When Lloyd George became Prime Minister during the First World War he
appointed a private secretariat to help him run the complex machinery of
wartime government. This book, drawing extensively on private and public
archives, describes the work of that Secretariat during its two years of
existence and discusses its contribution to policy-making and to the
development of the Prime Minister's office. The 'Garden Suburb', so
named from its temporary offices in the garden of 10 Downing Street, has
won a poor reputation. Contemporaries described it as a nest of intrigue
and imperialist, anti-democratic sentiment which helped to turn Lloyd
George from a great Radical into a cynical dictator; and historians have
tended to accept their word. This examination reveals a different
picture. On the one hand, wartime government was imperfectly
co-ordinated, and members of the Secretariat performed a genuine
administrative task in helping Lloyd George to supervise it and save it
from breakdown, although their small number and limited resources
allowed them to cover only a few politically sensitive questions. On the
other hand, the Garden Suburb was more eclectic in its ideological and
political affiliations than has been allowed. Home Rule, collective
security, temperance, state supervision of industry, Christian Science
and the revival of agriculture, as well as imperial unity and opposition
to socialism, each contributed through the Secretariat to the climate of
ideas in which policy was made.
