The Great Silence: Britain from the Shadow of the First World War to the Dawn of the Jazz Age

by Juliet Nicolson

  That afternoon, on the first day the guns fell silent, the announcement of the Kaiser’s abdication and his flight to Holland was posted outside The Times’ office in Printing House Square. A group of passers-by gathered around the billboard and began to cheer. But the newspaper staff noted that the tone of the cheers was not ‘hilarious’. ‘The shadows of the last few years remained,’ the reporter noted, even though ‘the silver lining of passing clouds’ seemed to be reflected in the eyes of the passers-by.

  A week earlier, although there had been no official word that the Germans were planning a surrender, hundreds of German guns without public explanation or fanfare were placed along the length of the Mall from Buckingham Palace. Brought directly from the French battlefields, they resembled the wounded enemy soldiers themselves, pockmarked and stained. Final, brutal evidence of the war had arrived in the heart of the capital.

  In New York there had been a muddle. On Thursday 6 November rumours that the end of the war was imminent had become so pronounced that they were taken for fact. Glancing out of the window of her couture cutting room on to the pavement below, Lucy Duff Gordon, the famous British dress designer, New York resident and survivor of the Titanic disaster six years earlier, was amazed to see old men letting off fireworks and staid-looking fathers kissing lovely young women who were quite clearly perfect strangers. At 2.30 p.m. the Stock Exchange closed and one hundred and fifty-five tons of ticker tape fluttered down into the street. Lucy found herself swept up in the excitement and, although her couture business had not been thriving in the manner she would have liked, she impulsively offered all her dress-cutters time off and unlimited champagne for the rest of the day. The day passed, Lucy noted, ‘in an orgy of celebration’. As dusk was falling another official announcement was made. It had been a false alarm. There was no armistice as yet. America who had joined the war nineteen months earlier remained at war.

  Five days later, on 11 November New York felt both sheepish and exhausted and Lucy noticed that the champagne they still felt compelled to drink had lost its fizz.

  In London, the newspaper compositors had been given six hours’ notice for assembling the size of type suitable for announcing the news that people had been longing for. The Armistice headlines were an inch high and small boys on bicycles careered through the rain-drenched streets carrying bundles of damp newspapers yelling the single word ‘Victory’.

  In front of Buckingham Palace the white marble statue of Queen Victoria turned black with the number of people who had climbed into the old sovereign’s lap and clung to the winged statues that surrounded her seated figure. The royal family appeared briefly on the balcony acknowledging the cheering crowds, a reassuring symbol for some that Britain was returning to normal.

  In London’s East End, the eleven o’clock sirens were at first confused for those that announced an air raid. The death of several children in Poplar two years before, when a Zeppelin bomb had exploded in the grounds of a school, had not been forgotten. Children in Canning Town were terrified when a shop handed out armfuls of free fireworks. The noise made by the rockets and Catherine wheels were frighteningly reminiscent of the deadly German bombs.

  Duff Cooper, glamorous diplomat and Grenadier, had returned from the battle lines a few days earlier. Back in London he felt overcome with despondency and unable to go down into the streets and join the Armistice Day party. As he watched the scene below him, with the coloured fairy lights threaded through the tricolour draperies, the cheering and the waving of flags, he was ‘overcome with melancholy’. He shuddered at the dancing and the noise of celebration and could think only of his friends ‘who were dead’. After dining at the Ritz on food that was ‘cold and nasty’ he slipped away as soon as possible, feeling the infinite sadness of loss wash over his girlfriend, Diana Manners, reducing her to tears. There was another reason, however, for Duff’s low spirits. He had a temperature of 102 and he suspected that he might be suffering from ‘a sharp attack’ of influenza.

  Florence Younghusband, wife of General George Younghusband who had commanded British and Indian troops during the Turkish invasion of Egypt, was travelling on the top of a London bus at the moment of the ceasefire. In front of her was a soldier, his face shattered by a shell. As Florence watched, the soldier ‘looked straight ahead and remained stonily silent’. Suddenly the lady bus conductor collapsed into the seat beside her and, leaning her head on Florence’s shoulder, she wept. Her husband, she confided to Florence, had died two months before and she felt incapable of celebrating. Florence, whose husband had been invalided home in 1916, felt herself to be a lucky one.

