Lambros becomes prime minister of Greece

On 10 October 1916, or 27 September by the Julian calendar then used in Greece, the government of Professor Spyridon Lambros was sworn in in Athens. This date is given by Greek lists of governments and by the British chronology of the war. The sources date the earlier stages of the crisis differently: the British publicist George F. Abbott, relying on a dispatch from the London Times correspondent, writes that Lambros accepted the task of forming a government on 8 October, and the American annual The American Year Book records his appointment under the same day. The British official history of the Macedonian campaign (Falls) states that the new cabinet was formed on 9 October. The country had been without a government for several days, because the cabinet of Nikolaos Kalogeropoulos, which the Entente powers refused to recognise, had resigned at the beginning of the month.

A scholar instead of a politician

Lambros, born in 1851 on Corfu, was one of the best-known Greek scholars. He studied in Athens and in Germany, took his doctorate in Leipzig, and from 1890 was professor of Greek history and palaeography at the University of Athens, which he twice headed as rector. As a Byzantinist he became famous for his research on manuscripts and his editions of sources; from 1904 he published the journal Neos Hellenomnemon (PL), and he was one of the founders of modern Greek sport: he co-wrote the official report of the 1896 Olympic Games in Athens. The British author J. Selden Willmore, no friend of the King, stressed that the new prime minister was neither a politician nor even a deputy, and that he chose as his colleagues two other professors and a few officials.

Such a government was a response to the demands of the powers themselves. Their note of 21 June had called for a cabinet without political colour, and Kalogeropoulos had been reproached precisely for governing as a party politician. According to the Greek list of governments, the Lambros cabinet was a “service” cabinet, made up entirely of people from outside parliament, which in any case was not sitting. The prime minister also took the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Education; he entrusted foreign affairs to Evgenios Zalokostas, the Ministry of War to General Nikolaos Drakos, and the navy to Rear-Admiral Ioannis Damianos, who had already headed it in the previous government.

The King’s man?

Neither the King’s friends nor his opponents had any doubt whose will the new government would carry out. The British official history of the Macedonian campaign calls the Lambros cabinet a government “of no definite political colour” and evidently merely a mouthpiece of King Constantine I. The Times correspondent reported on 8 October that Lambros was regarded as a Germanophile and that it was not known whether the powers would recognise his cabinet. Abbott, who defended the King, retorted ironically that the professor was a universally respected scholar whose only fault was that he was not a Venizelist. The new prime minister announced that he would continue the policy of his predecessors: friendly relations with all the belligerents and benevolent neutrality towards the Entente.

By then Greece already had two authorities. The day before, Eleftherios Venizelos had arrived in Salonika to head the National Defence government together with Admiral Kountouriotis and General Danglis. From then on the Athens government in practice ruled only so-called Old Greece, with the Peloponnese and the Ionian Islands, and the National Schism turned into an open split of the state.

The first day

Lambros did not have a moment’s peace. According to the British official history of the war at sea, the new prime minister was still completing his cabinet when the French vice-admiral Louis Dartige du Fournet, acting on orders from Paris, announced new demands. The British minister, Sir Francis Elliot, asked him to wait until Lambros was “in the saddle”, but to no avail. That same day the admiral handed the government an ultimatum concerning the fleet: within twenty-four hours Greece was to give up its light vessels and disarm its large ones. The new cabinet’s first decision was thus to yield to force. The British official history acknowledges that in the following weeks Lambros proved as conciliatory as circumstances allowed, and his government resolved to bear its humiliations patiently. It survived until the spring of 1917, through the most difficult period of the King’s conflict with the Entente.