a cigarette. But he would die being carried back to the British lines. The prime minister was almost—perhaps actually—broken; he wept on receiving the news, could not attend that day’s cabinet meeting, and for months was withdrawn and solitary.
Nevertheless, on this day, Asquith was resolute. He announced that he only intended to speak briefly (politicians often do this), then jumped straight in.
I associate myself with both the right hon. Gentlemen in deprecating the creation of an executive Minister of Defence, who would be over the Army and Navy and Air Service in such a way that they would be, or intended to be, subordinate bodies. I think it is of the highest importance that each of the heads of these Departments should have undivided responsibility for his own service, and that he should not be placed in a position in which he would he subordinate to irresponsible people.
Why a potential cabinet minister in charge of defence policy should be “irresponsible” is not clear, nor did Asquith explain why (which was his inference) the service ministers would be responsible. Having dismissed the notion, he then seemed to change tack slightly and rowed in behind this slightly nebulous idea of a more effective staff organisation.
We ought to have some machinery for closer co-operation and more continuous concentration of the staffs of the great defensive services, and that it is immediately desirable. It is a long time since I first came into touch with that problem in connection with the Army and the Navy. How far it has been carried with regard to the Air Service, I do not know, but I hope something of that kind is going on.
This added little to the debate. However, he did use his long experience, insofar as he could recall it, to add a helpful intervention on the CID, warning against regarding it as a panacea; he had, after all, been its chairman for eight years.
It was not, and was never intended, to be an executive body. It did not accept responsibility. The responsibility rested with the heads of the fighting Departments. It was an elastic body, both in its functions and its composition, which varied from time to time as the Prime Minister thought fit, in accordance with the needs of the time or the particular question which seemed for a moment to arise. Its function was to discuss questions of offensive and defensive policy. It came into consultation with temporary members of the Committee, and with the experts of the different services, so as to form a conjoint body, as experience suggested, to discuss the lines on which our policy ought to proceed. It was never intended that the Committee should take upon itself executive functions, but it was intended so to act as to avoid collisions and cross-purposes, and in some cases the waste of application or an approach to administrative confusion which might have occurred but for its existence.
This, at least, was why former prime ministers are useful to have in the House. Asquith was able to comment on his (extensive) experience of managing the CID as an organ of government, in a way no-one else could at this stage, except the incumbent, Lloyd George.
As the debate proceeded, Members returned to the advertised subject of the Navy Estimates, but Lieutenant Colonel Cecil Malone (Coalition Lib, East Leyton), seizing the wrong end of a well-handled stick, returned to the issue of a single defence ministry.
There is a divergence between the statements of the Secretary of State for War and the policy of the Admiralty. Take the argument of the First Lord. He states that he will, under no circumstances, tolerate the placing of the Admiralty under a Minister of Defence. At the same time we have the Secretary of State for War conducting the Air Ministry under the War Office. If the one is right the other is wrong, and if the one is wrong the other is right.
This was too much for Long, the first lord. He had the force of fact on his side, but he also had to dispel any sense that the Air Ministry was under the political control of another department, because of the implications it could have on his own Admiralty. He therefore rose to set out very plainly the situation which prevailed with Churchill’s dual appointment (and over which Seely had, of course, resigned).
The hon. Gentleman is making a statement for which he has no foundation whatever. My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for War has constantly stated here that since he became Secretary of State for War and Air he has maintained the two organisations quite distinct, and they could be separated to-morrow if necessary. It is not correct to say that the Air Ministry is under the War Office. If my right hon. Friend were here he would be the first to contradict that. He holds the two Seals, but holds the two offices distinct. The same man is head of them both, but there is no more link between the War Ministry and the Air Ministry than between the Air Ministry and my Department.
Malone was not placated: “That is a matter of opinion.” But Long would not rest. “It is not a matter of opinion. It is a matter of fact.” Malone would not let the matter rest.
We know quite well the influence over those Departments of the Secretary of State for War. He spends three days in the Strand and three days in Whitehall administering those Departments. Whatever may be said by my right hon. Friend, we know it is the fact.