  Susan and Tom Owen listened as the church bells of Shrewsbury began ringing, and said a prayer of thanks that their three sons had been spared, before going to answer the knock on the front door. A young man stood outside patiently, a telegram in his hand. The news concerning Wilfred, their eldest boy, could not have been more terrible.

  Vera Brittain heard the sounds that signalled of the end of the war through the window of the London hospital annexe where her hands were buried deep in a basin of pinkish water. Standing in her nurse’s uniform she continued to wash out and disinfect the bloody dressing bowls. Her pointed chin was set firm in concentration at her task. She did not interrupt her work, because ‘like a sleeper who is determined to go on dreaming after being told to wake up’ she had no interest in the jubilation going on outside the window. Only three years earlier she had written to her fiancé contemplating this exact moment. ‘Would she be one of those who take a happy part in the triumph?’ she had wondered, or instead would she ‘listen to the merriment with a heart that breaks and ears that try to keep out the mirthful sounds?’

  A few weeks after receiving the news in December 1915 that her 20-year-old fiancé Roland Leighton had been killed, Vera Brittain had gone to the house of Roland’s parents. That morning the postman had delivered a large brown paper packet. When Vera walked into their sitting room she had seen Roland’s clothes laid out all over the floor encrusted with mud. Here were clothes that showed what even a bluntly worded telegram could not show. The mud on this bedraggled set of garments ‘had not the usual clean smell of earth but it was as though it were saturated with dead bodies’. Here was mud of a different kind to ordinary English mud or even ordinary French mud. This was mud that clung, tenacious even when the struggle was over. This was death mud. In that moment, breathing in the dreadful smell of the jacket, the waistcoat, the breeches soaked in the dying blood of the man she had loved, Vera understood the reality of war, of decay, of mortality. Buried deep in an inner pocket she had found the only possession of Roland’s to escape the stench of death: a photograph of Vera herself. The warmth of his body had never lost the power to repel the damp and decay.

  Walking through the rain on 11 November 1918, with some fellow Voluntary Aid Detachment nurses, Vera slowly registered that the streets were brightly lit for the first time in four years. Her joyless-ness grew with the same speed as the elation that surrounded her. No adored brother and no longed for fiancé were here to celebrate with her; there was therefore nothing to celebrate. That evening, finding it impossible to recapture ‘the lost youth that the war had stolen’, she too realised for the first time ‘with all that full realisation meant’ that the world had altered irrevocably and that ‘the dead were dead and would never return’.

  The novelist and spiritualist Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was sitting in the lobby of the Grosvenor Hotel in Park Lane. Exactly two weeks before Maude Onions’ signal had gone out along the wires, Conan Doyle’s son, weakened by a wound he had suffered in the war, had caught influenza and died. As Sir Arthur sat in the lobby, still barely able to register the catastrophic news, he saw a well-dressed woman push her way through the revolving doors of the hotel. Carrying a Union flag in each of her hands, she slid into a solitary waltz, slowly, elegantly and silently making her way around the large lobby before spinning her way back through the circling door, then out again into the street.


  The novelist Arnold Bennett welcomed the damp foggy day because at least it was ‘an excellent thing to dampen hysteria and bolshevism’. He had noticed that in places there was a sort of madness in the air. Siegfried Sassoon was disgusted by what he saw. The poet was on sick-leave in Oxford where in the Cornmarket he saw that a woman had tucked her skirts right up to her naked waist and was playing to the cheering crowd, waving a Union flag at the army and navy cadets with unashamed abandon. Taking the train up to London, Sassoon found ‘an outburst of mob patriotism ... a loathsome ending to the loathsome tragedy of the last four years’.

  The morning’s peace announcement had come as something of a surprise and so it was not until later that many of the celebrants found their stride. But for some the effort was beyond them.

