Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Such rigorous censorship symbolised how the state Asquith steered was becoming more repressive and controlling, once the Rubicon of complete conscription had been crossed. On 25 July the North of Scotland Special Military Area was declared, restricting access north of the Great Glen. Sheppey, Newhaven, Harwich, Spurn Head and Dover would all follow by late September: the police could demand to see the credentials of anyone in those areas and arrest them if necessary. The police also started to turn up at the remaining public entertainments, locking the exits of theatres, music halls and sports grounds, questioning men of military age and demanding they produce certificates of exemption. Such activities were cheered on by a press howling about ‘shirkers, laggards and slackers’, and found great sympathy among those coming to terms with the Somme.102 There was bitterness against the Irish who, exempt from conscription, flocked from Ireland to take highly paid work; it was often, however, as useful to the war effort as serving in a trench.

  One victim of this increasingly repressive spirit was Bertrand Russell. Not content with banning him from going abroad, the government had also banned him from lecturing in any prohibited area – those near garrisons or naval dockyards, or anywhere considered sensitive under DORA – in case he engaged in subversive acts. Russell had planned a series of public lectures once the governing body of Trinity College, Cambridge had removed him from his lectureship, and had caused disquiet by giving speeches to munitions workers in South Wales, which led to his being banned from that area. He reported to the War Office on 5 September for a meeting with General George Cockerill, who told him that a sentence in his South Wales speech saying ‘there was no good reason why this war should continue another day’ was the root of the problem.103 ‘He said that such a statement made to miners or munition workers was calculated to diminish their ardour’ and that Russell ‘was encouraging men to refuse to fight for their country.’ Cockerill suggested that if Russell would return to teaching mathematics and stop engaging in propaganda he could go where he wished; but Russell would give no such undertaking. A philosophical debate ensued in which Cockerill, unsurprisingly, came off worse; but he insisted, nonetheless, that Russell would be banned from delivering such talks anywhere if he persisted. H. W. Massingham, editor of the radical weekly the Nation, who had publicly disagreed with Russell on several questions, wrote to The Times arguing that the decision to control where Russell could go in Britain was a ‘gross libel’ and an act of ‘persecution’.104

  Charles Trevelyan, the Liberal MP for Elland and a former junior minister who had resigned in opposition to the declaration of war, asked whether instead of suppressing Russell’s freedom of speech he might be allowed to deliver his lectures, risking prosecution only if he broke the law. Lloyd George responded that ‘the Army Council has offered to modify this Order so as to permit him to deliver the proposed lectures if Mr Russell will give an honourable undertaking to abstain from using them as a vehicle for propaganda that contravenes the Defence of the Realm Regulations, but, as Mr Russell declines to give any such undertaking, no modification of the Order is thought desirable. Prevention is better than prosecution.’105 Asked to describe the specific threat, Lloyd George said: ‘We had information from a very reliable source that Mr Bertrand Russell was about to engage in the delivery of a series of lectures which would interfere very seriously with the manning of the Army.’ He said it would be an ‘unpardonable weakness’ if the government allowed the lectures to be delivered, though was at a loss, in reply to a question from one member, to say why the public interest would be threatened by a lecture in Glasgow – near the heart of ‘Red Clydeside’ – but not in Manchester.

  Russell had said: ‘My proposed course of lectures on “The world as it can be made” is not intended to deal with the immediate issues raised by the War; there will be nothing about the diplomacy preceding the War, about conscientious objectors, about the kind of peace to be desired, or even about the general ethics of war. On all these topics I have expressed myself often already. My intention is to take the minds of my hearers off the questions of the moment.’106 He did not stick to his intentions in Cardiff, where he claimed he simply argued for peace negotiations to begin swiftly. Charles Stanton, a Welsh MP, pointed out, ‘at Cardiff he said everything he could say in the way of traducing this country, his own nation. As far as words would carry him in betraying the nation, everything that man tried to do [sic]. I think it is disgraceful for anyone to get up in this House and champion his cause, merely because he is a man who is supposed to have great intellectuality, and a man whom the Americans would welcome. I do not know we have much to thank America for. The Americans have been none too friendly as regards our own country, and that Bertrand Russell should be welcome in America is no test of a true Britisher.’107

