Dan Snow's History Hit - Britain in The Great War

Episode Date: August 16, 2020

I was thrilled to be joined by Simon Heffer, author of biographies on the historian and essayist Thomas Carlyle, the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and of the British politician Enoch Powell. He's also written a series of books on the social history of Great Britain from the mid nineteenth century until the end of the First World War. Using this wealth of knowledge, Simon took me through the reality and impact off Britain in the First World War, one of the most terrible conflicts the world has ever seen. Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about the First World War this time. We're talking about the Homefront, Britain in the First World War. The politics, society in Britain as it was waging this gigantic, this colossal conflict in several theatres around the world. I've got Simon Heffer on the pod. He is a giant of the British media scene. Journalist, writer, and he's turned his attention now to this subject. journalist, writer, and he's turned his attention now to this subject. It was great getting him on the podcast talking about what he made of Lloyd George, Asquith and the other politicians who ran Britain at the time, and what Britain had to endure in terms of aerial bombardment and blockade. If you want to watch any documentaries about the First World War, we've got loads. Honestly,

we've got lots of documentaries about the First World War. All of your First World War needs will be met at History Hit TV. It's like Netflix, but it just does history. If you use the code POD1, it's exclusive for people listening to this podcast. POD1, you get a month for free and one month for just one pound, euro or dollar. Just go and check it out. You're not going to believe your eyes. And get your historical face covering at historyhit.com slash shop.

Get your face covered when you go to the shops, when you go out in public, when you can't social distance, get your face covered, protect other people from coronavirus, and do so with a historical face covering. You want a Habsburg chin? You can buy one on that site. It's pretty sweet.

In the meantime, everyone, here is Simon Heffer. Simon, great to have you on the podcast. you for coming on well thank you for asking me staring at god I mean it's such a striking title for a history of the great war where did you get that from uh well I was rootling one afternoon a couple of years ago through mrs asquith's papers in the bodleian Library, and reading her diary, which is quite a brilliant document, actually, for anyone interested in this period. And at the end of October 1914, she suddenly realised that she had been wrong,

like so many other Britons, that the war wasn't going to be over by Christmas. She'd had this conversation about ten weeks earlier with Lord Kitchener, the day after he was appointed War Secretary, and Kitchener had warned her that the war would last for three or four years. And she didn't believe him. And suddenly at the end of October, with various of her friends' sons dying on the Western Front, she realised that something really terrible was happening and was going to continue to happen. And she referred in her diaries to seeing this whole generation blown to pieces by shrapnel. While she put it, we are left here staring at God.

And I came across that line in the manuscript and I thought, that is the title of my book. Because it really sums up the sheer hopelessness and ghastliness of that war in the way that it confronted the British people after that initial surge of sort of jingoistic Rupert Brooke-style patriotism that was prevalent in August and September. It's interesting that you've chosen to write about Britain during the First World War. You felt that I suppose there's so much focus on the battlefields of the war and not enough about what was actually going on at home. Well, I agree. I read one really good book on Britain during the Great War,

which was Jerry DeGroote's Blighty, which came out in the mid-1990s. Blighty is an exceptional book, but Jerry had about, I'd say, a third to a half of the word count that I was allowed by my very generous publisher. And I wanted to go quite deeply into the politics of the war, which are profoundly interesting, and which really changed the whole political landscape of the country for decades to come, but also into the privations that were inflicted upon so-called ordinary people during the war. You know, we didn't have the blitz that we had in the Second World War. We didn't have rationing in the way that we had it in the Second

World War. But everybody in the end ended up being involved in the war, even to the extent that schoolchildren by the last couple of autumns of the war were asked to go and collect conkers because the chestnuts that they collected, while inedible by humans, could be eaten by pigs and therefore the food that was being fed to pigs could be reconstituted and saved for human beings to eat. So everybody, men, women and children, were involved in this war. And I felt that their stories simply hadn't been told adequately. Do you trace, I mean, how important, let's talk about the politics first. How important is the First World War on the domestic politics of Britain and the development of the modern executive?

