Leslie Hore-Belisha

Transport minister, 1934–1937

Hore-Belisha was appointed Minister of Transport in 1934 coming to public prominence at a time when motoring was becoming available to the masses. All speed limits for motor cars had controversially been removed by the Road Traffic Act 1930 during the previous administration. There was, in 1934, a record number of road casualties in the UK, with 7,343 deaths and 231,603 injuries being recorded, with half of the casualties being pedestrians and three-quarters occurring in built-up areas.^{[citation needed]}

Shortly after being appointed, he was crossing Camden High Street when a sports car shot along the street without stopping, nearly causing him "serious injury or worse". He became involved in a public-relations exercise to demonstrate how to use the new "uncontrolled crossings".^{[citation needed]}

Hore-Belisha's Road Traffic Act 1934 introduced a speed limit of 30 mph for motor cars in built-up areas. The new act was vigorously opposed by many, who saw the new regulations as a removal of "an Englishman's freedom of the highway". The earlier 20 mph speed limit had been abolished in 1930 because it was universally flouted. A large backlog of court cases had made the law unenforceable. In addition, The Automobile Association (AA) and the Royal Automobile Club (RAC) had frequently been successful in defending their members against evidence from primitive speed traps.^{[citation needed]}

Hore-Belisha rewrote the Highway Code and was responsible for the introduction of two innovations that led to a dramatic drop in the number of road accidents: the driving test and the Belisha beacon, named after him by the public. On his retirement, he was made vice-president of the Pedestrians' Association and, the organisation adopted a logo (since replaced) of a walking zebra crossing with Belisha Beacon.^[7]

Secretary of State for War, 1937–1940

His success at the Ministry of Transport, in 1937, led to an appointment by Neville Chamberlain as Secretary of State for War replacing the popular Alfred Duff Cooper, who later resigned from the government over Chamberlain's policy of appeasement. There were voices within the Conservative majority that such a high-profile appointment should not have gone to a Liberal National, and Hore-Belisha's Conservative colleagues labelled him a warmonger. Many took to nicknaming him "Horeb-Elisha" or "Horeb" as an antisemitic pun on his race. (Horeb is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible as the place where the golden calf was made and to which Elijah fled.)

Upon appointing Hore-Belisha as Secretary of State, Chamberlain advised him to read B. H. Liddell Hart's book Europe in Arms, which advocated that Britain should avoid becoming involved in a continental land war and rely on the Royal Air Force as its offensive arm.^[8]

Impressed by the book's arguments and under Cabinet pressure to control expenditure, Hore-Belisha formed a close partnership with Liddell Hart and sought to refocus the British Army away from the aim of raising a second British Expeditionary Force to fight in France.

Unhappy with the Army Council's opposition to his policies, Hore-Belisha sacked Field Marshal Cyril Deverell, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, along with the Adjutant General and Master-General of the Ordnance in December 1937.^[8] Guided by Liddell Hart, he interviewed John Dill and Archibald Wavell before finally settling on Lord Gort, a relatively junior general, as Deverell's replacement. The new team at the head of the British Army was not a success. Gort was no more enthusiastic about Hore-Belisha's course of action than Deverell had been and objected to Liddell Hart's continued influence.^[8]: 209 For his part by March 1939, Hore-Belisha would declare that "Gort has no brain at all".

The Munich Crisis shook Hore-Belisha's confidence that Britain would be able to avoid full-scale commitment to a continental war. In December 1938, a group of junior Conservative ministers including the Under-Secretary for War, Lord Strathcona, demanded that Chamberlain remove Hore-Belisha. The Prime Minister refused and Strathcona was sacked, but the event demonstrated Hore-Belisha's political isolation. However, in February, he secured a major increase in budget to re-equip the British Army for continental operations. In his speech to Parliament during the March Budget Estimate, Hore-Belisha acknowledged this was a reversal of his previous policy, but still won plaudits for his plans.

