Books
After the revolution
Robert Blake
The British Revolution — Volume 2 Robert Rhodes James (Hamish Hamilton £8.50) Mr Rhodes James's first volume covered the years from 1880 to 1914. His second takes the story down to 1939. Like its predecessor this book is highly readable and particularly strong on personalities. The author is well known for his political biographies, that of Lord Rosebery being pre-eminent. When he deals with people he seldom goes astray. His judgements are candid, occasionally astringent, always fair and never uncharitable. His portraits of Asquith, Lloyd George, Baldwin, MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain are excellent. Although it is easier to be detached about the past than the present, the cool realism with which he regards Parliament and politicians should stand him in good stead in his new career as Conservative Member for Cambridge.
Throughout the period the Conservatives dominated politics. To themselves and to the public, forgetting that for most of the time they were in on a split vote, they seemed to be 'the natural party of government.' It is not surprising that the journalists and historians of the left who did so much to form opinion during and after the second world war should have presented a strongly adverse picture of the Britain of Lloyd George (regarded as having sold himself to the Tories), Baldwin (an incompetent bumbler), MacDonald (another sell-out), Neville Chamberlain (pro-dictator and an implacable enemy of 'the workers'). Conservatives, as so often in the last thirty years, half accepted the version of their enemies, and they were influenced by Churchill who was only a nominal Conservative and who had his own reasons for the retrospective destruction of the Conservative Establishment in his brilliant, but highly selective memoirs. It was not until Mr A.J.P. Taylor's England 1914-45 (published in 1965) that the balance was in some measure redressed by an historian who is usually associated with the Left rather than the Right. Mr Rhodes James, who was one of the few historians to be mildly critical of Churchill at a time when criticism almost seemed lese majeste, has presented a very fair picture of the politics of the period. This does not mean that he glosses over errors, but it does mean that he recognises the limits within which statesmen operated, the orthodoxies which constrained them, the problems they had to solve.
Some reviewers commenting on his first volume were puzzled at the title. Others equally puzzled preferred to wait till the second. It must be admitted that waiting has not resulted in enlightenment. At the end of some seven hundred pages one is by no means clear just what the nature of the 'revolution' has been. The word can no doubt be used in a number of senses, but in its normal political acceptance it implies, in the words of one dictionary definition, 'a sudden or violent change of government, or in the political constitution of a country, mainly brought about by internal causes'. An English revolution brought Charles1 to the scaffold. Another, often described as 'Glorious', brought an end to the reign of James II. One can talk of the American revolution of 1775-81. France endured four revolutions between 1789 and 1871. But during the sixty years which Mr Rhodes James covers in his two volumes, Britain and her dominions were conspicuous, along with France and the USA, in not having this experience; they differed from the majority of the independent countries in the world — Russia, China, Germany, Italy, Turkey, Spain, Portugal, Greece, the AustroHungarian Empire and its successor states, not to mention the countries of Latin America where revolution became almost a way of life.
One can of course talk of an industrial, a social, a literary, or an artistic 'revolution'. But Britain can hardly be said to have experienced these either. In terms of industrial technology she was a laggard, not a leader. The social class which ruled the country in 1880 was still very powerful in 1939. The rich may not have been quite so rich relatively as they had been fifty years earlier, nor the poor quite so poor, but the real 'revolution' in that sense was to occur after the end of the second world war, and its consequences have not worked themselves out yet. As for art and literature, their content, style and manner have indeed changed, but not more than elsewhere. One should not dwell too much on a title, but it would have been less worrying and irksome for the reader if Mr Rhodes James, instead of bothering us about revolutions, had simply described his books by their subtitle, British Politics 1880-1939, for that is what the two volumes are actually about.
In some ways the best part of the second volume is the hundred or so pages on the Great War. Mr Rhodes James has shown in books on Gallipoli and on Churchill's career until 1939, his mastery of the complicated interactions of war strategy and politics from 1914 to 1918. In his bibliography he says that 'there is as yet no single satisfying study of war-time politics'. No doubt a substantial volume could with advantage be written, but until it is, Mr Rhodes James's first three chapters provide the clearest and fairest interim account that we have. What an extraordinary story it was. Those who lived through it — and later historians with no personal experience have tended to see it through the eyes of the participants — took for granted many features which in retrospect seem scarcley credible. To cite only one example touched on by Mr Rhodes James, but ignored by nearly everyone else, what could have possessed Asquith at the height of a desperate war for survival to consent to setting up Royal Commissions to enquire into the Dardanelles and Mesopotamia campaigns with all the amount of wasted time, energy and money involved — quite apart from the exacerbation of military and political feelings? The scandals which contributed to the fall of Singapore and Tobruk in the second world war were probably even greater, hut Churchill took good care to avoid a similar inquisition — and no wonder; he had suffered in the past enough himself. Mr Rhodes James not only illuminates the 'Great War', but he also analyses with much percipience the build up to the 1939 war. He is particularly good on the British rearmament programme, the role of Baldwin (much more creditable than commonly believed), and the misunderstandings and illusions which shaped policy. It is particularly important, as he says, to distinguish the real facts about British and German air strength and what were believed at the time to be facts. The Air Ministry was far better informed than Churchill about the German air forces and it is a delusion to imagine that Churchill prodded the Government into doing anything which it would not have done without his advice.
One closes the book with a feeling of respect for an historian who has produced the best political narrative of the period covered, but also with a slight feeling of regret that he chose to conclude in 1939. Surely the right date should be 1945. This extension would bring to an end the fifty year struggle with Germany. It would enable the historian to assess the similarities and differences of the two world wars and perhaps to consider whether either or both were really necessary. It would also cover the origins of a change in British society which comes nearer to deserving the title of a 'revolution' than anything occurring between 1880 and 1939.
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