Myths and Legends of the First World War

by James Hayward

  It was also suggested that agony column advertisements were being used by spies to pass information back to Germany. Since refugees were known to communicate with friends and family abroad by this method there was nothing inherently ridiculous in the idea, and Thomson’s team found it necessary to check the bona fides of some of the more cryptic messages in order to allay public alarm. But as he records, even this task fell prey to fantasists:

  Later in the war a gentleman who had acquired a considerable reputation as a code expert, and was himself the author of commercial codes, began to read into the advertisements messages from German submarines to their base, and vice versa. He did this with the aid of a Dutch-English dictionary on a principle of his own. . . . In most cases the movements he foretold failed to take place, but unfortunately, once by an accident, there did happen to be an air raid on the night foretold by him. We then inserted an advertisement of our own . . . and upon this down came our expert hot-foot with the information that six submarines were under orders to attack the defences at Dover that very night. When we explained that we were the authors, all he said was that, by some extraordinary coincidence, we had hit upon the German code, and that by inserting the advertisement we had betrayed a military secret. It required a committee to dispose of this delusion.

  Another scare linked with advertising involved Maggi soup. During the German advance through Belgium in August 1914 a correspondent from a London newspaper floated an inexplicable story that the enamelled iron signs for certain brands of soup, meat extract and chocolate were being systematically removed by the invaders, and various instructions and details of local resources written in German on the reverse. As a result volunteer ‘screwdriver parties’ hastily banded together across London and removed a large quantity of signage for Maggi soup, but without discovering any secret Hun messages.

  Amateur spy-hunting became a national pastime, much of it little more than snooping and score-settling. It seems that in rural areas the constabulary, and Special Constables in particular, were only too keen to follow up any rumour, no matter how unlikely. In urban centres the position was different, and the constant stream of reports and denunciations put some considerable strain on police resources. It is reported that at one stage some 400 people a day were being reported as spies to the police in London alone. Indeed, in the opinion of Major-General Sir Charles Callwell:

  During many months of acute national emergency, while the war was settling into its groove, there was no more zealous, no more persevering and no more ineffectual subject of the King than the Self Appointed Spy Catcher. You never know what ferocity means until you have been approached by a titled lady who has persuaded herself that she is on the track of a German spy.

  While all enemy aliens quickly came to be viewed with (at best) grave suspicion, waiters and governesses were singled out for specific attention. The legend of the treacherous governess took several forms, the classic version being that on a given day the governess of a well-to-do family was noted as missing from the midday meal, and that when her trunks were opened a cache of bombs, explosives or firearms were found concealed beneath a false bottom. Naturally, everyone knew someone who knew the woman’s employer. A similar story told of a German servant girl at Bearsden, near Glasgow, caught with a trunk full of plans and photographs. Foreign waiters without number were also denounced as spies, and stories were legion of those who had involuntarily betrayed their muster point come Der Tag, or clicked their heels, or cursed in their native tongue. The Daily Mail recommended that right-thinking diners should refuse to be served by German or Austrian waiters, and demand to see the passpor t of any that claimed to be Swiss. According to the Spectator for October 24th 1914:

  We can very well understand the Home Office deciding that the work of a waiter, since it lends itself with such peculiar ease to the work of espionage, should not in wartime be practised by enemy aliens . . . A rule against them would be one to which no sensible person could object.

  Thomson describes how on one occasion a ‘very staid’ couple paid him a visit in order to denounce a waiter in one of the larger London hotels, and produced documentary evidence in the form of a menu with a rough sketch plan in pencil on the reverse. They believed it to be a plan of Kensington Gardens, with the Palace buildings roughly delineated by an oblong figure. It transpired that the waiter, a Swiss national, had simply prepared a plan of the tables in the dining room, and marked a cross against those he was charged to attend.

