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

by Juliet Nicolson

  Under oath Mr Ping Yoo’s Scottish wife Ada admitted that she would sit in the middle of a circle of men in pyjamas and ladies in chiffon nightdresses who watched as she prepared the opium. Later the guests would grab cushions to put behind their heads and ‘remained in a comatose state until the following afternoon’. Ada confirmed that one of the guests was Miss Billie Carleton. Humankind, those in court concluded, was not able to bear much reality.

  Diana Cooper had remained confined to a tiny housemaid’s room in the house in Green Street where her Peace Day fall had taken place. She lay in a muslin-curtained bed, topped off by a tricolour of ostrich feathers, surrounded by a flotilla of white-coated medical attendants. Some of Diana’s friends wondered privately whether the accident might not have been entirely accidental. When Raymond Asquith had died Diana felt such pain that ‘the near future seemed un-faceable’. People wondered whether this physical pain in her leg was perhaps preferable to that of suppressed misery, an emotion she felt to be ‘squalid, low, devitalising’. The ready prescriptions for morphine as well as the constant attention she received deflected her thoughts from the void left by her absent friends.

  Diana had long found morphine to be ‘a staunch partner in times of stress’. In the early days of the war the drug been openly on sale at the chemist’s. And Diana had always tucked a tube of quarter grains into the parcels sent from Arlington Street, adding to the other essentials Diana felt the boys at the front would need which included brandy, handkerchiefs, pencils and pocket classics. The chemists Savory & Moore in Mount Street, Mayfair, took advertisements in The Times praising their stock of gelatine sheets impregnated with morphine and cocaine and recommending them as ‘useful presents for friends at the front’. Diana did not think of morphine as the least bit ‘menacing’ and instead of using it as a suppressant of pain she took it ‘as a giver of Chinese courage and stimulus and ultimately dreamless sleep’.

  Morphine also carried with it a classiness that could never be associated with whisky and soda, an alternative stimulant that held little attraction for Diana. Since the early years of the war Diana had never concealed from her close friends the delicious effects of release that she enjoyed from drug taking. Even a visit to the dentist where she knew she would be given gas to manage the extraction of a tooth was anticipated with immense pleasure. In a letter to her adored Raymond Asquith in 1915 she described one ‘grand night’ when she and Raymond’s wife Katherine lay ‘in ecstatic stillness’, both of them ‘drugged in very deed by my hand with morphia’ - although she also confided to Raymond ‘the grave difficulty of the actual injection, the sterilising in the dark and silence and the conflict of my hand and wish when it came to piercing our flesh’.

  All through the summer Sister Manley, an Irish nurse who during the war had worked in the hospital in the Rutlands’ converted ballroom at Arlington Street, had been looking after Diana, who lay with her broken leg up raised in the air attached to an ‘erection like a gallows’. Presents of cold roast game appeared at the door, so there was no need for cooking, and twice a day, after lunchtime and after work, Diana would listen for the sound of Duff’s arrival. Duff, like his wife, was a novice driver and through the open window Diana, at the sound of ‘frenzied hooting and jams of brakes and gears’, would claim her daily dose of morphine from Sister Manley — so she might be ‘gay and stimulated’. On occasion Duff was early and the scene Diana made until she was given the overdue shot worried him. To appease him Diana invited a hypnotist to come to her bedroom and wean her off it.

  But the drug’s delicious effectiveness proved too seductive, and too addictive, and Diana was both reluctant and resistant to carrying out the hypnotic cure. Instead she would fake sleep and, leaving her breathing heavily, the hypnotist would tiptoe out of the room; whereupon Diana would summon the colluding Sister Manley and the morphine shot would be injected as usual. The chart for the professionally satisfied hypnotist read ‘natural eight hour sleep’. The reality was different. The only consequence of morphine use that Diana feared was the loss of her looks and Duff reassured himself in private that ‘her fear of ugliness is, I think, the best preventative’.