Any hope of reconciliation with his military subordinates was ruined when, at a Cabinet meeting on 28 March, Hore-Belisha recommended doubling the size of the Territorial Army to demonstrate Britain's resolve. This was announced in Parliament the next day, to the consternation of the Army Council who had not been consulted about the decision. Lord Gort, who was in France, reputedly learned of it from a newspaper. The Army was already badly short of equipment and raising the new Territorial Divisions would require transferring soldiers from the front line units.

In May, Hore-Belisha succeeded in passing the Military Training Act, the first peacetime conscription law in the United Kingdom. The Act provided for six months of full-time military training, after which men would enter the Reserve. The first cohort began their training in June. Following the outbreak of war in September it was replaced by the National Service Act.

Dismissal

In January 1940, Prime Minister Chamberlain dismissed Hore-Belisha from the War Office. He had been in an increasingly untenable position due to his disputes with the Army high command and the King and hostility from sympathisers within the public of the British Union of Fascists after Oswald Mosley claimed him to be a "Jewish warmonger".^[9] By 1940, his relations with Lord Gort, commander of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) in France, had deteriorated such that neither man had confidence in the other. Gort and other generals disliked Hore-Belisha's showmanship, but their main disagreements had stemmed from the Pillbox affair, concerning the defence of France along the border with Belgium. Hore-Belisha was unpopular amongst his fellow ministers, with meetings of the War Cabinet said to be regularly tense and loud. As a result, Chamberlain agreed to replace him as Secretary of State for War.^[3]

Military antisemitism contributed to tensions between Hore-Belisha and Gort, with Henry Pownall, the chief of staff to the BEF in France and Belgium until the fall of France in May 1940, claiming in his diary that "the ultimate fact is that they could never get on – you couldn't expect two such utterly different people to do so – a great gentleman and an obscure, shallow-brained, charlatan, political Jewboy".^[3]: 400

Initially, the Prime Minister considered Hore-Belisha for the post of Minister of Information, but decided against this when the Foreign Office raised concerns about the effect of having a Jewish politician in this position given the undercurrent of antisemitism in some sections of the public. Instead, Chamberlain offered him the post of Presidency of the Board of Trade. Hore-Belisha refused this demotion and resigned from the government.^[3]

Due to the sensitive nature of the disagreements, many MPs and political commentators were bewildered as to why the dismissal had taken place, and Hore-Belisha's formal statement to the Commons left them little wiser. A common belief was that Hore-Belisha's bold reforms at the War Office had been opposed by the established military commanders, often caricatured as Colonel Blimps, and that they had forced his resignation. Colin Brown wrote that Hore-Belisha's dismissal was "possibly fuelled by a desire to placate Hitler [by removing a Jew from the Cabinet] even once war had been declared",^[10] or even due to pressure by George VI upon Chamberlain because of Hore-Belisha's previous support for Edward VIII during the abdication crisis, although the offer of alternative office and Hore-Belisha's original appointment argue against this latter motive. Harry Defries argues that antisemitism was the root cause of the dismissal.^[2]

Subsequent political career

Hore-Belisha attempted to rebuild his career under the wartime premiership of Winston Churchill (1940–1945), but his re-appointment was blocked by a combination of his wounded intransigence and continued Conservative prejudice. He resigned from the National Liberals in 1942, sitting as a "National Independent" MP. In the Conservative "caretaker" government of 1945, he was briefly appointed Minister for National Insurance. At the 1945 general election, Hore-Belisha, still standing as a National Independent, was defeated in Devonport by the Labour candidate, Michael Foot. He, thereupon, peremptorily dismissed Musgrave, his faithful political agent, and joined the Conservative Party. In 1947, he was elected to Westminster City Council. He fought unsuccessfully in the Coventry South constituency at the 1950 general election. In 1954, he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Hore-Belisha, of Devonport in the County of Devon.^[11]

Primary sources

• R. J. Minney, ed. The Private Papers of Hore-Belisha (Collins, 1960)
• War Diaries 1939–1945 Field Marshal Lord Alanbrooke edited by Alex Danchev and Daniel Todman (University of California Press, 1957, 1959, 2001) ISBN 0-520-23301-8