  An oft-repeated tale told of a chance encounter between a German officer and a British friend, the given location often being Piccadilly, the Haymarket or the Army and Navy Stores. The officer either clicked his heels or involuntarily returned a salute, then realised his error and made good his escape in a passing taxi. Another common version described an English girl who came suddenly upon her fiancé, an officer in the Prussian Guards, who shook her hand, then cut her dead before jumping onto a passing omnibus. During the Second World War the myth would be updated, so that a tradesman who called on a newly let house found the front door opened by the brutal Prussian commandant of the camp in which he had spent the previous war as a prisoner. Other Germans adopted different guises. One apocryphal story told that a woman travelling on a tram to Brixton noticed four women dressed as nurses, sitting in couples opposite one another. One of the nurses tossed a book to her friend, who instead of separating her knees to catch it – as a woman might – drew them together in the fashion of a man. When the nurses got out at South Lambeth Road the observant woman wasted no time in alerting the police, and was said to have received a reward of £50. In Braintree in April 1916, another crossdressing German spy was said to have been betrayed by virtue of his oversized feet.

  Other tales hinted at similar Hunnish perversions. In a letter to The Times in September 1914, an ex-army officer pointed out that in the window of a curiosity shop he had seen for sale two army officer’s commissions, one signed by King Edward, the other by Queen Victoria: ‘this in a town where numbers of Germans reside, and where two spies have lately been arrested, one in female attire’. No less fantastical was a claim by a concerned London lady, Miss Nora Fane, who in August had submitted several letters to The Times on the subject of high-level espionage:

  In consequence of her letters on ‘Highly Placed Spies’, Miss Nora Fane, a lady living in the West End, has received anonymous threatening letters from various Germans. One was a typewritten letter in which the writer said he hoped that when the German army arrived in London from Paris, which would soon be the case, her house would be one of the first to be burnt and that she would be stripped and thrashed in her own drawing room.

  Stories of generous cash rewards for information received formed a distinct strand of the spy mania. On February 8th 1916 the Reverend Clark recorded in his diary a story told by Miss Gee of Felsted:

  This afternoon she had a minutely-told ‘perfectly true’ story. It was rather vague: thought it was Waterloo Station, but was not sure. A train was going off, taking soldiers to the Front. It was in broad daylight. A lady stepped back, as people do under this circumstance. In so doing, she trod on an officer’s toe. He (an officer, mind you!) swore softly, and swore in German. By sudden inspiration, she dashed to the barrier and told the porter in charge . . . The lady heard no more about it until three weeks afterwards, and then she had a cheque for £100 from the War Office. I said nothing about this story.

  I have my doubts about whether War Office cheques for £100 fly about exactly in this way, although (no doubt) public money is poured forth like ditch-water. And also, the same fable, adapted to the latitude of St Andrews, had been entered by me in these notes on 2nd February . . . A St Andrews lady travelling to Newcastle was suspicious about a man in her carriage. Wired to York giving the name of the carriage – heard nothing till six months later she got a cheque for £100 from the War Office ‘for information received.’

  Artists and bohemians seem to have been particularly prone to being denounced as spie
s. One unfortunate artist and his wife living in a rural cottage in the west of England were constantly harassed and abused by locals, despite the fact that both were entirely British. Hostile locals took to visiting the cottage during the hours of darkness, to rattle the doors and windows and shout out threats. On one occasion bricks were thrown at the couple, and a constant supply of spurious accusations laid with the police. The only ground to this persecution appeared to be that the artist was fond of wearing a soft, flat, wide-brimmed hat, and that his wife wore a cloak of an unusual cut. The local schoolmistress was moved to comment: ‘If he is not a spy, why does he wear a hat like that?’

  Graham Greene records that a German master at Berkhamsted fell under suspicion after he was spotted loitering under a railway bridge, without a hat. The rationale is hard to fathom, but a similar pattern was repeated elsewhere. A clique of writers living under the Malvern Hills soon discovered that any sort of unusual accent or behaviour was likely to sow the seeds of suspicion in those of rustic mind. The American Robert Frost was thought to be a spy on account of his New Hampshire accent, and stones were thrown at his cottage. Wilfrid Gibson’s cottage fell under suspicion after a Dutch poet came to stay, as did a party visiting Edward Thomas, who arrived late at night, and included a Russian boy from Bedales School. Near Stroud, meanwhile, the painter William Rothenstein was reported on account of his foreign accent, and steadfast refusal to change his surname to Rutherston, as his brothers had. When he was seen drawing a railway tunnel his neighbours leapt to predictable conclusions, and noted that his farmhouse dominated the valley. Because he had laid down concrete floors, predictable accusations regarding secret gun emplacements flew back and forth.

