A History of England

We saw last week that Britain wasn’t in any fit state to go fighting more wars in 1919. Having got out of the bloodiest war in history (up to then), a deep war-weariness had set in amongst the combatants, and no one felt up to more fighting. The British economy too was in no state to stand another war, what with Britain heavily in debt, to the point where its status as the banker to the world was...

At the end of the First World War, a devastating worldwide flu pandemic killed perhaps as many as 50-100 million around the globe, and even 228,000 in Britain. That was a cruel addition to the 880,000 lost to the war itself. Despite that blow, Lloyd George’s government did what it could to realise its objective of making Britain a ‘land fit for heroes’. That meant moving on with the programme of s...

Rudyard Kipling’s poem, The White Man’s Burden, is a song of praise to the selflessness of the white man who goes out to the lands of benighted savages and gives them the benefits of his wisdom and kind, if stern, governance to protect them from their own savagery. Sadly, when we take a closer look at imperialism, we find a rather different picture. That’s anyone’s imperialism and not just the Bri...

The 1918 election was a disaster for the Liberal Party. Although Lloyd George’s faction, inside the coalition government with the Conservatives, took 127 seats, the Liberals independent of the coalition only won 36. Asquith himself, their leader, even lost his seat. The Conservatives saw a huge surge in their number of MPs and could have formed a government themselves. For the time being, though,...

The return of peace after the First World War might have heralded the arrival of a time of tranquillity. Sadly, it didn’t. Too much had changed. Four empires, three venerable and one an unpstart, had collapsed: Turkey’s Ottoman Empire, the Russian Empire and the Austro-Hungarian Empire were the longstanding ones, and the German Empire, most powerful of all four, was the upstart that had shared the...

The First World Was over. Or was it? First of all, does it deserve the name First World War at all? Secondly, was it really over in 1918? That depends a lot on when we think the Second World War started. There are lots of possible dates in the thirties. One of the most striking suggestions, however, backed by some eminent historians, is that it was really only a continuation of the First. In which...

The last year of the First World War was one of startling about turns in fortune. In the spring, making highly effective use of a different approach to artillery in combination with new tactics for infantry, the Germans broke through the British lines in France. It looked for a moment as though victory might be in their grasp. But clever tactics weren’t enough once they were through the lines, sin...

In 1917, all the belligerents in the First World War were reaching the limits of their resources, certainly in finances, but also in manpower. It looked as though the Central Powers weren’t doing too badly, as revolutions in Russia pushed that nation out of the ranks of the Allied powers. Those allies clearly needed help from outside, and the obvious place, if any, had to be the United States. Iro...

Lloyd George was a Liberal, but he led a coalition government even more dependent on Conservative votes than the one he replaced under Asquith. And, not only was he dependent on the Conservatives, he also faced an Opposition – a loyal and generally supportive Opposition, committed to not blocking any measure designed to win the war – made up of Liberals, under the leadership fo the very Asquith he...

On Easter Monday in 1916, a group of armed Irish republicans took over the main post office in Dublin and several other public buildings. They had little enough popular support, and the British authorities were able to put down the uprising quickly, using Irish troops. Then, however, the military organised a court martial for fifteen surviving leaders and executed them, including a remarkable man,...

One of the men included in Asquith’s government in coalition with the Conservatives was the former Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour. He took over as First Lord of the Admiralty, the post Churchill was forced to vacate as a condition of the coalition forming. But Balfour had already been a member of Asquith’s War Council, the only Conservative on it. One of the major concerns of the Council was to fi...

The fallout from the disastrous Gallipoli campaign together with the so-called ‘Shell crisis’, when the army began to find itself short of explosive shells for its artillery, combined to produce an increasingly toxic atmosphere for the Asquith government. Ultimately, he decided that his only way forward was in a coalition government including the Conservatives. Liberals still made up a majority of...

