Meeting the Enemy

by Richard van Emden

  ‘The newspapers soon started their campaign of hatred against all Germans in England,’ wrote Noschke. ‘Everybody was termed a spy, and every employer was warned not to employ any German as they were all spies.’ This agitation became so strong, according to Noschke, that eventually, out of fear, his boss discharged him. His next job lasted just four days before he was sacked once more.

  I looked around for work, almost frightened by the attitude of the people, it was no easy matter, as most places had notices up that no German need apply, and most shops had notices in their windows, ‘No Germans served here,’ the feeling of the lower classes became so bitter by this time that they would almost throw a man from the top of an omnibus or out of a running train if they knew he was a German. At last one morning at Canning Town Labour Exchange I received a card to go to a place where a man was wanted [to make varnish], the official put my name on the card and said to me, ‘your name sounds Russian,’ I said, ‘Yes, it is,’ and he put right across the card Russian subject.

  Thirty-seven-year-old Richard Druhm was in similar difficulties. A German by birth, he had lived in London for fifteen years, working long hours to establish his hairdressing salon, moving from Camden to Hampstead as his hard work paid dividends. He married a London girl, Ethel Norris, in April 1905 and they had a daughter, Elfreda, born in September 1910.

  My father had arrived at the turn of the century and had done extremely well. He had never gone back to Germany, because he liked it here. Then he met my mother and they were married; both my parents worked in the ladies’ hairdressing shop. I know that my grandmother, Elizabeth Norris, didn’t approve of the match. She, as well as my aunts, strongly frowned upon the engagement, and in revenge they didn’t go to the wedding. Well, there wasn’t a wedding really, it all had to be hush-hush because nobody wanted her to marry a German.

  Our shop was smashed within weeks of war breaking out and we had to leave because there was so much hostility. I was there but I can’t say I remember it happening as a proper memory as I was in bed, but I do know that we cleared out of that house very suddenly. Father was taken away and interned, and Mother left at the same time. We had nowhere to go and we had to find furnished rooms quickly. Mother never said much about that night as it was a very painful part of her life. She had to leave everything behind. There was one relative who tried to help, a husband of my aunt, and he helped dispose of certain things, the furniture and the lease on the shop. He sold the furniture but got very little for that. My grandmother lived nearby as did one aunt, but they did little to help, which caused a lot of bad feeling for years.

  My mother tried to find work telling the truth, saying who she was, why she was looking for a job and where her husband was. Nobody would help because she was married to a German, even though she was totally English and had only once stepped out of the country. So she changed her name to Miss Norris, her maiden name, and as soon as she went as Miss Norris she was employed at a salon in Oxford Street.

  Newspaper stories of battlefield atrocities helped keep army recruitment high in September, October and November and continued to poison public opinion of Germans and Austrians living in Britain. One of the few who took a more objective view of the newspaper reports was a seventeen-year-old Kitchener volunteer, Charles Carrington. Like many boys of his age he could not wait to get into the army and had lied about his age to do so. He was also mature enough to have a healthy and sceptical view about some of the more lurid stories – Belgian babies bayoneted to church doors, for example – emanating from France and Belgium. ‘German atrocities are being taken absurdly seriously and I get much abused if I remind people that our Allies include the slave drivers of the Congo [a reference to an influential report condemning Belgian atrocities in the African colony], the Cossacks and the Serbians.’

  Carrington wrote to his mother that ‘distraught refugees and drunken “Tommies” will tell all sorts of tales’, and that he had never heard an authentic account of an atrocity at first hand. ‘The papers are full of witnessed accounts,’ he penned, ‘but the papers have to get copy from somewhere.’

  Enemy aliens were not completely cut adrift. In August 1914 the Society of Friends, the Quakers, set up the ‘Emergency Committee for the Assistance of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in Distress’. It launched a national appeal for funds and raised an initial but useful £5,500, including donations from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, Sir Edward Goschen, the last pre-war ambassador to Berlin, and Viscount Richard Haldane, the Lord Chancellor and former Secretary of State for War; Haldane was later ousted from office in 1915 after being accused of pro-German sympathies.

  The Friends’ Emergency Committee (FEC) set up in offices lent to them in St Stephen’s House, a building overlooking London’s Embankment and so close to Parliament as to be in the shadow of Big Ben. Ironically, the FEC shared the building with the newly established Parliamentary Recruiting Committee but there was little friction despite a growing number of Germans, who, in pursuit of help and protection, spilt out of the FEC’s offices into communal corridors and stairwells. In 1920 a record of the FEC’s work at St Stephen’s House was published. Written by a leading light of the organisation known only by the initials ABT, it gives a detailed and frank account of the charity’s work.

  Hundreds of discharged waiters flocked to us begging for work. Many of them had excellent references showing years of service in the best London hotels. Now in response to popular clamour they were destitute. Many had lost not only their jobs but their lodgings too, and were sleeping in the parks. Fortunately, August of 1914 was fine and warm, but soon the autumn rains of an exceptionally wet winter set in, and these poor people suffered. We arranged a soup kitchen for them and strove to help them in other ways.

