Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Beaverbrook became Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster several days after agreeing to reorganise what would now be called the Ministry of Information: the delay was needed to secure the King’s agreement, which required Lloyd George to plead that he only sought to enlist ‘in the King’s service all the best brains and energies of the nation’.56 The King assented, saying he did not know Beaverbrook ‘personally’ and therefore had based his low estimate of him on what he had read in the newspapers.57 He may have heard the view of his uncle, the Duke of Connaught, who had been governor-general of Canada and was alleged to have said that ‘no decent man would need Beaverbrook.’58

  Scott told Lloyd George that he, like the King, thought the appointment of Beaverbrook and Northcliffe unwise. The prime minister defended the latter by saying ‘it was necessary to find occupation for his abounding energies if they were not to run into mischief.’59 The controversy rumbled on, as the old order failed to comprehend the vulgar, corrupt and entirely improper way that Lloyd George chose to run his administration. In a debate in the House of Lords that he instigated on 6 March, to discuss what he considered to be the highly unsuitable appointment of Beaverbrook and Northcliffe, Lord Ribblesdale, subject of perhaps the finest Edwardian swagger portrait, complained about the two press barons, deploring how their methods ‘largely controlled and animated’ the government with which they were now connected.60

  Even before this debate the corrosive effects of a tripartite battle between politicians, generals and the press were already apparent. Lord Beresford, a retired admiral, savaged the press in the Lords on 12 February, for attacks on senior officers; he said any serviceman would know how destructive these were to morale in the Army and the Fleet, because they undermined confidence in military leadership. He believed DORA should be used to punish those publishing such material. ‘I warn the Government and the Prime Minister that there is a great deal of unrest in the country, and that there is a great deal worse in the trenches and in the Fleet, because of the power that the Press has to make or to unmake officers in the Services.’61 That was before Northcliffe’s appointment.

  Austen Chamberlain, about whom there had been rumours of a return to office, attacked the culture of government using the press to undermine public servants, a view Asquith shared. Chamberlain reflected a disquiet that ministers, and particularly Lloyd George, were too close to Fleet Street, and a smell of corruption was abroad. He said the slurs of Northcliffe and others ‘are not only deplorable in themselves, but they are cowardly, and the men who make them are not only acting in a way in which a patriotic citizen would not act in war-time, they are acting in a way in which gentlemen do not act at any time.’62 He accused Lloyd George of dereliction in protecting Robertson against attacks; but added that no attack on government policy should be traceable back to a senior officer, an allusion to the free flow of criticism between Haig and Robertson about how the prime minister ran the government’s affairs.

  Chamberlain also had a more specific complaint:

  The functions of the Press are not the functions of the Government, and the functions of the Government are not the functions of the Press, and it is not possible, without misconception and misunderstanding, that they should be combined in the same person. What is the function of the Government? Three great newspaper owners are members of, or are intimately associated with, the Administration. Their papers are found from time to time to contain matters which the Government repudiates with energy; and I, for one, say at once, with truth and with sincerity, you will never persuade the public that a member of the Government or a person connected with the Administration can conduct a campaign in his newspaper contrary to the policy of the Government of the day.63

  He said Lloyd George had caused ‘suspicion and distrust’ by including the proprietors in the government:

  I tell my right hon Friend what everyone is saying in the Lobbies, outside the House, where men meet, but what I think it is now time for someone to say publicly and as a responsible man in this House. You cannot escape misconception, you cannot escape trouble of this kind as long as you try to combine in the same person the functions of a director of a Press which asserts its independence and a member of a Government who owes loyalty to the Government. You cannot do the two things.64

  He added:

  You would not allow a colleague not the owner of a newspaper to go down and make speeches contrary to the policy of His Majesty’s Government or to attack men who are serving His Majesty’s Government. You cannot allow them, instead of making speeches, to write articles or to permit articles to be written in their newspapers. My right hon Friend and his Government will never stand clear in the estimation of the public, and will never have the authority which they ought to have, and which I desire them to have, until they make things quite clear, open, and plain to all the world and sever this connection with the newspapers.

  Several serving officers added their condemnations to Chamberlain’s. Colonel Sir Harry Verney attacked the ‘discreditable and dangerous alliance with the Northcliffe Press’ that the government had fostered, and said it ‘looked like a dirty business’.65 Major Walter Guinness spoke of the ‘extraordinary indignation’ felt by soldiers in France for which ‘the Government … have only themselves to blame.’ Colonel Claude Lowther asserted that newspapers run by Northcliffe, Rothermere and Beaverbrook would be loyal to the government that both men now served: an interesting assumption. Colonel Martin Archer-Shee referred to a claim by Beaverbrook about the Second Battle of Ypres, that British troops had ‘deserted’ the Canadians there, and thundered: ‘I say that to make a man capable of making a statement like that, which I venture to say was a gross libel on our troops, and absolutely inaccurate, Director of Propaganda in this country, on top of having been smothered with honours before, is to my mind also a matter which does not inspire one with trust in the Government.’66

  Chamberlain was consistent: three weeks later, at a dinner at Carson’s house, he announced to the assembly (including Milner and Amery, who recorded it in his diary) that it had been an act of ‘infamy’ to promote Beaverbrook and Northcliffe and ‘if he and Carson liked to combine in a resolution on the subject, the Government would collapse.’67 Milner warned him ‘he was barking up the wrong tree.’ No such challenge was issued. Beaverbrook took issue with him privately, but Chamberlain fought back: the ‘connection between the Govt and the Press … destroys the independence of the Press and involves the Govt in responsibility for all the opinions expressed in the Press.’68 But he also feared an attempt to ‘nobble’ the press by ministerial appointments and to facilitate ‘subterranean intrigue … against servants of the Crown and public men.’

