by Ian Ker
After investigating the contract, the committee of inquiry turned to the question of the rumours about ministers. On 12 February the editor of the National Review was called to give evidence. Having expressed surprise that the ministers had still not been called, he commented on the strange fact that they had not demanded to be called at the earliest possible opportunity in order to deny that they had bought shares in any Marconi company. Two days later Le Matin, a Paris daily newspaper, falsely reported that the editor of the National Review had alleged that Herbert Samuel and the Isaacs brothers had bought shares in the English Marconi Company for about £2 and then sold them for £8. Rufus Isaacs happened to be in Paris when the story appeared, and he and Samuel sued for libel. In response to this decision to sue a foreign newspaper for a silly libel rather than a British paper, Chesterton wrote some of his best satirical verses in the New Witness, entitled ‘Song of Cosmopolitan Courage’:
I am so swift to seize affronts,
My spirit is so high,
Whoever has insulted me
Some foreigner must die.
I brought a libel action,
For The Times had called me ‘thief’,
Against a paper in Bordeaux,
A paper called Le Juif.
The Nation called me ‘cannibal’
I could not let it pass—
I got a retractation
From a journal in Alsace.
And when The Morning Post raked up
Some murders I’d devised,
A Polish organ of finance
At once apologised.
I know the charges varied much;
At times, I am afraid
The Frankfurt Frank withdrew a charge
The Outlook had not made.
And what the true injustice
Of the Standard’s words had been,
Was not correctly altered
In the Young Turk’s Magazine.
I know it sounds confusing—
But as Mr Lammle said,
The anger of a gentleman
Is boiling in my head.99
Samuel and Isaacs, who had retained Sir Edward Carson and F. E. Smith, both Conservative backbenchers curiously enough, as counsel for the prosecution, decided to make a statement through their lawyers at the court hearing on 19 March, even though the Paris newspaper had retracted the story and apologised three days after printing it. Since the defendants were not contesting the case, there was no chance they could be cross-examined in court. Carson merely mentioned the purchase of American Marconi shares at the end of a long speech, claiming that it was strictly irrelevant to the libel case, but that the Attorney General did not wish to seem to be concealing anything. In fact, Carson’s statement was not as full as he maintained. The court was not told from whom Rufus Isaacs had bought the 10,000 shares nor at what price nor that the shares had not yet been on the market. The sale of shares to Lloyd George and the Chief Whip was disclosed, but not their subsequent dealings. Isaacs claimed irrelevantly that, while he had gained on the shares he had sold, he had lost on the shares he had retained. But he had lost only because he had paid his brother Harry nearly twice the price he had been offered a week before by his brother Godfrey, even though Harry had offered to sell the shares for the same price he had paid for them.
A week after the court hearing Rufus Isaacs finally appeared before the parliamentary committee of inquiry. He claimed that the reason he had not mentioned the American Marconi shares was because his sole concern was to rebut the libellous rumours that did not refer to American Marconi shares. The chairman of the committee made the obvious point that, had Isaacs specified that his dealings had been in American not English Marconi shares, the confusion that had caused the rumours would have been cleared up. As to why he had not appeared before the committee earlier to clarify matters, Isaacs replied that he had not sought preferential treatment. The Conservative Lord Robert Cecil succeeded in extracting from Isaacs the admission that he had indeed bought the shares before they were put on the market and at a lower price. Isaacs also divulged the later dealings of Lloyd George and the Chief Whip that had not been revealed at the court hearing. He furthermore admitted that he had briefed two of his friends on the committee to forearm them when the journalists in question gave evidence. At earlier committee hearings these journalists had been treated very differently from Isaacs, to whom the Liberal members of the committee deferred and whom the Conservatives questioned politely if tenaciously. On 28 March Lloyd George in his turn appeared before the committee. Both ministers claimed that, so far as they were concerned, Marconi was wireless telegraph and that it had never occurred to them that there was any other possible company. The New Witness contrasted the performance of Rufus Isaacs—like ‘a panther at bay, anxious to escape, but ready with tooth and claw’—with that of Lloyd George—‘like a spitting, angry cat, which had got, perhaps, out of serious danger from her pursuers, but which caterwauled and spat and swore with vigour and venomousness quite surprising in that diminutive bulk’.100 Asked why he had not originally told the House of Commons that he had bought American Marconi shares, Lloyd George replied that there was no time on that Friday afternoon and that two ministers had already spoken.
