240. Suez: nail in the imperial coffin

The First World War was a wonderful opportunity for cockups, seized on with glee by many military commanders or political leaders. In peacetime, such cockups do relatively little harm. In wartime they lead to deaths and injuries, and in this war, to millions of them. This episode tracks the particular series of cockups that culminated in the catastrophe that was the Gallipoli campaign, with its hundreds of thousands of casualties, to achieve precisely nothing. It follows that up with the story of one man in the campaign, and his strange turns of luck which at first sight looked like terrible misfortunes. He’s someone who’ll be back to inspire more than one episode in the future. This week also talks about the recruitment campaign that gave Britain its biggest volunteer army, and at the universality of human dumbness, exemplified not just by the British at Gallipoli but also by the Turks in the same campaign and by the Italians, like the Turks, latecomers to the feast. Quite a spectacle for you to enjoy. Illustration: ‘Your country needs you’. Kitchener’s image on the iconic recruitment poster. Public domain Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

24 Mars 202414min

We’ve been talking about the start of the First World War and, in particular, about the offensives and counter-offensives between French and Germans on the Western Front. What we haven’t considered was the British contribution to the French efforts there. That, in part, is because that contribution was, initially at least, so minimal – some 90,000 men out of a total of 2 million. And for a while it wasn’t sure that even that number would go. This week’s episode looks into the dithering on the British side, on the disagreements between politicians, and indeed between generals, often wrapped up with clashing personal ambitions. The dithering continued even after the troops finally went to France, epitomised by their commander Sir John French, who couldn’t make up his mind quite how to use his men or where, and had a curious way of collaborating with his French allies, whose language he didn’t speak, while his opposite number spoke no English at all. A splendid way to go to war. By the end of 1914, the British strength had built up considerably from the numbers originally sent. The soldiers had done well, though at the cost of taking heavy casualties. And, of course, by the end of the year they wre sitting in trenches, just like the French alongside them and the Germans opposite. Illustration: German troops in a trench at Ypres. Public domain. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

17 Mars 202414min

This episode wraps up the outbreak of the First World War and the first phase of great offences in which all sides sought glory and, above all, quick victory. Something that eluded them. We spend a little time looking at the failure of the international socialist movement, then very much in its heyday, to prevent war, even though the warmest supporters of socialism, the workers of different countries, were going to have to supply most of the soldiers put in harm’s way by the fighting. Then we move on to two other great radical movements, the Irish nationalists, who parliamentary representatives partially rallied to the British government, and the Women’s Suffrage movement, with the two main organisations taking opposed directions. The Suffragettes put the campaign for the women’s vote on the back burner and rallied support for the war effort. The majority movement of Suffragists continued to demand the vote and denounced the war for its butchery. Finally, we briefly review how the early offensives, above all in the west, led only to the appalling construction of a double line of trenches, all the way from Switzerland to the English Channel, and the start of a war of attrition. Illustration: The ‘taxis de la Marne’ that ferried French troops to the river Marne, to stop German offensive there. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

10 Mars 202414min

We’ve now reached the brink of the First World War. Before we dive in, this episode looks at how warfare had changed in the previous hundred years or so, with weapons far deadlier than had existed before, and which moved the advantage in battle from the offensive to the defensive: men with the powerful new firearms, sheltered by a good protective positions, were now well-placed to disrupt or even entirely overthrow any attempt by the other side to attack them over open ground. Next, we move on to think about how Europe looked different in 1914, with the map of central and eastern Europe dominated by three great Empires which actually touched each other – Austria-Hungary and Germany had a common border with Russia – while all the smaller states that we know today, such as the Czech Republic, Croatia, Estonia, Finland or even Poland, were simply parts of those empires. Finally, we look at how the continent spiralled downwards following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, to a general war involving the five greatest powers of the Old World, Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, France and Britain. Illustration: European alliances in 1914. Public Domain Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

3 Mars 202414min

In this episode we keep following the downward spiral into violence in the years after 1910. There was the violence of the Suffragettes and the brutal treatment handed out to them in return. There was the growing threat of violence as opposing sides armed in Ireland, and some initial outbreaks of actual violence. Meanwhile, though, real violence was shaking the other end of the European continent, when war broke out in the great tinderbox, right down to the present day, of the Balkans. And not just one war but two, as the four nations that first fought Turkey (the Ottoman empire) fell out with each other over the division of the spoils. That all led to increasingly hostile relations between Serbia, one of the new independent Balkan states, and Austria Hungary, which had major Balkan holdings, including right next to Serbia. We’ve seen the regular three-yearly crises that afflicted Europe, from Tangier in 1905, to Austria-Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia in 1908, to the Agadir crisis in 1911. Now the fourth one came along, on 28 June 1914, when a Bosnian Serb assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, in Sarajevo, capital of Bosnia, then an Austro-Hungarian province. I think we all know what that triggered… Illustration: Aftermath of carnage: the scene of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Public Domain Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