of the modern executive? Well, of course, Lloyd George, when he becomes prime minister in 1916, invents the cabinet secretariat. There hadn't been a cabinet secretary. Cabinets hadn't had agendas until then. And he has a much smaller war cabinet and delegates more and takes less account of parliament. He leaves it to Bonner Law, his

deputy, to do the boring stuff about going to parliament and making statements, while Lloyd George either sits in his office thinking great thoughts or goes and glads hand people on the front or in factories, or indeed spends not too of time with his mistress. So in that sense, the neglect of Parliament by prime ministers, which is a common theme through the 20th century, begins with Lloyd George. But I think more interestingly than what it does to the executive, the First World War effectively kills the Liberal Party. And we've just been through this great era of liberal dominance. I mean, this book is the third in a series of what will be four books that I'm writing about English history from the late 1830s to the Second World War. And in the first two volumes,

and indeed in the first half of this volume, you see the almost incongquerable power of the Liberal Party, of Gladstone, of Rosebery, of Campbell Bannerman and of Ascliffe. And partly because of Ascliffe's mismanagement of the party in the first half of the war, but also because of Lloyd George's ambition and his determination to be Prime Minister and to have power at all costs, the Liberal Party is effectively dead by 1922. And given how many years it has spent in power, and how much it had achieved, that was quite an astonishing result, to be replaced, of course, by the Labour Party. And so that's the real effect it has on the rest of the 20th century, right up to our own times, that the Tory party in one form or another survives

but the Labour party becomes the party first of all of opposition and then in 1924 for the first time a party of government. That's connected with the changes of the franchise as much as political misjudgment by Lloyd George and or the Asquith branch would you say? I don't know about that I mean Mrs Pankhurst famously when she got the vote voted Conservative and or the Asquith branch, would you say? I don't know about that. I mean, Mrs. Pankhurst famously, when she got the vote, voted Conservative. And so the argument that all these women came in, of course, women over the age of 30, women under the age of 30 didn't get the vote till 1928, and voted for the Labour Party, I think is slightly fallacious. What really helped the Labour Party was utter disunity in the Liberal Party and an almost tribal sense by people in the industrial

working class, who, since they got the vote in 1867, had voted usually for the Liberal Party, suddenly said, no, we have to vote for the Labour Party. The Conservative Party does not represent our interests, whereas the Labour Party does. And of course, the Labour Party was quite lucky in 1924 that it had, as one of its leading ministers, as its Lord Chancellor, Lord Haldane, who had been a great figure in the Asquith government. And so what is it about that great realignment? Why do you think, So what is it about that great realignment? Why do you think, why does that happen in that case? Well, Lloyd George issues a coupon, as it was called by Asquith, in fact, in 1918, of approved candidates for the general election. And the candidates of which he approves are candidates who have supported him unfailingly since he became Prime Minister in 1916,

or if they weren't in Parliament, people who have signed up to his beliefs. Now, most of Asquith's old Liberal Party that was in Parliament supported Asquith, and they lost heavily. The Liberal Party was reduced to about 59, I think, seats. It was absolutely thrashed in that election. And there was a big, as in 1931 and 1935, there was a big coalition government, which, although led by a Liberal, was largely composed of Conservatives. And that and that government went on to 1922 until the Tories fell out with Lloyd George and with some of those Tories who supported Lloyd George and they ended the coalition. But by that stage, the Liberal Party,

because it was so divided and largely had been booted out of Parliament, was not an electoral force. It managed to win a few dozen seats in 1922, 1923, 1924, that series of elections. But really, by the time you get to the mid-1920s, it's no longer a serious electoral force. And indeed, by 1929, when the Labour Party manages to win over 200 seats and form a government and to govern for a couple of years until the effects of the Depression get on it, even then, the Liberal Party can't use Labour's misfortune in government to revive. And they

effectively go where they were for the rest of the 20th century. So you've got political realignment in Britain, you've got a huge expansion of the franchise, you've got some institutional change. What other domestic, how else did the First World change Britain itself? Well, I think the greatest change was for women, because apart from getting the franchise, well, look at the reasons that Asquith stated in, I think, late 1916, just before he ceased to be Prime Minister, about why he had suddenly changed his mind after decades of opposing women's suffrage to supporting it. He recognised, as did everybody else in their right mind in this country, that without the

wholehearted support of women, we would have lost the Great War. Everybody thinks the Women's Land Army was started in the Second World War. Well, it wasn't. It was started in the Great War. Everybody thinks the Women's Land Army was started in the Second World War. Well, it wasn't. It was started in the Great War. And there were an enormous number of women working on the land by 1916. And if they hadn't been there, we would have starved, quite simply, because so many farm labourers had been taken off to the army. And many of the ships that were bringing in our food from North America were being sunk by U-boats.