The question was raised as to whether the American Marconi shares Godfrey Isaacs had bought really belonged to him or to his company. If he was acting as an agent for his company, then he had no right to sell some of the shares at cost price or to retain the profit he had made on the stock exchange by selling the others. His claim that he had in fact passed on £46,000 of profits to the English Marconi Company was not recorded in the Company’s books. Lord Robert Cecil naturally wanted to recall him to explain why there was no record of it. But the committee voted on party lines not to recall him. On 7 May the committee concluded its hearings, but was recalled early in June to hear that a London stockbroker who had bought 3,000 American Marconi shares for the former Chief Whip for Liberal Party funds had absconded.
On 9 January the New Witness had listed twenty companies connected with Godfrey Isaacs that had gone bankrupt. Sandwich men had paraded outside the House of Commons and the office of the Marconi Company, bearing placards proclaiming ‘Godfrey Isaacs’ Ghastly Record’ and selling copies of the paper.101 Although this was not done on his instructions, Cecil Chesterton later declined to disclaim responsibility. Isaacs’s solicitors wrote to warn him that Isaacs would prosecute unless he undertook not to make further libellous attacks on their client until both had given evidence to the parliamentary committee of inquiry. Cecil replied that he was happy that Isaacs intended to bring an action against him. While waiting for the trial to begin, Cecil slipped out of the office one day to be received into the Roman Catholic Church by Father Sebastian Bowden of the Brompton Oratory, the son of Newman’s close undergraduate friend, J. W. Bowden, who had earlier received Maurice Baring. According to ‘Keith’ Jones, ‘His decision had been taken swiftly and without any period of doubt. He sought a working philosophy of life, and, his reason satisfied, he accepted the Catholic fundamentals quite simply.’ He had been influenced by Belloc’s Californian wife, Elodie, who had had long talks with him about Catholicism.102
Chesterton and Belloc were there to support him on 28 February when he attended Bow Street magistrates’ court to be committed for trial. Cecil made a speech that impressed Godfrey Isaacs’s counsel, in which he boasted that some of the best-known writers of the day wrote for the New Witness, mentioning among others Wells, Shaw, and Belloc by name. The New Witness printed the speech in full in its issue of 6 March, in which Chesterton enthusiastically reviewed his old friend E. C. Bentley’s famous detective novel Trent’s Last Case. Bentley had dedicated it to him, saying, ‘I owe you a book in return for The Man who was Thursday.’103
On 27 May the trial opened at the Old Bailey, with Isaacs represented by Sir Edward Carson and F. E. Smith, the same counsel that his brother and Herbert Samuel had engaged. The judge, Mr Justice Phillimore, strangely enoug
h, was the uncle of Belloc’s old Oxford friend J. S. Phillimore, who, in ‘Keith’ Jones’s words, was one of ‘the most distinguished’ contributors to the New Witness, to which he would send ‘very brilliant, but almost indecipherable articles on classical subjects’. That week, by an extraordinary coincidence, the ‘principal article’ was by him, but it had ‘arrived very late and was written practically in Latin, spiced with Greek’. After the printers’ reader ‘gave up the ghost at the sight of the proof’, and with Belloc on the continent and not one of their scholarly contributors to be found, there ‘was but one hope left—the prisoner’. So ‘Keith’ rushed to the Old Bailey and managed to persuade ‘the gaoler to slip Cecil the proofs in the luncheon interval’. ‘Next morning the sandwich squad announcing that the New Witness had an article by J. S. Phillimore circled the Old Bailey outside, while a man of the same name was trying the Editor inside.’104 Cecil was charged with criminal libel; if found guilty he could be sent to prison. He took full responsibility as the editor for all attacks on Isaacs in the New Witness and refused to divulge the names of other contributors. In his opening speech Carson divided the six alleged libels into those that accused his client of corruptly persuading his corrupt brother Rufus Isaacs to persuade the corrupt Herbert Samuel into agreeing to a corrupt contract, and those that accused his client of criminal business