Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  The question of how families shorn of a breadwinner would survive without charity troubled the government, and on 16 September the cabinet agreed to award a separation allowance, on a sliding scale from 12s 6d a week for a childless wife to 22s 6d a week for one with four or more children. ‘Many of them will be better off than they ever were before,’ Asquith claimed to Miss Stanley.41 A widow’s pension of 6s 6d was set for a childless woman whose husband was killed in action, with higher rates for those with children. Voluntary organisations sought to keep women occupied and remunerated – whether in making clothing for the troops, or training young women as nurses, though that was a calling for which the mores of the time deemed women from the middle and upper-middle classes best suited. University women were urged to become nurses, and one of their institutions, Bedford College in London, started to hold extensive training sessions for those interested.

  The working class also closed ranks and looked after their own. Miners in many pits in Yorkshire donated 2d a week to a fund to help the wives and children of fellow miners who, as Territorials, had been called up. Engineering workers in Leeds, working longer hours for war production, agreed to put their overtime pay into a separate fund for such families. A Times correspondent, sent to Leeds to take the temperature, found that ‘there is a real spirit of unselfishness abroad, and patriotism is showing its finer side.’42 Dentists in the West Riding volunteered to check recruits without a fee; and Leeds’s substantial Jewish colony promised to raise a volunteer corps.

  Queen Mary was also instrumental in leading a drive to get women into work, to replace men and to boost family incomes. Many small businesses run by women were suffering from the war, and the Queen wanted to help sustain them. She sent her friend Lady Crewe to outline her wishes to the prime minister. Asquith had been the nation’s leading anti-suffragist, and the Queen could have been forgiven for fearing he might have been slow to appreciate the industrial contribution women could make. He was happy for the National Relief Fund to adopt the scheme, which would prove a successful means of alleviating hardship for women and of boosting the economy. Mrs Pankhurst announced that the activities of her suffragettes would be suspended for the duration: her daughter Christabel proclaimed that ‘Bismarck boasted that Germany is a male nation. We do not want male nations.’43 Pursuing national unity, Reginald McKenna, the home secretary, announced on 10 August that the King would remit the sentences of all suffragette prisoners, who were to be released unconditionally. (Former strikers convicted of assault were also released, McKenna expressing the hope that both groups would help and not destabilise the country.)

  However, a more subtle form of campaigning for women’s rights would continue throughout the war, underpinned by the growing strategic and economic importance of women. Christabel Pankhurst’s women’s journal Suffragette was retitled Britannia. A Women’s Emergency Corps was quickly founded by suffragette members of the Women’s Social and Political Union, its aims being to train female doctors, nurses and motorcycle messengers. It evolved into the Women’s Volunteer Reserve under the leadership of Lady Castlereagh, who in 1915 became Lady Londonderry on her husband’s inheriting the marquisate. She also founded the Women’s Legion, which trained 40,000 khaki-uniformed women volunteers to act as drivers, mechanics, farm workers and cooks; a number lost their lives during the war. Paul Rubens, a songwriter, published the song ‘Your King and Your Country’ within days of the war breaking out. It is better known by the words of its refrain, ‘we don’t want to lose you, but we think you ought to go’, and was intended to be sung by women to their menfolk. The royalties from the sheet music were donated to Queen Mary’s Work for Women Fund, and such was its enormous popularity that it raised nearly £500,000. It was also taken up by popular music-hall entertainers, such as Vesta Tilley, and sung by them with the express purpose of persuading men in the audience to go straight off to the recruiting office.

