Talk:H. H. Asquith

message: This page should be moved from "Herbert Henry Asquith" to "H.H. Asquith" because that was his actual use name.  (See my edit of the page.)  But although I am a registed user and logged on, when I try to do this I keep being sent to a page telling me that I need to be a registered user and log on to do this.
Whether or not Asquith preferred to be know as H.H. Asquith or not is irrelevant. His name was Herbert Henry Asquith and, importantly, it is as 'Herbert Asquith' that he is best known. Valiant Son 23:41, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Move 

message: Why does this page show up when I search for an entry on "squiff"? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 170.20.11.116 (talk • contribs) .
:Apparently it was a nickname used by his detractors. It may warrant a mention somewhere on the page... —Whouk (talk) 07:37, 12 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It was a nickname used by his political opponents. e.g. Leo Amery in February 1916 wrote Not only the country, but even the House of Commons are very sick of the Government - and old Squiff in particular. Bastie 00:45, 19 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Squiff 

message: Added a sentence on Asquith's infatuation with her; it's sufficiently well-known (resulting after all in a published volume of his letters to her which is an important biographical resource) that it seemed odd not to find her mentioned.  --Andersonblog (talk) 01:35, 26 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Venetia Stanley 

message: Asquith's reputation remains pretty low because of his wartime failure. John Little is something of a supported but Little admits that A's "reputation suffered severe criticism from his political enemies following his fall from office, and historians, almost without exception, have followed this lead. The image that survives is of a vacillating prime minister, barely handling forces he could not contain." Wiki should rpeat that consensus --"almost without exception" is pretty strong. See John Gordon Little, H. H. Asquith and Britain's Manpower Problem, 1914-1915. History; 1997 82(267): 397-409  Rjensen (talk) 17:40, 11 February 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Reputation

message: It has been suggested that Louis T. Stanley, owner of the BRM Formula One team, was an illegitimate child of Asquith's with Louis' mother, Venetia Stanley. This has come out in a new book - Louis was the author's stepfather. I thought someone might be interested in this as it could have some influence on future additions to the page. Readro (talk) 22:56, 2 March 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: This article has photographs of Louis Stanley and H. H. Asquith. The resemblance is uncanny. Apparently more of Asquith's letters will be released in 2015 by the Bodleian Library. Perhaps they will shed more light on their relationship.--Britannicus (talk) 20:42, 11 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Just to note that we have an existing article on the woman in question, Venetia Stanley (1887–1948). BrainyBabe (talk) 19:41, 18 June 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: For information, in the event that it is ever required.  I have read Ms Neate's book which is complete nonsense.  Lacking both an index and a bibliography, and very poorly written, it seeks to establish that Ms Neate's step-father, Louis Stanley, was the illegitimate son of Asquith and Venetia Stanley.  Unfortunately, it does so without any evidence, and indeed ignores evidence that doesn't fit Ms Neate's theory.  The examples are legion, including: positing an earlier beginning to the full relationship than is supported by the evidence; ignoring documented evidence that Venetia wasn't pregnant when Ms Neate's theory needs her to be; suggesting that the ending of the relationship was the direct cause of the first coalition; claiming that Louis Stanley's birth certificate must be forged as the date of his birth doesn't fit her theory; getting the date of Asquith's death wrong; and, perhaps most critically, saying that a further cache of Asquith-Stanley letters, which would support her claims, was held by the Bodleian and was due to release in 2015.  No such cache exists, as the Bodleian has confirmed to me.  All of the letters they hold were made available soon after their purchase in 2002, some 10 years before Ms Neate wrote her book.  Ms Neate's book does, at least, have the benefit of being truthful at some points - on p.88 she writes, "Everything slotted into place.  I had no evidence that Louis was illegitimate or even the son of an MP, but from that moment onwards I never had any doubts that Venetia Stanley was his mother and Asquith his father.  Now I had a purpose – something to fight for.  For my own satisfaction I would prove it.”  However, she has no more evidence for her claims at the end of her book than she did at its beginning.  In short, a very WP:Fringe source.  KJP1 (talk) 17:48, 15 November 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Based on what you say, it sounds like nonsense. When somebody has a theory and admits openly that he is "setting out to prove it", and starts claiming that evidence that doesn't support his theory must have been hidden away in small print appendices or, worse, documents concealed by the authorities or falsified, one is usually into crackpot territory.Paulturtle (talk) 19:05, 20 November 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Believe me, I've done you a favour by reading it!  And I had to buy it, though fortunately it was going for £2.01, p&p included, on Amazon.  I thought the "secret cache" of letters sounded odd so checked with the Bodleian and they confirmed there's nothing more.  But it's the kind of salacious stuff Wikipedia sometimes has a weakness for, so I thought I'd get a pre-emptive strike in. KJP1 (talk) 21:21, 20 November 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: Even superficial physical resemblance doesn't necessarily prove anything. So far as we can tell from old black and white photos Violet, HHA's daughter from his first marriage, appears to have borne a striking resemblance to Margot his second wife. But it's coincidental, as they were not blood relatives. Maybe he fancied Margot and Venetia (who also looked a bit similar) as like many men he had a "type", but that's as far as it goes. Paulturtle (talk) 06:34, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title: Possible illegitimate son