activities for which he would have been prosecuted but for the protection of his brother, the Attorney General. Cecil’s defence counsel argued that, in the case of the Marconi shares, the alleged libels were directed not against Godfrey Isaacs but against Rufus Isaacs and Herbert Samuel. But, if the Marconi contract was corrupt, then how could Godfrey Isaacs not be implicated? However, under cross-examination Cecil refused to charge Rufus Isaacs and Herbert Samuel with corruption, since they had denied it on oath, but alleged that Godfrey Isaacs had attempted to corrupt them. The case brought out into the open not only the fact that Godfrey Isaacs had concealed the clause in the contract that allowed the government to terminate it whenever it wished, but also that Isaacs had asked the Secretary to the Post Office to keep it quiet.
The judge in his summing up on 9 June allowed for the possibility that the American Marconi shares really belonged to the English company rather than Godfrey Isaacs and that he, Isaacs, had certainly been involved in a lot of company failures. But the summing up was heavily against Cecil, and the jury was out for only five minutes before pronouncing a verdict of guilty. The judge then gave Cecil a lecture but only fined him £100 with costs—although, he said, ‘it is extremely difficult to refrain from sending you to prison’.105 Writing more than a decade later, F. E. Smith explained that Cecil had not been sent to prison because he was ‘completely honest’ if misguided and the libel was not malicious.106 The verdict was greeted with cheers: in the jubilant words of ‘Keith’ Jones, ‘Against the Marconi Goliath of wealth and power David had more than held his own; he had… forced Ministers of the Crown to face public opinion. Although Cecil had withdrawn his charges against the ministers and had failed to prove dishonesty on Godfrey Isaacs’s part, his family regarded it as a moral victory—apparently because he had not been sent to prison, which, however, was a very rare sentence indeed, and because he had forced the ministers to face the bar of public opinion. Chesterton had defiantly told the judge, when giving evidence as to Cecil’s character: ‘I envy my brother his position.’ (He subsequently admitted at a public lecture, to the vast amusement of the large audience, that, when he was asked by the judge whether his brother’s character was ‘respectable’, he was tempted to reply: “‘Lord bless me, he was in the Fabian Society.” By a violent effort I refrained from alluding to the fact. We have all gone through many paths and stages in arriving at our present political opinions.’107)
Their mother and father had come to the Old Bailey every morning, but Mrs Chesterton could not bear to see her son in the dock, so Chesterton and his uncle Arthur took it in turns to bring them reports of the proceedings. Also present every day was Chesterton’s friend the writer J. M. Barrie (‘of all friends the least egotistical’, whose ‘humorous self-effacement’ seemed ‘to create round him a silence like his own’108), a ‘small brown figure in shabby tweeds… shy and alert as a squirrel on the look-out for nuts’. Present every day, too, was Godfrey Isaacs’s mother, ‘a large and heavily-built woman’ who ‘watched every movement, each expression of the prisoner, as though she feared he might by some nefarious miracle be spirited from the dock and beyond human punishment’. Astonished and outraged by the cheers of the crowd, according to ‘Keith (the crowd may have been more or less restricted to Cecil’s family, friends, and supporters), Mrs Isaacs found herself afterwards in the same hotel to which the Chesterton family had repaired for refreshments. While the two Chesterton brothers argued as usual over tea, Mrs Isaacs ‘fixed’ the Chesterton party ‘with a warrior eyeand drankher tea as if it were transferable poison’.109 The New Witness was triumphant, its circulation boosted by the publicity the trial had received. Shortly afterwards, it announced a national ‘Clean Government League’, as well as publishing details of the kind of money that had to be given to a political party’s funds in order to receive a peerage.110
