Secret Warriors

by Taylor Downing

  In 1900 the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company was formed in order to establish land-based radio stations that could communicate with radio operators on ships at sea. Marconi tried to enforce a monopoly by not allowing any of his radio operators to communicate with operators from rival companies, a prohibition that soon became impossible to sustain as other companies like Telefunken in Germany developed their own systems. For a while there was a sort of anarchy of the air waves, and before long an international agreement was needed to standardise the bandwidths that could be used. In 1906 a conference in Berlin created some sort of international order in the spread of long-range radio communications. Land-based stations transmitting out to sea had to accept certain uniform agreements about the use of wavelengths and in addition agreement was reached on the sending of distress signals. The Morse signal for SOS (three dots, three dashes and three dots) was approved as an international sign of distress, the spoken equivalent being the word ‘Mayday’ – based on the French m’aidez, help me.

  Over the next few years, several incidents headlined the value of the wireless telegraph at sea. In 1910 the murderer Dr Crippen escaped from Britain by sea but was arrested on arriving in Canada when the captain of the ship he was sailing on became suspicious and telegraphed Scotland Yard with his suspicions. And in April 1912, when the Titanic hit an iceberg and went down with the loss of 1500 lives, the need for every ship to carry a radio was dramatically highlighted. Only one ship in its vicinity, the RMS Carpathia, heard the Titanic’s distress SOS, yet that vessel was able to rescue more than 700 passengers who otherwise would have perished. Other ships within range were not equipped with radio and so did nothing to help, and hundreds of passengers drowned as a result.

  By the early twentieth century, key developments in the nineteenth had led to the development of another huge industry – the chemical industry. Formerly the province of small-scale local manufacturers, the production of sulphuric acid and bleaching powder had become an industrial process early in the nineteenth century. Then, in 1856, the English chemist William Perkin produced the first synthetic dye, mauve. Two years later, a German chemist synthesised the dye magenta. These and other new colours proved hugely popular in the production of textiles for the fashion industry. In the 1860s another English chemist, Alexander Parkes, invented cellulose, one of the first synthetic plastics. In order to produce these synthetic colours and materials a new chemical industry grew up using organic chemicals, that is compounds that contain the highly versatile element carbon. Although many of the original discoveries had been made in Britain, by the early years of the twentieth century Germany dominated the industry. And coal tar, produced in Britain in vast quantities as a by-product of the conversion of coal into coke or coal gas, was nearly all exported to Germany. Here, giant chemical companies like BASF (Badische Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik), Bayer and Hoechst acquired almost a world monopoly in the manufacture of chemical products derived from coal tar. The chemical industry was making an ever broader range of products, including those needed for the refining of sugar and petroleum; for the manufacture of glass, paint and cement; for photographic materials, cleaning compounds and agricultural fertilisers; and for medicinal and pharmaceutical products.5 For instance, on the cusp of the new century, in 1897, Bayer invented aspirin. It would soon be described as the new wonder drug.

  Furthermore, in the years before the war, the German chemist Fritz Haber invented a process for producing ammonia, a compound containing nitrogen and hydrogen, by synthesising the two elements from the atmosphere using iron as a catalyst. Another chemist in Germany, Carl Bosch, went a step further by developing a brand new high temperature, high pressure process for the bulk industrial production of ammonia. This became known as the Haber-Bosch process. Meanwhile a third German chemist, Friedrich Ostwald, developed a process for turning ammonia into nitric acid. All three chemists were to win Nobel Prizes for their work. The production of these chemicals was intended for the use of agricultural fertilisers, but both ammonia and nitric acid had a further application. They could be used to make explosives.

  Dramatic changes also took place at the beginning of the twentieth century in the field of medicine. The use of anaesthetics had begun in the early nineteenth century and ushered in a revolution in surgery, enabling the surgeon to carry out more radical operations than had been possible before. This had coincided with a growing understanding of the role of bacteria as the cause of infection. The thorough sterilisation of equipment to be used in surgery and the ability to maintain strict standards of cleanliness turned the operating theatre into the modern, clinical space familiar today. Antiseptics were developed in the decades before the war to treat bacterial infections, although there was still a general feeling that many bacteria were too powerful to be treated by drugs. In 1909, Paul Ehrlich, a specialist in the new science of bacteriology, developed a drug called salvarsan that provided a treatment for syphilis. German chemists were pioneers in many developments in antiseptics and by 1914 most of these drugs were produced by the booming pharmaceutical industry in Germany.

  Another item familiar to modern medicine that came into wide use just before the First World War was the X-ray, invented accidentally by another German, Wilhelm Rôntgen, in Wurzburg in the 1890s. On the brink of the new century the Curies discovered radium but failed to appreciate that exposure to it could be fatal, and Marie Curie herself died of leukaemia caught from over-exposure. Together, radiology and X-rays began a new era for diagnosing fractures and malformations. The development of film and plates for X-rays came out of the photographic industry and the manufacture of X-ray equipment became another branch of the electrical industries. Out of these industries also emerged the development of the electrocardiograph at the University of Leyden in 1903. Invented as a device to record the electrical activity of the heart muscle, it greatly helped the diagnosis of heart disease.