The accusation that Churchill spent half the week indulging himself was pointed. He was certainly no stranger to the Savoy Grill (his favourite dish was roasted deer with foie gras and truffle sauce) or to Simpson’s in the Strand, where he had a corner table. It was at the Savoy that Churchill and his friend and comrade-in-misbehaviour, F.E. Smith (later Lord Birkenhead), in 1911 founded the Other Club, a political dining society inspired by Churchill’s and Smith’s blackballing by the famous grouping known simply as the Club. It met (and continues to meet) fortnightly in the Savoy’s Pinafore Room while Parliament was sitting.
Malone was a man possessed. Long chided him for the accusation that he had effectively been untruthful, but Malone seemed not to care. “We have a right to interpret the method by which the Government Departments are being administered, There is a very considerable measure of agreement on this side on that matter, as has been so continuously asserted.” Then the first lord of the Admiralty tried to raise the stakes in a familiar parliamentary way. “Will you divide on it?” he demanded.
This is usually a good way to call a fellow MP’s bluff. For many reasons, not just the 15 minutes which the process requires but also the irritated obloquy of one’s colleagues, Members are reluctant to take that step and will tend to back down. Malone was not to be soothed. “We shall, certainly!” he responded. However rashly he was behaving, Malone was pressing the case of a single Ministry of Defence and was making a better case for it than Long or Asquith had made against.
If it is really the opinion of all the experts to place the three Services under a single Minister, I do not see any very great argument against that. Perhaps the greatest argument against it would be the enormous power which would rest in the hands of one Minister, and a power which, might or might not be used for the good of the country. From the point of view of efficiency and economy, and the co-ordination of offices, certainly to place the three Departments in closer relationship would be all to the good. Just picture the co-ordination which exists between those Departments. The only organisation is the Committee of Imperial Defence or whatever organisation has now taken its place.
With the benefit of knowing what was to happen over the proceeding century, it is hard to find serious fault with Malone’s argument. He perhaps over-emphasises the power which might accrue to a single defence minister—I have not in recent years feared a coup d’état by Liam Fox or Geoff Hoon or even my friend Penny Mordaunt—but that could be forgiven barely a year after the end of the most cataclysmic and destructive war the world had ever seen, during which all the business of the state had rightly been subordinated to the prosecution of the war on land, at sea and in the air.
The debate was losing its way badly. Long admitted as much as he began to wind up for the government. “I understand that we are to have a Division, although I confess I do not in the least know what the Division is to be about.” Lieutenant Commander Joseph Kenworthy MP (Lib, Central Hull), who had in 1912 accidentally rammed HMS Leopard with his own HMS Bullfinch and been sacked from his command, helpfully shouted “The amendment!” It hardly mattered. The Commons staggered to a division, and the amendment, “that a reduced number, not exceeding 135,900 be employed for the said Service”, was defeated 18-194. It had not been the House at its best.
Sir Maurice Hankey was more insightful. The cabinet secretary could see that focusing on the CID as a coordinating body was not the end in itself but a device to woo the doubters towards supporting a single unified defence ministry. He observed that the “movement for a joint staff and Ministry of Defence will be much easier to deal with once the CID is again on its legs”. The hope was that the role of the CID would be seen as useful but incomplete, and it would become the logical next step in development to create a single ministry.
There would be yet another prompt for those who wanted a new department. Government spending was rising and so too was taxation to fund it. In January 1921, in an announcement in The Sunday Pictorial, the newspaper magnate Viscount Rothermere launched the Anti-Waste League, a political movement dedicated to curbing public expenditure, and in the first six months of its life its candidates won three by-elections in seats previously held by the government. This sent a shiver of panic through the coalition, and in August 1921 Lloyd George appointed Scotsman Sir Eric Geddes MP (Unionist, Cambridge), the minister of transport, to chair a committee on national expenditure. Its terms of reference were as follows:
To make recommendations to the Chancellor of the Exchequer for effecting forthwith all possible reductions in the National Expenditure on Supply Services, having regard especially to the present and prospective position of the Revenue. Insofar as questions of policy are involved in the expenditure under discussion, these will remain for the exclusive consideration of the Cabinet; but it will be open to the Committee to review the expenditure and to indicate the economies which might be effected if particular policies were either adopted, abandoned or modified.