  D.H. Lawrence was also suspected of treachery. A pacifist, and in any event unfit for military service, Lawrence moved from London to Cornwall with his wife Frieda. However, his presence in the West Country attracted unfavourable comment and suspicion, particularly in the wake of negative publicity attached to the seizure and burning of copies of The Rainbow. Frieda was a German, and a cousin of the fighter ace Manfred von Richthofen to boot; unwisely the couple adopted the perverse practice of singing lieder, a form of German folk song, to piano accompaniment on becoming aware of rumours they were spies. Locals suspected them of provisioning German submarine crews along the coast, and these suspicions were taken seriously by the police, who took to following the Lawrences on country walks and conducted a search of their remote cottage while they were away in London. In October 1917 the police raided a dinner party held by the composer Cecil Gray at Bosigan Castle, described above, following which the two men were charged with breaking blackout regulations. Gray was fined, but Lawrence was ordered to leave Cornwall within three days, to avoid living in any prohibited area, and to report to the police whenever he moved. Lawrence recorded his feelings on the train journey back to London as he sat ‘feeling that he had been killed; perfectly still and pale, in a kind of after-death’.

  On at least one occasion persecution of this kind led to tragedy. In the Suffolk village of Henham, near Beccles, a schoolmaster was suspected of being a German agent, apparently because some years earlier a German friend of his son had stayed at the family house. Although the teacher had been born in Devon and lived a blameless existence in Suffolk for thirty years, the rumours persisted until he was ordered by the police to leave the parish, on the basis that the presence of ‘suspicious persons’ in coastal areas could not be tolerated under DORA. The threat of expulsion weighed so heavily on his mind that the man took his own life shortly before he was due to leave. In the view of Lord Stradbroke, the main landowner in the area, the locals had, by spreading untruths, killed their victim just as surely as if ‘they had drawn the knife across his throat with their cowardly fingers’. His innocence was posthumously established.

  The military were not immune, as Thomson records in Queer People:

  Near Woolwich a large house belonging to a naturalized foreigner attracted the attention of a non-commissioned officer, who began to fill the ears of his superiors with wonderful stories of lights, or signalling apparatus discovered in the grounds, and of chasing spies along railway tracks in the best American film manner, until even his general believed in him. Acting on my advice the owner wisely offered his house as a hospital, and the ghost was laid.

  Sometimes the disease would attack public officials, who had to be handled sympathetically. One very worthy gentleman used to embarrass his colleagues by bringing in stories almost daily of suspicious persons who had been seen in every part of the country. All of them were German spies, and the local authorities would do nothing. In order to calm him they invented a mythical personage named ‘von Burstorph’, and whenever he brought them a fresh case they would say, ‘So von Burstorph has got to Arran,’ or to Carlisle, or wherever the locality might be. He was assured that the whole forces of the realm were on the heels of von Burstorph, and that when he was caught he would suffer the extreme penalty in the Tower. That sent him away quite happy since he knew that the authorities were doing something.

  Perhaps the most ludicrous spy myths were the broadly conspiratorial type which held that numerous royals, peers, financiers and magnates had been imprisoned in the Tower of London on charges of treason, and even shot. Probably the first such report concerned the Crown Prince, Louis of Battenberg, who was Austrian by birth, but generally supposed to be of German origin. Mountbatten had been appointed First Sea Lord in 1912 after a distinguished career in the navy, but resigned in October 1914 following a spiteful campaign led by a London evening paper, the Globe, which hinted darkly that the navy was not playing its expected role in the war. According to Horatio Bottomley in John Bull:

  Blood is said to be thicker than water; and we doubt whether all the water in the North Sea would obliterate the ties between the Battenbergs and the Hohenzollerns when it comes to a life and death struggle between Germany and ourselves.