  In addition to the more accurate diagnosis and treatment of disease came substantial improvements in preventative medicine; advances in the supply of clean water and the disposal of waste and sewerage were coupled with the introduction of mass immunisation projects. The incidence of diseases like cholera and typhoid that had been the scourge of large, crowded nineteenth-century cities went into a marked decline in the early twentieth century. The whole concept of public health and of the need for the state, or local authorities, to make provision for improved sanitation and the chemical purification of water supplies became recognised in Europe and North America in the decades before the war. With this went a decline in death rates, a marked drop in infant mortality and a further growth in population.

  Another sign of the broadening interest in and support for public health measures in Britain was the establishment in 1913 of the Medical Research Committee (the forerunner of today’s Medical Research Council). The government set up this committee with funds raised by National Insurance contributions, payable since Lloyd George’s radical budget two years earlier. Every worker in the country paid a penny towards a fund to build sanatoria to treat tuberculosis, one of the great killers of the day, especially among the poor in overcrowded cities. The contributions were known as the ‘TB Penny’. Part of this money – a sum of £57,000 per year – was allocated for research. The role of the Medical Research Committee was largely to coordinate such work, although it was itself allowed to carry out research into all aspects of medicine. A group of nine leading scientists, chaired by Lord Moulton and supported by an Advisory Council made up of representatives from the universities, were to formulate plans for medical research that would be funded by the ‘TB Penny’. The creation of the Medical Research Committee marks another important step in the state’s growing interest in the health of the nation, although its work had barely begun when the war refocused its attention in a different direction.

  One of the major new medical concerns in the years before the war was what were loosely called ‘nervous conditions’. Indeed, some doctors spoke of nervous breakdowns as the disea
se of the era, brought on by the speed, noise and pressures of modern urban life. Although the medical profession gave a great deal of attention to nervous conditions, the forms of treatment were limited and were largely determined by the class to which the patient belonged. Doctors with private practices were paid large sums to advise wealthy clients suffering from various psychoses. The general name for this discipline was neurology.

  Neurologists had high status and were paid well. At the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in Queen Square, London, probably the most famous group of specialist doctors in the country studied and consulted on the physical changes that affected the brain in conditions like epilepsy, paralysis and tumour. However, the rest of the population who suffered from nervous breakdowns were classed as lunatics or simply ‘the insane’. They were assigned to lunatic asylums where lowly paid medical officers and psychiatrists tried to look after them. For many people, being registered as insane was nothing less than a life sentence. There was little attempt to treat them or solve their problems inside institutions that were often squalid and overcrowded.

  New academic work being done in Britain at Cambridge University led the way in the study of the new science of psychology. The university inaugurated a department of psychology at the end of the nineteenth century and in 1912 Charles Samuel Myers established there the country’s first experimental laboratory in psychology. But Britain still trailed behind the continent when it came to studying and treating neurotic diseases. In France the study of the mind was far in advance of Britain, and Paris had acquired an international reputation for the treatment of mental conditions. Joseph Babinski in his clinic at La Pitié hospital believed that cases could be cured by a stern approach, using isolation and counter-suggestion to reverse the psychological process that had caused the problem. Across the city at the Saltpetrière hospital, Jules Dejerine, on the other hand, launched the new science of psychotherapy to help a patient understand his or her own illness. Meanwhile, in Vienna, Sigmund Freud had already concluded that many psychological problems were down to the repression of memories and emotions in the unconscious mind. Only by bringing these emotions to the surface could a patient be cured. While the French doctors had a great deal of influence, however, Freud was not widely read or understood in Britain before the war.

  Another of the many developments taking place in the early twentieth century, and one that every Edwardian would have been very aware of, was in the field of mass communications. Newspapers that were once read only by the toffs, by the upper wealthy section of society, were becoming available to all. Furthermore, the railways had dramatically improved the speed of distribution and some of the major city newspapers like The Times of London and the Manchester Guardian became national dailies. Developments in printing with the advent of rotary presses, keyboard-operated type composition machines and roll newsprint paper enabled newspapers to be produced in much greater numbers than before. Following the educational reforms of 1870, literacy spread widely, especially among the lower middle classes, and by 1900 a new generation of clerks, shop assistants, artisans and white-collar office workers formed a reading public eager to buy something more interesting, shorter and more accessible than the traditional newspapers. As literacy levels shot up, prices came down. The numbers of penny journals, illustrated magazines and daily papers soared during the final decades of the nineteenth century. And then came a new breed of newspaper that spread like wildfire, consuming everything before it.