The committee consisted of five members: Geddes; Lord Inchcape, chairman of P&O, the shipping and logistics giant; Lord Faringdon, a former Liberal MP and chairman of the Great Central Railway; Sir Joseph Maclay, chairman of Maclay & Macintyre Ltd shipowners and until recently minister of shipping; and Sir Guy Granet, former manager of Midland Railway. The secretary of the committee was Gerald Steel, private secretary to the first lord of the Admiralty 1916-19 and then assistant secretary at the Ministry of Transport. He had a reputation for being able to charm people and direct their attentions towards a common goal, and was familiar with Geddes from the Ministry of Transport.
This was a logistics-heavy grouping, and not without its critics. Some argued that to pass the matter of savings to a committee of experts was a complete abdication of responsibility by the government in general and the Treasury in particular. It quickly became known as the “Geddes Axe” for its recommended cuts in spending, and the armed forces, inevitably after the all-consuming focus of the Great War, bore the brunt of the savings. Spending would fall from £189.5 million in 1921-22 to £111 million in 1922-23. The committee’s work was reviewed by cabinet committees in December 1921 and January 1922, then three interim reports were published in February 1922. The Manchester Guardian rather sniffily described their contents as “valuable facts and less valuable obiter dicta”, later adding that “no evidence is presented in confirmation of these ejaculations”.
For our purposes, the most important recommendation of the Geddes committee was—how did you guess?—the establishment of a single and unified Ministry of Defence. The reports noted the cost savings which had been achieved by the amalgamation of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service into the independent RAF in 1918, and applied the same logic to the three service ministries. Again, however, there was stiff resistance. On 16 February, Rear-Admiral Murray Sueter (Anti-Waste League, Hertford) asked whether a minister of defence would be appointed “forthwith”. The leader of the House, Austen Chamberlain (Unionist, Birmingham West), replied that the government had not made a decision on the matter in principle.
It would in any case be quite impossible to make so extensive a change operative during the present year. The question will, however, be considered during the year, and the possibility of combining certain elements in the staffs of the three services for the purposes of common study and also of combining certain of the common administrative services of the three Departments will be explored by technical sub-committees of the Committee of Imperial Defence.
If this seemed like an attempt to kick the issue into the long grass, that is because it was just that. Yet again, the government shied away from the logical outcome of its thought processes, despite now having the imprimatur of Geddes and his committee to reinforce the notion. But there were Members who would not rest.
On 3 May, Sueter used the Ten-minute Rule to bring in a Ministry of Defence (Creation) Bill. He began by stressing his reluctance to do so as a relatively new Member, but noted that it was by then “some five months since the Geddes Committee reported to the Cabinet that a Ministry of Defence should be set up”. He did not accept that the cabinet was too busy to address the matter, and reeled off some innovations which the existing service ministries had not addressed but which might have found some favour with a unified department. Turning to the role of the CID, he pointed out that it had no executive powers and so was no substitute for a defence ministry, and he tried to woo Chamberlain again by suggesting—perhaps not wholly mischievously—that he might he a suitable candidate.
The Leader of the House says that you cannot set up a Ministry of Defence, because you would want a super-Minister. I entirely disagree with him. He would make a very good Minister of Defence himself. He has had experience at the Admiralty, and we would soon show him a little air and submarine experience. I think his job now will soon come to an end, and there would be the Ministry of Defence to carry on with.
Sueter was also able to pray in aid the Canadian Parliament, which was currently in the process of considering a National Defence Bill to create a Department of National Defence. This would merge the Department of Militia and Defence and the Naval Service and the Air Board to be responsible for the Canadian Army, the Canadian Air Force and the Royal Canadian Navy. It was, in effect, exactly what Geddes had recommended and what some MPs had been calling for since 1920.
In October 1922, the coalition of Unionists and Liberals fell apart as Unionist backbenchers tired of Lloyd George and voted to have a single-party government. Bonar Law came out of retirement to lead the rebels as most of the senior Unionists—Chamberlain, Balfour, Birkenhead, Horne—refused to serve in the new government. There were three new service ministers: Leo Amery became first lord of the Admiralty, the Earl of Derby was appointed secretary of state for war and Sir Samuel Hoare took over the Air Ministry. But it felt almost like a reset of the Geddes committee’s recommendation of a coordinated defence ministry.