  Drugs continued to be the substance Diana relied on to maintain the emotional as well as physical control of her body. ‘Perhaps it will take me to a lovely grass-grown moat filled with irises and lilacs and put your hand in mine and sink all fears,’ she wondered to Duff. But she found other ways of controlling her mood. Sometimes she and Duff dined alone off mineral water and Brand’s Essence, a chicken-based consommè that unlike home-made chicken soup was fat free. Weight was important, or rather the lack of it, to young women. Girls who ate nothing much in order to arrive at the fashionably androgynous shape were accused of’banting’, the word for excessive slimming named after William Banting, the Victorian author of a slimming pamphlet called ‘Letter on Corpulence addressed to the Public’. The verb had made him a household name. And if Diana was not concentrating on limiting her food intake, then alcohol was always a good additional prop as an appetite suppressant and mental stimulant.

  As the summer came to an end Diana Cooper was still waiting for the fracture to heal. She had moved from the housemaid’s room back to her own home in Arlington Street where her convalescence in her own gold silk sheeted bed was recorded on canvas by the leading artist, Sir John Lavery. Her injury had been treated by the celebrated Scottish surgeon, Sir William Arbuthnot Lane, supporter of Harold Gillies’s pioneering plastic surgery hospital at Sidcup and much sought after for his successful new technique of mending fractures with internal plates and screws rather than the old-fashioned use of splints.

  Diana was determined not to give in to her disability. After more than two months in bed, in September she left her bedroom for the first time and was wheeled by Duff to Hyde Park and then back to the Ritz for lunch. The pusher and the chair’s occupant had soon become a novelty fixture in London society as she was trundled to and fro by Duff - both of them mackintoshed for the rain, beneath which Duff would dress in a black cloak-coat, white silk scarf and top hat, Diana in her ‘trousseau best, diademed in seed pearls’ — to dinner at the Ritz or for fresh air round the park, or to see the triumphant new season of the Russian ballet.

  The chair would not fit into a taxi but it did not matter. There was a shortage of taxis, with many of the drivers either never to return to the wheel or still awaiting their demobilisation papers. Instead Duff would push Diana for miles round the city streets. On one occasion he felt a trip to a concert in Hampstead was a push too far from Mayfair, and anyway Duff was not much of a classical music fan. Arthur Rubinstein however came to Diana’s rescue, thoughtfully hiring a hearse, the extra coffin-height neatly accommodating the chair so that her Ladyship could go to the concert after all.

  The weather that autumn was gloriously sunny and as late as 11 September the green of the Oxfordshire fields near Lady Ottoline Morrell’s house at Garsington still seemed as brilliant as it had in May. The temperature rose to 89 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest day of the year. The Times reported that lidos up and down the country were once again packed with swimmers taking advantage of the unexpected sunshine. To Ottoline it was as if during the intense light of those days ‘the sun was taking a last passionate embrace of the summer fields’. The Garsington guests wore their summer clothes.

  But the English weather is fickle. On the following day the sun vanished and within days ponds up and down the country had frozen, as deep snow fell across the length and breadth of the country. As much as two inches were recorded as far south as Dartmoor. The unfinished harvests were ruined. A week or so later the beneficial mood of summery light-heartedness had evaporated. On Monday 22 September 50,000 foundry workers went on strike for better pay but the Government were even more alarmed by the next stoppage. On Friday 26 September the failure of the delivery of post and milk confirmed to Ottoline the effects of a bitter ten-day railway strike, held over from the preceding March. She wondered if ‘it may be the
beginning of a revolution’.

  Lloyd George was aware that the railwaymen’s action could develop into a national strike. The paralysis of the railway system meant that coal was piling up outside pits all over the country with no means to transport it. Discontent was infectious. The anniversary of the Armistice was approaching and there were no official plans to commemorate the day. The Peace Parade of the summer had been something of a public performance and the temporary memorial in Whitehall had evoked pride in everyone who saw it.

  But Edward Honey, an Australian soldier and journalist living in London, had been unable to erase from his mind his uneasy response to the high spirits that he had witnessed on Armistice night. The exuberance of the day demonstrated to Honey a failure to understand and pay tribute to the fundamental horror of the past four years. He felt there should be some way of recognising the silent grief that so many of the bereaved were unable to express.

