Reynolds had been travelling for more than three weeks. It was an exhausting trip, rushing from border to border during an uncertain wartime atmosphere. It was also blisteringly hot, with temperatures regularly in the mid-to-high thirties. Despite the composed tone of his newspaper reports, he suffered, relaying to relatives at home the hair-raising nature of the journey. Istanbul marked roughly the midway point from Rome to Jerusalem. The weather would only get hotter and the circumstances more fraught.
Reynolds journeyed south from Istanbul to Ankara, which had been the Turkish capital since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. There was much confusion about what was happening across Turkey’s southern border in Syria, which had been ruled by the French under a League of Nations mandate since the First World War. With France now under German occupation, there were fears of a Syrian uprising against the ruling power, whose authority was at risk of collapse. Reynolds visited the French consulate in Ankara to check on the status of his visa to cross Syria and ask if it allowed him to spend time in Beirut, which was also under a French mandate. ‘You will stay at your own risk and peril!’ was the abrupt reply, which did not give Reynolds confidence in the French ruling powers.
Reynolds crossed the border and travelled to Aleppo in the north of Syria. ‘The authority of the French is at present unimpaired, though their prestige, as was inevitable, has sadly suffered in the eyes of the native population,’ he reported. ‘All hopes for the future in both Syria, with its Muslim majority, and Lebanon, with its Christian, are based on a British victory.’566
He reported on French displeasure in Syria at the British Navy’s decision at the start of July to destroy the French fleet based at Mers-el-Kébir, west of the French Algerian port of Oran, to prevent it falling into possession of the enemy. More than a thousand French sailors were killed, causing widespread French anger towards Winston Churchill, who had ordered the operation. But among Christians and Muslims in the Middle East, Reynolds reported, the action had been well-received and seen as a sign of British strength. British naval dominance of the Mediterranean was regarded as essential.
Though their authority remained intact – for now – the French spirit was draining quickly throughout Reynolds’s time in Syria. Frenchmen felt that it was pointless for Britain to continue fighting, which made personal relations ‘difficult’ for Reynolds. ‘The attitude of French Syria is like that of a boxer who has been knocked out and feels that the defeat of another champion would excuse his own poor performance,’ he wrote.567
From Aleppo Reynolds travelled to Tripoli in the north of Lebanon (which would win independence from the French in 1943) and then to Beirut. The city greatly impressed Reynolds. ‘The beautiful city of Beirut, rising from the sapphire waters of the bay and surrounded by mountains, might be a city on the French Riviera.’568 He drove south through the desert, crossing through three checkpoints recently installed by the increasingly nervous French. Reynolds referred to ‘countless underground movements among the native population’ in Lebanon, which were spreading fears of insurrection. There were other fears too. With confidence low, ‘many men are anxious to return to their wives and children in France and in the colonies,’ Reynolds reported. The checkpoints had been installed partly because of worries among French generals that officers may try to escape into Palestine.
The coastal road south, with the Mediterranean on one side and desert on the other, was breathtaking. Though Reynolds was exhausted, tired and missing the comforts of home, it would have been one of the most exciting episodes of his life. The sun on his back, the fevered atmosphere of war pushing him forward, he crossed the frontier into Palestine about a month after leaving Rome. He motored on to Jerusalem and crossed the threshold of the ancient city walls in the middle of July. His journey was complete.
Jerusalem had been a magnet for foreign correspondents in the couple of years before Reynolds made the decision to travel to the city. The Daily Mail’s G. Ward Price had been there early in 1939. He described how the British High Commission building was surrounded by barbed-wire defences. ‘Sentries at the gates levelled their rifles at my car as it approached,’ he wrote. It was a nervous atmosphere.
