Myths and Legends of the First World War

by James Hayward

  You deny the existence of the Hidden Hand. I have seen the criminal finger-marks of the Hidden Hand in Downing Street, in the Foreign Office, in the Home Office, in the Admiralty, in the Board of Trade, in the Local Government Board, in the headquarters of the County Constabulary, and in the Cabinet itself. The difference between an educated man and a half-educated man is the difference between perception and detection of truth and willingness to believe what one wants to believe. Disinterested study of evidence is the touchstone of statesmanship. You aver that the Hidden Hand is a myth. Lawyers and party politicians are no less liable to error than disinterested students of public affairs.

  White goes on to quote from a letter written by him to the Home Secretary, Herbert Samuel, in February 1916:

  For the last year I have had incessant complaints from Brighton and Hove of the extent to which Germans and pro-Germans are encouraged. The enclosed postcard, insulting the British Army, was bought to me in the presence of two witnesses on Saturday the 19th inst., at a shop of a German who was interned last year. On his internment he placed his brother in charge – a pure German. This man has recently been in Scotland, and has been granted an armlet to excuse him from service.

  From this underwhelming (and unspecified) evidence, White concluded:

  If there is no Hidden Hand, what was the force that enabled the Brighton Hun to affront the people of Sussex by insult to the British Army and then boast of his immunity?

  A later article by White on the subject of ‘Efficiency and Vice’ so impressed Billing that it was reprinted in The Imperialist in December 1917. The gist of this curiously garbled call-to-arms was that the combination of German efficiency and decadence amounted to a moral invasion of England, by which the ‘stamina’ of Britain’s youth was being undermined. White warned of unspecified ‘vices of the Cities of the Plain’, in respect of which ‘Palestine taught nothing to Potsdam’: Germany was said to be in a state of total moral degeneracy owing to the all-pervasive power of homosexuals, referred to as ‘urnings’. According to White, at London District Command, a dedicated team of ‘very able Intelligence officers’ was engaged in fighting the infection of Londoners, and troops in particular, with the doctrines of the German urning:

  Espionage is punished by death at the Tower of London, but there is a form of invasion which is as deadly as espionage: the systematic seduction of young British soldiers by the German urnings and their agents . . . Failure to intern all Germans is due to the invisible hand that protects urnings of enemy race . . . When the blond beast is an urning, he commands the urnings in other lands. They are moles. They burrow. They plot. They are hardest at work when they are most silent . . . Men are willing to die for their homes, but if the conception of home life is replaced by the Kultur of urnings, the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon world wilts and perishes.

  The myth of Teutonic homosexuality was scarcely new, and even permeates the pages of Greenmantle, John Buchan’s second Richard Hannay thriller published in 1916. While it is true to say that the years 1914–18 saw a significant increase in cases of male indecency brought before the courts, this had no more sinister cause than the simple fact that large numbers of young men were herded together under wartime conditions. White, however, discerned the presence of the Hidden Hand. Although his purple portrait of gay subversion was pure fantasy, it proved too much for Beaverbrook, who chose to sever all connections with The Imperialist in mid-January 1918. By way of response, Billing elected to push the myth of a homosexual Hidden Hand further still.

  PB had by this time employed a new assistant editor, Captain Harold Spencer. Spencer had been invalided out of British military intelligence, where he claimed variously to have undertaken secret service work in the Middle East, acted as aide-de-camp to the King of Albania, Prince William of Wied, and to have served as a captain in the Royal Irish Fusiliers. Latterly, said Spencer, he had been trained as a pilot, but little if any of this history was true: Spencer had been discharged from the service in September 1917 suffering from paranoid ‘delusional insanity’, and was now labouring under a deep (and probably pathological) sense of injustice. He complained to Billing of having been badly treated by his superior officers and higher authorities, who had refused to take his outlandish conspiratorial theories seriously.

