A last, great labour of love

Already well into his 90s, the great Oxford historian Michael Brock set himself one final major task.

The diaries of Margot Asquith, the wife of H.H Asquith, the Liberal Prime Minister at the outbreak of the First World War, were known to offer a unique ringside view of power.

For she was there in Downing Street to witness the final frantic days of peace before Britain was sucked into the Great War, in August 1914.

From her unique vantage point, she was able to offer insights into her husband’s wartime government, from the early years when Asquith’s leadership drew praise from all quarters, to his fall from grace in December 1916, when a palace coup saw him being replaced by David Lloyd George, whose career he had done so much to promote.

Brock, a former Warden of Nuffield College, working alongside his wife Eleanor, was involved for more than a decade in editing the diaries and overseeing the publication of Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary 1914-16: The View from Downing Street.

The job was completed in good time to see the book going into the shops for the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of “the War to End All Wars”.

However, the historian was not to survive to see the centenary of the Great War; he died in the spring, aged 94.

But to his great joy, he had been able to finish work on the book, which he knew would be his final project and and one of his most significant.

Dr Mark Pottle, of Wolfson College, Oxford, who assisted the Brocks, said: “Towards the end he was not able to work as quickly as he would have liked. I am sure that the prospect of not finishing had been a worry. By the end he was pretty frail.

“But he lived long enough to read the proofs and saw the cover featuring the lovely portrait of Margot by Philip Alexius de Laszlo. He was not able to hold the book in his hands but this was the next best thing.”

His final project could hardly have been more poignant for Brock, a long-serving member of Corpus Christi College and a former deputy-president of Wolfson. For he was recognised as a leading authority on the last Liberal Prime Minister, previously having edited the collection of letters sent by Asquith to the beautiful young socialite, Venetia Stanley, with whom the politician was besotted.

Dr Pottle reckons the book to have been a true labour of love: “He had such an incredible knowledge of the period and characters. He was completely immersed in it. The Margot diaries were hugely important to Michael, particularly with the centenary coming up. “It is a marvellous contribution to all the literature appearing this year. You really cannot get any closer to events than 10 Downing Street and the wife of the Prime Minister.”

And Margot has to be counted as an unusually fascinating leader’s wife as well, for, Margaret Thatcher aside, you would be hard pressed to find a female resident of Downing Street as waspishly opinionated and self assured as Mrs Asquith.

When it comes to diary writing, she is every bit as trenchant in her judgments and memorably acid as the likes of Alastair Campbell and Alan Clark, the best read political diarists of recent times.

Her character assessments of the good and great include such gems as her summing up of Winston Churchill in 1915.

“Winston’s vanity is septic,” she writes. “He would die of blood poisoning if it were not for a great deal of red blood which circulates freely through his heart and stomach.”

Lord Kitchener, may have provided a terrific poster, but as a war leader he hardly instilled confidence in Margot.

“He is a man of good judgement and bad manners; a man brutal by nature and by pose, a man of no imagination though not without ideas,” she wrote in October 1914.

“Slow and cumbersome in mind (totally ignorant of most things), he is clever and even teachable in practice; a bad organiser, good administrator, he has been the despair of the War Office since he succeeded Henry.”

As to his appearance, she writes, a month later: “Lord Kitchener looked better than anyone; he has a really grand figure, and if you can get over a very persistent ugliness, his appearance certainly had great authority. I expect it has contributed much to his reputation.”

Their new book Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary 1914-16: The View from Downing Street                    

Some of her most wounding comments are aimed at the man who ousted her husband as Prime Minister. “One and all have warned me that [Lloyd George] has no ounce of loyalty in him, that he was a traitor and a cad; and yet I’ve struggled (not to like him — I can’t but like him, he has such wonderful charm) to get rid of my disbeliefs in him, to make allowances for his curious nature.”

Born in 1864, the 11th child of a Scottish industrialist, Margot married Henry Asquith in 1894, following the death of his first wife from typhoid in 1891. The marriage register was signed by four Prime Ministers, past, present and future.

In 1912 the couple bought a house close to the Thames in Sutton Courtenay, which was to remain their home until 1928. They are both buried in the churchyard across the road, also the resting place of George Orwell.

By the outbreak of war, Margot had been writing diaries for nearly 40 years, usually recording her entries in the privacy of her bedroom in a feverish scrawl early each morning. She was to write more in 1915 than in any other single year.

The Brocks, who enjoyed a long and lasting writing partnership, were invited to undertake the editing of the diaries by Lord Bonham-Carter in the early 1980s.

All 22 volumes, along with other papers, were presented to Oxford’s Bodleian Library in 1998, by the late Mrs Priscilla Bibesco-Hodgson, Margot’s granddaughter.

In a lengthy introduction to the diaries, Brock suggests she did not always fully understand the full significance of the events she was witnessing. He writes: “Although she possessed some narrative skill she was an opinionated egotist, often inaccurate, the victim of flattery, and occasionally prone to fantasy. For this war period, however, these faults are outweighed by her advantage; she was closer to the Prime Minister, and thus to the centre of events, than anyone else.”

For Mrs Brock, Margot always saw politics in terms of personalities. She said: “Margot was not dispassionate, cool, calculating, but the opposite, and this led her to some very mistaken judgments. On people she could be remarkably perceptive — and while some of her predictions were proved wrong, about Churchill, for example, when she said that ‘even if he lives his future will never be a great political one’ — she could also be tremendously insightful.”

And if Margot could not begin to guess the level of suffering that lay ahead, she was certainly not alone.

As the nation prepares to mark the 100th anniversary of the Great War, one entry will surely linger in the mind of anyone who picks up the book on which the Brocks laboured so long.

“War! War! — everyone at dinner discussing how long the war would last,” she writes on July 24, 1914.

“The average opinion was three weeks to three months.”

Margot Asquith’s Great War Diary 1914-16: The View from Downing Street (OUP, £30)