Asquith (85 page)

The question of an invitation remained in doubt for several weeks after it was first mooted. But on January 21st a favourable decision was taken by a majority of 25 or so in a meeting of several hundreds.

“As you would see by today’s paper,” Asquith wrote to Mrs. Harrissonon the 22nd, “ the Paisley people have at last got down on the right side of the fence. I don’t look forward with much pleasure to the adventure, which however has to be faced. For one tiling I am not very fond of going back to Scotland, for another the issue is extremely doubtful, notwithstanding that the press is practically all with us. My present plan is to leave here by the night train on Monday.”
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On arrival in Glasgow on the Tuesday morning his first task was to install himself, Margot, his daughter Violet, and his secretary Vivian Phillipps in the Central Station Hotel there. His second was to proceed to Paisley and to turn a tepid and divided Liberal association into a compact body of enthusiastic supporters. That night he met 600 members at the Liberal Club, and in a short, thirty-minute speech achieved a remarkable success. From then until polling day, sixteen days ahead, his campaign never looked back.

He even showed signs of enjoying it himself, despite the strain of four and five meetings a day and the unfamiliar experience of soliciting women’s votes.

“We are having a wonderful time here,” he wrote on January 30th, “ and if outward enthusiasm were a reliable index we should not have much doubt as to the result. But street crowds and photographers and meetings are most untrustworthy guides. There are about fifteen thousand women on the Register—a dim, impenetrable, for the most part ungettable element—of
whom all that one knows is that they are for the most part hopelessly ignorant of politics, credulous to the last degree, and flickering with gusts of sentiment like a candle in the wind. Then there are some thousands of Irish, who have been ordered by their bosses to vote Labour—as if Labour had ever done or was ever likely to do anything for them. It is on the whole an incalculable problem. The only certain fact is that the Coalition man—a foul-mouthed Tory—will be well at the bottom of the poll. The meetings are wonderful: always a lot of opponents there, but when I speak they never interrupt and you could hear a pin drop. They are among the most intelligent audiences I have ever had, but the heckling is of very poor quality. Violet is a marvellous success as a speaker.”
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The Labour candidate was J. M. Biggar, who had fought the seat in 1918 and come within an ace of victory. He had the advantage on this occasion, so strangely does time alter political alliances, of a message of support from Lord Haldane. If Asquith was to be beaten it would be by him, and not by the “ foul-mouthed Tory,” J. A. D. MacKean. Yet Asquith directed the main effort of his campaign against the Coalition. Partly this was because it corresponded with his feelings; partly because it was a sound electoral tactic. The Labour vote was big and solid, but not a majority. Asquith’s task was to defeat it by securing every available Liberal vote and some moderate Tory ones as well.

He did not attempt to do this by a soft approach. He roundly attacked the whole policy of trying to grind Germany into the dust by the exaction of impossible reparations. He was equally forthright —and far-sighted—on Ireland. Nothing short of immediate dominion status, a proposal which was at the time denounced by the Government as “ insanity,” could avoid a future of violence, bloodshed and bitterness. Less controversially, he upheld the future of the League of Nations, and warned of the danger of the new states—and the old ones—engaging in damaging tariff wars.

He was supported in the campaign, apart from local workers, by those two eminent Liberal lawyers, Sir John Simon and Lord Buck-master, both outstanding platform orators. But his daughter Violet was better than either of them. Using a peculiar combination of highly-charged emotional phraseology and polished political wit, she was the great success of the contest. “ Her father,” as Churchill
was later to write, “ ... found in his daughter a champion redoubtable even in the first rank of Party orators.”
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Each night Asquith retired to the Central Station Hotel in Glasgow to read
Dr. Thorne
and
Framley Parsonage
and to contemplate with quiet satisfaction this new addition to his strength and a more generally favourable development of events than any tiling he had known for several years.

Polling day was on February 12th, but there was once again a delay of two weeks before the counting. As in 1918 Asquith went south as soon as the voting was over, but this time he did not stay there for the result. Nor did he waste much time on this second “ Paisley excursion,” as he called it. The whole family travelled up by sleeper one night and back by sleeper the next.

“I was present during most of the counting,” he wrote the following day, “ and it was clear after the first half-hour that we had won, but the majority steadily increased as fresh ballot boxes were opened till it mounted to close upon 3,ooo.
³
Perhaps the most satisfactory feature of the whole business was the sorry figure cut by the wretched Coalitionist MacKean: he fought dirtily and deserves the penalty he has to suffer of losing his deposit.

We had a gigantic farewell meeting—nearer 5,000 than 4,000— in the early evening, at which Violet made one of her best speeches, and when we took the night train (at) Glasgow we were nearly done to death by the demonstrative attentions of the University students.
⁴
However, we got through and after another tumultuous greeting at Euston this morning, arrived here (Cavendish Square) for a late breakfast. We found a magnificent wreath
over the front door, a characteristic gift from Lady Tree: and more letters and telegrams than it is possible to count.

It is Elizabeth’s birthday, and Puffin is up from Winchester for the day. We are all going this afternoon to a matinee of B. Shaw’s
Pygmalion
with Mrs. Campbell and Marion Terry in the chief parts.
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Amidst all the letters and telegrams which flowed in there was none from any leading supporter of the Coalition. No personal note came from Churchill or Montagu, from Balfour or Curzon, from Austen Chamberlain or Walter Long, let alone from Bonar Law or Lloyd George.
¹
Less surprisingly, the public welcome which Asquith received from the Government benches (then five-sixths of the total) in the House of Commons was equally chilly. But it was counterbalanced by extraordinary scenes of enthusiasm outside.