  The government agreed. Russell found the designation of a restricted area covered all counties on the east and south coast, in case he chose to signal to enemy submarines, and most great centres of population. He did not deliver his lecture in Glasgow, but a local miners’ leader read it out, in a meeting chaired by an ex-provost of the city. Morrell goaded the government about whether it would arrest the man who read out the lecture; if the government was determined to continue to hound Russell – though he protested there ‘was not a word of truth’ in the claims Lloyd George made about his lectures – Morrell had made his point about the stupidity of doing so.108

  Russell was not the only victim of this determined clampdown on dissent. In the later months of 1916 the government turned the screw on individuals or organisations deemed pacifist or seeking to subvert the war effort. The targets included leftist political organisations such as the Independent Labour Party (which repudiated war as a capitalist conflict in which the workers of different nations had no quarrel with each other), but also the Union of Democratic Control (both of which counted Ramsay MacDonald as a member) and the National Council Against Conscription, some of whom had their premises raided. A book, Two Short Plays by Miles Malleson, the husband of Lady Constance – Russell’s mistress – and a former officer, invalided out in 1915, caused special annoyance. Malleson was a west end actor of some renown, and prolific as a writer; he would later become beloved by cinemagoers as a character actor in films of the 1940s and 1950s, specialising in eccentric clergymen. Since his discharge he had become a committed pacifist, and the two plays – D Company and Black ’Ell – were both explicitly pacifist, the second featuring a decorated officer tired of killing. Copies were confiscated under DORA, and in the Commons both Byles and Morrell attacked the government for this. A military judgement and not an aesthetic one had caused the ban. Malleson also wrote two pacifist pamphlets, neither of which excited the attention of the authorities: which suggests an element of amateurishness on their part. The literary attitude to the war had changed since the days of Brooke: and in the hands of men such as Siegfried Sassoon it would become harsher and angrier still before the war ended. The difference was between those, such as Brooke, who wrote about the war before they had seen it, and those, such as Sassoon, who wrote about it after experiencing the reality.

  As concerning to the liberal-minded was the habit of the police or Army ‘round-up’. An instance of this came one September morning when police descended on Marylebone station in London. After questioning numerous men of military age they only found one who could not explain why he was not in uniform: he was ‘Ernest Snowdon, of Harrow-road, Paddington, leather dealer and a conscientious objector, who had been granted exemption from combatant service.’109 He should have reported for other duties, and having appeared in court later in the day and been fined £2 was handed over to a military escort. Others rounded up in other swoops included a professional boxer from Bermondsey arrested when in the ring; two hundred and fifteen men were detained after a football match in Hull, four of whom were found to be absent without leave from the Army; another forty-two were detained after a match between Reading and Queen’s Park Rangers, and all found to have their papers in or
der – it was such events that caused anger and irritation. An actor in a revue company playing the Nottingham Empire was marched off by a military escort for having failed to report for service; as was a former lion tamer, starring in a drama at the Edmonton Empire. The Times protested at this attack on law-abiding men in the guise of finding ‘shirkers’, with the victims ‘publicly branded with the degrading suspicion of being utterly unworthy of the name of citizens’, and pointed out that ‘the results of this high-handed action have been quite ludicrously small.’110 The Army handed over the responsibility for these activities to the police, who quickly scaled them down.

