Pearls before Poppies

by Rachel Trethewey

  Without children to distract her, Molly threw her considerable energy into philanthropy. During the war she became a doyenne of charity fundraising. She served on countless committees, ran her own private hospital and took a prominent part in the control of Red Cross finances and operations. Lord Northcliffe also worked hard for the charity, collaborating closely with Sir Robert Hudson, the chairman of the Red Cross and St John’s Ambulance Joint Finance Committee. Northcliffe used his newspapers to promote the work of the Red Cross through The Times Fund. Since the war began, The Times had donated significant advertising space to the organisation almost daily and free of charge. It was a generous gesture at a time when newspapers had been forced to reduce the number of pages they produced due to a drop in advertising revenue and paper shortages. By 1918, the situation became even worse when paper rationing was introduced and the allocations to newspapers were reduced by 50 per cent.20

  Throughout the war years, the paper informed its readership about what the Red Cross was doing. In November 1915, The Times produced free with every copy a Red Cross supplement of thirty-two pages containing full descriptions of the charity’s work with illustrations and maps. Determined to use his journalistic skills for the war effort, Alfred went to France to see for himself how the war was being conducted. In 1916, he published his At the War book about the work of the Red Cross and life at the Front. All royalties from the sales were donated to the charity. Fifty-six thousand copies of the book were sold in the English edition alone and the Red Cross received over £5,000 in the first six months of sales.21

  During the war, Northcliffe was one of the most powerful propagandists in Britain. In 1918 Lloyd George made him Director of Propaganda in Enemy Countries, but he had been using his newspapers to undermine enemy morale throughout the war. He was one of the Germans’ greatest hate figures. In 1914, a medal was struck in Germany showing Northcliffe on one side, sharpening a quill pen, and on the other a devil stoking flames, with the caption, ‘The architect of the English people’s soul’. Similarly, a 1918 German cartoon showed the devil in an inquisitor’s robe with one arm around a rotund Lord Northcliffe, who was dressed in a vulgar checked suit and had a threatening look on his face, holding a copy of The Times in one hand and the Daily Mail in the other. In the caption, Satan said to Lord Northcliffe, ‘Welcome, Great Master! From you we shall at last learn the science of lying.’22

  Northcliffe was perceived as such a threat by the Germans that they launched a direct attack on his country home, Elmwood, which was on the Kent coast. On a cold night in February 1917 the house came under a barrage of shells from a German destroyer. Shrapnel burst around the house, with some hitting the library. Alfred survived unharmed but his gardener’s wife, who was with her baby 50 yards from the house, was killed and two others were badly wounded.

  Like so many families in Britain the Northcliffes lost loved ones in the war. Four Harmsworth nephews, who had been like sons to the couple, were killed in action. Vere Harmsworth, the son of Alfred’s brother, Harold, wrote home in October 1916 warning that he might be killed. Aged just 21, he explained that he could not imagine himself growing old. If he fell, he asked his family not to mourn but to be glad and proud. He believed that his death was the price that had to be paid for the freedom of the world and that they should see his life as not wasted but gloriously fulfilled.23 Vere was killed shortly after writing this letter. His self-sacrificing sentiments reflected the attitude of so many young men who were to be immortalised through the Pearl Appeal.

  Another nephew, and son of Harold Vyvyan Harmsworth, who had joined the Irish Guards a few days after the outbreak of war, was wounded for the third time and died on 12 February 1918. When the news was broken to him at his desk, Lord Northcliffe cried out, ‘They are murdering my nephews!’24 Yet another family death just as the Red Cross appeal was launched gave a very personal impetus to Molly’s crusade. The determined society hostess called on all her contacts and ran the Pearl Appeal like a military campaign.