  Like White, Spencer was convinced that the manhood of Britain was being ‘exterminated’ by the German urning menace, and he appears to have been generally preoccupied with decadence, homosexuality and gynaecology. With the aid of a large body of information supplied by Spencer, Billing ran a lengthy and outrageous article in The Imperialist for January 26th 1918:

  THE FIRST 47,000

  There exists in the Cabinet Noir of a certain German Prince a book compiled by the Secret Service from reports of German agents who have infested this country for the past 20 years, agents so vile and spreading such debauchery and such lasciviousness as only German minds can conceive and only German bodies execute.

  It is a most Catholic list. The names of Privy Councillors, wives of Cabinet Ministers, even Cabinet Ministers themselves, diplomats, poets, bankers, editors, newspapers proprietors, and members of His Majesty’s Household. The officer who discovered this book while on special service [i.e. Spencer] briefly outlined for me its stupefying contents. In the beginning of the book is a précis of general instructions regarding the propagation of evils which all decent men thought had perished in Sodom and Lesbia. The blasphemous compilers even speak of the Groves and High Places mentioned in the Bible. The most insidious arguments are outlined for the use of the German agent in his revolting work.

  As an example of the thoroughness with which the German agents work, lists of public houses and bars were given which had been successfully demoralised. These could then be depended upon to spread vice with the help of only one fixed agent. To secure those whose social standing would suffer from frequenting public places, comfortable flats were taken and furnished in erotic manner. Paphian photographs were distributed, while equivocal pamphlets were printed as the anonymous work of well-known writers.

  Agents were specially enlisted in the navy, particularly in the engine rooms. These had their special instructions. Incestuous bars were established in Portsmouth and Chatham. In these meeting paces the stamina of British sailors was undermined. More dangerous still, German agents, under the guise of indecent liaison, could obtain information as to the disposition of the Fleet. Even to loiter in the streets was not immune. Meretricious agents of the Kaiser were stationed at such places as Marble Arch and Hyde Park Corner. In this black book of sin details were given of the unnatural defloration of children who were drawn to the parks by the summer evening concerts . . . Wives of men in supreme position were entangled. In lesbian ecstasy the most sacred secrets of State were betrayed. The sexual peculiarities of members of the peerage were used as a leverage to open fruitful fields for espionage. In the glossary of this book is a list of expressions . . . used . . . by the soul-sick victims of this nauseating disease so skilfully spread by Potsdam.

  If anyone was ‘soul-sick’ it was surely the delusional fantasist Harold Spencer, who had clearly given much energy to the construction of an imaginary world in which gay brothels, lesbian trysts, wanton sailors and indecency with children were commonplace. Like much of the copy which appeared in The Imperialist (which in February was re-born as The Vigilante), his extraordinary article was intended to trigger a civil libel writ that would further Billing’s self-appointed task. The charge that the lives of three million Britons in France had been betrayed by the perverse carnal tastes of 47,000 of their countryman could hardly be less serious, or more calculated to attract headlines. But despite the fact that Billing sent copies to selected ministers and government departments, no writs or other censure materialized, and the article was said to have caused hilarity in the trenches.

  Instead, the Vigilantes seized an unexpected opportunity to drag their cause through courtroom doors. In February 1918 it was announced by a minor theatr
ical producer, Jack Grein, that two private performances of Oscar Wilde’s Salome would be staged in London in April. The play had long been banned by the Lord Chancellor as blasphemous, and Grein’s production was given an added frisson by the fact that the actress cast as Salome was Maud Allan, a daring dancer from America long famous for her exotic performance piece, The Vision of Salome. Allan had performed her dance with great success in London in 1908, its popular success due in large part to her voluptuous figure and revealing costume. The name of Oscar Wilde, of course, remained synonymous with decadence and the love that dare not speak its name – even by urnings. Allan was rumoured to be a lesbian, or bisexual, and was known to have dined with the Asquiths, who had supported the posthumous rehabilitation of Wilde. Against this background, it was scarcely surprising that the proposed staging of Salome did not pass unnoticed by Billing and his coterie.

