Staring at God

by Simon Heffer

  Parliament was asked on 7 August to pass a Defence of the Realm Bill, part of which would allow courts martial to try spies and saboteurs; this went through all stages in a matter of minutes. The new Act – universally known as DORA, whose powers would be increased six times – also made it illegal to undermine recruitment, the currency or allegiance to the Sovereign in a printed article, speech or conversation. It had unforeseen consequences: several painters were arrested for working out of doors, including Sir John Lavery and Augustus John, because it was feared they were drawing a landscape in order to pass information about it on to the Germans.70 Legislation followed to punish anyone trading with the enemy, or giving commercial assistance. It was legislation far without normal British practice: it put the Army and Navy in charge of a field of civil law, with limited rights of appeal. However, for the first half of the war it impinged on relatively few. It was only in 1916, when conscription was enforced and public support for the war started to wane, and dissent rise, that the effects of DORA began to intrude seriously in ordinary lives.

  Reports of German outrages fed loathing of the enemy: and by mid-September the offences extended to those against culture as well as against people. The Belgian university city of Louvain was reduced to ashes, provocative enough to more sensitive Britons: but the news on 21 September that Reims Cathedral was a smouldering shell seemed definitive proof of German barbarism. Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George’s mistress and secretary, recorded that the destruction ‘moved him more than anything else since the outbreak of the war.’71 The Times called it a ‘crowning atrocity’ against something belonging not just to France, but to the ‘whole world’; Germany had ‘forsaken Christianity’ and gone ‘beyond the pale of civilisation.’72

  The public’s demand for harsh measures against Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in Britain was stoked up not least by the Northcliffe press, for which it had become a fetish. MO5(g), the forerunner of MI5, was highly active, intercepting cables and letters, which horrified McKenna when he was informed: such interference in communications was punishable by two years’ imprisonment, he reminded MO5(g) officials, who talked him round. He was unaware that the department, founded in 1909, had done it before the war too. In mid-October a huge round-up of aliens took place in London’s East End, and other major towns. Schweppes, the drinks firm, took large newspaper advertisements professing that they were Swiss, and asking for information that would allow them to bring a libel suit against whoever was spreading the rumour that they were German. On 21 October ninety aliens – mainly hotel staff and commercial travellers – were arrested in Newcastle and Gateshead; the next day one hundred hoteliers and businessmen in Sheffield were rounded up. The Times reported that ‘it is estimated that there are between 700 and 800 enemy aliens in Birmingham. About 20 were arrested yesterday [22 October] and the process will be continued until the city has been cleared.’73

  At Folkestone thirty-one aliens, mainly waiters, were run in, and within forty-eight hours the town was pronounced ‘cleared’ of military-age enemy aliens. On 22 October a thousand such aliens were arrested throughout Britain, and almost that number the next day. Those arrested in southern England – described by The Times as ‘an army of waiters’ – were held at a camp at Frith Hill in Surrey before being sent to the Isle of Man.74 Daily Mail readers were urged to refuse service by German or Austrian waiters; and if one said he was Swiss, to ‘ASK TO SEE HIS PASSPORT’.75 As well as hitting the hotel and restaurant trade, the round-up hobbled Britain’s dandies, since most of London’s best trouser-makers were Germans, and tailoring firms were bereft after their arrest. Many had British wives, some of whom were thrown on the mercy of the parish. Other Germans were in the wrong place at the wrong time. On 26 October Northampton Town Council sacked its tramways manager, Mr Gottschalk, because he was born in Germany. The pill was sweetened by £300 compensation, but the fate of most of German origin, registered as aliens and law-abiding, was that if sacked no one would employ them, and they could not return ‘home’. Naturalisation was dismissed: the notion of ‘once a German, always a German’ became common currency.