  On 27 February it was announced that a committee had been formed with Lady Northcliffe as its chairman. Giving the royal seal of approval, Princess Victoria, the spinster sister of King George V, agreed to be president of the appeal. Tall and elegant with large expressive eyes, the princess was the right person to encourage other royalty to donate. Although she could sometimes be sharp-tongued, she was seen as ‘the good angel’ of the family, the unmarried daughter, sister and aunt, who sacrificed her own needs for others. After her father, Edward VII’s death she lived with her elderly, stone deaf mother, Queen Alexandra. Although she had little in common with her sister-in-law, Queen Mary, who she described as ‘deadly dull’, she was particularly close to her brother, the king. Sharing a sense of humour and a similar outlook, they spoke daily on the telephone.25 As president of the Pearl Appeal she took her role seriously and was to be an active member of the committee, not just a figurehead.

  Reflecting the interconnections and intricate morality of the Edwardian era, also on the steering committee was Alice Keppel, the mistress of Princess Victoria’s father, Edward VII. Evidently Lady Northcliffe had no qualms about drawing on both women’s talents. As a woman of the world herself, Molly understood the subtle rules of the game; affairs were acceptable providing appearances were kept up and everyone behaved with tact. Sitting around a committee table with her father’s ‘La Favorita’ was much less highly charged for Princess Victoria than an earlier occasion where both women were thrown together. When Edward VII was dying, Mrs Keppel sent the queen a letter the king had written to her in 1901 when he had appendicitis. In it he explained that if he were to die he wanted to say goodbye to her. Queen Alexandra agreed to her husband’s wish and both wife and mistress met by the deathbed. According to Mrs Keppel, the queen shook hands with her and said she was sure that she had always been a good influence on her husband. Alexandra then turned away and walked to the window. The king had a series of heart attacks and kept falling forward in his chair, by this time he was so ill that he did not recognise his mistress. When the usually poised Mrs Keppel became distraught, it was Princess Victoria who gently escorted her father’s great love from the room and tried to calm her.26

  Kind and generous, Alice Keppel was a popular member of society. She was ready to use her charm to encourage her friends to give pearls. She was also an expert on jewellery, having received a priceless collection of love tokens from the king. One of the couple’s favourite jewellers was Fabergé. At Christmas 1900, she had a gold cigarette case designed for her lover by the jeweller, enamelled in royal blue with a coiled serpent studded in diamonds. Showing the magnanimity expected of her, another year she advised the king on a gift for his wife. Queen Alexandra also collected works by Fabergé and, thanks to Mrs Keppel, the king commissioned gold models of all their Sandringham animals for her. Habitually dressed in gowns by Worth and diamond and pearl chokers, Alice was renowned for her jewellery. Her daughter Violet wrote that she always imagined her wearing a tiara. She added that her mother had a goddess-like quality, but any pedestal she was placed on would have to be made by Fabergé.27

  Also in the inner circle on the executive committee was Lady Sarah Wilson, the sister of the Duke of Marlborough and aunt of Winston Churchill. She was a close friend of Mrs Keppel, and as they were so often at the same house parties Lady Sarah became known as her ‘lady-in-waiting’. Both women had sat together at Edward VII’s coronation at Westminster Abbey in a special pew reserved for the king’s girlfriends, past and present, humorously referred to as ‘the king’s loose box’.

  Lady Sarah had also known the Northcliffes for many years. During the Boer War, Alfred had made her the Daily Mail’s first female war correspondent, sending back stories which were aimed at women readers. During the winter of 1899, trapped in the besieged garrison of Mafeking with her husband Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Chesney Wilson, she kept a diary for the Daily Mail. She gained a huge following of readers, who liked her down-to-earth writing style and opt
imistic attitude. Although the situation at times seemed desperate, she did not dwell on the horror. Despite food shortages meaning they had to eat horse sausages, minced mule and curried locusts, she also described the more positive side, including cycling events and the celebrations for Baden-Powell’s birthday. When the siege finally ended after 217 days in May 1900, there were widespread celebrations back in Britain. Spirited Lady Sarah was treated as a heroine. The Daily Mail published a picture of their ‘lady correspondent’ wearing a large black hat topped with plumes and bows and her bravery was lauded as a symbol of the British ‘bulldog spirit’.

