Hugh Oakeley Arnold-Forster

Hugh Oakeley Arnold-Forster, P.C., (19 August, 1855 – 12 March, 1909) was a Liberal Unionist politician with a keen interest in the Royal Navy, later reflected by his position in the Government of the United Kingdom.

Arnold-Forster was born at Dawlish, Devon, on 19 August 1855, second son and third child (a second sister, Frances Egerton Arnold-Forster, was born later) of William Delafield Arnold (1828–1859), director of public instruction in the Punjab province of India, and Frances Anne (d. 1858), daughter of General J. A. Hodgson (who became surveyor-general of India). His father was a younger son of Thomas Arnold, headmaster of Rugby School, and brother of Matthew Arnold, the poet, critic, and inspector of schools. Oakeley (as he was known to family and friends) Arnold was thus born into the academic purple of the ‘intellectual aristocracy’ of Victorian imperial Britain. Among his widely ramifying cousinhood were Francis Cranmer Penrose, architect and archaeologist, and his daughter Emily Penrose, the principal of Somerville College; and on his mother's side Mary Augusta Ward, known as Mrs Humphry Ward, the novelist and mother-in-law of G. M. Trevelyan, and Julia Frances Huxley, daughter-in-law of T. H. Huxley, and mother of Julian and Aldous Huxley. All his life Arnold bore the stamp of this élite. He had a justifiably high opinion of his intellectual abilities and a corresponding sense of obligation to employ them worthily in social and public service. His high-mindedness was of an uncompromising integrity, redolent somewhat of his famous grandfather's schoolmasterly manner. He worked intensely as a scholar, writer, and controversialist, and then as a politician, to instruct and improve the world about him. Early life and education When Arnold was four months old his parents returned with him to India, where his early years passed with the family at Dharmsala and the hill station at Kangra. It was at this latter place that his mother died in 1858. His father decided to send the children back to England, but, while following them, died at Gibraltar on 9 April 1859. The orphaned children were taken in to the home of their aunt Jane Martha, their father's elder sister, who had married in 1850 the Quaker-bred Bradford woollen master and liberal politician William Edward Forster. The Forsters were childless, and the match between them and the Arnold orphans proved to be entirely happy and affectionate.

Arnold's early schooling was in his maternal family country at Exmouth, under John Penrose, a relation of his late mother. In 1869 he entered Rugby School, scene of his grandfather's renown, but was later withdrawn by Forster on the ground that the standard of discipline had declined. After preparation under a private tutor Arnold matriculated at University College, Oxford, on 24 January 1874. At Oxford he proved receptive to the influence of Ruskin's social, national, and imperial ideals, much as was the case with his near contemporary Cecil Rhodes. He graduated in 1877 with a first-class degree in modern history. On leaving Oxford Arnold, along with his siblings, adopted the name of Arnold-Forster. Early career On 5 November 1879 Arnold-Forster was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn, after having read at the chambers of R. A. McCall. ‘In all that he did’, McCall later recalled, ‘he was ever thorough’ (Arnold-Forster, 29). A promising career as a barrister seemed in prospect, but Forster's appointment by Gladstone in April 1880 to the chief secretaryship at the Irish Office opened up a much more spacious opportunity. Arnold-Forster took on the position of private secretary to his foster father at one of the most critical times in Britain's relationship with Ireland. As Forster grappled with the Irish revolution inspired by Parnell and the Land League his adopted son was initiated into the great world of high politics. Arnold-Forster commenced his voluminous career as a controversialist with the anonymous publication in 1881 of The Truth about the Land League. Forster's break with Gladstone, and his resignation over the so-called Kilmainham treaty and Parnell's release from prison in May 1882, followed by the murder of Lord Frederick Cavendish in Dublin a few days later, left foster father and adopted son united in hostility to Gladstone's Irish policy. Released from official secretarial duties, Arnold-Forster engaged himself assiduously in a variety of public activities. He became involved in social work projects in association with Octavia Hill, Canon Barnett, and other leading philanthropists. He wrote extensively for the reviews, soon establishing himself as an expert in the field of naval, military, and imperial affairs. He joined his foster father among the founders of the Imperial Federation League in 1884, and became its secretary. He became political editor of The Statist, which platform he used in the mid-1880s to criticize Gladstone for the want of a definite and constructive Egyptian policy. He travelled extensively, particularly in eastern Europe and Russia, often in Forster's company. Arnold-Forster had an insatiable love of the sea and seafaring: there was many a cruise in his Thames barge as well as, later, an immersion in the higher concerns of naval policy. His most notable exploit in this earlier period was his role in conspiracy with Captain John Arbuthnot Fisher RN, then director of the Portsmouth gunnery school, and the ‘sensational’ journalist William Thomas Stead to get up very successfully the ‘navy scare’ of the autumn of 1884. In ‘The truth about the navy’, published in Stead's Pall Mall Gazette, Arnold-Forster accused Gladstone's government of neglecting Britain's imperative duty to assure command of the seas.