And so, first of all, women proved their worth in that they literally fed the nation. Second, women became the majority of the workforce in arms factories and munitions factories. While some highly specialised men were allowed to avoid the draft and stay in factories to make munitions, most men working in munitions factories at the start of the war, and there weren't that many factories, by the way, we were very under-equipped in that line, they were put to the army. The factories that were opened were largely staffed by women.

The factories where men had been taken to the war, those men wereed by women. The factories where men had been taken to the war, those men were replaced by women. And that also ignores the fact that, as well as working on the land or working in factories, women were very seriously engaged in bringing up children in the absence of their husbands and fathers. And so they were actually the linchpin of society in the Great War. And so when the war ends and all these men come home from the army

and demobilisation takes place, suddenly women are told, well, OK, you've done your bit, now go back to hearth and home and bring up your families. And many women didn't accept that. They said, no, we've learned how to be independent. We've had jobs, we've made money, we've looked after ourselves, and we want to go back to work. And women would never again be the sort of downtrodden species

that so many of them were, sadly, before the Great War. And that, to me, is the greatest transformation of this country, and it had the widest effect in the rest of the century. Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt, and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history

and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Okay, so let's come back now to the experience of conflict. You mentioned there was no blitz. There was, of course, sustained aerial strategic bombing for the first time on British towns and cities. That wasn't to be brushed off. I mean, there were some very serious casualties, weren't there? Oh, yes. But let's get it in perspective.

I mean, 1,500 people, civilians, died in the course of the war. And I mean, that figure could be achieved on a night or two in the Blitz in 1940-41. There were Zeppelins originally that came over. They had very limited range. So it was only really the eastern counties that were bombed. There was a famous raid in December 1914 on Whitby and Scarborough on the east coast of Yorkshire. There were raids on places like Lowestoft and Great Yarmouth, which were the easternmost point of the country. And they did manage to get through to London. It caused a great scandal because there was a network of Royal Flying Corps airfields,

even early in the war, that was supposed to be defending London. And they were pretty hopeless at shooting down these enormous zeppelins. Soon the RFC got the measure of the zeppelins and the raids died down. But then the Germans invented the Goethe Bomber, which was an aeroplane and which caused terrible problems, again, mainly in London in 1917 and 1918, notably bombing a school in the east end of London and killing about 200 children, which was an enormous proportion of the total civilians who died during the war. But there were sufficiently few bombing raids that when a Zeppelin was shot down, for example, in Essex in 1915, it became a great tourist attraction. The farmer whose field it dropped in until he was stopped from doing so charged six months of time

for people to come and see it. So yes, I mean, there was an attempt to destabilise the population by doing that. But it was quite quickly realised by the Germans, if you really wanted to destabilise the British people, you got rid of their food supplies. And indeed, there was a conversation between the Kaiser and one of his advisers early in 1917 that said, well, the winner of this war will be the country that starves last. And they determined then by restarting the U-boat war in early 1917, the U-boat war had been suspended after the Americans were angry with the sinking of the Lusitania two years earlier. When they started that U-boat war and started sinking our ships, that was the real attempt to starve us into submission. It failed partly because of all those women growing crops in English agriculture,

but also because it brought the Americans into the war. And that was decisive once the troops got to Europe in 1918. You're quite critical of elements of the British government in response to the war, particularly in 1918. What areas, expand on some of those areas? Well, Lloyd George, I think, possibly quite rightly, had a low opinion of General Haig, or Field Marshal Haig. Lloyd George was horrified by the Somme, in whose planning he'd had no part. He became War Secretary a couple of days after the Battle of the Somme was launched.

