#17 The elephant in the room –
Ep 1 WW1: how much was it Britain’s fault?

Britain’s main problem by 1910 was Russian expansion towards its Persian oil and India, the jewel in Britain’s crown - now militarily indefensible.  So why did Britain go to war to support Russia and against Germany its closest European friend and trading partner?

Somehow everyone seems to know that Britain went to war in 1914 because the Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. It’s like a family heirloom.

The problem is … that it just wasn’t like that.

On 28 June 1914 the Archduke was murdered in Sarajevo by the Serbian terrorists calling themselves the ‘Black Hand.’ Now, in actual fact the Austrian Archduke had no business being in the Bosnian capital that day. It was the Serbian’s national day, the anniversary of the medieval Battle of Kosovo. And the Serbians were extremely exercised by the fact that the Austrians had unilaterally annexed Bosnia in 1908. So far from a sedate royal tour, the Archduke’s visit was a provocative political statement. Look at us, it said, we took Bosnia. You’re next. Privately the Grand Duke was rather sympathetic to the Serbians – but that’s another whole story and we’re getting sidetracked. 

The usual version of the story continues that the Austrians eventually used the assassination as an excuse to invade Serbia. The problem was that the Russians had undertaken to defend it. The Germans supported the Austrians. But the French were allied to the Russians. So Germany invaded France by way of Belgium. And that’s why the British jumped, in - because they’d signed a treaty in 1839 to defend the Belgians.

Tell it like that and it sounds like a farce. Except that, by November 1918, thirty-seven million people had been killed or wounded.

As a bald account of what happened in June and August 1914 it does have, I suppose, the quality of being, well, bald. But it’s a million miles from explaining why the British ever got involved in the First World War. Whatever went on in Serbia, one of many small Balkan states, nobody can ever seem to explain what on earth it had to do with the British. Their Empire was far away in Africa, the Middle East, India and Australia. Even if the Germans and French got involved, couldn’t the British have sat back and grown rich selling weapons to both sides? That, after all, is exactly what the Americans did.

The popular version supposes that the British were obliged to support the French and Russians because they were allied to them in the so-called Triple Entente.

But it is not true. The Colonial Secretary in 1914 was Viscount Lewis ‘Loulou’ Harcourt. Among his papers there’s a letter he wrote in January 1914 to his friend, the Foreign Secretary Edward Grey, ticking him off even for uttering the words ‘Triple Entente.’ ‘No such thing has ever been considered or approved by the Cabinet. In fact the thing does not exist.’

Loulou Harcourt was correct. The ‘Triple Entente’ did not exist. Britain had signed an ‘Entente’ or agreement, with France in 1904 and a Convention with Russia in 1907.

These two agreements settled various long-running disputes between Britain and France and Britain and Russia over their various colonies. But they said nothing whatsoever about fighting for each other in a war. The problem was, as Harcourt roundly told his friend Lord Grey, if he kept on talking about a ‘Triple Entente’ it would give France and Russia ‘the expectation of British support (as of right) against Germany.’ And if Britain did not then back them, she would be denounced, as she had often been in the past, as a treacherous, unreliable ally. The so-called ‘perfidious Albion.’ The reality was that Britain was under no obligation to lift a finger to help France or Russia, let alone sacrifice a generation of its young men.

Nor is there anything in the old story you often hear, about going to war in defence of Belgium. It’s true that, in August 1914, the British Government loudly proclaimed that the defence of poor little Belgium was its casus belli – its formal reason for declaring war.

But the Treaty of London that Britain had signed with France and Germany (and others) in 1839 did not commit any of them to do anything at all for the Belgians. Indeed, the treaty was so confusingly written it had become a joke at the Foreign Office. When the British Government got it off the shelf and took a close look at it in July 1914 they decided Britain was under no legal obligation to do anything at all. The Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith, wrote to the king, George V, telling him exactly that.

The plain conclusion from all of this is that the British were not obliged to join the war in 1914.

We can go a step further. What we were never taught in school is that on 1 August 1914 the Germans offered not to attack France or Belgium if the British and French stayed neutral in the coming conflict. Now, the episode is controversial and we shall have to take a proper look at it later. But it was, we argue, a serious German offer. For a few hours there was the chance it might have flowered into a genuine deal.

Had the British made the slightest effort to follow the German offer up, the long carnage of the trenches might well never have happened.

What’s most bizarre of all about the outbreak of war in 1914 is that the Germans were the last nation most Edwardian British people would have predicted going to war against. It really didn’t make any sense.

