The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

He did not get his way immediately. Denounced up and down the country as a reptile, a traitor and worse, Northcliffe watched while Asquith brought in Bonar Law and a coalition government. The resignation of Fisher had been the final blow, but the shells crisis had weakened Asquith fatally – and, as Churchill reflected later, there had been no victories to compensate, or carry the government through. The coalition was still dominated by Liberals. Unionists accepted surprisingly low positions, though Balfour got Churchill’s old job at the Admiralty and Churchill had to take a junior role before he quit politics, briefly, for the trenches. Kitchener would hang on, denouncing Northcliffe and the press, comforted by his national status, working busily on his rose garden, until he drowned while on a mission to Russia. Above all, as we shall see, Lloyd George was put in charge of munitions and began to entirely reshape the relationship between the state and the people before finally ousting Asquith and becoming prime minister himself. Northcliffe and his later rival Beaverbrook, now pulling the strings of the Daily Express, were both involved in the destruction of the last Liberal government. There has been a nonsensical argument ever since about which had done more to bring this about – the full-frontal attacks of Northcliffe on the shells crisis or behind-the-scenes plotting by Beaverbrook, the friend and protégé of Bonar Law, who was finally persuaded by the resignation of Fisher that the government must change. Was it the shells or was it Fisher? The Daily Mail or the Daily Express? The true answer was that it was both. After a year of disappointing and tragic war-making, the press ended the Liberal age. Asquith, like Kitchener, despised journalism. But journalism, while not more powerful than the politicians, had grown so strong it could now, given the right circumstances, destroy a government. How had this happened?

  There is a widely believed myth that popular British journalism was essentially imported from America. It was not. American journalism was sharper, faster and more aggressive but the British variant developed separately. It was largely created by a single genius, Alfred Harmsworth. A golden-haired, strikingly handsome boy from a poor family, by 1915 he had grown into a swollen ogre, demonized in Germany as the man who had taken Britain to war, the real power behind the façade of Parliament and court, manipulating the whole empire. Harmsworth, born in Dublin to a tough mother and a feckless, hard-drinking father, had been brought up in north London, the eldest of a large family. Mid-Victorian England was a hard place for families on the edge of economic survival: the Harmsworths’ neighbours went bankrupt and the whole family committed suicide. Alfred was bright, ebullient and obsessed by technology. Whatever was new – bicycling, motor cars, aircraft – thrilled him. And he had an uncanny understanding of what the huge newly literate lower-middle classes would be prepared to read. He learned his trade first with cycling and sporting magazines, but his empire started with what could be called snippet-journalism, an amalgam of quotes, pieces of information, curious facts, news and jokes. The first paper, Answers to Correspondents, was a direct copy of an earlier and highly original publication, Tit-Bits, for which Harmsworth had worked. But Alfred’s energy, promotional stunts and talent for controversy soon outstripped it and his success was assured when he ran a simple competition: guess the amount of gold in the Bank of England and win a pound a week for life – enough in those days to allow you to marry and set up home. He received more than 700,000 responses and was soon expanding, first with boys’ and women’s magazines, and then by buying the ailing London Evening News. Harold, his younger brother, had been persuaded to leave a safe civil-service job, which was lucky because he had the organizational ability and financial nous that Alfred lacked. Thus a late-Victorian publishing empire was built up, with nerve, chutzpah and a certain amount of vulgarity, out of almost nothing at all. This was the prologue. The main act was the Daily Mail.

