10. Conclusion

Throughout the First World War, the British railway industry’s trade press acknowledged the magnitude of the conflict and detailed the railways’ ongoing support to the nation’s armed forces. In the war’s opening months, as men streamed into the recruiting stations, the numbers and proportions of each company’s workforce to have answered Kitchener’s call were recorded in frequently updated league tables of patriotic service.¹ As the war expanded in scale and scope, the activities and increased prominence of railwaymen like Sir Eric Geddes and Sir Sam Fay were reported on with familial pride. After the fighting had ceased, the Railway Gazette marked the industry’s involvement with a special issue, which exclaimed in an editorial that although ‘transport has always been an important factor in war … never in the history of the world has it played such a great part as in the war now terminated’.² The fundamental requirements of modern, industrial warfare had presented unprecedented challenges for the transportation services behind all of the belligerent armies during the war: the accumulation and sustenance of millions of men; the transport of thousands of machines; and the provision of innumerable combinations of goods and services among others. Without vast bureaucratic organizations and complex, integrated supply systems the First World War could not have taken on the course or the character that it did. Transportation was central to the conduct of the war, and cannot be divorced from the discussion of the military campaigns that took place between 1914 and 1918. However, the prediction made by the North-Eastern Railway Magazine in 1916 – that ‘when the history of the present war is written it would be found that our railways and our railwaymen had taken a very large share in operations’ – has not proven to be the case.³ This book has rectified this deficiency.

This volume opened with three questions, the answers to which challenge Lloyd George’s principal assertion about the wartime British army and shed new light on the military’s application of civilian specialists between 1914 and 1918. It has demonstrated that Britain’s senior political and military figures acknowledged the value of industrial knowledge and technologies long before the outbreak of war in August 1914. The emergence and growth of the railway industry stimulated the development of an enduring professional association between the army, the government and Britain’s transport experts. This peacetime relationship manifested itself both in organizational and practical terms. The formation of the ERSC in 1865 underlined the army’s respect for the expertise of, and methods applied by, those tasked with the construction and management of a global transport and distribution network. The establishment of the REC in November 1912 represented a desire among both civilian and military figures to work harmoniously in the event of war. The army also benefited substantially from its pre-war interactions with Britain’s transport experts outside the committee’s deliberations. A new generation of officers received academic and vocational introductions to the operation of railways thanks to the contributions of British transport experts to the LSE’s administrative staff course and the Midland Railway’s engineering programme.

The importance of close collaboration between Britain’s transport experts, the army and the government was demonstrated graphically in the opening days and weeks of the war. The production of the WF scheme was a joint endeavour. The impressment of horses, the routing and rerouting of thousands of specially provided trains, the identification of infrastructural improvements that were required at the French Channel ports, the allocation of sufficient locomotives and rolling stock and myriad other tasks necessary for the mobilization and movement of the BEF to the continent could not have been accomplished by the military alone. A modern, industrial army equipped with weapons, vehicles, aeroplanes and other impedimenta could not have been despatched from Britain’s shores swiftly and effectively unless its transportation was properly coordinated. Henry Wilson’s principal contributions to the WF scheme was that he recognized how crucial the involvement of civilian specialists were to the formulation of a reliable, executable mobilization plan, and that he ensured the army’s preparations for war were supported by the companies that put them into practice.

The bonds forged before 1914 were thoroughly exploited over the years that followed. As the BEF grew exponentially, and the war’s insatiable demands for manpower and materials stretched into every corner of the empire (and beyond), Britain’s transport experts were called upon to play a multitude of roles in support of the military effort. They, and the private enterprises that employed them, were essential to the empire’s response to the demands of an industrial war. Within the first twelve months of hostilities the largest transport companies had placed their human and material resources at the War Office’s disposal, and they continued to do so throughout the war. Men with British, imperial and wider experience of railway construction and operation became core components of the supply services that were established to support the army’s various expeditionary forces. A plethora of experts examined, reported upon and enhanced the BEF’s transportation services on the western front. The industrial capacity possessed by Britain’s largest railway companies was redirected from its peacetime applications towards the manufacture of items as diverse as drinking cups and six-pounder Hotchkiss guns. Furthermore, when the demand for munitions necessitated the establishment of a dedicated organization in 1915, Britain’s transport experts were among the first technocrats to populate Lloyd George’s nascent Ministry of Munitions. Civilian specialists intensified British military power, and facilitated the colossal expenditures of ammunition that characterized the war on the western front.

