House of Commons passes conscription of married men

On 16 May 1916 the British House of Commons passed the new Military Service Bill on third reading. 250 members voted for it and 35 against. According to the Annual Register, the minority consisted of 26 Liberals and 9 Labour members. Among them were the former Home Secretary John Simon, Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden. The Act, passed only four months after the first, extended conscription to all men in Great Britain aged 18 to 41, married and unmarried. It thus ended a year-and-a-half-long dispute over whether the British army should continue to rely on volunteers.

The anger of married volunteers

The January Act covered only bachelors. The Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, had promised in November 1915 that married men who attested under the Derby scheme would not be called up before single men. But when in March the military authorities began summoning the first groups of married volunteers, and their first age groups went into barracks at the beginning of April, the men concluded that the promise had not been kept. Tribunals exempted many bachelors from service, and even more were protected by work in occupations deemed essential. A National Union of Attested Married Men was formed, which demanded that conscription cover everyone, including married men who had not attested at all. Receiving its deputation on 12 April, Asquith pointed out that he had never promised compulsion for married men who had not enlisted.

General conscription was championed by Lord Northcliffe’s newspapers and by the war committees of both major parties in the Commons. The Liberal War Committee resolved as early as 21 March that, since the bachelors’ Act was not producing enough men, compulsion must be extended to married men. The Unionists asked Edward Carson to move a motion to that effect in the House.

Cabinet crisis

On 11 April the Army Council set out its requirements to the government: according to the generals they could not be met without general conscription. A cabinet committee of Asquith, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald McKenna, Lord Lansdowne and Austen Chamberlain concluded on 14 April that no such necessity had been shown, but the cabinet rejected its report. The supporters of compulsion, led by the Minister of Munitions, David Lloyd George, threatened to resign. Liberal opponents and the Labour Party, which feared industrial conscription, resisted. On 18 and 19 April Asquith twice asked the House to postpone his promised statement, and admitted that if the dispute were not settled, the government would break up. Only on 20 April was agreement in the cabinet announced. The press had reported the course of cabinet meetings in such detail that on 22 April the government banned the publication of anything about its deliberations and about the planned secret sessions of parliament.

Secret session and a failed compromise

On 25 April, the day London learned of the outbreak of the rising in Dublin, both Houses sat behind closed doors. Ministers gave members figures that could not be disclosed publicly. The government’s plan, announced afterwards in a communiqué to the press, was a compromise. The service of soldiers whose engagements were expiring was extended to the end of the war, Territorials could be transferred to any unit, and every boy reaching 18 was to be liable to conscription. Married men who had not attested, however, were still to be obtained voluntarily. If 50,000 of them did not come forward by 27 May, followed by 15,000 a week, the government would ask parliament for compulsion.

The compromise lasted two days. On 27 April the President of the Local Government Board, Walter Long, asked leave to introduce the bill. Carson called it iniquitous to compel veterans to go on serving before compulsion applied to those who had not served at all. Opponents of conscription saw the bill as a prelude to full compulsion, and no member defended it. Asquith decided that in the face of such hostility the government would not press it, and Long withdrew the motion.

General compulsion

On 2 May Asquith announced general conscription. He calculated that since the start of the war the army had grown from 26 divisions to 70, and with the Naval Division and twelve divisions from the Dominions to 83, while the total military and naval effort of the Empire exceeded five million men. The bill was introduced on 3 May. Asquith explained then that in almost every respect it repeated Long’s bill, but supplied what members had found missing in it. The second reading on 4 May was opened by Lloyd George, who declared that he would rather be driven out of the Liberal Party, and even out of public life, than have on his conscience opposition to the advice of the soldiers. The Labour leader Arthur Henderson stated that the January Act, which critics said could not yield the 650,000 men the government expected, had covered 750,000, of whom the army was to receive 300,000. The bill passed by 328 votes to 36. The debates, as the Annual Register observed, aroused far less feeling than in January.

In committee of the whole House on 9 May the Ulster Unionists again proposed extending conscription to Ireland. Asquith refused, and the Irish nationalist leader John Redmond declared that an attempt to impose compulsion in Ireland after what had just happened there would be not only a mistake but madness. The amendment was withdrawn. The longest dispute was over conscientious objectors. Their defenders wanted them to be able to do civilian work, independent of the military authorities, instead of being punished. The government promised only to write into the Act an explicit sentence that tribunals could exempt them from all service. An assurance was also adopted that no soldier would be sent abroad before the age of 19 unless military necessity required it.

Third reading

The last day in the Commons, 16 May, was taken up with disputes over details: the re-examination of men previously rejected by medical boards, and a period of protection for munitions workers who had lost their jobs. The concession to Labour on the latter point outraged the Conservative Frederick Banbury, but it was carried without a division. Immediately afterwards the House passed the bill on third reading. It went to the House of Lords, where no further resistance was expected.