As time went on, there was more and more emphasis laid on pictorial information. War artists, stills photographers and, crucially, cinematographers were engaged to leaven the diet of factual pamphlets. The first Wellington House-sponsored war artist, Muirhead Bone, went out to France in 1916, while at the end of 1915, the first film, Britain Prepared, was premiered in both neutral countries and in Britain. It was followed by The Battle of the Somme, an hour-long film chronicling the preparations for the battle and the battle itself, which appeared less than two months after the offensive began. This had a substantial emotional impact on audiences, since it scarcely pulled its punches; for the first time on cinema screens, civilians saw scenes of dead British soldiers.
H. H. Asquith was removed as Prime Minister in December 1916 by a coup of his mostly Liberal enemies, and was replaced by David Lloyd George. He insisted on immediate changes in the propaganda operation, having always taken a more robust line on the subject than the fastidious and rather Olympian Asquith and Balfour, who held fast to the nineteenth-century view that the role of the State should be strictly limited, and who thought that the rightness of the Allied cause was, in any event, self-evident.
Lloyd George had hardly got his feet under the table of his new, small War Cabinet (consisting of Lord Curzon, Andrew Bonar Law, Lord Milner, Arthur Henderson and himself) when he persuaded his colleagues that the whole business of propaganda needed to be rationalised, with duplications stripped out, and deficiencies remedied. In this he was encouraged by the War Office, which was both keen on a centralised propaganda authority and jealous of the Foreign Office’s influence. The immediate cause was the adverse propaganda that had appeared in Italy about Eleftherios Venizelos, the pro-Allies Prime Minister of Greece – the model for Karolides in The Thirty-Nine Steps. But the deeper reason was the fear of post-Somme war-weariness amongst the Allies. What is more, although the Americans were on the cusp of coming into the war, there was a solid core of isolationism, especially in the Midwest, that needed to be addressed.
Lloyd George asked a number of departments, notably the War Office and the Foreign Office, as well as the General Staff, to prepare memoranda. He also turned to his old friend, Robert Donald, editor of the Daily Chronicle, who, as a newspaperman, had very strong views on propaganda, and asked him to provide recommendations on policy as well as personnel. However, in January 1917, without waiting for the departmental reports to come in, Lloyd George and the War Cabinet decided in principle to set up a separate Department to draw most of the propaganda strings together. A Cabinet minute reads ‘… what was required was not so much an attempt to convert neutrals by pamphlets as an effective system for the speedy distribution of sound news in this country, the Allied countries, and among neutrals. Attention was drawn to our failure to make any impression on the American West and Middle West, and to the extent to which the Germans, by bold and skilful contracts for advertising matter, were closing a large area of the American newspaper and publishing world to British propaganda … The first step is to select the head of the new organisation and invite him to report on the whole question with the view to the establishment of a good home organisation as a preliminary.’75
Several members of Parliament were approached to head this Department, although none could be persuaded to take on the task. Donald suggested three names for Deputy Director: John Buchan, T. L. Gilmour (an able and experienced journalist and administrator favoured by Donald) and Roderick Jones (Managing Director of the Reuters press agency). Donald admitted that JB had excellent qualifications, would be a popular choice with the war ministries, and ‘knows what is wanted in the way of propaganda and how it should be presented’.76
Lloyd George seems to have been reluctant to choose JB as Director, partly because of his close links to the Foreign Office, which Lloyd George (unfairly, in this instance) mistrusted, and partly because of JB’s connection with Field-Marshal Haig, against whom the Prime Minister consistently schemed. Lord Milner had to come to the aid of his long-time protégé,* writing to the Prime Minister in mid-January: ‘Don’t think I am too insistent! I wish you would not “turn down” John Buchan, without seeing him yourself. If you had a talk to him, and were not favourably impressed, I should have nothing more to say. But I am not satisfied to have him rejected on hear-say, and ill-informed hear-say at that!’77 Certainly newspapermen would have had an instinctive prejudice against a man who was both more highbrow than them and, as they saw it, not a ‘real’ journalist.
