William Tyler
1918-1922: A Faulty Peace and Broken Promises

William Tyler - 1918-1922: A Faulty Peace and Broken Promises

- Hello everyone, it’s good to be back. It’s, I was going to say, it’s nice to see you all. Of course I can’t see you, but I feel you out there. And thanks to all those people who sent messages and information and all sorts of stuff during the time of my holiday. I’m now, as it were, refreshed and ready to go again. But I had some sad news today, because a academic friend of mine, I learned today, had passed away, and he’d only just had his book published. And I would like to dedicate this talk to Jonathan Farley, who at one time was senior lecturer at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich, who was a great friend, a great academic. And so Jonathan, this is for you, as a tribute. So then folks, I’ve got three talks in a row, which deal with the period in British history from the end of the First World War to the beginning of the Second World War. And I’m going to begin by reading a passage from Martin Pugh’s book, “We Danced All Night.” Now all the books I mention today, as ever, are on my blog, and it’s quite a long bibliography today. I’ve got books everywhere, but I thought it was worth putting every book I’m using on the blog. If I use different books in the two weeks to come, I will put new blogs on with their titles and authors. So this is Martin Pugh and “We Danced All Night.” “At 11 o'clock on the morning of the 11th of November, 1918, the church bells were rung at the village of Enstone in Oxfordshire, to celebrate the news that an armistice had been signed, and that the Great War was consequently over. The job was not well done.

As the regular ringers were either in the army, or dead, a scratch team assembled. ‘You never heard such a pandemonium in your life,’ recalled one of them, ‘more like ringing in a new scare than ringing the old war out.’ Having done their best, the bell ringers walked the five miles to Chipping Norton in search of a celebratory beer, but on arrival found none to be had, and the town in darkness, for lack of paraffin to light the lamps.” In other places too, there was rejoicing, but all somewhat subdued by the great influenza epidemic, which had closed some factories down, and closed many schools down. And in the course of the influenza epidemic, 150,000 Britons were to lose their life, including, I always think horrifically, some of the men that had survived the war, had come home, but brought with them the influenza from the front. But it’s interesting to note what the British commander-in-chief, Earl Haig, said. On that day, when the armistice was signed, in November, 1918, you would expect Haig to be somewhat triumphant, but he actually wasn’t. And that is an extraordinary moment, I think, in terms of how we perceive the war, and how the war was perceived by those who fought it. This is Roy Hattersley’s book. Roy Hattersley was a leading member of the Labour Party, and he wrote a book called “On Borrowed Time.” And in it Hattersley said, “Field Marshal Haig, commander-in-chief of the British Army, seemed on the day the war ended to feel no emotion at all.” I’m not sure that’s true. Hattersley goes on to say, “He told his subordinate generals to continue their advance, and noted in his diary,” and this is what is crucial, “noted in his diary, quote, that ‘The state of the German army is said to be very bad.’

And he went on to write, ‘We hear this morning that the Kaiser is in Holland. If the war had gone against us, no doubt the king would’ve had to go, and probably our army would’ve become subordinate, insubordinate like the German army.’ Haig said he was reminded of John Bunyan’s remark on seeing a man on his way to be hanged. But for the grace of God, John Bunyan would’ve been in that man’s place.” In other words, following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia the year before, 1917, in 1918, although we had won the war, there was great expectation that Germany, who had lost the war, would become Marxist. And so Haig said, “If we had lost the war, we might well have become Marxist.” The end of the war was therefore, I think, in England, or in Britain, if you like, a strange time. There were those who wished to turn the clock back to 1914, and pretend that nothing had changed. But of course everything had changed, and there was no way that the clock could be turned back. In fact, the war represented a break between the past, the pre-1914 world, and the new world of the 20th century, post-1918. The Marxist era historian Eric Hobsbawm has talked about the short 20th century beginning, he says, and I would agree, in 1918/1919. Not of course that at the time many people recognized that the war had made such a break in the continuity of history, the continuity of life. On the 13th of November, on a Wednesday, the Reverend Andrew Clark, a rural Anglican in Essex, wrote in his diary the following. “Some of the girls at Hoffmann’s Works in Chelmsford were told on Tuesday the 12th of November,” that is in less than 24 hours after the armistice, that their wages would be reduced from two pounds, five shillings a week to 25 shillings a week.“

In other words, putting the clock back to pre-1914, women would be paid less. They were being paid more during the war because they were doing men’s jobs. Hoffmann’s made ball bearings. In the war, they were making war material. But less than 24 hours after the end of the war, the management of Hoffmann’s attempted to turn the clock back to 1914. And I said just a minute ago that you couldn’t turn the clock back. And it’s interesting to note, that in fact, the Reverend Clark realized this, because shortly afterwards, that is to say, on the 28th of November, 1918, he wrote in his diary, "I see that there is to be a woman candidate for the combined Scottish universities’ constituency.” For the election in 1918, the general election, women had been given the vote for the first time. Some women had been given the vote for the first time. And in those days, Scottish universities could elect three members of Parliament. He continued to write in his diary entry, Reverend Clark, “I shall vote for her, whoever she is, and whatever her political party. I think the woman graduates of St Andrews University ought to have their representation.” This is quite extraordinary. He’d written on the 12th of November, how Hoffmann’s in Chelmsford had attempted to put the clock back, and women were to be put back in their place. And on the 28th of November, he has an opportunity to vote for a woman candidate for the combined Scottish universities’ constituency. And he says he’ll vote for her, whoever she is, and whether she is Liberal, Conservative or Labour, he will vote for her. So he is grasping the fact that the future is here, in 1918, whilst acknowledging in his diary with Hoffmann’s, that the past was attractive to many. I should explain that the Reverend Clark was a graduate, and he could choose to vote either for a member of Parliament in Oxford or Cambridge, or from the universities in Scotland.

