by David Crane
It was a difficult case to answer, and all the more so for the unusual moderation with which it was expressed. ‘The last thing we want to do is to be unjust,’ the editorial went on in its measured ex cathedra tones,
but we cannot help thinking that, whether unconsciously or not, the idea of ‘equality of treatment’ – the idea that the officers and men must be treated alike is made unduly to come to the rescue of the desiderated artistic principles … Correctness of taste is good, but the sincere outpouring of a wife’s or mother’s love, may be even better than good taste. We do not know how far women were consulted in this matter, if they were consulted at all; but if a single mother had helped to draw up the Report we feel pretty sure that it would have caused less pain.
Who would have thought, one embittered mother wrote, ‘when they left us in 1914 in their boyish vigour that not even in death should we be allowed to choose for them’, and it was a cry from a pre-war world to which Ware was determined there would be no return. In the early days of the fighting he had glimpsed the democratic possibilities latent in his work, and he had no intention of seeing the vision of national and imperial unity enshrined in his cemeteries high-jacked now by what he saw as a narrowly self-interested, patrician clique, dominated by the extended Cecil clan for whom his old colleague from the early days in France, Lord Robert Cecil, was the chief spokesman.
It is important to realise too that this was as passionately a matter of ‘religion’ to Ware, who had been brought up in the evangelical dissenting tradition of Victorian England, as it was for the Anglican opposition to their plans. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, evangelicalism had lost much of the high ground in national affairs it once owned, and yet the cemeteries that he and the Commission were planning were as much an expression of that deflected Victorian evangelical energy and high earnestness as was the Empire they were built to honour.
The cemeteries seem in so many ways now the product of a new century of democracy, equality and agnosticism that it is easy to forget that they were in a very real sense the last great achievement of the Victorian Age of Faith. By the time that they were realised, the missionary zeal and dreams that had inspired that Age belonged to a fading past, but it is no coincidence that the men who shared Ware’s vision at the Commission were the same men who had given India New Delhi, South Africa its parliament building, Egypt the Aswan Dam and the Mother Country her last monumental proofs of her special place in God’s dispensation.
The opposition was not, of course, the privileged Anglican clique Ware liked to pretend it was – it was something that transcended wealth, party, denomination – but it suited him to pull out the ‘class card’ now as it had when William Gladstone’s body was repatriated to England in 1915. In the spring of 1920, a petition with more than eight thousand signatures was presented to the Prince of Wales, and yet all Ware could see, or was prepared to see, were the same old Cecil names that figured in every protest from the letter pages of The Times to the Canterbury House of Laymen. ‘Your Royal Highness,’ began Lady Florence Cecil’s petition, a gold-embossed and vellum-bound volume, ivory in colour, 10½ x 8½ inches x 3½ deep, crammed with line after line of signatures and pasted-in slips of paper,
In the name of thousands of heartbroken parents, wives, brothers and sisters of those who have fallen in the war, we, the undersigned, appeal most earnestly to Your Royal Highness as President of the Imperial War Graves Commission to help us.
We have been deeply wounded by the decision of the Commission that no crosses (other than those engraved on the headstone, which time and the weather will soon deface) are to be allowed over the individual graves of those who gave their lives to preserve the lives and liberty of others.
It was through the strength of the Cross that many of them were enabled to do so. It is through the hope of the Cross that most of us are able to carry on the life from which all the sunshine seems to have gone, and to deny us the emblem of that strength and hope adds heavily to the burden of our sorrow.
We do not ask that all should have crosses. Some may prefer headstones, but for those of us who so deeply desire it – is it too much to ask that the present wooden cross may be replaced at our expense, by more durable ones of stone …
We pray Your Royal Highness most fervently to grant that right which has been from all time the privilege of the bereaved may not be denied us.
It was a powerful and moving document – ‘Lost three sons … Three brothers … Three brothers … 3 sons killed in action … Four dear sons out of five having given their lives for King and Country … Mother of only son … Mother of two sons … Five nephews … My only child … Son aged 18 years … Bereaved of Chums … Bereaved of Pals … Fiancé …’ – but the ‘Cecil clan’ were not the only ones ready to mobilise their support.fn8
‘When the widows and mothers of our dead go out to France to visit the graves,’ a counter-memorandum from the Trades Union Congress Parliamentary Committee, representing four and a half million working men, declared,
they will expect to find that equal honour has been paid to all who have made the same sacrifice, and this result cannot be attained if differences, however restricted, are allowed in the character and design of the memorials erected.
The Imperial War Graves Commission was showing the benefit of having Harry Gosling, an old and experienced trade union activist, as one of its Commissioners, and with ‘The Comrades of the Great War’ and ‘The National Federation of Discharged Sailors and Soldiers’ weighing in with their own resolutions in favour of equality, the battle-lines were drawn. ‘As I see the position now,’ one sympathetic MP, the Unionist Member for Westminster, William Burdett-Coutts wrote in April 1920, after Lord Robert Cecil had demanded a division of the House over the war graves question,
the Commission has been roundly attacked by private influence, by a particular set of people whose names give a superficial weight to their views, and by methods of persistent personal persuasion, including not a little misrepresentation.