  II

  One of the United Kingdom’s foremost cultural figures, George Bernard Shaw, took a less elated view of the war. His Pygmalion, starring Mrs Patrick Campbell as Eliza Doolittle and Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Professor Higgins, had been the theatrical success of the year after its London opening the previous April. However, Shaw’s popularity crashed when he told an American interviewer in late September that soldiers on both sides should ‘shoot their officers and go home’.44 Having been in high demand to write journalism about the war, he found his telephone fell silent. By November he had revised his view; his pamphlet published in the New Statesman on 14 November, entitled Common Sense about the War, claimed to have ‘stated the democratic case for it’, by showing how the war could empower and enfranchise those further down in society and help them wrest control from the forces of capitalism.45 This won him more abuse, and his role in shaping public discourse for the duration would be circumscribed. Even Christabel Pankhurst described him as ‘beyond a joke’.46 Others normally sympathetic to him, such as the equally polemical G. K. Chesterton, were appalled, and H. G. Wells, with whom he had scrapped before the war and whose own view of the struggle would in time become more Shavian, gleefully went for him, calling him ‘an elderly adolescent’.47

  Keir Hardie too radically challenged the climate of unity. He had opposed the war because he was by nature a pacifist, and because he perceived its most likely victims to be working men. He deplored an alliance with the Tsar, prime enemy of the labour movement. However, in his animosity he made claims about the conduct of the war that embarrassed and aggrieved even fellow Labour MPs, including one who with him represented Merthyr Tydfil, Edgar Jones. Jones recited Hardie’s excesses in the Commons on 16 November: Hardie chose not to attend. He had seemed to belittle the suffering of Belgian women during the German invasion – suffering that outraged British sensibilities – by saying that ‘the ravaging of women has always been an accompaniment of war’.48 He had implied something similar was happening around Army camps ‘at home’, and claimed that letters from soldiers had been censored because they mentioned ‘ghastly tales about the on-goings of our French Allies.’49 Predictably, he imputed even worse crimes to Britain’s Russian allies; more shocking, he said that atrocities such as the Germans were alleged to have committed were ‘now happening in the towns and villages which are being recaptured by the Allies in France’.

  Hardie had also claimed the Russians would dictate the terms of any peace; that the Belgians had committed atrocities in the Congo; he had ‘sneered’ at the loyalty of Indian troops; he had vilified as ‘not to be trusted’ General Botha, who was mobilising South Africa behind the Allied cause.50 He had talked of the government having ‘opened wide the gate of the lie factory in which tales of German atrocities are made to order’, which he had called ‘a sign that the Allies are not making headway.’ Worst of all, he had compared the alleged military leadership of the Kaiser with Britain’s own ‘fireside-loving King.’51 That last sneer especially upset His Majesty’s loyal subjects in Merthyr Tydfil, hence the trouble to which Jones was going to distance himself from them.

  At the opposite end of the social ladder Lady Ottoline Morrell, who ran a salon at 44 Bedford Square and had been, effectively, the Bloomsbury group before anyone had heard of it, flew the flag of pacifism with her husband Philip, the Liberal MP. By day Lady Ottoline did good works for destitute Germans and helped those upon whom British public opinion had turned. But on Thursday nights from November 1914 she gave soirées at number 44, to cheer up the beau monde, or at least those who did not regard the Morrells as ‘pro-German’ and felt able to attend. These included the cream of artistic life – the Clive Bells, Duncan Grant, Mark Gertler, Walter Sickert and Augustus John – and writers and thinkers such as Lytton Strachey, J. M. Keynes, Bertrand Russell and Arnold Bennett. ‘Those who came often dressed themselves up in gay Persian, Turkish, and other oriental clothes, of which I had a store,’ Lady Ottoline recalled, artlessly, in her memoirs.52 While the British regular Army was being shattered on the Marne, Morrell wou
ld play the pianola (‘a new toy’), Grant ‘bounded about like a Russian ballet dancer’, and Russell was ‘a stiff little figure, jumping up and down like a child, with an expression of surprised delight on his face at finding himself doing such an ordinary human thing as dancing.’ Sadly, the Thursday evenings ended in April 1915, when Lady Ottoline and her menagerie decamped to the Morrells’ country house at Garsington, which would become a haven for pacifists and conscientious objectors in the era of conscription.

