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By Root 855 0

in the position. Batterbee had cleared his desk and gone, and at the first meeting held without him at the beginning of January a much greater sense of urgency could be seen. Representatives from the DO and FO, joined by colleagues from the Cabinet Office and Admiralty, debated the main question: could there be 'a half-way house between neutrality and participation' if Britain was at war.20 Harding was in the chair and stressed the need for discretion; the Dominion governments were not to know that such a possibility was even being considered. He was worried at what the future held, wondering whether the Royal Navy might even find itself forced to seize South African ports in order to guarantee unhindered wartime access to them. His Cabinet Office counterpart was much less concerned; Sir Edward Bridges was certain that even the least enthusiastic Dominions would merely mark time before joining Britain. The FO appeared generally uninterested about the issue, as had been the case during the previous 12 months, and its recommendations were few.21 Batterbee's departmental responsibilities had been assumed by another long-serving civil servant, John Stephenson, and he fortunately appeared a more dynamic force.22 The high commissioners in the Union of South Africa and Canada were now provided with the complete draft memorandum and asked for any relevant comments.23 It would take six weeks before the last of these arrived but they only served to emphasize the potential for disaster that appeared to exist.24

The level of cooperation from within Whitehall was still, however, at this stage far from encouraging. While the War Office and Air Ministry were 'probably willing to fall in line' with the DO strategy, the same was not true of the Admiralty which, having contemplated what it had heard at the previous meeting, now 'tended in the direction of attempting to force the hand of the Dominions'. This confrontational approach ran entirely counter to the advice of the DO but political niceties appeared not to be a concern for the First Sea Lord's department, who warned it would take its case to the CID where it clearly believed it would be treated sympathetically. In exchanges such as these it was obvious that, despite the DO's awareness and its long-running efforts to better educate its colleagues, there were few within Whitehall who recognized the true position of the Anglo-Dominion relationship. 'Common belligerency' had long since become a concept that could not be taken for granted, but few seemed to understand this fact. To echo the point, Sir Thomas Inskip, who had replaced MacDonald in January 1939, was told by Halifax that the Dominions should be expected to 'trust us to draw a just conclusion from the reports we receive'.25 Bridges also still remained generally optimistic about the future position. Only after repeated reminders, at the beginning of March the Cabinet Office had finally submitted a formal statement and this argued that the Dominions would surely recognize that 'supreme control can only be exercised by those at the centre' if war broke out.26 Further evidence of such thinking came with Neville Chamberlain's dramatic policy shift mid-March following the German seizure of the rump Czech state. The strategy the British leader now adopted had been decided upon without any prior discussion with the Dominions and was almost entirely at odds with what the DO thought they might have best received.27

The lack of any advance warning of this new approach caused considerable rancour amongst Dominions' politicians, and the high commissioners in London were the most visibly petulant. They believed their role during the Sudeten crisis had been decisive, despite there being little evidence to support such a view, and this, consequently, had led them to develop a much higher opinion of their own importance.28 Six years previously the South African member of the group, Charles te Water, had bluntly informed the then secretary of state that if there was another war 'none of the Dominions would follow' Britain.29 He had not altered