  Spencer moved quickly. After contacting a local doctor to enquire after an appropriate anatomical term, he graced the front page of The Vigilante for February 16th with the following paragraph:

  THE CULT OF THE CLITORIS

  To be a member of Maud Allan’s private performances in Oscar Wilde’s Salome one has to apply to a Miss Valetta, of 9 Duke Street, Adelphi, W.C. If Scotland Yard were to seize the list of these members I have no doubt they would secure the names of several of the first 47,000.

  Neither Grein nor Allan saw the piece until three weeks later, but on doing so instructed solicitors immediately. On March 8th a judge in chambers granted leave for the pair to commence criminal proceedings for both obscene and criminal libel. This move rattled Billing, who had reckoned only on a civil libel action and a modest claim in damages, rather than a Crown prosecution and the prospect of a maximum of two years’ penal servitude. Nevertheless, although a third charge of defamatory libel was added at a later date, Billing continued to fire lurid broadsides from the pages of The Vigilante. On March 23rd, for example, its small band of readers was warned of the methods by which the Hidden Hand were spreading venereal disease:

  The German, through his efficient and clever agent, the Ashkenazim, has complete control of the White Slave Traffic. Germany has found that diseased women cause more casualties than bullets. Controlled by their Jew-agents, Germany maintains in Britain a self-supporting – even profit-making – army of prostitutes which put more men out of action than does their army of soldiers.

  But by now the British armies in France and Belgium were facing a far graver challenge than the clap. On March 21st the long stalemate in the trenches was brought to an abrupt end by a massive German assault on the Western Front. The attack fell mainly on the British Fifth Army, which was sent reeling in the face of 59 German divisions, many of them released from the Eastern Front following the negotiated peace with Russia. During the first week the Germans advanced 40 miles, and by the beginning of June had reached the Marne to threaten Paris. The Allied situation was more critical than at any time since September 1914. In panic, the War Cabinet talked of pulling back to the Channel ports and evacuating all British troops back to England.

  In this climate spy mania and anti-alien sentiment reached fever pitch. Like Billing and his Die-Hard ilk, the Northcliffe press stepped up its campaign to ‘Intern Them All’ and make ‘a clean sweep’ of individuals of enemy origin from public office. The campaign, and others like it, also called for the closure of German businesses and banks, and a boycott of German goods. Local councils up and down the country began to pass resolutions endorsing like measures, while July saw mass antialien rallies in Trafalgar Square, Hyde Park and the Albert Hall, as well as the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. In August, the groundswell of support for total internment was such that a ‘monster petition’ some two miles in length and containing more than a million signatures was delivered to Downing Street by lorry, accompanied by a veritable three-ring circus.

  The Billing libel case opened at Bow Street Magistrate’s Court in April, and after PB entered a plea of justification was committed to the Old Bailey for trial in May. During the intervening period an already complicated plot had thickened further. After it emerged that Lloyd George was engaged in secret peace negotiations with the German foreign minister, Billing was approached by The Times’ influential military correspondent, Colonel Charles Repington. Talk of peace outraged the Generals, who found allies in the British far right. Repington suggested that Billing get his trial postponed, and use the mythical ‘Black Book’ to smear senior politicians and inflame anti-alien feeling in the Commons. By this logic, the current peace talks would be ruined and Lloyd George’s authority undermined. He would be brought down, leaving the Generals to take control of the War Cabinet and run the war as they wished. The government, in turn, attempted to spike Billing by means of a female agent-provocateur, Eileen Villiers-Stuart, whose purpose was to lure PB to a male brothel in Duke Street. Here, it was hoped, Billing would be compromised, or at least observed, and his parliamentary career immolated in a blaze of scandal. It was a textbook example of fighting fire with fire, although the plan was destined to backfire after Villiers-Stuart fell in love with Billing and became his mistress.

