1. 1918 - 1925: The Years the Locusts Have Eaten
February 6, 1918: The Representation of the People Act received Royal Assent, granting the vote to virtually all men over 21, some women over 30, and enforced proportional representation for general elections using the Single Transferable Vote system.
December 14, 1918: A general election was held, with 705 seats available and 353 needed for a majority, the first to allow women to vote and the first to use the Single Transferable Vote. The Conservatives won 283 seats, Labour won 163, David Lloyd George’s Coalition Liberal won 113, the Liberals won 99, Sinn Fein won 50, and the National Democrats won 13. Despite the Conservatives coming first, David Lloyd George’s coalition still pieced together an overall majority with members from across the Commons.
January 18, 1919: The Paris Peace Conference opened, the meeting of the Allied victors following the end of World War I to set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers diplomats from more than 32 countries and nationalities. The major decisions were the creation of the League of Nations; the five peace treaties with the defeated states, including the Treaty of Versailles with Germany; the awarding of German and Ottoman overseas possessions as "mandates", chiefly to Britain and France; reparations imposed on Germany, and the drawing of new national boundaries (sometimes with plebiscites) to better reflect ethnic boundaries. The main result was the Treaty of Versailles with Germany, which in section 231 laid the guilt for the war on "the aggression of Germany and her allies". This provision proved humiliating for Germany and set the stage for the expensive reparations Germany was intended to pay. The "Big Four" were the Prime Minister of France, Georges Clemenceau; the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Lloyd George; the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson; and the Prime Minister of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando. They met together informally 145 times and made all the major decisions, which in turn were ratified by the others
January 21, 1919: Dáil Éireann met for the first time in the Mansion House, Dublin. It comprised Sinn Féin members elected in the 1918 general election who, in accordance with their manifesto, had not taken their seats in the Parliament of the United Kingdom but chosen to declare an independent Irish Republic. In the first shots of the Irish Civil War, two Royal Irish Constabulary men were killed in an ambush at Soloheadbeg in County Tipperary.
January 28, 1919: More than 60,000 people flooded into central Glasgow in late January to protest high rents. A famous photo, now a symbol of the socialist movement in Britain, emerged of a red flag rising amid a sea of grey-clothed protestors, shining in their presence like a sun. The British Army were forced to intervene with tanks supported by exclusively English soldiers, while the Cabinet discussed utilising the new Royal Air Force against the rioters.
June 21, 1919: Admiral Ludwig von Reuter scuttled the interned German fleet in Scapa Flow in Scotland. Intervening British guard ships were able to beach a number of the ships, but 52 of the 74 interned vessels sank. Many of the wrecks were salvaged over the next two decades and were towed away for scrapping. Those that remain are popular diving sites.
June 27, 1919: On the last day of the annual Labour Party Conference in Southport, Lancashire the Leader of the Labour Party, William Adamson, delivered a speech in which he condemned the far-left rioting taking place across the country. The speech provoked a near-riot among the crowd as Adamson seemed to be fleeing from genuine socialism especially as he entertained coalition with the Conservatives.
June 28, 1919: The Treaty of Versailles was signed.
August 15, 1919: The Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act was passed by the House of Commons, allowing returning servicemen to get their old jobs back and shunting many women out of their wartime professions.
October 18, 1919: William Adamson resigned as Leader of the Labour Party in the aftermath of the disastrous conference in Southport, to be replaced by J.R. Clynes.
January 10, 1920: The League of Nations Covenant entered into force.
January 11, 1920: The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was recognised de facto by European powers in Versailles.
January 16, 1920: The first meeting of the League of Nations took place in Paris, France.
January 19, 1920: The United States Senate voted to reject membership of the League of Nations.
February 2, 1920: The Estonian War of Independence came to an end with the signing of the Tartu Peace Treaty, which recognised the independence of both the Republic of Estonia and the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic.
February 8, 1920: Royal Air Force Airco DH.9s bombed the Dervish State stronghold at Tale, including Mohammed Abdullah Hassan's personal compound. Hassan survived and fled into Abyssinia. The British campaign to restore their control over British Somaliland came to a successful conclusion in only three weeks, at a low cost in British lives and money. It was the prototype of the "aerial policing" of rebellious colonies that the Royal Air Force would conduct in the 1920s and 1930s, most notably in Ireland and Iraq.
February 12-24, 1920: Leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Italy met in the London Conference to discuss the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire.
February 19, 1920: The United States Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles.
March 7, 1920: The Syrian National Congress proclaimed Syria independent with Faisal I of Iraq as king.
March 12, 1920: The British government presented its annual budget. The government may as well have been running a war economy with a budget of £2.5 billion; the 1914 budget had been thought shocking enough for peacetime spending of £200 million. These numbers are somewhat distorted by inflation, but when the inflationary bubble was pricked in 1920, the government was forced to declare its priorities. Interest rates rose to nearly 8% while the budget more than halved government spending. Before the war, income tax had been 8%; now it was 33%. A quarter of the government’s budget was dedicated to serving its interest.
March 13-17, 1920: Wolfgang Kapp and Walther von Lüttwitz's 'Kapp Putsch', an attempted coup in Germany, briefly ousted the Weimar Republic government from Berlin but failed due to public resistance and a general strike.
March 15, 1920: Military occupation of Constantinople by British Empire forces acting for the Allied Powers against the Turkish National Movement. Retrospectively, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey regards this as the dissolution of the Ottoman regime in Istanbul.
March 25, 1920: British recruits to the Royal Irish Constabulary began to arrive in Ireland. They became known from their improvised uniforms as the "Black and Tans."
August 7, 1920: According to new figures released by the Treasury, unemployment in Britain had fallen to a level lower than it was before the Great War thanks in a significant part to the Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act. With this, strikes were beginning to fall and unrest among the unemployed also declined.
August 27, 1920: Lloyd George presided over a Cabinet meeting in which he held court for four solid hours, “talking without pausing for breath” according to a witness, as he argued the need for a significant public works programme. Despite his passion, the Prime Minister was getting nowhere.
October 20, 1920: By this point, Britain had fallen into recession. Her factories had been archaic before the war, now they struggled to sell anything to a shrivelled post-war export market. Unemployment was quick to quintuple to 10%, while inflation turned to a deflation of nearly -15%, adding an additional burden onto Britain’s already crushing national debt which had reached 135% of national income. With the huge cuts imposed by the Treasury, there was no extra spending to cushion the effect of the recession. Social reform was often impossible, and the recession came to be described at the time as the worst since the Industrial Revolution. Housebuilding was a prime victim with Christopher Addison, the man behind the state programme, resigning as target after target was missed. The Treasury may have soon been running a surplus, but the deep deflation ensured that debt was little affected, not decreasing until 1923, and very modestly.
December 23, 1920: The Government of Ireland Act 1920 passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom received Royal Assent from George V, providing for the partition of Ireland into Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland with separate parliaments, granting a measure of home rule.