The House of Commons is apt to be led by sentiment, and has not a very long memory. The sentiment in this case has been confined to sympathise with the harrowing appeal on behalf of a comparative few individuals.
In all the history of the Commission there is perhaps nothing odder than the intervention of a man who in thirty-five years as an MP had scarcely so much as troubled the House. With a name like ‘Burdett’ and the constituency of Westminster, he might have seemed born to take such a stand, but this particular Burdett was not all he seemed, having only adopted the name by Royal Licence in 1881, when, to a good deal of ribald gossip, he had married the great Victorian philanthropist and heiress to the Burdett political inheritance and Coutts banking fortune, Angela Burdett-Coutts.
William Ashmead-Bartlett, as he then was, was thirty at the time of his marriage, Angela Burdett-Coutts sixty-seven and, unfairly or not, a faint air of improbability seems to have surrounded him ever after. Her closest friends always insisted on the contribution he made to her work and happiness, but even if that were true it is not just imagination that detects a note of mild surprise in Commission circles that their democratic champion in Parliament should turn out to be the sixty-nine-year-old widower of the Victorian age’s richest heiress.
Until this moment, in fact, William Burdett-Coutts had spent his whole life in the shadow of either wife or brother or, when they were both safely dead, of a war-correspondent nephew who had made his name with his Gallipoli despatches. His widowed mother had brought him and his four siblings from America to England while they were all still young, but while the older and flashier Ellis was progressing from a double First at Christ Church – where he routed Asquith for the presidency of the Oxford Union – to full-blown Disraelian imperialism and an unchallenged position as the rabble-rousing Michael Heseltine of the late nineteenth-century Conservative faithful, William was making his plodding way through Keble into the Burdett-Coutts philanthropic empire.
If Burd
ett-Coutts had spent thirty-five years in Parliament in virtual silence, however, he was ready when his chance came. He had first publicised his sympathy with the Commission in a letter to The Times in February, and when the following month Cecil tabled a question in the House demanding his debate, Burdett-Coutts rose ‘as one who is strongly and conscientiously opposed to the policy of the Noble Lord’, to echo the demand as the clearest way of endorsing Commission policies.
Ware had probably been hoping that someone more prominent would take up their cause, but after three weeks had produced no one else, he made his first overtures. ‘An attack on the general policy of the Commission will shortly be made in the House of Commons,’ Ware wrote to Burdett-Coutts in mid-April, thanking him for his earlier contribution in The Times,
and I understand that you intend to speak on the occasion. I should be glad to give you any information you may desire on the subject … I would be much obliged if you could give me the names of any members likely to be interested in the matter … and would care to be supplied with the facts.
Ware needed to maintain a delicate balance here, because while he was keen to maintain at least the appearance of Burdett-Coutts’s independence, he was determined that he was going to be well coached. ‘I understand that you are going to draw up a statement and send it over here,’ he wrote again on 19 April, forwarding on with his offer of help the trade union statement of support that Harry Gosling had orchestrated: ‘If you wish me to draw up a skeleton statement of headings I shall be happy to do so.’
The statement when it came at the end of the month, printed at Burdett-Coutts’s expense and over his name and circulated to MPs, had, like so many apparently independent documents, Ware’s signature all over it. ‘The Imperial War Graves Commission was constituted by Royal Charter in 1917,’ the statement began, reminding Members that the money involved was ‘imperial’ money and not simply ‘national’ money, and the principles on which it had been pledged imperial principles that the House had no business interfering with. ‘It is of the utmost importance that the House should realise the position in which the Imperial War Graves Commission is now placed by the Motions [demanding a change of policy],’ Burdett-Coutts concluded, his final paragraphs set in a bold type for emphasis,
It is not too much to say that the whole work of this great Imperial and National Memorial is now paralysed by this fatal atmosphere of doubt. The way of the Commission must be cleared once for all, so that they can be free to get on.
Under these circumstances it will not be sufficient to defeat the motion under notice, if the House should so decide, when it is brought forward. A negative decision would still leave the matter open and the commission liable to some new attack … Therefore, if the motion is made, an Amendment will be moved which will enable the House, if it so wills, to directly confirm the principle of equality of treatment … and the entire policy connected therewith.
