by Mark Rowe
which at least tells us something about what was popular with young men. Every possible guilt was piled on men: they were lazy while their fellow men were fighting for good (and God), and ‘if you sonny don’t fall in, girls would cut you dead’. If you had a wife, your children would ask what you did ‘in the war that kept men free’, and burden you with more shame.
Would that really happen? Wouldn’t women in fact be more glad to be with you, because fewer men were around? Would your children care in the least about a past war? Surely they would mind more if you were dead in Belgium. And as for keeping men free, if you were scratching a living down a mine or in a factory, breaking your back, black with dirt, did you feel that free? Where there was strength in numbers, as on coalfields, resisters to the calls for volunteers felt confident enough to air their disagreement in public. In a significant exchange of letters in early September in the Cannock Advertiser, a weekly covering a coal-mining part of Staffordshire, first an anonymous old soldier wished for a local branch of the ‘white feather brigade’. He mocked young men, three or four in some families, he said, who were ‘staying at home to keep mother’. The next week a Heath Hayes man called George Higgins mocked the old soldier back, saying he ‘wears petticoats’ - that is, wanted women to do his work. Evidently already women were handing ‘white feathers’ to men who they thought ought to be in uniform, seeking to shame them, by implying they were cowards. In Cannock at least, only the opponent of the ‘white feather brigade’ had the self-confidence to give his name.
That was how the ‘white feather brigade’ worked - they took it upon themselves to judge others, while they didn’t have the courage to say who they were or to ask a man to explain himself - as he may have had reasons for not wearing a uniform. Miles Thomas, who went on to a distinguished business career, and indeed served his country well in both world wars, recalled in his autobiography how his Birmingham employer was happy that he stayed at work, making munitions; he had volunteered for a defence unit; and at 17 was too young for the army anyway. One evening on the corner of New Street and Hill Street in the city centre, ‘a giggling chit of a girl’ handed him a white feather:
The back of my neck and the whole of my face blushed scarlet as I hurriedly stuffed the beastly thing in my pocket. I was shocked beyond measure. I suddenly didn’t want anyone to see me ...
Thomas walked to his digs ‘burning with an anger that was fringed with shame’ and soon left the city to become an armoured car driver. The white feather worked. What was the motive of that woman handing it out? A wish to help her country? Indignation that her love had gone, and not others? A bit of mischief? Or malice? Did women join the ‘white feather brigade’ for the same reason men volunteered for the war, and people crowded on seaside beaches each August - they wanted above all to do something right, because what everyone else was saying, or doing, had to be right? How can we explain Thomas’ reaction - why did the silent accusation by a stranger cut him so? He felt he could not face society; even though he was the victim of a random, unjust, prank (did the girl hand out many others, or did the fun soon wear off?); and even though joining the army would make his mother cry. For the symbol of the feather to work, it did require Thomas to have a sense of shame, stirred by a woman.
Not everyone approved of such a trick. Early in September the Harrow Observer columnist ‘Socrates’ deplored anonymous postcards with words pasted out of newspapers, urging the ‘loafers of England’ to ‘for God’s sake play the man’, and volunteer. Evidently two men (who had volunteered) sent their hate-mail to Socrates. Presumably the postcard-paster knew the men to send cards to, but felt unable to talk to them; or maybe he did, but felt he had to blackmail them as well. Interestingly Socrates throughout August wrote conventionally, describing the war as a test for the nation, urging young men not to be ‘idling about’, and so on. According to Socrates, men ought to know the proper thing to do, without nasty cards through the post.
