Reynolds’s lectures took him around the country, to cities ranging from Newcastle, Middlesbrough and Scarborough in the north-east to Exeter, Hastings and London in the south. Topics covered in the lectures, each of which was followed by a discussion, included Russian history, its political scene and religion. It was satisfying work that suited Reynolds well. Yet he had little idea that his nascent career as an author and lecturer on Russia would soon take on a new significance.
Reynolds was in London during the fateful summer of 1914. British politicians had grown increasingly disturbed by the expansionist intentions of the German Kaiser and the assassination of an Austro-Hungarian prince in Sarajevo provided the unlikely spark for a war that would change Europe irrevocably.
Munro was a spectator in the House of Commons on the day that Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey stated Britain’s position, and war became inevitable. That evening Munro met Reynolds and two friends for dinner at a restaurant on the Strand to discuss the momentous events. He said the strain of listening to the speech was so great that he ‘found himself in a sweat’.72 Munro had insisted on walking to the restaurant from Westminster at great pace – the start of his drive to be fit enough to fight in the war. ‘He was determined to fight,’ said Reynolds. In the weeks that followed, Munro was ‘condemning himself for the slackness of his years in London and hiring a horse to take exercise, to which he was a little addicted, in the park.’73
While Munro enlisted, Reynolds stayed behind in London. Just a couple of years younger than Munro, he did not share his friend’s desire – which many felt ardently in the patriotic wartime atmosphere – to head to the front. A war memorial at Pembroke College records how narrowly Reynolds avoided being part of the generation ravaged by war. He studied at Cambridge between 1892 and 1895, leaving when Kaiser Wilhelm II’s reign in Germany was just seven years old and a continental war seemed an unlikely prospect. Pembroke’s memorial cloister lists the names of 300 college members who died in the First World War. Around a third of the men who joined Pembroke between 1911 and 1917 had died by 1919.74
The war was a difficult period for Reynolds. He lost friends in the trenches. A country and a leader he much admired, the Russia of Nicholas II, succumbed to revolution. Polish lands were again subject to foreign aggression. When war broke out and the lamps went out all over Europe, to use Foreign Secretary Grey’s famous phrase, Reynolds was occupied with his lecturing. During 1914 and 1915 he continued to travel across Britain delivering lectures on Russia, which attracted more interest than ever given the country’s new status as a wartime ally. For centuries viewed by Britons as a mysterious far-off land with a strange language and odd customs, Russia was now fighting the same fight against the deadly Hun.
Reynolds’s enthusiasm for Russia, already evident from My Russian Year, made him an ideal teacher to inform the curious about their new allies. He spoke effusively about them. ‘Our confidence in the Russians rests partly on their bravery and courage,’ he told an audience in London in March 1915, ‘but above all, on the fact that throughout their history they have always displayed a great spirit of self-sacrifice in times of national crisis.’75
He took the message around the country. ‘If our friendship with Russia, which [is] so warm at present, was to last, it must be based on sincerity, truth and forbearance,’ he told an audience in Scarborough in September 1915.76 The next month he spoke in Middlesbrough. As well as loftier subjects such as religion and Anglo-Russian relations, Reynolds focused on day-to-day life in Russia to a surprising degree of detail. During a London University lecture in March 1915, he ‘gave interesting particulars with regard to the cost of the living of the peasant classes of the country, basing his figures on personal observation’.77 A typical Russian household, said Reynolds, may spend about sixteen pounds a year, with heating costing two pounds, lighting sixteen shillings, furniture one pound, tax fourteen shillings and men’s clothing nine pounds. ‘The women were expected to provide their own clothes, weaving themselves.’