May 7, 1921: King George V was assassinated in Belfast during the opening of the Northern Ireland Parliament. He was shot by Jackie Finnegan, an Irish nationalist, who was later hanged for the murder. The king’s murder massively escalated the situation in Ireland and triggered the Irish Civil War. Many historians consider the death of George V to be the definitive end of Pax Britannica, and its psychological impact for the British was severe. The politically naïve Edward VIII, a 27-year old vain, petulant womaniser, was thrust onto the throne “far before he can be considered ready.”
May 8, 1921: Lloyd George ordered the British Army to mobilise and fully occupy Ireland, while declaring a state of emergency in the province. Upwards of 100,000 troops were prepared for deployment in Ireland, at a time when anti-Irish riots were sweeping Britain especially in London and Liverpool where a dozen people had been murdered. The Government of Ireland Act, passed the previous year, was suspended as martial law was implemented across the whole of Ireland.
May 11, 1921: The funeral of George V took place in London, his body returning to England aboard HMS Hood. The King’s assassination had galvanised support for the use of military force in Ireland, and thus made it politically unacceptable for a British government to allow Irish independence despite widespread support for it in Liberal and Labour circles.
May 28, 1921: The Special Protection Service, a specialised armed branch of the Metropolitan Police, was formed with the task of protecting high-ranking politicians and dignitaries following the murder of George V.
June 4, 1921: A secret meeting between Lloyd George and the Labour leader, J.R. Clynes, took place at Pinfold Manor in the Surrey village of Walton-on-the-Hill. Within the Cabinet, Lloyd George had been fighting fiercely for an alternative for deflation but his Conservative chancellor, Austen Chamberlain, was refusing to budge and the Prime Minister’s lofty hopes of an increased state role in the economy seemed dashed. Lloyd George hoped to persuade Clynes of forming a new coalition, without a general election, with defectors from Asquith’s Liberals making up the numbers to achieve a majority. Clynes was non-committal in the meeting, but it mattered little; despite the secrecy, word got out almost immediately and a crisis erupted in the existing coalition.
June 10, 1921: David Lloyd George made an open appeal to Herbert Asquith for the two to reunite their parties into a single Liberal Party once more, openly suggesting that coalition with the Conservatives could end and that a fresh leadership election for the newly reunited party could be held. For Asquith, this offered the potential of his returning to the premiership. For the Conservatives, they saw the appeal as a naked demonstration that Lloyd George was doing everything he could to banish the Tories into Opposition. Their leader, Andrew Bonar Law, was ill and with this crisis some within the Cabinet saw him as a liability amid the possibility of a sudden election.
June 20, 1921: Without fanfare, Andrew Bonar Law was removed as Conservative leader and replaced by Stanley Baldwin, the President of the Board of Trade.
June 30, 1921: The Conservatives formally withdrew from the coalition, forcing David Lloyd George to go to Buckingham Palace and ask that Parliament be dissolved and a fresh election be called.
August 11, 1921: A general election was held, with 705 seats available and 353 needed for a majority. The Conservatives came first with 253 seats, while Labour won 222, the Liberals took 117 while the National Liberals took 88. The Irish Parliamentary Party took 53 of Ireland’s 105 seats and once again boycotted the Commons. 14 Independent candidates also took seats, while the Communists won a “disappointing” 6. The haggling over a coalition deal began.
September 1, 1921: A coalition agreement between Labour, the Liberals, and National Liberals was signed with a majority of 126 due to the IPP’s boycott. Britain earned the accolade of being the first country to elect a social democratic government through universal suffrage. J.R. Clynes became Labour’s first Prime Minister, while Herbert Asquith became Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lloyd George was made Minister without Portfolio, with the responsibility for advising the Prime Minister on economic policy. This was bound to cause tension with Asquith, especially as the exact definition of Lloyd George’s responsibilities was left vague and thus allowed it to overlap. Clynes found himself trying to run a Cabinet dominated by two powerful Liberal personalities which hated each other.
November 2, 1921: 17 Liberal MPs resigned the Liberal whip and crossed the Commons chamber to join the Conservatives in protest at the coalition with Labour, with Winston Churchill among the defectors.
December 1, 1921: The British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC, was founded.
December 8, 1921: The Labour-led coalition delivered its first budget, with the very concept of a Labour-led government remaining a curiosity that much of the world was watching. It introduced an experimental one-time capital levy of 5%, which the Liberals had deeply opposed before the election but now accepted if it would keep a program of nationalisation at bay. Also announced was a graduated wealth tax on fortunes over £5,000 (£200,000 today) and an increase in death duties for large estates. There would be a super-tax on the highest incomes, taxation of land values and a commitment to reforming the tax system so it better reflected people’s ability to pay. With this new revenue the party found room for some fiscal stimulus too. Anyone on an income of £250 (£10,000 today) or less would be exempted from income tax while anyone earning between £250 and £500 were promised that their taxes would not rise. A public works programme to increase investment and reduce unemployment would also be funded, a passion project for both Labour and Lloyd George. A new network of trunk roads across the country were to be built, what Asquith promised would be “the greatest roadbuilding project since the Romans.” There was also a commitment to bringing an end to Britain’s inefficient and fragmented electricity supply system, which relied on a patchwork of small supply networks, by bringing about the state owned National Grid with the promise of electricity coverage for all homes within ten years. Also promised was slum clearance, a renewed housebuilding effort, the improvement of sanitation systems, and funding to modernise British factories.
January 8, 1922: An anti-British protest in Dublin turned violent, with troops of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers intervening with tanks helping to break up the crowds.
February 1, 1922: Britain recognised the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
February 7, 1922: The King’s Speech took place, the first to be delivered by Edward VIII. The King’s Speech outlined the government’s legislative agenda for the year, and proved highly controversial with many Labourites for lacking any mention at all of bringing industries or utilities into public ownership. J.R. Clynes had agreed with his Liberal partners not to entertain such notions but had avoided being clear with his own party about this agreement, lest he alienate them. Among the most vocal of the outraged were the Red Clydesiders, a group of about 30 Scottish MPs with hardline left-wing views.
February 22, 1922: The United States Congress passed the Kelley-Cochran Act, imposing a 20% tariff on imports from Britain in response to the “occupation” of Ireland.
March 17, 1922: The Lord’s Shuttle was established by several Catholic associations in the United States, with the purpose of funding the expatriation of Irish Catholics to the safety of the U.S. amid the civil war. Within five years, more than 150,000 had made the journey. Similar expatriations to France and Spain were taking place.
April 2, 1922: The Representation of the People Act 1922 was passed by the House of Commons, equalising the right to vote for both women and men.
April 27, 1922: The Equal Pay Bill passed its second reading in the House of Commons. A significant Labour policy, it would enshrine into law the right of equal pay for women. However, outside Parliament a huge trade union protest against the bill was turning violent with running battles against police.
April 28, 1922: The British government suddenly withdrew its support for the Equal Pay Bill before it could come to a final vote, panicking over the widespread trade union opposition so early into the government’s existence. J.R. Clynes apparently seemed to feel that jettisoning the bill was a necessary sacrifice for wider legislative success, having already seen for himself while in opposition how quickly the party could tear itself apart.
