The Imperial War Cabinet was created by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George in the spring of 1917 as a means of co-ordinating the British Empire's military policy during the First World War. The body met through 1917 and 1918 and consisted of, in addition to Lloyd George: Sir Robert Borden, Prime Minister of Canada; Louis Botha and General Jan Smuts, each successively Prime Minister of South Africa; Billy Hughes, Prime Minister of Australia; Bill Massey, Prime Minister of New Zealand; and Sir James Meston, the Lieutenant-Governor of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh.
Other senior Ministers of the Crown from Great Britain and the dominions also served on the Imperial War Cabinet, as did H.H. Major-General Sir Ganga Singh, the Maharaja of Bikaner, a representative of British India. Other eminent imperial statesmen in the Imperial War Cabinet were Lord Curzon, the Leader of the House of Lords and a former Viceroy of India, and Andrew Bonar Law, the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons (and future British Prime Minister).
In 1917 the Imperial War Conference passed a resolution regarding a future special Imperial Conference to readjust the relations of the component parts of the Empire. That readjustment should be based upon the full recognition of the dominions as autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth, with an "adequate voice" in foreign policy.
Winston Churchill revived the Imperial War Cabinet during the Second World War at the insistence of John Curtin, the Prime Minister of Australia. William Lyon Mackenzie King, the Prime Minister of Canada, declined to join the body and, as Churchill was already unenthusiastic about sharing power with the dominions, the Imperial War Cabinet's role in the Second World War was greatly diminished in comparison to the previous war.
Famous quotes containing the words imperial war, imperial, war and/or cabinet:
“Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.”
—Apocrypha. Ecclesiasticus, 44:14.
The line “their name liveth for evermore” was chosen by Rudyard Kipling on behalf of the Imperial War Graves Commission as an epitaph to be used in Commonwealth War Cemeteries. Kipling had himself lost a son in the fighting.
“When your fathers fixed the place of GOD,
And settled all the inconvenient saints,
Apostles, martyrs, in a kind of Whipsnade,
Then they could set about imperial expansion
Accompanied by industrial development.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“From the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”
—Charles Darwin (1809–1882)
“I suppose an entire cabinet of shells would be an expression of the whole human mind; a Flora of the whole globe would be so likewise, or a history of beasts; or a painting of all the aspects of the clouds. Everything is significant.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)