The Clémentel agreement

On 3 December 1916 the governments of the United Kingdom and France concluded an agreement on shipping. The British chronology of the war calls it the “Clémentel agreement”, after the French Minister of Commerce and Industry, Étienne Clémentel, who had been pressing for months for joint management of the Allies’ economies. French historians speak of the Runciman–Clémentel agreements, because on the British side they were signed by Walter Runciman, President of the Board of Trade, the British ministry of commerce. It was one of the last acts of Herbert Henry Asquith’s government. Two days later Runciman lost his office together with the whole cabinet. Arthur Salter, the British official in charge of ship requisitioning and later one of the architects of inter-Allied shipping control, called the agreement “important, though incomplete” in his history of that control (Allied Shipping Control, 1921).

France without ships of its own

Before the war France had a small merchant navy. In August 1914 French ships amounted to about 2.5 million tons, British ships to about 21.5 million. As early as 1913 less than a quarter of France’s seaborne imports arrived under the French flag. During the war France, which had lost a large part of its northern mines to the occupier, had to bring coal, steel, grain and arms by sea. In this it depended on British ships.

Salter wrote that in 1915–1916 British shipping assistance to the Allies was “improvised rather than organised”. Usually about 600 British ocean-going ships were in the service of France and Italy, and small coasters with a total tonnage of about 250,000 tons were also employed carrying coal to France. Each sailed on different terms. Some had been requisitioned and were paid for at fixed rates, others had been chartered at rates reduced at the government’s demand, and still others on the open market at a multiple of that price. When France was short of coal or of some military equipment, a mission from the French government or headquarters came to London, and help was granted or refused from day to day. In May 1916 the British cabinet, on the advice of the Shipping Control Committee, limited the number of British ships in Allied service to the level of 1 April and decided not to replace those that were sunk. Every charter (PL) of a British ship for France had to be approved by a separate licensing committee. The French therefore could not plan their own shipments. Moreover, the Allies competed with one another for neutral ships and drove up each other’s freight rates (PL).

Clémentel tried to change this. In June 1916 he presided over the Allied economic conference in Paris, and in November France, the United Kingdom and Italy set up the Wheat Executive, a joint body for the purchase of wheat. The December agreement extended part of this cooperation to shipping.

What was agreed

The United Kingdom undertook to maintain a specified tonnage in the coal trade to France and in several other listed services. According to Salter, many provisions concerned France’s immediate needs. The British were to help carry rice and labourers from French Indochina and coal and steel from England, supply railway wagons to clear the congested French ports, and make it easier to complete several French ships in British yards.

More important were the general provisions. As long as France did not exceed the tonnage allotted to it, it decided for itself what the British ships were used for. From then on time charters were to prevail over voyage charters. The two governments were to exchange monthly returns of what their ships were engaged in. Shipments of French wheat were to be coordinated with the Wheat Executive, although France still had to provide the ships for them itself. Colliers carrying coal to France were to return with iron ore and pit props for England. The most far-reaching provision was that all chartering of neutral ships should be conducted by a joint inter-Allied bureau in London. Salter noted that the points of the agreement followed no logical order. In his view this showed how, during the talks on principles, successive French requests for help were added to the text.

A first step

The agreement did not put an end to sudden requests for ships. Salter considered such partial arrangements incomplete by their nature. Nevertheless, joint institutions grew out of it. In January 1917 the Inter-Allied Chartering Executive, with representatives of the United Kingdom, France and Italy, began work. It bought neutral tonnage as a single customer, which checked and then slowed the rise in rates. The Inter-Allied Shipping Committee set up the same month, on the other hand, proved useless, because neither the ministers nor the officials who allocated ships day to day sat on it. French assessments are harsher. A work published by the institute of the French Ministry of Finance states that the Runciman–Clémentel agreements of 3 December 1916, concerning 500,000 tons, were never honoured.

At the end of January 1917 Germany announced unrestricted submarine warfare from 1 February, and everyone began to run short of ships. Only in November 1917 in Paris did the Allies set up the Allied Maritime Transport Council. Its members included Clémentel, and Salter chaired its executive committee.