Amid the stir of these activities in 1884 Arnold-Forster married Mary, eldest daughter of Mervyn H. N. Story-Maskelyne, professor of mineralogy at Oxford. In order to put his marriage on a secure financial footing (there were eventually four sons of the union) Arnold-Forster entered the publishing firm of Cassells in 1885, and commenced on an extensive programme of writing books designed to instruct children in (in his foster father's words) ‘what ought to be the principles which should actuate them as patriotic citizens’ (Arnold-Forster, 62). Of his historical and geographical texts, a piece for Murray's Magazine, ‘In a conning tower’ (1888), was admired by Rudyard Kipling for the authenticity of its depiction of naval warfare. Arnold-Forster was a critic of Edward Cardwell's army reforms of the 1870s, and in 1892 and 1898 made two books out of his indefatigable letters to The Times on the subject. In all, the list of Arnold-Forster's books and ‘principal articles’ in reviews extends to forty-four items. Sir Michael Grant-Duff remarked that ‘Arnolds seem to write as naturally as they learn to breathe or walk’ (ibid., 40).

Like his uncle Matthew, Arnold-Forster found Gladstone's summoning of the ‘masses’ increasingly indigestible. He disliked also what he saw as the pointless brawling of party politics. At the time of debate about the third Reform Bill in 1884 he collaborated with Sir John Lubbock on Proportional Representation. His reservations about Liberalism led to his declining an offer of nomination to contest Oxford City in the Liberal interest in 1881. In 1883 he was nominated to contest Devonport, but withdrew in 1885, following Forster's repudiation of Gladstone's appeal to the country in the general election of that year. It was after the Liberal split over Irish home rule in 1886 that Arnold-Forster found a more congenial role as a Liberal Unionist. He stood unsuccessfully at Darlington in 1886 and at Dewsbury in 1888. In these years he continued to write copiously on questions of imperial defence and inter-service collaboration, as raised particularly by the Hartington commission's work between 1888 and 1890. It was George Robert Parkin, the educationist and imperialist, who commented on Arnold-Forster's intolerance of dissent and his ‘brusque manner which sometimes exposed him to criticism’ (Arnold-Forster, 41). Parliament and the Admiralty At the general election of 1892 Arnold-Forster was successful as a Liberal Unionist in the West Belfast division, which he continued to represent until 1906. He entered the House of Commons as one of Joseph Chamberlain's followers, though characteristically he was at pains to insist upon his independent standing. One of his first acts as an MP in 1893 was to be instrumental in having the union flag flown over the Palace of Westminster while parliament was in session, when existing protocol dictated that the royal standard alone be raised over a royal palace. Official employment could not be found for Arnold-Forster in the construction of the Conservative and Liberal Unionist coalition government in 1895. He was never a popular House of Commons man, nor was he at ease in the clubs. In his advocacy of Chamberlainite policies such as imperial federation and tariff reform Arnold-Forster was ever the stiff and austere intellectual. Chamberlain, now colonial secretary, asked him in August 1900 to go to South Africa as chairman of a land settlement commission to report on the prospects of settling discharged British soldiers in that country after the South African War. Arnold-Forster fulfilled his task in highly difficult circumstances with characteristic dispatch and efficiency. On his return later in 1900 Lord Salisbury invited him to take on the parliamentary secretaryship of the Admiralty in the reconstructed Unionist government, and to answer for that department (Lord Selborne being the new first lord) in the House of Commons.

This was a post well suited to so enthusiastic a navalist as Arnold-Forster. With accustomed energy and single-mindedness he launched himself into a programme of reforms ‘modern and scientific’. A characteristic concern was to optimize the efficiencies to be got by standardization of dimensions of equipment and materials. He worked to this end with Sir Joseph Whitworth, having already (in 1899) published The Coming of the Kilogram. He worked also once more with the new second sea lord, Sir John Arbuthnot Fisher, in revolutionizing the system of entry and training of naval officers to meet the exigent demands of a new era of technology. He worked too with the ‘back-room’ eminence and royal confidant Lord Esher and with Sir George Sydenham Clarke at the War Office on the beginnings of what became the committee of imperial defence. As the journalist James Louis Garvin remarked of Arnold-Forster, ‘no man knew more about public affairs as a whole’ (Arnold-Forster, vii). If such knowledge, combined with unsparing application and athletic dynamism (he was a keen cyclist), were the essential prerequisites of political success, Arnold-Forster's public career seemed by 1903 to be poised on the brink of expansive good fortune.

