by John Fairley
One of the suspects over whom Miller ran his unseeing eyes was James McMahon, an Army Service Corps private, 1 Eaton Street, Prescot, Merseyside, who remembers being spreadeagled against a wall and repeatedly interrogated by officers following his arrest at the Three Arch Bridge.
He said: ‘I had joined a group of mutineers who had hemmed some Canaries and Military Police into a corner. We systematically beat them up with our rifle butts but, thanks to sympathetic young officers like Lieutenant Miller, I was not positively identified.’
McMahon and Toplis were to become friends and comrades in the years ahead.
In the middle of the mutiny, Haig had made what seemed an extraordinarily stupid and spiteful decision which threatened for six months to blow a huge hole in the hush-up he carefully created. Without explanation, he had issued an order that the forces’ sweetheart at Étaples, Lady Angela Forbes, was to be sent back to England. Not until one of his junior commanders, General Fowke, was subsequently confronted by the redoubtable and indefatigable Lady Angela, demanding with pencil and notebook in hand an official reason for her deportation, did the Commander-in-Chief lamely let it be known that he considered she ‘was not a good influence with the troops’.
At 41, Angela Forbes, who had been a high-society beauty of her day, was a leading member of the British aristocracy who had abandoned a whirlwind life of rich gaiety for one of great personal sacrifice and service behind the British lines. She had nursed war-wounded in Paris hospitals at the start of the war, and later founded an organization known as British Soldiers’ Buffets at Boulogne and Étaples, months before the Expeditionary Force or YMCA canteens put in an appearance at either of these places.
Before the arrival of General Thomson as commandant, she had succeeded, in the face of much official resistance, in establishing her big tea-and-bun hut in the middle of the camp. Until her arrival the Bull Ring trainees had struggled on without a midday break or a meal. Angela had worn down the opposition to the point where she personally served the troops with cups of tea half-way through their long and terrible Bull Ring day.
Grateful troops used to send her letters of thanks from the front line, and when the news broke of her fight to stick to her self-appointed post, she received many messages of encouragement.
The high-born Angela had been a strong supporter of Sir John French, and when he was replaced by Haig she had become an open critic of the new commander-in-chief. She was highly regarded and much loved by some officers and all the soldiers, but was looked upon askance by the Montreuil GHQ. She was far too avant garde, much too outspoken and too ‘well connected’. She was also a cigarette-smoking divorcée who entertained officers to dances in her Le Touquet villa. Her servants were actually intercepted in the streets by representatives of GHQ and questioned about the identity of her guests.
Haig’s edict had not been the first attempt to oust her. She had resisted an earlier effort by the War Office to amalgamate her private-enterprise canteens with those of the YMCA, whereupon an official of the association, prompted by jealousy at the popularity of her huts, reported her as having been seen smoking in public in a Boulogne hotel. There were further complaints that she had been heard swearing and that she rejected all forms of uniform in preference for gaily coloured jumpers and skirts. Clearly, Angela was no angel except in the eyes of the common soldier she tirelessly served!
One of the people who spied on her was Assistant Provost Marshal Strachan, who was directly responsible for the Étaples Military Police. It was her contention that the cruel conduct of the military policemen was but a reflection of the crudity of their chief, who, when he was not reporting on her activities, was continually paring his nails with a penknife in her presence! She complained about Strachan to General Plumer.
Among Angela’s officer friends was General Asser, with whom she had spent a merry evening drinking in the New Year of 1917 in the deserted dining-room of the Meurice Hotel in Boulogne; and Asser was one of the High Command sent to Étaples to try to control the mutiny nine months later. To the great delight of his drinking companion, Asser selected Strachan as one of the first to be sacked. GHQ tried to reinstate the assistant provost marshal, but Asser was adamant: Strachan was out for good.
Yet even Asser was powerless to intervene when Haig viciously retaliated by selecting Asser as his personal messenger to Angela with the notice to quit the country. In support of Haig in this move was Adjutant-General Macready, another of Angela’s enemies.
In the immediate aftermath of the start of the mutiny on 9 September, at least 10,000 soldiers were rushed away from Étaples and up the line in an effort to stop the rebellion spreading. And the supreme irony of Angela’s situation was that, at the very moment she was told to go, she was catering for both the needs of men and authority as never before. Her canteen at Étaples station was the only one serving tea and sandwiches to the 10,000 who were being hurriedly sent on their way. And when General Asser’s car drew into the siding, she was standing exhausted behind the counter with her helpers.
The tall, commanding, and still beautiful head tea lady saw that her friend the general was looking unnaturally grave. She recalled the moment:
‘He told me, “I have just come from the AG’s office with a message for you.”
‘I jokingly retorted, “To order me out of France?”
‘“Exactly,” was his reply.
‘I burst out laughing. Then I saw he was really serious and I was dumbfounded. What on earth had happened? I had broken no rules or regulations. I had not the smallest sin on my conscience to give me any clue to his extraordinary message.
‘When I asked him why he only shook his head and told me he had less idea than I had.’