message: "After Lloyd George’s Paris speech (12 November) at which he said that “when he saw the appalling casualty lists he wish(ed) it had not been necessary to win so many (“victories”)” Asquith (briefed by Robertson) rose to loud cheers to debate the matter in the Commons (19 November) ..."
This sentence appears to be in need of a little expansion. Is there a summary of what Asquith said? Did the debate result in anything? etcEnigmaMcmxc (talk) 07:40, 18 January 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: The "official" line, put about by the generals and their press allies, was that the Somme, Third Ypres, etc were "victories", based in part on massaging the German casualty figures upwards, but otherwise a line which one still occasionally encounters in sillier military history enthusiasts even today, sometimes based on cherry picking a few choice sentences from the memoirs of German generals out of context. Of course they inflicted painful loss on the Germans, but not enough - France, Italy and Russia all cracked long before Germany did, British losses were unsustainable for a war whose duration was still uncertain (with agriculture, shipbuilding and ship-crewing also needing manpower), and the Allies might very well have had to throw in the towel had the USA not lent a hand (which is not to denigrate the BEF's superb role in autumn 1918). That is why the popular myth version of the war (that those offensives were simply "disasters", or Haig a moron) grew up. By the end of 1917 Lloyd George was starting to reassert political control over the war and getting ready to scale down the BEF and concentrate on land grab in the Middle East (he openly said that Palestine and Mesopotamia would be his legacy just as Bengal and Quebec had been for Pitt the Elder). The debate resulted in Lloyd George retaining power and Liberal division deepening, and ultimately Henry Wilson replacing Robertson as CIGS, and then in Spring 1918 the Germans, supposedly almost beaten, came close to inflicting catastrophic eleventh hour defeat on the Allies, the blame for which continues to be debated.Paulturtle (talk) 16:44, 1 April 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  19 November 1917 Commons debate 

message: A note for passing researchers, but unworthy of comment in the main text. In a Corney & Barrow order book (Guildhall Library, MS 11779) are records of orders of champagne, by “The Rt Hon’ble H. H. Asquith M.P.” (of “127 Mo[illegible]t Street”), on several dates including 10th January 1893. “2 Dz. Perrier Jouet 1884 Champagne … £10—”, and “2 Dz. Giesler 1884 Champagne … £9.12—”. (My picture #5974.) Those writing (another) biography might wish to be the first to peruse this tome. JDAWiseman (talk) 22:52, 17 May 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Wasn't Perrier Jouet Oscar Wilde's favourite champagne? DuncanHill (talk) 00:30, 22 June 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Champagne from Corney & Barrow 