And he chose to vote for St Andrews, because St Andrews had a woman candidate. And that, as I think, extraordinary. That’s very 20th century. And yet Hoffmann’s putting the clock back is very 19th century. As I said a moment or so ago, the end of the war was a strange time. Those who wanted to go back, those who were going to plow forward. And thinking of going forward, some people feared the future. The Bishop of Lincoln, a man called Edward Hicks, confessed to his diary the following. He said this. “We are in for all sorts of reaction. There is likely to be Bolshevism in this country.” In other words, he says, unlike Hague who said, had we lost, we might have become Bolshevik, here Hicks is saying we could become Bolshevik even though we won. So there is a great fear in 1918/1919, that the Russian Revolution of 1917 would be exported across Europe. And of course Lenin had been quite clear that that was his intention, that Marxism would spread quite naturally, beginning with Germany, and then spreading across the rest of Western Europe. It was an uneasy time. It was a strange time. Queen Victoria had only been dead 17 years when the war ended in 1918. But she had been on the throne since 1837, and 1918 minus 1837 equals a vastly different world. And the certainties of Victorian England, you might even say the certainties of Edwardian England, up to 1914 were shattered by the 1418 War. People had lost their reference points.

Are we to go back and hold onto the past whilst we can, or should we march into an uncertain future? The novelist H.G. Wells has given us the phrase, “the war to end all wars,” to describe the First War, the war to end all wars. The prime minister Lloyd George gave us another phrase. He said that after the war, we would build “a land fit for heroes to live in.” The war to end all wars, a land for heroes to live in. Both phrases now ring very hollow indeed, because we have the advantage of hindsight, and we know it wasn’t a war to end all wars. As the commander in chief of British and French forces, Marshal Foch said in 1918, “This is not a peace. It is merely a crux at the last 20 years.” 20 plus 1919 gives you, yes, 1939. A land fit the heroes to live in, it didn’t. But we know that many people wanted to believe both phrases, the war to end all wars, the land fit for heroes to live in. Some people believed in that. They believed that was true. We could never go to war again. It was so appalling, and they believed that we could now build a land fit for heroes to live in. They believed it. Others, others wanted to believe in it, desperately wanted to believe. It’s when politicians today say, “Things will get better.” We want to believe them, even if we have doubts. But some people do believe them, less I think, than believed Lloyd George at the end of the First World War. In his own war memoirs, and you have to read Lloyd George’s war memoirs with a good deal of salt, because he manages to excuse himself all the way through for any responsibility, not entirely different than Churchill’s account of the Second World War. But Lloyd George wrote his account just before the Second World War. He wrote it in 1936. So he had the benefit of hindsight by 1936. And Lloyd George wrote this. This is volume two. They’re thick volumes, but actually worth reading, if you keep some salt next to you to throw onto the pages. Lloyd George wrote this, 1936.

“The nations turned from the war, wounded in body, in economic order, and still more deeply wounded in the soul. Some of those wounds have since proved to be gravely septic, and the poison from them yet mars the health of the world.” And of course in 1936 he was right. But in 1918 I don’t think he would’ve believed that. In 1918, “we were wounded in body.” I think he thought we could recover economically. In fact, I’m sure he did, and he felt we could recover in soul, but we didn’t, because it’s not 1913, it’s 1918. The world has shifted on its axis. It’s true that before the 1914 war, when Herbert Asquith was the Liberal prime minister, his government had embarked on the most radical program of social reform that Britain had seen up to that date. And two of the leading members of the Liberal candidate forcing through social reform was Lloyd George, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and none other than Winston Churchill. Thus when Lloyd George promised a land fit for heroes to live in, it seemed to him, as well as the people listening to him, to be perfectly possible, because although we had a coalition government of Liberal and Conservative, we nevertheless had people like Lloyd George and Churchill in that government, who were committed to the policies of Herbert Asquith’s pre-war government. But it didn’t quite go like that. It didn’t go like that, as early as 1919. The historian Simon Webb has described the year 1919 as Britain’s year of revolution.

Remember the fear of Bolshevism in 1917? And before the First War, there had been endless strikes. In fact there were more strikes during the war than before it. But in 1919, Webb says how dangerous it was. He writes this. “On the August bank holiday in 1919, the government in London dispatched warships to the northern city of Liverpool, in an overwhelming show of force. Thousands of troops backed by tanks had been trying without success to suppress disorder on Liverpool streets. Earlier that year in London, 1,000 soldiers had marched on Downing Street, before being disarmed by a battalion of the Grenadier Guards. In Luton that summer, the town hall was burned down by rioters, before the army was brought in to restore order. And in Glasgow, artillery and tanks were positioned in the center of the city to deter what the Secretary of State for Scotland described as a Bolshevik uprising, industrial unrest, and mutiny in the armed forces, combined together to produce the fear that Britain was facing the same kind of situation that we’d had for the Russian Revolution.” So they had reason in 1919 to believe, as the Bishop of Lincoln believed, and as he vaguely had said, that revolution would come, despite the fact that we had been victorious. The old pre-war battle of the classes was engaged with renewed vigor, including members of the armed forces that had fought in the war to end all wars. And now it looked as though civil war would break out in Britain in 1919. Now this is largely forgotten in the great panoply of history, ‘cause it doesn’t fit a nice cozy view of British history. But the truth of the matter is, 1919 was a very difficult period, when we had to call the Grenadier Guards out to defend Downing Street against mutinying soldiers, not against trade unionists, but mutinying soldiers, well fed, well clothed, and at the state of the time, relatively well paid.