Before the commencement of war, the city was a hotbed of spies and diplomats as rival powers sought to influence the future of this sacred Middle Eastern city. ‘Apart from the critical situation in Europe, the most troubled centre was Palestine, where the hostility between Arab and Jew amounted almost to a state of war,’ Price wrote. ‘In this campaign the British were defending Jewish immigrants against attacks from Arabs who feared and resented the economic consequences of the constant arrival of more Jewish settlers.’569
Another eminent foreign correspondent to report from the city was the Daily Express’s Delmer. He travelled there after reporting on the Munich Crisis, to offer his take on Arab fears that the rising tide of Jewish immigration was weakening their grip on Palestine. The country’s existing population did not trust the British authorities. Though the wave of immigration had been caused by Hitler’s persecution, they believed the German radio stories spreading fear and stoking anti-British sentiment.
‘The British are betraying us,’ said a spokesman of the Arab resistance movement to Delmer. ‘They allow more and more Jews to enter our country. The Jews buy our people’s land from the peasants with money. The peasants spend the money and become landless paupers. The Jews then settle the land with their people. If this is allowed to go on they will soon drive us out of our homeland and make it theirs.’570
On one occasion, a nervous Delmer was pleased to leave the rebel headquarters safely, and in his excitement he forgot to take off his head-dress as he passed a British checkpoint. ‘Alt!’ cried the guard. ‘What d’yes think yer playin’ at?’ he asked in a thick Scouse accent, ‘Lawrence of Arybia?’571 The tension was broken for a moment, but Jerusalem was far from an easy or carefree assignment.
That remained the case when Reynolds arrived in the summer of 1940, though there had been a slight easing of tensions since the start of war. Some Arabs in Palestine had come round to the idea that a German defeat would stem the flow of Jews into the country and perhaps encourage some to return. Jews in Palestine fully supported the ruling British powers, not least those who had escaped the horrors of Nazi Germany. ‘The French debacle came as a great shock to Palestine, but it has not shaken the confidence of the people in the ultimate result,’ the Telegraph’s roving war correspondent Arthur Merton wrote on 15 July.572
Soon after arriving in Jerusalem, Reynolds met up with Merton, who had been reporting from Palestine. The city was heavily fortified, as it had been since before the war because of the religious and territorial tensions. There was a nightly blackout across Palestine, which was regarded as a more likely target for German bombs than French-controlled parts of the Middle East. Reynolds filed a handful of reports after arriving in Jerusalem. He loved the city’s ancient history and religious significance, but tragically he was not to enjoy it for long. Weak from his long journey, he contracted malaria. There were no effective drugs available to handle the condition. He was passed into the care of doctors at the British government hospital, and in his fragile state, he caught pneumonia. There was little they could do.
But his pilgrimage was complete. He had made it to Jerusalem, one of the spiritual centres of his faith, and that knowledge brought him solace in his final hours. Broken memories of his travels flashed through his mind: meetings with Hitler, Mass at St Catherine’s in St Petersburg, tea with Rupert Brooke before the last war. He remembered his parents, his early years in the Church of England, and his colleagues in the press pack. He thought of the siblings he had left behind. On 20 August, he died.
EPILOGUE
News of Reynolds’s death was received with desperate sadness by his siblings in Belvoir Terrace. The fact that he had died in a distant land, and not surrounded at home by those who loved him, was felt sorely. But given the nature of his long career it was not altogether a surprise tha
t he had passed away overseas. They focused on his achievements and the joy he had brought to those around him in life.
The news left a household of four at the home in Cambridge. Reynolds’s sisters Kathleen and Marjorie, brother Ronald and Olga Rennet, a refugee they had taken in, remained. Rennet was able to buy a flat after Reynolds’s death thanks to money he left her in his will, which he had changed just days before leaving for Italy. Herbert Kaden and his mother soon left Cambridge but used to return to visit her, as well as the remaining Reynolds siblings, at intervals in the following years. ‘The whole family was fascinating. They were all very lovely – and kind to us,’ Kaden told me in 2015.573
In late August, just days after his brother’s death, Ronald received a phone call. A reporter from the Catholic Herald wished to talk about Rothay for an article he planned to mark his passing. Ronald duly obliged, grateful for the opportunity to discuss his brother’s many achievements, and talked without reservation. ‘He was once described, and not without justification, as Europe’s best-dressed correspondent,’ he said in tribute to his brother’s sartorial flair. Then, mindful of the publication he was talking to, Ronald turned to religion. ‘But what journalist friends could not so easily seize upon, and what did not appear obviously in his work, though it informed it, was his intense and active Catholicism.’
