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

by Juliet Nicolson

  The second film, With Lawrence in Arabia, centred on Thomas’s irresistible mix of what he listed as ‘biblical places, camels, veiled women, palm trees, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, deserts, Arabs, cavalry charges and the story of a mysterious young hero’. In Chase’s footage the humanity of the Arabian world was never missing. Arabs stared gravely into Chase’s camera lens, as British soldiers, less composed, self-conscious and prone to nervous giggling, posed as if for the still photograph they were more familiar with. Thomas himself, wearing his American army uniform and scarf-swathed headdress, occasionally ambled into the scene.

  Soon the show transferred to the larger setting of Madison Square Garden, a performance space the equivalent to London’s Olympia and one of the largest theatres on the North American continent. After that Thomas took his show to Canada and an unprepared and amazed audience heard the astonishing tale at the Massey Hall in Toronto on 6 June. The following morning readers of the Toronto Star marvelled at descriptions of this ‘Uncrowned King’ and Lowell Thomas’s ‘astounding’ story about a ‘British Boy who united the Arabs’. The tale, the paper said, seemed to belong more properly in the fictional pages of Rider Haggard or Kipling.

  Returning to New York the final performance at Madison Square Garden was once again a sell-out. An influential Briton had slipped into his place in the stalls. Mr Percy Burton, impresario and manager of such stars as Sarah Bernhardt and Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, rushed backstage as soon as the show was over and managed to detain Thomas long enough to tell him of his passionate insistence on a transfer to London. Thomas said it would be quite impossible. The show was already booked in theatres along the length and across the breadth of the United States. Burton was determined and persuasive. Thomas weakened. He might be able to manage a brief trip over the Atlantic, during the hottest period of the American summer, when the atmosphere in theatres there was so stifling that performances became impossible. But Thomas, sensing the upper hand was his, made two extraordinary conditions for the proposed trip. First, he asked that the most famous theatre of all, Drury Lane, should be booked for the showing, and secondly he required the King himself to issue a personal invitation to Thomas to bring the production to England. Burton was not easily beaten. Returning to London he pulled strings, made telephone calls and sent a cable to Thomas. Drury Lane was unavailable but would the stage of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden be acceptable? And yes, King George V was delighted to extend a personal invitation to Thomas to visit England with his show that summer.

  By the time Thomas arrived in London on 14 August the two features had been merged into one with the new title With Allenby in Palestine and the Liberation of Holy Arabia. The film of General Allenby’s cavalry was a revelation to the British audience. The reviewer in the Sphere listed the human elements under the General’s command: ‘Hunting yeomen from the “shires” and the “provinces”, Anzacs who were bred in the saddle, Sikhs, Punjabis, Pathans, Gurkhas from the Salt Range, natural horsemen and above all horse-masters’. The audience for the opening night at the Royal Opera House was a hand-picked crowd of Very Distinguished People. The Prime Minister Lloyd George and most of the Cabinet came to hear the talk as well as several Generals. A publicity puff from Lloyd George himself was printed prominently on the handouts. ‘In my opinion Lawrence is one of the most remarkable and romantic figures of modern times.’

  The borrowed background set had originally been designed for the Moonlight-on-the-Nile scene from Handel’s oratorio Joseph and His Brethren. In front of the painted palm trees stood the band of the Welsh Guards in their scarlet uniform. As a tribute to Lawrence’s birthplace the band had been asked by Thomas to provide ‘half an hour of atmospheric music’ to put the audience in the right mood. Several skimpily dressed young women with undulating midriffs followed the choir and performed the dance of the Seven Veils with remarkable authenticity. The audience, especially the men among them, were mesmerised. From behind the scenes came the distinctive sound of the Arab call to prayer, a new arrangement written by Thomas’s wife and sung by an Irish tenor.