On 14 December, Sueter was on his feet in the House again, asking whether the new government would “appoint a representative committee to inquire into the question of setting up a Board or Ministry of Defence, with executive powers, for the more efficient and economical administration of the Navy, Army, and Air Services, as briefly outlined in the Ministry of Defence (Creation) Bill, introduced by several service Members last Session”. (His bill had run into the buffers after its introduction and had not been debated.)
Law was unmoved and immoveable. “As this question is under consideration by the Committee of Imperial Defence, I do not think any useful purpose would be served by setting up a committee such as is referred to in my hon. and gallant Friend's question.” This was, perhaps, at least a glimmer of progress: the matter was now being examined by the CID. But there remained no sense of urgency or indeed support within the government.
In March 1923, it seemed at last that momentum was beginning to grow. That month, the Marquess of Salisbury (son of the great Victorian prime minister), lord president of the Council, was appointed chairman of a sub-committee of the CID to examine national and imperial defence. Its terms of reference were:
To enquire into the co-operation and correlation of the Navy, Army and Air Force from the point of view of National and Imperial Defence generally, including the question of establishing some co-ordinating authority, whether by a Ministry of Defence or otherwise, and, in particular, to deal with:
(a) The relations of the Navy and Air Force, as regards the control of Fleet air work.
(b) The corresponding relation between the Army and Air Force.
(c) The standard to be aimed at for defining the strength of the Air Force for purposes of Home and Imperial Defence.
But there was still no shortage of vested interests. The War Office remained unconvinced by the case for an independent air force, and was determined that the Army’s budget should not be cut to provide more resources for the RAF. Indeed, Derby wrote to Salisbury before the inquiry began, setting out the extent to which a larger RAF would add to the work required of the ground forces.
I feel I must place on record my opinion that the committee will be failing in its objects unless it reviews the military commitments of the Empire in relation to our military strength… It is only on the assumption that this question will not be overlooked that I can willingly consent to serve as a member of the committee.
This was not quite a nuclear option, but with the secretary of state for war threatening not to participate in the committee’s work, there were lines being drawn in the sand.
Lord Salisbury was a man of gravitas, even if much of it was inherited. Before going up to University College, Oxford, he had accompanied his father, then foreign secretary, to the Congress of Berlin in 1878. In 1885 he was elected as Conservative MP for North East Lancashire, losing his seat in 1892 but being returned for Rochester at a by-election in 1893. He succeeded his father in his peerage in 1903. As a Cecil, he benefited from the family connections of the Conservative and Liberal Unionist coalition of 1895 to 1905 by which the previous Lord Salisbury had been succeeded as prime minister by his nephew, A.J. Balfour; he was under-secretary of state for foreign affairs from 1900 to 1903, then joined the cabinet as lord privy seal. In March 1905, he became president of the Board of Trade but left office with the other ministers when Balfour resigned in December.
For the next 15 years, he was out of office, and was a High Tory opponent of Lloyd George’s People’s Budget of 1909/10 and the passage of the Parliament Act 1911, which removed the House of Lords’s veto on legislation. But he was not the family’s only representative in public affairs. His brother Lord Robert Cecil spent most of the war as a Foreign Office junior minister before being created Viscount Cecil of Chelwood and joining him in the cabinet; Lord Hugh Cecil was Unionist MP for Greenwich then the University of Oxford, before also going to the House of Lords, as Lord Quickswood, and becoming provost of Eton College; and Lord William Cecil was bishop of Exeter from 1916 to 1936.
Salisbury returned to office in 1922, after the fall of Lloyd George. In truth, Bonar Law needed him and, more, his name: with Chamberlain and the other grandees staying out, the government lacked big hitters—Birkenhead sneeringly remarked that the “cabin boys” had taken over the ship—and Salisbury, along with Curzon, gave the cabinet ballast. He was lord president of the Council and chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, both positions being sinecures, and also served as deputy leader of the House of Lords to Curzon. But for the task which he was now given, he had the weight and longevity to be a credible and effective, if unimaginative, chairman of the committee to review defence.
