Britain recognises the Venizelos government

On 19 December 1916 the new British prime minister, David Lloyd George, made his first speech as head of government in the House of Commons. Speaking of the worst aspects of the military situation, above all the defeat of Romania, he added: “That is why we have taken very decisive steps in Greece during the last few days. We do not intend to take any risks there. We have decided to act firmly and decisively, and I think it has succeeded. We have also decided to recognise the representatives of that great Greek statesman, M. Venizelos.” The British chronology of the war records under this date that the government decided to recognise the government of Eleftherios Venizelos. The British official history of the Macedonian campaign (Falls) states that recognition came on 19 December.

Why only now

The Government of National Defence had been operating in Salonika since October, and on 23 November it declared war on Germany and Bulgaria. The Allies supported it with money and arms, but at the conference in Boulogne on 20 October they had decided not to recognise it officially. The French prime minister, Aristide Briand, was still hoping for an understanding with King Constantine I, and Russia and Italy distrusted the Venizelists. The British official history of the naval war (Newbolt) cites the Italian doubts: what borders would the new government have? By recognising its authority in some places but not in others, the Allies would in practice be partitioning Greece.

Everything was changed by the fighting in Athens on 1 December. Greek troops and reservists fired on the Allied landing party, and then for two days attacked the Venizelists, looted their houses and filled the prisons with them. Falls writes that after the “Athenian Vespers”, as the events of 1 December were called, the Allies could no longer deny their friends the formal respect they were still showing to those who had fired on their sailors. Lloyd George, who had replaced Herbert Henry Asquith on 7 December, had long admired Venizelos. The British writer Vincent Seligman, an ardent supporter of the Greek statesman, wrote that it was the new prime minister who took the initiative. In the same week Athens accepted the ultimatum and began withdrawing its troops from Thessaly, and on 17 December issued a warrant for Venizelos’s arrest for high treason.

Recognition, but of what kind

The decision was a cautious one. London agreed to receive Venizelos’s diplomatic representatives and to send its own to Salonika, but it did not break off relations with the government in Athens. On 22 December the MP Ronald McNeill asked in the Commons whether this meant full and official recognition of the provisional government. The Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, Lord Robert Cecil, replied that he was not quite sure what full and official recognition meant. “We recognise that it is in fact the government where it has established its authority, and we agree to receive its representatives and to discuss with them matters of importance to the provisional government and to ourselves,” he said. McNeill accused him of wanting to recognise two governments and at the same time only one. Cecil retorted that recognising two governments in one country was nothing unusual, and recalled the American Civil War. Asked whether Venizelos was acting in the King’s name, he replied that it would be somewhat rash to say so. The same day he also gave an assurance that the withdrawal of the royal troops from Thessaly did not mean that Venizelos’s authority would extend to the evacuated territory.

Venizelos’s biographer S. B. Chester writes that the provisional government’s representative in London became Ioannis Gennadius, who had resigned as the King’s minister in Britain after the events of early December. The British diplomatic representative to Venizelos, from January 1917, was Lord Granville, formerly counsellor of the embassy in Paris. France followed London’s example and sent Robert de Billy to Salonika. Seligman writes that this happened soon after the British decision. Venizelos himself, in an interview with the Chicago Daily News on 30 December, said that the Entente had recognised his administration, and the day before his representatives. He wanted more, however: recognition as the sole legitimate government of Greece, without which he could not legally call up Greeks living abroad, and the handing over to him of the fleet that the Allies had taken from Athens in October.

The neutral zone remains

Recognition did not mean support for a march on Athens. Seligman writes that after 1 December Venizelos was convinced that Constantine could no longer remain in Greece, and asked the Allies to abolish the neutral zone separating his territory from the royalist one. Falls observes that France and Britain went on “keeping the ring”: they did not allow the Venizelists to extend their authority by force, nor the royalists to act against them. Several islands declared for the government in Salonika, although, as Falls adds, it is hard to judge how much of this was spontaneous support, how much the effect of the blockade and how much the persuasion of Allied officers. On land the neutral zone was maintained. Greece remained divided until June 1917, when the Allies forced Constantine to leave the country and Venizelos returned to Athens as prime minister.