Britain was not obliged to go to war in 1914 to defend Belgium, France or anyone else. The Germans offered not to invade Belgium or France if the British and the French kept out. Going to war against Germany in fact made no sense.

Now, there are plenty of people who will be surprised – even outraged – that we say that. Surely Germany was Britain’s age-old enemy? Well that, of course, was the story that Governments in 1914 and after the war, wanted the British people to believe. But it’s simply nonsense.

Let’s start at the personal level. The British upper classes usually had German governesses. The reason was that they believed French ones would get pregnant. In some stately homes the children had to practise speaking German every day except Christmas. Downstairs their parents showed off their pricey German Meissen [Mice-en] and Dresden china. In Germany refined households spread Oxford marmalade or English mustard on their Wedgwood plates with Sheffield cutlery. Richard Milton’s Best of Enemies, Britain and Germany (2007) has a lot of fun showing how Germany was Britain’s most important trading partner. For years Britons and Germans had bought and sold each other’s inventions and specialities. Britain imported German Nivea, Persil, Aspirin, Siemens [Zeemens] electrical goods, Leica [Like-a] cameras, Adler typewriters, Daimler and Mercedes cars. They put their children into Kindergartens and bought the little darlings German toy trains and stuffed Steiff [stife] bears. (It was the Americans who called them Teddy Bears after their President Theodore Roosevelt.) The Germans, rather more impressively, commissioned full-sized British-built trains and steamships, and more significantly supplied Britain with the steel to make more.

Holidaying Brits imitated their German hosts in a rather more low key manner. After Thomas Cook had first introduced Britons to sight-seeing tours it became fashionable to go hiking with rucksacks and alpenstocks – which were adjustable walking poles. Only the Tyrolean hat with the feather, which originally completed the outfit, has not lasted. The British-German Friendship Society, founded in 1911, was popular with British businessmen, particularly manufacturers and those Lancashire mill owners. Also with mapmakers, publishers and printers who worked so closely with their German counterparts they have been described as a ‘freemasonry’.

But to be serious. This was serious. It was serious economics. Now, you weren’t supposed to take notes in cabinet meetings. But Colonial Secretary Loulou Harcourt did it anyway, scribbling in pencil on the back of official papers. His scribblings are now in the Bodleian Library in Oxford and they are a goldmine for what was going on behind closed doors in the Cabinet in the weeks before the First War.

On 31 July 1914 Harcourt’s illegal notes report how the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, told the Cabinet that he had canvassed City and business opinion on going to war. ‘Govs. of Bank of England & all city opinion,’ Harcourt scrawled, ‘aghast at any possibility over our being dragged in. Business men in North say if we were, all mills, factorys, mines, shipping etc. stopped. Wholesale unemployment, population starving because no wages to buy food. One man sd. to him, “they won’t be able to buy food but they will get it. England will be in revolution in a week.”’

Well, we know that the Governor of the Bank of England had also pleaded with ministers ‘keep us out of it. We shall be ruined if we are dragged in.’ He had tears in his eyes.

Two days before war was declared, the Times carried an angry letter from Norman Angell. He was best known for his 1910 book The Great Illusion which argued that the countries of Europe were so tied together by finance and trade that war would do nothing but ruin them all. In the 1930s he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

In his letter to the Times published on 2 August 1914, Angell pointed out the particular nonsense of going to war on the side of Russia, which was a shockingly backward farming nation ruled by a medieval monarchy, and against Germany whom many regarded as the most advanced and civilised nation on earth. ‘Will a dominant Slavonic federation of, say, 200 million autocratically governed people, with a very rudimentary civilization, but heavily equipped for military aggression, be a less dangerous factor in Europe than a dominant Germany of 65 million highly civilized and mainly given to the arts of trade and commerce?’ Many British – including most Government ministers – thought Angell had a point.

Why then, on Tuesday 4 August 1914, did Britain declare war for the mistrusted Russians and against the Germans, their closest European friends?

The story turns out to begin in December 1905, and shady, not to say secret, meetings held in London.

 *This is not the complete episode – to find out more, subscribe for free to the podcast

Keywords
Colonel James Grierson, Colonel Victor Huguet, Barbara Tuchman, The Guns of August, David Owen The Hidden Perspective, Boer War, Colonel William Robertson, Schlieffen Plan, Simon Higgens, Lieutenant Charles à Court Repington, the Army and Navy Club, Arthur Balfour, Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Edward Grey, Edward VII, Richard Haldane, Naval Race, British Royal Navy, Persia, Iran, India, the Great Game, Ira Klein, Keith Neilson, Lord Kitchener, garrison the moon, William Knox D’Arcy, Masjed Soleiman, Norman Angell