May 8, 1922: The Mons Conference took place in Belgium, called for by the British government to resolve remaining issues regarding Germany. British, French, German, Italian, and Belgian representatives attended. J.R. Clynes hoped to end the requirement for Germany to pay reparations following the Great War, but found his efforts frustrated by the French government. Clynes delivered his most famous speech on the final day of the conference, warning that “blood will flow once more on European fields” if reparations were maintained. The Mons Conference ended in failure, but Clynes’ words would prove prophetic. The British government’s continued courting of ending reparations would prove a significant factor in the Anglo-Franco split.
May 27, 1922: The British government established the Industrial Improvement Board, which would provide money to industries to allow them to modernise their equipment and practices. The IBB was heavily controversial among the trade unions, as “modernisation” was seen as code for cutting staff numbers, and the Commons vote to approve its creation would only narrowly scrape by as many Labourites rejected it out of hand.
July 12, 1922: Germany demanded a moratorium on further reparations payments, encouraged by the British attitude on the subject, and received the endorsement of the British government. The demand fell on deaf ears in Paris.
August 16, 1922: The first woman was appointed to the Cabinet, when Annabelle Watson MP for Liverpool West Derby was appointed Minister of Pensions. Before entering Parliament she had been a significant figure in the Amalgamated Union of Operative Bakers and, notably, was born in Derby to parents who were both Crimean Tatars.
August 22, 1922: The Dublin Conference took place, intended to find a peaceful solution to the Irish Civil War. It ended in failure as the British government refused to accept independence for Ireland; before the escalation of the conflict with the killing of the king, it would have been politically possible but now the country had been galvanised and to give in the demands of the Irish nationalists would be seen as a defeat that could not be accepted.
September 8, 1922: The House of Commons passed the Mandatory Minimum Wages Act, which established the national minimum wage and was a significant legislative victory for the Labour movement.
September 15, 1922: The Cabinet met to discuss the Chanak Crisis, as Turkey moved to push the Greek armies out of Turkey and restore Turkish rule in the Allied occupied territories of Turkey, primarily in Istanbul. Lloyd George was the sole proponent for military action against Turkey. The firm rebuttal of his insistence to go to war helped significantly isolate him within the Cabinet, and he himself turned his entire attention to economic affairs; in the next series of Cabinet meetings to discuss issues of foreign affairs, Lloyd George did not even attend for fear of isolating himself further and causing a reduction of his brief.
October 8, 1922: Already facing discontent in the party for his “middle ground” attitude to socialism and willingness to challenge the trade unions as shown by his support for the Equal Pay Bill, J.R. Clynes faced a leadership challenge championed by the Red Clydesiders. Ramsay MacDonald, a hero of the Labour movement, challenged Clynes but faced opposition from many who saw his radicalism as dangerous in a time of coalitions. MacDonald lost the leadership challenge by 7 votes.
December 12, 1922: The U.S. Secretary of State, Charles Hughes, called for an impartial investigation of Germany's capacity to make reparation for damage done in the Great War. Britain quickly endorsed the call, but it was rejected by France.
January 7, 1923: France and Belgium initiated the occupation of the Ruhr, an industrial area of Germany, in response to the German failure to keep up with reparation payments. J.R. Clynes called Parliament into an emergency session, with many in the Labour party calling the French action an act of imperialism.
January 8, 1923: At an emergency session of the House of Commons, J.R. Clynes condemned the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr as “unacceptable” and called for the end of reparation payments by Germany. The House of Commons voted to officially condemn the Franco-Belgian action, further splitting the wartime allies with the Anglo-French entente apparently over. France lodged a formal diplomatic protest, with the government in Paris toying with the idea of recalling their ambassador in London.
January 10, 1923: The German government issued an order to begin mobilising its military, potentially to take back the Ruhr from France and Belgium; many within the German government were seeing Britain as a potential ally in any conflict.
January 14, 1923: With the Ruhr Crisis at a critical moment, the British government announced that any conflict between France and Germany would see Britain throw its support behind France. The announcement helped defuse the crisis as Germany backed down, but resentment against Britain lingered within a French government which regarded Britain as unsatisfactorily committed to keeping Germany down.
February 17, 1923: The House of Commons passed the Education Act, which increased the school leaving age from 14 to 16 and removed substantial portions of education policy from the remit of local councils and centralised it within a new Ministry of Education. Many on the Labour benches had hoped to abolish private education altogether but instead the act provided for experimental “comprehensive” schools which did not select students on the basis of aptitude or family wealth. The act was heavily influenced by the writings of the socialist intellectual R.H. Tawney; it organised primary and secondary education as two stages in a single continuous process, with the comprehensives representing the long-cherished view that equality of opportunity should guide education policy.
April 3, 1923: The National Liberals officially became a separate party, renaming themselves to the People’s Party with Lloyd George at their head. They were early exponents of Keynesian economics, with this being the centre of their platform.
April 18, 1923: The House of Commons passed the National Pensions Act, which reformed the pension system in the United Kingdom by reducing the age of entitlement from 70 years of age to 65, and increased the weekly payment from 5 shillings to 11.
April 26, 1923: Prince Albert, Duke of York married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in Westminster Abbey.
May 3, 1923: Work began on one of the most famous symbols of the coalition’s public works programme; the pumped-storage hydroelectric dam in northeast Wales at Dinorwig. Ironically, the public works scheme was not championed by Labour ministers within the Cabinet but was really the brainchild of David Lloyd George, who continued to beaver away as Minister without Portfolio. Labour ministers had seemed more focused on extending and liberalising unemployment benefits, but Lloyd George had won many in the Labour movement around to his way of thinking that the government “must treat the cause, not the symptoms,” and it was observed by J.R. Clynes that Lloyd George seemed to have more friends in the Labour movement than he did within his own Liberals.
May 18, 1923: J.R. Clynes presided over the opening of Great Swinburne in Northumberland, the first of the New Towns to be created by Labour policy to alleviate the housing shortage. It featured 10,000 houses built on what had once been a near-empty village and a new trunk road connecting it with Newcastle, the first bypass to be built as part of Labour’s grandiose vision for a nationwide system of motorways.
June 2, 1923: Andrew Bonar Law, the former Conservative leader, resigned from the House of Commons and withdrew from political life due to ill health.
June 19, 1923: The British government introduced the “cat and mouse strategy” in the Irish military campaign. It brought about new regulations on the conduct of troops deployed in Ireland, to bring an end to atrocities and win the hearts and minds of Irishmen. It was hoped that the IRA would continue to commit atrocities, and thus lose the support of the populace. J.R. Clynes had always been unhappy about the brutality with which the war was being waged, and hoped the new strategy could keep Labour together.
July 4, 1923: The Sherwood Declaration was issued by the owners of several British film companies, agreeing to merge their studios together to form a single company which could perhaps challenge the might of Hollywood. Islington Studios, Ealing Studios, Elstree Studios, and Cricklewood Studios merged into Royal Sherwood Studios, based north of Nottingham. This came amid severe difficulty for the British film industry with American films dominating the market, and it was hoped that Royal Sherwood could sufficiently pull its weight to save the industry in Britain. It possessed several millionaire backers and over the next few days a highly successful publicity campaign attracted millions more in public donations. Nearby Nottingham would go on to be regarded as the European capital of film. The first Chairman of Royal Sherwood, Sir Oswald Stoll, gave a speech at the new Sherwood Palace headquarters where he promised that a “talking picture” would come out of Royal Sherwood by 1927.