  As Thomas appeared on stage, a musky incense filled the theatre, billowing from several braziers positioned up and down the aisles. ‘Come with me to lands of history, mystery and romance ...’ he again began as the Welsh bandsmen struck up their musical accompaniment, amplifying the tale of danger, colour and courage. Every grunt of a camel and each rumbling sound that preceded a charge of the cavalry was given its own peculiar musical effect.

  Lawrence himself never appeared on stage although at least five times that year he crept into the Albert Hall after the lights were dimmed to watch in anonymity. Thomas’s wife would sometimes spot him and Lawrence would blush crimson at being discovered and rush away into the dark. To some who knew him though, his figure was unmissable, looking out into the darkness as if he were ‘looking out from under a tent’ and standing, according to the war artist Eric Kennington, ‘as if he were floating - like a fish’.

  In an unprecedented move, newspaper editors cleared the front pages of advertisements and ran the reviews for Thomas’s show in their place. Allenby came. Feisal came. Sir Ernest Shackleton came and tried unsuccessfully to persuade the cameraman Harry Chase to jump ship, to work on some technical adaptations to Shackleton’s own footage of the Antarctic. General ‘Fighting Charlie’ Cox came, the Australian Brigadier General, and was so impressed by what he saw that at the end of the performance he mounted the platform to congratulate Thomas and in his enthusiasm lost his balance, toppling into the orchestra pit below and breaking a leg. Winston Churchill should have been at a late-night sitting in the House of Commons; he was nowhere to be seen. Someone let slip that despite his personal reservations about the ‘King’ of Arabia, Churchill had been unable to resist scuttling off to see the show that everyone was talking about.

  More publicity ensued. Hundreds of people desperate for a ticket would bring portable stools and sit all day outside the box office in the hope of a seat. The King requested a special performance at Balmoral in Scotland where he and Queen Mary were spending the summer. The Royal Opera itself remained conveniently outside London, playing to a surprised but delighted provincial audience who had expected them to move back to their home in the capital. As the summer came to an end, however, Sir Thomas Beecham could stay away no longer even though he was benefiting from the profits of Thomas’s full houses. There was a new operatic season to launch and Beecham had no choice but to return.

  Thomas cancelled the American tour as Burton took yet another brave step. The Royal Albert Hall had a capacity of six thousand. He booked it. To the astonishment of his family, but most of all himself, by the end of the summer Lawrence had become one of the most celebrated of all wartime heroes. His patriotism was ranked with that of Rupert Brooke. Indeed, by surviving the war he had even eclipsed Brooke’s previously unchallenged position.

  Lawrence was ambivalent about his fame. He felt that the war years had taken him ‘to the top of the tree without the fun of swarming about the middle branches’. War seemed to have interrupted a natural maturing and peace seemed to trap rather than liberate his character. A new but increasingly close American friend, a fellow literary enthusiast, Ralph Isham, observed that summer how Lawrence’s ‘hatred for his body was a boy’s hatred; his fear of women was a boy’s fear; his terror of being noticed was a boy’s terror’. Isham wondered if this idolisation would one day topple him and urged his friend to return to ‘the infinity, the silence’ of the desert. Lawrence himself wrote to another friend, Nancy Astor, that ‘everything bodily is hateful to me ... this sort of thing must be madness and sometimes I wonder how far mad I am.’ He compared his fame to a ‘tin can attached to a cat’s tail’.

  Lowell Thomas, by now comparing Lawrence to Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh, capitalised on the diffidence of his hero, introducing his show with words suggesting that Lawrence was at that very moment ‘somewhere in London, hiding from a host of feminine admirers, book publishers, autogra
ph fiends and every species of hero worshipper’.

  Not everyone believed Lawrence’s protests that he was not entirely enjoying his sudden celebrity The eminent playwright George Bernard Shaw thought he was making a mistake by trying to disguise ‘his genius for backing into the limelight’. However, Lawrence had abandoned the Arab headdress that for a few months after the war he had continued to wear, and instead adopted clothes that were as anonymous as possible, a trilby or untidy tam o’shanter helping to shield him from intrusive fans.

