Field Marshal Sir Henry Hughes Wilson, 1st Baronet, was one of the most senior British Army staff officers of the First World War and was briefly an Irish unionist politician.
Edgar Algernon Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood,, known as Lord Robert Cecil from 1868 to 1923, was a British lawyer, politician and diplomat. He was one of the architects of the League of Nations and a defender of it, whose service to the organisation saw him awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1937.
A war cabinet is a committee formed by a government in a time of war to efficiently and effectively conduct that war. It is usually a subset of the full executive cabinet of ministers, although it is quite common for a war cabinet to have senior military officers and opposition politicians as members.
Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner, was a British statesman and colonial administrator who played a very important role in the formulation of British foreign and domestic policy between the mid-1890s and early 1920s. From December 1916 to November 1918, he was one of the most important members of Prime Minister David Lloyd George's War cabinet.
Maurice Pascal Alers Hankey, 1st Baron Hankey, was a British civil servant who gained prominence as the first Cabinet Secretary and later made the rare transition from the civil service to ministerial office. He is best known as the highly-efficient top aide to Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the War Cabinet, which directed Britain during the First World War.
Violet Georgina Milner, Viscountess Milner was an English socialite of the Victorian and Edwardian eras and, later, editor of the political monthly National Review. Her father was close friends with Georges Clemenceau, she married the son of Prime Minister Salisbury, Lord Edward Cecil, and after his death, Alfred Milner, 1st Viscount Milner.
A ginger group is a formal or informal group within an organisation seeking to influence its direction and activity. The term comes from the phrase ginger up, meaning to enliven or stimulate. Ginger groups work to alter the organisation's policies, practices, or office-holders, while still supporting its general goals. Ginger groups sometimes form within the political parties of Commonwealth countries such as the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Pakistan.
The Supreme War Council was a central command based in Versailles that coordinated the military strategy of the principal Allies of World War I: Britain, France, Italy, the United States, and Japan. It was founded in 1917 after the Russian Revolution and with Russia's withdrawal as an ally imminent. The council served as a second source of advice for civilian leadership, a forum for preliminary discussions of potential armistice terms, later for peace treaty settlement conditions, and it was succeeded by the Conference of Ambassadors in 1920.
Captain Stephen Wentworth Roskill, was a senior career officer of the Royal Navy, serving during the Second World War and, after his enforced medical retirement, served as the official historian of the Royal Navy from 1949 to 1960. He is now chiefly remembered as a prodigious author of books on British maritime history.
The Blockade of Germany, or the Blockade of Europe, occurred from 1914 to 1919. The prolonged naval blockade was conducted by the Allies during and after World War I in an effort to restrict the maritime supply of goods to the Central Powers, which included Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire. The blockade is considered one of the key elements in the eventual Allied victory in the war. In December 1918, the German Board of Public Health claimed that 763,000 German civilians had already died from starvation and disease caused by the blockade. An academic study done in 1928 put the death toll at 424,000. An additional 100,000 people may have died during the post-armistice continuation of the blockade in 1919.
The Doullens Conference was held in Doullens, France, on 26 March 1918 between French and British military leaders and governmental representatives during World War I. Its purpose was to better co-ordinate their armies' operations on the Western Front in the face of a dramatic advance by the German Army which threatened a breakthrough of their lines during the war's final year. It occurred due to Lord Alfred Milner, a member of the British War Cabinet, being dispatched to France by Prime Minister Lloyd George, on 24 March, to assess conditions on the Western Front, and to report back.
The Dury, Compiègne and Abbeville meetings were held by the Allies during World War I to address Operation Michael, a massive German assault on the Western Front on 21 March 1918 which marked the beginning of the Kaiser's Spring Offensive. Since the fall of 1917, a stalemate had existed on the Western Front. However, German victory against Russia in 1917, due to the Russian Revolution and the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, freed up German armies on the Eastern Front for use in the west. During the winter of 1917-1918, approximately 50 German divisions in Russia were secretly transported by train to France for use in a massive, final attack to end the war. The battle that followed, Operation Michael, totally surprised the Allies and nearly routed the French and English armies from the field. The meetings below were held under these dire circumstances.
The War Policy Committee was a small group of British ministers, most of them members of the War Cabinet, set up during World War I to decide war strategy. The committee was created at the request of Lord Milner on 7 June 1917, through a memorandum he circulated with his peers on the British War Cabinet. Its members included the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, Lord Milner, Edward Carson, Lord Curzon and Jan Smuts. The committee was formed to discuss the strategic matter of the Russian Revolution, and the new entry of The United States. Coincidentally or not, the timing of Lord Milner's memo coincided with the detonation of 19 underground mines filled with explosives on the Western Front, which created the largest human explosion of all time. The night before this explosion, General Harington said to reporters "Gentleman, I don't know whether we are going to make history tomorrow, but at any rate we shall change the geography". In Milner's memo, he stressed that the allies must act together for the common good, and not devolve to piecemeal arrangements that satisfied specific countries. The War Policy Committee was formed, and it discussed every major initiative taken by the allies until the end of the war. It was chaired by Lord's Milner and Curzon, with Jan Smuts as its Vice Chairman.