The fact was, many men, maybe most, could not work out for themselves what was proper. Nothing in their lives told them how to react to a continental war. The men of affairs - the politicians of all main parties, the lords and generals - knew Britain faced a crisis. The rest had to be won over, whether by conviction, argument, the pressure of the herd, or most likely some of each. If you were inside Sheffield Artillery Drill Hall, for example, on Tuesday night, September 8, packed to hear Lord Charles Beresford, you were halfway to the army already. You were singing, over and over, songs popular with the troops such as It’s A Long Way to Tipperary. The band of the local regiment, the Hallamshires, played patriotic tunes (shouldn’t they have been at the war?). Listening to Beresford - in his khaki uniform - in such an intoxicating setting, the crowd around you clapping everything, it would take some gumption to spot Beresford’s outright lies (he reckoned the authorities were running the war with ‘faultless organisation’). As he came from near the centre of power in London - nearer than you ever were, at any rate - you had to take what he said on trust: those commanding the fleet were known to him. They could not be bettered; “Germany would be beaten and justly beaten but we must have men,” and he appealed to the nuts, dandies and athletes.
If you believed Beresford, the men at the top were setting an example; the young, fashionable and sporty types ought to follow, and think of someone other than themselves for a change. In fairness to Beresford, if you listened closely, he did spell out what war would mean. They had to fight to the end, he said, whatever the sacrifice. And how much sacrifice? Beresford said the Empire was inexhaustible in men and almost inexhaustible in riches. “If we had time to do it the British Empire could put almost 20 million men into the field.” Would victory over Germany, a country with more men than England, take 20 million? As Beresford was insisting on a fight to the end, would one side win only when the other - Germany, or England - exhausted its riches, in wealth, and men?
Cleverly the organisers did not give you chance to dwell on any questions; they made it easy for you to volunteer while you were still under the influence of the meeting. Buses waited outside to take you to the recruiting halls. Beresford turned up there, recruiting still, in what the Sheffield Daily Independent the next day called ‘his usual breezy style’. Beresford told the men: “I like the look of you, and am glad indeed to see so many of you, but when the enemy see you they won’t like the look of you. Every man jack in the country will be proud of you.”
Chapter 15
United?
England, said Henry VIII in words echoed by Shakespeare in King John, can never be conquered so long as it remained united.
Wolsey, by A F Pollard, 1953 edition
I
Beresford did good work that night in Sheffield: 125 men took the oath, and who could say how many more thought harder about volunteering afterwards? The thousands in the meeting who were too old, or too female to join the army, would add to the climate of opinion that men who could go, should go. As Beresford, the ‘white feather brigade’ and their followers took care to impress on everyone, right was on their side, even if it meant sacrifice.
Of all Beresford’s remarks, the most relaxed ones - and therefore most significant - came after the proper meeting, in the more intimate setting of the recruitment hall. As the men there had heeded him, he no longer had to win them over; he only had to wish them good luck. Every man in the country will be proud of you, Beresford told them. How did he know? Beresford and his kind, based in London and dashing from meeting to meeting, had no way to gauge public opinion. It merely suited them to claim that the country was united. If it was, why did only 125 men come forward that night? Surely that meant most of the men had gone home ignoring him, at least for the time being, or had not turned up at all? And if the country was so keen to fight, why were Beresford and others like him having to convince people to volunteer?
II
The recruitment rallies began one month after Britain began the war, n
ot because recruitment was flagging, but because that was as fast as politics could go. News reached people weekly, at most daily in papers; at best a town or city paper would bring out several editions over several hours as the very latest news came in. Meetings would come together, speakers and venues arranged, by letters through the post, at the very fastest fixed over the telephone or by telegram. News of such meetings, again, would reach people through the papers, or on posters. Labour and trade union speakers, if ignored by unfriendly newspapers, might have to advertise their gatherings by chalk, on pavements. Word of mouth would take over. Likewise, newspaper buyers passed their paper to a neighbour or workmate. Newspapers reached many more readers than copies sold; but far from everyone, all the time.
