Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War.

by Gerry Docherty

  The Armaments Trust in Britain had its champions in both political parties, its friends at Court and its directors in the House of Lords and Commons. Its voice was heard in the press, and its ‘apostles were in the pulpits of cathedrals and tabernacles’.41 The churches were represented on its boards or shareholder lists by bishops of the Anglican Church. The vested interest carried its own ‘vestry’ interest.

  Just as the profits of war never went to the ordinary people, so the profits of preparing for war were channelled into the pockets of the private investors. State-owned arsenals, dockyards and factories like Woolwich were deliberately run down, and five-sixths of the new naval construction contracts were awarded to private firms. Despite the protests from local Labour MPs, orders placed by the Admiralty or the War Office went mainly to the great armaments companies on whose boards senior military figures regularly sat.42

  With the huge increase in naval building, the shareholders in Armstrong, Whitworth were receiving 12 per cent dividends with a bonus of one share for every four held. From the turn of the twentieth century, the dividend never fell below 10 per cent and on occasions rose to 15 per cent. Investments in armament shares provided windfalls for the well-to-do and the influential. In 1909, the shares list of Armstrong, Whitworth boasted the names of 60 noblemen, their wives, sons or daughters, 15 baronets, 20 knights, 8 MPs, 20 military and naval officers, and 8 journalists. Shareholder lists showed a marked connection between armaments share-holding and active membership of bodies like the Navy League, which promoted ever-greater warship construction.43

  Armstrong, Whitworth and Co. shamelessly paid Rear Admiral Sir Charles Ottley as a defence director.44 That the former director of Naval Intelligence and secretary to the Committee of Imperial Defence was ever in the employment of an armaments giant tells its own story. Vickers, one of the largest armaments firms in the world, had a similar list of notable shareholders.45 Vickers and Armstrong were firmly entrenched in the governing class of Great Britain. With senior employees comprising retired military, naval and civil servants of the highest rank, the armaments firms possessed secret information supposedly restricted to the heads of the government. Shareholders included the nobility, senior politicians, admirals, generals and other members of the British Establishment who had direct access to the inner circles of power and were well equipped to apply political pressure.

  Vickers grew through acquisitions of other companies into a vast concern with ordnance works in Glasgow, factories at Sheffield and Erith, and naval works at Walney Island. The London House of Rothschild was heavily involved in the Vickers takeover of the Naval Construction and Armaments Company, and issued £1.9 million of shares to finance the merger of the Maxim Gun Company with the Nordenfelt Guns and Ammunition Company. Nathaniel Rothschild retained a substantial shareholding in the new Maxim-Nordenfelt Company and ‘exerted a direct influence over its management’.46 Vickers was launched on the international road to prosperity backed by funding from Rothschild and Cassel.47 The Secret Elite held sway at the very heart of the armaments industry.

  The Rothschilds had always understood the enormous profits generated by these industries. Financing wars had been their preserve for nearly a century. Bankers, industrialists and other members of the Secret Elite, the same men who were planning the destruction of Germany, stood to make massive profits from it. War, any war, was a means of garnering wealth. Secret Elite bankers had provided Japan with high-interest-yielding loans to build a modern navy with which to attack Russia. The greater part of that victorious Japanese navy was constructed by the British yards from which the Secret Elite made even more profits. Of course, the Japanese people were left to foot the bill. After the Russian fleet had been destroyed at Tsushima, Russia was provided with high-interest-bearing loans of £190,000,000 to rebuild her navy. Much of the construction work went to factories and shipyards owned by the Secret Elite, and the cycle repeated itself, with the Russian people left to pay the price.48 It was no different in Britain. The great ‘naval race’ produced millions of pounds of profits, and the cost was met by the ordinary citizen.