Indeed, Angela had played no part in the mutiny. All she had done was to rush out when the shooting started near her hut. She had then found herself being swept downhill to the station in the midst of the incensed mob pursuing the military policemen. The only accusation that could have been levelled against her was that for the first thirty-six hours of the mutiny she had kept her refreshment hut open, and had then been given a safe-conduct escort of Australians through the camp and the town of Étaples. Still accompanied by her Australian bodyguard, she had driven her car at a snail’s pace to her Le Touquet villa past thousands of mutineers, all madly cheering for ‘Angelina’, as she was known.
Angela fought back bitterly against Haig with all the power at her command, and that power was enormous. She was a daughter of Lord Rosslyn, Lord High Commissioner of the Church of Scotland, and a goddaughter of Baroness Burdett-Coutts and Lady Bradford. Heading the list of frequent royal guests at the family’s two homes in England and their estate in Scotland was the then Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. In Angela’s childhood, Queen Victoria had also been a guest of the family. The remainder of the visitors’ book read like Debrett’s Peerage.
Flimsy though Haig’s case against Angela was, there had been some low cunning behind his action. Haig’s desperation was as great as that of General Thomson, who was strenuously seeking to make strong drink the scapegoat for the mutiny. Haig’s thinking was that, if news of the mutiny was going to break, then the most likely source of leakage would be the highly influential Angela with all her friends in high places. He sought therefore to pin the blame in advance on her unsettling influence among the soldiers. And, in the same bold stroke, to settle an old score born of personal enmity.
The commander-in-chief knew from his spies at Étaples that Angela was fond of repeating in public a politician’s description of him as ‘all chin and no head’. He knew that she openly referred to him as an obstinate and stupid man who ought to be replaced by a French commander. And while Haig spied on Angela, she kept a close watch on him, noting among his other activities the time that he spent playing golf at Paris Plage. And she, in turn, was well aware that the cavalry frequently played polo on the fields adjoining the golf course. Moreover, Angela was an enthusiastic repository for the many rumours of
wild drinking parties and scandalous bedroom scenes in the villas of Le Touquet and Paris Plage after the tennis and golf matches in which officers of High Command competed.
Lady Angela was an exceedingly romantic figure whose voluntary war service was exemplary. In contrast to the high jinks and goings-on in the homes of some of her lady friends in society, Angela’s claim was that the only time she had ‘gone off the beaten track’ was when she and her two young daughters had dined with an officer friend in his billet on his birthday, but even that innocent excursion had been reported back to Haig.
Since Haig had no real case against her, he would, if necessary, simply make one up. Even when he started raking into her past, all that he could come up with was that she had written risqué books, one of which, Broken Commandment, had been banned by pre-war libraries because it was regarded as ‘highly improper’. It was scarcely enough ammunition to start a fusillade against a formidable opponent, one of whose regular villa guests was the new, young Prince of Wales.
But what troubled Haig even more than the repeated sojourns of His Royal Highness with Lady Angela was the secret news imparted to him by Strachan that one of her guests, a few weeks before the mutiny, had been a regular army battalion commander, Toby Long, son of Walter Long, the most respected voice in the Cabinet and consultant to Lloyd George, Haig’s arch-enemy. Disturbed by the lack of officers at the front, young Long had decided personally to investigate widespread complaints that Étaples was not just over-crowded with military police, but was also massively over-staffed by high-ranking officers, who ought to have been up the line. Haig was greatly worried that Angela and Toby Long had been intriguing against him and would between them arrange for a bad report to be sent back to Downing Street.
Happily for Haig, his concern was unnecessary and he had worried unduly. If Toby Long had intended to make a bad report, then it died with him at the front, in the week of the mutiny when the officers were still conspicuous by their absence in the firing line.
Angela’s first blast of retaliation against Haig’s order that she should quit France immediately went via the War Office in London in a personal letter to Lord Derby whom she had known all her life. She also wrote to another friend, Lord Wemyss. He wrote back to her that he had called on Lord Derby, who had at first made ‘some rather veiled accusations against her’, but had later withdrawn them. Angela immediately set out from Étaples to London to demand an interview with Lord Derby, but he sent a message refusing to see her until her case had been investigated.
She was dismayed. As she recorded later, she had never thought of this particular acquaintance of her family as a man overburdened with brains, but until then she had thought that he was essentially just. Despite Haig’s order to get out of France, and to stay out, she returned to Étaples, and from there to Haig’s office at Montreuil, six miles away, where she deliberately parked her car in the space permanently reserved for Haig’s own staff car.
Instead of being allowed an audience with Haig, she was ushered into the far from august presence of one of his subordinates, the flaccid-faced Fowke, who squirmed his embarrassed way through an interview in the course of which she further disconcerted the hapless general by writing down his answers to her cross-examination. Among the more grotesque reasons advanced for Haig’s dismissal order were:
‘A clergyman has heard you say damn.’
‘You washed your hair in the canteen.’
The comic interview ended with Angela observing that it was not her habit to swear in front of padres, and, yes, she had washed her hair, but out of sight in the canteen kitchen.
