After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  But Max Aitken had not been slow to see, during the first year of the war, that real power – as far as the politicians were concerned, terrifying power – was being exercised by Lord Northcliffe. In the autumn of 1916, as Asquith’s career came to a close, and as Law began to look as if he might lose control of the Unionist party, Aitken bought controlling shares in the ailing Daily Express. His life as the greatest newspaper proprietor after Northcliffe belongs to a later period, but he could see clearly enough the way in which the wind was blowing. Fireside chats with political leaders would, for many a decade to come, and perhaps for ever, be one way in which political deals were brokered, and power wielded. But the days in which the political class met in clubs and country houses, and could conduct their nation’s affairs without popular will or consultation, were over.

  The fruitless slaughter of 1916 was leading to political upheaval all over Europe. In France agitation became so extreme that Clemenceau took all but dictatorial powers to himself. In Russia, in 1917, they went through two political revolutions. In Germany Bethmann-Hollweg, that gentle pessimist who played Beethoven on the piano each day, fell as Chancellor in July 1917. The collapse of Asquith’s power must be seen against this background.27 But the power of the Press in Britain was undoubtedly a key element in the story. It was the Age of the Journalist. George V could protest against the rise of Harmsworth and Aitken28 but the creation of popular journalism was one of capitalism’s most extraordinary developments. The hatefulness of the Press to aesthetes, aristocrats, dictators, poseurs, kings, poets, would grow and with reason. Its power without responsibility was to be likened to that of the harlot, in a phrase written for Stanley Baldwin, when Prime Minister, by his journalist cousin Rudyard Kipling. The very phrase has such a journalistic ring to it. The truth is that the countries where such appalling vulgarians as Northcliffe and Beaverbrook flourished were, mysteriously, freer and better places to live than those where the Press was successfully bridled and stamped upon. Shortly before he became Prime Minister, Lloyd George received a visit from Monty Smith, one of Northcliffe’s underlings, ‘To present Lord Northcliffe’s compliments and to say that he (L.G.) was too much in the company of Winston’.29 There is something undoubtedly unpleasant about a bullying businessman writing in this way to an elected and royally appointed cabinet minister. But the twentieth century would witness countries where the bullies did not own newspapers – they suppressed them.

  Churchill himself, who was one of Northcliffe’s bêtes noires, was himself a keen popular journalist who was not ashamed to earn his crust from Northcliffe’s brother Lord Rothermere, and indeed his many acts of populism show him, as well as being an aristocratic hero, to be a tabloid journalist with an eye to a good story. Churchill, however, had a divided attitude to popular journalism, as to so much else. He had risen to fame as a war correspondent in the Boer War; in his years of political exile during the 1930s he would use his friendship with Beaverbrook and Rothermere to propound his views. In power, he had an anti-libertarian attitude, however. As Prime Minister, in the Second World War he frequently tried to censor the BBC’s news coverage, and in the First World War at the height of Northcliffe’s anti-Asquith campaign, Churchill was urging his Prime Minister to close down The Times, or nationalize it and make it the official organ of public opinion.30 Needless to say, Churchill’s ‘impudent desire to muzzle the press’ – the phrase was that of a Times leader writer – came to nothing.

  Clearly, if the war was to be won it needed new leadership and new initiative – and Lloyd George abetted by the Northcliffe Press could supply it. Common sense is obliged to say, however, that this begs a very big question. The great powers were locked in stalemate. Domestically they were on the edge of, or actually suffering, starvation, anarchy and revolution. If any demonstration was needed that the battles of Ypres, Mons, Verdun, the Somme had been lunatic, it was provided in summer 1917 at Passchendaele, when Sir Douglas Haig launched an attack against the Messines Ridge south of Ypres. It was a repeat performance of the other acts of mass-slaughter: 240,000 British casualties, 70,000 dead, with German losses around 200,000. By a second attack, in November 1917, on Cambrai, Haig took the Germans by surprise and gained about four miles of mud. Ten days later the German counter-attack regained all their lost ground. If ever there was an object lesson in the folly of war, the sheer pointlessness, here it was shown in all its bloodiness. This was how it began to seem to many Germans, including those in high command, who had tried to sue for peace in December 1916. It was, crucially, how it had seemed throughout 1916 to the President of the United States, the gentlemanly Princeton professor Thomas Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924).