  Such people were, however, in a minority: many who shared the artistic interests of the Morrells and their friends gave themselves entirely to the war effort. Lloyd George, himself a reluctant convert to war, now threw himself wholeheartedly into the fight, seizing initiatives in a way Asquith seemed incapable of doing. On 2 September, at Lloyd George’s suggestion, Charles Masterman, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and former co-editor with Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford) of the English Review, asked twenty-five ‘eminent literary men’ to Wellington House to form a secret Propaganda Bureau. They included Arnold Bennett, Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Hueffer, Thomas Hardy, Kipling, John Masefield, Newbolt, G. M. Trevelyan and Wells. Perhaps because of an oversight, one absentee was Robert Bridges, who that morning described the war as being, in his view, ‘between Christ and the Devil’, with the Germans taking their philosophical lead from Nietzsche.53

  The operation at Wellington House – whose existence was not officially confirmed until 1935 – became a point of coordination for British propaganda to neutral countries. However, the government also grasped the broader benefits of the public reading its favourite writers extolling the virtues of Britain’s fight. Masterman commissioned his literary friends to write pamphlets about the Hun’s wickedness, such as When Blood is Their Argument by Ford, son of a German immigrant, a counterblast to Shaw’s Common Sense about the War, which saw wrong on both sides and compounded his earlier offence in observing that as war broke out ‘the ordinary war-conscious civilian went mad.’54 Newbolt began writing adventure stories for boys to instil patriotic virtues, tramping the country giving a lecture entitled ‘Poetry and Patriotism’. His audience at one point consisted of a small group ‘mostly knitting’.55

  Assisting ministers and men of letters in advocating war were dons in the faculty of Modern History at Oxford, who by 14 September had published a slim red hardback called Why We Are at War: Great Britain’s Case. It noted European tensions since 1870, and described the perfidy of Germany’s conduct during July 1914. It addressed constitutional philosophy: ‘The war in which England is now engaged with Germany is fundamentally a war between two different principles – that of raison d’état and that of the rule of law.’56 It evoked the old struggle between the Stuarts who had chosen to act above the law and Parliament that had fought to include the Crown within the law, and subject to its rule. At a more demotic level Ivor Novello, the songwriter, took up the message in ‘Keep the Home Fires Burning’. According to legend, he wrote it because his mother was bored by ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, and begged him to compose an alternative.57 Its second verse includes:

  Overseas there came a pleading

  ‘Help a nation in distress.’

  And we gave our glorious laddies –

  Honour bade us do no less.

  For no gallant son of freedom

  To a tyrant’s yoke should bend,

  And a noble heart must answer

  To the sacred call of ‘Friend’.

  Long before the dons of Oxford published their justification for the war, the government had established the line to be taken: Germany was the aggressor, and Britain had sought only to stop the conflict. Evidence of this was provided on 6 August, when the full diplomatic correspondence of the crisis was laid before the House, prior to an address by the prime minister. The only other such information had been published by the Germans on 4 August, and was incomplete, making no mention of the negotiations between Britain and Germany. It was a clever propaganda move, helping ensure no weakening of the general public resolve that Britain had been in the right. Asquith confirmed the price Germany had offered to keep Britain out of the fight: the nation breaking its word to Belgium, and disregarding its neutrality. ‘Belgians are fighting and losing their lives,’ he told the Commons. ‘What would have been the position of Great Britain to-day, in the face of that spectacle, if we had assented to this infamous proposal?’58 He could not have entertained such ‘betrayal’ and ‘dishonour’.59 He praised Grey for his attempts to maintain peace: and proclaimed that ‘we are unsheathing our sword in a just cause’, giving the definitive view of why war had been declared:

  If I am asked what we are fighting for I reply in two sentences. In the first place, to fulfil a solemn international obligation, an obligation which, if it had been entered into between private persons in the ordinary concerns of life, would have been regarded as an obligation not only of law but of honour, which no self-respecting man could possibly have repudiated. I say, secondly, we are fighting to vindicate the principle which, in these days when force, material force, sometimes seems to be the dominant influence and factor in the development of mankind, we are fighting to vindicate the principle that small nationalities are not to be crushed, in defiance of international good faith, by the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering Power.60

