Ministry of National Service takes over recruiting

On 1 November 1917 the office in Britain that decided who went into the army changed. Recruiting, run since the beginning of the war by the War Office, was taken over by the Ministry of National Service, headed since August by Sir Auckland Geddes. The British chronology of the war records the “creation” of the ministry under this date, but that is a simplification. The ministry had formally existed since March 1917. From 1 November, however, it gained what it had lacked before: control over recruiting for the army. The work of the new civilian medical boards, which examined men of military age, was also counted from that day.

Chamberlain’s failed office

The ministry grew out of the Department of National Service, which the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, had announced in December 1916. It was to allocate the country’s manpower between the forces and industry. At its head was the Lord Mayor of Birmingham, Neville Chamberlain. An Act of 28 March 1917 gave the department the status of a ministry, but no new powers. Recruiting was still run by the army, the labour exchanges were under the Ministry of Labour, and the government, which had promised the trade unions that it would not introduce industrial conscription, rejected Chamberlain’s proposals. He therefore had to persuade volunteers to move into war industry. The results were meagre: according to his biographers, only a few thousand workers were released for the army in this way. On 8 August 1917 Chamberlain resigned, and his relations with the Prime Minister turned into a lifelong mutual dislike.

Geddes and the new ministry

The final reason for his resignation was the War Cabinet’s decision, with which Chamberlain disagreed, to transfer recruiting from the War Office to National Service. On 17 August he was succeeded by the 38-year-old Auckland Geddes, a doctor by profession and before the war a professor of anatomy, until then Director of Recruiting at the War Office, and brother of Eric Geddes, First Lord of the Admiralty since July. Unlike his predecessor he received the title of minister, the backing of the War Cabinet and wider powers, and at the end of October he entered the House of Commons as member for Basingstoke. Between August and November the ministry was reorganised. According to the British National Archives, it took over the War Office’s local recruiting network, and the minister was henceforth to decide, jointly with the Army Council and the Secretary of State for War, on recruitment, discharges, exemptions and reserves. As Geddes himself later said, the new ministry was put together from Chamberlain’s old department, the recruiting branch of the War Office and a new medical section.

Civilian doctors

The most noticeable change was the examination of recruits. Until then this had been done by military medical boards, which besides health assessed what kind of service a soldier was fit for and placed him in one of several categories. Their work attracted more and more complaints: they were accused of passing sick men as fit for service while wasting healthy ones. From 1 November recruits were examined by boards of civilian doctors nominated by the medical profession itself. They ruled only on how fit a man was in relation to his age, and divided men into “grades”. Which arm of the service a conscript would go to was decided separately, according to the army’s monthly requirements.

The reform came at a moment when Britain’s reserves of manpower were dwindling. The offensive in Flanders was consuming tens of thousands of soldiers a month, and industry, agriculture and the shipyards were also demanding labour. The allocation of men between the front and the factories was from now on to rest in a single pair of hands, although priorities were still decided by the War Cabinet. The ministry survived until 1919, and the report of its medical boards on their first year of work, which showed how many conscripts were in poor health, provoked a much-publicised post-war debate on the health of the nation.