Lord Curzon and Leo Amery also weighed in on JB’s behalf and so, despite Lloyd George’s misgivings, he was offered the job, his title being Director of the Department of Information, at a salary of £1,000 per annum and the rank of temporary (unpaid) Lieutenant-Colonel. Although he had jumped several military ranks, the lack of real seniority was to prove a great disadvantage, especially in his dealings with the War Office.
Before taking up the post, JB produced a report recommending that the Department be directly answerable only to the War Cabinet, and have two main functions: propaganda, by which he meant the putting of the Allied case in neutral countries and the explanation of the British effort in Allied countries ‘with the object of ensuring a wholesome state of public opinion’; and also addressing British opinion where it was needed: ‘It is not suggested that there should be any attempt to spoon-feed the British press … But the War Cabinet may desire to give a lead to British opinion, either by the confidential disclosure beforehand to responsible editors of some line of policy or coming event, or by the publication of some statement or other.’78 This was a significant departure from the nineteenth-century consensus concerning the State’s limited role.
On JB’s recommendation the new Department of Information was split into four. There were two Production sections: Wellington House handled books, pamphlets, photographs and art, while T. L. Gilmour’s department dealt with cables and wireless, films and press articles sent abroad. The Administrative section, under the very experienced Hubert Montgomery, was fashioned out of the old Foreign Office News Department, and was concerned with propaganda abroad; it was divided into branches corresponding to the ten geographical regions, with a specialist in charge of each one. This section was housed in the Foreign Office, where JB chose to locate his office (although he toured the other sections frequently). The Department of Information, inevitably, remained very reliant on the Foreign Office, especially for the distribution of material abroad and because of the expertise developed by the News Department. Lastly, there was an intelligence branch, which provided reports upon political and civilian matters in foreign countries. At Nelson’s before the war, JB had been involved with the company’s international business, providing printed matter for countries as far away as South America; this experience proved valuable. Indeed, according to the Buchan scholar Michael Redley: ‘The model on which he built the Department of Information was Nelson’s reprint publishing, in which the publisher identifies popular demand and seeks out the supply to satisfy it.’79
JB took up his new position on 20 February 1917. It is clear that he understood the complexities of the task, although he probably overestimated the capacity of other people to understand his vision, and underestimated the capacity of politicians and journalists to make trouble, even at a time of national emergency. Moreover, this was a Department, not a Ministry, and lacked the prestige necessary to safeguard its interests and enforce its requirements. It was not staffed by experienced civil servants and many of his colleagues were unpaid, often part-time, and emboldened at times to take their own line.
All the virtues of the administrator that JB had learned young in South Africa – approachability, having an open-door policy, being slow to chide and quick to bless, prodigiously hard-working, and with the courage to back his own judgement – he brought to this job. However, as it turned out, those qualities could be negated by his inability to second-guess, and therefore counter, those who intrigued against him, and a certain reluctance to conduct diffi
cult interviews. Nor was he as careful with public money as was desirable, considering that there were many politicians, even in 1917, who thought propaganda an unnecessary evil. To these people £750,000 a year (which rose to £1,200,000 when the Department became a Ministry in 1918) was a staggering, unjustifiable drain on the Exchequer.
