The War Cabinet

At 11.30 a.m. on 9 December 1916 the War Cabinet, the new body directing British war policy, met for the first time in the War Office building in London. It was convened by David Lloyd George, who had become prime minister two days earlier. The full list of ministers in the new government had not yet been announced, which happened only the following evening, but Lloyd George did not want to wait. He later recalled that he remembered how many precious days had been wasted in May 1915 on forming the coalition government while important decisions waited. According to the Annual Register, the cabinet sat all day, and from then on it was to meet daily, almost in permanent session. The British chronology of the war records both ends of this change: the last meeting of the previous government’s War Committee on 1 December and the first meeting of the War Cabinet on 9 December.

The end of the War Committee

The War Committee had been in existence since November 1915. It was meant to be a small body deciding questions of the war quickly, but over time it had grown. At the beginning of December 1916 it had seven ministers: the prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, Lloyd George, Andrew Bonar Law, Arthur Balfour, Reginald McKenna, Lord Curzon and Edwin Montagu. Moreover, it was only a committee of the cabinet, and its decisions required the approval of the whole 23-member government. Lloyd George described the meetings of the last weeks bitterly in his memoirs. Ministers argued for hours over who should direct aircraft production, and an urgent memorandum by the President of the Board of Agriculture, Lord Crawford, on dwindling food stocks was repeatedly put off to the next meeting for lack of time. According to this account, at the last meeting the aircraft question seemed at last to be settled, but as the ministers were leaving Curzon challenged it and Asquith agreed to return to it next time. There was no next time.

The last meeting of the War Committee took place on 1 December. The same day Lloyd George presented Asquith with a memorandum demanding that the direction of the war be handed to a small committee with full powers. Within a few days the dispute over this proposal led to Asquith’s resignation and the formation of a new government.

Five men

Lloyd George replaced both the War Committee and the existing large cabinet with a single small body. The Annual Register observed that the largest cabinet of modern times had given way to the smallest. The War Cabinet had five members. Besides the prime minister, a Liberal, it comprised: the Conservative Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India, as Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Lords; the Conservative Lord Alfred Milner, British High Commissioner in South Africa during the Boer War, as minister without portfolio; the leader of the Labour Party, Arthur Henderson, also without portfolio; and finally the Conservative leader Bonar Law as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons.

The novelty was that four of them headed no ministry and could devote all their time to the war. The only exception was Bonar Law, who ran the Treasury and represented the government in Parliament. According to the Annual Register, he was not even expected to attend meetings regularly. The heads of the great departments, including war and the navy, did not enter the War Cabinet, but were to be summoned to its deliberations when their business was discussed. Lloyd George had originally intended to give a seat in the cabinet to the Ulster Unionist leader Edward Carson as well, but the Conservative ministers objected and Carson took the Admiralty. The prime minister later regarded this as a mistake.

The first meeting

According to the minutes quoted by the British government, on 9 December, besides the five members of the cabinet, those present were Carson, the future First Lord of the Admiralty; the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Lord Charles Hardinge; the First Sea Lord, Admiral John Jellicoe; and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, General William Robertson. Greece was high on the agenda. A week earlier, on 1 December in Athens, Greek troops had fired on Allied detachments, and the day before the meeting the Allies had begun the blockade of Greece.

This composition became the rule. The Foreign Secretary, the First Sea Lord and the Chief of Staff attended every meeting with the latest news, and departmental ministers and their officials came when their business was being decided. According to the War Cabinet’s report for 1917, between 9 December 1916 and December 1917 it held more than 300 meetings, attended by 248 people from outside the cabinet and secretariat, from diplomats to experts on shipping and agriculture.

Minutes and the secretariat

The most lasting change proved to be the minutes. Until then the British cabinet had kept no record at all. As Asquith himself reminded the House of Commons, the unwritten rule was that the only record of proceedings was the prime minister’s letter to the King. It was therefore often unclear what had actually been decided. The War Committee and earlier war committees had already kept minutes, and now Lloyd George extended the practice to the whole government. Maurice Hankey, for years secretary of the Committee of Imperial Defence, became Secretary of the War Cabinet, with Lieutenant-Colonel W. Dally Jones as his deputy. Their record of the meeting of 9 December was the first set of minutes of a British cabinet meeting.

The secretariat was not only to record the proceedings but also to prepare the agenda, send decisions to the ministries that were to carry them out, and check that they had been carried out. By the end of 1917 it had, besides Hankey, ten assistant secretaries and was housed at 2 Whitehall Gardens. From it grew the British Cabinet Office, and Hankey remained Cabinet Secretary until 1938.

The composition of the War Cabinet later changed several times. In 1917 it was joined by, among others, the South African Minister of Defence Jan Smuts and Carson, and Henderson was replaced by another Labour man, George Barnes.