Scotland the Brief

Part 3: Choosing a Future
17 Finest Hour

The Boer War of 1899-1902 proved a conflict too far. British ambitions in South Africa were frustrated by intelligent opponents and international opposition to what was seen as aggression. 'Splendid isolation' ended up as 'isolation': new allies had to be sought: first Japan, then France: and new weapons.

In 1904 the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Cawdor, commissioned a huge new turbine-powered, ten-heavy-gun battleship, HMS Dreadnought. At one step this made the 100-odd capital ships of the Royal Navy obsolete and triggered an expensive naval race with Germany. Speed, armour and guns escalated, though overhead and undersea new, far more deadly weapons waited. Ten years later, the guns started firing.

The 1906-1915 Liberal government, first under Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, then under H H Asquith (both MPs for Scottish seats) increasingly took centre-stage as two armed camps confronted each other in Europe: France and Russia (1895) plus Britain (1905) against Germany and Austria (1878). Turkey, Britain's traditional ally, was shifting to the 'Central Powers', Italy away from them. Slav nationalism triggered an Austro-Russian confrontation in the Balkans, and Germany launched a pre-emptive strike against France. Britain was dragged into war in late summer 1914 by treaty obligations to protect Belgium, but the conflict came after some years of intense political controversy and conflict, in practically every European state the 1905 revolution in Russia, the Dreyfus Case in France, and labour conflicts overall.

War propaganda was an early success which owed to the Scots involvement in mass literacy, and ranged from John Buchans The Thirty-Nine Steps and Ian Hays the First Hundred Thousand. This was important because there was no conscription and British workers had to be inspired to fight, largely by a campaign alleging German wickedness towards 'plucky little Belgium. But more significant was the strength that lay in reserve. The Germans dont seem to have believed that UK munitions production was possible on the scale achieved. But Munitions Minister Lloyd George and his associates managed this after May 1915, producing a wide variety of military equipment, from cargo steamers and sandbags to aircraft, lorries and tanks. The war administration he headed after December 1916 was drawn from the civic leaders and business classes of the West. Two of the war cabinet's six members were Scots, the Tory Andrew Bonar Law and Labour's Arthur Henderson.

Industry had to be decisive. Austria and Turkey depended on the warfare state of Germany. Of the allies, the Russian steam-roller never got properly moving. A primitive road and rail system, aristocratic incompetence and corruption saw to that. The Germans set out to wear the French away at the fortress of Verdun, inspiring the first great British push to relieve them, at the Somme in June-November 1916. In early 1917 Tsarist Russia collapsed, and desperate measures were taken to keep the new unstable Russian republic in the war. French and British offensives ended in terrible slaughter, and although the USA entered the war in April, for the period until her troops arrived Britain stood against Germany with our backs to the wall as Haig put it.

Britain was also menaced by sea not by the High Seas Fleet, after the drawn battle of Jutland in May 1916 but by submarines. German use of these against neutral shipping brought about American intervention in April 1917. Lloyd George and his men of push and go took on the business of outgunning Krupp, RheinStahl and Skoda, through forcing 'dilution', automation and female workers on the labour aristocracy of Clydeside, and won. The army that pressed eastwards from Cambrai in mid-1918 was far different from the tiny force that had landed in Belgium in August 1914. Thousands of brand-new weapons had been manufactured for it planes, trucks, tanks, machine-guns, bombs, and millions of tons of high-explosive shells. All this changed and distorted the machinery and methods of the Clyde, making any return to peacetime methods difficult.

for those who stayed. A friends father said of the troops who marched out of his east coast burgh They marched out, and they never came back. Were they killed? No. they just didnt come back.