The committee had eight members other than Salisbury: Stanley Baldwin, chancellor of the exchequer; Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, foreign secretary; the Duke of Devonshire, colonial secretary; the Earl of Derby, war secretary; Earl Peel, India secretary; Leo Amery, first lord of the Admiralty; the Earl of Balfour, former prime minister; and Viscount Weir, former president of the Air Council. It was served by the inevitable Sir Maurice Hankey as secretary. In addition, there was a special sub-committee (or a sub-sub-committee, strictly) to examine the relationship between the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force (see a)), chaired by Balfour with Peel and Weir also members.
Only a fortnight after the Salisbury committee was empowered, the issue of a Ministry of Defence was again raised in the House of Commons. It was, once again, a debate on the Navy Estimates for 1923-24 on 22 March, and Major General Sir Robert Hutchison (Nat Lib, Kirkcaldy Burghs) bemoaned the fact that the lessons of the First World War had not been learned.
The experience gained in the War has been wasted, largely because we have no central staff to deal with the defence of the country. I suggest we ought to press very strongly for a combined staff inside the Committee of Imperial Defence to see that the money devoted to the Services is expended in such a way as to give us and give the tax-payer the best possible value. It is well known that during the War co-operation between the various Services was not all that it might have been.
Of course the lessons had been available for nearly five years, but there had been a consistent refusal to carry them to their logical conclusions. And still Hutchison accepted the prevailing wisdom, however flimsily supported, that there should not, could not, be a unified defence ministry.
I am satisfied that a Ministry of Defence with a staff under it is not a part of practical politics to-day. The system of War Cabinets which existed during the latter part of the War is possibly from the point of view of this country, the best method of conducting war, but in peace time we want to make arrangements for war; we want to make arrangements for the executive which is going to carry on war and which is going to apply the Army, Navy and Air Force against our potential enemies. To this extent it is perfectly obvious that the only executive which can handle all the forces of the country and all three arms, is an executive working under the Prime Minister. The Prime Minister is really the Minister for Defence and he with his War Cabinet must be the executive.
So after all of that, Hutchison essentially wanted a mildly reheated version of the status quo: a strengthened and better resourced CID, chaired by the prime minister, a war cabinet to oversee policy, and separate service ministries, but, under no circumstances, a single minister for all three armed forces. This was the kind of mood music which was playing as Salisbury and his colleagues began their deliberations.
The membership of the Salisbury committee was not at first revealed. On 28 March, Lieutenant Colonel Francis Fremantle (Unionist, St Albans) asked the prime minister to identify the committee members. Baldwin, standing in for Law, replied “It is not customary to give them”. Commander Carlyon Bellairs (Unionist, Maidstone) inquired why the names could not be given, but Baldwin was feeling no more loquacious than usual.
As was stated in the House on the 26th March by the Prime Minister, it is not customary to give the names of members of Sub-Committees of the Committee of Imperial Defence during the inquiry.
In May 1923, Law had to resign as prime minister. He had first stepped down as Unionist leader in 1921 because of poor health, “quite worn out” and suffering from hypertension, and by the beginning of 1923, he was ailing again. His victory in the general election of November 1922 should not be underestimated: he took the Unionist/Conservative Party to its first solo win since 1874, seizing 344 seats against a growing Labour Party and divided Liberals to have a majority of 74. In April he went on holiday to Paris, returning to the House of Commons tanned but still hoarse. He was soon diagnosed with incurable throat cancer. After resigning, he lived only a few months.
Stanley Baldwin emerged as the new prime minister, preferred over the more eminent, experienced and brilliant Lord Curzon. There was a feeling that with the Labour Party now forming the official opposition, but having no presence in the House of Lords, it was difficult for a peer to lead the government. That consideration, in addition to the fact that Curzon was not an easy man to like and could antagonise colleagues, made Baldwin the safer choice, although he was a lesser known figure. Into Baldwin’s position as chancellor of the exchequer—and a member of the Salisbury committee—stepped Neville Chamberlain.
