Facsimile of 1912 edition (Cd. 6352). -- Contents: Part 1 - List of witnesses: evidence days 1-2; Part 2 - Evidence days 3-6; Part 3 - Evidence days 7-10; Part 4 - Evidence 11-15; Part 5 - Evidence days 16-19; Part 6 - Evidence days 20-24; Part 7 - Evidence days 25-28; Part 8 - Evidence days 29-34; Part 9 - Evidence days 35-36 and forms; Part 10 - Index to the evidence. - 10 vols. not sold separately. - Wreck Commissioner, Lord Mersey. - Proceedings held from Thursday, 2nd May, 1912 to Tuesday, 30th July, 1912. - Copies produced on the Stationery Office on-demand publishing system
Asquith's administration laid the foundation of Britain's welfare state, but he was plunged into a major power struggle with the House of Lords. The budget of 1909 was vetoed by the hereditary upper chamber, and in 1910 Asquith called and won two elections on this constitutional issue. The Lords eventually passed the 1911 Parliament Act, ending their veto of financial legislation. Asquith was Prime Minister on the outbreak of World War I, but his government fell in 1916 as a result of the 'Shells Scandal'.
H. H. Asquith: Last of the Romans chronicles the life of H. H. Asquith (1852–1928), the longest-serving British prime minister between Lord Liverpool and Margaret Thatcher. In this study, V. Markham Lester argues that the key to understanding Asquith is to recognize the classical virtues he acquired early in his education. Employing unpublished sources and documents made public since the last full-scale biography of Asquith was published more than forty years ago, Lester challenges many interpretations in earlier biographies. Previous studies of Asquith have often glossed over his education and early years, contending that his development did not contribute materially to his mature outlook. On the contrary, by examining thoroughly Asquith’s early career—particularly his tenure as home secretary and his time as a barrister—this book offers unappreciated insights into Asquith’s character and development as a political leader. Lester further challenges the previous conclusions that Asquith failed as a war leader, demonstrating that Asquith succeeded in meeting the novel challenges of World War I and that his accomplishments have been insufficiently understood. He explains how Asquith’s lifelong reliance on rational thought, eloquence, and self-control produced the impressive leadership required to hold the fragile government together as it struggled to handle the unexpected and unprecedented challenges of world war and to lay the foundation for ultimate victory in the Great War.
Eldest son of the Prime Minister, with an outstanding academic record at Oxford, Raymond Asquith devoted his great talents to friendship, preferring conversation and literature to the struggle for worldly success. In this collection, edited by his grandson, there are touching and revealing letters to friends as diverse as Winston Churchill and Lady Diana Cooper, love letters to his wife, Katherine, as well as frank and witty anecdotes about many of the major social figures and politicians of the day. His letters from the Western Front, before his death on the Somme in 1916, are as memorable as anything in the painfully emotive literature of the period.
The lives, deaths, poetry, diaries and extracts from letters of sixty-six soldier-poets are brought together in this limited edition of Anne Powell's unique anthology; a fitting commemoration for the centenary of the First World War. These poems are not simply the works of well-known names such as Wilfred Owen – though they are represented – they have been painstakingly collected from a multitude of sources, and the relative obscurity of some of the voices makes the message all the more moving. Moreover, all but five of these soldiers lie within forty-five miles of Arras. Their deaths are described here in chronological order, with an account of each man's last battle. This in itself provides a revealing gradual change in the poetry from early naïve patriotism to despair about the human race and the bitterness of 'Dulce et Decorum Est'.
Margot Asquith was the wife of Herbert Henry Asquith, the Liberal Prime Minister who led Britain into war in August 1914. Asquith's early war leadership drew praise from all quarters, but in December 1916 he was forced from office in a palace coup, and replaced by Lloyd George, whose career he had done so much to promote. Margot had both the literary gifts and the vantage point to create, in her diary of these years, a compelling record of her husband's fall from grace. An intellectual socialite with the airs, if not the lineage, of an aristocrat, Margot was both a spectator and a participant in the events she describes, and in public affairs could be an ally or an embarrassment - sometimes both. Her diary vividly evokes the wartime milieu as experienced in 10 Downing Street, and describes the great political battles that lay behind the warfare on the Western Front, in which Asquith would himself lose his eldest son. The writing teems with character sketches, including Lloyd George ('a natural adventurer who may make or mar himself any day'), Churchill ('Winston's vanity is septic'), and Kitchener ('a man brutal by nature and by pose'). Never previously published, this candid, witty, and worldly diary gives us a unique insider's view of the centre of power, and an introduction by Michael Brock, in addition to explanatory footnotes and appendices written with his wife Eleanor, provide the context and background information we need to appreciate them to the full.
During a pivotal few months in the middle of the First World War all sides-Germany, Britain, and America-believed the war could be concluded. Peace at the end of 1916 would have saved millions of lives and changed the course of history utterly. Two years into the most terrible conflict the world had ever known, the warring powers faced a crisis. There were no good military options. Money, men, and supplies were running short on all sides. The German chancellor secretly sought President Woodrow Wilson's mediation to end the war, just as British ministers and France's president also concluded that the time was right. The Road Less Traveled describes how tantalizingly close these far-sighted statesmen came to ending the war, saving millions of lives, and avoiding the total war that dimmed hopes for a better world. Theirs was a secret battle that is only now becoming fully understood, a story of civic courage, awful responsibility, and how some leaders rose to the occasion while others shrank from it or chased other ambitions. "Peace is on the floor waiting to be picked up!" pleaded the German ambassador to the United States. This book explains both the strategies and fumbles of people facing a great crossroads of history. The Road Less Traveled reveals one of the last great mysteries of the Great War: that it simply never should have lasted so long or cost so much.