  Anti-German feeling became worse as the enemy, repelled on the Marne, continued to advance elsewhere, nearing Calais in the north-west and only just held by the British in what would become known as the First Battle of Ypres. The King told Asquith on 23 October that he and the Queen had received ‘heaps of letters’ abusing them about their German cousins fighting against Britain: and, closer to home in every sense, about what one correspondent had termed ‘the damned German spy’, Prince Louis of Battenberg, the King’s cousin, the First Sea Lord.76 Asquith found the King ‘a good deal agitated’ about Prince Louis, and defensive of his cousins fighting on the other side: ‘He told me rather naively,’ Asquith relayed to Miss Stanley, ‘that Cousin Albert is “not really fighting on the side of the Germans”: he had only been “put in charge of a camp of English prisoners” near Berlin! – a nice distinction.’ Asquith visited an internment camp at Deepcut on the Surrey/Hampshire border and realised what a cross section of society had been corralled there: ‘They were a rotten looking lot – waiters, hairdressers & the scum of Whitechapel & the East End with a sprinkling of doctors, professors and educated men.’77 On 27 October the government published a list of coastal areas where enemy aliens, even if registered and law-abiding, could not set foot, in case they observed movements of shipping. These included the entire counties of Norfolk, Suffolk, Sussex and Monmouthshire; most of coastal Scotland, and Orkney and Shetland; and almost every port in Britain with the exception of London. The next day the state, already struggling to billet, clothe and equip its new soldiers, ran out of accommodation for internees.

  Prince Louis was not the only high-profile victim of anti-German feeling. Another casualty was the proprietor of Sanatogen, who being in Germany received no profits from his British subsidiary during the war. Also, the annuity of £3,000 a year paid to the last surviving grandchild of George III, the ninety-two-year-old Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz – born Princess Augusta of Cambridge to George III’s seventh son, and beloved aunt of Queen Mary – was stopped, as the Grand Duchess (born at Kensington Palace, and married to her cousin the Grand Duke at Buckingham Palace) was holed up in Neustrelitz, in Pomerania. There was also Sir Edgar Speyer, who had been one of the great financiers behind London’s underground railways in the 1890s and 1900s, and in their electrification. He had been rewarded with a baronetcy in 1906 and, more unusually, a privy counsellorship in 1909; his honours reflected his lavish donations to the Liberal Party. He had been born in New York in 1862 to German-Jewish parents, but then educated in Frankfurt. He was chairman of Speyer Brothers, his family’s finance house, and a partner in its New York and Frankfurt branches. He took over the London branch in 1887, and in 1892 he took British citizenship. He and Leonora von Stosch, his violinist wife whom he married in 1902, were generous patrons of classical music, and Speyer counted Elgar, Richard Strauss and Debussy among his friends. Keen to enrich the cultural life of his adopted country, he also underwrote the promenade concerts at the Queen’s Hall for thirteen seasons, from 1902 to 1914, as one of many acts of philanthropy, others of which included acting as treasurer to Scott’s expedition to the Antarctic, being a founder of the Whitechapel Art Gallery and donating to numerous hospitals.

  The day war broke out Speyer resigned from the Frankfurt bank; a month later he resigned his American partnership too, as British subjects were forbidden to do business with any firm still trading with Germany, as the New York bank was. However, this did not stop an onslaught against him. He had to remove his daughters from their schools and resign his positions on charitable boards. For months he lived with a police guard on his house. He had a property on the coast at Overstrand in Norfolk, from which it was rumoured – without any supporting evidence – that he signalled to the German fleet. In May 1915, in a torrent of anti-German feeling after the sinking of the Lusitania, he offered to resign from the Privy Council
and forfeit his baronetcy. Asquith said the King refused to contemplate either, and added that he himself knew Speyer better than to think he was pro-German. However, Speyer resigned his chairmanship of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London; and when a campaign began to remove the privy counsellorship, he had had enough. He began to behave with what his friend Lord Reading called a ‘studiously disrespectful’ attitude, and took his wife and daughters to New York. He became increasingly hostile to Britain, so much so that in 1921 his and his family’s naturalisations (and his privy counsellorship) were revoked.78

  However, in October 1914 the Asquiths would still have the Speyers to dinner in Downing Street, even though some of their friends would shun them and others withdrew investments from Speyer’s bank. It would not be the last time the prime minister would entertain them, though some who still felt able to attend would not discuss war-related topics in front of them. Unfortunately, Speyer’s brother James, who ran the New York business, had proclaimed himself for Germany and had entertained the German ambassador to Washington.