Reviews in the provincial press suggest Reynolds’s lectures on Russia were warmly received. Strong feelings existed about the importance of the lecture scheme during the war. ‘It is impossible to over-rate the good which the University Extension movement has effected in the spread of education in the last twenty years,’ said a September 1915 editorial from the Newcastle Journal. ‘This is one of the reasons that makes us hope that in whatever other direction the present government may seek to economise in the present crisis, they will not adopt the penny-wise and pound-foolish policy of cutting down the grants to the universities.’78
Reynolds had more than his lectures to keep him busy in the early months of the war. He remained a regular contributor to various national and provincial newspapers ranging from the Daily Mirror to the Birmingham Gazette. The witty and playful style of his earlier writing was gone, replaced by a serious tone more suited to wartime. How else to deal with such subjects as the death of Miss Cavell, the British nurse executed by Germany for helping allied soldiers escape from Germany in 1915, or the perils faced by his Polish friends, witnessing unthinkable bloodshed and tragedy on the war’s eastern front? These were dark days and Reynolds did his bit by drawing attention to the plight of the suffering.
One of his articles was titled ‘My Friend the Squire: A Memory of a Manor House in Poland’. Memory it was, since the forest-dwelling squire in question had seen his homeland ‘swept by flame’ during the war, in the words of Reynolds. ‘Now the voices are silent. Now the manor-house is deserted. Now the wild things have fled. Now the forest is withered in the breath of war.’79 Another article, ‘A Menaced Polish City: Recollections of a Visit to Vilna’, drew attention to the centuries-old town of Vilnius, the capital of modern-day Lithuania. It was a similarly impassioned account of a place and people in danger.80
Reynolds’s campaign to spread awareness of eastern lands extended beyond his lecturing and newspaper articles. His one-man propaganda effort to improve perceptions of Russia developed in 1915 with a new edition of My Russian Year. ‘The unity of the Russian Empire at the present time is as perfect and as sublime as that of the British Empire,’ he wrote in a new foreword. ‘Racial animosity has disappeared. The disputes of politicians have ceased. Terrorists crave the privilege of fighting the enemies of Russia. Wrath at the wicked aggression of Germany and love of the holy Russian land have united throne and people.’81
He wrote two more books during the First World War: a second on Russia, titled My Slav Friends, and The Story of Warsaw, published in 1915. The Story of Warsaw is a picture book and just sixty pages in length, with most of the space taken by photographs. It was billed as ‘a popular account of the famous medieval city with its beautiful buildings. A vivid description splendidly illustrated with 68 unique photographs. An excellent idea of the city will be gained from this book, of most exceptional interest at the present time.’
Reynolds adopted a stridently anti-German tone in the book. ‘Has any town in Europe suffered more terrible calamities or seen more bewildering changes [than Warsaw]?’ he asked.82 ‘No Prussian occupation, not even if it were to last as long as the Prussian occupation of 1795, can permanently ruin the fortunes of a city favoured by nature and made famous by the genius of its citizens,’ he wrote.83 The book goes on to give a short history of Warsaw and introduce its main landmarks, several of which were later destroyed by bombing in the Second World War. The book was reviewed reasonably well in The Spectator on its release in the summer of 1915, but did not seem to make much of an impact.84
The other book he released during the war, did. My Slav Friends, published a year later in 1916, struck an even more ardently pro-Russia tone than My Russian Year. Reynolds was candid about the book’s objective: ‘I have at the moment no higher ambition than to convince the reader that the Russians are very much like ourselves,’ he wrote.85 There is an ‘essential unity of the British and Russian peoples and the solidarity of their aims’.86 The book was also published
in the US, suggesting an attempt to influence public opinion there. America, still neutral, was not to join the war until 1917, but the British government was desperate to change this. Encouraging international support for the Russian alliance was an important aim until the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.
A reviewer in the New York Times shrewdly observed that Reynolds’s book amounted ‘almost to propaganda’.87 This is not far from the truth; it may well have been officially sanctioned as part of Britain’s secret war effort. The Liberal Party politician Charles Masterman turned his hand to propaganda during the First World War as head of the War Propaganda Bureau, known to insiders as the Wellington House Operation. He commissioned books and pamphlets by well-known authors including Arthur Conan Doyle and John Buchan to influence public opinion overseas. The unit was responsible for the ‘Report of the Committee on Alleged German Outrages’, which sparked global anger with its revelations of the atrocities committed by German troops in Belgium.88 Some of its more extreme claims, most notably that German troops had bounced Belgian babies on their bayonets, were disputed in the years that followed. But the impact of the propaganda was undeniable and helped turn international opinion against the Kaiser and his army. Officially sanctioned or not, the publication of My Slav Friends was in line with the objectives of Masterman’s Wellington House Operation. Reynolds’s work during the first half of the war, designed to improve perceptions of Russia and its people, had another impact. It brought him to the attention of a secret department of Britain’s emerging intelligence infrastructure that wanted to make use of him.
