The blockade claims controversy

Three months after Chamberlain became foreign secretary, Cecil Hurst travelled by ship to the United States. On board he met Frank Kellogg, the American ambassador at London who had just resigned and was returning to Washington to take office as Coolidge's new secretary of state. In the course of a general conversation, the secretary-designate commented on the subject of outstanding claims that his government had against the British government; Hurst understood him to include with these blockade claims dating from the Great War. Between August 1914 and April 1917 a large number of American industrialists, shippers, and other traders, who lost cargoes that were intercepted and seized as war contraband or who believed that the British blockade had interfered with their neutral right to trade and as a result had lessened their profits, filed private complaints against the British government through the State Department at Washington. These were the blockade claims. In reporting this conversation to the Foreign Office, Hurst suggested that he might have been mistaken in assuming that Kellogg had included blockade claims; nevertheless, he recommended that preparatory work on this question should begin.