Difference between revisions of "Committee of Imperial Defence"

Revision as of 04:22, 21 August 2023

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]

On 4 May Balfour formally wrote to the Treasury 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.^[6]

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.^[7]

Footnotes

Bibliography