  One of the most enduring deceptions perpetrated by the agents of the Secret Elite was in regard to Italy. It was assumed that, as a signatory to the Triple Alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, Italy would have a dangerous naval presence in the Mediterranean should war break out. Any comparative naval statistics on the total size of opposing fleets given in Parliament or the press included Italian warships49 and torpedo-boats but studiously ignored the irony that British armaments firms owned the very yards that were building those warships for Italy.50 The British Armstrong-Pozzuoli Company, on the Bay of Naples, employed 4,000 men and was the chief naval supplier to Italy. The Ansaldo-Armstrong Company of Genoa, which belonged to the same British firm, built dreadnoughts and cruisers for Italy even although it was Germany’s supposed ally.51 Rear Admiral Ottley was a director of the Armstrong works at Pozzuoli in addition to being defence director of the parent company.52 Ottley again. How much did he gain from his insider dealings?53

  Vickers was also an important supplier to the Italian navy through combination with three Italian firms that constituted the Vickers Terni Co. Both Vickers and Armstrong also held a large proportion of the shares of Whitehead & Co., the torpedo manufacturer with works at Fiume in Hungary. During the war, Labour MP Philip Snowden angrily stated in the House of Commons:

  Submarines and all the torpedoes used in the Austrian navy, besides several of the new seaplanes, are made by the Whitehead Torpedo works in Hungary … They are making torpedoes with British capital in Hungary in order to destroy British ships.54

  Throughout the war, those Whitehead torpedoes were also loaded into the tubes of German U-Boats and used against British shipping. Numerous individuals sitting in the warm comfort of Westminster or their exclusive London clubs or grand gothic cathedrals profited from the torpedoes that sent thousands of brave British seamen to cold graves in the Atlantic. These men made untold fortunes on the products of death and misery.

  Some, at the inner core of the Secret Elite, conspired to make war to their own advantage. Some were simply in the business of providing the instruments of war. Some were mindless investors with no moral inhibitions.55 Those in the high pulpits who profited from the war while extolling it as God’s work included the bishops of Adelaide, Chester, Hexham, Newcastle and Newport, as well as Dean Inge of St Paul’s Cathedral.56 They formed the legions of God who profited from the legions of hell.

  In 1921, a sub-committee of the Commission of the League of Nations concluded that armaments firms had been active in the decades before in fomenting war scares and in persuading their own countries to adopt warlike policies that increased their spending on armaments. They were found guilty of bribing government officials both at home and abroad, and of disseminating false reports about the military and naval programmes of various countries in order to stimulate armament expenditure. The litany of accusations further indicted them for influencing public opinion through the control of newspapers in their own and foreign countries. The ring was directly criticised for all these activities and not least for ensuring the outrageous price of armaments, but nothing of any consequence was done about it.57 The Secret Elite was not identified.

  SUMMARY: CHAPTER 9 – SCAMS AND SCANDALS

  The Committee of Imperial Defence continued to host a secret sub-committee that continued to pursue military and naval ‘conversations’ with France.

  Richard Haldane at the War Office had to reorganise the military connections that had been left loosely in the hands of the Times correspondent Colonel Repington, a journalist with his own office at the War Office.

  The Secret Elite sanctioned a raft of fear stories and scares to generate the belief that Britain was being threatened by German naval construction in a race for survival.

  This propaganda was bolstered by an armaments scam that the Cabinet endorsed, the opposition of A.J. Balfour’s Conservatives abused, and the nava
l lobby turned into a clamour for more dreadnoughts.

  The major British armaments firms formed close associations and partnerships. They made vast fortunes and engaged in national and international ‘trusts’ or ‘armaments rings’ that bled governments dry.

  Many key figures inside the Secret Elite gained handsomely from the trade of death, as did many members of the House of Lords, the Cabinet and the House of Commons. Even high-ranking churchmen were shareholders in this infamous scandal.

  British armaments were later to be used in the slaughter of British soldiers and sailors.