  The trial opened at the Old Bailey on May 29th before Mr Justice Darling, who seems to have been specifically assigned to the trial. Billing chose to conduct his own defence, a move which did much to ensure that every conceivable strand of paranoid Vigilante nonsense was drawn out in evidence, and that the proceedings swiftly degenerated into farce. The six-day trial attracted wide press coverage, chiefly because of the novelty of a high-profile MP being sued by an exotic dancer, and the supposed existence of the Black Book containing 47,000 names of famous people, all said to be at risk of blackmail due to moral weakness and perverse sexual predilection. The legendary book, of course, was never produced. A climax of sorts was reached on the second day when Eileen Villiers-Stuart, who claimed to have been shown the Black Book by two army officers over afternoon tea in Ripley in the summer of 1915, revealed certain of the names in open court:

  Billing suddenly banged the table with his fist, dramatically pointed at the Judge, and he and Villiers-Stuart began shouting at each other at the tops of their voices.

  PB: Is Justice Darling’s name in the book?

  VS: (shouting) It is.

  JD: Just a moment.

  VS: (still shouting) It can be produced!

  Considerable commotion in court. Cries of ‘Order’ by the ushers.

  JD: It can be produced?

  Villiers-Stuart, waving her hand wildly at the Judge, and Billing, still with hand outstretched, continued shouting at the tops of their voices.

  VS: It can be produced; if it can be produced in Germany, it can and shall be produced here. Mr Justice Darling, we have got to win this war, and while you sit there we will never win it. My men are fighting, other people’s men are fighting-

  PB: Is Mrs Asquith’s name in the book?

  VS: It is.

  PB: Is Mr Asquith’s name in the book?

  VS: It is.

  PB: Is Lord Haldane’s name in the book?

  VS: It is.

  At which point Darling belatedly intervened, and ordered Villiers-Stuart to leave the witness box. She did not, and from this point on the judge lost control of the court. Villiers-Stewart went on to claim that Jack Grein was a German agent, and that her two officer friends from the Ripley tearoom had been murdered in Palestine on account of their detailed knowledge of the contents of the Black Book. Billing next called Harold Spencer, the delusional former intelligence officer from whose disordered mind had sprung the ‘First 47,000’ and the ‘Cult of the Clitoris’. Spencer claimed to have seen the Black Book while perusing the private papers of Prince William of Wied in Albania in 1914. Examined by Billing he told the court:

  PB: Did you see the list of public houses and baths, and recognise the names of any of them in London?

  HS: Yes, that was gone into with Admiralty Intelligence. Admiralty Intelligence did their best to close the whole matter a
s far as they could . . . They conducted a very thorough campaign and I believe stamped out part of the German system here in London.

  PB: Were these German agents using these public houses, and baths and massage establishments?

  HS: I believe our Intelligence has evidence they were.

  PB: You said in the article that the names of ‘Privy Councillors, youths of the chorus, wives of Cabinet Ministers, dancing girls, even Cabinet Ministers themselves, while diplomats, poets, bankers, editors, newspaper proprietors, and members of His majesty’s household follow each other with no order of precedence. . .’ Do you stand by that on oath?

  HS: On oath.

  Spencer went on to state that Margot Asquith and Lord Haldane appeared on the list, but declined to name others. Darling took no effective action to stop these irrelevant smears, on the dubious premise that his own name had already been blackened. Spencer went on to inform the judge that Wilde’s play Salome was ‘pure sadism’, which he defined as the lust for dead bodies.

  PB: Are you aware that it is only perverts who practise these vices?

  HS: I do not know if the German agents are really perverted.

  PB: Do you mean they practise them even against their own will in the interests of their own country?

  HS: Against their own instincts, I should think.

  JD: What do you mean; do you think the German agents practise these things?

  HS: If a German agent is instructed to practise sodomy by his chief, probably he does.

  PB: Do they succumb?

  HS: I know they do.

  PB: How do you know?

  HS: Through the Intelligence; through the Admiralty.

  PB: They practise this to bring into bondage English people?

  HS: That is their object, apparently.

  PB: And these perverts are people who take an interest in all sorts of sexual inversion. Do you know of your own knowledge that only pantomime performances of unnatural passion appeal to the German people?