179. Insurance, a mishap and two claims

The year 1911 was action-packed.

Churchill, who’d been made Home Secretary the year before and got caught up in that great fake-news event, the Tonypandy massacre, added to his reputation, not in a good way, at the Sidney Street Siege.

His leader in their radical duo, David Lloyd George, got his National Insurance Act through and set Britain firmly on the road towards a welfare state. Not that everyone was happy about it, including many of the workers it was designed to help. But it’s noteworthy that even when the Conservative came back to power, they left the National Insurance scheme in place.

Then the Kaiser sent a gunboat to Agadir. Europe took a step closer to a major war but avoided it again. For now. Still, Britain decided it had to make some war preparations at last. One involved a change at the top of Navy, with Churchill, in yet another milestone on his career, taking over as First Lord of the Admiralty.

Meanwhile, the Irish and the women had to wait again. Though at least the women had a promise, one first made three years earlier. Now, Asquith made clear, it would at last be kept.

The Irish would have to hang on a little longer.

Illustration: Churchill (the leading figure in the top hat) at the Sidney Street siege. National Army Museum, Out of Copyright

Music: Bach Partita #2c by J Bu licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives (aka Music Sharing) 3.0 International License.