  Mountbatten nevertheless managed to find some black humour in the fact that he was reported to have been shot at dawn, and no doubt took some comfort in being sworn to the Privy Council by the King. Famously, in 1917 the Royal Family would substitute the name Windsor for Saxe-Coburg.

  An equally fantastical report from a newspaper in Pittsburgh in January 1916 held that the founder of the Scout movement, Sir Robert Baden-Powell, had faced a firing squad ‘without a quiver’ following a conviction for selling secrets to the enemy. By way of an epitaph, the report offered that England had ‘put into his last sleep one of the bravest soldiers who ever headed her armies into foreign lands’ – lines which, according to Baden-Powell’s biographer, the Chief Scout considered might make the death penalty his lifetime’s achievement. Contrary rumours also circulated that BP was engaged in secret service work in Germany throughout the war. In June 1917 rumours circulated that Admiral Sir John Jellicoe had been court-martialled and shot for losing the Battle of Jutland, and that his wife had also been executed as a spy. Being one of the last people to leave HMS Hampshire, the ship on which Lord Kitchener sailed fatefully for Russia in June 1916, his death was said to be traceable to her actions as a spy. Pioneer aviator Claude Graham-White was also falsely reported as shot, a press muddle possibly caused by his having troubled to try to clear the name of his friend Gustav Hamel, who stood accused of defecting to Germany before the outbreak of war. These delusions undoubtedly owed something to the fact that twelve bona fide German spies, Carl Lody included, were indeed held in the Tower prior to being executed there.

  A related myth concerned supposed high-level imposters. One such story held that a distinguished German field-marshal, August von Mackensen, was actually the British war hero Sir Hector Macdonald (‘Fighting Mac’), who had committed suicide in Paris to escape disgrace following a homosexual scandal. The tale ran that Macdonald had faked his own death in 1903 and entered German service in place of the real von Mackensen, who was terminally ill. Meanwhile Lord Haldane, the Lord Chancellor and Secretary for War, was persistently d
enounced as pro-German and unfit for office. Prior to the outbreak of war Haldane had vigorously promoted Anglo-German friendship, had once described Germany as his ‘spiritual home’, and was widely renowned as a student of German literature and philosophy. As a result, Haldane became the most widely reviled public figure in Britain, and in his autobiography records that:

  Every kind of ridiculous legend about me was circulated. I had a German wife; I was the illegitimate brother of the Kaiser; I had been in secret correspondence with the German Government; I had been aware that they intended war and withheld this from my colleagues; I had delayed the dispatch and mobilization of the Expeditionary Force. All these and many other things were circulated . . . The Harmsworth Press systematically attacked me, and other newspapers besides. Anonymous letters poured in. One day, in response to an appeal in the Daily Express, there arrived at the House of Lords no less than 2,600 letters of protest against my supposed disloyalty to the interests of the nation.

  It was also said of Haldane that he owned a dog named Kaiser, and that he employed a ‘full-blooded German chauffeur’ who regularly drove him to Olympia where he ‘hob-nobbed with the German prisoners and brought them cigarettes’. The hate mail directed at Haldane was so prodigious that his maid was obliged to burn it by the sackful. By his own account he was heckled at public meetings, in constant danger of being assaulted in the street, and even of being shot. Although in May 1915 he was dropped from the government and entered the political wilderness, by the end of the year he was still being cursed so roundly across the nation that The Times’ military correspondent, Colonel Charles Repington, remarked that one might as well ‘try to stop Niagara with a toothbrush’ as attempt to end a dinner-table tirade against the luckless Lord. But Haldane was not alone. Margot Asquith, the wife of the Prime Minister, was popularly supposed to harbour lesbian and pro-German sympathies, as well as a German maid, and was thus held in similar odium, while several ministers and MPs were also denounced as traitors.