This was an uneasy, uncertain time. We avoided, of course, civil war. We have only Bolshevism. And later in his book, Webb says this on how we did it. “If a revolution in the sense of a popular uprising were to have been on the cards in Britain in the years following the end of the First World War, then 1919 was the year in which it would’ve been taking place. It is a matter of historical record that it did not, either because the social and political conditions in the country were unfavorable to such a project, or more probably for the simple reason that ultimately, neither the government nor the various factions ranged against it wished to see the country precipitated into what must inevitably have been a period of chaos and bloodshed.” One of the reasons is because the emerging Labour Party of the early decades of the 20th century is not Bolshevik, and that Labour Party is actually to achieve government in 1924. So we are looking at a situation, when in the 1920s, we have a Labour government, but, but, that’s not the only reason. The other reason is, that it required, as it did in Russia, a middle class leadership revolution. And there is no such middle class leadership in Britain. And we somehow managed to stabilize ourselves, with people being able to vote Labour, and for the country, that is to say, for the establishment to accept the Labour government. The question in 1918/1919 was could Lloyd George lead the country into a quieter, more tranquil period? And the short answer is no, he couldn’t, because Lloyd George loses office by 1922. Liberal Lloyd George had been leader of a wartime coalition, as I said, with the Conservative Party. And though a Liberal Conservative coalition won the general election in 1918, where the Reverend Clark voted for a woman who was a candidate for the University of St Andrews, Lloyd George’s position became more and more tenuous and difficult. Iain Dale in his book on the Prime Ministers, writes of Lloyd George at this moment in the following words.

“When victory came in November, 1918, Lloyd George was the most powerful man in Europe.” Now, I don’t know that that’s true, but that’s what Dale says. I think that’s arguable. “And led his coalition government to a landslide victory in the election. But the balance of power greatly favored the Conservatives, with 379 MPs to Lloyd George’s 127 Liberals. The Tories could have governed by themselves, and there would always be those who questioned why they did not. Yet as long as they believed in Lloyd George’s popularity with the returning soldiers, and the newly enfranchised working classes, whom they feared would otherwise support the Labour Party, they would back him.” In other words, they didn’t think the returning soldiers would vote Conservative, which of course is exactly what happened in 1945, when the returning soldiers voted Labour and not Conservative. And that was with Churchill leading the Conservative Party. This is Lloyd George leading a coalition. So the Conservatives said, “Let it settle. We’ll let Lloyd George take the flack if you will.” In 1922, the Conservatives withdrew their support from Lloyd George. He was becoming more and more unpopular, not only amongst Conservative MPs, but in the country as a whole.

And Dale writes this. “Serious industrial disputes with the coal and railway trade unions had threatened to bring the country to a standstill. And the still rising national debt following the war was creating mounting political pressure to cut government’s expenditure. There were growing concerns about Lloyd George’s working style as well. He had devoted considerable time to international conferences, to settle the affairs of the post-war world. Versailles had been followed by meetings at Cannes, Sanremo, and a series of intimate summits with the French government, at the luxurious home of his wealthy parliamentary private secretary, Sir Philip Sassoon, at Port Lympne, on the South Kent Coast. The house, incidentally, you can visit today. "Maurice Hankey observed, after visiting the prime minister at Port Lympne, that he had quote, 'a disagreeable feeling’ that he was getting too fond of high living and luxury.” Well, that can be leveled at any senior politician that’s been in power too long. But Lloyd George lapped it up. The Conservative leader in the coalition, Andrew Bonar Law, resigned from the government, coalition government, he said, on the grounds of ill health in March, 1921. For those of you listening in Canada, Bonar Law is interesting ‘cause he was Canadian, born in 1858 in New Brunswick. His mother died, his father was a clergyman. His mother died, and his mother’s sister came out from Scotland to look after the reverend’s children.

The reverend remarried, and the sister, well I think, went back to Scotland. Whether she was pushed by the new wife or not, I don’t know. But she went back to Scotland, and she was so taken with young Bonar that she took him back as well. And they had money, and they invested in Bonar’s education, and thus Bonar becomes a Canadian Englishman, put bluntly, resigns as leader of the Tory Party and from the government in 1921. But within a year he’s back, and back as prime minister of a Conservative government. The final straw in the form of Lloyd George came with Lloyd George’s wish to go to war to support the Greeks in Antolia against the new Turkish government that had replaced the Ottoman government. And Iain Dale writes this. “The final straw for many Conservative MPs was a government statement on the 16th of September, threatening war with Turkey if it violated one of the neutral zones on the Asian side of the Dardanelles.” Thomas Jones, an aide to Lloyd George, noted in his diary, quote, “The outcry in war-weary Britain was immediate and widespread. Shortly afterwards, a meeting of Conservative MPS at the Carlton Club on the 19th of October, who voted 185 to 88 in favor of a motion that the party should fight the next election as an independent force with its own manifesto and its own leader. And Lloyd George resigned.” And Lloyd George resigned. An election is held. Bonar Law returns and becomes prime minister, for a Conservative government. I don’t think it mattered too much to the population as a whole. The importance is not that the Liberals had switched, Liberal government had switched for a Conservative government. That had been going on throughout the 19th and early 20th century.

