Abstract
After two and a half years of unprecedented warfare, Britain had gained a new leader, and few had made more drastic sacrifices to gain that high place. David Lloyd George had split his party, severed most of his oldest political alliances and blackened his reputation among the working classes, whose best champion he had been for many years. He led into 1917 what was termed a coalition but which was, in fact, a thoroughly Tory beast with an attenuated Liberal tail — and himself as its head. Certainly he was an ambitious man, but his drastic actions at the close of the previous year were driven largely by his frustration at the continuation of what he thought to be ineffective war leadership by Herbert Henry Asquith.
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Notes and References
See David R. Woodward, Lloyd George and the Generals (Newark, Del., 1983) ch. 7.
For the background of the Passchendaele campaign, see John Terraine, The Road to Passchendaele: The Flanders Campaign of 1917, A Study in Inevitability (London, 1977), a ‘documentation’ which contains many useful source materials on the offensive. See also Wolff, In Flanders Fields. An excellent discussion of the maneuvering between the ‘brass hats’ and the ‘frock coats’ may be found in Woodward, Lloyd George and the Generals, ch. 8.
The Right Honourable Auckland Campbell, Baron Geddes, GCMG, KCB (Mil.), MD, The Forging of a Family (London, 1952) pp. 304–5. Geddes and Dr Addison were the first two trained physicians to enter the British Cabinet, and each had preceded his political career by serving as a professor of anatomy. Unlike Addison, Geddes returned for a time to academic medicine.
Field Marshal Sir William Robertson, Soldiers and Statesmen, 1914–1918 (London, 1926) vol. II, p. 320.
The text of the speech is reproduced in ibid, vol. V, ch. 2, appendix B. See also Marvin Swartz, The Union for Democratic Control in British Politics During the First World War (Oxford, 1971) ch. 9, ‘The Reaction of the War Cabinet’.
See G. D. H. Cole, Trade Unionism and Munitions (Oxford, 1923) pp. 138–9.
5 March 1918, Lloyd George Papers, F/48/6/5. The Field Marshal had resigned his post as CIGS over the Curragh affair in mid-1914. In regard to the entire question of the attempt to apply conscription to Ireland, see Dangerfield, Damnable Question, ch. 18. In addition to this excellent study, see also Robert Kee, The Green Flag: The Turbulent History of the Irish National Movement (London, 1972) part 5, ch. 3.
Dorothy Macardle, The Irish Republic (London, 1968 edn) pp. 232–48.
For the origins and course of the Convention, see Robert B. McDowell, The Irish Convention, 1917–1918 (London, 1970) passim.
A. J. P. Taylor, A History of the First World War (New York, 1963) p. 148.
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© 1987 R. J. Q. Adams
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Adams, R.J.Q., Poirier, P.P. (1987). Passchendaele. In: The Conscription Controversy in Great Britain, 1900–18. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08787-7_10
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