  CHAPTER 10

  Creating the Fear

  THE SECRET ELITE HAS ALWAYS had a handle on the press. Newspapers have immense power to influence how people think and act. Important events in public life, including appointments and elections, are swayed by them. They like to portray themselves as standard-bearers for morality, for loyalty, for what is for the public good. When they get it right, they promote themselves with unconscionable arrogance. When they get it wrong, they simply move on to the next opinion. Few have absolute loyalty to a political party. They smell the wind and change their allegiance accordingly, but their concerted attacks can bring down politicians or blacken the character of public figures. Newspapers serve their owners and always have. When their owners are part of the greater conspiracy, democracy itself becomes a fraud.

  Viscount Alfred Milner understood the role and the power of the press. From his earliest years in the Pall Mall Gazette in the 1880s, Milner’s personal network of journalist friends included William T. Stead, editor of the Review of Reviews, George Buckle and later Geoffrey Dawson at The Times, Edmund Garrett at the Westminster Gazette and E.T. Cook at the Daily News and Daily Chronicle. All were members of the Secret Elite.1 The combined impact of these newspapers and magazines gave the Secret Elite great influence over public opinion by directing editorial policies from behind the scenes, but it was the intimacy between The Times and the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office and the War Office that demonstrated just how deeply this symbiotic relationship ran.

  Milner’s good friend the Times correspondent Flora Shaw had been a welcome guest at the Colonial Office and ‘was in the confidence of all concerned with Imperial Policy’.2 Her task in justifying war in South Africa had been to insist day after day in The Times that President Kruger was refusing to address legitimate grievances in the Transvaal. Flora Shaw was also given the opportunity to rewrite history. The Times sponsored an updated Encyclopaedia Britannica and she was invited to revise the imperial sections, a task that involved ‘rewriting a great many articles’.3

  The connections between The Times and the Foreign Office continued through another known member of the Secret Elite, Valentine Chirol.4 Formerly a Foreign Office clerk, Chirol moved to Berlin as the Times correspondent before returning to London to take control of their foreign department. From this powerful position, Chirol promoted Secret Elite policies for 15 years up to 1912. What he supported through his editorials became the policies that the government followed. With unerring certainty he promoted the Boer War, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, the Entente Cordiale, the 1907 agreement with czarist Russia and increasing antagonism towards Germany.

  Charles Repington, as we have seen, was yet another Times correspondent whose involvement in secret inter-government agreements belied his journalistic role. His access to Foreign Office and War Office civil servants, diplomats and secret papers went far beyond propriety.5

  The Times was taken over and controlled by Milner’s men in much the same way as they took control of All Souls College in Oxford: ‘quietly, and without a struggle’.6 Others might own the newspaper, but he ensured that its editorial leadership came from within the Secret Elite’s trusted ranks. Members of the innermost circle swarmed all over The Times, writing editorials and articles, submitting news and views in line with their agenda. Professor Quigley stated that up to 1912 the old order inside the Elite, those initially associated with Lord Salisbury, were in charge, but after that point control passed seamlessly to Milner’s close and trusted friend Geoffrey Dawson. Like all his favourites, Dawson had been personally recruited by Alfred Milner, originally for work in South Africa.7 He poached him from the Colonial Office in 1901 and had him appointed editor of the Johannesburg Star before he left Africa in 1905.8 When George Buckle was approaching the end of his tenure as editor of The Times, Dawson was sent for, spent a year hanging about the offices and was duly appointed editor-in-chief in 1912. That was how the Secret Elite worked: always one step ahead of the rest, sometimes two.

  The Times could not boast a mass circulation. It never pretended to be a vehicle for mass propaganda. What Milner and his Secret Elite associates understood clearly was that The Times influenced that small number of important people who had the capacity to influence others. It represented the governing class, that elite of political, diplomatic, financial, wealth-bearing favoured few who made and approved choices for themselves and for others. It was part of the whole process through which the Secret Elite directed policy, by endorsing those elements that met their approval and deriding contrary opinion. When, for example, a member of the Secret Elite announced a policy on national defence, it would be backed up in an ‘independent’ study by an eminent Oxford don or former military ‘expert’, analysed and approved in a Times leader and legitimised by some publication favourably reviewed in the Times Literary Supplement.9 Everyone involved in the process would in some way be associated with or approved of by the Secret Elite, including the writer of the anonymous review.