  Lloyd George had been delighted with London’s grand parade of thanks, but not far from the official ceremonies, in Luton in Bedfordshire, there was an indication that marching bands and an upturned catafalque would not be enough to restore England to a state of contentment. That day, driven to despair over the levels of unemployment, a group of cap-wearing ex-servicemen torched the Luton town hall where the Mayor was holding a celebratory lunch. After raiding a music shop, the rioters dragged pianos into the street, pounding on to the keys the rousing tune of’Keep the Home Fires Burning’ with appropriate irony. Further disturbances in Wolver-hampton, Salisbury, Epsom, Coventry and Swindon had also interrupted the day of peace. Reporting these events the Daily Herald detected a country-wide ‘epidemic of violence and atrocious murder’.

  But the centrepiece of the Peace Parade remained in people’s minds. On the following Monday The Times had printed a letter suggesting that it would be a pity to consider the Cenotaph ‘an ephemeral erection’, given the simple dignity that it evoked. It wondered whether ‘a design so grave, severe and beautiful’ might be refashioned into stone and kept on permanent display.

  Ten days after the Peace Parade a smaller ceremony took place in one of the poorest parts of London’s East End. In June 1917 a new form of enemy warfare had overtaken the Zeppelin airships. To children the glinting light of the approaching Gotha bombers made them appear as ‘huge silver dragonflies’. Eighteen children, an entire class of five and six year olds at the Upper North Street School, had been killed by a bomb dropped from the sky in the first ever daylight raid. After a joint funeral in which the East End came to a halt while the coffins placed on eighteen horse-drawn hearses had been smothered under eiderdowns of white flowers, the children had been buried in a mass grave.

  Life in Poplar had not improved much since the war. Unemployment and poverty was so acute that after disturbing reports of starvation, the borough’s counsellors devised a scheme by which the rates would be diverted towards a food voucher scheme. And no one had forgotten Poplar’s worst day. On 23 June 1919 a statue was unveiled in Poplar Recreation Grounds just off the East India Dock Road. The occasion was heartbreaking for the memories it revived. Friends of the dead children gathered around the marble and granite monument, their faces as white as the stone figure of the angel that surmounted the memorial, with wings spread wide and high to the sky and hands clasped in prayer. One child, Jack Brown, now aged eight, could not get the memory of the smell that morning two years earlier out of his mind. He had thought at first it was roast rabbit. Now he knew it was the burning flesh of his friends. The Mayor of Poplar, the Reverend William Lax, paid tribute to the children who he said had ‘suffered for the country as any men who have perished in the trenches, or on the high seas or in the air’.

  Despite the harsh penalties of the Peace Treaty, anti-German feeling remained unconfirned. Condolence cards had been handed out among the crowd that day with the words ‘In memory of the victims of the Hun death-dealers’. The Peace Parade and the cult of heroes like Lawrence diverted attention from the restlessness that loitered in the lives of the general population.

  8

  Honesty

  Late Summer 1919

  A new phrase was hovering over the candle-lit dining tables of intellectual society. People were talking of a tendency to avoir le cafard, a lingering dissatisfaction with life, a sense of being down in the dumps for no identifiable reason. The phrase had also crossed the Atlantic where Lucy Duff Gordon was anxious about the future of her couture business. People did their best to forget: the older generation moved house, the well-off travelled, and Lucy watched the young people who ‘went to victory balls, danced all night, got hilariously drunk and went to bed in somebody else’s house’.

  And yet happiness was elusive. With an honesty rarely expressed at the time, Lucy saw that ‘those who were not under the spell of hectic gaiety were bored and listless’. The recent past was an inescapable fact and even the combined amnesiacs of drink, drugs and sex could not effect a permanent reprieve. Previously unspoken of subjects were bursting through taboos.

