Secret Warriors

by Taylor Downing

  If the British government had little to worry about in terms of promoting the war at home, it was quite another thing when it came to countries overseas. The Germans bombarded neutral countries from the start with posters, leaflets and pamphlets explaining the reasons for Germany’s entry into the war and attempting to discredit the motives and behaviour of its enemies. The British government had no plans to mount a propaganda campaign in neutral countries but grew concerned about the possible growth of anti-British feeling, especially in the United States where German publicity was thought to be particularly virulent. Asquith agreed to ask Charles Masterman, Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, well known as a writer as well as a Liberal politician, to set up a new secret organisation to inform and influence public opinion in the Dominions and in neutral countries. Its official title was the War Propaganda Bureau, but it would be far better known from the name of the building in which it was located, Wellington House.

  Masterman was one of a new breed of propagandists (or information controllers) who slowly began to transform the government’s attempt to influence public opinion, both abroad and later at home. From a well-established Quaker family, he had grown up in Tunbridge Wells before going to Christ’s College, Cambridge. There he became president of the Union, the student debating society, and a leading figure in the University Liberal Club. While still at university he began writing articles for Liberal papers like the Daily News and edited the student magazine Granta. His two passions were reform, as he came under the influence of the Christian Socialist movement, and literature. After graduating he moved into a tenement block in Camberwell, to live among the poor working class of south London. The experiences he gained there went into various books, including From the Abyss (1902) and The Condition of England (1909). In 1906 he was elected a Liberal MP and played a central administrative role in the great reforms of 1910–11. He was both Financial Secretary to the Treasury and chair of the National Insurance Commission. Unusually for the time, the latter body employed a series of speakers to travel around the country in order to explain to both workers and employers the benefits of the new National Insurance scheme, a rare example of a government publicity campaign to promote its own policies. At the outbreak of war, then, Masterman was a rare creature, a Cabinet minister with excellent literary and journalistic connections, and with a background in trying to sell the government’s message. He was not exactly a man of the people but he had a crusading zeal for causes he took up and could be persuasive and charming when he wished. He was not only an obvious but also a very good choice to take control of propaganda intended for countries overseas.

  Masterman had a completely blank canvas. There was no precedent for undertaking the sort of task he now faced. The Foreign Office had a high and mighty view on attempts to influence opinion overseas. According to its traditionalist outlook, diplomacy was for diplomats to conduct between themselves; the less the outside world knew about what they were up to, the better. Any revelations might threaten what was perceived to be the national interest. Often treaties were negotiated in secret, or at least had secret addendums to their public clauses. There was no tradition of transparency at all. If awkward questions were asked in the House of Commons, the Foreign Secretary simply put a finger to his lips and that was the end of the matter. No further questions would be asked.18 In this view of international relations there was absolutely no need to consider foreign public opinion, while the gentlemen of the diplomatic corps felt nothing but contempt for what they called the ‘gutter press’ in Britain. It was a closed, arrogant world. But the war was about to blow it apart.

  Masterman started by consulting both the literary and the journalistic worlds. At a conference at the beginning of September 1914 a host of the great literary figures of the day came together, including J.M. Barrie, Arnold Bennett, G.K. Chesterton, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Galsworthy, Thomas Hardy, Rudyard Kipling, John Masefield, Gilbert Murray, G.M. Trevelyan and H.G. Wells. They pledged their full support for the Propaganda Bureau and many would do work for Masterman over the next few years. George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright and Fabian, was the only prominent figure who refused to participate. In a pamphlet titled ‘Commonsense and the War’ he argued that defending Belgium was simply a pretext for going to war to defeat a major rival. The government considered banning the pamphlet, although it never did.

  A few days later a group of top newspaper editors and leading journalists met with Masterman. They proposed sending messages outlining the country’s case through embassies abroad. Still smarting from the restrictions of the ‘suppress bureau’, they also demanded that ‘unnecessary obstacles to the speedy and unfettered transmission of news should be done away with.’19 Under pressure, the War Office made a tiny concession to the newspaper editors’ demand for access to the front; it agreed to set up a small group of its own writers who would operate as quasi-correspondents at GHQ in France, sending back reports that would be credited as coming from ‘Eye-Witness’. The first Eye-Witness was Colonel Ernest Swinton, assistant secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence, the man whose observations on trench warfare would later prompt him to play a leading role in the development of the tank. Swinton had a more open attitude than his superiors to what could be made available to the press and he soon added a much-needed level of realism to the reporting of military events.

  Swinton was the first Eye-Witness but others would soon follow. One of these was Max Aitken, a Canadian millionaire who went to GHQ to write reports about the Canadian troops on the Western Front. Aitken was one of the few relatively classless individuals who had thrived in class-ridden Edwardian Britain. Given his country of origin, he was regarded as something of an outsider. It was also an advantage that he had risen from being a poor country boy to a wealthy Montreal industrialist. The son of a Scottish-born Presbyterian minister, he grew up in Ontario, making his first fortune in securities in Halifax, Nova Scotia before going to Montreal where he acquired a monopoly in the production of cement and made a second fortune. In the wake of a minor scandal about the way the shares had been handled, Aitken left for Britain, taking his money with him.