December 7, 1923: Four Irish insurgent gunboats off the coast of Sligo attacked the Royal Navy destroyer Wakeful, which suffered minimal damage from machine gun fire before sinking all four gunboats, killing roughly 50 insurgents.
March 3, 1924: The Feast Day Massacre took place in the Irish city of Cork, when insurgents ambushed and killed 36 British soldiers while a mortar attack set fire to the Cathedral of St Mary and St Anne. The British authorities responded with a series of brutal raids against IRA sympathisers across Ireland.
April 10, 1924: The Dawes Committee convened, at the request of the Allied Reparations Commission, to find a way to resolve the outstanding issues of Germany being unable to pay the reparations required of it in the Treaty of Versailles.
June 7, 1924: The Bank of England issued a widely circulated report which effectively endorsed the government’s economic policy rejecting tariffs, arguing that it had done much to keep industrial output stimulated and reduce unemployment. By this point the British economy was undoubtedly over the difficult post-war years; industry in particular was doing better than almost anywhere else in Europe, largely because of the happy marriage of Lloyd George’s public works programmes and Labour’s prioritising of modernising industry, which had kept British competitiveness up and unemployment down.
July 6, 1924: The Imperial Conference of 1924 convened in London; there, J.R. Clynes agreed to extend dominion status to India, effectively declaring it an equal member of the British Empire alongside Canada or Australia with self-autonomy.
August 10, 1924: In a crucial Cabinet meeting, the government came very close to collapsing over the war in Ireland. Although the Security Service had done an astounding job in infiltrating and dismantling Irish Republican Army cells, the devolved structure of the IRA made destroying just one cell a significant job. Nonetheless, the IRA was running out of money and the controversial “cat and mouse” strategy to lure the IRA into committing atrocities seemed to be working by driving Irish residents away. The meeting concluded that a plebiscite ought to be held in Ireland to decide its future, setting a precedent that would see referendums called by the government to avoid making difficult choices that might be their downfall.
August 17, 1924: The Dawes Committee dissolved, unable to overcome the refusal of France to withdraw from the Ruhr area.
September 4, 1924: A plebiscite was held in Ireland on whether it should become an independent state. Amid a widespread Catholic boycott, the measure was rejected overwhelmingly, but the poor turnout largely rendered it meaningless. By this point in the war, roughly 100 British soldiers were being killed each month and their death toll had risen to about 2,300.
October 1, 1924: The French Parliament voted to formally annex the Territory of the Saar Basin from Germany, inviting widespread condemnation for its blatant violation of the League of Nations mandate and demonstrating to the world that the League of Nations was unable to deal with issues arising from the behaviour of the great powers. The British government called for a strengthening of the League’s abilities, while the French action played right into the hands of far-right elements in Germany and helped catapult Adolf Hitler into a major figure in German domestic politics, as Germany lost its vital coal and steel industries and hyperinflation soon followed.
November 11, 1924: An anti-war march through London, opposing the continued conflict in Ireland, forced the cancellation of Armistice Day ceremonies.
January 1, 1925: The Commonwealth of India was proclaimed in Delhi, following the example of other British territories such as Canada or Australia by accomplishing the federation of its 13 provinces, though most of the princely states maintained their nominal sovereignty. Mahatma Gandhi was sworn in by the Governor-General of India, The Viscount Peel, as the interim Prime Minister of India. The new Commonwealth of India included OTL Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma and was referred to by J.R. Clynes, who was present for the Delhi proclamation, as “the birth of a future world capital.”
March 4, 1925: The Parliament Act 1925 was passed, which abolished hereditary peerages in the House of Lords and capped the number of peers in the Lords at 1,000. It was a significant victory for the more hardline Labourites in the Commons, but now many looked towards the possibility of abolishing the chamber altogether.
May 1, 1925: Cyprus became a Crown colony.
June 17, 1925: In a major defeat for the government, the House of Commons voted against a measure to ban the closed shop. It had been a significant concession to the Liberals in the coalition, but had enraged trade unionists and triggered outright rebellion in the Labour Parliamentary Party.
July 3, 1925: J.R. Clynes resigned as Prime Minister and as Leader of the Labour Party amid inconsolable differences within the party over industrial policy which seemed insurmountable in a coalition. Clynes lamented that the Parliamentary Party seemed unable to understand how a coalition worked, as his old nemesis Ramsay MacDonald became the new Prime Minister, for the party to discover that he was actually more moderate than they thought.
July 27, 1925: The BBC's Daventry transmitting station on Borough Hill, Daventry in central England opened as the world's first longwave broadcast radio transmitter, taking over from its Chelmsford facility.
August 7, 1925: The Stardust Film Festival began for the first time at Sandbanks in Poole, on the Dorset coast. It would come to be the world’s premier film festival.
August 10, 1925: The coalition issued the Northumbria Declaration, which amounted to a renewal of the Labour-Liberal coalition with a new series of agreed policies. The Liberals, still desperately trying to tread a middle ground between Labour and the Conservatives, gave in and accepted Ramsay MacDonald’s demands for public ownership in the form of cooperatives in the mining and railway industries. The declaration reiterated the coalition’s rejection of tariffs and finally formalised a rejection of returning to the gold standard. With Britain presently the largest economy in Europe, and her economy seeming healthy,
September 1, 1925: In an effort to set the tone of his administration, Ramsay MacDonald blocked the attempted purchase of Vauxhall Motors by American giant General Motors and promised a subsidy for the automobile industry in Britain to help it develop.
October 7, 1925: The Belfast Agreement was signed by the British government and representatives of the Irish Republican Army, which mandated a general ceasefire, the reduction by two-thirds of the British forces stationed in Ireland, and partition of Ireland into two nations; Ulster and Eire, both of which would have near-total legislative independence while remaining part of the United Kingdom. The agreement was effectively an acceptance of the defunct Government of Ireland Act 1920, with the IRA having been exhausted and largely destroyed as an organisation by the civil war. Nonetheless, political violence would remain endemic in Ireland and more serious violence would regularly flare up in the future.
December 31, 1925: The New Year Revolution took place in Germany, when communists seized government buildings in Weimar and briefly arrested Chancellor Hans Luther amid the hyperinflation which had followed the loss of the Ruhr and the failure of the Dawes Plan. The revolution proved a failure; Luther escaped his captors and was smuggled out of Berlin, while the revolutionaries had no plan outside of the capital as they assumed the populace would rise up spontaneously across the country. The army intervened within hours and retook control. The revolution had two significant consequences; it helped demonstrate even to France that a solution was needed to the German economic situation, and it helped further embolden the Nazi Party as the bogeyman of communism was shown to be a direct threat.