  Ramrod-straight, bespectacled, Woodrow Wilson was an old-fashioned Virginian, a child of the Enlightenment, but with a prim, even slightly puritanical manner. His heroes were Abraham Lincoln, Edmund Burke and W. E. Gladstone. For his Independent rival, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson was ‘as insincere and cold-blooded an opportunist as we have ever had in the Presidency’, whereas admirers such as Ray Stannard Baker, his press aide, saw him as ‘one of those rare idealists like Calvin or Cromwell, who from time to time have appeared upon the earth & for a moment, in a burst of strange power, have temporarily lifted erring mankind to a higher pitch of contentment than it was quite equal to’. He had his more genial aspects. He was good at imitating voices and accents. He liked women. When his first wife died he married a beautiful Washington widow seventeen years his junior. ‘What did the new Mrs Wilson do when the President proposed?’ was the joke circulating in Washington at the time. Answer: ‘She fell out of bed with surprise.’31

  To Wilson, as to any sensible outside observer, the best solution to the European situation would surely be a negotiated peace. When he was re-elected president on 7 November 1916, Wilson had seen it as an opportunity for peace. On 18 November the eighty-five-year-old Emperor Franz Josef had died, to be succeeded by his twenty-nine-year-old great-nephew the Grand Duke Karl. On 12 December Bethmann-Hollweg made a speech in the Reichstag offering peace negotiations to the Entente, to be conducted in a neutral country. Wilson’s letter to all warring powers suggesting that the United States were ‘too proud to fight’ caused profound offence. ‘Did the President realize’, asked a British diplomat, Lord Hardinge, ‘that to support peace at that moment was to support militarism with all the horrors that it entailed?’32 The Entente preferred to press on to Passchendaele, to mayhem and to slaughter.

  For the governments of Britain and France, and for the political classes and groups which sustained them, a negotiated peace was too great a risk to take. They needed outright victory. Wilson did all he could to keep America out of the war. Had the German military, naval and diplomatic powers had their wits about them they would have moved and conciliated American opinion. Instead, they continued to threaten and torpedo passenger liners – the Cunard liner Laconia was sunk on 25 February 1917 without warning – and to make offers to Mexico to return their ‘lost’ territories in New Mexico, Texas and Arizona in the event of a German victory.33 On 4 April the United States Senate voted in favour of war by 82 votes to 6. Two days later the House of Representatives also voted overwhelmingly for war (375 votes to 50). That day, 6 April, the United States declared war on Germany.34

  Lloyd George sent Arthur Balfour to Washington that month. They could dress up the aim of the visit, but the real reason was basic: Britain had bankrupted itself and needed American money. America had very little military hardware, no modern aircraft, no hand grenades, no mortars, no poison gas. The US army remained ‘a nineteenth century force and a very small one at that’.35 Since the beginning of the war, however, the British had relied upon American money, and by 1917 the debt stood at $400 million. This was the material reality behind Lloyd George’s marvellous rhetoric on America’s entry into the war.

  He said that America had at one bound become a world power in a sense she never was before. She had waited until she found a cause worthy of her traditions. The America
n people had held back until they were fully convinced the fight was not a sordid scrimmage for power and possessions, but an unselfish struggle to overthrow a sinister conspiracy against liberty and human rights. Once that conviction was reached, the great Republic of the West had leaped into the arena, and she stood now side by side with the European democracies who, bruised and bleeding after three years of grim conflict, were still fighting the most savage foe that ever menaced the freedom of the world.