  9

  Silence

  11 November 1919

  The late November issue of the Tatler carried ‘a camera study’ by the fashionable photographer Hugh Cecil, known for the daring simplicity of his pictures. His latest photograph was of an unnamed woman in a sleeveless black chiffon evening dress, leaning so far forward that her head was resting on her enfolded arms, one hand hidden, the other visible yet almost lifeless on her knees, the draped folds of the sleeves falling down from her arms towards her waist. The fourth finger of the left hand, the one that traditionally carries the wedding ring, was out of sight but even though the woman’s face was turned away from the camera and only the dark curly hair on the back of her head was visible, you could tell that she was beautiful. The picture was reminiscent of the looking-glass image of the romantic, fabric-draped paintings of Lord Leighton and Lawrence Alma Tadema; but it turned the optimism of the late nineteenth century on its head. Cecil’s picture was entitled ‘Grief’.

  A year had elapsed since the guns had stopped firing and at first glance the country seemed drawn towards a determined gaiety. But the legacy of psychological wounds remained raw beneath the celebratory optimism. By the time the first anniversary of the Armistice arrived, many - particularly those in senior positions in government, and most particularly the King of England - had hoped that the memories of the war would have begun to recede. But the intervening year had proved that the effects of the war on the British people were not to be erased in so short a time. Indeed the first year of peace carried with it more national tumult than had been seen in several decades before the war.

  As England prepared to enter the second year of peace many were doing their best to put that first unsteady year behind them, to be thankful that most of the soldiers who had survived had now returned to their families, that the deadly threat of influenza seemed to have passed, to hope that the economy would gather strength and that a new decade would usher in a new and peaceful way of life.

  Right up until a few days before the first anniversary of the Armistice there had been no public announcement of any plans to mark the day itself. A letter to The Times on 4 November from a demobbed officer, a patriotic Mr Donald Howard, pointed out that ‘beyond the advertisement of a big fancy dress ball - an excellent institution of itself but not one that embraces or affects all classes of the community’, he was unaware how the occasion was to be recognised. ‘To those of us who were at the front,’ he gently pointed out, ‘and to those who were at home, this was the day which more than any other of late filled our hearts with thanksgiving, pride and happiness.’ Could there be a flag display, he wondered, or a gun salute, or most rousing of all ‘the singing, not merely playing of the National Anthem in theatres, cinemas, restaurants and all possible public places’?

  Edward Honey had written to the London Evening News with an alternative suggestion. Concentrating on the bereaved rather than those relishing victory, Honey’s idea was less tangible than a monument, and all the more accessible because it did not require people to travel or involve any sense of pilgrimage. Honey proposed a moment of silence, an act of remembrance that would be open to every man, woman and child at any place they chose to be. ‘Five little minutes only,’ he proposed. ‘Five silent minutes of national remembrance. A very sacred intercession.’ He suggested not an obliterating of the past but a proper act of memory such as could only be retrieved in a state of silence. In those five minutes people would have a chance to find ‘new strength, hope and faith in the morrow’. Church services could provide the framework within which such a pause could be staged but better still, ‘in the street, the home, the theatre, anywhere, indeed where Englishmen and their women chance to be’, this five minutes of ‘bitter-sweet remembrance’ would provide a moment to reflect.

  The Prime Minister had been told of Honey’s idea by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, High Commissioner for South Africa. Sir Percy explained to Lloyd George how during every single day of the war at noon South Africa had observed a silence. The troops in South Africa had paused for three minutes because, they reasoned, ‘when we are gone it may help bring home to those who will come after us, the meaning, the nobility and the unselfishness of the great sacrifice by which their freedom was assured’. During the silence, a chance would be given to salute the memory of the fallen, to recognise ‘The Great Sacrifice’ and to allow four groups of individuals to be acknowledged for the part they had played in the war. First should come women who had both lost and contributed so much, next children for whom future freedom had been won, then the men who had survived the war and finally of course those who had not.

