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

by Juliet Nicolson

  The day of the Silence fell in the middle of the school term and there was an unusual calm in the Parish household. Three-year-old Pam’s brother and sisters had gone to school. Apart from the cook preparing lunch in the kitchen, the maid upstairs dusting the bedrooms, and the family’s two pet badgers waiting patiently by the front door in the hall to be taken for their morning walk in the fields around Sidcup, all was quiet. Pam and her mother were alone in the house. Just as the grandfather clock began to strike, Pam’s mother, her long thick chestnut hair flying behind her, rushed into the playroom and, gripping Pam by the hand, motioned to her not to speak, not to make a sound. Copying her mother Pam knelt beside her on the kitchen floor. Together they joined their hands together, fingertips touching, in the gesture of prayer. Pam, though still only three, knew she was being asked to remember something terrible and to give thanks that it would never happen again. Her mother had told her that they were remembering ‘The Great War to End all Wars’ and that Pam should be thankful that in her lifetime there would never again be anything like it.

  In Whitely’s department store near Paddington, the doors closed at 10.45 a.m. and shoppers and assistants together assembled beneath the vaulted roof at ten minutes to the hour. The Reverend Mr Murphy, vicar of St Matthew’s, Bayswater, invited them to sing ‘Oh God Our Help in Ages Past’, his Irish boom rising to the balconies four floors above before the hymn came to an end just before eleven o’clock as shoppers prepared themselves for silence.

  In Selfridges a solitary bugler walked out on to the central balcony of the store overlooking Oxford Street and sounded his instrument to signal the approaching silence. At Harrods in Knightsbridge the fire alarms were rung. In the City at Lloyd’s insurance brokers the huge 106-pound Lutine Bell rang out as it always did when the need arose to mark an event of national importance. A murder trial at the Old Bailey was interrupted.

  In Baltimore, Maryland, the train on which the Prince of Wales was travelling was halted and in England the entire railway network of passenger trains, goods trains and shunting engines juddered and clanked to a standstill. Trading on the stock market ceased. Out in the Channel, ships stayed their course.

  Just before eleven o’clock there was a tremendous burst of synchronised noise across the country. In the cities of London, Birmingham and Bradford, maroons were fired into the sky, and burst with a great clatter. Cities that even in the small hours of the night were never silent, were about to experience something unprecedented.

  Town clocks struck with mechanical predictability and in village churches up and down the land peals of bells, so often used for celebration, with their repeated tumbling refrains summoned people to stand still and to remember.

  In the coastal towns of Britain the signal for those in distress at sea which customarily caused families of sailors to flinch and pause with fear, rang out. At Piccadilly Circus, the place where Londoners felt the pulse of their city, the traffic was still thudding when the first maroon sounded. By the time the second maroon was heard the heartbeat was arrested, the man late for work no longer ran for the bus, families huddled at the edge of the pavement, poised to dash across the street, a window cleaner steadied his ladder, the violet-seller fell silent. Over them all, the elegant stone wings of Eros were as ever frozen in motion. For a moment or two as the traffic came to a halt, a faint under-hum could be heard; then all conversation ceased. The only sound was the splash of the fountain.

  Far beneath the London streets all underground trains had ceased to run. Above ground London was normally so frantic that the police were often in despair. Motorcycles carried with them a particular danger, according to the mid-November issue of the Saturday Review, and seemed to drive ‘at full speed at pedestrians’, while the police were seen to ‘scold instead of soothing the pedestrians who appeal for help’. But just before 11.00 a.m. motorcycles and cars waited obediently at junctions. Engines stilled as War Office lorries, taxis and motorbuses came to a halt. Horses exhaled deeply as they were pulled up by the side of the road.

  Bicycles braked, road menders laid down their spades, telephone exchange operators unplugged their connection boards, factory workers switched off the machinery, dock workers stopped their unloading, schoolchildren stopped their lessons, miners downed their tools, shoppers stopped their purchasing, lovers stopped murmuring, and even villagers talking to one another over the garden fence held their tongues.