  Ottoline Morrell, hostess, socialite, bohemian, friend of Virginia Woolf, felt ‘too numb to respond’ to the news, her thoughts turning to the distress of the young children of German prisoners of war as she wondered how she could contribute to their new life in England. Perhaps she could arrange Morris dancing or carpentry lessons in the village hall where she lived at Garsington in Oxfordshire? That evening she emerged with the painter Mark Gertler into Charing Cross Road from a performance of the ballet at the Coliseum and was confronted by a disturbing scene in the street. The lifeless arms of a very drunk young boy with one leg were being hauled over his crutches by two ‘rough, thick set’ men but the arms would not stay in place. As the limp youth collapsed, his companions tried to drag him along the ground. Ottoline and Gertler crossed the road towards them but the men spoke angrily, snapping at them to go away and leave them alone. War’s contribution to this young man’s life, Ottoline wrote later in her diary, had been to ‘maim him in body and ruin him in soul’.

  The Russian impresario Serge Diaghilev was back in London on Armistice night and had dined with the writer Osbert Sitwell in Swan Walk in Chelsea. After dinner the party went up to Trafalgar Square where they found a packed crowd ‘sometimes joining up, linking hands, dashed like the waves of the sea against the sides of the Square, against the railings of the National Gallery, sweeping up so far even as beyond the shallow stone steps of St Martin’s in the Fields’. Packed between the flag-waving, hat-brandishing revellers, cigarettes stuck to their lower lips, mouths opened wide to yell out the cheers, Sitwell examined Diaghilev’s reaction to the scene. ‘With something of the importance of a public monument attaching to his scale and build, bear-like in his fur coat, [he] gazed with an air of melancholy exhaustion at the crowds’.

  Diaghilev often appeared exhausted. Excessive consumption of food seemed in particular to sap his energy. The French couturier Coco Chanel had noticed how, forehead already perspiring, the impresario would not even bother to remove his white gloves before helping himself to a proffered box of chocolates, continuing to ‘finish the box, his fat cheeks and his heavy chin wobbling as he munched ... his trousers held up by a couple of safety pins’.

  Cynthia Curzon (known as Cimmie to her friends), younger daughter of the former Viceroy of India, was also in Trafalgar Square, straddling a stone lion, a Union flag wrapped around her shoulders, watching the German guns (that had been brought into the square from the Mall) being set alight. While Cimmie joined in with all those around her belting out the rousing words of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ into the night air, a dark-haired officer of athletic appearance stood watching her, a look of despair on his face. On her descent to the pavement he challenged her elation.

  ‘Do any of you think for one moment of the loss of life, the devastation and misery?’ he asked a somewhat abashed Cimmie. The officer introduced himself. He was Oswald Mosley, and at the age of 21 was standing as Coalition candidate for the Harrow seat at the following month’s general election.

  Doris Scovell, assistant cook, was out on the town that night, her hand tucked into the crook of the arm of her sweetheart, the footman Will Titley. They had both been given the evening off from their domestic duties below stairs at the grand house at 142 Piccadilly. The night of 11 November 1918 was an occasion for courting couples to go out and celebrate.

  Not far from number 142, a celebratory evening at the Savoy was threatening to get out of hand as delirious members of the RAF swung from the chandeliers. The following morning the dustbins of the hotel contained 2,700 smashed glasses. Nearby in Regent Street an exuberant young woman was sitting on the roof of a taxi waving flags that she had snaffled from the shelves of Selfridges department store. Restaurants and cafés that had been closed after three hours each evening for the last four years remained open to revellers until 11.00 p.m. by special order of the Prefect of Police.

  At the Apollo Theatre the production of Arlette starring Miss Winifred Barnes was interrupted as Herbert Buckmaster, husband of the actress Gladys Cooper, watched a young man leap from a box on to the dress circle tier. Landing neatly on the stage, he threw himself into the leading lady’s arms and gave her a resounding kiss. The audience ‘howled with delight’.

  Violet Keppel was in a mood to feel ‘a reckless sense of combined release and anti-climax’. Despite the death of so many of Violet’s friends, making her accustomed to requiring ‘superhuman courage to open a newspaper’, the end of the war coincided with the intense flowering of a great love affair. Although the object of her passion was in bed alone being monitored with some concern by her husband after an outbreak of flu, nothing could diminish Violet’s personal happiness that day, not even the absence through illness of her lover Vita Sackville-West.

