Compared to the events of the seismic Bolshevik Revolution that followed twelve years later, the ‘revolution’ of 1905 seems relatively insignificant in impact. But it was not a minor event for Russians living through it. An urban uprising in the country’s capital had led to soldiers firing on their countrymen, a tragic indictment of the rule of Tsar Nicholas II. He may not have shot any bullets that day, but he was the military’s leader and the events contradicted his ‘Father of the People’ image. Changes to the country’s political, religious and agrarian spheres followed.
What did Reynolds make of it all? Though he stayed at the National Liberal Club while in London, he had a diverse mix of political views. He was a monarchist, supporting Nicholas II and the reforms undertaken during his time in Russia. Reynolds did not condemn the violence of Bloody Sunday. ‘The Russian Government cannot be condemned for using severe measures to restore order in the country,’ he wrote.44 He observed Tsar Nicholas II’s rule in a traditional sense. ‘In Russian theory the emperor has a double part to play. He is autocrat and he is also father of his people.’45 Reynolds’s favourable view of the Tsar endured, as this admiring passage near the end of his time in Russia shows: ‘When [Nicholas II] went to Poltava in 1909 to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of Peter the Great’s victory over the Swedes, [he] refused to listen to the advice of the police, and strolled about chatting with peasants. His homes at Peterhof and Tsarskoe Selo are small country houses, and the splendid palaces in both places stand empty.’46 It is admiring fluff rather than critical journalism.
The reforms started in 1905 partly explain Reynolds’s support for a monarch whose appeal to liberals was damaged by the violence of that year. He approved of the Tsar’s manifesto in April 1905 in which he apparently renounced his authority over the religious lives of his subjects. The new policy of increased tolerance towards faiths other than the Orthodox church was a liberal move, chiming with Reynolds’s political sentiment. The personal implications for him as a Catholic convert were of great importance too. And it paid off for the Tsar, or so Reynolds thought. ‘When Nicholas II, on his own initiative, adopted a policy of toleration, a conservative newspaper of Moscow declared that his manifesto had destroyed the Orthodox Church,’ he wrote. ‘These fears have proved to be groundless. The manifesto has given new life to the church.’47
In politics the progress was more limited. While Reynolds supported the inauguration of the new Russian Parliament, he was well aware of how Nicholas II had ensured the Duma would pose no threat to his power. It did not take long for the Tsar’s old habits to reappear. In the summer of 1908 Reynolds visited a prison in Moscow to speak to Sergey Muromtsev, the president of the first Duma, and eleven other members of Parliament who had been incarcerated. After his visit he reflected on how legal rights in Russia differed from Britain. ‘The elementary safeguards of liberty are wanting.’48
Though political liberty was in short supply, Reynolds found Russian society to be less fusty and rule-bound than his homeland. ‘I did not understand what liberty is until I left England and lived in Russia,’ he wrote. A man ‘is not considered dirty because he has been too lazy to shave, nor ill-mannered if he be unpunctual, nor eccentric if he goes into the stalls of a theatre in a check suit.’49
It seems unlikely Reynolds partook of those particular freedoms. He was clean-shaven and – crucially, for a journalist – had no reputation for missing deadlines. Furthermore, he took his tailoring extremely seriously. His brother Ronald once described him as ‘Europe’s best dressed correspondent’.50 Despite apparently admiring Russia’s social freedoms and its people, Reynolds was a man of standards, and in several ways the country disappointed him. Russian cuisine fell short of acceptable in his judgement. ‘I have been to dinner-parties in Petrograd at which the food was dull and the conversation enthralling,’ he wrote. ‘The reverse is so often the case in London.’51 Reynolds, who was able to combine a strong interest in gastronomy with a slim figure, was also accustomed to certain levels of service. ‘It is a matter of uncertainty whether it will occur to anybody to bring one shaving water in the morning,’ he wrote during an account of life at a country house, seemingly without irony.52
Reynolds spent most of his thirties in Russia, leaving in 1910 at the age of thirty-eight. Entering middle-age, he was established in a second career and had acquired specialist knowledge of Russia that would prove of great benefit on his return to London. He remained a bachelor, a status his time abroad does not seem to have come close to changing. But Reynolds was no loner. His ability to make friends from all walks of life was frequently commented on and his time in Russia had added a new set, most notably Munro. His spell abroad had also established him as a traveller, which would remain the case until his death. Did he regret the nomadic path on which he had embarked? There is a hint of melancholy in the following passage about Reynolds’s visit to a countryside acquaintance in Eastern Europe: ‘When I left Ivan’s home there was a tinge of envy in my heart. Its simplicity was imposing. I was a wanderer; Ivan had his castle, standing in the midst of fields which were his own and would pass to his children.’53
- CHAPTER III -
WAR AND MI7
Catholic in faith and a journalist by trade, a very different Reynolds returned to Britain after six years abroad. He arrived in a country at the peak of its power thanks to industrialisation and the global networks of empire. George V succeeded his father Edward in 1910 but the Edwardian era lived on for four years after Reynolds returned to his home country: an age of innocence, with little indication of the devastation war would soon inflict on the nation and its families.