  During the First World War she called on that spirit once again. Within days of the war being declared she posed for a photograph with a bulldog and a resolute expression on her face, appealing for funds for a hospital. After her husband was killed in action in November 1914, she dedicated all her energy to the war effort. With her sister-in-law, Lady Randolph Churchill, she raised money for free buffets for soldiers and sailors at railway stations. Rather daringly she also sold lingerie in a shop in Piccadilly to raise funds for the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. She was a useful member of the Pearl Committee because of her journalistic ability and her experience in asking her friends to donate heirlooms. Earlier in the war she had appealed for art and furniture to sell to raise money for the hospital she was setting up for the Belgian Army.28

  Soon, nearly every society woman in London wanted to be involved in the pearl gathering. Lending their names to the cause were nine duchesses, twenty-seven countesses and dozens of viscountesses. The wife of the American ambassador, Mrs Page, and even the glamorous Princess of Monaco appeared on the list of patrons. Demonstrating her ability to distance herself from her husband when necessary and run the appeal as a formidable woman in her own right, Molly pulled off the considerable coup of persuading both the present and previous prime ministers’ wives, Margaret Lloyd George and Margot Asquith, to serve on the appeal’s general committee.

  Margot Asquith loathed Lord Northcliffe with a passion, believing he represented a force of evil in public life because he very publicly criticised her husband’s running of the war. Using the full force of his newspapers, Northcliffe had attacked Asquith’s government for the high-explosive shell shortage, which he blamed for the death of many British soldiers. Under increasing pressure, Asquith’s Liberal government fell in May 1915 and was replaced with a coalition government with Asquith still as prime minister but David Lloyd George as the Minister of Munitions. At this time, Northcliffe admired Lloyd George, seeing him as another self-made man of outstanding ability, he called him ‘the little wizard from Wales’.29

  In the following months, Northcliffe’s unrelenting attacks on Asquith continued. By this point Margot Asquith became increasingly hysterical, writing in her diary that she would like to see the press baron arrested and claiming that because he encouraged the generals and politicians to quarrel, Germany had no better friend than him.30 In the political crisis of December 1916, which brought the Asquith government down, Alfred gave his support to Lloyd George becoming the new prime minister. Historians debate the extent of Northcliffe’s role in events; most agree that he helped to create a hostile atmosphere for the government, but his direct involvement in the final manoeuvring was limited. However, Northcliffe liked to see himself as a powerbroker. When the government collapsed, he phoned his brother Cecil and asked, ‘Who killed cock robin?’ Cecil replied with the answer he wanted, ‘You did.’31

  The fact that the wives of the men at the centre of these bitter political struggles could put aside their differences for the sake of the cause illustrates the strength of the Red Cross appeal and how it was fast becoming the most fashionable charity fundraiser of the era. At a meeting to launch the campaign at the Automobile Club, Lady Northcliffe rallied her troops. Emphasising that this was women’s special tribute to the men who fought, while joking about the new right of women aged over 30 to vote (which became law on 6 February 1918), she began:

  Your Royal Highness, ladies and gentlemen – You observe that I have put man in what is now regarded as his proper place. We are not concerned, however, to-day with women’s rights, it is women’s duty which brings us here. Our plan is to collect from willing givers pearls which shall make an historic necklace to be sold eventually for the benefit of the sick and wounded.32

  She called on the owners of beautiful pearls to give from their strings and to persuade others to donate. A little laugh went around the crowded room when she remarked that no one would miss one pearl from her necklace. The Queen, the society lady’s newspaper, agreed with her, adding:

  [Probably not] a woman in the land would mind missing just one of her gems for such a cause. It seems so little to give to those who give so much, and yet the price of one pearl may save a life; indeed the price of some of the pearls already given will save many lives.33

  Like her husband’s newspaper success which relied on reaching all sections of society, not just a limited elite, Lady Northcliffe wanted her appeal to extend beyond the upper classes to include all women who wanted to give. She reminded her audience that it was not only the most perfect pearls that could hope to find a place in the necklace, there was room for smaller ones too, so that no one need hold back fearing her gift would be deemed unworthy.