  Prince Louis, a naval officer and naturalised Briton since 1868, had to endure an assassination of his character led by the Northcliffe press. Churchill told Asquith that Prince Louis would have to go, not because of any wrongdoing or impropriety, but simply, like the man who ran the Northampton trams, because of his birth. Asquith concurred, and Churchill had ‘a most delicate and painful interview’ with the Prince, the more so since the Prince’s nephew, Prince Maurice (Queen Victoria’s youngest grandchild), had been killed at Ypres the previous day. Asquith noted that Prince Louis behaved ‘with great dignity and public spirit’ in resigning at once. Briefed by the First Lord, he wrote Churchill a short and dignified letter about how ‘I have lately been driven to the painful conclusion that at this juncture my birth and parentage have the effect of impairing in some respects my usefulness on the Board of Admiralty.’79 The King made the Prince a privy counsellor to show his faith in his loyalty and integrity: ‘There is no more loyal man in the country.’80 The Times – a Northcliffe paper that had not hounded him – called the campaign ‘part of it honest if ill-timed, part of it monstrously unjust’.81 Churchill said that ‘no incident in my public life has caused me so much sorrow.’82

  Hand in hand with anti-German feeling came the greatly increased fear, and prospect, of espionage. Since 5 August Scotland Yard detectives had been rounding up suspected spies, including one ‘staying at a fashionable hotel in the vicinity of Hyde Park’.83 It was reported that a dozen were arrested in London, out of twenty-one held that day, many near dockyards: and of four men remanded under the 1911 Official Secrets Act at Bow Street, three were German and the fourth a British subject of German origins. For days newspapers carried stories of arrests, and other spy scares, including rumours that the mayor of Deal had been arrested, as had an Australian with a camera ‘acting very suspiciously’ near the Windsor Castle waterworks. By mid-August the cells at Felixstowe police station were ‘full of men arrested as spies.’84 To cope with this epidemic MO5(g) more than doubled from seventeen people to forty by the end of 1914, and still could not manage its workload.85 A year later it would have colonised a building in the Adelphi in London and found another 227 recruits, including wounded officers unfit for active service, but able to serve in an equally important way. Most of its office staff, however, were well-educated women, a pioneering example of the female contribution to the war effort.

  The first spy executed in Britain in the war, Carl Hans Lody, was shot at dawn on 6 November. There had been no execution in the Tower of London since Lord Lovat’s in 1747, after the Jacobite rebellion. Lody had been captured in Killarney on 2 October after a telegram he had sent to Sweden had been seen by MO5(g), who recognised the address as an enemy operation. Before fleeing to Ireland he had watched naval manoeuvres in the Firth of Forth. Letters to Berlin had been intercepted, packed with information about the Fleet, and signed, in a curious anachronism, ‘Nazi’.86 His trial, by a military court, during which he sat in the dock guarded by two soldiers with fixed bayonets, had been held in public (though the court was cleared when matters of national security were discussed) and reported almost verbatim in the quality press – the government wished to show the enemy how good its anti-spy defences were – though the sentence was delivered in camera. Lody denied nothing. MPs were angry that four days elapsed between his execution and its announcement: Sir William Bull, MP for Hammersmith, said: ‘it is difficult to conceive the reason why the news that Lody had been shot should not have been immediately telegraphed over the Empire. There are a great many spies who never believed we should shoot anybody.’87 There would be ten more such executions in the Tower.

