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.
History
On 10 November 1902[1] 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.[2]
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.[3]
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 chair of the previous Defence Committee.[4] 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.[5]
Footnotes
- ↑ The note was apparently printed on 8 November.
- ↑ Memorandum on the Improvement of the Intellectual Equipment of the Service. p. 2.
- ↑ Ibid. p. 3.
- ↑ Johnson. Defence by Committee. p. 54.
- ↑ Ibid. p. 56.
Bibliography
- Memorandum on the Improvement of the Intellectual Equipment of the Service. The National Archives. CAB 37/63/152.
- Johnson, Franklyn Arthur (1960). Defence by Committee: The British Committee of Imperial Defence 1902–1959. London: Oxford University Press.