  Soon the Pearl Appeal was reaching far beyond the drawing rooms of Mayfair. Across the country, committees were set up to collect pearls; in the counties, the high sheriffs’ wives headed the appeal, in the cities the lady mayoresses took on the role. In Birmingham, the lady mayoress, Mrs Brooke, announced in the local paper that she was ‘at home’ at the Council House to receive pearls.

  Although word of mouth was vitally important, what really made the difference was publicity. Thanks to Lady Northcliffe’s press connections, the Pearl Appeal reached a mass audience. Her husband threw the full weight of his newspapers behind her fundraising and over subsequent months stories about the pearls appeared in The Times and the Daily Mail several times a week. With The Times selling 131,000 copies a day and the Daily Mail being bought by 973,000 in 1918, public awareness of the Red Cross appeal soon spread across the country.34

  Women from all walks of life, who were not part of high society, wanted to do their bit for the cause. Those who did not have pearl necklaces or could not afford to give a pearl individually were urged to give collectively. In response, one gem came ‘from a few ladies in County Galway’. It was suggested that collections for the purchase of a pearl should be organised among workers in munitions and aeroplane factories or in the mining districts. Soon, a fine orient pearl weighing 8.2 grains was sent in by the crew of an airship. The original idea had been to form a single rope of pearls, but the owners of the gems had other views and soon jewels were pouring in from across the country.

  Two

  FAMOUS PEARLS

  A picture of a society beauty, with her hair knotted in a simple chignon, her eyes cast down and wistfully looking away from the camera graced the cover of a March edition of The Queen. However, the focus of the photograph was not on the cover girl but on her large, luminous pearls which were perfectly set off by a gauzy white wrap draped discreetly across her shoulders. Under the chaste image, the caption read, ‘The Countess of Cromer, who is on the Committee of the Historical Pearl Necklace which will be sold for the Benefit of the Red Cross Funds.’1

  The countess was a particularly appropriate figure to represent the appeal. Before her marriage known as Lady Ruby Elliot, one of the three daughters of the Earl of Minto, she had been made a Lady of Grace of the Order of St John of Jerusalem for her war work. The Pearl Appeal had become a family affair for Ruby, as her mother, the Countess of Minto, and her sister, Violet Astor, were also involved. The Minto family, like so many others, had paid a high price during the war. Both Violet’s husband, Charles Mercer Nairne, and the Minto girls’ brother, Esmond Elliot, had been killed. However, reflecting the idea that the pearls represented hope as well as loss, the countes
s’ serenity in the photograph was partly because she was pregnant. Already the mother of two daughters, in July she gave birth to her first son.

  The cover was the ultimate endorsement from fashionable society. Inside this edition, The Queen captured the evocative element of the Pearl Appeal and the excitement it was creating:

  If all pearls come to us with the moving mystery of romance about them, how immensely greater is this quality in the case of that wonderful Red Cross necklace – that necklace which is growing, pearl by pearl by pearl, in the service of those who are wounded in the fight for Britain, for Liberty, for Right. Strangely suitable are pearls to be the vehicle of mercy and of healing with their tender beauty, their mystic meaning, their almost spiritual loveliness: and how great is the need which these treasures will supply.2

  The article was illustrated by a necklace made up of pearls interspersed with seed pearl-framed miniatures of royal donors and the symbols of the Red Cross and the Order of St John.

  The royal family had led the way by giving the first pearls. Three generations offered their support: on 4 March, Queen Mary donated a fine jewel, and on subsequent days Queen Alexandra and Princess Mary also gave gems. Each of the royal ladies wore a different style of pearls.

  Alexandra was the ‘Queen of Pearls’, from the moment the Danish princess married Bertie, Prince of Wales, in 1863 she became closely identified with the jewels. For her wedding, her family gave her the ‘Dagmar necklace’. Designed by the Copenhagen court jeweller Julius Dideriksen, the necklace was Byzantine in style, with pearl and diamond medallions set in ornate gold and diamond scrolls and swags. It was made from 118 pearls and 2,000 diamonds. The two large drop pearls came from the Danish royal collection and had been exhibited at the Great Exhibition of 1851.3 The necklace’s name came from the Dagmar Cross pendant, which is attached to it.