The UK’s oldest spy agencies – the Security Service for domestic espionage and Secret Intelligence Service for overseas – are known widely by their more prosaic labels MI5 and MI6. This is a legacy of the First World War, when both were sections of the Directorate of Military Intelligence, itself a part of the War Office. MI5, MI6 and the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which provides signals intelligence, are the three spy agencies remaining in 21st-century Britain. Forgotten are the other divisions of military intelligence, since disbanded or subsumed into other sections of the British state, which fought the country’s espionage battles between 1914 and 1918.
There were nine in total, from MI1 through to MI9, which handled all manner of issues, from military ciphers and postal censorship to the positioning of submarine cables.89 The seventh section, MI7, dealt with press and propaganda in the UK and overseas. Part of its remit was the study of foreign newspapers in enemy and neutral countries to detect hostile propaganda. For this a skilled team of translators was required and the multilingual Reynolds was perfectly suited to the task.
The subsection undertaking this work was called MI7(d). Reynolds started in 1916, viewing it as another way to contribute as the horrors of the war intensified. The team of translators worked in a small office located just off the Strand in Watergate House, part of the Adelphi buildings, a neoclassical terrace designed by Robert Adam. Working in such grand surroundings was a welcome fillip for Reynolds in light of his eighteenth-century architectural tastes.
Through his work at MI7 he made a lifelong friend of Ronald Knox, the theologian and later author of detective fiction, who began there in the summer of 1916. Knox took just a few weeks to acquire enough knowledge of the Norwegian language to be useful – a skillset that, ‘as far as can be known, was never of the smallest use to him in later life’, his biographer Evelyn Waugh drily noted. Though Knox was born sixteen years after Reynolds, the two men had a great deal in common. Knox was also brought up an Anglo-Catholic and was ordained in the Anglican church before converting to Catholicism. His time with MI7 coincided with the period immediately prior to his conversion in 1917, a time marked by doubts and uncertainty about his faith. Reynolds, who had been through a similar process, was ideally placed to support Knox at this time.
While Reynolds, Knox and the other translators at MI7(d) served a significant purpose, the most important part of the unit was section (b), which dealt with the creation of propaganda to be distributed to foreign countries. Lieutenant-General George Macdonogh had served as an officer in France until the end of 1915, when he was recalled to London to serve as Director of Military Intelligence in the War Office. His time in France had alerted him to the possibilities of using propaganda to undermine the confidence of the German army and he was behind the creation of section (b) in March 1916. Captain A. J. Dawson, a journalist, author and staff officer working in military intelligence, was attached to MI7(b) and ‘instructed to prepare a plan for obtaining continuous supplies of articles about the work of the army, so far as possible without cost to the country’90 – in other words, to build a specialist team of propaganda writers.
That summer an appeal went out to British fighters overseas. Those with literary experience were invited to apply to work for a new section in London. The lure of a break from the trenches was greatly appealing and some thousands responded before a small team of officers was selected to conduct the work. For the remainder of the war the section, whose numbers averaged about twenty, produced reams of written and pictorial propaganda, some of it printed in allied newspapers and some dropped behind enemy lines. Efforts included Le Courrier de l’Aire, a weekly newsletter published in French and dropped by aeroplane over Belgium, and a ‘Weekly Letter to Soldiers’ distributed to British troops at home and abroad.