  It is impossible to quite explain the novelty and shock value of the now-familiar Mail when it first appeared in May 1896. So much of what it pioneered is what we now think of simply as journalism. It junked the word-for-word reporting of dull political speeches. It introduced first-person-singular ‘I was there’ reporting. Its stories were short and dramatic. It delighted in controversy, arguments to get people angry and get them talking. When most papers were grey and crammed, hard to read, it was printed on bright white paper with enough space to make it easy on the eye. It was aimed at what one harrumphing politician (Lord Salisbury) dismissed as ‘office boys’ but what Harmsworth called ‘the busy man’ – though he insisted on features to appeal to women, too. It was right-wing, patriotic and optimistic about progress. He told his journalists to ‘explain – simplify – clarify’ and coined the now well-known phrase, ‘When dog bites man, it isn’t news; when man bites dog, it is.’ He told another reporter: ‘The three things which are always news are health things, sex things and money things’ – which remains, broadly speaking, true. He told Thomas Marlowe, an early Mail editor, that it was not made ‘by licking Ministers’ boots . . . I have a natural horror of that sort of journalism’ and that it was ‘no good printing long articles. People won’t read them. They can’t fix their attention for more than a short time.’ The whirling radicalism of the Harmsworth style was a revolution in popular culture that can reasonably be compared to the arrival of the radio or the internet. Before broadcasting, this was the voice of the new democracy.

  Alfred had sales stunts of all kinds, from jigsaws to sky-writing, from free books to prizes for pilots. When the Boer War started, his paper brought back thrilling despatches from South Africa and tangled with the authorities. It used pictures early, used them big and used them often. And it was cheap, half the price of its rivals. It was an almost instant success, causing Alfred to exclaim on the second day of publication that he had struck a gold mine.

  Within a few years it was such an established part of British life that there were music-hall songs and jokes about the Mail, or the Daily Liar. Harmsworth was called the enemy of the human race and the man who was ruining the Empire. In turn, he shunned the establishment, though he accepted a peerage in 1905, at the time the youngest person to get one. The Edwardian political elite did not know quite how to respond to Northcliffe and the ‘new journalism’ which he represented. It was possible to demonize the man, but it was not possible to brush aside his readership, because it was identical to the newly enfranchised rising classes. He represented a fresh force in Britain, unpredictable and crude but rising, while the aristocracy and ‘country-house government’ was falling. Politicians would woo him in private and denounce him in public – Churchill was particularly guilty of this – but they understood that the popular press was now far more important than the old political journalism. And in 1908 the two collided, when Harmsworth bought The Times. This made him one of the most powerful people in Britain, above all because he not only had the means, he also had an agenda to push. A passionate imperialist, he was an early and relentless Cassandra about German invasion. He can best be described as a maverick, anti-party right-winger who believed in technical progress and getting things done and who had little time for Parliament or the political classes. Harmsworth and his newspapers were at least as complacent and flat-footed in July 1914 as the politicians were, but as soon as the war came, he was brimming with ideas about how to win it and had a network of informants across Europe that made him much better informed than any minister. The clash with Asquith and Kitchener was all but inevitable.

  The confrontation was worse than it might have been because Kitchener despised journalists and was determined to fight the war without any news coverage at all. In the early days, most of the papers sent correspondents to the front and some brought back stories that were extraordinarily vivid. They were there when Kluck’s First Army crashed head-on into the BEF and they described the retreat from Mons, and the first stages of trench warfare, sparing the reader very little. The Mail’s Hamilton Fyfe wrote bleakly about shattered British soldiers with no trench protection under constant shelling. Another reporter, G. Ward Price, watched the bomb
ardment of Rheims Cathedral, reported the phlegmatic courage of the advancing Germans, mown down but still coming on, and described what it was like to be shot at. At home, a Press Bureau under the Tory politician F. E. Smith had been set up to censor what was published and was soon being called the Suppress Bureau by journalists. Philip Gibbs, one of the greatest reporters of the time, then working for the Daily Telegraph and the Chronicle, managed to get out to the front disguised variously as an orderly, a stretcher-bearer or a French correspondent, and many more did similarly. Gibbs was arrested five times trying to get his stories back. Yet stories kept getting out, via American papers, or thanks to ingenious reporters who tucked their reports into their caps and smuggled themselves back to London. Kitchener then announced that no reporters would be allowed at the front, and threatened to shoot any who were found there. Fyfe was exiled to Russia. The Daily Mail, a favourite among the British troops, responded by printing letters they had sent home, and which were passed on for publication by their families.