  Sir Stanley Buckmaster, the Solicitor General, had been drafted in to supervise the Press Bureau. He curtly reminded Bull not just of the need to protect the nation’s security in ensuring information released was both accurate and of no use to the enemy, but that things could be much worse: ‘We are,’ he told them, ‘the only institution that stands between the press and the untempered severity of martial law.’88 Under DORA the press was subject to martial law: by printing only what the Press Bureau sanctioned, it had a cast-iron defence against any allegation that it had endangered national security. The public were not stupid, and contrasted reports of dead and wounded and the entrenched nature of the fighting with what was termed the ‘deceptive optimism’ of the newspapers. The Times argued, sharply, that ‘the real responsibility for a one-sided impression of events rests with the Censorship.’89 There could hardly have been clearer confirmation that what their customers were reading was far from the whole truth.

  The public was ever more vigilant for spies, or other acts of treachery, following the Lody trial. It became known that the Duke of Cumberland and the Duke of Albany, both of whom had been born British subjects (and the latter of whom had been born in England), were now actively assisting enemies of the Crown. Cumberland, a great-grandson of George III, was a vocal supporter of the Kaiser; Albany, posthumous son of Queen Victoria’s son Leopold, was commanding German troops. He had succeeded his uncle, her son Prince Alfred, as Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha in 1900, aged sixteen, and had his education superintended by his cousin, the Kaiser. An MP, Swift MacNeill, asked Asquith whether both dukes were not guilty of treason; and whether they should not, in the first instance, have their British titles removed and be barred from the House of Lords. Asquith, conscious of the embarrassment this might cause the King, a cousin of both men, said it could wait until after the war. It would be revisited before then, however, in 1917, when the King decided to change his family name from the unappealing Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the more homely Windsor.

  Although the panic was overdone, security was appallingly lax. Lody had strolled into England off a boat at Newcastle, posing as an American tourist. Politicians, officers and their wives gossiped about troop movements, strategies and policies so loosely that anyone in London society could within a couple of days have picked up much that was going on. In Ireland, even though Nationalists had rallied to the Union flag, seditious anti-recruiting pamphlets abounded. The Earl of Meath told the Lords on 18 November that Ireland was awash with German money and German spies, and that ‘Dublin at this moment is being swamped by literature which I should think came within the category of high treason.’90

  As spy mania had, in the words of Basil Thomson, assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, ‘assumed a virulent epidemic form accompanied by delusions which defied treatment’, it turned its wrath on the Germanophile Haldane, Asquith’s closest political friend.91 Unwilling to submit to such prejudice, he spoke in the Lords of the unfair treatment of some internees – such as a man, German by birth, who had two sons fighting for the King while he languished in a concentration camp. None of this did anything to allay the suspicions the Unionists and their friends in the press held about him, on account of what they believed to be his pro-German sympathies.

  The Times renewed its a
ttempt to smear Haldane, begun when it feared he, and not Kitchener, would be appointed to the War Office. It admitted Haldane was a ‘faithful patriot’, but had been ‘long and honourably known for his warm predilections for Germany.’ He was ‘partially educated in that country, he has frequently spent his leisure there, his mind is coloured by his unremitting study of German literature and philosophy, he cherishes many close German friendships.’ Having listed these disqualifications, the leader-writer deemed them ‘innocuous enough’: less so, it seemed, than his ‘strenuous … efforts to promote Anglo-German friendship, and in pursuing this course he has unwittingly contributed to cloud British perception of the arrogant dominating aims of German national ambition.’ The fact was that he had had the temerity to take a different approach to Germany from Northcliffe, provoking this tirade of prejudice and ignorance extreme even by the standards of The Times under his proprietorship. In the fevered mood, it hit home. Magnanimously, the paper advocated that he remain on the Woolsack. Lies about Haldane would circulate for months, enraging colleagues who knew the existence of the Territorial Army, many of whose members were about to be sent abroad, was his achievement. Nor was Northcliffe, who had inflamed sentiment by publishing a self-regarding pamphlet entitled Scaremongerings – which boasted about how right the Daily Mail had been to forecast German belligerence – the worst culprit. The main assault on the Lord Chancellor came from the ultra-Conservative Morning Post.