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February 6, 1918: The Representation of the People Act received Royal Assent, granting the vote to virtually all men over 21, some women over 30, and enforced proportional representation for general elections using the Single Transferable Vote system.
December 14, 1918: A general election was held, with 705 seats available and 353 needed for a majority, the first to allow women to vote and the first to use the Single Transferable Vote. The Conservatives won 283 seats, Labour won 163, David Lloyd George’s Coalition Liberal won 113, the Liberals won 99, Sinn Fein won 50, and the National Democrats won 13. Despite the Conservatives coming first, David Lloyd George’s coalition still pieced together an overall majority with members from across the Commons.
January 18, 1919: The Paris Peace Conference opened, the meeting of the Allied victors following the end of World War I to set the peace terms for the defeated Central Powers diplomats from more than 32 countries and nationalities. The major decisions were the creation of the League of Nations; the five peace treaties with the defeated states, including the Treaty of Versailles with Germany; the awarding of German and Ottoman overseas possessions as "mandates", chiefly to Britain and France; reparations imposed on Germany, and the drawing of new national boundaries (sometimes with plebiscites) to better reflect ethnic boundaries. The main result was the Treaty of Versailles with Germany, which in section 231 laid the guilt for the war on "the aggression of Germany and her allies". This provision proved humiliating for Germany and set the stage for the expensive reparations Germany was intended to pay. The "Big Four" were the Prime Minister of France, Georges Clemenceau; the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, David Lloyd George; the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson; and the Prime Minister of Italy, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando. They met together informally 145 times and made all the major decisions, which in turn were ratified by the others
January 21, 1919: Dáil Éireann met for the first time in the Mansion House, Dublin. It comprised Sinn Féin members elected in the 1918 general election who, in accordance with their manifesto, had not taken their seats in the Parliament of the United Kingdom but chosen to declare an independent Irish Republic. In the first shots of the Irish Civil War, two Royal Irish Constabulary men were killed in an ambush at Soloheadbeg in County Tipperary.
January 28, 1919: More than 60,000 people flooded into central Glasgow in late January to protest high rents. A famous photo, now a symbol of the socialist movement in Britain, emerged of a red flag rising amid a sea of grey-clothed protestors, shining in their presence like a sun. The British Army were forced to intervene with tanks supported by exclusively English soldiers, while the Cabinet discussed utilising the new Royal Air Force against the rioters.
June 21, 1919: Admiral Ludwig von Reuter scuttled the interned German fleet in Scapa Flow in Scotland. Intervening British guard ships were able to beach a number of the ships, but 52 of the 74 interned vessels sank. Many of the wrecks were salvaged over the next two decades and were towed away for scrapping. Those that remain are popular diving sites.
June 27, 1919: On the last day of the annual Labour Party Conference in Southport, Lancashire the Leader of the Labour Party, William Adamson, delivered a speech in which he condemned the far-left rioting taking place across the country. The speech provoked a near-riot among the crowd as Adamson seemed to be fleeing from genuine socialism especially as he entertained coalition with the Conservatives.
June 28, 1919: The Treaty of Versailles was signed.
August 15, 1919: The Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act was passed by the House of Commons, allowing returning servicemen to get their old jobs back and shunting many women out of their wartime professions.
October 18, 1919: William Adamson resigned as Leader of the Labour Party in the aftermath of the disastrous conference in Southport, to be replaced by J.R. Clynes.
January 10, 1920: The League of Nations Covenant entered into force.
January 11, 1920: The Azerbaijan Democratic Republic was recognised de facto by European powers in Versailles.
January 16, 1920: The first meeting of the League of Nations took place in Paris, France.
January 19, 1920: The United States Senate voted to reject membership of the League of Nations.
February 2, 1920: The Estonian War of Independence came to an end with the signing of the Tartu Peace Treaty, which recognised the independence of both the Republic of Estonia and the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic.
February 8, 1920: Royal Air Force Airco DH.9s bombed the Dervish State stronghold at Tale, including Mohammed Abdullah Hassan's personal compound. Hassan survived and fled into Abyssinia. The British campaign to restore their control over British Somaliland came to a successful conclusion in only three weeks, at a low cost in British lives and money. It was the prototype of the "aerial policing" of rebellious colonies that the Royal Air Force would conduct in the 1920s and 1930s, most notably in Ireland and Iraq.
February 12-24, 1920: Leaders of the United Kingdom, France and Italy met in the London Conference to discuss the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire.
February 19, 1920: The United States Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles.
March 7, 1920: The Syrian National Congress proclaimed Syria independent with Faisal I of Iraq as king.
March 12, 1920: The British government presented its annual budget. The government may as well have been running a war economy with a budget of £2.5 billion; the 1914 budget had been thought shocking enough for peacetime spending of £200 million. These numbers are somewhat distorted by inflation, but when the inflationary bubble was pricked in 1920, the government was forced to declare its priorities. Interest rates rose to nearly 8% while the budget more than halved government spending. Before the war, income tax had been 8%; now it was 33%. A quarter of the government’s budget was dedicated to serving its interest.
March 13-17, 1920: Wolfgang Kapp and Walther von Lüttwitz's 'Kapp Putsch', an attempted coup in Germany, briefly ousted the Weimar Republic government from Berlin but failed due to public resistance and a general strike.
March 15, 1920: Military occupation of Constantinople by British Empire forces acting for the Allied Powers against the Turkish National Movement. Retrospectively, the Grand National Assembly of Turkey regards this as the dissolution of the Ottoman regime in Istanbul.
March 25, 1920: British recruits to the Royal Irish Constabulary began to arrive in Ireland. They became known from their improvised uniforms as the "Black and Tans."
August 7, 1920: According to new figures released by the Treasury, unemployment in Britain had fallen to a level lower than it was before the Great War thanks in a significant part to the Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act. With this, strikes were beginning to fall and unrest among the unemployed also declined.
August 27, 1920: Lloyd George presided over a Cabinet meeting in which he held court for four solid hours, “talking without pausing for breath” according to a witness, as he argued the need for a significant public works programme. Despite his passion, the Prime Minister was getting nowhere.
October 20, 1920: By this point, Britain had fallen into recession. Her factories had been archaic before the war, now they struggled to sell anything to a shrivelled post-war export market. Unemployment was quick to quintuple to 10%, while inflation turned to a deflation of nearly -15%, adding an additional burden onto Britain’s already crushing national debt which had reached 135% of national income. With the huge cuts imposed by the Treasury, there was no extra spending to cushion the effect of the recession. Social reform was often impossible, and the recession came to be described at the time as the worst since the Industrial Revolution. Housebuilding was a prime victim with Christopher Addison, the man behind the state programme, resigning as target after target was missed. The Treasury may have soon been running a surplus, but the deep deflation ensured that debt was little affected, not decreasing until 1923, and very modestly.
December 23, 1920: The Government of Ireland Act 1920 passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom received Royal Assent from George V, providing for the partition of Ireland into Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland with separate parliaments, granting a measure of home rule.