  It was a classic confrontation between military thinking and democratic thinking and, in the conditions of the Great War, a hard one to disentangle. The more people at home knew about the atrocious conditions and losses being sustained at the front, the greater the danger of morale crumbling. Unrestricted reporting would, of course, give Germany, through her agents in Britain, vital information. Yet this was a war which could not be won without the support of the civilian population, and the less people knew, the wilder the rumours. The often-told tale of Russian troops being seen landing in Scotland with the snow still on their boots and marching through to France was one example. And over time, as the slaughter mounted, the yawning gap between official reports of victories and the tales told in letters, or by the returning wounded, would cause more anger and despair than truthful reports would have done. Kitchener, who had been a kind of military dictator in Egypt before the war, had no conception of the needs of a parliamentary democracy at war. Interestingly, although Germany was in most ways far more authoritarian and regimented than wartime Britain, her armies were far more open to journalism, including that of neutral countries, so that at times it seemed easier to find out what had happened from the enemy.

  Eventually, Kitchener relented enough to allow a small number of accredited journalists at British headquarters behind the lines, and some of their reports were brilliant. Here, for instance, is Philip Gibbs describing life in the trenches during a quiet phase in the first Ypres campaign, as the rains came.

  In ‘Plug Street’ and other lines of trenches they stood in water with walls of oozy mud about them, until their legs rotted and became black with frostbite, until many of them were carried away with bronchitis and pneumonia, and until all of them . . . were shivering, sodden scarecrows, plastered with slime. They crawled with lice, these decent Englishmen from good clean homes, these dandy men who once upon a time had strolled down the sweet shady side of Pall Mall, immaculate, and fragrant as their lavender kid gloves. They were eaten alive by these vermin and suffered the intolerable agony of itch.75

  The war poets were not the only people describing to the public the reality of what was happening. Gibbs sometimes sounds absurdly cheery to modern ears, but his day-by-day reports of the Battle of the Somme make absolutely clear that, victory or not, many of the British attackers had to march steadily into scythe-like machine-gun fire, that the ground was soon strewn with corpses and that the Germans, far from being demoralized by the huge bombardment, were fighting with huge courage. He also reports captured Germans saying there will be another war with Britain in ten years’ time. This is not the simple propaganda of legend. The Great War was not the finest hour of British journalism. No war involving the state so deeply is likely to produce notably daring or critical reporting. But working under very difficult burdens, including threats to close down their papers and arrest individual journalists, many papers responded well. Politicians might fume. But if they were to survive, they needed the press. Two men understood this intuitively. One was Churchill, though he was still learning. The other was his master, Lloyd George. But before they would rise again, Britain faced a return to the issue which had nearly destroyed them before the war – Ireland.

  Cruel, Promising Easter

  The story of the sad, brave and incompetent Easter Rising of 1916 could begin almost anywhere – among the money-raising Fenians in America, the foundation of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, or even in Germany. But since it was a rebellion against the very idea of empire, one could also begin it far from Europe. In the year 1890 in a corrugated-iron shed in the humid, greedy heart of the Belgian Congo, in a dirty little town called Matadi, two white men met, both lean, both bearded, both seething. Surrounded by adventurers, drunks, sadists, prostitutes and desperadoes hoping to make a fortune from the slaughter of elephants for their ivory, the great Joseph Conrad met a British consular official whose story would rival anything in his fictions, Sir Roger Casement. The novelist, whose Heart of Darkness would become the most powerful fictional denunciation in English of the evil of colonialism, found his companion intelligent and sympathetic. They sat for ten days and talked. Later, when they met again in London, Conrad wrote about his new friend. This official of the Empire, said Conrad, ‘could tell you things! Things I have tried to forget. Things I never did know.’ In the early years of Edwardian Britain Conrad and Casement were on the same side, ardent for justice.

