Committee of Imperial Defence

The Committee of Imperial Defence was a standing advisory committee of the British government from 1902 onwards which helped to formulate imperial defence policy in a formal setting. On the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 it was merged into the new War Cabinet.

Inception

On 10 November 1902 the Secretary of State for War, W. St. John F. Brodrick, and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Selborne, submitted a "Memorandum on the Improvement of the Intellectual Equipment of the Services". Its main proposal was:

Let the Defence Committee of the Cabinet be abolished and a Defence Committee substituted in its place which shall not be considered as a Cabinet Committee. The President of this Committee should be the Prime Minister or another Cabinet Minister, such as the Duke of Devonshire, specially told off for this work. The only Cabinet Ministers who should be permanent members of this Committee should be permanent members of this Committee are the President, the Prime Minister if not himself the President, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and the Secretary of State for War.
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the Secretary of State for the Colonies, the Secretary of State for India, and the President of the Board of Trade should attend only when questions affecting finance, foreign affairs, the Colonies, India, or trade are under discussion. The other members of the Committee should be the Senior Naval Lord of the Admiralty, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army, and the Directors of Naval and Military Intelligence.

Brodrick and Selborne concluded that:

This Committee should have meetings at fixed periods, and at other times when summoned by the President; and its members should no more miss its meetings than they would a Cabinet Council. The Directors of Naval and Military Intelligence should not only be members with a right of speech, but act as Secretaries, and keep permanent records of the decisions of the Committee.

The Prime Minister of the day, Arthur J. Balfour, agreed, and on 18 December the new committee met for the first time, under the presidency of the the Duke of Devonshire, Leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Council, and chair of the previous Defence Committee. When he resigned his offices in 1903, Balfour took the chair. In a departure from the Brodrick–Selborne memorandum, records were not kept by the intelligence heads, but by a Mr. Tyrrell, a clerk in the Foreign Office. Even in 1903 it was already being referred to as the Committee of Imperial Defence by Devonshire in the House of Lords, and by Selborne in public. While it had no staff of its own, that did not mean that people weren't working for it: the Army Estimates for 1904 (published in February of that year) provided for ten men at a cost of £4,180 "temporarily employed for work connected with the Committee of Imperial Defence".

In 1903 a committee on the reconstitution of the War Office was appointed under the chairmanship of Lord Esher (now widely known as the Esher Committee). Its other two members were Admiral Sir John Fisher and Colonel Sir George S. Clarke, with Lieutenant-Colonel Gerald F. Ellison acting as Secretary. In its first report, dated 11 January 1904, the committee reported:

The existing Defence Committee has, under the auspices of the present Prime Minster, proved capable of useful work. There have been, however, in the past and there will be in the future, Prime Ministers to whom the great questions of Imperial defence do not appeal. The Committee is necessarily a changing body. It is not safe to trust matters affecting national security to the chance of a favourable combination of personal characteristics. We are, therefore, convinced that the addition of a permanent nucleus to the Defence Committee is essential as the only valid guarantee (1) that vitally important work with which no one is now charged shall be continuously and consistently carried on, and (2) that the Prime Minister shall have at his disposal all the information needed for the due fulfilment of his weighty responsibilities. And, further, we can conceive no other means of focussing questions of national defence under existing conditions without involving constitutional changes which would be undesirable if not impracticable.

Calling the Defence Committee "in actual fact the corner stone of the needed edifice of Reform", the Esher Committee recommended:

9. The permanent nucleus of the Defence Committee should consist of:—
I. A Permanent Secretary who should be appointed for five years renewable at pleasure.
II. Under this official, two naval officers, selected by the Admiralty, two military officers chosen by the War Office, and two Indian officers, nominated by the Viceroy, with, if possible, one or more representatives of the Colonies. These officers should not be of high rank, and the duration of their appointment should limited to two years.
10. The duties of the permanent nucleus of the Defence Committee would be:—
A. To consider all questions of Imperial Defence from the point of view of the Navy, the Military Forces, India and the Colonies.
B. To obtain and collate information from the Admiralty, War Office, India Office, Colonial Office, and other departments of State.
C. To prepare any documents required by the Prime Minister and the Defence Committee, anticipating their needs as far as possible.
D. To furnish such advice as the Committee may ask for in regard to Defence questions involving more than one Department of State.
E. To keep adequate records for the use of the Cabinet of the day and of its successors.
11. We consider that the functions now vested in the Joint Naval and Military Committee for Defence, and in the Colonial Defence Committee, should be transferred to the Defence Committee. These two Committees should, therefore, be dissolved, as soon as the permanent office which it is proposed to attach to the Defence Committee can be formed.