The multiplicity of contributions recorded in this book – both collectively and, as in the case of Sir Francis Dent’s numerous responsibilities, individually – have stressed the extent to which civilian skills and expertise were applied to the prosecution of war-related duties during the First World War. Manufacturing, engineering and labour, engaged in dispersed but interlinked activities, were all vital to the continued capacity of an army engaged in a war of attrition. As Major Wilfred Lindsell acknowledged in his post-war textbook on military administration:

As senior managers within some of Britain’s largest companies, the pre-war railway industry provided figures such as Geddes, Fay and Sir Guy Granet with experience that made some of the challenges – if not the global scale – of wartime transport organization recognizable ones.

The recalibration of the Franco-British coalition, which took place concurrent with Geddes’s installation as DGT and DGMR, also increased the opportunities for Britain’s transport experts to play a larger role in the prosecution of the First World War. France and Britain entered the conflict without an adequate managerial framework to ensure that national priorities were subordinated to the shared aim of expelling German forces from occupied territory. During 1914 and 1915 both Dent and Gerald Holland found their designs to improve the BEF’s logistical capabilities constrained by the French authorities. As hosts, senior partners and the suppliers of the vast majority of the machinery, personnel and infrastructure required to operate the shared transport network behind the allied forces, the French army and state’s desire to retain overall control of the apparatus upon which its national defence rested overrode all other considerations. Even after the BEF grew to number more than a million men, and the colossal battles of 1916 had eroded France’s ability to honour its pre-war agreements, the latter proved reluctant to combine demands for further British support with a willingness to surrender executive control to Britain’s transport experts.

Geddes’s first real exposure to the Franco-British alliance underlined the inherent complexities of coalition warfare. The transportation discussions that opened proceedings at the Calais conference on 26 February 1917 have been overshadowed by the political machinations that followed, but the disagreements between Geddes and Albert Claveille emphasize the need for further studies on the mechanics of the allies’ partnership. This book has documented the accumulation of British manpower, machines and materials behind the western front that followed Geddes’s appointments as DGT and DGMR; it has raised doubts about the businessman’s temperamental suitability for a role that demanded a conciliatory and diplomatic approach; and it has illustrated how British transport expertise was disseminated throughout the global war effort with varying degrees of success after 1916.

However, further research is required to understand how the other belligerents’ military and railway authorities responded to the unprecedented challenges of industrial warfare. Elizabeth Greenhalgh, in a reference to ‘conflict’ between Claveille and GQG, has provided a tantalising glimpse into the civil–military relations that shaped the French war effort.⁵ Yet the view from the other side of the conference table and the other side of the hill remains partial. More work is needed in this direction to produce a comprehensive account of transportation on the western front and beyond, one which covers topics such as: how the different pre-war transport arrangements developed by Britain and the continental powers affected the establishment of efficient supply organizations behind the front lines; how effectively the Franco-British partnership exploited the available transport infrastructure and supported its weaker allies; how efficiently the German railway authorities were able to utilize the rail capacity available in occupied territory to support their troops in a multi-front war; and how the continued presence of domestic concerns and post-war strategic considerations manifested themselves in the evolving coalitions that fought the war. As Sir Philip Nash’s attempts to secure a British contribution to improve the transport connections between France and Italy in 1918 demonstrate, internal calculations retained a powerful influence over individual belligerents’ actions throughout the war.

In highlighting the breadth and diversity of Britain’s transport experts’ contributions to the war effort, including Nash’s with the IATC, this book has demonstrated that Geddes’s transportation mission to GHQ in August 1916 was far from unique in scale or scope. The foregoing discussion has argued that Geddes’s contribution must be considered as part of a wider narrative of civil–military relations, one which permits a more nuanced understanding of how Britain’s senior political and military leaders conceptualized the war as it unfolded. The full implications of industrial warfare’s material and organizational requirements revealed themselves only gradually. In 1914 and 1915 the manpower and materials required to overburden the extant rail and road systems on the western front had yet to be accumulated in France and Flanders. The military inclination and political justification for a large-scale examination of the BEF’s transportation services lay dormant until 1916, when the unprecedented effort of the battle of the Somme illuminated the weaknesses of the infrastructure and organization upon which any substantial allied advance depended. Under such circumstances the use of civilian specialists was confined; the talents of men such as Dent and Holland were applied selectively in response to comparatively small-scale conundrums, such as the increased throughput of goods at the Bassin Loubet or the development of an efficient IWT fleet. Prior to the Somme, when the true extent of the commitment required to defeat the Germans remained unclear, it was both militarily undesirable and politically impossible for large quantities of precious raw materials to be redirected from the ever-growing demand for munitions and weapons of destruction into the production of locomotives and rolling stock. Until the absolute necessity for substantial infrastructure improvements was made abundantly clear during the second half of 1916, there was insufficient compulsion for transportation to be considered a priority issue in the allocation of raw materials.⁶ Geddes’s most important contribution to the British war effort was that he produced the organizational systems, manpower and equipment required to conduct warfare on a hitherto unimaginable scale. That a civilian, rather than a professional soldier, was given the opportunity and the support to do so, has tinged many of the military’s histories of the conflict with a sense of resentment.