And he allowed himself to be bamboozled both into the Nivelle Offensive of the spring of 1917, which was really the Battle of Arras, and that was bad enough. But he was then further bamboozled by Haig into agreeing to what became the Battle of Passchendaele. Now, Haig wasn't to know that it was going to be the wettest summer in living memory in northern France and south Belgium. And therefore, he wasn't prepared for the terrible mud bath that began at Passchendaele because of these torrential rains that lasted for weeks. And it bogged down the army and presented what should have been a mobile British army as effectively a sitting target for the German guns. So when we got to the beginning of 1918, the Russians had left the war.

The Germans had concluded the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with them after the Russian Revolution. And it became apparent to British intelligence, which was actually quite good during the Great War, that vast quantities, I think it was something like getting on for 40 divisions of German troops, were moving from the old Eastern Front to the Western Front. And Lloyd George was not only told by British intelligence that these divisions were on their way, he was also told that they were heading for a part of the line where the British line met the French line

and was therefore possibly at its weakest and that there would be an attack. therefore possibly at its weakest, and that there would be an attack. And he was asked by Haig, and was advised by some of his advisers in London, that he should send as many British troops as possible out to the line to reinforce it. So young men of 18 who wouldn't normally have been asked to go and serve, people whose training could perhaps be cut short, soldiers home on leave, he was told to get them all out there and he simply refused and he refused for possibly the good reason that he didn't want Haig to murder all them in the way that Haig had murdered them at the Solomon at Passchendaele. What this meant

though was that the line was woefully under-supported when the Germans attacked on the 21st of March 1918, and they got to within about 60 or 70 miles of Paris. They went over the Somme battlefield, which we'd fought over four and a half months, in an afternoon. I mean, the land the Germans obtained was pretty useless. It was all pot, shell holes and blended smithereens and laid waste. But it did get them closer to the seat of the French government than they'd otherwise have been. And had a large number of American troops not arrived on the Western Front in June and July 1918 to help drive the Germans back, we would have been in serious trouble. What I objected to about Lloyd George was that when he was found to have made a mistake or

miscalculation in doing this, he refused to own up to it. He tried to blame everybody else, which was a favourite tactic of his, whereas he had quite clearly taken the responsibility to decide that those troops should not be sent out there. And when somebody objected, that person was General Morris, who was a soon-to-be forcibly retired member of the General Staff in London and a very gifted intelligence officer. When Morris pointed

up that Lloyd George had lied to the House of Commons about the number of troops that were actually on the Western Front, Lloyd George had him thrown out of the army and tried to get his pension reduced, and again tried to blame everybody apart from himself for the error. Then to compound everything else, when the war was won, which was, I say, not least down to Americans coming into the fight, but also because of the huge success of the Royal Navy in blockade in Germany into starvation, which, as had been predicted, would finish them off,

Lloyd George called himself the man who'd won the war. And in fact, Lloyd George was the man who very nearly lost the war. And eventually, this aspect of his reputation became well known. And it was not least responsible for the end of his time as Prime Minister late in 1922. What about Britain? I mean, how did the war change Britain? You've mentioned, of course, the political realignment, but were there, you know, the losses suffered, the people talk about the sort of end of a patriarchal society, deferential society. Do you buy all that? How did Britain change in sort of its ideological, its cultural makeup,

do you think? It was certainly the beginning of the end of a deferential society because many people, particularly ex-Tommies who'd spent three or four years up to their necks in Mardin, Flanders, being shot at by Germans, did not have a high opinion of the political or military direction that had led to them being in that predicament. And so there was to an extent, and I don't want to overstate it, there was to an extent a distrust and a lack of confidence in the old ruling class. But then you only have to go to any public school and look at the war memorials to see that the highest proportion of any demographic group in society to be killed in the Great War were young men from the upper, from the middle and upper middle and upper classes, who died in huge quantities, leading men on the Western Front. So I think a lot of people who'd fought on the front recognised that the officer class had taken more than its share

of casualties and fatalities in fighting the war. But when they got back, they weren't prepared to give the sort of trust and deference to their social superiors and to politicians that they'd been used to doing before. Also, one great part of the economy, which began to decline severely with the outbreak of war and never really recovered afterwards, was those, I think, four million people before the war who were in service. Many men who went to fight on the Western Front said that they were never going to go back into service again.