  The extent of British debt was actually difficult to assess, as Balfour discovered when he reached the American capital. He set up a British War Mission, with the aim of focusing the American mind and the American purse on British war needs. It was not in his area of skill – dreamy, aging philosopher as he was – to coordinate the different agencies. Balfour was not a money-and-propaganda man. Lloyd George had the Napoleonic brilliance to send Northcliffe in Balfour’s place to become head of the British War Mission. The new Prime Minister had been Northcliffe’s choice, but Lloyd George knew that it would only take a few setbacks in the European war for the Daily Mail to be clamouring: WELSH WIZARD MUST GO. L-G’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, Major David Davies, said it was ‘a damn bad appointment’,36 and called it ‘a gratuitous insult to the Americans’, but it removed from the British scene a potential troublemaker, and it had the effect of silencing the Northcliffe Press’s instinctive anti-Americanism. Notice-boards in all Daily Mail departments soon fluttered with an urgent piece of information: ‘I am leaving to take over Mr Balfour’s American mission and it is essential that not one line of criticism of the United States, men, books, or anything else should appear in the Daily Mail, the Continental Daily Mail, the Overseas Mail, or any other publication associated with the Daily Mail.’

  The British ambassador in Washington, Sir Cecil Spring-Rice, was utterly dismayed. This frock-coated Victorian, author of the hymn ‘I Vow to Thee My Country’, asked: ‘Whatever induced the Government to send Northcliffe here?’ ‘To Spring-Rice, Northcliffe was the incarnation of all that he disliked in the twentieth century.’ The Washington political class and the president’s entourage in the White House looked forward to Northcliffe running ‘amok’, but he was much too astute for that. With his unconventional approach, his genuine understanding of money, the war situation, and America, he went down very well. He had been obsessed by America all his life and wanted to be the British Joseph Pulitzer. He generally wore a blue serge suit, soft white collar, red checked tie and soft grey hat. The American public liked him. He emphasized his Irish origins wherever he went. He was impatient of America. He was surrounded by detectives. They read his mail. He cabled:

  NOT ONLY AM I WATCHED BUT EVERY PERSON CONNECTED WITH MISSION WATCHED GOVERNMENT THINK IT NECESSARY THAT I SHOULD NEVER MOVE UNLESS ACCOMPANIED BY SECRET SERVICE AGENTS WHO ARE WITH ME DAY AND NIGHT THAT WILL GIVE YOU SOME IDEA OF THE DIFFERENCE OF LIVING IN LONDON AND NEW YORK – NORTHCLIFFE.

  He missed his mother terribly. Northcliffe’s marriage, and love life, were tempestuous, but his love for Mrs Harmsworth was undying. He wrote to her constantly. ‘Most sweet and adored … I miss my cool room at Poynters which I can see vividly as I write and I miss my darling, darling Mother. Six o’clock is of course twelve o’clock with you. I keep a clock and English time before me always. I cable every day, dear, and I hope they arrive the same day.’ Uncomfortable as Washington was during a hot summer, however, he knew that he was doing good. In New York he addressed a crowd of 14,000 and received a five-minute standing ovation. The American papers proclaimed him ‘the most powerful man in Britain’. ‘The American Govt’, he told his mother, ‘is very nice to me. They are a mighty people, these Americans, and will end the war.’

  More than most British politicians, however, Northcliffe knew the price which was being paid for the peace which was on its way. Having an instinctual, journalistic intelligence, a feel (strong, though by no means infallible) for the way the world was going, this newspaper man could sense that debt lay at the heart of the story. What was not allowed in a Northcliffe newspaper often speaks more eloquently than the headlines. Northcliffe’s months in America were devoted to begging – for tractors ‘to keep starvation out’ of Britain, for oil to fuel the Royal Navy, for cheap food and clothes, for motor-cars, and motor parts. Although he was received with personal adulation, he and his journalists saw enough of American life to know that the American mood was not ecstatically pro-British. Louis Tracy, formerly the manager of the Evening News, was his correspondent in New York. There are some bright moments in Tracy’s picture, as when he tells the Chief that ‘the American Army has suggested that all the German-American Societies shall henceforth be grouped together as one big organization, which shall be known as the Sons of Botches’.42 But Tracy was aware that the Great American Public resented the deaths of American troops in an obscure French war. American soldiers who returned home after being billeted in England were not happy. When the war was over, Tracy told Northcliffe: ‘There is a curious anti-British propaganda going on among the troops returning from abroad, especially those who have been stationed in England. It got to such a pitch in the Garden City Camp that twenty men were placed under arrest and may be court-martialled for sedition. These men could not say anything bad enough about the treatment meted out to them while in England, and it is a singular thing that they nearly all wore metal rings made by German prisoners.’43