Reynolds had changed more than Britain during the Edwardian years. When he first left for Russia he had been close to ascetic in his personal life. Now in his late thirties, Reynolds had transformed into something approaching an Edwardian dandy. He drank coffee, preferred to converse in French, wore braces and used Brillantine in his hair. His first book, The Gondola, was a novel published in 1913 that featured a lead character named Richard Venning. A travelling convert Catholic journalist from Britain who has recently worked in Russia, it is clear who Reynolds had based Venning on. The character provides numerous insights into his own life.
‘Journalism was demoralising,’ Venning declared at one point.
If he had never been the correspondent of a London paper in St Petersburg, he would never have formed expensive tastes. He had sacrificed his love of simplicity for the benefit of the paper. Could he ever have got the scoops, which had made his reputation, without the help of little dinners in restaurants and boxes at the opera? Of course not.54
Journalism had clearly elevated the standards to which Reynolds was accustomed – especially compared with his time in the church, when he lived on a meagre annual allowance.
Aside from excursions to various religious orders in Britain and a handful of foreign assignments, Reynolds spent most of the next decade based in London. He did not own a permanent home but took temporary rooms at places such as the Liberal Club in Whitehall and Lincoln’s Inn in Holborn. He continued with journalism and was still writing about Russia for the Daily News in 1911, despite returning from the country. There were other diversions. In that year he and Munro, who had both been in thrall of the Russian ballet in St Petersburg, hosted a reception for Sergei Diaghilev’s ballet troupe, including its star Vaslav Nijinsky, during its first tour of Britain. Guests at this exotic event were required to speak French, as that was the only other language the Russians could speak. It was a sensational meeting of cultures. At one point Munro’s sister, Ethel, found Nijinsky cowering under a table. ‘It is the devil!’ he cried to her, pointing in panic to an Aberdeen Terrier sitting nearby. He had never seen the breed before.55
Part of the reason Reynolds had returned to Britain was to capitalise on the unique experiences of his time in Russia. However, the book ideas he pitched to publishers did not meet with immediate success and he soon found he was missing life as a foreign c
orrespondent. In 1912 he left for a second overseas assignment, this time reporting on events in Berlin for The Standard, forerunner to the London Evening Standard.
It was the first time he had lived in Germany. The country was ‘exceedingly prosperous and enjoying the fruits of a peace, which, except for conflicts with rebellious natives beyond the seas, had not been interrupted for more than forty years’, Reynolds wrote. ‘There was work for all and German merchants and manufacturers were exporting their goods to the end of the earth.’56 Reynolds may have arrived in Germany at a prosperous time, but he viewed Berlin as inferior to other European capitals. ‘Berlin in 1912 had the air of a provincial city. It lacked the movement and animation of London and Paris, and the charm, which age has given to those cities, was absent.’57 Despite this verdict, Reynolds enjoyed his time there, perhaps relishing the slower pace of life. ‘In summer, the innumerable trees in broad streets compensated for the lack of beautiful buildings. The wheels of life went slower than in London and jolted less.’58
He arrived in Berlin early in February 1912, a few days before the British Secretary of State for War, Lord Haldane, arrived in the city to negotiate with Germany about a naval agreement between the two countries. Britain was prepared to yield to some of Germany’s colonial demands in Africa if Germany would recognise Britain’s dominance of the seas. The mission ended in failure. Rather than striking a deal, Haldane’s visit only underlined the differences between the two countries. The chances of a future war had increased.
Reynolds passed his days reading, socialising and writing in the coffee houses of Berlin. He was at home in these centres of information and discussion, which he described as clubs without subscriptions. ‘For the price of a mug of beer or a cup of coffee one could sit in them by the hour and read the newspapers of all the capitals of Europe, which the proprietors provided for their guests.’59 Reynolds’s favourite coffee house was the Café des Westens, ‘a haunt of the intelligentsia, of poets and writers, artists and socialist members of the Reichstag.’60 There he struck up a friendship with Rupert Brooke, who went on to become one of the great poets of the First World War with poems including ‘The Soldier’.
If I should die, think only this of me;
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England
Brooke was in Berlin to research his dissertation on Elizabethan drama in the Prussian state library. One day Reynolds was sitting beside Brooke in the Café des Westens when the young student turned to him with glee and said: ‘I have made this café famous.’ The reason? Brooke had just penned his classic pre-war poem ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, in which he nostalgically dreams of England. A line at the top of the poem dates it to the ‘Café des Westens, Berlin, May 1912’. It includes the famous lines:
God! I will pack, and take a train
And get me to England once again!
For England’s the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go
Brooke made a strong impression on Reynolds, who later described the encounter in his final book, When Freedom Shrieked.