There was impatience in Parliament about the Salisbury committee. In June, Viscount Wimborne asked a question in the House of Lords in a debate on a new naval base in Singapore and expenditure more generally: “since this matter was discussed we have a new Government, and it will be very interesting and important to know whether the present Government hold the same views upon these subjects as their predecessors did.” Lord Salisbury responded with as little clarity or information as he could.
I am afraid that I cannot respond to the noble Viscount's invitation to enter into that subject again in detail on the present occasion? I do not think it was very long ago that we discussed the matter at some length, and since then certain events have taken place, trifles like a Ministerial crisis, which, though very important in themselves, have certainly delayed matters a little as far as the consideration in Cabinet Committees of these very necessary questions is concerned.
Eventually the committee delivered its report in November. It was a solid and thorough piece of work, albeit not one which delivered radical recommendations or suggested that its contributors had dreamed many impossible dreams. How much of the eventual report was the work of Salisbury or the other members of the committee and how much owed its existence to Hankey’s pen is impossible to know, but that is an eternal truth of committees and reports and secretaries. Salisbury was only in his early sixties; he would live to 85 and was still active in politics in the 1930s, pressuring the government on the slow pace of rearmament. He was still vigorous enough to act as lord high steward at the coronation of George VI and Queen Elizabeth in 1937.
Balfour, on the other hand, chairman of the sub-(sub-)committee on the Navy and the Air Force, was well into his seventies and had never exactly been a vigorous dynamo in his heyday. His health remained good, and he played tennis regularly, but his languidity had assumed the proportions of parody. Balfour was now, recently elevated to the Lords, a fully fledged elder statesman, and the king had sought his advice over the premiership in May 1923. (He expressed his preference for Baldwin, disliking Curzon who had succeeded him as foreign secretary in 1919.) His attitude was encapsulated by his tendency towards aphorism: “I am more or less happy when being praised, not very comfortable when being abused, but I have moments of uneasiness when being explained.” But his mind was still scalpel-sharp, and he knew the field; he had been the principal British Empire delegate at the Washington Naval Conference in 1921-22, and was, after all, the founder of the CID.
Some of the Salisbury committee’s conclusions were unremarkable. It endorsed the continuing independence of the RAF, the only opposition to which had come from the more conservative elements of the two other services; it generally affirmed the utility of the CID as a coordinating body, and suggested it should be strengthened, including by appointing a chairman of the committee who would be, in effect, the prime minister’s deputy in matters of defence and security (the prime minister was to remain president of the CID), and stipulating some of the committee’s membership, specifying the following ministers: the three service ministers; the chancellor of the exchequer (or the financial secretary to the Treasury in his absence); the foreign secretary; the colonial secretary; the India secretary; the three service chiefs of staff; and the permanent secretary to the Treasury as head of the Home Civil Service.
On the subject of a Ministry of Defence, those who have read this far will guess that the idea was dismissed. The committee did not mince its words.
It is undesirable and impracticable to supersede the Ministerial heads of the three fighting Services by making them subordinates of a Minster of Defence; the alternative plan for an amalgamation of the three Service Departments is equally impracticable.
This was a dazzling display of misdirection. There had been no serious discussion of merging the three departments, and any model of coordination which had been proposed took as a (sometimes tacit) assumption that there would be three separate “units”, even if not completely independent departments, sitting under the overall supervision of a single minister. (Indeed, this did not even happen with the creation of a single department in 1964; individual service ministers within the MoD and a division by service rather than by function and capability survived until the Nott Review of 1981.)
But let us look at the objections of the Salisbury committee. Creating a Ministry of Defence (the sort of institution which, we must remember, every NATO member state now has, and alternatives to which would be regarded as organisationally laughable and inefficient) was “undesirable”. Why so? The evidence had been rehearsed ad nauseam, and verging on the borders of infinitum, that a lack of inter-service cooperation had been a real drawback to the effective prosecution of the First World War, and insofar as the CID was a desirable and useful body it was because it allowed that coordination. Of course each individual service had healthy supplies of amour propre, and the Royal Navy, as the oldest and senior service, probably had most of all, and that was understandable but not acceptable as an opposition to reform. There was also a feeling, which, looking at the history of the United Kingdom after 1964, we must realistically dismiss, that a single minister responsible for the Navy, Army and Air Force would be too powerful. Finally, there were concerns, which, to be seasonally charitable, we can call contestable, that the broad range of operations which the three services comprised were simply beyond the ability of one man to encompass or usefully direct. Again, it seems from post-1964 history that this was not so.