  V

  The government may have managed, in the immediate aftermath, to keep from the public the scale of losses on the Somme. However, it could not conceal that the battle had made the demand for men even more desperate, to replace those killed or wounded. Therefore 500,000 civilians who had failed medical examinations were retested, the bar being set lower. Repington noted on 16 October that 1,000,000 men would be needed by September 1917 if units were to be kept at their existing strengths, and only 170,000 men remained to be called up under existing arrangements.111 It was decided to review exemptions, with single men in munitions factories targeted for replacement by women. The War Office recruiting department set up a Substitution Bureau to ensure that any job that could be done by a woman was; and that men taken from businesses who were no longer fit for military service were substituted for men who were. It was stated that unless such efforts succeeded, men aged between forty-one and forty-five would have to be called up too.112 Attested men of forty-one were, within days, told to report on 1 November: it caused such anger (because these men knew that many younger and fitter were still in civilian life) that the proposal was dropped. It was agreed, however, to ‘comb out’ all unskilled men in munitions work under the age of thirty and replace them with women or boys under eighteen.

  There was also anger about the exemption for miners, as coal output was falling due to disputes; it was now 253,000,000 tons, compared with 287,000,000 in 1914, when demand was less.113 Even Smillie, the leader of the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain, admitted that if miners were exempted to dig coal and were not doing so, there could be little case for their exemption. The problem was worst in South Wales, where avoidable absenteeism during September 1916 rose from nearly 6 per cent to nearly 10 per cent, Monday being an especially bad day. The miners’ response was to demand a rise in wages.114 The dispute between the owners and the miners came to be seen as a private feud, but one that threatened grave national consequences, until the press began to urge the government to take coercive measures effectively to nationalise the Welsh coalfield.

  A debate on 11 October on a new vote of credit turned more on the matter of manpower – a Manpower Distribution Board, chaired by Chamberlain, had been set up – and exposed an ugly obstinacy. Robert Houston, a Liverpool Tory MP, asked why troops from the African colonies were not being used: ‘It is simply prejudice,’ he said. ‘They are fellow-subjects of ours. They enjoy all the privileges of the British flag and all the privileges of freedom, and they are fit to fight for freedom. If we were beaten now and crushed under the heel of the Germans, what would become of these coloured peoples?’115 He quoted the Bishop of Pretoria as having said about his local black population: ‘These fine races of men were in danger of being spoiled owing to the disgusting example often set them by white people … Our boys in German East Africa are being shot down by German trained blacks. Why don’t we employ them also? The Prussian Guard would not stand up to a second Zulu charge.’ He knew the reason was racism, and read a postcard – suitably censored – from an anonymous correspondent in response to a piece he had written in the Daily Mail a fortnight earlier suggesting the use of colonial troops. His correspondent had accused him of wanting ‘to bring millions of negro soldiers to overrun Europe and to slaughter decent white people. You are nothing but a so-and-so and a so-and-so to make such a vile proposal.’ For good measure, the writer suggested Houston should have his throat cut.

  So desperate was the need for men that some – The Times, for example, in a leading article on 4 October – called for Irish conscription. This was foolhardy in the extreme. Six months after the Easter Rising, Ireland remained volatile and the Irish increasingly angry, and the Liberals in the government mostly felt that this was a means of making the overall situation worse, not better. Lloyd George believed such a move would be premature because the men would not be put to good use. He feared they would just be slaughtered, until strategy and tactics improved. Although he believed – somewhat naively – that when the time came conscription for Ireland could be ‘properly handled’, the Irish response, in its hostility, bore no resemblance to that. T. P. O’Connor, the veteran Nationalist MP, was ‘violent and emphatic’ against it, predicting ‘bloodshed at every cottage door’ – while conceding the idea was entirely logical.116 Redmond made his first public speech since the Rising at Waterford on 5 October, and said he could not believe the government would be so ‘insane’ as to try to impose conscription on Ireland, where it would be ‘resisted in every village’.117 He countered the idea that recruitment had stopped since the Rising, quoting War Office figures that 61,000 men had enlisted since then; however, figures soon showed that there were 161,000 Irishmen of military age not engaged in agriculture or other reserved occupations who were available.118 With an eye on Sinn Féin, he also took the opportunity to say that his party would never accept conscription, nor the permanent partition of Ireland. Carson pointed out that more men had joined up from Ulster than from the other three provinces combined.