There was the flimsiest of olive branches from Churchill in the form of a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury inviting a text for the great Cross of Sacrifice, but any last-minute nerves disappeared the moment in the late afternoon of 4 May 1920 that the Member for Westminster rose to a packed House to reply to the motion. ‘No one could be more reluctant than I am to deprive relatives of anything that can in any way assuage the irreparable loss that they will carry to the end of their days,’ Burdett-Coutts began, an elderly and childless widower transparently, almost humbly, conscious of the grief that separated him from so many of those to whom he was speaking,
They have had to meet awful trials in this War and they have borne themselves in their darkest hour with a heroism that seems to reflect and form a very part of that shown by those whom they mourn. The women: the mothers, the wives, the daughters and sisters of England and Great Britain! We used to read of the Roman women in this connection. But classic story contains no examples of mingled resignation and pride comparable to that shown by British women in the 20th century of the Christian era. Can I say less of the men – the fathers who lost their sons, often an only son. I can only say, and I think many hon. Members have felt the same thing, that when one met them for the first time after the blow had fallen, something came into your throat that almost prevented your speaking. And there they have stood, speechless too perhaps, but brave, proud, calm and uncomplaining. It has been wonderful throughout the War, but what is clear is that it is they themselves whose light has gone out who seemed to have died the death for their country. No, it is not want of sympathy that will lead a single member of the Commission to go into the Lobby, as I hope a large majority will do, to confirm once for all the policy of the Commission … It is rather the natural movement of sympathy into the largest channel, and one where it is most needed, that will do it.
It might not have been the kind of language that Kenyon or Macready would have used, perhaps, but age demands and gets a different sort of licence, and it was an astute opening from a man defending a Commission that stood accused of bureaucratic heartlessness. ‘I approached this subject with an absolutely fresh mind,’ Burdett-Coutts went on, keen to erase any impression that he was the Commission’s poodle; he ‘was only the man in the street’ … ‘knew nothing of the discussions that had taken place’ in the House over the last year and knew nobody on the Commission ‘except one man, the great poet of Empire’ who ‘kindly came down to this House the other day and made a most convincing speech to a meeting of hon Members’.
It would be intriguing to know how much of this was coaching and how much spontaneous. Whichever way it was, it is impossible to believe that Ware did not know what was coming next. ‘At the time I speak of, [Kipling] was away, and I could not get at him,’ Burdett-Coutts continued – and across the century one can see the House in the subfusc shades of mourning, many of them men who had fought in the trenches, men who had lost their own sons; men whose decisions had sent a million troops to their deaths, Asquith, Churchill, Lloyd George … and on his feet the sixty-nine-year-old Member for Westminster, only a year from his own death, the seeming incarnation of disinterested and diffident simplicity, carefully unfolding a letter as he softened up his audience for a coup de théâtre that his brother in his Gladstone-baiting heyday would have been proud of.
I cannot help, however, reading one sentence from a letter I received from him a day or two ago. The letter is marked ‘private’, but I do not think he will object to my quoting this sentence … The words are these: ‘You see we shall never have any grave to go to. Our boy was missing at Loos. The ground is of course battered and mined past all hope of any trace being recovered. I wish some of the people who are making this trouble realise how more than fortunate they are to have a name on a headstone in a known place.’
It was a crucial moment in the debate and with Kipling’s letter, Burdett-Coutts had given the Commission the human face it needed. ‘In my communications with the Commission,’ he went on, clawing back yard by yard the emotional high ground that the opposition had held unchallenged over the past year, two things had struck him: the ‘infinite consideration’ of the Commission to ‘all classes of relatives’ and,
what I call the genius of this War … which has never in history had an opportunity of expressing itself before. That is the solid and united effort, embodying its unity in forces drawn from every island and continent under the British Flag, fused and welded into one, without distinction of race, colour or creed, fighting, ready to die, and dying for one common cause that they all understood. It is that great union, both in action and in death, that the Commission seeks nobly to commemorate and make perpetual by its policy and design.
The debate had just begun, though, and if some of the rancour had momentarily gone out of it, the truce was only temporary. In his opening speech Sir James Remnant had paid a warm tribute to his ‘old personal friend’ Ware, but when Viscount Wolmer – a Cecil grandson – rose in his turn, a cursory nod in the direction of the Commission’s ‘fine’ motives was the most they were going to get.
‘I listened to my hon. Friend very carefully,’ Wolmer went on, successfully turning the whole argument of equality and compulsory uniformity on its head before going straight for the heart of Ware’s imperial dream. So long as there were clear guidelines as to size and cost there could be no conceivable objection to variety, he argued,
But there is a further point … the conception that you have in the graveyards designed by the War Graves Commission is of a great national Imperial memorial, a great war memorial, a great memorial to the British Army … By all means have memorials. Make them out of Government stone if you like. Make them uniform. But you have no right to employ, in making these memorials, the bodies of other people’s relatives. It is not decent, it is not reasonable, it is not right. A memorial is something to be seen. There will be two classes of people who will visit these graveyards: there will be the idle tourists in the first place, and secondly there will be the bereaved relatives. Are you going to consider the feelings of the bereaved relatives or the artistic susceptibilities of the casual tourist? These graveyards are not and cannot be war memorials. Have your war memorials in England or in France or wherever you like … but you have no right to take the precious remains of bereaved widows, parents and orphans and build them into a monument which is distasteful and hateful to those relatives, as in many cases it is.