What is important is that Lloyd George not only fell from office, but the Liberal Party crumbled around him, and as it crumbled the Labour Party increased. And so now, working men do not have to vote Liberal, they can vote Labour and more importantly, many middle class intellectuals vote Labour, the sort of people that might have led a Bolshevik revolution, but had no intention of doing so, are quite happy to vote for a Labour government which is totally committed to democratic parliamentary rule. And so we shift in Britain, almost without realizing it, in 1922 from a two-party political system, Liberal versus Conservative, the old Whig versus Tory, now we are shifting to a new two-party system, Conservative versus Labour. And that division in the 1920s is very much a class division, with the proviso that many intellectuals on the left voted Labour, and many working class patriots on the right voted Conservative. And so in that way, we gain a stability of sorts. I say a stability of sorts because the governments, whether Conservative, coalition or Labour in the 1920s and 1930s, are not great. But they did serve one important purpose, which was to calm down the threat of revolution here. And if you say, “But William, there was never going to be a chance of revolution,” that’s not true. That really isn’t true. And people didn’t think that was true at the time. But by the 1930s, when we had the right under Mosley causing trouble on the streets, we are much more united. And thus when we go into World War II, and into a coalition government which has Liberals as well as Labour, mainly Labour in coalition with the Tory Prime Minister Churchill, we have an agreement.

There was a very famous cartoon by the cartoonist Low, which has Churchill striding out, followed by the Labour and Liberal members of his cabinet, and the title for the cartoon is, “We’re Right Behind You, Winston.” And that didn’t look necessarily the situation in 1918/1919, and I think that’s a sort of rather important point to make. This is a period of change. Those living through it had difficulty seeing it. We looking back, see that it was a difficult period. We have two decades before the Second World War, the '20s and the '30s. In the '20s, we are still a very divided society in class terms. After all, we have a general strike in the middle of the 1920s. And in the 1930s, well, some historians would argue that we were calm, and on a more satisfactory trajectory as a nation, because of external threats, that is from 1933, the threat of Nazi Germany. I’m not sure, well we’ll come to that. I’m going to talk next time about the 1920s and the class divide in the 1920s, which continues from the pre-war class divisions. But then in my final talk, I’ll talk about the 1930s, and the ever-growing threat, and the ever-growing realization of the threat from Nazi Germany, and in all of that, the economic chaos of the period as well, which is what hit Lloyd George in 1918. Had the economic situation been better in 1918, and Lloyd George could for example build the houses that were required, and he began to build the houses, something that was attempted to be followed by Labour governments in the '20s and '30s, we nevertheless were unable to do what needed to be done, because of the lack of money. And I’m sure historians in the future will trace the failure and fall of Britain in the 21st century, back to the 1920s. It’s 100 years that we’ve been on a slide.

Economists will tell you it’s the 1890s onwards that we’ve been on a slide, but I think the slide really begins in 1918, or if you prefer 1914 and war debts, and we never successfully recovered from 1914, and we’re hit again in 1939, and we don’t recover in the 1950s, and we know the story onwards from there, of joining the European Union, having been rejected by France, and then withdrawing from the European Union, and all of that is dust that has to settle for historians, so that we can trace the history of Britain. Victorians thought the history of Britain was like that, going up, up, and up. Many historians today see it going down and down and down, in terms of, well, whatever you want to measure it by. I often wonder what would Asquith and Lloyd George, even Churchill, think of where we are today? Would they be optimistic? I don’t know that they would. I think they would be surprised that things that they had been committed to in 1913 Asquith administration, all three of them have not been followed through to the present. Okay, they were followed through in 1945 by Attlee’s Labour government, but that lies now, 80-odd years in the past. It’s interesting and dangerous as well for historians to look at the present day, and see the trends of where we’ve come from. But I think they are there. One of the problems, which we shall see in the coming weeks more than today, is that Britain found it difficult to come to terms with the loss of world power. It wasn’t so obvious in 1918. In fact, the empire had never been larger, when we took over German colonial territories and mandated territories in 1918, 1919, and so on. We still thought of ourselves, frankly, as superior. The phrase constantly used in public schools when I was a child was effortless superiority. And that characterized the British establishment. Well that clearly is nonsensical in the 2020s.

No one would defend such a view today, and a more realistic view of where we are in the world. But if you look at what the people, the politicians pursuing Brexit were talking about, they were talking about replacing the Europe with a reinvigorated commonwealth. Well, and America, almost as though America was still a colony. “Oh, it doesn’t matter. We’ll do trade deals with the states.” Well, so much for that. So when I’m talking about 1914-18 being a moment in history, between a past and a present and a future, that’s what I believe. I think this is a turning point, and historians have written about it as being a turning point long before the present day. But the present day emphasizes that even more, than say, it did in the 1950s. We are never going to go back to 1913. The question is, where do we go forward to? We’ve had three prime ministers since World War II that had a vision, two Labour, one Conservative, Attlee, Thatcher and Blair. I don’t think any of them would be very pleased at where we are today. Are we, in fact, back to the 1920s and '30s, with poor quality politicians, the Ramsay MacDonalds, the Baldwins, and so on? Well, you have to decide, and if you’re listening from outside of Britain, the same main arguments apply, and you must ask yourselves. Now it is true that in the States, you have Woodrow Wilson for example, and then you have later, about Woodrow Wilson, of course we know, Woodrow Wilson, we know only too well, was so ill on coming back from Versailles, that that to all intents and purposes, America had its first female president, in Mrs. Wilson. The story is told that if people came to see Wilson at the White House, Mrs. Wilson used to say, “Sorry, he’s busy. I’ll go and ask him what the answer is to your question.” She would go out of the room, not consult him, of course, come back five minutes or 10 minutes later, and give her answer, purporting to be her husband’s answer. But Wilson had this one great idea, which he’d taken to Versailles, the League of Nations.