On 4 May a Treasury minute stated in the name of the First Lord of the Treasury (Balfour) that:

The experience of more than a year's working of the remodelled Committee shews that the services of a small permanent staff are essential if the Committee is to be placed in a position to discharge effectively the duties devolving upon it.
Mr. Balfour recommends that such a staff should at once be formed, and that it should consist, at least in the first instance, of a Secretary and two Assistant Secretaries, with such clerical assistance, if any, as may be found necessary.

The staff were to be paid for out of a new special Sub-head of the Treasury Vote.

The Secretariat of the Defence Committee will be in direct relation with, and under the direct control of, the Prime Minister. Its duties may be defined as follow:—
(1) To preserve a record of the deliberations and decisions of the Committee.
(2) To collect and co-ordinate for the use of the Committee information bearing on the wide problem of Imperial defence, and to prepare any memoranda or other documents which may be required for the purposes of the Committee.
(3) To make possible a continuity of method in the treatment of the questions which may from time to time come before the Committee.
As the Committee is itself only a consultative or advisory body, so the Secretariat will have no administrative or executive functions.
Any decisions arrived at by the Committee which require executive action must, of course, be carried out under the directions, and on the responsibility, of the Minister in charge of the Department concerned. In the same way any information required by the Committee from a Department will be procured only in such a manner as the Head of the Department may from time to time direct.
The First Lord [of the Treasury] proposes that the Secretary should be appointed for a period of five years, and that the normal salary of the post should be 1,500l. per annum without a title to pension; but that the first holder of the office should receive a salary of 2,000l. per annum, in consideration of the fact that he will have to create and organise a new Department.
The two Assistant Secretaries will be nominated by the First Lord of the Admiralty and the Secretary of State for War, subject to the approval of the Prime Minister. They will be appointed for three years, and will receive salaries at the rate of 500l. per annum, without military or naval pay.

Clarke's appointment as Secretary made it's way to the press by 14 May. The appointment of Captain Charles L. Ottley as Naval Assistant Secretary was dated 14 June. Lord Esher wrote to Fisher on 27 July:

I have heard that at the Defence Cttee Clarke sits at a separate table, in a corner of the room. My authority is the Viceroy who was rather shocked at this want of assertiveness on his part.
I have written to Clarke on the subject, and told him that he must sit on the left hand of the President of the Cttee: and assert himself!
He has not enough desire [?] in him. Curzon was not impressed by the way the Cttee did their work. Too much talk, too little decision!

In the August debate which voted the money for the Secretariat, Balfour made sure to publicly identify those he held responsible for the Committee:

I must say how much in this matter we owe to the late Secretary of State for War, the present Secretary for India, and to the First Lord of the Admiralty. I do not say that the idea of this reform of the Committee originated wholly with them, because in matters of this kind almost every good invention has several legitimate fathers. But in a Cabinet Memorandum which they circulated they did more than any other two persons to start the movement upon a sound basis and whenever any one speaks with gratitude of the work of the Committee, they will not forget the names of the two Ministers of the Crown who deserve so much of the praise.

Secretaries

• Colonel Sir George S. Clarke, R.E., May 1904.
• Rear-Admiral Sir Charles S. Ottley, 1 October 1907.
• Colonel Sir Maurice P. A. Hankey, R.M., 1 May 1912.
• Colonel Hastings L. Ismay, 1 August 1938.

Bibliography

• Memorandum on the Improvement of the Intellectual Equipment of the Services. The National Archives. CAB 37/63/152.
• Army Estimate of Effective and Non-Effective Services for the Year 1904–1905. 1904. H.C. 73 (1904).
• Report of the War Office (Reconstitution) Committee. (Part I.) 1904. Cd. 1932.
• Committee of Imperial Defence. Copy of Treasury Minute Dated 4th May 1904, as to Secretariat. 1904. Cd. 2200.
• Recommendations of the National and Imperial Defence Committee as Approved by His Majesty's Government, upon I.—The Relations of the Navy and the Air Force. II.—The Co-ordination of the Defence Forces. 1923. Cmd. 1938.
• Statement Relating to Defence. 1936. Cmd. 5107.
• The Organisation for Joint Planning. 1942. Cmd. 6351.
• Gooch, John (1975). "Sir George Clarke's Career at the Committee of Imperial Defence". The Historical Journal. XVIII:3. pp. 555-569.
• Johnson, Franklyn Arthur (1960). Defence by Committee: The British Committee of Imperial Defence 1902–1959. London: Oxford University Press.

See Also

• Minutes of the 114th Meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence