Myths and Legends of the First World War

by James Hayward

  To this stock of rumour and legend McDonagh might have noted that spies had been busy causing 300 horses to stampede at the camp of the Staffordshire Yeomanry at Bishops Stortford, as well as organising hit-and-run attacks in assorted motor vehicles, and the belief that all ‘Germhuns’ employed by water boards and gas, electricity and tramway companies were sleepers patiently awaiting the call to sabotage essential utilities on the eve of invasion. Armed bands were raised, and only later brought under official control as the Volunteer Training Corps, a forerunner of the Home Guard a quarter century later. By the time McDonagh wrote the passage quoted above, the Home Office had issued a statement on September 4th intended to calm the panic and sporadic riots:

  Articles and correspondence which have been printed in some of the newspapers show that there are symptoms of uneasiness and even alarm in regard to the presence in London and other parts of the country of large numbers of German and Austrian subjects, and stories have been freely circulated of alleged cases of espionage and outrage . . .

  The military authorities and the Home Office had kept observation for a long time on the operations of such persons in all their ramifications, and a large number who were known to be, or suspected of being, engaged in espionage were, when war became inevitable, immediately arrested in different parts of the country. It is believed that the most active of the foreign agents were caught in this way.

  Apart from breaches of the regulations, no actual case of outrage has been brought to the notice of the police or the military. A number of statements have appeared in the press, but when these have been investigated they have proved to be without foundation. For instance a few days ago there appeared in the press a circumstantial report of a midnight attack by two men on a signalman. As a result of enquiry it was found that the signalman was suffering from nervous breakdown and there was no truth in his story. There was no suggestion of any attempt to wreck a train.

  There have been reports of attacks on police constables by armed motorcyclists, but in no case was the report substantiated. The stampedes of horses at a Yeomanry camp were attributed to malicious persons, but careful enquiries disclosed not even the slightest ground for suspicion. A few cases of aliens having failed to declare possession of a gun or revolver have been suitably dealt with under the Aliens Restriction Order, but the reports of the discovery of secret arsenals are untrue.

  However, official denials of spy favourites such as the bludgeoned signalman and the murderous motorcyclist did little to dampen public interest, or credulity. For as the Commons were told in November, 9,000 Germans and Austrians were by then being held in detention camps, while 120,000 reported cases of suspicious activity had been investigated, and 6,000 properties searched. For many the figures spoke for themselves, so much so that during its first week of publication in 1915, the sensationalist book German Spies in London sold an equally impressive 40,000 copies. McDonagh again:

  What about the Press Censorship? The Government deny that there is any foundation whatever for the rumours; but then the Government – these people argue – are not going to admit what everyone knows them to be – footlers, blind as bats to what is going on around them. Why, they have even failed to see that tennis courts in country houses occupied by the Germans were really gun platforms.

  The myth of secret enemy gun platforms was one of the most widespread and enduring falsehoods prevalent on the Home Front. The rumour first entered into circulation after a war correspondent described how the Germans had utilized secret gun emplacements disguised as tennis courts during their bombardment of Mauberge. In the event of a German invasion of Britain, it was whispered, hidden artillery would be wheeled out, or raised from underground hides, to assist in the destruction of key points within range. The Reverend Andrew Clark, the parish vicar at Great Leighs near Chelmsford, recorded a local rumour from December 1914:

  Miss Gold says that in Little Waltham the populace have discovered another German fort: ‘Cranhams’ was owned by Herr Wagner, who is now said to be an Austrian. Formerly some called him a Russian, others a Pole. The villagers say that at Cranhams, (a) there is a concrete floor for the emplacement of heavy guns of a fort which would command Chelmsford and the Marconi works there; and (b) there is a store of arms and ammunition.

  A few tennis courts in London were inspected and probed, although none appear to have been dug up. Nonetheless, according to Basil Thomson:

  Given a British householder with a concrete tennis court and pigeons about the house, and it was certain to be discovered that he had quite suddenly increased the scale of his expenditure, that heavy cases had been delivered at the house by night, that tapping had been overheard, mysterious lights seen in the windows, and that on the night of the sinking of the Lusitania he had given a dinner-party to naturalized Germans . . . For many weeks denunciations poured in at the rate of many hundreds a day.

  Paved gardens, ornamental lakes and flat roofs also fell under suspicion, particularly where situated on high ground. In October 1914 the police raided a lithograph factory in Willesden, constructed from concrete with a floor and foundations built to an unusually robust specification. The factory was a single storey building and boasted an unbroken view over London to the Crystal Palace, as well as being situated close to a railway line. A crowd jeered as about 20 enemy aliens ‘of military age’ were escorted from the factory, it having been discovered that the firm had an office in Leipzig. According to the architect, the solid foundation was necessary in case it was decided to raise the building higher, although entirely rational explanations of this kind did little to allay a fear that fanned out across the country and even crossed the Atlantic to California. That same month one correspondent wrote to the Daily Mail to demand:

  Is it too much to ask that our kid gloved government will ascertain how many German owned factories have been built in this country which incidentally command Woolwich, Dover, Rosyth? A timely inspection might reveal many concrete structures.

  One celebrated gun-platform report led to the issuing of libel writs against the Evening News and the People. The former paper had published an article suggesting that a concrete-bottomed lake in the Japanese garden of Ewell Castle, a house near Epsom, was capable of mounting five heavy guns to command the main railway line to London. The property was owned by Captain Clarence Wiener, a naturalized American born in Austria, who had commissioned the lake early in 1914. The paper detected further evidence that Wiener was a spy in the fact that he possessed a 80hp car equipped with a 500 candle-power acetylene searchlight. In July 1916 a local MP, Watson Rutherford, was induced to ask a question in the Commons about Ewell Castle, with the object of allaying suspicions. The bid failed, and ultimately Wiener sued for libel, even going so far as to instruct the celebrated barrister Edward Marshall Hall to clear his name. At trial, in April 1917, evidence was given that the concrete had been laid down by a landscape gardener to prevent the water from escaping from the lake. A local doctor also asserted that he had never known Wiener display any pro-German tendency. However, Wiener fought shy of answering potentially embarrassing questions relating to his private life, and was censured by the judge, Mr Justice Darling, for writing threatening letters to his former butler. The plaintiff scored a pyhrric victory: damages of just £50 and £25 respectively were awarded against each of the papers.

  Another early spy scare involved homing pigeons, the possession of which by enemy aliens had been proscribed under the ARO. All pigeon lofts in the country were sealed up, and owners put to strict proof that they were the legitimate owners of the birds in their possession. On August 18th 1914 The Times reported the first of several prosecutions of pigeon fanciers, and by September, in order to secure convictions, the Crown was even calling in expert evidence on how far certain birds might be able to fly. Also in August another German ‘hairdresser’, named Schauber, received six months for possessing seven pigeons and a revolver, while one unfortunate foreigner actually found himself summonsed on the information of the w
ife of an ex-army officer, who gave sworn evidence that:

  On Tuesday afternoon she was on Primrose Hill when the prisoner passed by, and she noticed a pigeon on a level with his head, and about three yards in front of him, flying away with a little white paper under its wing.

  For which outrage the accused was convicted, and sentenced to six months. At Maldon in Essex a local man fell under suspicion after a carrier pigeon landed on the roof of his house, causing an anxious crowd of several hundred to assemble. A police search of the house revealed nothing untoward, and after the bird’s owner was traced it transpired that the creature was simply lost. By November the Daily Mail was reporting that carrier pigeons, all with nefarious intent, were being sent off in droves from neutral shipping.

  Following the first Zeppelin raid on the British mainland, over Sheringham, Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn in January 1915, strict blackout precautions were imposed. The MP for King’s Lynn, a Mr Holcombe-Inglely, claimed that the night raider had followed the movements of two mysterious motor cars, whose occupants used searchlights to locate targets. Predictably, reports of mysterious night signalling rapidly increased in number and were boosted by each successive air raid. What appeared to be morse signals from a window in, say, Bayswater, were believed by some to be directed towards German submarines in the Channel or North Sea, despite the fact that these pinprick flashes could scarcely be seen from a window on the opposite side of the street. Thomson of the Yard offered a sceptical view:

  It was not safe to ignore any of these complaints, and all were investigated. In a few cases there were certainly intermittent flashes, but they proved to be caused by the flapping of a blind, the waving of branches across a window, persons passing across a room, and, in two instances, the quick movements of a girl’s hair-brush in front of the light. The beacons were passages of light left unshrouded. The Lighting Order did much to allay this stage of the disease. Out of many thousand denunciations I have been unable to hear of a single case in which signals to the enemy were made by lights during the war.

  Similarly, in Norfolk a vigilant Territorial officer posted near Dereham observed what he took to be suspicious signalling lights from the top of a nearby church tower. Assembling a party of men, the group advanced on the church with fixed bayonets and were about to open fire on several shadowy figures in the steeple when it was realised that their targets were troops from another company. Their comrades had seized the opportunity to carry out some unscheduled signalling practice. And as late as October 1917 the writer D.H. Lawrence was ordered by police to leave Cornwall following a raid on a dinner party at Bosigan Castle, at which – so locals alleged – signals had been flashed to a German submarine.

  Even the First Lord at the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, fell prey to the mania, albeit while in drink. On September 17th 1914 Churchill visited the Grand Fleet, which was moored at Loch Ewe, a remote deepwater anchorage on the northwest coast of Scotland. After a long night in the wardroom of Admiral Jellicoe’s flagship, the Iron Duke, Churchill became convinced that the owner of a nearby mansion, a retired Tory MP named Arthur Bignold, was signalling to the enemy with the aid of a searchlight mounted on his roof. Undeterred, Churchill set about commandeering arms and ammunition from the Iron Duke’s armoury, and mustered a somewhat over-qualified landing party which included Rear-Admiral Sir Horace Hood, Commodores Keyes and Tyrwhitt and Vice-Admiral Henry Oliver, the then Director of Naval Intelligence. This brass-heavy group held Bignold and his butler at pistol point while a search of the house was conducted, although little was established beyond the fact that the searchlight was not in working order. Indeed, it is abundantly clear from private correspondence that Churchill and his wife Clementine were obsessed with phantom spies and saboteurs.

  A close relative of the signalling mania was the belief that illicit wireless messages were passing to and from the enemy. The scare was given impetus following a pronouncement by an expert that an effective aerial array could be concealed in a chimney, and messages received on an iron bedstead. As with night signalling, reports of this kind often coincided with Zeppelin raids, for example that recorded by the Reverend Clark in September 1915:

  Monday 27 September: Yesterday I heard a long story about Mr Seabrook of Broomfield. When the Zeppelin dropped bombs on Maldon, Seabrook was there with his car. When it passed over Witham and Broomfield on its way to London, Seabrook was there. On both occasions of its visiting Chelmsford, Seabrook was there. The report was that he was held up on occasion of the second air raid on Chelmsford, and his motor car was found to have a wireless-installation in it. Whereupon he was arrested. This evening there is a report in the village, purporting to have come from a ‘military man in London’ that Seabrook has been court-martialled and shot. Such reports, however, about detection and shooting of spies and secret agents have been common. Confirmation of any of them is lacking.

  During the same month Clark recorded:

  Friday 3 September: Mr Mitchell is manager of the Marconi Works at Chelmsford: says he is certain that there are three houses in Chelmsford in communication with the enemy’s agents outside that town, partly by means of wireless, partly by flashing signals. They send their wireless when Marconi Works are busy sending messages so that their electrical discharges pass unperceived.

  A popular play written by Lechmere Worral and Harold Terry, The Man Who Stayed at Home, discussed below, no doubt played a part a part in spreading the wireless spy myth far and wide, while according to Thomson:

  At this period the disease attacked even naval and military officers and special constables. If a telegraphist was sent on a motor-cycle to examine and test the telegraph poles, another cyclist was certain to be sent by some authority in pursuit. On one occasion the authorities dispatched to the Eastern Counties a car equipped with a Marconi apparatus and two skilled operators to intercept any illicit messages that might be passing over the North Sea. They left London at noon; at 3 they were under lock and key in Essex. After an exchange of telegrams they were set free, but at 7pm they telegraphed from the police cells in another part of the county, imploring help. When again liberated they refused to move without the escort of a Territorial officer in uniform, but on the following morning the police of another county had got hold of them and telegraphed: ‘Three German spies arrested with car and complete wireless installation, one in uniform of British officer.’