On 13 June the committee of inquiry adopted a report prepared by one of the Liberal members Rufus Isaacs had briefed, which merely said that the ministers had acted in good faith. The original report prepared by the ineffectual Liberal chairman, that had mildly criticized the ministers for indiscretion in buying the shares and for lack of frankness to the House of Commons, had been completely watered down. It was a disgraceful whitewash, in which the Labour and Irish Nationalist members who supported the Liberal government were implicated. Some years later, Chesterton excused the Nationalists for agreeing ‘to whitewash the tricks of Jew jobbers whom they must have despised’, since their ‘motive was wholly disinterested and even idealistic’, acting as they did ‘solely for the sake of Home Rule’, albeit misguidedly in Chesterton’s view.111 The vote was 8 to 6. The Times called it a ‘pailful of whitewash’ that instead of whitening the ministers had blackened the committee. Lord Robert Cecil’s minority report criticized Rufus Isaacs for acting with ‘grave impropriety in making an advantageous purchase of shares… upon advice and information not yet fully available to the public’, and for failing to be open with the House of Commons to which he had been lacking in ‘respect’.112 It also said that it was ‘highly inadvisable’ for ministers to buy shares in American Marconi whose interests were indirectly bound up in the success of English Marconi obtaining the contract.113 Not only was the minority Conservative report published, but also, significantly, the Chairman had his own report published. The Conservatives tabled a motion on the lines of the minority report, which was predictably defeated, but three Liberal members voted against the government, while Carson and Smith, who had disgusted many of their colleagues by acting as counsel for Herbert Samuel and the Isaacs brothers, were constrained from speaking in the debate and felt obliged to abstain. Even Asquith admitted that the ministers had shown lack of prudence by leaving their actions open to misinterpretation.
There was certainly no collusion between the two main parties in this affair, as Cecil Chesterton and Belloc had claimed in The Party System was typical of the parliamentary system. True, Arthur Balfour, the Conservative leader—who was in fact under criticism from his backbenchers for not opposing the Asquith government more effectively—utterly repudiated any suggestion that the ministers involved had been guilty of corruption, but he did severely criticize them for their lack of frankness; he also rebuked the Attorney General for apparently not carefully inquiring into a transaction that was in fact quite improper, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer for speculating on the stock market, which he called ‘the very gravest indiscretion’ in view of his position, as well as criticizing them both for their failure to apologize. And he demanded that the House should formally express its ‘regret’ that the ministers had bought the shares and then concealed from the House th
e fact that they had done so—although the opposition was happy for the statement to include the recognition that the ministers had not acted corruptly.114 Not only was Balfour much more critical than Chesterton remembered more than twenty years later, but it had after all been a Conservative member who had first raised the matter in the House and it was a group of young Conservatives who had paid Cecil Chesterton’s legal costs, while the Conservative minority on the committee of inquiry had done their best to establish the truth in the face of considerable obstruction on the part of the Liberal members. The Conservative Times in its leader of 19 June was scathing:
A man is not blamed for being splashed with mud. He is commiserated. But if he has stepped into a puddle which he might easily have avoided, we say that it is his own fault. If he protests that he did not know it was a puddle, we say that he ought to know better, but if he says that it was after all quite a clean puddle, then we judge him deficient in the sense of cleanliness. And the British public like their public men to have a very nice sense of cleanliness.115
L. S. Amery, the leading Conservative member of the committee along with Lord Robert Cecil, was later scathing about the committee’s failure even to report on the Marconi contract, for which it had been convened in the first place: ‘the resources of the whitewash pail were exhausted, and… there would not be enough left to furbish up poor Mr Samuel. 116 Even the Cadbury Liberal press was uneasy, an unease that was amusingly satirized in the New Witness by one of its contributors:
’Tis the voice of the Cocoa