message: I check pages listed in :Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of :H. H. Asquith's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.
Reference named "odnb":
From Percy Alden: 
From William Nicholson, 1st Baron Nicholson: 
From Sir Edward Holden, 1st Baronet: 
From Arthur Winnington-Ingram: Article by Jeremy Morris.
From Rosalind Howard, Countess of Carlisle: 
From Reginald McKenna: "McKenna, Reginald" - Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
From Frederick Leith-Ross: 
From Claud Schuster, 1st Baron Schuster: 
From Michael Howard:  (Subscription Required)
From John Simon, 1st Viscount Simon: 
From May Tennant: Serena Kelly, "Tennant, Margery Mary Edith Josephine Pia (1869–1946)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
From Henry McCardie: 
From William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield: 
From Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener: 
From John Lawson Walton: J. B. Atlay, revised by H. C. G. Matthew, Sir John Lawson Walton in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online; OUP 2004–10 (subscription or UK library card required for online access).  Retrieved on 20 August 2010.
From John Cowans: John Cowans at Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
From Sir Frederick Treves, 1st Baronet: 
From John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute: Miller, Karl, Stuart, Lady Louisa (1757–1851), writer in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, September 2004 & online edition, January 2006 (subscription required) accessed 2 March 2008
From Thomas McKinnon Wood: 
From Nevil Macready: 
From Francis Bridgeman (Royal Navy officer): 
From Rab Butler: 
From John French, 1st Earl of Ypres: 
From Martin Dunbar-Nasmith: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
From Charles Abbott, 1st Baron Tenterden:  
I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT⚡ 05:36, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Orphaned references in [[:H. H. Asquith]] 

message: Are the claims made by Bobbie Neate worth including in the article at the present time? It seems to me to be a single, uncorroborated, and speculative source. Bobby Neate is not a historian. DuncanHill (talk) 15:51, 16 July 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: In general I'm not fond of chopping stuff out of articles but it does seem a bit thin. Perhaps it should be relegated to a footnote. There've been a few books published about Margot lately so it would be worth checking to see if the claim has been given any credence by reputable writers. My understanding is that Venetia and Asquith probably did not have much, if any, of a sexual relationship, although people have tried to read stuff into some phrase in one of Asquith's letters about how he'd "got to know the real her" which was apparently a euphemism of the time.Paulturtle (talk) 01:06, 18 July 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with the footnote idea, and if there are any reliable sources giving credence then yes, it could go back into the main body. DuncanHill (talk) 14:05, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

text: Ann de Courcy's book about Margot doesn't discuss this, although she does have some useful material about how Venetia used to write back to Asquith - it wasn't just a one-sided crush. Her view, and it does seem to be just opinion, was that Asquith and Venetia probably were lovers as she was in her late twenties and Margot had broken off conjugal relations after a series of difficult pregnancies. There is also a paragraph about the post-coital oily douche which upper-class women used to use for contraception at that time, which is an amusing bit of social history if nothing else.Paulturtle (talk) 02:26, 29 July 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bobbie Neate claims. 

message: This section was semi-complete, almost entirely my fault as I started writing it up a few summers ago and had only managed to write up the period up to Edward VII's death. (I wish we could find a cite for the cry at the time that Asquith had "killed the King"). My notes from 1910 onwards are somewhere in development hell, along with my notes on the horribly complex intrigues of December 1916. A lot of good stuff has been added lately but a fair bit of baby - e.g. the real or perceived Irish dimension - had gone out with the bathwater.
At same stage we may need a bit more on Asquith's bullying of the new King late in 1910, e.g. telling him that he had no business consulting the Tory leaders, so King George gave a pledge unaware that Balfour would have been willing to form a government. And yet Edward VII had been consulting Balfour throughout. Asquith at one point lectured the new King that it had been established since the 1830s that ministerial advice was binding on the monarch - he was referring to William IV's attempt to put Peel in as Prime Minister in 1834 - a deliberate confusion of the monarch's purely nominal role in day-to-day government with his having to bow to political reality in the exercise of his powers as Head of State (legal textbooks to this day inform us that the monarch appoints and dismisses the Prime Minister and can take advice from whoever she pleases on that matter - otherwise a Prime Minister could give "binding advice" that he remain in office, or who his successor should be - even if in practice she has to appoint somebody who can command a majority in the House of Commons and it is hard to think of a crisis so grave that the monarch would actually get involved in politics nowadays). The same sort of thing was true over the Curragh Incident of March 1914 - Asquith cheekily lectured the King at one point that the Army was entirely under government orders, and the King's role purely nominal, in the same way as any government department like the Post Office. This view was most certainly not shared by the King or by senior officers, who made clear that they were not prepared to do the government's dirty work for them.
One does has to be careful with this topic as the Tories and Ulster Unionists of that era do get a very rough ride from even moderately leftish historians, e.g. crass talk that their actions were "barely legal", so much so that it's an eye-opener to read documents from the period and see how Asquith and his Cabinet were regarded by half the political nation as virtual traitors. If Asquith had failed, e.g. if Edward VII had told him to shove off in April when he demanded creation of peers without a second election, it's impossible to say where the crisis would have gone but it seems fair to say that historians would write about him rather differently.Paulturtle (talk) 05:40, 27 July 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you for your thoughtful advice.  Do you have suggestions as to what sources I might consult (especially if online, say JSTOR or the like) as to Asquith and King George in late 1910? I am sorry to overwrite your work.--Wehwalt (talk) 12:00, 28 July 2015 (UTC)