  III

  The reduction of the causes of the war to a simple dualism of a virtuous Britain seeking to drive out of an oppressed nation an aggressive and duplicitous Germany had an inevitable, and swift, effect on how the public viewed Germans living in Britain, rendering them objects of suspicion. The natural desire to guard against German infiltration into British life quickly grew into anti-Germanism. After cabinet on 5 August – which resolved to ask Parliament for a vote of credit of £100 million to pay the initial expenses of the war, about which Asquith in a bipartisan spirit immediately consulted Law – the prime minister saw the King, whom he found ‘a good deal relieved’; he told Miss Stanley the Monarch was ‘becoming very anti-German’.61 An Aliens Restriction Bill was introduced on the same day ‘to remove or restrain the movements of undesirable aliens’, in the words of Reginald McKenna, helping prevent espionage.62 What would become MI5’s Central Registry (staffed by women) denominated six classes of alien:

  AA – Absolutely Anglicised or Absolutely Allied – undoubtedly friendly

  A – Anglicised or Allied – friendly

  AB – Anglo-Boche – doubtful, but probably friendly

  BA – Boche-Anglo – doubtful, but probably hostile

  B – Boche – hostile

  BB – Bad Boche – undoubtedly hostile.63

  The Bill dictated that the coming and going of such people would be rigidly controlled, as would their activities and places of residence. The law would punish those who helped aliens evade restrictions. Those thought hostile would be placed in internment camps – or as the government called them, ‘concentration camps’.64 Cases arose of wives and children of internees plunged into destitution: the local Boards of Guardians, who administered workhouses, were given grants to assist them.

  The inevitable question was asked – by Joseph King, the Liberal MP – about Germans who had lived in Britain for years and who ‘are much more British in sentiment than German’: McKenna said they would be unmolested, once they had registered, provided they did not live in prohibited areas, and gave the authorities no reason to believe they were ‘secretly engaged in operations against this country’.65 The Bill passed in a few minutes: no one questioned its urgency. A few days later a Liberal MP, Edmund Harvey, emphasised that ‘it is very noteworthy that while we are in a state of war there is no feeling of grudging or hostility against the mass of the Germans. We have no sort of unfriendly feeling to them, and we can show, in a time of crisis, friendliness and self-restraint to these unhappy strangers in our midst.’ That attitude would not prevail much longer, eroded first by the press, and then by German excesses against civilians. Within
the first month 66,773 Germans, Austrians and Hungarians registered, 37,457 of these in London and 949 in Ireland. By 1 November 17,283 enemy aliens had been interned.66

  Signs of Germanness vanished from British life. Offices of German steamship companies in London and elsewhere were shuttered. Shops owned by Germans acquired British names; a chain of German delicatessens displayed notices proclaiming that ‘the proprietor is a naturalised British subject’. As an extra precaution another notice read: ‘During war-time 25 per cent of the takings of all my shops will be given to the British Red Cross Society.’67 Newspapers published announcements by people who had changed their names, a trait the Royal Family would adopt within three years. Felix Rosenheim, a Liverpool magistrate, became Mr Rose; two brothers from Holloway named Siegenberg chose the aristocratic name of Curzon, and Alfred Schacht, a stockbroker, transmuted into Alfred Dent.68

  Matters were worse for those further down the social order. Areas such as London’s east end, with a high concentration of Germans, were plastered with posters informing local residents of their obligations under the Aliens Restriction Act. German shops had bricks put through windows; a couple of Limehouse bakers and a grocer had their premises wrecked, following rumours that German tradesmen were poisoning the food they sold. Some tradesmen sold their businesses, at very disadvantageous prices, and others retired. Some feared repatriation to Germany, which had become a foreign country to them. Many Jews came under suspicion early in the war: the editor of the Jewish Chronicle countered ‘the ignorant assumption up and down the country that every Jew is necessarily a German and is hence being made an object of hatred as an enemy of this country … Jews are by their tradition and, indeed, by absolute Jewish law, bound by loyalty to the country of which they are citizens.’69