Robert Cecil becomes Minister of Blockade

On 23 February 1916 Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith, answering a private notice question from the MP Jonathan Samuel in the House of Commons, announced that all the work of the committees and offices concerned with stopping goods going to and from enemy countries would henceforth be directed by a single minister. He explained that these matters had become increasingly complex. Since the new minister was to answer to Parliament for the War Trade Department and all the specialised committees, it was decided that he should have Cabinet rank. The post was accepted by the Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, Lord Robert Cecil. Asquith announced that Cecil would be able to draw on the advice of an admiral as an expert. Asked what title the new minister would receive, he replied briefly: Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Cecil kept his existing office, but colloquially, and soon officially too, he was called the Minister of Blockade. The British chronology of the war and the official history of the blockade give 23 February as the day the Ministry of Blockade was created.

The blockade under fire

The decision was taken under pressure from public opinion. Since the autumn of 1915 the press had been accusing the government of running a leaky blockade of Germany: the Royal Navy stopped ships, Foreign Office officials then had them released, and everything Germany needed flowed to it through neutral Holland and Scandinavia. The British historian of the blockade Archibald Bell later called these attacks a “turbid flood of invective”, but admitted that some criticism was inevitable. In January the Foreign Office published a statement of the measures in force, and the Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey, explained in the House of Commons that Britain had no right to deprive neutrals of goods genuinely intended for their own use, and that the whole difficulty lay in distinguishing such trade from trade with the enemy.

On 22 February, in the House of Lords, Lord Sydenham (George Clarke) moved that the Allied fleets could cut off supplies that prolonged the war more effectively. That same evening Lord Lansdowne announced on behalf of the government that the whole “blockade”, as it was conveniently called, would be directed by a single minister of Cabinet rank. By the morning of 23 February Cecil’s name was already in the newspapers. In the debate Lord Grimthorpe regretted that the new minister was a lawyer and said he would have preferred a “fighting man” in the post, Admiral Charles Beresford or Lord Fisher. The Lord President of the Council, the Marquess of Crewe, replied that an eminent knowledge of the law was one of Cecil’s many qualifications for the work, and recalled that it was precisely contempt for legal niceties that had led the Germans into Belgium. Sydenham, assuring the House that he had not meant to move a vote of no confidence in the government, withdrew the motion.

Who the new minister was

Lord Robert Cecil was 51. He was the third son of the three-time prime minister the Marquess of Salisbury, and a cousin of the former prime minister Arthur Balfour, then First Lord of the Admiralty. A lawyer by training, he was by conviction a deeply religious Conservative. He had been an MP, with a short break, since 1906. At the start of the war he worked for the Red Cross, and when the coalition government was formed in May 1915 he became Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. In that post he had already defended the blockade policy in the House of Commons, explaining how closely intertwined the threads of neutral and enemy trade were.

The new ministry

According to Bell, the ministry was created on the initiative of Eyre Crowe, a senior Foreign Office official, who became its supervising under-secretary. Its core was the Foreign Office’s existing Contraband Department, now divided into eight sections. In practice it directed the whole of policy towards the neutral states: it reviewed the dispatches of the ministers in neutral Europe and reports of debates in the American Congress. The War Trade Statistical Department, which drew up ever more precise weekly and monthly returns of imports into neutral countries, passed to the ministry, as did the War Trade Intelligence Department, which issued weekly bulletins on the movement of goods, detained ships and the working of the agreements with neutrals. The Foreign Trade Department was to keep the black list of firms connected with the enemy, and beside it a confidential list of suspect consignees who were refused export licences. A department of financial transactions was also added. The War Trade Department was not absorbed, but the chairmen of all the committees concerned with cutting the enemy off from supplies sat on a new War Trade Advisory Committee chaired by Crewe.

The new ministry at once adopted a tougher line. At the beginning of February Grey, after long persuasion by Foreign Office officials, had agreed to so-called forcible rationing: cargoes bound for a neutral country were to be stopped as soon as its imports of a given commodity exceeded the pre-war level. Cecil soon wrote that the whole basis of the blockade must henceforth rest on the statistics of imports into neutral countries, and ordered that the shipping of states with which Britain had concluded no agreements be obstructed, within the limits of the law. Bell regarded these documents as the executive order under which the blockade was conducted for the rest of the year. The first black list appeared in the last days of February, and its extension soon provoked sharp protests from the United States.

Cecil was Minister of Blockade until July 1918. After the war he became one of the founders of the League of Nations, and in 1937 he received the Nobel Peace Prize. As early as the autumn of 1916 he wrote in a memorandum for the Cabinet that in future blockade and financial pressure might compel states to settle their disputes peacefully.