  Whole families came to us also, father, mother and little children. Sometimes they were faint for want of food, for many would not ask for help whilst they had a crust remaining. We saw people in the pangs of hunger - people who fainted whilst being interviewed - people who looked at us with sad despairing eyes and burst into tears at the first kindly word. Careful arrangements were made for investigating the truth of their stories and we required at least two reputable references before giving anything beyond an emergency grant.

  To meet the first needs we were able to obtain a considerable number of offers of hospitality, and many Friends and others entertained these distressed people for days, weeks or even months at a time. Two furnished houses were used by the Committee as hostels, and a lady furnished a roomy garage as a temporary shelter for some of the cases when delayed in London waiting for their travelling permits.

  Many of those the FEC helped were holidaymakers caught out by the declaration of war; others were attending summer schools as teachers or students. As German banks in London closed, many Germans were stranded without access to funds; they would have to be housed while travel permits were obtained. Like Britons trapped in Germany, these visitors were susceptible to irrational fears; they heard that railways in France and Belgium had been destroyed: they would be turned out into the fields to walk; there were agents of the white slave trade working on Dutch trains preying in particular on young girls. More credible were threats from fraudsters and opportunists, including one who came to the attention of the FEC. This man wrote to desperate aliens claiming to have been commissioned by their families in Germany to bring them home although an upfront fee of £10 would be required if he was to help them.

  For every unfortunate visiting Britain, far more, like Richard Noschke and Richard Druhm, were permanently domiciled in London or the provinces. Of those helped by the FEC, eighteen years was the average length of residence in their adopted home.

  The FEC was not the only charity helping enemy aliens; others included the Central Council of United Relief Societies, the International Women’s Relief Committee and the Prisoners of War Relief Agency, all remarkable organisations swimming against the fast-flowing river of public resentment and animosity. Their impa
ct was generally to ameliorate the worst effects of government policy particularly in respect of internment and the effects that imprisoning the chief breadwinner had on family life.

  Unfortunately, much of the government’s policy of internment was fashioned without much thought as to the practicalities of imprisoning thousands of enemy aliens. After the period of grace granted to all Germans to leave Britain, the procedure that August was to intern all male enemy aliens of military age, seventeen to forty-two. The numbers interned rose gradually. From just 4,300 at the end of the month, the figure accelerated as news reached Britain of the BEF’s military setbacks in Belgium and France, and the public grew correspondingly nervous. The numbers rose again to 6,600 by the second week of September and then almost doubled to 11,000 seven days later. The press reported the numerical rise just as the authorities ran out of available accommodation, the War Office suspending the arrests of civilians as figures, including prisoners of war, touched 14,000 by 23 September.

  Ironically, it was because enemy aliens were hounded from their homes and jobs that internment became the best and most practicable option. It would be far easier to feed and clothe enemy aliens in one place and to grant allowances to their destitute families than to have them spread out in the wider community and at the mercy of the more troublesome elements of society.

  Kitchener recruit Charles Carrington went to view one of the earliest camps at Deepcut in Surrey mistakenly assuming that it was for German spies only.

  There were several hundred of them [Germans]. They live in tents in a huge square on the top of a moor with the finest air in England and one of the finest views. They are protected by two barbed wire entanglements. The whole space is I should think 300 yards square. The inner fence is 10 feet high of tight barbed wire guarded at the top by live electric wires. At each corner are platforms for sentries and at intervals inside the outer fence which is a barbed wire entanglement five feet high and thick, are arc lights on poles. Inside are tents and a few sheds and plenty of room where the men were playing football. Some of the better class Germans looked fed up already. We were allowed to walk round and stare.

  Internment began again in early October when gruesome and largely unsubstantiated tales of enemy atrocities caused public outrage. Within days, perennial problems of accommodation caused authorities to backtrack and Chief Constables were once more instructed to halt arrests while accommodation was found. The War Office would notify Chief Constables as beds became available, allowing arrests to resume. In fact the government did not revisit the issue of internment until the next bout of anti-German paranoia hit Britain the following May by which time, conversely, 3,000 enemy aliens had been released back into the community to ease the pressure on space.

  The government’s logistical problems were mostly of its own making. In peacetime, Britain’s regular army numbered 250,000 men, but of these well over half were stationed overseas on garrison duty in such places as India and South Africa. Britain relied on its navy for national security and the regular army was small in comparison to those of its European counterparts. On the outbreak of war the new Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener, set out his stall for a New Army made up of civilian volunteers. In five months nearly 1.2 million men responded to the call to enlist, swamping the army’s ability to house, let alone train and equip them. Out of necessity, 800,000 soldiers were billeted in private dwellings by the autumn, while hundreds of thousands more were living in existing or hastily erected camps. Many men, rather than being billeted in huts, were still under canvas; all right in summer but with autumn rains and colder nights, these once happy-go-lucky civilians were becoming disgruntled soldiers slopping around ankle-deep in mud.