JB was also unlucky. Only a week after taking up the post, he had to submit to long-planned surgery on his digestive tract. This procedure, a gastroenterostomy, was conducted by a well-known surgeon, John Lockhart-Mummery, at home in Portland Place. Although JB intended to recuperate carefully, by going to stay, together with his family, at the house belonging to their friends, Fred (F. S.) and Katie Oliver at Checkendon in Oxfordshire, the intense pressures of his new job did not allow enough time off for the operation to be perfectly successful. Roderick Jones, a colleague at the Department of Information, later recalled: ‘It was a dangerous proceeding and called for care and rest in convalescence. Yet disregarding all prudent advice Buchan insisted upon papers being sent to him from the Department, which he studied, annotated, and fixed judgement upon, and, in general, directed the Department from his bed … But his unquenchable spirit and energy drove him forward, then and at many another time, and I cannot help feeling that he paid dearly for it in the end.’80
The number of people involved with the Department rose to 485. Roderick Jones of Reuters worked on telegraphy and wireless communication, while Hugh Walpole, the novelist, studied Russia, Arnold Bennett, another novelist, ran the French section, and Hugh Seton-Watson, the historian, dealt with enemy propaganda in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Even the Test cricketer, ‘Plum’ Warner, became involved. JB’s Oxford friend, Reginald Farrer, roved about the battlefields, sending back reports, which he put into a book called The Void of War, and dedicated to JB, ‘the onlie begetter’.81 Sandy Gillon, who had fought at Gallipoli and on the Somme, and been wounded, was pleased to become, for a time, JB’s personal assistant, although this caused trouble with the War Office, who wanted him back at the front. The ever-loyal and efficient Lilian Killick also worked in JB’s office, only going to Nelson’s in Paternoster Row to pick up the post.
JB might have been disliked by some politicians and newspapermen but he commanded the warm loyalty of those who worked under him. Jones wrote later about his capacity for winning support and cooperation from those about him: ‘For he was tireless and swift. We others strove to imitate him, perhaps not always with success, but certainly with more effect than if we had had a less sympathetic and vitalising leader.’82
As far as JB was concerned, opinion in the United States was of the first importance, especially as there were many Americans under the misapprehension that the French and the Canadians were the main protagonists amongst the Allies. JB sent a man called Geoffrey Butler to New York to run what turned out to be a successful British Bureau of Information, responsible to the American section of the Department. Academics and poets, such as Gilbert Murray and John Masefield, crossed the Atlantic to speak on what they liked, the only proviso being that they did not mention Ireland – the US having a large population of people of Irish descent, who tended to support Home Rule. JB, who had always been keen on neutrals seeing what was really going on, ensured that a château at Radinghem in northern France was available to provide hospitality to visiting American opinion-formers.
A British press bureau, Maison de la Presse, was also opened in Paris. Additionally, JB found some money for Lina Waterfield, one of the Anglo-Italian scholars who had recently founded the British Institute in Florence, to increase its activities; this was an attempt to combat the widespread anti-British feeling in Italy, which existed even though the country had joined the Allies in May 1915.
JB encouraged Masterman and Arnold Bennett to employ more battlefield photographers* and also those war artists who had seen action. These included Richard Nevinson, William Orpen, Henry Lamb, Wyndham Lewis and Stanley Spencer. JB visited an exhibition of drawings by Paul Nash of the Ypres Salient on the Western Front in July 1917 at the Goupil Gallery in London; although the pictures did not appeal to him personally, he arranged for Nash (who was within hours of being sent out to Egypt) to meet Masterman, with the result that he was appointed an official war artist based at GHQ in France. Nash told his wife, ‘I hope to hear from Buchan shortly; would you like to ring him up and worship over the phone – he deserves it.’83 On his return to England, Nash was nervous that Masterman would not care for the startling, uncompromising pictures he painted, but the latter was enthusiastic and arranged for them to be exhibited at the Leicester Galleries in May 1918. The fruits of all these endeavours were some of the greatest war paintings of the first part of the twentieth century: Nevinson’s Harvest of Battle, Orpen’s Zonnebeke and Nash’s The Menin Road and We are Making a New World.
There is no doubt that propaganda acquired a harder edge** under JB than it had in the days of Masterman at Wellington House. This was partly because, by 1917, the conflict was no longer prosecuted by relatively small, professional armies obeying age-old conventions, but had become an all-out struggle for the nation’s survival. However, it had also to do with JB’s ever-present fear that Evil could prevail over Good. To win that battle, most weapons were permissible.