The “undesirable” factor was only window dressing. If there was a serious argument to be made against a single department, it was that it was “impracticable”; that is, it simply could not be done. The committee had paid particular attention to the views of Lord Haldane, who had argued that a Minister of Defence would either be too weak or too powerful in relation to the service ministers, that he would either be too powerful in cabinet and rival the prime minister, or too weak to the detriment of military matters, and would somehow have a complicated accountability. Haldane had asked rhetorically, “what would be the constitutional and practical relationship of the new Minister of Defence to the three older Ministers?”
This question summed up the nonsense of the Establishment’s objections. It posed the question as if it were unanswerable, and assumed that that was so, but in fact it is perfectly easy to answer, and could be satisfied in a number of different ways. But one is supposed to think, Well, if a man of Lord Haldane’s stature and eminence does not know the answer to this question, how can it be resolved, let alone understandably, by mere mortals such as us? But the lie is given by the wording: the “new” Minister of Defence and the “older” service ministers. Make no mistake. This was an exercise in maintaining the prestige and power of the service ministries. Perhaps it was also a matter of preserving the legacies of the service ministers: if it was demonstrated that a single man (or woman) could in fact supervise the operations of all the armed forces, how much did that diminish the achievements of every first lord of the Admiralty, every secretary of state for war, every secretary of state for air who had held office?
One can argue in an academic and organisational way about the persistence of the three service ministries, like an inflamed professor of business administration or a furious management consultant. What the Salisbury committee’s recommendations made clear was that there was no political will to change the position of the service ministries, nor was there a major figure willing to devote substantial capital to changing the political weather. That, in context, is the alpha and omega of the discussion: with no-one to fight for it, there would be no Ministry of Defence, and the government would have to learn its lessons another way.
Combined ministries of defence were not unknown. Although comparable nations like the US, France and Japan maintained separate political organisations to control the services, Germany, reeling in the wake of its shattering defeat in the war, had created a unified ministry of defence, the Reichswehrministerium, in October 1919. The UK had the opportunity to join its defeated foe at the cutting edge of military thinking, but it chose instead to hug the familiar close to itself.
Salisbury did result in one significant, if detailed, improvement in the institutions of coordination. It recommended the creation of what we now call the Chiefs of Staff Committee, that is, a forum in which the three service chiefs could sit and consult, and from which they could formulate coordinated policy. It is, however, rather characteristic of the committee’s style and the atmosphere in which it was working that it expressed this recommendation in a quite extraordinarily roundabout way.
Each of the three Chiefs of Staff will have an individual and collective responsibility for advising on defence policy as a whole, the three constituting, as it were, a Super-Chief of a War Staff in Commission. In carrying out this function they will meet together for the discussion of questions which affect their joint responsibilities.
This Whitehall circumlocution, with a whiff of historical constitutionalism about an office “in commission”, meant that the chiefs of staff would meet as a sub-committee of the CID and provide advice on combined or joint operations. This was not a complete innovation. The United States had created a Joint Army and Navy Board in 1903; but France, Germany, Australia, Canada, Russia and, until 1918, Austria-Hungary, for example, did not have such a coordinating body. So in this sense, at least, the Salisbury committee was acting with an eye not only on current developments but on the future organisation of the armed forces.
At the inauguration of the Chiefs of Staff Committee we shall pause. The road to 1923 from 1919 has been a longer one than I expected, and the ratio of words spoken to actions taken has not been the one I anticipated. But we leave the armed forces each represented in cabinet by an individual minister (the War Office and the Air Ministry would not be held in common again), but working within the architecture of a revived CID, with a forum for the three professional heads of the services to come together and coordinate policy. There is still, I should warn you, a long way to go.