  Casement had travelled with a Belgian officer who collected human heads. He had seen the beatings, murders and amputations visited on local people ordered to gather rubber. He had travelled on foot, with his bulldog, deep into the jungle to gather first-hand accounts of atrocities. He had rented an iron steamboat and sailed deep inland to see for himself the heart of darkness. He had learned native languages. He had bombarded the Foreign Office with furious and interminable letters about the cruelties visited by rapacious whites on defenceless blacks. At home his style is well described by another writer, Ford Madox Ford, who said: ‘I have myself seen in the hands of Sir Roger Casement who had smuggled them out of the country, the hands and feet of Congolese children which had been struck off by Free State officials, the parents having failed to bring in their quota of rubber or ivory.’ (Even Conrad doubted such a thing could be true: Conrad was wrong.) Casement wrote to the Belgian officials too, predicting that their rule could only lead to the semi-extinction of the people and the effective destruction of the whole region – a prediction that by the twenty-first century, when the Congo has become lawless, semi-deserted and isolated, seems bleakly vindicated. This was no ordinary imperial official. Still, he had official backing, however nervous: his 1904 ‘Casement Report’ on the Belgian Congo atrocities was commissioned by the government and shocked public opinion around the world.

  Casement’s campaigning led him to fund and covertly support one of the most vigorous radical organizations of Edwardian England, the Congo Reform Association. Its organizer was a young half-French radical and former shipping worker, E. D. Morel, and between them they roused much of British opinion against King Leopold’s personal fiefdom in Africa, with its forced labour and confiscation.76 They recruited aristocrats, famous writers such as Conan Doyle and Galsworthy, the Archbishop of Canterbury, many MPs, philanthropic businessmen and retired colonial governors. They made enough noise for the Belgian king to become a hate-figure in Punch and spread their influence to America. Most importantly, the Casement Report was eventually accepted by the Belgian Parliament, which began moves to take the Congo under formal Belgian rule, and away from the King. The CRA would eventually be wound up in 1913, by which time a constitutional change for the Congo and a series of reforms could allow it plausibly to declare at least a temporary victory. Casement had moved on. In 1906 he was sent to Brazil, and then to Peru, where he campaigned on behalf of natives kept in a similar state of murderous subjection by rubber-planters, founding the Anti-Slavery Society in Britain and eventually achieving, as in the Congo, some real successes. B
y the time he retired from the Consular Service in 1912 he was a well-known, decorated and esteemed figure, connected to a wide range of politicians and writers – a radical, but an establishment radical. Yet there were a couple of things about Casement which would change the way he is remembered – and change it utterly.

  For Casement was no more English than Conrad. He was Irish. His father had been a typical soldier of the Empire, a dragoon who had served in the first Afghan campaign, but his mother was a Dubliner, a Catholic, and he was born just outside the city. When his parents died early, he was brought up by relatives in Ulster, and never ceased to think of himself as fundamentally Irish. We have already seen how the events of 1912–14 split Ireland and forced tens of thousands of people to rethink their loyalties. Casement joined the Irish Volunteers, the pro-home rule movement set up to confront the Ulster Volunteers under Carson. His experiences in Africa and South America had made him a determined critic of imperialism. That was unusual. What was more unusual still was that he consciously began to connect the injustice of British rule over Ireland to the rule of the British in Africa, Egypt and India. The Irish, he believed, were ‘the white slave race of Europe’. Casement went to America in 1914 to try to raise money for Irish revolt from the Fenians there, but once war was declared he decided that, if Ireland was to free herself, she could do it only with German help. His enemy’s enemy was his friend. He sailed back to Europe and made his way to Berlin. There, in November 1914, he persuaded the Kaiser’s men to declare that ‘under no circumstances would Germany invade Ireland with a view to its conquest or the overthrow of any native institutions in that country. Should the fortune of this great war, that was not of Germany’s seeking, ever bring in its course German troops to the shores of Ireland, they would land there not as an army of invaders to pillage and destroy but as the forces of a Government that is inspired by goodwill.’