On the following Monday, when Asquith took his seat, there was a great crowd all the way from Cavendish Square to Westminster, and they gave him “ a tumultuous but most enthusiastic procession.” A band of medical students in Parliament Square added their own tribute by annexing his new top hat and doing one hundred pounds’ worth of damage to his motor car. But he found this much more agreeable than the “ stony silence ” with which the unfamiliar occupants of the familiar benches greeted him within.

A few days later, when his daughter Violet, guest of honour at a National Liberal Club luncheon, delivered what still reads as one of the best speeches of its sort ever made, she painted the contrast:

One last scene—the closing scene of the drama of Paisley. Let us remember it together, for you have shared it with me—the sight of those great cheering crowds that thronged Whitehall and Parliament Square the day he took his seat. When I went in out of the noise, into the silence of the House—the House in which I had seen him lead great armies to great triumphs; when I saw that little gallant handful of men which is all his following now, and heard their thin cheer raised, for a moment I felt—is this all, are these all he has behind him? But then I remembered the great voice of the crowd—it rang in my ears; and I knew that this,
this
was the voice of England—not the drilled cheers of those conscript ranks on the Coalition benches. And I knew that our small force that day was like the little gallant garrison of a beleaguered city that hears for the first time the great shout of the relieving forces—“ Hold on, hold out; we are coming.”
And they are
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¹
_{The nearest approach to an exception was a warm letter from Lord Cave, who had been Home Secretary from 1916-19. This was ironical, for later, in 1925 (see page 511
infra)
Cave was to be the agent for the delivery of one of the last and most severely felt blows against Asquith.}

But they never did. Paisley was a false dawn, both for Asquith and the Liberal Party. At best it was the equivalent of some late winter daybreak on the fringes of the Arctic Circle. For a time the light grew gradually a little stronger. After a few years the Coalition crumbled. In the period of political confusion which followed the Liberal Party achieved an uncomfortable reunion and gained a little in influence. Asquith won two more elections at Paisley and even had something approaching a worth-while party to lead. But, compared with the “ great armies ” and “ great triumphs ” of pre-war days, it was very small stuff. The post-war Liberal day never achieved more than a grey and short-lived light. By 1924 it was dusk again. By 1926, for Asquith at least, it was political night.

Fortunately, on that exhilarating March afternoon in 1920, he could not foresee all this. Otherwise, even his massive reserves of self-assured fortitude would hardly have been enough to enable him to begin the long and unrewarding parliamentary battle against the Coalition. Unrewarding it certainly was. “ You have given the best proof since the G.O.M. took up Home Rule in 1886 that courage has not vanished from political life,”^ Bryce wrote to him. Asquith in 1920 was ten years younger than Gladstone at this turning-point, but the ground was still less promising and he fell further short of success.

It was not for want of trying. After his election for Paisley he spoke in the House of Commons far more frequently than ever previously when not a minister. He did the same in the country, stumping up and down from Portsmouth to Manchester and Cardiff to Newcastle in a way that he had never done before. As a result, when the Chief Whip delivered a report in June, 1921 on speaking activity, Asquith came out top of the list—“ a complete refutation,” as he rather defensively noted, “ of the silly legend that I have lost ‘ grip and keenness

Until the settlement of 1921 it was mainly Ireland which engaged his attention. He kept up a constant pressure against the Government. But he felt that it was an ineffective pressure. The House was deaf to
his appeals. “ I took some pains with my speech,” he wrote after his first major effort on this subject, “ and said all that I intended. Five years ago it would have been rapturously applauded, but this House is the most impossible place, and though they crowd in and listen attentively there is practically no response.
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He did not mind the isolation. His inner resources were proof against that. “ Now that Ll.G. calls me a lunatic and Carson calls me a traitor I begin to feel sure that I must be on the right lines,”* he wrote in October, 1920. But he hated the waste of ineffective action. He had no taste for speech-making for its own sake. “ Squandering himself like a fountain spraying into desert sand,” was his description of Coleridge, than whom “ there is no more tragic figure in literature
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and free from self-pity though he was, he might have thought that the words had some application to himself.

Even his own supporters were sometimes hesitant. “ And if one tries to strike a bold true note,” he wrote on October 24th 1920, “ half one’s friends shiver and cower, and implore one not to get in front of the band: in other words, to renounce both the duties and the risks of leadership.”
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Asquith represented a strand of distinguished opinion in the country. “You have stood for what is fine in the soul of this country in the greatest months of her history,” John Masefield wrote to him after the Paisley election, “ and my wife and I send you our heartiest congratulations that you are now to bring back fineness and sanity to the councils of this heaving time.”* The weakness of the strand was that it had more distinction than width, and that some of those within it felt more nostalgia than hope. Yet Asquith tried as hard as he could, both to broaden his basis of support and to think of the future as well as the past. Over the summer of 1921 he held a series of “ conclaves ” designed to promote a new basis for an alternative Government. First he tried to get Grey committed to a return to active politics. On June 29th he wrote:

E. Grey came to see me this morning by appointment. After some preliminaries I said to him that in my opinion the policy of the Coalition brought us both at home and abroad to a dangerous and almost desperate pass: that there was every ground for thinking that this was not only the growing but the dominant feeling of the country: that the success of anti-waste candidates at the by-elections was a crude expression of that feeling; and that
everything pointed to a general desire for a strong alternative government to which it could rally. At present there was no such government in sight. In my judgment it could only be provided by the Liberal Party re-inforced by such men as Lord R. Cecil, and perhaps with an infusion of moderate Labour. But (I told him) the first essential was
his avowed and open co-operation
, both in a declaration of general policy and the ultimate responsibilities if and when the country should decide on a change.”
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