Alternatives to Conscription: Richard Burdon Haldane and a ‘Liberal’ Nation-in-Arms

Abstract

Despite the efforts of the NSL, compulsory military service was not introduced in Britain before the outbreak of the First World War. Yet the years before 1914 nevertheless formed a period of remarkable military reform. In December 1905 Richard Burdon Haldane was appointed secretary of state for war in Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s new Liberal administration. During the next seven years, through the creation of a general staff, the reorganization and re-equipment of both the regular and auxiliary armed forces, and a raft of other innovations, Haldane effectively created the army with which Britain entered the Great War in August 1914. The implementation of these various and far-reaching reforms represented a political triumph that had eluded all of his recent predecessors. As Haldane himself observed in 1907, his Territorial and Reserve Forces Bill was ‘the only large bill for army reform that has been passed since 1872, a generation and a half ago’.¹ This achievement was all the more remarkable in the light of the political obstacles that Haldane was obliged to negotiate. The conflicting demands, on the one hand of the radicals within his own party, strongly committed to retrenchment in military spending, and on the other hand of a Unionist opposition ever ready to denounce the government for neglecting the cause of national defence, meant that Haldane was forced to walk a political tightrope from the moment he entered the War Office.