May 7, 1921: King George V was assassinated in Belfast during the opening of the Northern Ireland Parliament. He was shot by Jackie Finnegan, an Irish nationalist, who was later hanged for the murder. The king’s murder massively escalated the situation in Ireland and triggered the Irish Civil War. Many historians consider the death of George V to be the definitive end of Pax Britannica, and its psychological impact for the British was severe. The politically naïve Edward VIII, a 27-year old vain, petulant womaniser, was thrust onto the throne “far before he can be considered ready.”
May 8, 1921: Lloyd George ordered the British Army to mobilise and fully occupy Ireland, while declaring a state of emergency in the province. Upwards of 100,000 troops were prepared for deployment in Ireland, at a time when anti-Irish riots were sweeping Britain especially in London and Liverpool where a dozen people had been murdered. The Government of Ireland Act, passed the previous year, was suspended as martial law was implemented across the whole of Ireland.
May 11, 1921: The funeral of George V took place in London, his body returning to England aboard HMS Hood. The King’s assassination had galvanised support for the use of military force in Ireland, and thus made it politically unacceptable for a British government to allow Irish independence despite widespread support for it in Liberal and Labour circles.
May 28, 1921: The Special Protection Service, a specialised armed branch of the Metropolitan Police, was formed with the task of protecting high-ranking politicians and dignitaries following the murder of George V.
June 4, 1921: A secret meeting between Lloyd George and the Labour leader, J.R. Clynes, took place at Pinfold Manor in the Surrey village of Walton-on-the-Hill. Within the Cabinet, Lloyd George had been fighting fiercely for an alternative for deflation but his Conservative chancellor, Austen Chamberlain, was refusing to budge and the Prime Minister’s lofty hopes of an increased state role in the economy seemed dashed. Lloyd George hoped to persuade Clynes of forming a new coalition, without a general election, with defectors from Asquith’s Liberals making up the numbers to achieve a majority. Clynes was non-committal in the meeting, but it mattered little; despite the secrecy, word got out almost immediately and a crisis erupted in the existing coalition.
June 10, 1921: David Lloyd George made an open appeal to Herbert Asquith for the two to reunite their parties into a single Liberal Party once more, openly suggesting that coalition with the Conservatives could end and that a fresh leadership election for the newly reunited party could be held. For Asquith, this offered the potential of his returning to the premiership. For the Conservatives, they saw the appeal as a naked demonstration that Lloyd George was doing everything he could to banish the Tories into Opposition. Their leader, Andrew Bonar Law, was ill and with this crisis some within the Cabinet saw him as a liability amid the possibility of a sudden election.
June 20, 1921: Without fanfare, Andrew Bonar Law was removed as Conservative leader and replaced by Stanley Baldwin, the President of the Board of Trade.
June 30, 1921: The Conservatives formally withdrew from the coalition, forcing David Lloyd George to go to Buckingham Palace and ask that Parliament be dissolved and a fresh election be called.
August 11, 1921: A general election was held, with 705 seats available and 353 needed for a majority. The Conservatives came first with 253 seats, while Labour won 222, the Liberals took 117 while the National Liberals took 88. The Irish Parliamentary Party took 53 of Ireland’s 105 seats and once again boycotted the Commons. 14 Independent candidates also took seats, while the Communists won a “disappointing” 6. The haggling over a coalition deal began.
September 1, 1921: A coalition agreement between Labour, the Liberals, and National Liberals was signed with a majority of 126 due to the IPP’s boycott. Britain earned the accolade of being the first country to elect a social democratic government through universal suffrage. J.R. Clynes became Labour’s first Prime Minister, while Herbert Asquith became Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lloyd George was made Minister without Portfolio, with the responsibility for advising the Prime Minister on economic policy. This was bound to cause tension with Asquith, especially as the exact definition of Lloyd George’s responsibilities was left vague and thus allowed it to overlap. Clynes found himself trying to run a Cabinet dominated by two powerful Liberal personalities which hated each other.
November 2, 1921: 17 Liberal MPs resigned the Liberal whip and crossed the Commons chamber to join the Conservatives in protest at the coalition with Labour, with Winston Churchill among the defectors.
December 1, 1921: The British Broadcasting Corporation, or BBC, was founded.
December 8, 1921: The Labour-led coalition delivered its first budget, with the very concept of a Labour-led government remaining a curiosity that much of the world was watching. It introduced an experimental one-time capital levy of 5%, which the Liberals had deeply opposed before the election but now accepted if it would keep a program of nationalisation at bay. Also announced was a graduated wealth tax on fortunes over £5,000 (£200,000 today) and an increase in death duties for large estates. There would be a super-tax on the highest incomes, taxation of land values and a commitment to reforming the tax system so it better reflected people’s ability to pay. With this new revenue the party found room for some fiscal stimulus too. Anyone on an income of £250 (£10,000 today) or less would be exempted from income tax while anyone earning between £250 and £500 were promised that their taxes would not rise. A public works programme to increase investment and reduce unemployment would also be funded, a passion project for both Labour and Lloyd George. A new network of trunk roads across the country were to be built, what Asquith promised would be “the greatest roadbuilding project since the Romans.” There was also a commitment to bringing an end to Britain’s inefficient and fragmented electricity supply system, which relied on a patchwork of small supply networks, by bringing about the state owned National Grid with the promise of electricity coverage for all homes within ten years. Also promised was slum clearance, a renewed housebuilding effort, the improvement of sanitation systems, and funding to modernise British factories.
January 8, 1922: An anti-British protest in Dublin turned violent, with troops of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers intervening with tanks helping to break up the crowds.
February 1, 1922: Britain recognised the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
February 7, 1922: The King’s Speech took place, the first to be delivered by Edward VIII. The King’s Speech outlined the government’s legislative agenda for the year, and proved highly controversial with many Labourites for lacking any mention at all of bringing industries or utilities into public ownership. J.R. Clynes had agreed with his Liberal partners not to entertain such notions but had avoided being clear with his own party about this agreement, lest he alienate them. Among the most vocal of the outraged were the Red Clydesiders, a group of about 30 Scottish MPs with hardline left-wing views.
February 22, 1922: The United States Congress passed the Kelley-Cochran Act, imposing a 20% tariff on imports from Britain in response to the “occupation” of Ireland.
March 17, 1922: The Lord’s Shuttle was established by several Catholic associations in the United States, with the purpose of funding the expatriation of Irish Catholics to the safety of the U.S. amid the civil war. Within five years, more than 150,000 had made the journey. Similar expatriations to France and Spain were taking place.
April 2, 1922: The Representation of the People Act 1922 was passed by the House of Commons, equalising the right to vote for both women and men.
April 27, 1922: The Equal Pay Bill passed its second reading in the House of Commons. A significant Labour policy, it would enshrine into law the right of equal pay for women. However, outside Parliament a huge trade union protest against the bill was turning violent with running battles against police.
April 28, 1922: The British government suddenly withdrew its support for the Equal Pay Bill before it could come to a final vote, panicking over the widespread trade union opposition so early into the government’s existence. J.R. Clynes apparently seemed to feel that jettisoning the bill was a necessary sacrifice for wider legislative success, having already seen for himself while in opposition how quickly the party could tear itself apart.