Not only did he annoy Clemenceau, the French prime minister, but he annoyed Lloyd George as well. You remember Clemenceau’s famous quotation on being given the fact that Wilson was bringing 14 points to Versailles. He said, “Mr. Wilson bores me with his 14 points. Why, God Almighty only had 10.” Wilson threatened to withdraw from Versailles because of Lloyd George and Clemenceau’s very tough stand against Germany. In the end, Lloyd George was the compromiser between the extreme view of Clemenceau, and what we could see today as Woodrow Wilson’s positive view. But Woodrow Wilson positive view, remember, was not accepted in the States, and the United States Congress did not ratify Versailles and the League of Nations. And so the League of Nations was shot in the foot from day one. The idea that “this will be a war to end all wars,” H.G. Wells, an intellectual said, Woodrow Wilson, the academic from Princeton, believed it, that we could do better. But we haven’t done better, and the United Nations is as flawed in many respects as the League of Nations. So the international situation after 1918 was not good. The treaties imposed in Europe and the Middle East after 1918 sow the seeds of future conflict. With the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the fall of the German Empire, and the fall of the Russian Empire, the West, Britain, France and the States were blind to the consequences of their decisions, in Central Europe and in the Middle East in particular, and in Germany, by the imposition of impossible war reparations, which many today believe led, well one of the major causes of the rise of Nazism.

Simon Schama, in his book, “The History of Britain, Volume Three,” this is a book. I can barely hold this book. Right on page 444, “H.G. Wells, for H.G. Wells, as for like-minded writers such as Bernard Shaw and Arnold Bennett, the end of the war had to be the moment, perhaps the last moment when the conditions that have produced the general massacre of the war were removed.” That is what Wilson believed. “Away with preposterous empires and monarchs and the tribal fantasies of churches and territories.” Well, Wilson would’ve signed up to that. “Instead, there will be created a league of free nations,” Wilson’s great idea, “advocated by Shaw, Bennett, and the philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell in Britain, this virtual international government, informed by science and motivated by disinterested guardianship of the fate of common humanity, must inaugurate a new history.” “Otherwise,” they argue, “The sacrifice of millions would’ve been futile. They were to be disappointed, because as Wells talked of the vindictiveness of Versailles, which imposed the blame and the cost of the war on Germany. Wells was also frustrated by the limited authority given to the League of Nations, which was made even weaker by the U.S. Congress’s repudiation of the treaty.” The war to end all wars was not to be. It created a base not only for the Second World War, but for the difficulties post-1945, in the breakup of Yugoslavia, and in the, well, I think the word to use is chaos, of the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East, which continues today. How disappointed would Wilson have been?

His idea was idealistic, as we know now, and maybe the world is not yet ready, if it ever will be, for idealists like Wilson. And so for those who hoped of a great new start, it was not to be. And in Britain, that’s certainly the case. And Lloyd George falls from power in 1922, and we’re back to Tweedledum and Tweedledee, in this case Labour and Conservative, but also with poor quality men, and they’re still men at the top of British politics. This is the journalist Andrew Marr, in what I think is an excellent book called “The Making of Modern Britain,” Getting all of the books on there, my blog, and Marr writes this, two paragraphs, and I think this is very good. You know that when I talk or when I quote other people, you don’t have to agree. In fact, it’s better to disagree, and to work out for yourselves. “I think William is totally wrong, because.” “I think Marr that he quoted is totally wrong, because.” For what it’s worth, Marr wrote, “Those living through the period often talked of being a post-war generation, post-1918. Apart from a few hyper alert and prescient people, they did not know a worse war was coming, but it was the most important self-description for the period. The Great War seemed to have sliced away most of what went before it. Old habits of deference, old authorities had gone. The question was now, how shall we live? Not everyone bothered to ask it, but the most interesting people did ask it, whether their reply was to drink and take drugs, or to live in a rural community, or four, for a new political creed.” It’s an uncertain time, is the phrase I keep using.

The second paragraph I want to quote from Marr is a couple of paragraphs further on. “Most of the people voted in their millions for moderate and even timid political parties. Dull though most of Britain’s politicians were, we can thank our lucky stars or our lucky birthplace that they presided over a country so complacent, hidebound, unthinkingly loyal to its increasingly suburban monarchy, and so stupefied by the fading glory of its past, that it never fell for thrilling politics, as most of the rest of Europe had. Politicians used to compliment one another on having common sense, ballast, or bottom. In the 1931 general election, 55% of voters went to the Conservatives. In 1935, the national government did almost as well. Most other voters opted for the middle of the road Labour. Only north .1% voted Communist. The '20s and '30s were a time of idealism, and sparkling visions of new futures, but they were also when the British were saved by a low center of gravity, by Britannia’s vast and heavy buttocks, her unimaginative tea swilling, bovine inability to be easily exciting. These were the years when despite every temptation, we kept our balance,” or buried our head in the sand, you might add to what Marr wrote. This is a difficult time. People thought they had time, all the time in the world, to create the sort of society that would emphasize equality, rather than division. Well, they didn’t have all the time in the world.

They had two decades, two decades under poor political leadership, two decades without the cash to deliver on the basis of the changes that Asquith had introduced with Lloyd George and Churchill before 1914. I’ve got an eye on the clock. And coming to the end, I hope you found some things of interest, and I hope you gathered the main thrust of what I’m saying, because at the beginning of my talk, I made the point that the 1914-18 war marked a significant break between an old past and a new present, and a new future. And I also emphasized what an uncertain time it was. But it is this break with the past, and how we deal with the new future, of going backwards or going forward, and if we go forward and that is the only answer, to go forward, you can’t go back. What does going forward mean? Those were the questions which intellectuals were asking, but few politicians. I’m going to leave politicians aside, I’m going to leave historians aside, and I’m going to have a word about the naturalist writer and poet, Edward Thomas. Edward Thomas, in March of 1913, just over a year before we go to war, but of course he didn’t know it at the time, undertook a walk from London to the coast of Somerset, and ostensibly it was a walk in search of spring. March, beginning of March, April, March, the end of winter, April, the beginning of spring, he walks westwards to find spring. That’s the basis of his book. He’s a nature writer. The book came out as “In Pursuit of Spring,” and was published in the war, year that war began, in 1914. I have to say, that for me, the writings of Thomas are fantastic. They are, well, if I can find the book.

