Macready resigns as adjutant-general

In the last days of August 1918 Lieutenant-General Sir Nevil Macready, since February 1916 Adjutant-General of the British Army, agreed to leave the War Office and take the post of Commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police. The British chronology of the war places his resignation on 30 August, the day the capital’s police went on strike. According to Macready’s own memoirs, however, he received the offer a day later, on 31 August, and took his leave of the War Office on 3 September. He took up his new post on Wednesday 4 September.

Policemen on the streets

During the night of 29–30 August most officers of the Metropolitan Police and the City of London Police refused to go on duty. According to various sources between 11,000 and 12,000 men struck, practically the whole force. The strike was organised by the National Union of Police and Prison Officers (NUPPO), which the authorities did not recognise. The policemen demanded pay rises, because their wages had not kept pace with wartime inflation, higher war bonuses, pensions for widows, the reinstatement of Constable Thiel, dismissed for union activity, and above all recognition of their union. The police leadership was taken by surprise: as late as 28 August the superintendents had assured the Commissioner that all was quiet in the ranks. The Commissioner, Sir Edward Henry, was on leave at the time. A detachment of Guards was sent to protect the Scotland Yard building, and policemen in plain clothes demonstrated on Tower Hill and in Whitehall.

The government gave way quickly. On 31 August the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, received the strikers’ delegates and granted almost all their pay demands: a rise of 13 shillings a week, a war bonus, child allowances, widows’ pensions and a shorter period of service before a pension. Thiel was reinstated. The union was not recognised, the Prime Minister explaining that this was impossible in wartime. The policemen returned to duty. Edward Henry, who believed that the government had encouraged the union men to mutiny, resigned at once.

Two hours at Downing Street

Macready knew the London police from before the war, when as a director at the War Office he had been responsible for the use of troops during strikes in Wales. Before the war he had also been earmarked as Henry’s successor. On the morning of 31 August he warned the Secretary of State for War, Lord Alfred Milner, that concessions to the police union might encourage similar demands in the army. In the afternoon Milner told him that the Prime Minister wanted him as Commissioner. Macready refused. He had reached the peak of his military career and wanted to finish the war as Adjutant-General. That evening at Downing Street he resisted the pressure of Lloyd George, Milner and the Home Secretary George Cave for nearly two hours, proposing other generals instead. He gave way only when the Prime Minister declared that it was a matter of national importance. The King’s consent was obtained by telephone.

As Adjutant-General, Macready had for two and a half years been responsible for the army’s reinforcements, including the difficult period after the losses at Passchendaele and the German spring offensives. His successor at the War Office, from 11 September, was General George Macdonogh, until then Director of Military Intelligence. In September Macready was promoted to full general. At Scotland Yard he set about reorganising the police and abolished some of the hated financial penalties, but he had no intention of talking to NUPPO and instead created representative boards elected by the policemen. The dispute over the union returned in 1919, when a second police strike ended with the dismissal of all who took part in it.