OVER 16 months, the NWAC evolved from a privately funded, unofficial organisation, into a publicly funded, quasi-official body. Influential and independent, it represented the primary parliamentary device of domestic patriotic ‘education’ for the remainder of the war, strong enough to withstand suggestions by Lord Beaverbrook that it should be incorporated within his new Ministry of Information. According to Brock Millman, ‘perhaps the most important purpose of the NWAC had nothing to do with propaganda’ but was its ‘secret repressive agenda’. However, the evidence of this chapter rejects Millman's inaccurate interpretation of the NWAC's scope and purposes.

When it began in mid-1917, the NWAC was a small organisation, reliant on private donations, comprising five MPs and based at Conservative Central Office in St Stephen's Chambers. While undoubtedly ‘Lloyd George was the guiding political light of the NWAC’, he (and his fellow presidents) had little involvement with its operations beyond making the occasional speech and forwarding some correspondence. When a London businessman, W.W. Howard, suggested the necessity of publicly recapitulating ‘the facts relating to the beginning of this awful war’, since ‘memory will fade with the time which has elapsed’, offering £500 to assist with expenses, Lloyd George passed this letter to the NWAC. Howard was then informed of their work, which was ‘being very rapidly pushed forward’. ‘Seeing the work necessarily entails a heavy expenditure’, the reply continued, ‘this Committee would welcome any donation to its funds which you would like to subscribe’.

However, by then the NWAC's executive, together with Sir Edward Carson, assigned by the War Cabinet to ‘assume general supervision over [domestic] propaganda’ on 21 August, had already decided that such funds were insufficient to effectively run the campaign. On the 30th, Carson told the War Cabinet the campaign might need