Here it is. I told you I had too many books. My wife said, “You can’t possibly have all those books for only an hour.” “In Pursuit of Spring.” One of the things about Thomas, is that he writes in that wonderful language of the Edwardian period, which is so rich. Now, I can only give you a flavor of this 1913 book. It’s a look at an England before war came, and as far as he knew, that war wouldn’t come. And he’s just reached Somerset, in the west. You don’t need to know about the places that he mentions, just indulge in the language. It’s like having a hot spa bath, reading Thomas. It’s so beautiful. It’s not surprising he later became a poet. Thomas writes, “Turning to the left again, when the signpost declared it’s 7 ¾ miles to Bridgewater, I found myself on a glorious sunlit road, without hedge, bank, or fence on either side, proceeding through fern, gorse and ash trees, scattered over mossy slopes. Down the slopes, I looked across the flat valley to the Mendip Hills and Brent Knoll, and to the Steep and Flat Holm Islands, resting like clouds on a pale cloudy sea. What is more, through a low arched rainbow I saw the blueness of the hills of South Wales. The sun had both dried the turf and warmed it. The million gorse petals seemed to be flames sown by the sun. By the side of the road were the first bluebells and cowslips. They weren’t growing there, but some chard had gathered them below at Stowey or Durley, and then getting tired of them, had dropped them.

They were beginning to wilt, but they lay upon the grave of winter. I was quite sure of that. Winter may rise up through mold, alive with violets and primroses and daffodils. But when cowslips and bluebells have grown over his grave, he cannot rise again. He is dead and rotten, and from his ashes, the blossoms are springing. Therefore, I was very glad to see them. Even to have seen them on a railway station seat in the rain, brought from far off on an Easter Monday, would’ve been something. Here in the sun, they were as if they had been fragments fallen out of the rainbow over against Wales. I had found winter’s grave, I’d found spring, and I was confident that I could ride home again, and find spring all along the road. Perhaps I should hear the cuckoo by the time I was again at the river Avon, and see cowslips tall on ditch sides and short on chalk slopes, bluebells in all hazel copses, orchids everywhere in the lengthening grass, and flowers of rosemary and crown imperial in cottage gardens. And in the streets of London, cowslips, bluebells, and the unflower-like yellow green spurt. Thus I leapt over April and into May as I sat in the sun, on the north side of Cothelstone Hill, on that 28th of March, 1913, the last day of my journey westward to find the spring.” The book, published in 1914, the year we went to war. Thomas was 36 years of age with a wife and children, and did not volunteer and was not expected, at his age and in his family situation, to volunteer.

But in July, 1915, before conscription was introduced in Britain, he did volunteer, it’s said largely because he was influenced by the American poet Frost, his friend, who had really said, “You’ve got to make choices.” Now whether Frost meant that he should go to war, or simply support the war is unclear. And what finally drove him to sign up? We don’t know precisely. He wasn’t, he certainly was no warmonger, but what he was, I think the answer is, he was committed to saving what he’d written about on his walk in 1913, the England of his, not imagination, but the England of the countryside, an England that seemed eternal. And it was for that he fought, not for king, but instead for country. In 1916 he wrote a poem, and the poem is one of his most famous poems. He’s known as a war poet today, but his poetry is rather unlike the other war poets, and it’s rather more subtle. He wrote this in 1916. It’s called, “As the Team’s Head Brass.” It’s about a team of plow horses. “As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn, the lovers disappeared into the wood. I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm that strewed an angle of the fallow, and watched the plow narrowing a yellow square of charlock.

Every time the horses turned, instead of treading me down, the plowman leaned upon the handles to say or ask a word, about the weather, next about the war. Scraping the share, he faced towards the wood, and screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed once more. 'The blizzard felled the elm tree, whose crest I sat in, by a woodpecker’s round hole,’ the plowman said. ‘When will they take it away?’ I said. ‘When the war’s over.’ So the talk began. One minute and an interval of 10, a minute more and the same interval. ‘Have you been out?’ ‘No.’ ‘And don’t want to, perhaps?’ ‘If I could only come back again, I should. I could spare an arm. I shouldn’t want to lose a leg. If I should lose my head, why, so, I should want nothing more. Have many gone from here?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Many lost?’ ‘Yes, a good few. Only two teams work on the farm this year. One of my mates is dead. The second day in France they killed him. It was back in March, the very night of the blizzard, too. Now if he had stayed here, we should have moved the tree.’ ‘And I should not have sat here. Everything would have been different.