text: I'll look for it tonight, though the Asquith bios are going to go back to the library for a while tomorrow due to higher priorities. I may do some additional reading before resuming.--Wehwalt (talk) 21:23, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  The Budget and the Lords 

message: A note on the proposed Catholic procession (currently note 65) is "Devlin, pp. 408–409". The book's title needs to be included as it is not in the references section.--Britannicus (talk) 15:30, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: That's a prime example of why that style of referencing is so bloody awful and unsuited to Wikipedia. DuncanHill (talk) 15:31, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: agreed. Rjensen (talk) 15:50, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

text: I think I've found it on JSTOR in a piece in Volume 63 of Church History- if I'm right I'll update the ref. Well spotted! DuncanHill (talk) 16:02, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Done! JSTOR was being a bit temperamental and pretending that I wasn't logged in, but got there in the end. Many thanks for spotting this, "ghost" refs are in many ways worse than no refs, as if people aren't as on the ball as you they can easily get overlooked. DuncanHill (talk) 16:31, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Good job on hunting down the reference!--Britannicus (talk) 16:56, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: Sorry about that, I meant to add it when I added the ref, but I was on a cruise ship (Baltics) at the time and they charge internet by the minute, so my editing was a bit disjointed.--Wehwalt (talk) 21:21, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Reference

message: I have just found two incorrect references - wrong pages being given. I wasn't even looking for them. Both were to the Roy Jenkins biography of Asquith. When I get the time I shall check all the refs to that work. DuncanHill (talk) 15:33, 29 May 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: The first one, on his return to the Commons Chamber after Paisley, was mine. Sorry. I was using an older, rebound, copy of Jenkins from a library (I do have a paperback bought in 1991, but it's somewhere in the attic). The one about it being dusk in 1924 and night in 1926 was somebody else's.Paulturtle (talk) 06:22, 2 June 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Reference mistakes 

message: Under H. H. Asquith#Family background, it lists Emily Willans Asquith as having lived from 1828-1888.
"and his wife Emily, née Willans (1828–1888)."
However, under H. H. Asquith#Childhood and schooling, it says that "[i]n 1863 Willans died". 
Which one is correct? Tiniestkid (talk) 21:34, 25 September 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: The article was worded rather obscurely. William Willans, the father of Emily, died in 1863. I've tried to clarify the text a little with this edit. DuncanHill (talk) 21:00, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

text: Thanks for clarifying! I thought it was Emily who had died and didn't realize it was her father. Tiniestkid (talk) 21:34, 25 September 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Emily Willans Asquith Correct Year of Death? 

message: I have removed the succession box claim that Asquith was President of the Liberal Party from c 1924-1928, as he wasn't. Donald Maclean was President 1923-1926, J. A. Spender from 1926-1927, Charles Hobhouse from 1927-1930. I do not know why or when or by whom the claim was added to this article. DuncanHill (talk) 10:39, 27 November 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  President of the Liberal Party? 

message: A discussion is taking place to address the redirect :Henry Asquith. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 April 20#Henry Asquith until a consensus is reached, and readers of this page are welcome to contribute to the discussion.  NotReallySoroka (talk) (formerly DePlume) 22:57, 20 April 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Henry Asquith" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]]