Robert Blakeby for instance, the London draper’s employee, according to his diary like many people heard about the ‘threatened European war’ by buying a newspaper. On July 29 he wrote: “Mr Burgess (advert department) said he would give me his Daily News and Leader every night instead of throwing it away.” For the first time on August 13, walking after work to his mother’s to eat dinner, Blakeby ‘read Selfridges war news on the way’, evidently displayed in the Oxford Street department store’s windows to draw customers. While on a week-and-a-half’s holiday at the end of August Blakeby bought his own newspaper, and on August 31 - the day he went by train to Skegness and back - he bought two. Besides learning the news, the act of reading a newspaper gave readers a shared experience. Meetings, as in peacetime, were the way men of power explained the news without the newspaper’s slant, and gave their own message, whether party-political or religious. Beresford and the rest were making the first effort of wartime to tell people what they should do.
Some, speakers and listeners alike, welcomed the unity that war brought, as a contrast from the conflicts of peacetime. At a meeting in Stafford on Monday August 31, Lord Dartmouth said what others did on other stages. “They did not,” he said, according to the Stafford Newsletter, “forget that six weeks ago we were at each other’s throats over questions of politics; there was no party now. There were no classes now. Today we were all Britons united in a common cause to face a common danger.” As at many meetings, songs were a way of binding people. At Stafford, the meeting began with the national anthem, and then the anthem of their French allies, the Marseillaise, ‘which was not a success’ as the Newsletter put it politely.
Assuming Dartmouth was correct, the change over six weeks from national conflict to unity came in stages. Before any thought of war, the trade union leader Ben Tillett could dismiss talk of war as imperialism, the work of the army and navy and their cheer-leaders, with nothing in it for the workers. Tillett told a meeting in Walsall in June: “If the working man had any sense at all, he would be only too glad to see the Germans invade their country.” Once war came, the likes of Tillett had to change their tune, shut up, or face being called a friend of the enemy. Because as the Hull MP Sir Mark Sykes put it in a letter dated (probably) Thursday July 30 - the night he set off from London to command his Yorkshire battalion on exercise in north Wales - “this has put an entirely new complexion on affairs”:
the Nationalists are behaving vilely and also the Radicals and Labour Party - the Nationalists boast that they will not have a united front without Home Rule on the statute book - in this they are very foolish - I believe the Ulster volunteers will volunteer to serve us - this should smash the Irish because they are avowedly against us now - if it comes to war, the Government have got to face coalition with us, as the extremists intend to vote against them, all this if it comes out will tend to help us toward National solidarity.
Sir Mark was thinking of uniting with the Liberals, but judging by his tone, only Liberals who thought like him; he did not feel as welcoming towards socialists, Irish nationalists or peace-preferring Liberals (‘Radicals’). Once Germany invaded Belgium, and Britain went to war, men who had sincerely stood against war had second thoughts. The trade unionist and Labour MP for Derby, J H (Jimmy) Thomas, by September was sitting on the same platform as his political and social opposite, the Duke of Devonshire, lord lieutenant of Derbyshire. As Thomas said at the time, and in his end of career memoir (a point worth making, because public figures are not always as consistent), the war was not a question of political parties, nor between capitalists (who made workers do all the killing); the war was between nations, and between, so Thomas insisted, ‘might and right’. Thomas still took care to defend his own kind; he asked that employers look after workers, so that volunteers for the army could look after their families.