For it would have been another world.’ ‘Aye, and a better, though if we could see all, all might seem good.’ Then the lovers came out of the wood again. The horses started, and for the last time, I watched the clods crumble and topple over, after the plowshare and the stumbling team.” On Easter Monday, the 9th of April, 1917, the whistles blew along the front line at Arras, the first day of the Battle of Arras, and Lieutenant Thomas went over the top with his men. Only three months after reaching the front line, he fell, facing the foe. His fellow poet, W.H. Davies, wrote a memorial poem, simply called, “Killed in Action, Edward Thomas.” And Davis wrote, “Happy the man whose home is still in nature’s green and peaceful ways, to wake and hear the birds so loud, that scream for joy to see the sun, is shouldering past the sullen cloud. And we have known those days when we would, woke to hear the cuckoo first, when you and I with thoughtful mind would help a bird to hide her nest, for fear of other hands, less kind. But thou my friend, are lying dead. War, with its hell-borne childlessness, has claimed thy life, with many more. That man that loved this England well, and never left it once before.” It’s a change from the past to the future. Thank you for listening. And I’m sure people have got lots of things they want to correct, ask.

Q&A and Comments:

Oh, thanks for all the people saying welcome back. Now, I did have a nice holiday, and I always take August off, ever since I changed my life nearly 30 years ago now. Oh, that’s nice of you.

I think that should say Haig. It says hang, Adrian. I think it’s Haig. I’m sure it’s Haig. “Haig had no personal responsibility,” says Adrian, “for the loss of so many thousands of of troops. This is unacceptable in today’s leadership.” Yes, that’s true. In his memoirs, Lloyd George wanted to sack Haig. He didn’t like Haig, and they came from different social classes. He would’ve gladly sacked Haig, and he wanted to promote the Australian Monash. And we talked about that before, that he felt that he couldn’t, simply because the British senior officers would not accept someone who was not British, but was a colonial.

Q: Oh, Jonathan, “Could you please explain how Britain could have become Marxist if Germany had won World War I?”

A: No, if Germany had won World War I, we are unlikely to, well, the truth of the matter is, if Russia had continued the war in 1917 and taken Germany, then Germany would’ve become Marxist, and we would have ourselves become Marxist. On the other hand, that did not happen. But it wasn’t that they didn’t think it would happen. And there were plenty of Marxists here, as there were in Germany. And so there might well have been a Marxist state here and in Germany. And you remember that Munich was for a time a Marxist state.

That’s also true, Michael. The other rumor was that Lloyd George intended the commander of the Canadian army Currie, too. That’s absolutely true. I think his preference would be for Monash, but both are interesting, and both failed on the grounds that they were colonials in the view of senior British officers.

Q: “Did the wage reduction of the women who worked in the place of men hold?”

A: Yes it did, yes it did.

Q: “Were the Jews of Britain active in the unrest in 1919? Were some of them Bolshevik revolutionaries?”

A: The answer to that is yes, but not, no, no, no, forget about it being Jews. There were Jews in the working class. There’ve also, who would’ve been Bolshevik. There were Jews in the middle class who were decidedly anti, so the Jews in Britain would simply have been like the rest of Britain. So there isn’t, as it were, a Jewish political view. That would be quite untrue.

“With hindsight, says Mark, "was there no legislation that would’ve benefited public stability in the early ‘20s? If not, why not?”

• Right, Mark, you are jumping ahead of me. I will do 1920s next week. If you’re saying there were some things that were introduced, but the basic class thing was never really dealt. We’ll come to that, if you don’t mind, next week, when we look at the first Labour government.

Yana says, “A major topic you haven’t addressed is a societal, yet addressed, is a societal debate as a functional role of government. Without such a general agreement, there can be no civics education. Without civics education, a stable government system is unachievable.” Yeah, that’s a different issue altogether than what I’ve been talking about today. That’s a debate for now, when democracy in the States and here and in other places, that liberal Western democracy is under attack. That’s a quite different issue. Yeah, Jonathan, right.

“I recommend 'Paris 1919’ by Margaret MacMillan, who is a great-granddaughter of Lloyd George.” Absolutely, Margaret MacMillan is an excellent historian.

Q: “MacMillan maintains in ‘Paris 1919’ that the reparations against Germany, causing the inevitability of World War II have been overstated. Do you agree?”

A: Not particularly, Judy, I don’t. I think the evidence is that they weren’t, no, I don’t necessarily agree with that. It’s there. You can have a view, you can agree with that. I personally, I don’t.

Q: “What health or financial benefits did World War I veterans receive on their return?”

A: Oh, you’re joking, Ralph, you’re joking.

Q: “Did Smuts not have some influence in the formation of the League of Nations?” says Alan.

A: Yes, but the idea, it entirely comes from Wilson. He is the person with the vision.

Michael says, interesting point, Michael, “The intrusiveness and partisanship of the modern media mitigates against having quality politicians.” I’m not sure that partisanship has anything to do with it, because we’ve always had partisanship in the media, in terms of the written newspaper media, in all our democracies in the West. Intrusiveness is a different issue. I’ve always said, I could never be prime minister because everything about my brother would appear on the front page. I joke, but you know what I mean.

Q: “Why did the U.S. Congress not ratify the League of Nations?” says Cheryl.

A: Oh, because America withdraws into its natural position of isolationism from Europe. America’s policy is one of isolationism from Europe, and let Europe deal with its own problems, and they, with Wilson not able to argue his case, America’s never going to get involved. Remember that It takes some time for Roosevelt to be able to take America into World War II. Well that Shelly, that’s a good question.

Q: “Was Wilson as clueless about consequences of how nations in Africa and the Middle East were carved out without reference to tribes and religions in European countries?”

A: As regards Africa, that had been done before the end of World War I, and we know on record that Wilson was opposed to empires. That’s what put the backs of the British up against Wilson or the British establishment. As regards the Middle East, by then, Wilson is no longer a power in the land, and it’s carved up by Britain and France, and not a good solution, as we all know. Yes, oh, thank you Monty for that. Because I was going to say it, and I forgot to write it on my notes. Tonight at 10 o'clock in the UK on Channel 4, is a documentary about the massacre of 34,000 Jews during the Holocaust in Kyiv, in the Ukraine. It gives a balance to this, “Everything about Ukraine is white, everything about Russia is black.” We have to be very careful about saying that.