As Angela had determinedly, doggedly remained a voluntary civilian worker throughout the war, Haig technically had no jurisdiction over her other than to order her removal from the war zone as an undesirable presence. And it was this knowledge that spurred her on in her search for justice. She followed up her meeting with Fowke with a letter to Haig demanding sane, relevant reasons for his order. But the commander-in-chief ignored this communication. He also ignored the fact that the Forbes canteens at Étaples station and the Étaples base continued to function as before, and that Angela went on journeying to and from France without regard for the order, which he did not try to enforce.
It was slowly beginning to dawn on the commander-in-chief that he had bitten off a great deal more than he could possibly chew, and that the best course open to him was a return to the one of masterly inactivity that he knew so well. But that was not enough for Angela. She wanted to have the order officially rescinded and her good name cleared. She dragged the case through a reluctant House of Commons into the House of Lords, with selected friends in both Chambers seeking further information about Haig’s action. Consoling letters poured in on her from all over Britain and France, and eventually the carefully, worded evasive replies culminated in an apologia being delivered in the Lords by Lord Derby, the text and content of which had been dictated by Angela and her friends, Lord Wemyss and Lord Ribblesdale.
Part of the deal was that the Lords Wemyss and Ribblesdale would scrap their prepared speeches attacking the War Office and GHQ, and that they would make no attack on either in the Press. Instead they eulogized the good works of Lady Angela.
Another fear which haunted Haig had been ill-founded. Angela’s attempts to get a full hearing of the story of the mutiny and its causes had failed. The cover-up had continued. When she next returned to Étaples, awaiting her was a GHQ pass ensuring her freedom of movement all over France.
By then it was February 1918, and Angela felt weary and soured. She tore up the pass and set out to work on behalf of the French soldiers. The British soldiers suffered with their sweetheart. As a result of her enforced and repeated absence in London fighting her case, the Étaples canteens had to close down.
To his charge of a pre-war publishing ‘impropriety’, Haig had raked up and falsely laid at Angela’s door the blame for the eccentric behaviour of one of her society friends who, early in 1915, had taken his pack of hounds up to the front with a view to setting off in pursuit of the enemy. When it was politely pointed out to him that this would serve no useful purpose, he had promptly switched to chasing foxes in the countryside behind the battle areas.
Haig however had another crisis behind the lines, which seems to have unhinged him even more than the encounter with Lady Angela.
He was telephoned at his Montreuil HQ with the news that he had dreaded most. Rebellion had not been contained. It had spread back up the coast road to Boulogne where the Number 74 Labour Company, comprising unwilling Chinese and Egyptian personnel, inspired by news of events at Étaples, stopped unloading supply boats at the port, downed tools and went on the rampage.
Enraged, Haig ordered swift, harsh reprisals which resulted in a total of twenty-seven unarmed strikers being shot dead, thirty-nine wounded, and twenty-five imprisoned. The colour of their skins seems to have determined the fate of the Boulogne rebels who were considered to be unworthy of the luxury of courts martial.
Corporal Harry Rodgers from Birmingham was one of many British soldiers at Boulogne ordered, in the words of one of his officers, to ‘kill those foul foreigners’ by shooting on sight. He remembers:
It was a wretched, pitiful business. The poor bastards had been little more than slaves, earning one penny a day compared to our shilling a day, which was bad enough. They were nearly all illiterate peasants without the slightest notion of why they were slaving eighteen hours a day in order that one alien country might knock hell out of another.
Our officers instructed us not to accord them even the dignity of rebels.
We were under strict instructions to look upon them as pure rabble. If they showed face in the streets in groups of over three in number they were to be shot like rabid dogs, and , they were, mainly because a feature of the massacre was the clear understanding that if we did not obey orders to kill we too could be shot.
We had heard what was going on at Étaples, and, as we took up firing positions in
groups of twenty on the street corners of Boulogne, we could not help wondering if this was what was being meted out to our comrades just down the coast. The Boulogne affair ought to have been handled by the Military Police, but they were as much hated at the port as they were at the base camp, and it was considered unwise for them to patrol the streets. There was a severe risk of the MPs being ‘accidentally’ shot by our own troops who felt really sorry for the Chinese ‘Coolies’ as they were known.
The most fashionable of the Boulogne restaurants, Mony’s, was to be the scene of the worst slaughter. Its high reputation as the gathering place of the elite was considered sealed when the Prince of Wales dined there. Staff cars continually jammed the narrow street as senior British officers dined on Madame Mony’s lobster Americaine and sole meuniere.
Trouble in Boulogne had started with isolated skirmishes on 5 September, the day the 74 Labour Company were out of control. George Soutter from Glasgow, was a private in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders:
That morning I was detailed to go on patrol in pursuit of Chinese and Egyptians who had been repelled when they attempted to raid the Louvre Hôtel and a café in Rue Edouard VII. As the attackers were weak through undernourishment, and without weapons, they had been easily held off in hand-to-hand combat with the waiters and the kitchen staff of the two establishments.
It was not anticipated that the mutineers would dare approach the exclusive Mony’s, never mind launch an attack upon it, so no special guard had been mounted outside the restaurant. But just after noon a dispatch rider roared down the street shouting out that they had been seen in the vicinity of the restaurant. Our patrol and two others elsewhere in the town, each consisting of about thirty men, were immediately switched to the scene.