  There was nothing surprising about this. Just as many Americans are descended from German as from British stock, and the Irish-Americans in particular had every reason to loathe the British. ‘There can be no question,’ said Tracy, ‘that some underground agency is spreading far and wide the United States, the belief that the next war is to be between England and in the United States.’44

  When Northcliffe came back to England, however, no such talk was aired. He was offered the post of Minister of Aviation by the prime minister. He turned it down – not privately, but in an open letter in The Times: ‘I feel that in present circumstances I can do better work if I maintain my independence and am not gagged by a loyalty that I do not feel towards the whole of your Administration.’45

  There was something mad, as well as magnificent, about this. (In the event, Northcliffe’s brother Lord Rothermere became the Air Minister.) Lloyd George did not ask Northcliffe to be an official part of the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference when the war ended, and this put the seal on the enmity which Northcliffe felt for him. ‘The break had to come’, LG recalled, ‘when he wanted to dictate to me. As Prime Minister I could not have it. Northcliffe thought he could run the country. I could not allow that.’46

  Lloyd George said these words after Northcliffe’s death in 1922, aged fifty-seven.

  It was a terrible death, not less terrible for being, like his life, partially comic. The year before he died, he had made a world tour. It disconcerted him. He sensed that the Empire he loved was coming to an end, and he feared that newspapers would be supplanted by wireless. His tendency, when back in London, to send abusive and megalomaniac telegrams to underlings and government ministers became so uncontrollable that they had to be stopped, and his telephones disconnected – the equivalent in Northcliffe’s case of disconnecting the valves of a lesser mortal’s heart. He was suffering, not as his enemies averred from syphilis, but from endocarditis. Before they removed his telephone connection, he was heard whispering down the line to someone at the Daily Mail: ‘I hear they are saying I am mad … Send down the best reporter for the story.’47

  One of his last barked instructions was: ‘Tell Mother she was the only one!’48 Other scoops which he had vouchsafed to his staff included the intelligence that God was a homosexual.49

  By then he had retreated to a hut on the roof of his house in 1 Carlton House Gardens. The doctors believed that the cooling breezes would soothe his troubled mind. The roof was too weak to support the revolving shelter, and his neighbour the Duke of Devonshire gave permission for the roof of the adjoining hous
e to be used. There, raving and sad, the father of modern British journalism died lonely beneath the modern sky of a London summer.

  13

  Peace

  The Germans fought no less gallantly than the British or the French or the Russians. They nevertheless lost the war. There were a number of factors which could be said to explain this. One, undoubtedly, was the extent of socialist-inspired anti-war, anti-monarchical and antigovernment feeling among the German people at home. Another was the effect on German morale of the American entry into the war, even though General Pershing’s Expeditionary Force made little military impact at first. (By June 1918, when America had been a belligerent for over a year, 800 American troops had been killed in action, compared with the 1.8 million Germans, 1.7 million Russians and 1.384 million French who were killed in the entire war.) It was not so much the American army which helped to subdue Germany’s hopes, as the thought of the world now being against the Fatherland. Austria-Hungary was collapsing, and the Ottoman Empire had failed to put up a resistance to the combined troops of the Entente. General Allenby entered Jerusalem as a conqueror, though humbly and on foot, on 9 December 1917. In these circumstances, with a feeling of the whole world being against them, only a supreme display of military strength, and a very good measure of luck, could have won the war for the Germans on the Western Front.

  And it was here that the third, and principal, reason for their defeat was made clear to them. Munitions were the key. Lloyd George’s decision to build more tanks, and more and bigger guns, than the enemy was the vital ingredient in the Allied victory. General Pershing’s American forces had no tanks, and almost no artillery, but by the summer of 1918, 1.5 million US troops had arrived in Europe, to be issued with French and British equipment, particularly the 75-mm field gun and the Renault light tank. These young men who had arrived fresh and well-fed from the prairies, plains and cities of the New World made a powerful impact on the old world they had come to save or conquer. Vera Brittain, serving as a nurse in Etaples in the spring of 1918, saw a contingent of American soldiers march down the road: ‘I pressed forward … to watch the United States physically entering the War, so godlike, so magnificent, so splendidly unimpaired in comparison with the tired, nerve-racked men of the British Army.’1