  The same day the Unionist War Committee, led by Salisbury, passed a resolution demanding the government stop recruiting newspaper proprietors unless those men relinquished control of their businesses. This sufficiently worried Lloyd George that he addressed the committee and, in the privacy of the meeting, conceded that the characters of some he had promoted were not ideal. But he added: ‘In these times we must not be squeamish. For dirty work give me the dirty man.’69 Chamberlain felt that ‘Lloyd George bamboozles the House too easily and they don’t make him sweat for his offences as they should.’70 Chamberlain’s critique, both in the Commons and around society, of Lloyd George’s methods had rattled the prime minister. It was highly accurate and carried great weight, coming from a man of uncontested probity; and Chamberlain had great clout in the Unionist Party, on whose support Lloyd George relied to stay in office. Before he addressed the Unionist committee, the prime minister had an hour’s private talk with Chamberlain, in which he said ‘he had laid it down that any Minister must absolutely dissociate himself from control of a newspaper while in office, and that Rothermere and Beaverbrook had been appointed ‘on their merits’. Eventually, on 11 March, he made a public statement to that effect in the Commons. Rather pathetically, he told Chamberlain he had stated ‘the other side of the case’ to the press
because soldiers had ‘intrigued’ against him. In the House, he absolutely denied that either he, or any official in his name, had ‘inspired paragraphs attacking admirals and generals’. He was heard in silence, apart from a cry of ‘what about Northcliffe?’71

  Later that day the House held a long debate on government relations with the press, introduced by Chamberlain, who said he had taken Lloyd George at his word. Others had not, such as Spencer Hughes, a journalist and the Liberal MP for Stockport, and one of the most popular men in the Commons. ‘We know that the Northcliffe Press conducted a campaign of insult and slander against the right hon Gentleman the Member for East Fife (Mr Asquith),’ Hughes recalled. ‘That was a proceeding on the part of these papers which I regarded not only as deplorable, but as detestable. I have sometimes wished, when I read those criticisms of public men, that we could have the man who wrote the article produced, and put by the side of the man he assailed. Let us judge which of the two has rendered the country and the Empire the greater service.’72 Hughes then quoted an unnamed editor on the state of the contemporary British press:

  We have never hesitated to stand up for the light when we felt that public opinion was with us. We have always protested against the wrong when we saw it to be unpopular. We have stated the truth when we happened to know the facts, and have never hesitated to resort to fiction when we have been convinced of its superior validity. We have never employed the lumberings and tedious methods of demonstration when we felt we could rely on the credulity of our readers, and we have never asked for gratitude when we have found self-satisfaction the surer road to happiness.

  He continued: ‘A good many papers are run on those lines to-day. I cannot think it is right that the fate of any public man—statesman or sailor or soldier—should be left in the hands of papers so conducted, nor can I think it right, indeed it is scarcely credible, that the policy of such papers should control or influence in any degree the policy of any Administration which is worthy the name of Government.’73

  Other members raged about the wickedness of the Northcliffe press: the ‘vendettas’ against Kitchener, Robertson and Jellicoe were aired, followed by the grudges Northcliffe held against other countries, ordering his editors at different times to write nothing positive about the French, then about the Germans.74 Inevitably, the faked stories about German corpse factories were mentioned. John McKean, an Irish Nationalist, gave Northcliffe credit for having pioneered aviation, and for ensuring the Daily Mail was not a servile organ; but for most MPs the opportunity to attack him was long overdue. Another Nationalist, Arthur Lynch, summed up the widespread feeling: ‘I do not think that this Government is strong enough even against unjust pressure of the Northcliffe press. The Northcliffe press is their mother and their father, the Government has been nursed, fostered and spoon-fed and brought up to its doubtful maturity by the Northcliffe press. What the Northcliffe press has made it can unmake, and to-day the Government dare not have an opinion contrary to the Northcliffe press.’75

  Pringle openly accused the prime minister of having fed the press, especially Northcliffe’s, with stories disobliging to his rivals while climbing to the prime ministership. When Lloyd George spoke – he regarded the matter as of such personal importance that he paid one of his increasingly rare visits to the Commons – he ignored such accusations but defended Beaverbrook, his new minister. ‘Since the appointment I have seen men who have come to me, and criticised this appointment. I have said to them, “Would you mind giving me the name of anyone who would do it better?” I have never had an answer up to the present.’76