May 8, 1922: The Mons Conference took place in Belgium, called for by the British government to resolve remaining issues regarding Germany. British, French, German, Italian, and Belgian representatives attended. J.R. Clynes hoped to end the requirement for Germany to pay reparations following the Great War, but found his efforts frustrated by the French government. Clynes delivered his most famous speech on the final day of the conference, warning that “blood will flow once more on European fields” if reparations were maintained. The Mons Conference ended in failure, but Clynes’ words would prove prophetic. The British government’s continued courting of ending reparations would prove a significant factor in the Anglo-Franco split.
May 27, 1922: The British government established the Industrial Improvement Board, which would provide money to industries to allow them to modernise their equipment and practices. The IBB was heavily controversial among the trade unions, as “modernisation” was seen as code for cutting staff numbers, and the Commons vote to approve its creation would only narrowly scrape by as many Labourites rejected it out of hand.
July 12, 1922: Germany demanded a moratorium on further reparations payments, encouraged by the British attitude on the subject, and received the endorsement of the British government. The demand fell on deaf ears in Paris.
August 16, 1922: The first woman was appointed to the Cabinet, when Annabelle Watson MP for Liverpool West Derby was appointed Minister of Pensions. Before entering Parliament she had been a significant figure in the Amalgamated Union of Operative Bakers and, notably, was born in Derby to parents who were both Crimean Tatars.
August 22, 1922: The Dublin Conference took place, intended to find a peaceful solution to the Irish Civil War. It ended in failure as the British government refused to accept independence for Ireland; before the escalation of the conflict with the killing of the king, it would have been politically possible but now the country had been galvanised and to give in the demands of the Irish nationalists would be seen as a defeat that could not be accepted.
September 8, 1922: The House of Commons passed the Mandatory Minimum Wages Act, which established the national minimum wage and was a significant legislative victory for the Labour movement.
September 15, 1922: The Cabinet met to discuss the Chanak Crisis, as Turkey moved to push the Greek armies out of Turkey and restore Turkish rule in the Allied occupied territories of Turkey, primarily in Istanbul. Lloyd George was the sole proponent for military action against Turkey. The firm rebuttal of his insistence to go to war helped significantly isolate him within the Cabinet, and he himself turned his entire attention to economic affairs; in the next series of Cabinet meetings to discuss issues of foreign affairs, Lloyd George did not even attend for fear of isolating himself further and causing a reduction of his brief.
October 8, 1922: Already facing discontent in the party for his “middle ground” attitude to socialism and willingness to challenge the trade unions as shown by his support for the Equal Pay Bill, J.R. Clynes faced a leadership challenge championed by the Red Clydesiders. Ramsay MacDonald, a hero of the Labour movement, challenged Clynes but faced opposition from many who saw his radicalism as dangerous in a time of coalitions. MacDonald lost the leadership challenge by 7 votes.
December 12, 1922: The U.S. Secretary of State, Charles Hughes, called for an impartial investigation of Germany's capacity to make reparation for damage done in the Great War. Britain quickly endorsed the call, but it was rejected by France.
January 7, 1923: France and Belgium initiated the occupation of the Ruhr, an industrial area of Germany, in response to the German failure to keep up with reparation payments. J.R. Clynes called Parliament into an emergency session, with many in the Labour party calling the French action an act of imperialism.
January 8, 1923: At an emergency session of the House of Commons, J.R. Clynes condemned the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr as “unacceptable” and called for the end of reparation payments by Germany. The House of Commons voted to officially condemn the Franco-Belgian action, further splitting the wartime allies with the Anglo-French entente apparently over. France lodged a formal diplomatic protest, with the government in Paris toying with the idea of recalling their ambassador in London.
January 10, 1923: The German government issued an order to begin mobilising its military, potentially to take back the Ruhr from France and Belgium; many within the German government were seeing Britain as a potential ally in any conflict.
January 14, 1923: With the Ruhr Crisis at a critical moment, the British government announced that any conflict between France and Germany would see Britain throw its support behind France. The announcement helped defuse the crisis as Germany backed down, but resentment against Britain lingered within a French government which regarded Britain as unsatisfactorily committed to keeping Germany down.
February 17, 1923: The House of Commons passed the Education Act, which increased the school leaving age from 14 to 16 and removed substantial portions of education policy from the remit of local councils and centralised it within a new Ministry of Education. Many on the Labour benches had hoped to abolish private education altogether but instead the act provided for experimental “comprehensive” schools which did not select students on the basis of aptitude or family wealth. The act was heavily influenced by the writings of the socialist intellectual R.H. Tawney; it organised primary and secondary education as two stages in a single continuous process, with the comprehensives representing the long-cherished view that equality of opportunity should guide education policy.
April 3, 1923: The National Liberals officially became a separate party, renaming themselves to the People’s Party with Lloyd George at their head. They were early exponents of Keynesian economics, with this being the centre of their platform.
April 18, 1923: The House of Commons passed the National Pensions Act, which reformed the pension system in the United Kingdom by reducing the age of entitlement from 70 years of age to 65, and increased the weekly payment from 5 shillings to 11.
April 26, 1923: Prince Albert, Duke of York married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in Westminster Abbey.
May 3, 1923: Work began on one of the most famous symbols of the coalition’s public works programme; the pumped-storage hydroelectric dam in northeast Wales at Dinorwig. Ironically, the public works scheme was not championed by Labour ministers within the Cabinet but was really the brainchild of David Lloyd George, who continued to beaver away as Minister without Portfolio. Labour ministers had seemed more focused on extending and liberalising unemployment benefits, but Lloyd George had won many in the Labour movement around to his way of thinking that the government “must treat the cause, not the symptoms,” and it was observed by J.R. Clynes that Lloyd George seemed to have more friends in the Labour movement than he did within his own Liberals.
May 18, 1923: J.R. Clynes presided over the opening of Great Swinburne in Northumberland, the first of the New Towns to be created by Labour policy to alleviate the housing shortage. It featured 10,000 houses built on what had once been a near-empty village and a new trunk road connecting it with Newcastle, the first bypass to be built as part of Labour’s grandiose vision for a nationwide system of motorways.
June 2, 1923: Andrew Bonar Law, the former Conservative leader, resigned from the House of Commons and withdrew from political life due to ill health.
June 19, 1923: The British government introduced the “cat and mouse strategy” in the Irish military campaign. It brought about new regulations on the conduct of troops deployed in Ireland, to bring an end to atrocities and win the hearts and minds of Irishmen. It was hoped that the IRA would continue to commit atrocities, and thus lose the support of the populace. J.R. Clynes had always been unhappy about the brutality with which the war was being waged, and hoped the new strategy could keep Labour together.