  The revolution in newspaper circulation, with its popular daily papers, magazines and pamphlets, bypassed The Times in the first years of the twentieth century but did not alter its focus. The paper was, however, ailing and in danger of running at an unsustainable loss. Its saviour, Alfred Harmsworth, was, on first consideration, an unlikely guardian of the Secret Elite’s public voice. As leader of the ‘Yellow Press’, a term of utter contempt derived from the sensationalist journalism developed in New York at the turn of the century, Harmsworth did not naturally belong inside the Elite, but, as his extensive stable proved, sensationalism sold newspapers and they wielded immense influence. He bought up a very large section of the London-based press, including the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Graphic, Evening News and Weekly Dispatch. If he was not from the natural constituencies that bred Britain’s elite, he was close to them.

  Harmsworth had been very supportive of Alfred Milner during the Boer War, and his Daily Mail gave great prominence to Percy Fitzpatrick’s The Transvaal from Within, which helped promote the need for war.10 It brought him great profit. He spent large sums of money on stories that helped the circulation of the Daily Mail rise to over a million. Kipling’s poem ‘The Absent-Minded Beggar’ was bought by his Daily Mail, set to music and sold to raise tens of thousands of pounds for ambulances and provisions for the troops.

  Harmsworth was an innovator. He convinced Cecil Rhodes to give him an exclusive and entirely favourable interview which he published ‘throughout the civilised world’.11 Having been forewarned by his Secret Elite contacts that Arthur Balfour was about to resign in 1905, he scooped the story in an in-depth interview with the prime minister that included his plans for a general election.12 Harmsworth was ennobled by King Edward that same year, took the title of Lord Northcliffe and was increasingly drawn into Secret Elite circles.

  Gaining control of The Times was not straightforward. Northcliffe had a serious rival in Sir Arthur Pearson, proprietor of the Daily Express, and both bought up stock from the 68 major shareholders. Northcliffe was the Secret Elite’s chosen man. His loyalty to the Empire, Milner and the king shone through. Lord Esher was sent to vet him on their behalf, since it was vital ‘that the policy of The Times remained unchanged’.13 Aided by the general manager, Moberly Bell, to whom he also had to make promises that ‘The Times of the future would be conducted on the same lines as The Times of the past’,14 Northcliffe gathered 51
per cent of the company stock and announced his ownership on 27 June 1908. Any fears that the editors, journalists, correspondents and readers might have expressed before his acquisition were quickly dispelled, for the only noticeable change he introduced was to the price. It fell from three pence to one penny.15

  Northcliffe was a valuable contributor to the Secret Elite in their drive to vilify the kaiser, and his papers constantly repeated the warning that Germany was the enemy. In story after story, the message of the German danger to the British Empire, to British products, to British national security was constantly repeated. Not every newspaper followed suit, but the right-wing press was particularly virulent. In addition, Northcliffe had by 1908 bought up The Observer and the Sunday Times. According to Professor Quigley, the definitive assurances given by Northcliffe to the Secret Elite that their policies would be willingly supported brought him into the confidence of the Society of the Elect.16

  What made Northcliffe and his associated newspapers so valuable was that the long-term plan to alienate public opinion against Germany could progress on two levels. The Times manipulated the ‘elite’ opinion in Britain, moulding policy and poisoning the climate, while the Daily Mail and its sister newspapers created sensational stories against Germany that excited the gullible of all classes. The Morning Post, whose unquestioning support for the myth of Winston Churchill’s ‘great escape’ in the Boer War propelled him into politics, always promoted traditionally conservative views. It was even more committed to the Secret Elite cause after 1905 when one of its own, Fabian Ware,17 became editor. A friend and trusted colleague of Milner himself, Ware ensured the Morning Post’s unstinting support against Germany.