In 1903 A. J. Balfour, who succeeded his uncle Lord Salisbury as prime minister in 1902, was in great difficulties following Chamberlain's resignation of the Colonial Office in order to further his campaign for tariff reform in an imperial Zollverein, and the consequent counter-resignation of the chief of the free traders, the duke of Devonshire. In his reconstruction Balfour moved St John Brodrick from the War Office to the India Office. Brodrick had not been a convincing reformer of the army, which the South African War had exposed as the most imperative requirement among the great institutions of the British state. On paper Arnold-Forster was his obvious replacement at the War Office. Balfour's difficulty was that he knew Arnold-Forster's great weakness: that he was an over-rigid theoretician and an intellectual perfectionist, unwilling to accept that (in Clarke's words) ‘curiously … illogical institutions’ could answer for Britain's needs more effectively than ones founded on dialectic impeccability (Tucker, 100). In a subordinate office, as at the Admiralty, these considerations were not disabling for Arnold-Forster. But the War Office notoriously required a tactful handling of personalities and a sureness of parliamentary touch. It was thus that Balfour's offer of the War Office and cabinet rank came to Arnold-Forster only after the refusal of five more favoured candidates (the king first wanted Esher, Balfour first wanted Aretas Akers-Douglas). The War Office Hence Arnold-Forster was reluctantly appointed to an office widely regarded as a graveyard of political reputations, at a time when Balfour's ministry was beginning to crumble under the pressures of the division in the Unionist Party over the fiscal question. It was unfortunate also that shortly before taking over at the War Office Arnold-Forster strained his heart severely in a riding accident, from which he never fully recovered. He none the less set about confidently scrapping the Cardwell and Brodrick reforms. Linked battalions and regimental depots were set to be abolished, with ‘large depots’ established for recruitment and supply. Brodrick's army corps system was abandoned. Arnold-Forster wanted a perfectly logical dual-system army: a short-service (two-year) home army to build up a reserve for expansion in time of war, and a long-service (nine-year) army to garrison the empire. His primary aim was to create a real striking force of all arms able to take the field without cumbersome delays of mobilization. In order to fit into this system the militia would be scrapped and integrated into the short-service home army, liable for foreign service in time of war. The commandership-in-chief was abolished and an army council established on the model of the Board of Admiralty. Arnold-Forster set in train plans for a general staff and an inter-service defence committee composed of the intellectual élite. He ‘lectured the generals of the army council as if they were schoolboys and treated the House of Commons with scarcely more respect’ (Hamer, 230).

This ruthless frontal assault on well-entrenched professional interests created for Arnold-Forster many enemies. Eminent and influential people with whom he had collaborated when at the Admiralty, and who were initially sympathetic to root and branch military reforms, found his personality and his methods at the War Office counter-productive. The militia colonels in parliament were especially active in stirring up hostility to his plans. Balfour defended Arnold-Forster to Esher as the ‘best of good fellows, [but] he is at once unconsciously inconsiderate of other people's feelings, and unduly sensitive in his own,—a rather unfortunate combination’ (Hamer, 231). Esher thought Arnold-Forster ‘not quite a gentleman’ (Lees-Milne, 147), and likened his policies to his lack of prowess at shooting: ‘He knows all about guns, but he can't hit a haystack’ (ibid., 231). It was he who played the decisive part in undermining Arnold-Forster's reforming plans at the War Office. Avoiding responsible office, and adept and feline in intrigue, Esher used his connections with the court and his place on the War Office reconstruction committee to work to subordinate the War Office to the policy decisions of the newly formed committee of imperial defence. Esher challenged Arnold-Forster directly on such issues as disposition of militia battalions in what his biographer has described as ‘a bold stance for an independent peer to take up against an accredited Secretary of State for War’ (Lees-Milne, 152). Arnold-Forster ‘never forgave Esher for his interference in military affairs’. He felt he had cause also to condemn Brodrick as a ‘false friend’ (Hamer, 227). Fisher also in his own way became a ‘false friend’ by his resistance to Arnold-Forster's plan to make the Admiralty subject to inter-service co-operation. Esher clandestinely arranged for the formation in January 1905 of a secret subcommittee of the committee of imperial defence, chaired by Balfour and backed by Joseph Chamberlain, to settle matters behind Arnold-Forster's back.

The impasse into which Arnold-Forster got himself in any case hardly mattered in the context of the general disintegration of the position of Balfour's government in 1905. Balfour's resignation in December of that year ended any chance of Arnold-Forster's achieving substantial results for his ‘dual army’ scheme. At the general election called by the new prime minister, Campbell-Bannerman, in January 1906 Arnold-Forster retired from his Belfast constituency and was adopted at more convenient Croydon. This division he successfully held amid the collapse of the unionist parties under the Liberal landslide. In the new parliament he conducted a futile campaign against his successor at the War Office, Richard Burdon Haldane. Death and reputation During 1907 Arnold-Forster suffered severely from his heart condition. A visit to Jamaica, accompanied by his wife and a son, on the invitation of Sir Alfred Jones to attend the conference of the Imperial Cotton Growing Association was intended as a relaxing diversion, but unfortunately coincided with a devastating earthquake which wrecked Kingston and destroyed Port Royal. He and his family were lucky to survive. He returned to Britain in shock, his health in unrelieved decline, and died at 27 Hereford Square in South Kensington on 12 March 1909. He was buried at Wroughton, Wiltshire, the parish of his wife's family home.