They weren't going to, you know, work in somebody's household and tug their forelock to them. And many women who had been in domestic service as parlour maids or cooks or housemaids said, well, we're not doing it either. I mean, hence much of the 1920s written about the servant problem, even at times of high unemployment. So the notion of an upper middle class that was weighted on hand and foot, that, apart from in very big houses, that really does come to an end after the war. And as I say, women become independent. Women start looking for ways to be successful without depending on their husbands. And it's a long way to go. I mean,

we don't get to equal pay for women until the 1970s. But it's the start, I won't say of a feminist movement, but of an equality movement for women. And that does, I think, become quite a big deal. Finally, in 1917 and 18, while everyone's worrying about fighting the war, there are groups of people, notably in the House of Lords, led by people like Lord Haldane and in the House of Commons by HAL Fisher, the Education Minister, who are very concerned about how to improve education after the war, that they want more opportunity for everybody. They realise how very bad Britain has been at managing its human resources, in that many people capable of achieving a lot in education, capable of having an intelligence well developed by going into a sixth form or going to university. These people are leaving school at 13 or 14 and having no chances at all. And it is recognised at the end of the war as part of a raft of welfare measures

that include some sort of proto-health service and some sort of proto-social service, that it's absolutely important to ensure that we educate all our children better. So that too is about the breaking down of class barriers. It's about thinking that working class children and children at the lower end of the middle class have as much right to a decent education as people who in the past could afford to pay for it. The Second World War looms so large in popular imaginations of the standing alone, the blitz of the D-Day, various things. Do we remember, do the British people today, does the First World War mean anything?

Do we remember it? Do you know, it means a lot more than it did when I was a child 50 years ago. I can remember in the 1970s, a state of almost complete disregard for the Great War. There were still a number of veterans alive then, of course, men then in their 80s and 90s. And, you know, it was almost, well, do we need to bother to keep going on with Armistice Day? And I think that one of the great changes in my lifetime has been when that last group of soldiers who had fought in the Great War died around the turn of this century, it suddenly focused minds of the British public that those people were gone and that there was no one left who'd actually gone through that ordeal of fighting in the trenches.

And that it was important to try and envisage what they had gone through. And when one starts to do that, one realises the immense sacrifice that they made. You know, 880,000 British soldiers died in the war, plus about another 100,000 or so from the British Empire. And this was death and carnage on a scale that we cannot conceive of. I mean, quite rightly, if we lose a single soldier now in a foreign conflict, it appears on the news and we lament that fact. But when you consider that 19,026 men died on the first day of the Somme, it's something

which we as a country now could not absorb. And it was only absorbed in 1916 by the fact that it was massaged and it was largely concealed from the public that a loss of that size had happened. So I think we've become very used to remembering the Great War in the last 20 or 30 years. And we've now also in tandem got, you know, the last people who fought in the Second World War are shortly no longer going to be with us. There's one man left now who fought in the Battle of Britain, who's 101. And that quite rightly focuses our concentration on that fight for our freedom. But the Great War, I think, becomes, or is seen to have been,

a really pivotal moment in our history. Of course, history isn't taught very well in schools. If I say, as I would, that there's no event really since the Reformation in Great Britain that is so far-reaching on society as the Great War, Many people who don't know what the Reformation is will wonder what I'm talking about. But certainly, the Reformation is the only event between the Norman Conquest in 1914 that is of comparable significance. And I think as time

goes on, and let's hope that history is better taught in schools and universities, that people will come to recognise just how that war changed society, but also what a massive act of sacrifice it was by us to have fought it, you know, in defence of a treaty to guarantee Belgian independence that had been sealed in 1839. Absolutely. Simon Heffer, thank you very much. Your book is called? My book is called St book is called staring at god uh britain during the great war thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast thank you dan it's been a great pleasure

hi everyone it's me dan snow just a quick request it's so annoying and i hate it when are strong. This part of the history of our country all work out. And finish. Hi everyone, it's me Dan Snow. Just a quick request. It's so annoying and I hate it when other podcasts do this but now I'm doing it

and I hate myself. Please, please go onto iTunes wherever you get your podcasts and give us a five star rating and a review. It really helps and basically boosts up the chart which is good

and then more people listen which is nice. So if you could do that I'd be very grateful. I understand if you don't subscribe to my TV channel. I understand if you don't buy my calendar

but this is free come on do me a favour thanks