  On the evening of the ceasefire David Garnett, a pacifist who had been working as a farm labourer at Charleston, the East Sussex farm of the painter Vanessa Bell, found the London streets milling with lorryloads of ecstatic factory girls, bearing the yellow stains of acid that had leaked over their hands and faces as they made up the munitions. Exhilarated by the sight, Garnett met up with the artist Duncan Grant and together they went to a flat in the Adelphi to join the critic Clive Bell, the painters Roger Fry and Dora Carrington, the economist Maynard Keynes, the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova (who had come straight from her performance in Schéhérazade at the Coliseum) and Lytton Strachey, the fêted author of the recently published biographical sketches Eminent Victorians. Osbert Sitwell and Diaghilev arrived at the party directly from Trafalgar Square and Sitwell watched in surprise as ‘the tall flagging figure’ of Strachey ‘with his rather narrow angular beard, long inquisitive nose … iigg[ed] about with an amiable debility’. Strachey, Sitwell concluded, was ‘unused to dancing’. Sitwell’s brother Sacheverell was there too, confusing the uncomprehending Diaghilev, whose most fluent expression in English was ‘more chocolate pudding’, and who could not understand why Sacheverell insisted on catching the last train to Aldershot. ‘Who was this Aldershot? She must be very beautiful.’

  Soon D. H. Lawrence arrived with his wife Frieda but Garnett was shocked by his friend’s appearance. The light had left the famous novelist’s eyes and Garnett’s loving greeting was received with a flatness bordering on indifference. Another friend, Cynthia Asquith, had noticed that the war had given Lawrence the appearance of someone in ‘acute physical pain’. Grief and anger combined to prompt him to confess to her that his soul had been ‘fizzling savagely’, and despite ‘radiant lucid intervals’ Cynthia Asquith thought him to be in a state of’delirium’. Garnett, hurt by the rebuff and incapable of an articulate response, gathered Carrington into his arms and whirled her into the centre of the room as someone began to play on the piano.

  But Lawrence’s presence was impossible to ignore and Garnett returned to hear him speak. ‘I suppose you think the war is over and that we shall go back to the kind of world you lived in before,’ Lawrence snapped, in a tone of deep scorn. ‘But the war isn’t over,’ he continued, answering his own question. ‘The hate and evil is greater now than ever ... It makes me sick to see you rejoicing like a butterfly in the last rays of the sun before the winter ... hate will be dammed up in men’s hearts and
will show itself in all sorts of ways which will be worse than war. Whatever happens there can be no peace on earth.’ And with his words joy and merriment left the room.

  Later, at Waterloo Station Sacheverel Sitwell, who was trying to catch the last train to Aldershot, saw groups of women staggering along the platform, so drunk that they had to be rolled along ‘like milk cans and piled into the guard’s van’.

  The Countess of Fingall, the half English, half Irish society hostess, was also unable to see the promised benefits that a British victory would bring. ‘I used to think and say during the war that if ever that list of Dead and Wounded could cease, I would never mind anything or grumble at anything again,’ she recalled. ‘But when the Armistice came at last, we seemed drained of all feeling. One felt nothing. We took up our lives again or tried to take them up. The world we had known was vanished. We hunted again but ghosts rode with us. We sat at table and there were absent faces.’

  Monica Grenfell, the sister of Julian and Billy who had both lost their lives to the war, wrote to her mother Lady Desborough that day of how she felt there to be ‘agonising sadness in this calm after strife’.

  There had been no armistice celebration in East Peckham in Kent where kindly Elizabeth Tester managed the village laundry. Despite her son Edward’s efforts to be brave, his letters from the trenches had been profoundly upsetting. Mrs Tester sensed the loneliness barely concealed between the jokey but highly accomplished line drawings. Ted, as he was known by all those who loved him, always had a talent, she told her friends, but the drawings and the cheery requests for a pot of his mother’s home-made jam, the thought of which ‘makes my mouth water’, did not deceive his mother. Occasionally his homesickness slipped right through the bravado. ‘I don’t think I shall grumble much about anything when I get back again,’ he had written to his mother. ‘I shall know how to appreciate a good home.’