  Alfred Charles William Harmsworth was the eldest of eleven children born to a middle-class family. His alcoholic father struggled to keep up appearances for the family growing up in north London and, aged sixteen, Harmsworth left school with two passions, journalism and cycling. In 1886 he combined the two and became editor of Bicycling News for a Coventry-based newspaper group. Harmsworth had a brilliant intuitive sense of what the vast reading public wanted and he soon started to publish his own cheap and hugely popular papers and magazines, including Answers, Comic Cuts and Forget-Me-Not, a popular journal for women. By the end of 1894 his papers and journals were selling more than two million copies weekly and he began to amass a fortune from his growing publishing operations. Two years later he founded the Daily Mail with the tag line ‘A Penny Newspaper for One Halfpenny’. He changed the layout of newspapers by using bolder typefaces and large eye-grabbing headlines. All the items were short, including political and business reports. There was plenty of sport and daily racing tips. And there were several columns dedicated to women, reporting on fashion, food, cookery and general matters relating to the home. Today this would be seen as gender stereotyping, but in the 1890s Harmsworth judged his readership perfectly and in no time the Daily Mail was selling half a million copies a day, rising to over a million during the Boer War. In 1903, Harmsworth went further and founded the Daily Mirror, which specialised in the reproduction of photographs using a new half-tone printing process.

  Harmsworth helped to project a new form of popular tabloid journalism into Britain just as the numbers of readers with time, money and the interest to buy newspapers exploded dramatically. With the wealth he built up, he went on to acquire established titles like The Observer, and in a coup he anonymously bought The Times, by now almost bankrupt, thereby gaining control of a central organ of the British establishment. His newspapers took clearly established positions on the big issues of the day. For instance, he repeatedly railed against the commercial, naval and political rivalry of Germany and he regarded the British establishment as being asleep to the threat posed by this growing, expansive nation. The Kaiser himself even complained of the hostility to Germany expressed in the pages of The Times and the Daily Mail as ‘doing the most harm’ to Anglo-German relations.6 Although entirely a self-made man, Harmsworth mixed with leading politicians and writers and, partly thanks to his support of the Unionist cause, in 1905 he was created Baron Northcliffe. As the owner of one of the biggest publishing empires in the world he was able to exert immense influence not only over British politics but also over the popular culture of the nation.

  Alongside this, an entirely new type of popular entertainment created at the very end of the nineteenth century would become one of the great cultural forms of the new century. Like so many inventions, that of the moving picture cinematograph involved bringing together many existing or recently discovered technologies. The concept of the ‘persistence of vision’, that the eye retains an image flashed only briefly in front of it, until a following image is presented, thus maintaining a sort of visual continuity, had been understood for some time. It was at the core of many Victorian children’s parlour games based around the Zoetrope. The lantern show, meanwhile, was a more common form of entertainment for people of all ages in which slides were projected on to a screen. When the precision technology of the moving camera was combined with George Eastman’s creation of flexible roll film – made from the new synthetic plastic ‘celluloid’ – that could be pulled through the camera on sprockets, all the elements needed to make the cinematograph were in place.

  Thomas Edison, the inveterate US inventor, and the Lumière Brothers in France both laid claim to having been the first to screen moving pictures to a paying audience in 1895. During the first decade and a half of the twentieth century, the cinema spread from being a sideshow attraction at fairgrounds to becoming a form of popular entertainment in its own right. People could now go and pay to see a series of short, moving picture entertainments in new, custom-built ‘electric cinema palaces’. By 1914, there were already 4500 cinemas in Britain.

  The bicycle was yet another invention of the mid-nineteenth century, this time bringing together a mechanical means of propulsion with an effective suspension system. When the mechanical framework was combined with the invention of the pneumatic tyre, the modern safety bicycle was born. In the early twentieth century bicycles began to offer young people opportunities for travel and a means to break up the insular, parish basis of rural life. Boys could find girlfriends outside
the village or community in which they lived. Girls could cycle to find work away from the streets in which they had grown up. The bicycle offered both men and women an invitation to adventure and an opportunity for freedom.

  The bicycle also created a new generation of mechanical processes: first design and manufacture, then constant maintenance and repair. Mechanically minded young men began to open cycle repair shops in every town and city. In Britain, Coventry became the centre of bicycle manufacturing as other mechanically based industries there sought to diversify. The Coventry Sewing Machine Company was one of many operations that made a gradual shift to the manufacture of bicycles, and the growth of the industry would have a major effect upon the face of the West Midlands from the 1860s onwards.

  The development of the internal combustion engine was another revolutionary technology, a great force for change in the twentieth century that had seen its origins in the last decades of the nineteenth. The German engineer Nikolaus Otto produced a gas engine in 1876. When Gottlieb Daimler adapted this to run on petrol and a suitable chassis produced by Karl Benz was added in 1889, a period of huge innovation and change followed. Although the motor car was ‘invented’ in Germany, it was developed far more quickly in France where, in the early 1890s, the likes of Armand Peugeot and Panhard Lavassor soon began to make money by selling large numbers of cars. Britain was characteristically late to the party as the Light Locomotives on Highways Act kept the speed limit on Britain’s roads to a pitiful 4 mph, and had initially insisted that a man carrying a red flag should walk in front of every vehicle. It was only after the Act’s repeal in November 1896 that motoring in Britain began to spread.