The First World War was a wonderful opportunity for cockups, seized on with glee by many military commanders or political leaders. In peacetime, such cockups do relatively little harm. In wartime they lead to deaths and injuries, and in this war, to millions of them. This episode tracks the particular series of cockups that culminated in the catastrophe that was the Gallipoli campaign, with its hu...

We’ve been talking about the start of the First World War and, in particular, about the offensives and counter-offensives between French and Germans on the Western Front. What we haven’t considered was the British contribution to the French efforts there. That, in part, is because that contribution was, initially at least, so minimal – some 90,000 men out of a total of 2 million. And for a while i...

This episode wraps up the outbreak of the First World War and the first phase of great offences in which all sides sought glory and, above all, quick victory. Something that eluded them. We spend a little time looking at the failure of the international socialist movement, then very much in its heyday, to prevent war, even though the warmest supporters of socialism, the workers of different countr...

We’ve now reached the brink of the First World War. Before we dive in, this episode looks at how warfare had changed in the previous hundred years or so, with weapons far deadlier than had existed before, and which moved the advantage in battle from the offensive to the defensive: men with the powerful new firearms, sheltered by a good protective positions, were now well-placed to disrupt or even...

In this episode we keep following the downward spiral into violence in the years after 1910. There was the violence of the Suffragettes and the brutal treatment handed out to them in return. There was the growing threat of violence as opposing sides armed in Ireland, and some initial outbreaks of actual violence. Meanwhile, though, real violence was shaking the other end of the European continent,...

We’ve reached a time of rising violence in English history. This episode concentrates firstly, and briefly, on the violence around the growing militancy of the trade union movement, worrying and ugly though not even remotely comparable to what was happening in the US at the time – these things are all relative… Next we return to the women’s suffrage movement, to the growing divergence between the...

The general elections of 1910 left Asquith’s Liberal government dependent, to stay in office, on the votes of the Irish Nationalist MPs. The price of their support was a renewed attempt to drive through Home Rule for Ireland. That would recreate the Dublin parliament absorbed into Westminster over a century earlier. Gladstone had twice tried to introduce Home Rule but it had split the Liberals. Th...

This week we’re back with women’s suffrage movement, as the conflict heated up and turned a lot uglier. That was partly because one of the main movements, the Suffragette Women’s Social and Political Union led by Emmeline Pankhurst, turned to more violent means, leading to an increasing divergence from the biggest organisation, Millicent Fawcett’s Suffragist National Union of Women’s Suffrage Soci...

The year 1911 was action-packed. Churchill, who’d been made Home Secretary the year before and got caught up in that great fake-news event, the Tonypandy massacre, added to his reputation, not in a good way, at the Sidney Street Siege. His leader in their radical duo, David Lloyd George, got his National Insurance Act through and set Britain firmly on the road towards a welfare state. Not that eve...

1910 was a year of battle between the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Which means a year of battle between the Liberals, with their (initially) huge majority in the Commons, and the Unionists with an equally massive (and entrenched) majority in the Lords. Two issues needed settling between them. Firstly, what would happen to Lloyd George’s People’s Budget, which the Lords had already reje...

Lloyd George wasn't going to be able to fund his ambitious plans for social reform by simply cutting expenditure elsewhere in government, specifically on defence. Instead he was going to have to cover both social assistance and defence. That meant that he was going to have to raise the money from taxation. His answer was a 'people's budget'. It included a tax on value gained from s...

The big challenge facing David Lloyd George, and indeed the man who had become something of a sidekick of his on the radical wing of the Liberal Party, surprisingly for a former Tory, was how to pay for old age pensions and later for the other social security measures he hoped to introduce. That was particularly difficult given the pressure to invest more in the Royal Navy, as Germany built itself...

The tragedy that struck Joseph Chamberlain in 1906, a massive stroke that paralysed his right side and left this outstanding orator barely capable of speaking, allowed ex-Prime Minister Arthur Balfour to confirm his leadership of the opposition to the Liberal government and of the Unionists in the Commons. He and Lord Lansdowne, in the Lords where the Unionists enjoyed a huge majority, worked hard...