The socialist Robin Page Arnot, in London again in August, had few visitors at the Fabian Research Department off The Strand, after he, other Fabians and socialists debated the end of capitalism in the Lake District. According to him, first the war bewildered people, then caught them in what he called a ‘patriotic wave’: “and most of them were to be swept into the torrent”. Labour politicians J H Thomas and Arthur Henderson, who spoke up for the war, were scorned by purists like Arnot, as somehow weak enough to be caught by the ‘tide’ of feeling for war. It’s at least as fair to say that Thomas and Henderson were sticking up (as best they could) for their country, and against the older enemy - capitalists at home or abroad who wanted to screw more out of workers for less. The likes of J H Thomas were already having to defend the principle of voluntary service against the imperialists, who even before the war had wanted conscription (like Germany, which nearly everyone agreed was so wicked). Forcing men to join the army, and knuckle under generally, would mean even less power for working men. In short, wartime Britain had the same divides, whichever way you described it, between rich and poor; capitalist and wage-earner; educated white-collar and ignorant and dirty (or no) collar. Some did believe in unity, and found it remarkable; such as M W Colchester-Wemyss, chairman of Gloucestershire county council, who (in a fine example of local government) set up a general committee. He wrote to the King of Siam about its first meeting on August 19:
All sorts and conditions of men and women were there, all distinctions of class or politics or religion were forgotten. One moment I would be talking to a duke, the next perhaps to a trade union leader then perhaps to the wife of an earl and directly afterwards to the daughter of a butcher then to the bishop of the diocese, a minute afterwards to a nonconformist minister but with one and all the case was the same; all differences of class religion and politics were forgotten ... and they did me the compliment of accepting almost without alteration the scheme I had prepared.
Colchester-Wemyss had the usual charitable and sometimes vague ideas, such as women to make garments for the troops; and do-gooders in each district to care for the wounded and to help soldiers’ families in distress. Without doubting that Colchester-Wemyss meant well, as did the 180 people he invited (and nearly all turned up): after they left the room, was anything different? The war had given the country a common enemy. That did not mean that anyone felt more like trusting men of other parties and opposing interests who (as Dartmouth and others admitted) had been ‘at each other’s throats’. Men did not suddenly change character; or if they did, goodwill could wane. It’s telling that even at the very start of the war, when you might have expected fellow-feeling to be strongest, few spoke like the Yorkshire Telegraph and Star did on August 7: “This is a People’s War,” its editorial ended. Few people said it, because few believed it. Britain was no more ‘one people at war, all pulling together’, than it had ever been in peacetime.
III
Besides, the war divided Britain in new ways, showing people as the good and bad characters they were. We have already met the Conservative MP Lord Charles Beresford who loved the sound of his own voice. He went too far in the hall of the Carlton Club on the Thursday evening, August 27, in the hearing of several members; we know because one of them, the Conservative MP Arthur Lee, told on him.
Winston Churchill sent a letter to Beresford on August 30 that he had heard Bere
sford was in the habit of talking ‘in a rash and loose way about the First Sea Lord’, Prince Louis Battenberg. Churchill, as the politician in charge at the Admiralty, made this his business. The prince was a lifelong Royal Navy man; he married a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. King George V likewise was a grandson of Victoria, who had married Prince Albert, a German; Battenberg, too, had come from Germany. In short, when Beresford said (as Lee insisted he did) that all Germans should leave the country, including highly placed ones, and Prince Louis ought to resign, Beresford had to watch out: it might have sounded like a threat to the king.
Beresford understood the danger he was in, and like the bully he was, or because he sensed attack was the best form of defence, he went after the tell-tale, not the more powerful minister. Lee wrote to Churchill on the Saturday, August 29, from his weekend home in the Chilterns, Chequers Court: “I have just been called up on the telephone by Beresford who has assailed me with a torrent of violent abuse in consequence of a letter which he says he has received from you.” Lee was not the first or the last to learn how thankless it is to be a snitch. Beresford, according to Lee, called the report ‘a malicious libel and a foul untruth’; in other words, Beresford was threatening Lee.
The ins and outs we have to guess, because in his letter of August 30 Churchill said he considered the incident closed. Churchill had warned Beresford to watch his mouth; the only man left unhappy was Lee. In another letter to Churchill, from his Mayfair address on Monday August 31, Lee noted that Beresford was also complaining,
however absurdly, that I had violated club law or the decencies of social intercourse by repeating a private conversation. It takes some time for even the most sensible people to realise what being at war means and they are apt to cling to social shibboleths even when the enemy is at the gates!