MI7(b) was a small unit of writers but it contained a remarkable array of talents. Its ranks included A. A. Milne, the creator of Winnie the Pooh, the humorist J. B. Morton and Cecil Street, another member of MI7 who later turned his hand to detective fiction, writing the Dr Priestley novels. So secret was the work of MI7 that few outside the small department’s walls knew what its writers were up to. Macdonogh himself felt in the dark. ‘I don’t know what MI7 are doing but I do know there is no section that could land me in a worse mess,’ he once remarked.91 All of MI7’s documents were destroyed as soon as the war ended because of the potential embarrassment that could be caused if information about its underhand methods got into the public domain.
Some evidence survived. Captain James Lloyd, one of MI7(b)’s writers, kept copies of 150 articles, which were discovered in 2013 during a house clearance in Wales. The cache contains a copy of the striking first issue of The Green Book, a small satirical magazine created by the writers of MI7(b) just after the war, which they intended to use to stay in touch. It is full of poems and prose, in-jokes and dry observations about their wartime work. ‘In MI7(b), who loves to lie with me, about atrocities, and Hun Corpse Factories,’ rhymes Milne on one page, while on the next Lloyd writes about how it might feel, decades hence, to explain his wartime duties to his grandson.92
In Lloyd’s piece his grandson says that he has heard Lord Northcliffe was behind the propaganda efforts of the First World War. This was a sensitive issue for the men of MI7. The owner of the Daily Mail had indeed been involved in propaganda, but the way he and other press barons took credit for it publicly after the war was a source of sourness for MI7, whose efforts remained entirely secret. Lord Northcliffe occupied a powerful position during the war, with his ownership of the upmarket Times and populist Mail, which he founded in 1896, giving him a unique influence in political circles and wider society. Vigorous reporting by The Times on the military ‘Shell Crisis’ had been a major factor behind the collapse of Herbert Asquith’s government midway through the war.
After turning down a seat in Cabinet, Northcliffe became the Director of Propaganda in Enemy Countries in February 1918 and oversaw efforts at Crewe House, which was responsible for distributing leaflets behind enemy lines in the last year of the war. It was important but, with the war ending sooner than expected, short-lived work. It certainly does not appear to merit the praise received two years later on publication of Secrets of Crewe House: The Story of a Famous Campaign. ‘MI7 did the real thing and, as with Secret Service, kept it completely dark,’ one of its staff, Colonel W. E. Davies, wrote to the war’s official hi
storian in 1943. But MI7’s band of talented writers, who socialised at the Authors’ Club once their work was done, could not compete with powerful self-publicists such as Northcliffe and Lord Beaverbrook. It has taken many years for some of the secrets of MI7 to emerge and most remain concealed more than a century on.
Reynolds was a fervent supporter of the country’s propaganda campaigns in the war. ‘The word propaganda has an evil sound today and is being degraded to a synonym for the act of passing off false news and lying statements for truth. Its history is noble,’ he later reflected.93 However, not working for the central section of MI7, he had a more nuanced view on the contributions made by the press barons. ‘Lord Northcliffe’s propaganda during the war had been to make facts known with the help of the machinery at his disposal,’ he said, continuing:
The material required was supplied by the Germans and was immensely superior to that which they could use themselves… They could not point to Cologne Cathedral in ruins or the state-library of Berlin in flames to set off against the destruction they wrought at Rheims and Liege. No Germans had to flee into foreign countries, rousing the pity and exciting the indignation of the people in whose land they found refuge by accounts of their suffering at the hands of British soldiers or Belgian or French soldiers. All the cards were in our hands, and Lord Northcliffe played them with such skill that the anger of his opponents was still alive long after the war.94
Like almost everyone in the country, Reynolds lost friends and acquaintances in the war. Rupert Brooke met his end in 1915 after a mosquito bite became infected while he sailed on a troop ship towards the Gallipoli landings. A ten-minute walk from Reynolds’s old college at Pembroke is King’s College and its stunning chapel, home to a memorial commemo-rating fallen soldiers including Rupert Brooke. ‘War robbed England of him,’ wrote Reynolds later. ‘But the thoughts with which he faced that ordeal remain in the treasure-house of our literature and in the hearts of those who knew him.’95
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