  Northcliffe in fact did his job well. He was constantly hampered by a series of respiratory illnesses in the spring of 1918, but worked hard to flood Germany with propaganda about its responsibility for the war, and the probability of its defeat. He enlisted Wells to help. At a meeting on 31 May it was agreed the threat of eventual starvation through blockade should be matched by the promise of the prosperity of peace, overseen by a League of Nations – one of Wells’s pet ideas, given his commitment to world government. The matter was referred up to Balfour, and was stuck for weeks in the Foreign Office machine; though even existing propaganda leaflets were held back for want of planes from which to drop them over enemy lines. Wells soon became disillusioned, and Northcliffe struggled to rein him in, promising to take up the organisational failures with Beaverbrook.

  Censorship, to which the press fell victim, continued to irritate. In March 1918 one of the official war artists, Christopher Nevinson, tried to show his painting Paths of Glory at an enormously successful exhibition of war art in the Leicester Galleries in London; it showed two dead Tommies lying in a blasted landscape. He was told that under DORA he could not depict dead British soldiers, so he put a diagonal piece of brown paper across the painting covering them up, with the word CENSORED emblazoned on it. This also caused trouble, because that word was allowed to be used only by official sanction. Later in the year a painting of two dead Germans in a trench, by Sir William Orpen, created no difficulties precisely because the corpses were German. Although the war had arrested the Vorticist movement early on, since 1914 painters had put their skill at the nation’s disposal. Wellington House commissioned war artists including Nevinson, John Lavery, Paul Nash and Eric Kennington to visit the front and paint it.77 The results were not explicit, and often romanticised: they were, after all, part of the propaganda effort, hence Nevinson’s difficulty when he crossed the line into realism. The depiction of acts of heroism, in paintings or in the various periodicals describing the war that the public lapped up, was highly popular. Illustrations by those such as Bert Thomas – best remembered for his cheeky, pipe-smoking Tommy saying ‘Arf a “mo”, Kaiser!’ as he lit up, featured in magazines and on a rich variety of posters for recruitment and national savings.

  One key case of censorship reached the courts. Having walked out of The Times, Repington moved to the Morning Post, where he would become, with Gwynne’s support, a one-man campaign against his ex-proprietor’s ideas on military strategy. He told St Loe Strachey that he considered Lloyd George and Northcliffe ‘a curse to the country’ and, ironically like the prime minister, thought the Army Council should have the latter taken out and shot.78 Repington’s first article in his new paper, on 24 January, discussed the ‘procrastination and cowardice of the Cabinet’. It had not been through the censor, and prompted Lloyd George to demand his prosecution, until his colleagues talked him out of it.79 On 11 February Repington wrote about the Versailles meeting and how under-resourced the BEF was, given a possible German attack. This time the War Cabinet decided to prosecute, Lloyd George feeling especially vindictive towards anyone who dared illuminate his failures.

  He had wanted Repington and Gwynne tried for treason, until his law officers convinced him such a prosecution would fail, and make the Germans think Repington had a point. Repington had imparted nothing of value to the enemy, whose newspapers had given more extensive reports of the Versailles meeting than he had been able to do. Nonetheless two Scotland Yard officers arrived at his Hampstead mansion (whose substantial mortgage had propelled Repington into his new post, as his creditors were circling) the following afternoon to question him, and the next day he was summonsed to appear in court. For the ‘technical offence’ of printing his piece without passing it through the censor the paper was fined £100, and Repington the same amount. This disappointed Lady Bathurst, the Morning Post’s proprietrix, who had wished to show solidarity with her employees to the extent where she said she hoped she would be locked up with them.80 The court case, which brought to Bow Street the largest crowd since the arraignment of Dr Crippen – ‘there came to look on a great number of friends and many ladies,’ Repington noted – greatly increased his celebrity and authority, precisely what Lloyd George did not need.81 The Colonel stepped up the vitriolic tone of his articles, much to the prime minister’s rage, and would soon have even more scope to do so.

  Later in the summer of 1918 a new anti-a
lien campaign, led by the Northcliffe press, convulsed Britain: the target was naturalised Germans, Austrians and Hungarians who had escaped the great round-up of 1914–15. The campaign was bred by a fear, common that summer, that the war might be lost: it reflected not least a determination to get retaliation in against the Germans before they dictated terms. Northcliffe’s newspapers sent correspondents to major cities to whip up, and report, anti-alien feeling. On 30 July 8,000 people filled the Albert Hall, and unanimously passed a resolution demanding immediate internment of all people of ‘enemy blood’, irrespective of gender, rank or naturalisation.82 Beresford, who made the keynote speech and who supported the Northcliffe press when it suited him, blamed alien influence for the wave of strikes, what he considered the weakness of the blockade, and various other difficulties for which he could adduce no evidence. Assisting Northcliffe was Noel Pemberton Billing, an independent MP, former officer in the Royal Naval Air Service and an early advocate of the RAF, but also a man who had learned much of what little he knew from Horatio Bottomley.