July 4, 1923: The Sherwood Declaration was issued by the owners of several British film companies, agreeing to merge their studios together to form a single company which could perhaps challenge the might of Hollywood. Islington Studios, Ealing Studios, Elstree Studios, and Cricklewood Studios merged into Royal Sherwood Studios, based north of Nottingham. This came amid severe difficulty for the British film industry with American films dominating the market, and it was hoped that Royal Sherwood could sufficiently pull its weight to save the industry in Britain. It possessed several millionaire backers and over the next few days a highly successful publicity campaign attracted millions more in public donations. Nearby Nottingham would go on to be regarded as the European capital of film. The first Chairman of Royal Sherwood, Sir Oswald Stoll, gave a speech at the new Sherwood Palace headquarters where he promised that a “talking picture” would come out of Royal Sherwood by 1927.
December 7, 1923: Four Irish insurgent gunboats off the coast of Sligo attacked the Royal Navy destroyer Wakeful, which suffered minimal damage from machine gun fire before sinking all four gunboats, killing roughly 50 insurgents.
March 3, 1924: The Feast Day Massacre took place in the Irish city of Cork, when insurgents ambushed and killed 36 British soldiers while a mortar attack set fire to the Cathedral of St Mary and St Anne. The British authorities responded with a series of brutal raids against IRA sympathisers across Ireland.
April 10, 1924: The Dawes Committee convened, at the request of the Allied Reparations Commission, to find a way to resolve the outstanding issues of Germany being unable to pay the reparations required of it in the Treaty of Versailles.
June 7, 1924: The Bank of England issued a widely circulated report which effectively endorsed the government’s economic policy rejecting tariffs, arguing that it had done much to keep industrial output stimulated and reduce unemployment. By this point the British economy was undoubtedly over the difficult post-war years; industry in particular was doing better than almost anywhere else in Europe, largely because of the happy marriage of Lloyd George’s public works programmes and Labour’s prioritising of modernising industry, which had kept British competitiveness up and unemployment down.
July 6, 1924: The Imperial Conference of 1924 convened in London; there, J.R. Clynes agreed to extend dominion status to India, effectively declaring it an equal member of the British Empire alongside Canada or Australia with self-autonomy.
August 10, 1924: In a crucial Cabinet meeting, the government came very close to collapsing over the war in Ireland. Although the Security Service had done an astounding job in infiltrating and dismantling Irish Republican Army cells, the devolved structure of the IRA made destroying just one cell a significant job. Nonetheless, the IRA was running out of money and the controversial “cat and mouse” strategy to lure the IRA into committing atrocities seemed to be working by driving Irish residents away. The meeting concluded that a plebiscite ought to be held in Ireland to decide its future, setting a precedent that would see referendums called by the government to avoid making difficult choices that might be their downfall.
August 17, 1924: The Dawes Committee dissolved, unable to overcome the refusal of France to withdraw from the Ruhr area.
September 4, 1924: A plebiscite was held in Ireland on whether it should become an independent state. Amid a widespread Catholic boycott, the measure was rejected overwhelmingly, but the poor turnout largely rendered it meaningless. By this point in the war, roughly 100 British soldiers were being killed each month and their death toll had risen to about 2,300.
October 1, 1924: The French Parliament voted to formally annex the Territory of the Saar Basin from Germany, inviting widespread condemnation for its blatant violation of the League of Nations mandate and demonstrating to the world that the League of Nations was unable to deal with issues arising from the behaviour of the great powers. The British government called for a strengthening of the League’s abilities, while the French action played right into the hands of far-right elements in Germany and helped catapult Adolf Hitler into a major figure in German domestic politics, as Germany lost its vital coal and steel industries and hyperinflation soon followed.
November 11, 1924: An anti-war march through London, opposing the continued conflict in Ireland, forced the cancellation of Armistice Day ceremonies.
January 1, 1925: The Commonwealth of India was proclaimed in Delhi, following the example of other British territories such as Canada or Australia by accomplishing the federation of its 13 provinces, though most of the princely states maintained their nominal sovereignty. Mahatma Gandhi was sworn in by the Governor-General of India, The Viscount Peel, as the interim Prime Minister of India. The new Commonwealth of India included OTL Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Burma and was referred to by J.R. Clynes, who was present for the Delhi proclamation, as “the birth of a future world capital.”
March 4, 1925: The Parliament Act 1925 was passed, which abolished hereditary peerages in the House of Lords and capped the number of peers in the Lords at 1,000. It was a significant victory for the more hardline Labourites in the Commons, but now many looked towards the possibility of abolishing the chamber altogether.
May 1, 1925: Cyprus became a Crown colony.
June 17, 1925: In a major defeat for the government, the House of Commons voted against a measure to ban the closed shop. It had been a significant concession to the Liberals in the coalition, but had enraged trade unionists and triggered outright rebellion in the Labour Parliamentary Party.
July 3, 1925: J.R. Clynes resigned as Prime Minister and as Leader of the Labour Party amid inconsolable differences within the party over industrial policy which seemed insurmountable in a coalition. Clynes lamented that the Parliamentary Party seemed unable to understand how a coalition worked, as his old nemesis Ramsay MacDonald became the new Prime Minister, for the party to discover that he was actually more moderate than they thought.
July 27, 1925: The BBC's Daventry transmitting station on Borough Hill, Daventry in central England opened as the world's first longwave broadcast radio transmitter, taking over from its Chelmsford facility.
August 7, 1925: The Stardust Film Festival began for the first time at Sandbanks in Poole, on the Dorset coast. It would come to be the world’s premier film festival.
August 10, 1925: The coalition issued the Northumbria Declaration, which amounted to a renewal of the Labour-Liberal coalition with a new series of agreed policies. The Liberals, still desperately trying to tread a middle ground between Labour and the Conservatives, gave in and accepted Ramsay MacDonald’s demands for public ownership in the form of cooperatives in the mining and railway industries. The declaration reiterated the coalition’s rejection of tariffs and finally formalised a rejection of returning to the gold standard. With Britain presently the largest economy in Europe, and her economy seeming healthy,
September 1, 1925: In an effort to set the tone of his administration, Ramsay MacDonald blocked the attempted purchase of Vauxhall Motors by American giant General Motors and promised a subsidy for the automobile industry in Britain to help it develop.
October 7, 1925: The Belfast Agreement was signed by the British government and representatives of the Irish Republican Army, which mandated a general ceasefire, the reduction by two-thirds of the British forces stationed in Ireland, and partition of Ireland into two nations; Ulster and Eire, both of which would have near-total legislative independence while remaining part of the United Kingdom. The agreement was effectively an acceptance of the defunct Government of Ireland Act 1920, with the IRA having been exhausted and largely destroyed as an organisation by the civil war. Nonetheless, political violence would remain endemic in Ireland and more serious violence would regularly flare up in the future.
December 31, 1925: The New Year Revolution took place in Germany, when communists seized government buildings in Weimar and briefly arrested Chancellor Hans Luther amid the hyperinflation which had followed the loss of the Ruhr and the failure of the Dawes Plan. The revolution proved a failure; Luther escaped his captors and was smuggled out of Berlin, while the revolutionaries had no plan outside of the capital as they assumed the populace would rise up spontaneously across the country. The army intervened within hours and retook control. The revolution had two significant consequences; it helped demonstrate even to France that a solution was needed to the German economic situation, and it helped further embolden the Nazi Party as the bogeyman of communism was shown to be a direct threat.
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