Creation of the Air Council

On 21 December 1917 at Buckingham Palace, King George V, at a meeting of the Privy Council, issued an Order in Council on the composition of the Air Council. This gave effect to the Air Force Act, which had received royal assent three weeks earlier. Its eighth section provided that, for the administration of matters relating to the air force and the air defence of the realm, a council would be established with one of the secretaries of state as president, and that the rest of its membership and the date of its establishment would be fixed by the king by Order in Council. The text was published the same day in the London Gazette.

Membership and division of work

Under the Order the Council was to consist of: the Secretary of State as president, the Chief of the Air Staff, his deputy, the Master-General of Personnel, the Controller-General of Equipment, the Director-General of Aircraft Production in the Ministry of Munitions, the Administrator of Works and Buildings, the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State and two additional members. The Secretary of State was responsible to the king and Parliament for all its work. The Chief of the Air Staff, the Master-General of Personnel and the Controller-General of Equipment were to administer the organisation, distribution, personnel, armament and supply of the air force, the Under-Secretary finance, contracts and lands, and the Administrator aerodromes and buildings. Three members of the Council were enough for its decisions to be valid. The Order left the date from which the Council was to begin work to be fixed later.

The men

The president of the Council, that is the first Air Minister, was to be Lord Rothermere, the press magnate and brother of Lord Northcliffe, designated as early as November. The hardest post to fill was that of Chief of the Air Staff. The natural candidate was Major General Hugh Trenchard, commander of the Royal Flying Corps in France since 1915. Trenchard had earlier opposed merging the army and naval air services, fearing it would weaken support for the troops at the front. Summoned from France, on the morning of 16 December he crossed the Channel in a destroyer and in the afternoon met Rothermere. When he heard that his support would be useful to the minister in a press campaign against Field Marshal Douglas Haig and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, William Robertson, he refused. Rothermere and Northcliffe tried to persuade him for a dozen or so hours, threatening to use his refusal against Haig. Trenchard finally gave way, on condition that he first spoke to Haig, and after that conversation he accepted the post.

Also on the Council sat, among others, General David Henderson, the first commander of the Royal Flying Corps, as vice-president, the former Rear Admiral Mark Kerr as Deputy Chief of the Air Staff, Commodore Godfrey Paine, until then responsible at the Admiralty for naval aviation, as Master-General of Personnel, General Sefton Brancker as Controller of Equipment, and the industrialist William Weir from the Ministry of Munitions. The Under-Secretary of State was Major John Baird, who in November had steered the Act through the House of Commons. Army and navy officers, until then rivals for aircraft, engines and men, thus sat side by side on the Council.

What came next

On 2 January 1918 Rothermere was sworn in as Secretary of State, and a further Order in Council fixed 3 January as the date of the Council’s establishment. On that day the Council took over the duties of the Air Board and the Air Ministry began work, housed in the Hotel Cecil on the Strand in London. Trenchard took up his work at the ministry on 18 January, after handing over command in France to General John Salmond. His co-operation with Rothermere soon broke down, and both left in April 1918. The Council nevertheless prepared the merger of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service, from which on 1 April 1918 the Royal Air Force was formed. It directed British military aviation until 1964.