Harcourt promises the dominions a voice on peace

On 14 April 1915 the British Colonial Secretary, Lewis Harcourt, gave an assurance in the House of Commons that the governments of the dominions would have a voice in settling the terms of peace. It was not a new declaration but the first public announcement of a promise that Harcourt had already conveyed confidentially in January to the prime ministers of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa and Newfoundland.

A cancelled conference

The occasion was a question about the Imperial Conference. Before the war the prime ministers of the dominions met every few years in London with members of the British government, and the next conference was due to meet in May 1915. When war broke out, London judged that it would suit no one, and the matter went quiet. That day the MP Gilbert Parker, a Canadian-born writer and Conservative politician, asked the minister whether he could give the House more information about the postponement of the conference.

Harcourt replied at unusual length. He explained that at the beginning of December 1914 he had learned unofficially that the Prime Minister of Australia, Andrew Fisher, would like the conference to meet despite the war. Harcourt asked the prime ministers of the other dominions for their views by telegram. All of them considered that an ordinary conference during hostilities would be difficult, if not impossible, and at least two stated that their ministers could not come. Fisher did not insist. Harcourt read out his letter of 15 February, in which the Australian prime minister admitted that he had not been convinced by the arguments for postponing the conference but accepted the decision with good grace.

The promise

The most important part was the rest of the answer. Harcourt stressed that only the “normal” conference had been cancelled, with its resolutions, long deliberations, verbatim records and printed reports. In January, however, when informing the dominions of its postponement, he had instructed the governors-general to tell the prime ministers that the British government intended “to consult them most fully and, if possible, personally, when the time arrives to discuss the possible terms of peace”. The minister gave an assurance that the government would observe not only the letter but also the spirit of this declaration, which in his view had fully satisfied the dominion governments.

The promise mattered. The dominions did not conduct their own foreign policy. When Great Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914, the whole empire was at war, and the governments in Ottawa, Melbourne or Wellington could decide only how large a contribution they would make. They contributed a great deal. In February 1915 the 1st Canadian Division crossed to France, and the Australians and New Zealanders, who had been training in Egypt for months, were preparing for the expedition to the Dardanelles. In return for this blood and money the dominions expected influence over the decisions that would determine the fate of the empire after the war.

Aftermath

Harcourt did not remain in office long enough to see the promise fulfilled. In May 1915, when Herbert Henry Asquith formed a coalition government, the Colonial Office was taken over by the Conservative Andrew Bonar Law. For a long time the dominion leaders complained that London treated them as supplicants and told them little about the conduct of the war. The Prime Minister of Canada, Robert Borden, felt this particularly keenly.

Change came only in 1917, when the new prime minister, David Lloyd George, invited the dominion leaders to London and set up the Imperial War Cabinet. After the war Borden and the Prime Minister of Australia, William Hughes, won separate delegations for the dominions at the Paris Peace Conference and the right to sign the peace treaty with Germany in their own right. In the British Parliament it was recalled at the time that Asquith’s government had already pledged to give the dominions a full share in settling the terms of peace.