While JB was building up the Department of Information, his brother Alastair was writing encouraging, cheerful letters to his fearful family from France, telling them that the past two years had been the happiest of his life. ‘There are two corporals in my company that I love. They are called Dobson and Hamilton and have been friends from the beginning. They are both wonderful and don’t know what fear is – a thing which a timid man like myself marvels at. Also they have a marvellous sense of direction, and are kindly disposed towards the weaker sex (that’s me again). They form my bodyguard and every time I fall into a shell-hole or dodge a crump you can hear them shout “Are ye hurt, Mr Buchan?” They both wear the Military Medal.’84
In March 1917 his battalion moved up to Arras, in preparation for the coming spring battle. He attended ‘an English church service [i.e. Anglican] which was nice and quiet and simple. We read a most appropriate psalm about the terrors by night, etc … Things may be happening soon, but don’t worry about me. I was just thinking last night what a good time I have had all round and what a lot of happiness I have had. Even the sad parts are a comfort now.’85
At dawn on Easter Monday, 9 April, Alastair led his platoon ‘over the top’ – like his hero Cyrano de Bergerac ‘behind the walls of Arras’. They managed to reach the second line of German trenches before he was badly wounded by shrapnel. When JB visited the casualty clearing station the following week they told him that Alastair had been practically pulseless when he was brought in, and had died within an hour. The nurse, Beatrice Reid, who had cared for Alastair and another dying officer, wrote to Mrs Buchan, telling her that ‘when she had washed the battle-grime from their faces and smoothed their flaxen hair, they looked mere children, and, knowing that somewhere over the Channel hearts would break for these bright heads, before they were laid in the earth she kissed them for their mothers’.86
The telegram arrived at Portland Place two days later. Susie jumped into a taxi but, when she arrived at the Foreign Office, she had to wander along anonymous corridors, waiting until JB came out of a meeting, trying to compose the right words to say. When finally she was ushered in to see him, he rose from his desk, smiling, and all she could do was hold out the telegram, saying simply ‘Alastair’. When the couple arrived back at Portland Place, another telegram was waiting, this time to announce that Tommy Nelson was dead. The two men had died within half a mile of each other, Tommy being killed instantly by a shell as he stood in a trench near the railway station in Arras.*
Sandy Gillon, veteran of a number of battles, wrote to Anna of Alastair: ‘… he was a splendid, attractive lad – the happy warrior if ever there was one … I suppose he was doing the very best work possible for one of his years – the capable and gallant leading o
f men in battle, and watching and caring for them behind the front. I could see at a glance that he was the right man in the right place, and I know what his Colonel thought of him – the very highest possible. He was just what one would like to see grow out of the little boy in the kilt sitting next to me at John’s wedding, and the shy, bright-eyed schoolboy who came to Broadmeadows with Willie; which reminds me of another loss. But what better lives have been led than these two? Willie and Alastair were lovely and pleasant in their lives** and the good they did by work and example will never die.’87 Amongst other condolence letters was one from Alastair’s erstwhile commanding officer, Winston Churchill.
On 18 April, in a hand that was not steady, JB wrote to his sister about having a picture of Alastair painted, he hoped by William Orpen, who was working for him: ‘Don’t worry about me, old Nan. I am wonderfully well, and to be desperately busy is a great comfort in these times. I am a lucky man, for I am working directly for the same cause for which our dear laddie fell.’88
JB travelled to Arras the following week and visited his brother’s grave. He met Alastair’s fellow officers and the two corporals who had taken such care of him. It can be no coincidence that the sturdy, pugnacious, lovable Jock who looks after General Hannay in France in Mr Standfast is called Geordie Hamilton. JB met William Orpen at a hotel in Arras and the painter agreed to take on the commission himself, for which he would take no payment – although he did not finish it for ten years.
*
JB readily acknowledged that he faced nothing like the dangers and hardships of the trenches, but he was, nevertheless, under great pressure throughout the summer of 1917. Like almost everyone else, he had to deal with the continual news of the death or wounding of friends. He had to meet the prodigious demands of Nelson’s History. His mother expected a daily letter and he had to make time to read the manuscript of Anna’s novel, The Setons, which was published that November and enjoyed substantial commercial success. On top of all of this, he was still often dealing with the minutiae of Nelson’s business.
Beyond the Thirty-Nine Steps Page 24