  Thomson also investigated a spy rumour attached to the destruction of Zeppelin SL11 above Cuffley in Hertfordshire in September 1916, amongst the wreckage of which was found a scrap of paper bearing the name and address of a Belgian woman living in London. After a lengthy investigation it transpired that the note had been dropped by one of the thousands of onlookers who flocked to the scene after the crash.

  Predictably, Zeppelins gave rise to a rich crop of legend. In September 1914 a local rumour in Cumberland held that a German airship was operating from a clandestine base near Grasmere, and flew sorties over Westmorland by night. The story was only dispelled after a Royal Flying Corps pilot undertook several patrols above the Lake District in a Bleriot monoplane, and saw nothing but glorious scenery. Perhaps the most improbable Zeppelin story concerned the landing of a saboteur on Hackney Marshes in October 1916. According to Mr S.C. Thomas, while in the company of a young lady named Hilda Cavanagh on the Marshes near the River Lea on the evening of the 19th:

  Hearing a swishing, droning sound, we looked up and saw a Zeppelin right over our heads at the height of 100 feet. Orders were barked out, a clanking sound and from about 40 feet from the rear a light showed. A basket was lowered, hit the ground ten feet from us, toppled over and a tall man got out. He looked all around, saw us and came to us, and asked the way to Silvertown in perfect English. I told him to follow the Lea towing path till he came to Bow. He had either one eye or a patch and carried a long parcel wrapped in black canvas. The basket was wound up and the Zepp pointed its nose upwards and went away at a very fast speed. Meanwhile searchlights madly fann
ed the sky searching for it. I went to Hackney Police and told them, but was laughed at. If any other persons were on the Marshes then perhaps . . . they will verify my account of a German landing in London.

  Mr Thomas’s attractive memoir is somewhat undermined by the fact that no enemy air activity was monitored on the day in question, either by day or night. Elsewhere in London, the cataclysmic explosion at the Brunner Mond explosives factory at Silvertown on January 19th 1917, in which 69 people were killed, yielded a host of wild rumours. The officer in charge of the subsequent inquiry noted that ‘persons of every class’ believed that the explosion was an act of aggression or sabotage. One version held that the factory had been bombed by one of two invisible Zeppelins built by Germany, which generated their own gas as they moved. Another held that Sir Alfred Mond was a German, and that the factory was a nest of enemy agents. Others found significance in the fact that the explosion occurred on the Kaiser’s birthday, and on the first day of Sir Alfred’s annual holiday.

  Another metropolitan rumour which surfaced in 1915 predicted some form of unspecified enemy outrage on the underground. The most common form of the story was told against the background of an English nurse having brought a wounded German officer back from death’s door. On parting, the German revealed in a flush of gratitude that the nurse should ‘beware of the Tubes’ come April. Thomson expanded:

  As time wore on the date was shifted forward month by month, to September, when it died of expectation deferred. We took the trouble to trace this story from mouth to mouth until we reached the second mistress in a London Board School. She declared that she had heard it from the charwoman who cleaned the school, but that lady stoutly denied that she had ever told so ridiculous a story.

  Judging from the dates, the story was probably a result of the first German poison gas attack at Ypres in April 1915. Sporadic poison scares broke out across the country at various times, the inhabitants of one village in Gloucestershire becoming convinced in the autumn of 1914 that villainous German spies had doctored the blackberries in local hedgerows. Mayfair, the journal published by Maundy Gregory, told of a spy who had been arrested in possession of enough typhus bacilli to incapacitate an army corps. Another spy was widely believed to be touring the country on a motorcycle, disguised as a scoutmaster, handing out poisoned sweets to sentries. By 1918, the myth had mutated so that enemy aircraft were dropping poisoned confectionery in an attempt to kill British children. This version was probably sparked by the discovery in Hull of boiled sweets containing arsenic, subsequently traced to a manufacturing fault at the factory.