  While poor living conditions bedevilled camps for Kitchener’s volunteers, there was little chance that the authorities were going to expend energy on the comforts of enemy prisoners and internees. With suitable accommodation at a premium, civilians were packed into anything available and this varied greatly in quality. The War Office, for example, requisitioned nine transatlantic liners at a cost of around £75,000 a month. The ships retained their three classes of accommodation and fortunate was the German who could afford to pay for the privilege of a first-class suite and, if he was prepared to find six shillings and sixpence extra, even better food and waiter service. This was a far cry from the worst examples of accommodation such as that given over to 700 civilians sent to an old wagon factory in Lancaster. The floor, made of wooden blocks, was filthy; there was no heating or artificial light and scant bedding or furniture of any kind. Sanitary arrangements were inadequate and fresh water in short supply. At Newbury racecourse, internees slept in horse boxes, six or eight stretched out side by side. All were locked up from sunset until morning with no heating and the grounds a quagmire. Only when a large camp was constructed at Knockaloe on the Isle of Man were unsuitable camps closed.

  Private Thomas Hughes, a recruit serving with the 1/28th London Regiment (Artist’s Rifles), was sent with other men in the battalion to mount guard at the Olympia exhibition centre. Here, as on the transatlantic liners, position and relative wealth made a difference, however small, to a man’s quality of life.

  The wretched Germans are herded together in pens in the annexe, with a large pen at the far end, called the House of Lords, where about 20 men were, owing to their blood and wealth. [These men are] kept apart and allowed chairs to sit on and to buy extra food beyond the half pint of tea and two slices of bread and butter allowed to the proletariat, who only get meat once a day. Five men had blood of such blueness or purses of such length that they were allowed to go out into the yard for an hour a day with a sentry. The rest only walk round and round the main hall in fours for an hour every afternoon, a grim procession of lost souls.

  At Olympia, as elsewhere, internees became the target for repeated degradation and even physical violence, much to the obvious disgust of Private Hughes:

  Only one man, an Irish Guard, was a sufficiently advanced cad actually to knock the prisoners about and he only just hit the very small ones who were unlikely to retaliate, but every humiliation was turned upon them. They have to give up their blankets and mattresses every morning and have them dealt out again at the point of the bayonet every evening. There are not enough of either to go around and they get different ones each night so that the talk of keeping free from vermin is well nigh impossible.

  Britain’s policy of internment brought retribution. After remonstrating with the British government, its German counterpart announced on 6 November that all unnaturalised British male civilians of military age would be held. But there were fewer than 3,900 Britons in Germany who were eligible. One huge camp on Ruhleben racecourse, near Berlin, was turned over for their confinement. Here, too, internees were forced to sleep in brick stable buildings and haylofts until a vast complex of huts was eventually built.

  Finding suitable secure accommodation for prisoners of war was a greater struggle for the Germans than it was even for the British. With its requirement that all young men undertake at least two years’ military service, and very commonly three, Germany had a large number of barracks that could be used to hold prisoners. The problem was that Germany was also calling up vast numbers of young men and they would also require accommodation. The Germans were also fighting a war on two fronts, and with substantial and easy victories against the French in the west and the Russians in the east, 815,000 prisoners only exacerbated the difficulty. These men arrived in Germany at an average rate of over 100,000 per month, vastly more than the 7,000 German soldiers removed to Britain over the same period. Indeed, prior to the Battle of the Somme in July 1916, the British held fewer than 14,000 German prisoners of war.

  Private Charles Duder, serving with the 4th Royal Fusiliers, described his POW camp at Sennelager. It was September 1914 and the men lay in the open, with no tents or mattresses.

  This lasted some two or three weeks, during which time we got two dirty old blankets. The food was bad and insuf
ficient . . . Afterwards we got into tents, accommodation very bad, very wet, lying on straw, which got like floating mud. We soon got covered with vermin. After being in the tents some time we went to Senne II. First of all we were in stables and then as soon as the huts were built, we were moved into them; this would be some time in December.

  The living conditions for British POWs were shaped in part by the German belief that their own prisoners were being ill-treated. The American ambassador in Berlin, James Gerard, went to Britain to see conditions for himself, reporting back that prisoners were being reasonably treated, thereby improving conditions in Germany. Soon afterwards an agreement was reached that, on giving reasonable notice, the American ambassadors in London and Berlin or their representatives would have the right to visit POW camps in either country and converse with prisoners out of the earshot of camp guards. This sounded good in theory. However, owing to the federal nature of the German state the quality of POW camps varied immensely. Germany had been divided into Army Corps districts, each district presided over by a corps commander who had virtual autonomy, to the effective exclusion of outside civilian officials. It was his attitude to prisoners that dictated how good or how bad a camp became for its inmates.

  By the beginning of September 1914, nearly 10,000 British officers and men were missing or captured. Their number included Major Charles Yate of the 2nd King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, taken prisoner at the Battle of Le Cateau on 26 August. This officer’s story was remarkably similar to that of Captain Morritt’s last-ditch bayonet charge. Cut off, his ammunition exhausted and with all other company officers killed or wounded, Major Yate led twenty survivors in a bayonet charge against overwhelming odds. He was captured when a German officer kicked his revolver from his hand.