Yet by moving the consideration of Britain’s transport experts in the First World War beyond Geddes, this book has presented a more balanced interpretation of the relationship between civilians and soldiers than that which emerged from the post-war period. Lloyd George’s claims about the triumph of civilian ingenuity and innovation over a hidebound, conservative, obstructive military must be revised in light of this study’s findings. The reluctance of officers such as Frederick Clayton, Ronald Maxwell and Richard Montagu Stuart-Wortley to support the transportation mission has provided the bedrock for historical accounts of the so-called civilianization process that took place after August 1916. The foregrounding of insular, individualistic officers with self-preserving tendencies has created an imbalance in representations of the civil–military relationship at play within the British war effort. Haig proved able to work constructively with successive DGTs, while officers such as Henry Mance and Albert Collard were clearly highly respected members of the hybrid civil–military team assembled in the directorate-general of military railways.

Furthermore, this study has highlighted that the civilian specialists drawn into the military machine were not immune to engaging in boundary disputes, nor did they entirely embrace the army’s existing hierarchies. Ralph Wedgwood’s adversarial approach to those who pointed out inefficient practices at the docks under his control, while not directly increasing inefficiency, did nothing to alleviate the problems either. Furthermore, John Stewart’s designs on the role of DGT in the war’s final months demonstrate that not all civilians were driven by purely altruistic motivations during the conflict. The interactions between civilians and soldiers – and, indeed, between civilians and civilians or soldiers and soldiers – within the crucible of the First World War cannot be reduced to simplistic stereotypes. The relationships that developed during the conflict, whether friendly or unfriendly, depended upon such variables as personality, circumstances and timing.

This book has studied the interface between the British army and the empire for whose protection it was responsible. It has shown how the army came to reflect the society from which it came, argued that it was an industrial machine forged from an industrial population, and emphasized that it was sustained by many of the same techniques, methods and procedures that drove a world-leading economy. Between 1914 and 1918, and particularly after 1916, civilian specialists were redirected from the pursuit of profits towards the production of military power on a colossal scale. Britain’s transport experts, from within and without the army’s organizational structure, permitted the empire to pursue a far more material-intensive form of warfare than had hitherto been possible.

The impact of the First World War on British society was profound and abiding. It has left a long shadow over the nation in the century since the guns fell silent. Yet the influence of British society over the conduct of the war was equally significant. From the very outset, and indeed for many years prior to the outbreak of war, Britain’s transport experts and the army conspired to ameliorate the logistical challenges to be addressed in the prosecution of a modern conflict. Between them they planned Britain’s response to the war, enlarged the scope and scale of the empire’s contribution to the fighting and sustained the full implications of modern, combined-arms warfare until victory had been secured.

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¹ ‘Railwaymen and the war’, Railway Gazette, 6 Nov. 1914, pp. 493–97.

² ‘The organisation of war transportation’, Railway Gazette: Special War Transportation Number, 21 Sept. 1920, p. 1.

³ ‘The romance of the railways’, North-Eastern Railway Magazine, vi (1916), p. 38.

⁴ See W. G. Lindsell, A. and Q.: or Military Administration in War (Aldershot, 1933), p. 129.

⁵ E. Greenhalgh, Victory through Coalition: Britain and France during the First World War (Cambridge, 2005), p. 241.

⁶ As Granet noted in a memorandum on the supply of wagons in late 1916, there already existed a ‘great shortage of steel owing to the large demands for big gun ammunition’. See PA, Lloyd George papers, LG/E/6/1/5(A), memorandum on the question of railway wagon supply, p. 3.