  On arrival he became Unionist MP for Ashton-under-Lyne in 1910. That same year, he bought up Charles Rolls’ shares in Rolls-Royce after Rolls’ death. But although immensely wealthy, Aitken held radical views on a variety of subjects. For instance, although a committed imperialist he believed in freedom for Ireland as long as Ulster remained in the Union. By 1914 he had acquired a part share in the Daily Express, and his attitude to the paper perhaps summed up his attitude to Britain: he wanted it to appeal not only to the lower middle classes, like Northcliffe’s Daily Mail, but to people of all classes. At the time he was largely successful in expanding its readership. As a well-known financier, he took it upon himself on the declaration of war to try to generate confidence in financial institutions. So on the day war was declared he went to Ashton-under-Lyne and flamboyantly made a deposit of £5000 in the local savings bank. The gesture was much appreciated locally.20

  In early 1915, the Canadian government appointed Aitken as Eyewitness at the front. Not only did he send back regular reports on the Canadian troops who fought so bravely in the Second Battle of Ypres, but he wrote the first two volumes of a major history entitled Canada in Flanders, following the story of the Canadian troops in battle. He also formed the Canadian War Records Office and assiduously started to collect orders, war diaries and letters, storing them initially in his own office in London. His reporting of events on the battlefield had a great impact in Canada, from where many of his articles were passed on to the United States. When criticism was voiced in London that many Americans seemed to have the impression that Canada was bearing the brunt of the fighting in France, Aitken responded bluntly that the British government should therefore start up its own publicity campaign.21 That, of course, was precisely what Charles Masterman was trying to do.

  Masterman opened shop for the War Propaganda Bureau in the old of
fices of the National Insurance Commission, which were located in a block of flats in Buckingham Gate. Wellington House would remain headquarters of the bureau for the next three years. Many of the leading figures in the Commission transferred to the new organisation. Masterman took to his task with relish, and the system he created was to set the tone for British official propaganda overseas during the early years of the war. Standing aside from the anti-German hysteria that infected the British press, Masterman wanted to base his propaganda only on reports that could be accurately substantiated. When criticised for not passing on rumours that the Germans had cut the hands off a Belgian baby, he said, ‘Find me the name of the hospital where the baby is and get me a signed statement from the doctor and I’ll listen.’22

  Masterman saw his first task as to inform those who helped to create public opinion abroad, including newspaper editors, writers or politicians. He wanted to offer them an accurate, reliable source of information that if challenged could be shown to be based on fact. As all British propaganda was to be carried out in secret, Masterman decided as his second task to use commercial publishers or news agencies to spread the message he wanted to get across. Consequently, the books and pamphlets produced by Wellington House always appeared to be independent publications, as Masterman thought they would have more impact than propaganda directly issued by the British government. Often, this literature was not distributed freely but was sold for a small sum, as Masterman thought this would give it more value and credibility; he calculated that people were more likely to believe something if they had paid for it. The publications of scholars or experts would also be more likely than blatant British propaganda to impress opinion makers abroad. So Masterman began to set up a network of contacts with publishing houses in Britain and America. By June 1915, Wellington House had distributed two and a half million copies of books, pamphlets and speeches in seventeen different languages, either sending them to influential people, selling them in leading bookshops or placing them in public libraries. This had all been done in total secrecy, with no apparent link to the work of the British government.23

  Among the academics who worked in secret for Wellington House were two young historians, Arnold Toynbee from Balliol College, Oxford, and Lewis Namier from the London School of Economics. Both men, then in their mid-twenties, would work on propaganda throughout the war, later becoming distinguished figures in the field of British history. The laboratory of war was casting an ever-widening net to draw in expertise and scholarly support.

  All British propaganda at this stage of the war was directed at opinion makers, not at the public themselves. Another way of trying to reach newspaper editors, politicians and writers was through the established news agencies, of which Reuters, based in London, was the biggest; its cables went to newspapers throughout the world and its news reports were highly respected. So the government approached Reuters, who agreed to send a certain amount of material on its cables in return for a small subsidy. The Reuters management was concerned at first that this deal would threaten the company’s reputation for impartiality, on which much of its credibility as a global news agency relied. But when Roderick Jones, an experienced news reporter and a loyal Reuters man, took over as general manager after the suicide of Baron Herbert de Reuter in April 1915, he justified passing on British official propaganda as straight news by arguing that with British public opinion so firmly behind the war, it was acceptable to present the government line as one that was completely objective. Furthermore, as a patriotic Englishman, he had no qualms about representing the British perspective. Jones also had a further motive. Reuters was in desperate financial straits because of the war and needed the financial help offered by Wellington House to survive.24

  In addition, Reuters set up a new service to complement its existing news bureau. Known as the Agence Service Reuter, it would supply news in both English and French to Allied and neutral countries in Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. It was entirely funded by the British government, an agreement which served both parties well. Reuters received much-needed funding to ease its financial difficulties and the government could send its propaganda under the cloak of a commercial news agency. As one official noted, the news sent out ‘is that of an independent news agency of an objective character with propaganda secretly infused … it is essential that independence should be preserved.’25 This was how Reuters reconciled patriotism and impartiality. But the Agence Service Reuter regularly sent out 8000 words a day, and at its peak as much as 60,000 words a day.26 Many writers had to be found to produce all these words.