  Lloyd George was intrigued by the idea. But such a national event needed royal approval. Two weeks before the anniversary of the Armistice the Prime Minister and the King met to discuss the idea. George V was rather dubious about the practicality of imposing such a scheme on the normal day-to-day bustle of life. A fastidiously punctual man, he could not bear the idea that the concept could be destroyed by one careless individual failing to hold to the allotted time. Members of his own family did not seem able to keep their watches in line with his own and if anyone was tactless enough to mention his mother’s ‘rebellious unpunctuality’, as the secretly amused Prince of Wales put it, they knew that trouble lay ahead. The King discounted the five or even three suggested minutes as far too long. Even to expect a whole nation to keep to the precision of a two-minute silence was, he thought, probably asking too much.

  In November 1919 the King was behaving cautiously with good reason. Here was a man whose confidence had been severely undermined by the fear that the country might reassess a previously largely unquestioned belief in his royal birthright. He deliberated long over the reception that every important decision might receive. But Lloyd George, ‘the man who won the war’, remained enthusiastic about the idea and he wore down the King’s resistance, reassuring him that maroons would be fired in London at the beginning and end of the designated time and that the rockets would alert everyone to the importance of observing the precise moment.

  An announcement made directly from the King at Buckingham Palace to all his subjects throughout the land was carried in all the main newspapers on Friday 7 November. The statement read:

  Tuesday next, November 11, is the first anniversary of the Armistice which stayed the worldwide carnage of the four preceding years and marked the victory of Right and Freedom. I believe that my people in every part of the Empire fervently wish to perpetuate the memory of the Great Deliverance and of those who have laid down their lives to achieve it. To afford an opportunity for the universal expression of this feeling it is my desire and hope that at the hour when the Armistice came into force, the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month, there may be for the brief space of two minutes a complete suspension of all our normal activities. No elaborate organisation appears to be required. At a given signal, which can be easily arranged to suit the circumstances of the locality, I believe that we shall interrupt our business and pleasure, whatever it may be, and unite in this simple service of Silence and Remembra
nce.

  And so the relevance of the day that marked one year since the Armistice assumed its shape and the day of the Great Silence came into being. The Great Silence would commemorate the Great War, and would provide a time to remember the Glorious Dead and their Great Sacrifice, as well as to celebrate the Great Deliverance.

  The King now embraced the idea of the silence with gusto, although not everyone was equally enthusiastic. A 16-year-old schoolboy, Evelyn Waugh, was a pupil at Lancing College in West Sussex. His elder brother had been expelled from Sherborne for writing a homoerotic novel about the school and Evelyn by sibling association was forbidden to follow him there. But he was grateful to find that one of the refreshingly liberated aims of Lancing ‘was to produce prose writers’. Making the most of his developing skill he responded to the idea of the Great Silence. ‘A disgusting idea of artificial nonsense and sentimentality,’ young Waugh wrote in his diary. ‘If people have lost sons and fathers, they should think of them whenever the grass is green or Shaftesbury Avenue is brightly lighted, not for two minutes on the anniversary of a disgraceful day of national hysteria. No one thought of the dead last year. Why should they now?’

  But a reason and an excuse to concentrate on that loss was exactly what millions of frustrated mourners had come to wish for. The Times’ death announcements page on 11 November 1919 still carried a subdivision entitled ‘Death by Wounds’.

  That morning mist and gloom were hovering over Whitehall, and traces of the snow that had fallen two days earlier were still on the ground. Temperatures had dropped during the night to a level lower than any could remember for over fifty years. A dancing sparkle of frost covered the English countryside. Four-year-old Geoffrey Woolley was in the garden with his governess where the gardener was going about the winter business of repairing and sluicing down the tall rockeries. The first chimes of the drawing-room clock that marked the hour began to ring out from inside the house, and the governess suddenly burst into a run, racing towards the gardener, shouting that he must turn off the hose at once. The noise of the water threatened to destroy the imminent silence.