Asquith (2 page)

Herbert Henry Asquith was born in the small Yorkshire woollen town of Morley on September 12th, 1852. He was the second son of Joseph Dixon Asquith, a minor employer in the woollen trade. Three daughters were born to the family later, two of whom died early. Such a casualty rate amongst children was not unusual at the time, but physical infirmity or ill-fortune was a marked characteristic of the family, affecting all of its members except for Herbert Asquith,
¹
who was always notably robust, and his sister Evelyn. Joseph Asquith died suddenly at the age of thirty-five, having twisted an intestine in a game of village cricket. He had enjoyed no intensity of life to set against its early end. “ I gather from local and family tradition,” his second son wrote many years later, “ that (my father) was a cultivated man, interested in literature and music, of a retiring and unadventurous disposition, and not cut out in the keen competitive atmosphere of the West Riding for a successful business career.”
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Emily Asquith, his wife, was a much stronger personality. She was a woman of wide interests, considerable cultivation, and unusual
conversational power. She is described as having “ a biting turn of phrase and humour
.”
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But she spent most of her life lying on a sofa, suffering from a mixture of bronchitis and heart weakness. Despite these afflictions, she survived her husband by twenty-seven years, and both because of this fact and of her other attributes had a far greater influence upon Herbert Asquith than did his father. In particular, she gave him a habit of omnivorous reading.

1
_{Herbert (or, as a child, Bertie) was the Christian name by which Asquith was known throughout the first forty years of his life. But his second wife called him Henry, and so did the few friends of his middle and later years who addressed him by his first name. Any reference to “ Herbert ” by the time of his premiership came as a faint echo from a distant past. The change was not widely noticed, for there have been few major national figures whose Christian names were less well known to the public. “ H. H. Asquith ” was throughout his chosen designation, and his almost invariable signature, except for occasional abbreviations to “ H.H.A. ”.}

The third physically unfortunate member of the family was the elder son, William Willans Asquith. He was only a year older than Herbert, and the two boys, intellectually well-matched, were the closest of companions for much of their early lives. But at the age of sixteen the elder one received a severe kick on the spine during a school game. He was slow to recover and had to leave school. Thereafter Herbert was always ahead of his brother, although William’s intellectual achievements remained considerable. But the growth of his mind was not matched by that of his body. The kick was responsible for his height never increasing beyond 5 feet 1 inch. After leaving Oxford he went to Clifton as a schoolmaster and remained there for the whole of his active career. He never married, and died in 1918.

The circumstances of life of this rather frail family were those of modest comfort. Croft House, where the children were born, was a solidly built dwelling of dark Yorkshire stone, with six or seven bedrooms, three or four living-rooms and a good staircase. It had nothing of even the most minor magnate’s residence about it and was in no way set apart from the surrounding community. Yet, in a characteristic West Biding way it was at once half urban and half rural. It commanded a good view looking towards Leeds across the scarred industrial landscape. Both geographically and socially it was a little indeterminate. The mills were at the back door but the countryside was at the front; and it might have been the house of a small manufacturer like Joseph Asquith, or of a school-teacher, or of a non-conformist minister or of a local tradesman who had decided to move half a mile away from his shop. Herbert Asquith’s principal Morley memories were of walking round the town at the head of a procession of children to celebrate the end of the Crimean War in 1856, and of regular, stiffly-attired, Sunday visits to Rehoboth Chapel, the local home of a Congregationalist sect and very much the centre of his parents’ lives.

In 1858 the Asquiths removed about ten miles north-west to the village of Mirfield. Life here followed much the same pattern as at Morley and the change made little difference to the children. At neither place did Herbert and his brother go to school. They were looked after by a nursery maid and taught by their mother.

After two years at Mirfield Joseph Asquith died suddenly. He left little money and the family were henceforth dependent upon their mother’s father, William Willans. Willans was the head of a wool-stapling business in Huddersfield. He came from the same Puritan, petty-bourgeois background as Joseph Asquith, but he was more energetic and, by this time, a good deal more prosperous. He was an important civic figure in Huddersfield, and in 1851 he had narrowly missed election to Parliament as Radical member for the borough. He established the Asquith family in a house a short distance from his own, and undertook the education of the two boys. For a year they were sent as day-boys to Huddersfield College, and then went on to a small mixed boarding school run by the Moravian order
¹
at Fulneck, almost in the suburbs of Leeds.

This school kept rather oddly timed terms and the two Asquiths arrived there at the beginning of August, 1861 (with no prospect of even a day’s holiday until September), shortly before Herbert’s ninth birthday. From here he began to write his first letters to his mother, and filled them with expressions of rather resigned distaste. “We do not like the place at all,” he wrote on August 6th, “ for besides having nothing to do such dreadful smoke comes over from Pudsey that it makes everything quite black. ... I do not like either masters or boys. ...” However, he was sufficiently composed to finish the letter with the dignified ending: “ With best love to all, believe me ever to remain, Your affte. son H. H. Asquith. ”
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The boys never got to like the school; but the teaching was said to have been quite good.