The X Committee was established during World War I by Lord Alfred Milner as a way of managing and providing strategic direction to the Great War. Its members included Prime Minister Lloyd George, Lord Milner, General Henry Wilson, and Maurice Hankey as its Secretary. Hankey delegated his responsibility to Leo Amery. Meetings were held at 10 Downing Street, sometimes once, sometimes twice daily. Amery says the X Committee "really ran the war during the critical spring and summer months" of 1918. The X Committee's first meeting was held on 15 May 1918, and its last meeting on 25 November 1918. From a biography written about his father, the son of Jan Smuts revealed that the words "X Committee" stood for "Executive Committee", and that Lord Milner must have learned about it during his time in South Africa (1897–1905).
The Monday Night Cabal was a 'ginger group' of influential people set up in London by Leo Amery at the start of 1916 to discuss war policy. The nucleus of the group consisted of Lord Milner, George Carson, Geoffrey Dawson, Waldorf Astor and F. S. Oliver. The group got together for Monday night dinners and to discuss politics. Throughout 1916 their numbers and influence grew to include Minister of Munitions David Lloyd George, General Henry Wilson, Philip Kerr, and Mark Jameson. It is thought that word of the Ginger Group reached Douglas Haig, prompting him to invite Lord Milner to France in November for an 8-day tour of the Western Front. It was through the Ginger Group that Times editor Geoffrey Dawson published a December 4, 1916 news story titled "Reconstruction" that set in motion events that caused Prime Minister H. H. Asquith to resign, signaling the rise of the Lloyd George Ministry. Among the group's primary objectives was the formation of a small war cabinet within government to fight the war against the German Empire effectively. This point was advanced by The Times as early as April 1915, so it is unknown if the Ginger Group, or one its predecessor elements was responsible for the idea behind Lloyd George's decision to create a War Cabinet on the day he was appointed Prime Minister. However, his surprise choice of Lord Milner as one of the War Cabinet's five members shows the influence of the ginger group on him.
Sir Lancelot Storr was a British Army officer and an assistant war cabinet secretary during World War I. He served on the personal staff of Lord Kitchener at the War Office (1914-1916), and as a secretary on the Committee of Imperial Defence (1916-1921). With Kitchener's help, Storr was transferred to the staff of Sir Maurice Hankey at the end of 1916, as part of the reforms promised by Prime Minister David Lloyd George. Working on Hankey's staff, he served as assistant secretary to the British War Cabinet (1916), the Imperial War Cabinet (1917-1918), and the British Section of the Supreme War Council at Versailles (1917-1918) during World War I. Along with Hankey and assistant war cabinet secretary Leo Amery, Storr is prominently featured in the Imperial War Cabinet photograph of 1917. He also participated in the San Remo conference in 1920. He was knighted and retired from the Army in 1921.
The Garden Suburb is the name given to a collection of ministerial positions created by the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George in December 1916, to help facilitate the running of World War I. They were housed in temporary wooden structures in the Garden of 10 and 11 Downing Street. Due to their contacts with the press, they were sometimes regarded with suspicion, and their ideas at times created trouble for the Cabinet Secretary Maurice Hankey, who was charged not just with supervising the taking of minutes at War Cabinet meetings, but also with executing their decisions. Known as the Prime Minister's personal secretariat and private "brain trust", the Garden Suburb included the likes of Professor W. G. S. Adams, Lord Milner, Philip Kerr and Waldorf Astor.
The Beauvais Conference of World War I was held at the request of French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau to solidify command of the Western Front and to ensure the maximum participation of France's allies in the war. The conference was held on April 3, 1918, at Beauvais Town Hall, France, one week after the Doullens Conference that appointed General Ferdinand Foch as Commander of the Western Front. Clemenceau thought the wording of the Doullens Agreement was too weak, and that a correction was needed to solidify Foch's command. The urgency of the meeting was underpinned by Germany's Spring Offensive on the Western Front, which opened a gap 50 miles wide and 50 miles deep in the line, forcing the British Expeditionary Force to reel back, and retreat orders from both French and British army commanders to protect their armies.
The Rue Nitot meeting was an important First World War event, when the British Empire delegates at the Peace Conference in Versailles got together to register the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles, and tried to soften the conditions for peace with Germany. The meeting was held at Prime Minister David Lloyd George's flat, 23 Rue Nitot, in Paris, on June 1, 1919.
