First meeting of the Imperial War Cabinet

On 20 March 1917 the first meeting of the Imperial War Cabinet was held in London. The prime ministers and ministers of the Dominions and representatives of India sat at one table with the members of the British War Cabinet to deliberate together on the conduct of the war and the terms of the future peace. The next day, 21 March, the Imperial War Conference, made up of the same representatives of the Empire, opened its sessions at the Colonial Office. The British chronology of the war records under 20 March “the first meeting of the Imperial War Conference”, but in fact it was the cabinet that met that day, and the conference a day later. Since the two bodies worked in parallel and with the same people, we describe them together.

The invitation

The idea was announced by the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, in his first speech in the House of Commons on 19 December 1916. He said then that the time had come for the Dominions to be formally consulted on the course of the war and the terms of peace. The telegrams of invitation had already been sent on 14 December. The government did not want to call an ordinary imperial conference in its pre-war form. The Dominion prime ministers were invited to a series of special meetings of the War Cabinet, of which they were to be members for the time being, to consider urgent questions of the conduct of the war, the possible terms on which it might end and the problems that would then arise. India was invited on the same terms, although a resolution of the 1907 conference had excluded it from imperial conferences. The Dominions had long demanded a say in a war in which their armies were fighting. As early as April 1915 Asquith’s government had promised them a part in settling the terms of peace, and in the summer of that year the Prime Minister of Canada had for the first time attended a meeting of the British cabinet.

On 2 March 1917 the War Cabinet decided that the imperial meetings would begin around 20 March. Canada was represented by the Prime Minister, Robert Borden, with three ministers, among them the Minister of Overseas Military Forces of Canada, George Perley. From New Zealand came the Prime Minister, William Massey, and the Minister of Finance, Joseph Ward. The Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, Louis Botha, could not leave the country, so he was replaced by the Minister of Defence, General Jan Smuts, who in January had handed over the command in East Africa in order to come to London. Newfoundland was represented by its Prime Minister, Edward Morris. India was to be represented by the Secretary of State for India, Austen Chamberlain, accompanied as advisers by the Lieutenant-Governor of the United Provinces, James Meston, the lawyer Satyendra Prasanna Sinha, and the Maharaja of Bikaner, Ganga Singh, representing the Indian princes.

Without Australia

Only Australia was missing. The Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, wanted to extend the life of parliament so that he could go to London, but the Senate rejected the plan and Hughes stayed at home to prepare for an early election. According to Lloyd George’s memoirs, the War Cabinet decided it could not wait for Hughes, who could have arrived in April at the earliest, but it was agreed to postpone for the time being the discussion of peace terms and other matters concerning Australia. On 17 March Smuts proposed telegraphing Hughes that imperial deliberations without Australia would be unreal. It was decided, however, that such a dispatch would only make the Prime Minister’s already difficult position harder, and that at its first meeting the cabinet would pass a resolution expressing regret at Australia’s absence.

Cabinet and conference

The Imperial War Cabinet was chaired by Lloyd George. Besides the representatives of the Dominions and India, it included the members of the British War Cabinet, Andrew Bonar Law, Lord Curzon, Lord Milner and Arthur Henderson, as well as the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, and the Colonial Secretary, Walter Long. At the first meeting the Prime Minister gave a broad review of the course of the war and the aims for which it was being fought. Since the meeting was secret, he could speak openly about the situation and the prospects, without the restraints imposed by public speeches. At the second meeting, on 22 March, Balfour and Chamberlain spoke on foreign policy. The cabinet later dealt with shipping, food, finance, the contribution of the Dominions and India to the war, and relations with Russia and Greece, while two sub-committees chaired by Curzon and Milner drew up the Empire’s territorial and non-territorial peace aims. The proceedings were secret. By 2 May the cabinet had met fourteen times.

On 21 March at 11.30 a.m. the Imperial War Conference, chaired by Long, met at the Colonial Office. Welcoming the delegates, he said that the day before had seen the first meeting of the first imperial cabinet ever to have met in the Empire. He expressed regret at Australia’s absence and especially welcomed the representatives of India, who, he said, gave the conference a character it had never had before. The conference dealt with matters less urgent than those before the cabinet, connected with the war or the post-war order: munitions, naval defence, trade, migration. On the very first day Smuts stipulated that questions of the constitution of the Empire and of future economic policy should not be settled in wartime, and that the conference should concentrate on what would help to win the war. By 27 April the conference had met fifteen times, usually alternating with the meetings of the cabinet.

Significance

The most important decisions were taken in April. On 13 April the conference resolved that India should be fully represented at all future imperial conferences, and endorsed the creation of the Imperial War Graves Commission, today’s Commonwealth War Graves Commission. On 16 April it adopted Resolution IX, whose principal authors, according to historians, were Borden and Smuts. It postponed the readjustment of constitutional relations within the Empire to a special conference after the war, but announced that this would be based on “a full recognition of the Dominions as autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth”, with the right to “an adequate voice in foreign policy”. It was one of the first steps on the road to the transformation of the Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations. At its last meeting, on 2 May, the Imperial War Cabinet decided that imperial cabinets would meet every year. After returning home Borden, convinced that the front needed reinforcements, decided to introduce conscription in Canada. The cabinet met again in June 1918, this time with Hughes.