  In London the King and Queen had sent their wreath to Whitehall in advance of their own arrival, and just before Big Ben’s minute hand moved to the top of the clock, Lloyd George, white moustachioed, his long hair touching the collar of his dark tail coat, was seen walking towards the now rather dilapidated wood and plaster Cenotaph that had continued to be a focus for mourners since the summer. He was carrying orchids and white roses, woven into a circlet of laurel leaves. An announcement that the monument would be demolished early in the year had prompted a huge protest against the Ministry of Works for being ‘utterly without soul or sentiment or understanding’.

  But while Whitehall and Lutyens’s monument provided the grand backdrop for royalty and statesmen and other leaders of the nation, this was really a silence designed for the common man. Men bared their heads, holding their hats before them in clasped hands. Only the act of breathing, the final affirmation of life, remained as the sign of human activity. In that fraction of a second before the silence began a reporter for The Times noticed a ‘certain hesitancy’ in the step, in anticipation of the moment, and within those small gestures an unmistakable determination not to miss it.

  The first stroke of Big Ben announcing the hour of eleven gave notice of what was required as the nation fell still. ‘Here and there an old soldier could be detected slipping unconsciously into the posture of attention,’ wrote an observer. ‘The hush deepened.’

  At precisely 11.00 a.m. all movement stopped.

  In that silence many prayed that the meaning of death would somehow be revealed. But some questioned whether such understanding would give them relief from unhappiness. No one who had lost someone in the war (and it was estimated that three million people had lost someone close) was immune from grief. Many tried not to give in to it, believing that acknowledgement of the intensity of their feelings would lead them to the verge of collapse. Some found that after the initial shock a state of denial was in itself a comfort.

  Others were like Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative Chancellor and Leader of the House during the wartime Coalition Government. Bonar Law had lost two of his sons, killed in action, and his friend Lord Blake described how Bonar Law was managing his loss. ‘Night seemed to have descended upon him. For the moment he was incapable of work and could only sit despondently gazing into vacancy. All those dark clouds which were never far below the horizon of his thought came rolling up obliterating light and happiness.’ Silence was unlikely to bring much comfort to Bonar Law. For within silence lies not only stillness but also agitation: the agitation of memory. For the agitated mind silence can become a place of threat and even of terror. At a time when the pain rather than the comfort of memory predominates, ‘the great wings of silence continue to beat’. Absolute silence remains elusive.

  That morning The Times reporter described how

  Even in the high Alps the solemn stillness which sometimes comes with the night is broken by the groan of the creeping glacier or smothered thunder of a distant avalanche. In the depths of a wood at twilight a leaf rustles or a twig snaps.

  In London’s Westminster the sudden sharp sound of a woman’s sob was made all the more painful by its unexpectedness, its isolation and its quivering echo, coming and going, strengthening and fading between the tall grey buildings of Whitehall. Life, breath, sound would go on, but never again without being mistrusted or feared. Certainty and dependability had gone. This was, in Quaker terms, a ‘living silence’: those who took part were actively engaged in thought.

  There were some in the crowd around the Cenotaph, who had come wi
th their families to take part in the solemn moment, for whom the outside world no longer held any meaning. The damaging roar of the trenches had made many unable to hear even the slightest sound. For them silence was a permanent state.

  But during lulls in the firing in France one unenfeebled sound had persisted through all, usually at its clearest with the first light of day. The unexpected and welcome sound of birdsong was often noticed by Duff Cooper, who had written from the trenches to his girlfriend Diana Manners in 1918 to tell her how ‘still bravely’ the larks continued to sing. ‘Everywhere else in France they are shot by the Français sportifs,’ he wrote. ‘But here since neither the English nor the Germans can ever hit anything they are perfectly safe, with the result that the front line has become a regular bird refuge, and ... one has anyhow always to be awake at dawn which as you know is their favourite hour for kicking up a row.’ Maybe some of those who stood now, their heads bowed, their heads bared, were summoning from memory the beauty of the birdsong, perhaps the only thing of beauty they had encountered during four years.