Ronald made clear that his brother had not been able to write all he wanted about the Nazis until returning to England. ‘All the Daily Mail readers missed of his acute and penetrating appraisal of the Nazi regime he put into his book When Freedom Shrieked,’ he said.
He knew all the Nazi leaders personally, and from the very beginning seemed to sense the evil in them, which at the time not everyone allowed. He referred to them all as gangsters, and was never impressed by Hitler’s social and economic experiments to the extent of losing sight of his underlying evil philosophy.574
Ronald was glad to highlight that Reynolds had seen Hitler and his associates for what they were at an earlier stage than his Daily Mail articles may have suggested. In the ensuing article the reporter was keen to press home this point, going further than Ronald wished. The reporter described Reynolds as a ‘man of the world of affairs whose Catholicism enabled him to appraise more accurately than his employers wanted, Europe’s evils’. The work conducted by Reynolds, the reporter continued, was ‘especially difficult in view of the difference in philosophy and outlook of the paper for which he worked and his very Catholic view of events taking place’.
When he saw these two sentences in print, so soon after his brother’s death, Ronald was deeply alarmed. He did not wish to make an enemy of the Daily Mail and its powerful owner. He wrote to the Catholic Herald making clear that the opinion belonged to the author and not him. He added, however, that his quotes on the subject were accurate. A small clarification followed in a later issue.
Ronald was chastened by this experience and rarely talked of his brother in public again. He no doubt felt guilty for not maintaining the discretion that his brother had showed to the end. Aside from hints in When Freedom Shrieked, his brother had never made public his anger at Lord Rothermere’s open support for Hitler. Publishing the book had been his riposte, the method by which he vented the views that he had been forced to withhold. Reynolds fully recognised the book may look like a belated attempt to save his reputation after years of seemingly toeing a pro-Nazi line. But he was content to publish and let readers decide without directly casting aspersions himself towards his former employer. Ronald felt as if he had slipped in allowing such sentiments to emerge in a conversation, and with a journalist at that.
And yet the sentiment was justified. His brother had been restricted in what he could write for the Daily Mail. His friends in the press, as wary as Ronald of falling foul of such a powerful newspaper, could only refer to the situation in cryptic terms. The habitually outspoken Douglas Reed merely observed that being Lord Rothermere’s correspondent in Berlin was a ‘difficult task’.
In later years, there were rumours that Reynolds’s death was the result of something more sinister than pneumonia. There was a theory that the Gestapo, having read his critical account of Nazi Germany, had tracked him down in Jerusalem. But there is no evidence for this. After the war, a ‘Black List’ did emerge of targets in Britain that the Gestapo would aim to eliminate in the event of a German invasion, but Reynolds had not been on the list. Predictably, Norman Ebbutt was. More surprising is that Reynolds’s colleague at the Mail, G. Ward Price, also featured. In his memoirs after the war, Price used this fact to defend himself against accusations that he had been too close to the Nazis.
In the years during and after the war, countless words were written about how the British press had reported the events of the 1930s. Had they been too trusting of Hitler, too ready to turn a blind eye to how the Nazis treated minorities? Had they been too ready to accept the government’s appeasement policy without question? Had the political stripe of newspaper owners been too important a factor in how events were reported? The commentator Malcolm Muggeridge highlighted this latter point as early as 1939. ‘Accounts of contemporary Germany,’ he wrote, ‘range between a gruesome picture of butterless woe and non-stop jamboree.’575 How could different newspapers reporting on the same situation report such different findings?