  In the Commons a fortnight later Redmond resumed his attack on the government, and argued that the administration in Ireland operated contrary to the ideals for which the British Army was fighting the Germans, and was responsible for the turbulent state of the country. He said this was ‘a moment when the public interest can be served by plain speaking’, and used the tones of a man who had realised that he, his party and moderate Nationalism were fighting for their lives.119 He called the situation ‘full of menace and danger’ and on the verge of undoing forty years of work by the ‘constitutional movement’ in Ireland. He condemned the government for its handling of the Irish since August 1914, while also noting that 157,000 Irishmen – 95,000 Catholics and 62,000 Protestants – had joined the Army, and another 10,000 the Navy, the Catholics showing their goodwill after the arrival of the Home Rule Act on the statute book.120 Around 30,000 Irish National Volunteers had joined up, but the snubbing by Britain of Ireland had, he said, resulted in many others being turned away, thwarting his desire to keep Ireland and its people in close step with Britain. The ‘suspicion and distrust’ these attitudes fostered had culminated, he said, in the events of the previous Easter.121 Later in the debate Lloyd George disputed Redmond’s figures: 157,000 men had offered their services, but 52,000 had been turned down on medical grounds, and the total proportion was far lower than the rest of the United Kingdom.122 Lloyd George himself subsequently admitted this figure was erroneous too.

  Inevitably, a debate about Irish conscription turned into a discussion of British conduct in Ireland since the Rising. Redmond estimated that at most 1,500 men had participated in the rebellion, yet all of Ireland had been ‘scoured’ for rebels, alienating the law-abiding population when thousands of innocent young men had been arrested. The implementation of Home Rule had been postponed again, martial law was still being imposed, and Unionist ministers were imposing it: and yet Irishmen were dying for the King of England on the Western Front. He believed the situation was salvageable if Home Rule were implemented quickly; but feared disaster if it were not, especially if an attempt were made to impose conscription on Ireland; and when new Irish volunteers were not being sent to Irish regiments, but to English and Scottish ones, much to their distaste.

  In reply Henry Duke, Birrell’s successor as chief secretary, adopted a conciliatory tone, but denied that government policy
had assisted the rise of Sinn Féin. His and Redmond’s divergent views proved theirs was no meeting of minds. Duke disputed the figure of 1,500 conspirators, claiming 3,000; and many sent to prison had had their sentences reduced. There were 560 men still interned: there was no sense trying all 560 for treason, but equally the government did not wish to let them loose to foment trouble in a divided country. He argued that martial law continued not for Britain’s benefit, but for that of the ordinary, law-abiding Irish man and woman. He blamed Ireland, and not the government, for the failure to implement Home Rule that July: the people had failed to agree among themselves. That was a matter of interpretation, and not an especially reliable one. The upshot was that coercion would continue, and (whatever Duke thought) more Nationalists would cross to Sinn Féin, and hard-core republican ideals.

  Also poisoning relations was the matter of 570 men locked up in an internment camp at Frongoch in Wales, reduced from 1,800 sent there after the Rising. The inmates slept in former malt stores, described as rat-infested, damp and unventilated, a description the government inevitably contested; it did not contest that, that October, 176 pounds of meat sent to feed them was declared unfit for human consumption.123 An officer running the camp suggested the meat should be washed with vinegar to eliminate the smell. Although Samuel, responsible as home secretary, called the allegations about living conditions ‘baseless’, he also refused to let a deputation of MPs visit the camp to inspect it.124 Many internees were intellectuals; the camp became known as the university of the revolution because of the classes organised for the less educated. Among the alumni would be Michael Collins, interned for having been aide-de-camp to Joseph Plunkett. Asquith denied that the Unionist ministers running the government of Ireland did so in an ‘anti-home rule spirit’.125 He did not even indicate a new plan for Home Rule: it was as if he were stuck in a swamp from which he could not move. Following the Somme, however, he had too much else to concern him. However, he was shrewd enough to decide that he would take the matter of conscripting Irishmen no further.