25 Feb 202414min

We’ve reached a time of rising violence in English history. This episode concentrates firstly, and briefly, on the violence around the growing militancy of the trade union movement, worrying and ugly though not even remotely comparable to what was happening in the US at the time – these things are all relative… Next we return to the women’s suffrage movement, to the growing divergence between the Suffragists of Millicent Fawcett’s National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and the Suffragettes of Emmeline Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union, as the former stuck to the commitment to campaigning by legal means only and the latter moved increasingly towards violent actions. But the changes were also producing internal splits within the WSPU itself. We talk in this episode about what happened as the Pankhursts fell out with each other, leading to Adela Pankhurst’s departure to Australia and Sylvia’s expulsion from the WSPU, with her organisation emerging as the East London Federation of Suffragettes, wedded as firmly as ever to the cause of the working class and the Labour Party, and close to one of that party’s most fervent supporters of votes for women, George Lansbury. Finally, we mention the one martyr’s death for the Suffragette cause, that of Emily Davison, an iconic event in the campaign, though perhaps not quite what many people believe it to have been. Illustration: The funeral procession for Emily Davison. Postcar print by Ferdinand Louis Kehrhahn & Co, June 1913. National Portrait Gallery x45196 Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

18 Feb 202414min

The general elections of 1910 left Asquith’s Liberal government dependent, to stay in office, on the votes of the Irish Nationalist MPs. The price of their support was a renewed attempt to drive through Home Rule for Ireland. That would recreate the Dublin parliament absorbed into Westminster over a century earlier. Gladstone had twice tried to introduce Home Rule but it had split the Liberals. The party then left it on the back burner. Now it was back on the front burner. The problem was that there was powerful opposition to Home Rule, in Britain, but also in Ireland, where Protestant opponents, especially in Ulster, went so far as to raise an armed force to resist it. That meant that Britain might find itself in the paradoxical position of having to use the military against people not for wanting to leave British rule, but to stay within it. The resistance had support in Britain, right up to the top of the Unionists, led by Andrew Bonar Law, the son of a Presbyterian minister from Antrim in Ulster. However, the Parliament Act, which Law referred to as the ‘Home Rule in disguise bill’, meant that legislation could be driven through parliament without the agreement of the House of Lords, where the Unionists were in a powerful majority. Long debates led to no compromise. With the Parliament Act behind it, the Home Rule bill finally became law, as the Government of Ireland Act of 1914. But lack of support in the army for action against the Ulstermen left it uncertain it could ever be enforced. By then, though, other events had overtaken the whole issue. On 4 August, Britain joined what would become the Great War. Relations between Britain and Ireland would be relegated once more to the back burner. Illustration: Ulster Volunteer Force parading in Belfast, Northern Ireland in 1914. Public domain. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

11 Feb 202414min

This week we’re back with women’s suffrage movement, as the conflict heated up and turned a lot uglier. That was partly because one of the main movements, the Suffragette Women’s Social and Political Union led by Emmeline Pankhurst, turned to more violent means, leading to an increasing divergence from the biggest organisation, Millicent Fawcett’s Suffragist National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. Equally, the ugliness was also down to the increasing violence of the state, force feeding women in prison and displaying brutality at Suffragette demonstrations, notably at the Black Friday event on 18 November 1910. Meanwhile, parliamentary bills to grant women the vote kept failing due to lack of time for the Commons to consider them, and on the third occasion, because the violence turned some MPs previously in favour, against the measure. And another bill, that would have granted universal suffrage for men and was due to be amended to extend to women, failed when the Speaker of the House ruled the amendment out of order, a strange decision which looked much more politically than constitutionally driven. It seems, though, that the Liberal Prime Minister, Asquith, was far from unhappy over this outcome. The suffrage movements realised how lukewarm Liberal support for their demands had become and started to move away from the party. Again, the NUWSS and the WSPU moved in opposite directions: the former towards Labour but the latter, rather more surprisingly, towards the Conservatives. Illustration: A victim of police brutality at Black Friday, believed to be the Suffragette Ada Wright. Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.

4 Feb 202414min