The four major newspapers that emerged from this period with their reputations enhanced were the Manchester Guardian, Daily Telegraph, News Chronicle and Morning Post. The Manchester Guardian was the newspaper that most frequently and stridently highlighted the horror of life inside Nazi Germany. Its roving correspondent Frederick Voigt was fearless to continue reporting on the brutality despite the genuine danger to his life. His editor William Crozier was overall a supportive and encouraging presence, though he should have listened to Voigt earlier about rearmament.
The Daily Telegraph did not have a correspondent in Berlin who shone to Voigt’s extent, but was nevertheless a strong and independent voice that made the right calls on rearmament and appeasement. While other right-wing newspapers took the easy route of vocally arguing for more arms while also encouraging appeasement, the Telegraph – together with its star columnist Winston Churchill – was on the correct side of both debates. Though it ceased to exist as an independent title in 1937, the Morning Post was an early voice campaigning for more rearmament and its correspondent in Berlin, Karl Robson, was one of the first British correspondents to be thrown out for his fearless reporting. It closed before having to make a judgement call on appeasement.
Intervention by senior figures at the News Chronicle at the time of the Munich Agreement was a stain on the newspaper’s largely unblemished track record during the 1930s. Exceptional correspondents including Vernon Bartlett and Ian Colvin broke news about the reality of Nazi Germany. ‘When I went out to Berlin I was told that I could safely report any kind of political news without fear,’ its correspondent H. D. Harrison later wrote.576
The brave attitude of most News Chronicle reporters is exemplified by John Segrue, expelled by the Nazis from Germany and then Austria. He was in the Balkans when war commenced and was working in Belgrade in 1941 when the German army arrived. Other reporters had left on the last available British ship but Segrue had stayed. ‘I must send my story first,’ he told a messenger who was incredulous at his refusal to evacuate.577 The Nazis captured him and he died a year later in a German concentration camp at the age of fifty-nine. Segrue stands out as one of the bravest reporters of the era and was not forgotten. In 1981 he was honoured by the Guild of Jewish Journalists for having ‘alerted the world to the true evil of the Nazi philosophy’.578
The other major newspapers of the era have more mixed records when it comes to their coverage of Germany. The Sunday Times was too quick to support Chamberlain and its influential ‘Scrutator’ column on foreign affairs was too often on the wrong side of the debate. W. W. Hadley was too close to the Prime Minister. The other Sunday title, The Observer, provided some strong on-the-ground r
eporting, for instance, when it sent Shiela Grant Duff to report on events in the Saar in 1935. But as the decade wore on, the views of its domineering editor James Garvin steered the newspaper’s approach. He was a staunch supporter of appeasement until Hitler’s tanks were on their way to Prague in 1939. The Daily Herald also offered periods of strong reporting, but it should have done more, given its influential position with the Labour Party, to drive forward opposition to the Conservative government’s policy of appeasement towards the end of the decade.
The Times boasted one of the finest foreign correspondents of the age in Norman Ebbutt, who was sceptical of Nazi claims and maintained a shrewd attitude in his reports. His work, however, was overshadowed by the support his editor Geoffrey Dawson and deputy editor Robert Barrington-Ward gave to Chamberlain and Halifax as they pursued an appeasement agenda. The evidence about the extent to which Ebbutt’s reports were interfered with is inconclusive. While his editors certainly seemed keen to please Germany, his own reports were often long and needed cutting. There was certainly not a regimented campaign to suppress his work, but there were many occasions when there was subtle interference, and the period represents a blot on the paper’s history.
Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express was a curate’s egg in respect to Hitler and Germany. The Canadian baron deserves credit for funding a network of foreign correspondents and the high volume of dispatches it yielded, but some of those reports were skewed. There was bias in the flamboyant Sefton Delmer’s early reports, which was most likely a by-product of his inexperience rather than anything more sinister. As the decade wore on Beaverbrook interfered to introduce a pro-appeasement stance. Just as Delmer was too close to the Nazis in Berlin, so was Beaverbrook too close to the politicians in London.
Reporting on Hitler Page 26