The next family unheaval occurred only two years later, when William Willans died. The Huddersfield connection died with him, and Emily Asquith, with her daughter, left Yorkshire for the softer climate of St. Leonards, in Sussex. The two boys went to London to live with their uncle, John Willans, who had taken over responsibility for their education.
¹
They arrived there in January, 1864, but within a year John Willans and his wife moved back to the north. Herbert Asquith, still only twelve, went with his brother as paying guests, first to a family in Pimlico and then to a dispensary doctor ” and his wife in Liverpool Road, Islington. That was the end for them, both of a close Yorkshire connection and of any effective home background. They went as day-boys to the City of London School, then in Milk Street off Cheapside. Their lives alternated between the City and, after the move to Islington, a typical mid-Victorian residential dependency of commercial London. It was a physical environment very similar to that which Joseph Chamberlain, born in Broad Street and brought up in Highbury, had experienced ten years earlier.

1
_{Financial responsibility was later divided between him and his three younger brothers. All four of the uncles were later repaid by the Asquiths.}

Only the physical background was similar, for the City of London School, despite the commercial bent of much of its teaching and of most of its pupils, offered to some the opportunity of a classical education of the highest quality, and this was most eagerly seized upon by Herbert Asquith. The school had been re-founded by the Corporation of London about thirty years previously and had 650 boys by the time Asquith entered. It offered no advantage of surroundings. The buildings were undistinguished and cramped, and there was no playing field. For games—never of much interest to Asquith—the boys went on half-holidays to Victoria Park in Bethnal Green. The number of masters was small and Asquith was at first taught in a class of sixty. But the quality of some of them was enough to make up for this. The most notable, and the one who did most to facilitate Asquith’s academic success, was the new headmaster, Edwin Abbott, who arrived in 1865. He had himself been a boy at the school and had then gone to Cambridge, where he had been Senior Classic in 1861, the year before the pre-eminent Jebb. In Asquith’s own words: “ He was a Cambridge scholar of the most finished type in days when that type produced some of its most brilliant specimens.”
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He was also a remarkably gifted teacher, although he himself discounted the view that he had done much for Asquith. His main contribution, he insisted, was to excuse him from handwriting and book-keeping in the fifth form, and from
mathematics in the sixth form. “ There was nothing left but to place before him the opportunities of self-education and self-improvement, Abbott wrote; “ simply to put the ladder before him, and up he went"
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Yet, despite Asquith’s rapid and seemingly effortless progress up this ladder of classical academic attainment, it was not in this field that his most outstanding quality lay. “ As a classical scholar,” his official biographers have perceptively written, “ (he) was rather strongly and finely competent than freakishly endowed. What his tutors discerned was the application of an extra-ordinarily muscular intelligence to a subject for which it had a marked sympathy rather than the uncanny specialised aptitude of a Jebb or a Murray.”
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Where his ability was almost unique was in the use from an early age of a resonant, elaborately constructed, yet beautifully balanced and lucid English diction. Dr. Abbott has testified that his speeches in the school debating society exhibited all the
gravitas
and massive precision which were later to become recognised as the most notable Asquithian oratorical characteristics. The opening sentences of a prize-winning encomium upon the original founder of the City of London School, which he composed and declaimed at the age of seventeen, provide a fair sample of the measured maturity of tone which apparently came naturally to him:

“ In acknowledging our obligations to the heroes of the past,” he announced, “it is always a relief to be able to desert the commonplace of eulogy, and to point to the fabric built upon their self-denying efforts as the best memorial at once of their greatness and of our gratitude. The great man whom we commemorate today, could his spirit hear the tribute of our praise, would I am sure rejoice that we should turn from the obscure details of his career, to dwell in preference upon those after-fruits which have crowned with an honourable immortality the name of John Carpenter.
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At the end of 1869 Asquith won a Classical Scholarship at Balliol. At that time only two were awarded each year, and as the reputation of the college was already very high it would have been a great achievement for any boy, and was particularly so for one from a relatively unknown school which had never previously gained a Balliol scholarship. He was captain of the school at the time, and was riding confidently and even a little complacently upon a high tide of early success. In his academic work his contempt for what he regarded as
inferior disciplines outside the main stream of traditional learning had the paradoxical effect of making him rigidly specialised. A contemporary recorded that “ he had little interest in any subject except Classics and English,” and that he spent his mathematics hours composing Greek verses, his chemistry hours in making “ irreverent jests ” and his German hours in diverting the master from the teaching of such an unimportant language.
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This being the bent of his mind—and given the fact that he was never intellectually very tolerant—it was an advantage to him that he spent his schooldays in the crowded heart of the capital rather than in some cloistered academic grove. In the latter surroundings he might have grown up a classical pedant with little comprehension of the mid-nineteenth century world around him. In London, “ generally taking a little stroll in Cheapside after lunch, but (getting) awfully knocked about during it,” as he expressed it in a letter to his mother, such detachment was much more difficult. And Asquith’s interest in everything touching the conduct of public affairs was always strong. He went frequently to the House of Commons and heard some of the great parliamentary reform debates of the midsixties. He wrote meticulous accounts of them to his mother, and even practised some amateur analysis of the division lists. He went also to meetings of the City Court of Common Council at Guildhall and, more frequently, to the Law Courts. Here his early sense of fastidious discrimination was exercised to the full.