  Just before the end of the war, Marie Stopes, a clear-eyed and handsome 37-year-old academic, had published a book that brought the advantages of contraception into the open. Her own marriage had never been consummated and she had divorced her husband as virgo intacta. Motivated by her own personal ‘misery, humiliation and frustration’ she pledged to help other women. Astonishingly, her own lack of sexual experience did not diminish her understanding of the importance of sexual love. At first her book was turned down by a publisher who told her ‘there are few enough men for girls to marry and I think this would frighten off the few’. But in 1918 she was able to put her own advice into practice when she married for a second time. Humphrey Roe was a wealthy and generous manufacturing magnate and it was Stopes’s new husband who provided the funding to get her book into print.

  Married Love was addressed to the vast majority of women who were neither simply maternal nor unashamedly ‘loose’. During the war soldiers had returned on leave to the open arms of their sweethearts, the limited time making many unmarried couples less cautious than they would have been in peacetime. Thousands of illegitimate births might have been avoided if contraceptive advice had been available. Instead a conspiratorial silence surrounded the origins of many new babies. Gladys Wearing’s husband and her son had both been killed in the early days at the front. To the puzzlement and delight of Gladys’s goddaughter, Pam Parish, and Stella her sister, Gladys arrived one day at their house pushing a pram out of which peered a baby girl. The baby they were told was called Zaidee. There was then a lot of grown-up talk and an assumption that curious young ears were not listening. But after being begged for an explanation, Mrs Parish confided to her astonished children that Gladys had adopted the child born to her elder brother’s sweetheart. Conceived on one of his leaves home, the stigma of illegitimacy had been too powerful to ignore. A solution had been found in pretending that Gladys’s illegitimate niece was her own adopted child. To Pam and Stella’s further consternation they heard that Gladys had fallen in love with their neighbour, Stuart Lloyd. Gladys did not seem to mind that half of Mr Lloyd’s mouth was missing and to the horror of the Parish sisters Gladys seemed positively to enjoy kissing Mr Lloyd’s poor bashed-in face.

  A central part of Marie Stopes’s message was the use of proper contraception rather than the chancy rhythm and withdrawal methods. She spoke to the poor on whom unwanted pregnancies had the greatest financial impact. Childbirth itself was a dangerous process. Although anaesthetic was available to the rich, the poor made do with gripping on to a knotted towel as the primary form of pain relief. If the mother was lucky enough to have a hospital birth, there were no facilities available for staunching a haemorrhage except perhaps with the ward curtains, hastily ripped down. Infection was uncontrollable.

  Contraception was the better way and abstinence and withdrawal were the cheapest and most popular methods. And when they failed, abortion was the alternative and final resort. Condoms were only used in special cases. They were expensive, and their frequent reuse after thorough washing with soap and water meant that holes often developed in these thick, de-sensitising sleeves. Dutch caps were also available and, according to one disillusioned user, were ‘thick rubber things made from something like car tyres’.

  The medical establishment was sceptical about contraceptive devices. The Royal Society of Medicine warned that the use of
all forms of contraception was ‘deleterious and dangerous’. The Society also believed that a popular paste, called Volpar, the shorthand for Voluntary Parenthood Paste, carried the risk of producing deformed children. Pessaries made of lard, or margarine combined with flour, or even coconut butter mixed with quinine, were thought to have some success. Marie Stopes herself recommended the use of a large flat sponge soaked in olive oil which was ‘an absolutely safe domestic condiment found in most homes’.

  Purges made of pennyroyal, a herb that contained a uterine stimulant, compounds of aloe and iron, scalding baths, gin and excessive exercise were all popular methods of ending a pregnancy. The most determined even swallowed a thimbleful of gunpowder hoping for a satisfyingly explosive effect. The death of the unborn, unwanted child often included the death of the mother as well.

  Marie Stopes, however, was determined to establish her belief that the use of contraceptives removed the anxiety of unwanted pregnancy and therefore made sexual intercourse all the more enjoyable. A second book, Wise Parenthood, was published in the same month as the Armistice, in time for returning soldiers to take notice. A rhyme, as familiar as the household copy of the book that now lived on the top shelf of thousands of wardrobes, soon reached children’s playgrounds.