  The quality of this silence was strained, brimming over with pain. Tears streamed from the eyes of men and women.

  As the two minutes ended there was a reluctance and uneasiness in resuming movement. This ending was not like the moment at the end of an examination in school, when chairs scrape back with audible relief, or of a church service, when the organ bursts into life and the congregation collects its belongings and re-engages with the daily business of living.

  The moment that immediately followed the silence seemed to extend itself fractionally - before, as if in slow motion, hats were replaced, throats were cleared and the traffic once again began to move. This curious suspension of sound and movement had shown, as The Times commented, ‘a glimpse into the soul of the nation’.

  The day after the Silence, the motionless tableau of a shattered country was unfrozen, at least on the surface. Many, including the Prime Minister Lloyd George, hoped that the Great Silence would prove to have been a moment of national catharsis, the result similar to a massive, instantaneously effective blood transfusion. But the following morning, only a day after the country had engaged in its collective act of remembrance, The Times carried an unsigned advertisement in the personal columns.

  Lady of Gentle birth (clergyman’s widow) insane through overwork, poverty, air raids, loss of husband, brothers killed in War, has two children. Inquiries welcomed. Nomination to suitable home or financial aid wanted to give her reasonable chance of recovery. Will anyone help?

  Silence had not proved to be a cure for her.

  For others less traumatised, the Tatler of that week carried a notice for Clincher Motor Tyres showing a woman draped in furs and a man in evening dress sitting in a beautiful car. ‘When the old moon smiles these nights you can’t help smiling back’, ran the caption, going on to encourage the reader contemplating moonlit expeditions: ‘Moonlight no longer betokens the possible visit of “Gothas” and “Zepps”.’

  That evening Lady Diana Cooper was still unable to stand without support as she appeared at the Albert Hall wearing eighteenth-century Russian costume for another Victory Ball. She was not enjoying the ball at all, immobile in her by now hated bath chair and confiding her misery to a very drunk but increasingly sympathetic Lord Beaverbrook in his private box, while her husband of five months had excused himself from the party and vanished. She was sure he was seeking out that annoying Diana Capel, the woman whose husband was rumoured to be having an affair with the clothes designer Coco Chanel, leaving his wife free to spend time with her husband. Duff had arrived at the ball wearing a false beard. His wife was annoyed to notice that earlier he had removed it during the course of the dancing and was looking more handsome than ever.

  Outside, the snow began to fall across the country from Edinburgh to Dartmoor, but inside the Albert Hall the partygoers celebrating the first anniversary of the Armistice appeared as gay and light-hearted as ever. Paper streamers decorated the walls, and balloons floated high up into the huge ceiling vault. All thoughts of another formal pageant or procession were abandoned because, as the Sketch pointed out, ‘Quite frankly people wanted to dance.’ Reserve was thrown aside. The outfits were mesmerising. Gentlemen in satin knickerbockers, ladies in pom-pom frocks and thigh-skimming dresses whirled around the huge dance floor. A Mrs Ashley was spotted by reporters for the society pages holding a giant powder box fashioned as an umbrella, her skirt an elegant powder puff. Mademoiselle Edmée Dormeuil came as a bunch of large hothouse grapes, ‘a full vine on her charming head’.

  The time for national mourning was, Lloyd George continued to hope, now at an end and yet he sensed his optimism to be manufactured. At dinner with Duff Cooper a year earlier he had voiced those fears. He spoke to Duff of the long memories of the British. He spoke of those still alive who remembered the great famine of seventy years earlier, and ‘that one should never rouse those memories because it was a dreadful thing to fight against ghosts’.

  In 1919 there were ghosts in every town and village of the country - the ghosts of those who had fought for their country and who had been denied the burial and homecoming that their relations knew was their due. The Silence had aroused old feelings just as receding memories had begun to settle. Some wished for a more permanent silence. Others chose to carry on dancing.