Allison says, “I must say that the 1945 Labour achieved many effective social reforms, including the NHS.” Yes, they did. But my point is that they don’t exist today. Many of the reforms begun by Labour in 1945 have fallen foul of time in the same way that 1913 did. We did not pursue the sort of country that Attlee had in mind. It, we never, and when we get Labour governments under Wilson, Callahan, and Blair, it’s nowhere near what Attlee and his government were trying to create.

Q: Am I going to explore the role of suffragettes?

A: No, I’m not. Simply Sheila, because that lies in Edwardian Britain, and that’s before the First World War. After the First World War, there was no way that Britain or the States could deny women the vote. But it’s not, the suffragettes are, have done the job by then. And you are right, Monty, Smuts was a member of the Imperial war cabinet.

Oh, Mona, that’s really nice of you, because that’s what I think, so I’m obviously going to agree.

“Thank you for talking about reading for the pure joy of language. The book ‘Horse’ that I keep talking about is because of the steeplechase and power of the language.” Yeah, language is important, and I, when we read pre-1914 books, I’m staggered by the quality of the language. It’s so beautiful. It’s like I’m, I’m sorry to give a Christian analogy, but it is the beginning of quality English, as Shakespeare, the “Book of Common Prayer” in the Church of England, and the authorized version of the Bible give you such beautiful language. Or “John Bunyan,” which was mentioned today, is such beautiful language. I’m sorry, those are Christian references in, to Britain, but they’re the ones that, but Shakespeare isn’t. Did you see somebody arguing in a university in Britain and reported in “The Times” that we shouldn’t be reading “Robinson Crusoe,” because he doesn’t mention insects? I mean, we’re going mad.

Oh, well done, Paula. “‘In Pursuit of Spring,’ the book by Edward Thomas, is available as a PDF on archive.org.”

Oh, I’m so pleased, Jane, that you like the Edward Thomas readings. I hesitated a lot about using them, because he isn’t particularly well known, and his poem, like the one I read, is not the ones I would normally read, because it’s a little bit more subtle, but I wanted to give a before and after, and the fact that he died a year after he wrote that poem. Well, less than a year after, no, just over a year after he wrote that poem. He wrote it in May ‘16. He died in April, just under a year in April, 1917, yeah.

Oh, the poet who wrote in memory of Edward Thomas is W.H Davies, D-A-V-I-E-S, a friend of Thomas. And if you simply look up W.H. Davies, plus the, whatever, yeah, hang on. If you look up W.H., put in Google, “W.H. Davies,” plus “Killed in Action,” the poem I read will come up on the screen. “W.H. Davies” plus “Killed in Action.” “William Owen was killed in 1918, same day as my father’s cousin.”

Oh, Nicholas, 4th of November, 1918. How dreadful, so near the end. So near the end. I didn’t mention Vietnam.

I’m not sure what you mean, Barry, by that. I wouldn’t ever think of mentioning Vietnam. If I was doing French colonial history, I might, but other than that I would only begin a talk about Vietnam post-1945.

“I don’t think you mentioned the significance of warmongers in the run-up to 1913.” No, I didn’t, because I was really trying to talk about the end of the war, not the beginning. That’s a nasty way of getting out of it. But that’s true, I didn’t want to go backwards too far.

Q: “I don’t understand your assertion, William, that the liberal democracy in the UK is under threat. Where does the red threat come from?”

A: No, the Conservatives under Sunak are not middle of the road. That’s where the danger lies, that people think they are. No, the attack on lawyers and the judicial system is extremely worrying. The defiance of international law is worrying. The potential withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights is deeply worrying. There’s all sorts of worries, and we don’t know what Starmer might do. No, I think we are in difficult, you and I probably are not going to agree, James, politically on where we are. But I am very, very concerned about how we are slipping away from liberal democracy, let alone the corruption of the present government. Do I think it will be better under Labour? We’ll see, we’ll see.

“The threat to liberalism, if it exists, comes from outside politics, e.g. cancel culture that threatens freedom of speech.” No, the government is threatening freedom of speech as well. That’s one of the problems. No, I won’t get involved in an argument, James. You and I could argue until the cows, as they say, come home. Don’t think we’re going to convince either, each other, and we will just have to live to be 150, to find out which of us is going be right. I’m determined to live to, well, I’m determined to get my letter from the king. I guess it won’t be Charles when I’m 100.

Carol says, “Actually, Smuts had everything to do with the League of Nations. As far as I know Wilson received his paper regarding such a proposal, and took it up from there.” Okay, if that is true, then I apologize. That’s something I didn’t know.

Q: “Why was the Kaiser dealt with so leniently at the end of the war?”

A: Because we had no mechanism to try him, basically, and because he was no threat, and he himself was a cog in the wheel, and by 1918 was a very small cog. We only get the concept of international courts once we create the inquiry into the horrors of Nazism, after World War II. That is different. That is different, because of the horrors of Nazism, and not simply that Germany took us to war. It is the Holocaust, and all the other horrors associated with Nazism that made it essential that people were put on trial. And since then we’ve developed international law to deal with those questions.

I think, folks, I’ve come to the end. Thank you very much for all your interesting questions. Thank you also for pointing out lots of interesting, not least about Smuts. Thank you very much indeed. I think it was Carol that was very clear about that. Thanks very much again, and I look forward to seeing as many of you who can join me, same time, same place, and unfortunately same lecturer, this time next week. See you then.