  One of the writers mobilised by Masterman to fight the war of words was novelist John Buchan, then just forty. Buchan was tall and suave, his good looks marred only by a deep scar on his forehead from a childhood accident. Very sociable, he was much liked for his dry Scottish humour, and was one of the more remarkable characters of the Edwardian era. The son of a Scottish minister who had served a parish in the Gorbals district of Glasgow, Buchan had grown up as a ‘son of the Manse’, imbibing a strong Calvinist tradition that emphasised the need for hard work. Alongside this he developed a deep love of the Scottish countryside, especially the Borders region around Peebles where relatives lived and where he spent every summer. Buchan attended Glasgow University at the age of just seventeen, but really began to flourish when three years later he went on to Brasenose College, Oxford. While still an undergraduate he published his first novel, became president of the Union and won several literary and history prizes. He was a popular figure, admired for his brilliant, witty conversation. After Oxford, he became a lawyer and was called to the Bar, but he continued to write prolifically, mostly novels but also some popular history. He moved in the top literary and political circles, where he enjoyed the glittering company of many individuals on whom he based characters in his novels. But he still spent as much leisure time as possible rambling in the Scottish highlands. He would think nothing of making a two-day, sixty-mile hike across the mountains of Scotland.

  In the aftermath of the Boer War, Buchan had taken a job in South Africa where he served for two years as private secretary to Lord Milner, the High Commissioner, charged with the task of rebuilding the country after the destruction of the war years. This work involved resettling tens of thousands of refugees whom the British had gathered in what were called ‘concentration camps’. Milner was particularly impressed by the abilities of his young assistant, who demonstrated not only great administrative skills but also a prodigious ability for hard work. While in South Africa, Buchan was introduced to the world of intelligence and became aware of the work of several remarkable men. On returning to London, he became a director of the publishing house Thomas Nelson & Sons, for whom he edited a set of popular encyclopaedias and started commissioning contemporary writers for a revolutionary new series called Nelson’s Sixpenny Classics. Like the popular newspapers of the day, these handy-sized books catered for the tastes of the rapidly growing and increasingly literate lower middle classes, offering good contemporary fiction in an accessible format at a reasonable price.

  In the summer of 1914, as the diplomats argued and Europe slid rapidly towards war, Buchan rented a house in Broadstairs, Kent with his wife and young family and spent his spare time writing another novel, what he called a ‘shocker’. In this spy thriller he created a new character, Richard Hannay, who would feature in several of his later novels and who was based on the intelligence agents he knew. The storyline played on the idea of a German conspiracy against Britain, a popular theme in fiction since Erskine Childers’ bestseller The Riddle of the Sands ten years before. But Buchan’s story was also very modern in its style and anticipated aspects of the thriller genre of the future. Much of the novel was taken up with a long chase from London to the Highlands of Scotland, in which the innocent Hannay finds himself being pursued by both the adversaries in the plot: suspected by the British police of being a murderer, he is at the same time being hunted by German agents. Published the followin
g year, The Thirty Nine Steps was to become probably his most famous novel.27

  In late 1914, before the book had come out, Buchan suggested to his partners at Nelsons that they should publish a history of the war. He felt that although the full story would not be known for years, it was possible to write a first draft of history, to come out in several volumes roughly three to six months after the events it described. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was asked to write the History. But he was too busy. Nelsons then approached Hilaire Belloc, but at the last minute that deal fell through and Buchan ended up writing the history himself. It would be a massive undertaking. The first of no less than twenty-four volumes appeared in February 1915. Buchan eventually wrote more than a million words.28 The History displayed all Buchan’s talents. He summarised large amounts of material and conveyed a real sense of the fighting while at the same time providing a cracking narrative pace.

  The venture was independent, with all royalties going to war charities, but it was just the sort of project Masterman approved of. He approached Buchan and started secretly to subsidise some of Nelsons’ output. Britain’s War by Land, which Buchan wrote in 1915, was translated into several different languages. He wrote several pamphlets for Masterman that were likewise translated and distributed around the world. Masterman’s support helped Nelsons survive the difficult times of war and the high costs of paper. And for Wellington House it was the perfect cover. Buchan was a well-respected author writing for an independent publisher. No one would suspect that he was producing British-sponsored propaganda.