  10

  Release

  Early Winter 1919

  The skies were filling with spectacular and record-breaking machines. Alcock and Brown’s recent crossing of the Atlantic by air in June was still on everyone’s mind when on 12 November a Vickers Vimy aeroplane departed from Hounslow airfield in Middlesex on a journey bound for the other side of the world. The Australian Captain Ross Smith, a pilot with an impressive flying record from the war, and his brother Keith Macpherson Smith planned to make the journey with twenty-one refuelling stops, including landings at Lyons, Rome, Cairo, Damascus, Basra, Bander Abbas, Karachi, Delhi, Rangoon, Bangkok, Singapore, and Bima, a distance of 11,340 miles. The journey felt like a means of escape to the other side of the world, to a continent where memories were not so clamorous. The Australian government offered a £10,000 prize for the successful completion of the journey.

  On the same day Handley Page transport announced the production of an aeroplane large enough to carry fifteen people from London to Paris in two hours ten minutes and in considerable comfort. Passengers would be seated in velvet-cushioned armchairs, their feet resting on fitted carpets, their reading matter illuminated by electric light. The world seemed to be shrinking.

  A month later a mesmerised audience watched as Sir Ernest Shackleton presented the extraordinary and heroic pictures of his attempt to cross the Antarctic and reach the South Pole. His 350-ton pine, oak and greenheart ship, Endurance, had left Plymouth on 8 August 1914 with a crew of twenty-seven men. England had been at war with Germany for four days. As the war continued, thousands of miles away the men of the Endurance struggled through the ice stacks, along needle-thin channels, using the ship as a battering ram as the ice floes, sounding like ‘heavy distant surf’, rose up into gargantuan towers all around the ship. Icebergs measuring thirty-two miles long and a hundred and fifty feet high resembled avenues of hostile skyscrapers in which no human could ever take up residence.

  Eventually ice had defeated the expedition. But to the lasting benefit of movie-going audiences, Australian cameraman Frank Hurley had made his way as fast as possible towards the listing, leaking, creaking, paralysed hulk of the ship. He dived into the freezing water of the hold, managing to rescue his films and photographic plates, smashing many but happily not all of them in his urgency to get back to safety.

  The resulting film, entitled simply South, made the wintry London weather seem benign in contrast to the snow-bound beauty of the scenes shimmering on the screen, the ship’s intricate rigging frosted with icicles. The seventy accompanying sledge dogs, half mad with hunger, existed on seal meat, emperor penguins and bleeding steaks ga
shed from the barnacle-encrusted flanks of furious bull sea-elephants. The men of the expeditionary force chewed hard on their pipes as they stared into the camera lens. One man provided the company with the ‘vital mental tonic’ of a banjo, while arms were encased to the elbow in vast fur gauntlets. By the time of their eventual return in 1917, the crew had been out of touch with civilisation for nineteen months, protected from little except the knowledge of the grim progress of the war.

  Audiences were amazed by man’s resilience as they watched the terrifying black and white pictures of Shackleton’s ship. First its rudder smashed, then the mast crumpled and finally the Endurance was lifted high up into the air by the force of the erupting ice below it, before sinking for ever into the freezing water.

  Cinema and the taste for daring escapades provided one kind of release of emotion. Music and dance offered another. During the war the front covers of the Tatler magazine had mostly been devoted to black and white photographs of upper-class ladies, either newly widowed or in nurse’s uniform. But on 26 November 1919 the cover carried a full-coloured drawing of a smiling soldier in full uniform throwing his sweetheart into the air. As his dancing partner, she is wearing an elegantly and daringly short, floaty skirt and is tossing back a glass of champagne as the bulbous stomached butler hovers nearby ready to refill her glass. At home gramophones were often contained inside a cocktail cabinet, and as the steel needle was lowered on to the thick wax record, the whole disc gently rose and fell seductively. The nation was in a mood to dance.

  An ever-expanding troupe of five or six hundred freelance musicians would gather between noon and two each day in Archer Street just off London’s Shaftesbury Avenue to meet entertainment agents and hope for a booking at a debutante’s ball or for an engagement in one of the big hotels. New songs were being composed at the rate of five hundred a week and the players had to work hard to hold on to their individual repertoire of current melodies.