With his mop of yellow hair and a complexion as clear as a girl’s, heightening, not diminishing, the impression of physical and intellectual strength that he made, Rupert was bound to attract attention anywhere. Set among the shallow scribblers and debaters of the Café des Westens, he was a god indeed.61
Reynolds’s time in Berlin for The Standard was brief compared with his Daily News years in St Petersburg. His departure in the summer of 1912 was caused by the belated success of his attempts to find a publisher. Mills & Boon, a small British firm formed just two years earlier in 1910, commissioned him to write two books. The publisher came to be known for romantic fiction for women, but in its early years it published a broader range of books. Reynolds signed agreements to write one novel, The Gondola, and a non-fiction account of his time in Russia, My Russian Year. The latter was a factual account of Russian life, part of a Mills & Boon series of books including titles such as My Parisian Year and My Sudan Year. The price of slotting into this series was the book’s misleading title, which unfairly shortened Reynolds’s experience of life in Russia from six years to one.62
In August 1912 he moved to Ettal, a village in the Bavarian mountains, to write his books. Reynolds worked in the guesthouse of the Benedictine Abbey, at the centre of village life. There he found the quiet that he sought. In 1913 he returned to Britain, where the books were coming to market. My Russian Year made the greater impact. Reynolds kept a binder of newspaper and magazine reviews and collected forty-one in total from a wide range of publications, titles as diverse as the Sunday Times, Punch, Tatler and Indian Daily News.
A slim volume running to 165 pages, My Russian Year describes conditions in Russia with details of its customs, religion, food and drink, town and country life. The book was well received by the Morning Post – perhaps no surprise given that its review was written by Munro, who was keen to vouch for the book’s veracity. ‘An entertaining and instructive picture of twentieth century Russia… The general charm of treatment is matched by the accuracy of the details.’ Other, perhaps less biased reviews, appeared in all the main papers. The Times Literary Supplement said it was ‘conversational, easy and eminently readable … a truthful and impartial picture of ordinary Russian life’.63 The Daily Telegraph called it ‘by far the most comprehensive account of Russian life yet given to English readers … The flavour of his humour is delicious.’64 The left-wing Manchester Guardian was also impressed. ‘We have rarely come upon such an interesting and well-balanced account of modern Russia. Mr Reynolds has seen his Russia with eyes unclouded by passion, though they are often twinkling with humour, and occasionally dimmed by tears.’65
Reviews of the second book published by Reynolds in 1913, The Gondola, are harder to find. The novel follows the exploits of Richard Venning, who travels across Europe in pursuit of the affections of an Italian countess, ‘Contessa Della Casa’. Written in a richly comic tone, it contains such sections of flamboyant prose as:
The enchantment of the mountains enthralled Venning. The sky was a brighter and more luminous blue than he had ever seen it, and the sun, just risen above a snowy peak, threw trails of rose and saffron flowers on the opal surface of a frozen lake, stained the heights beyond crimson, and turned the snow by the roadside to crystal.66
The novel begins in the Swiss alpine setting of St Moritz, a stop-off on Venning’s journey to Venice as part of a European tour. While there he attends a masquerade ball and meets the countess, but does not immediately win her affections. More of Venning’s adventures across Europe are recounted, including several scenes set in St Petersburg, until the book’s finale in Poland, where he is ultimately successful in his pursuit. Unlike Reynolds’s subsequent books, which are serious in tone and offer factual accounts of his time abroad, The Gondola is something of a romp. Its comic style reveals, more than any other evidence in surviving books and letters, Reynolds’s sense of humour. Here one can possibly detect the influence of his friend Munro, who may have emboldened him in this style of writing.
A lack of modesty shines through in Reynolds’s description of Venning, who at one point is referred to as ‘exceedingly handsome and probably an adventurer’.67 He is pious, on one occasion reprimanding an English couple attending a church service in St Petersburg for criticising the Catholic practice of applying ash to foreheads on Ash Wednesday. While still in Russia, Reynolds has Venning refer to the ‘silly tricks’ of the suffragettes, indicating a somewhat illiberal attitude to the campaign for votes for women.68 Reynolds’s love for Poland shines through, as it does in all four of his other books. ‘Were I not an Englishman, I would be a Pole,’ Venning declares at one point.69 In one passage the countess, who is Polish, bemoans the ‘unjust’ influence of Germany, Austria and Russia on her country.70
His books published, Reynolds found another way to capitalise on his time in Russia. Early in 1914 he
began working as a lecturer specialising in the country for the Cambridge University Extension movement, which offered courses on different subjects at locations throughout Britain. The publicly funded movement started in Oxford in the 1880s before spreading to Cambridge and other universities, with the aim of disseminating knowledge from the country’s academic centres to the wider public.
In January 1914 a series of adverts appeared in the Devon and Exeter Daily Gazette promoting a course of classes on ‘Modern Russia’, beginning on 23 January. The first one was free and a full course of eleven cost ten shillings and sixpence. Three days before the first talk the course was advertised in the newspaper’s ‘City Chat’ column:
In view of the entente cordiale existing between this country and Russia, and the increasing interest in Russian art and Russian literature, the subject of the course should arouse wide interest, and the lecturer would seem to possess the qualifications necessary to give it a special interest. He was for over five years St Petersburg correspondent of the Daily News, and has had rare opportunities of contrasting Russian life with life in other countries for he subsequently acted as Berlin correspondent of the Standard, and his recent novel, The Gondola, shows an intimate knowledge of Venetian life … His lectures ought to be particularly interesting, and, in spite of the academic auspices under which they are to be given, entertaining.71
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