by Mark Rowe
The Fabians made camp in tents beside the lake, or stayed in hotels. Early one morning Arnot went to the jetty, testing the water with his toes. Swimming between the islands of Derwentwater was ‘a bearded, good-looking lean figure of a man’: George Bernard Shaw. Meeting for the first time, the playwright said to Arnot: “The temperature is very even.” Arnot, and others, duly went in. Such was Fabianism; you left the world (and your clothes) behind, and chose a new element, so cold that only the most determined would go through with it. Once you became used to it - the talk of guild socialism, collectivism, provision for maternity, and the like - you could tell yourself you were enjoying it, and look down on everyone else as too stupid to follow. Except, if socialist reforms were so good for you, why weren’t more people there? As Arnot admitted, he saw Americans, Indians, Scots and continental Europeans at the conference, and fairly few English.
Everyone was looking forward to the arrival of the French socialist leader, Jaures. As the fortnight ended, on August 1, Arnot wrote: “I saw the face of Beatrice Webb turn white as she learned by the morning papers of the assassination in Paris by a warmonger of her old friend Jean Jaures. It was this more than any flood of frequently contradictory telegrams in the daily papers which made us all realise that war was very near indeed; that it would be hard to prevent it; and that the first blood sacrifice had been made ...”
The Fabians left the Lakes by train at Keswick, for London. “We were leaving a world of keen and animated Socialist discussion and planning of how to end Capitalism, of what was to take the place of it, and of how to provide the means to build up a new society. But this which had seemed so near, so actual, so full of zeitgeist was already far in the past.” So Arnot claimed. Whenever the train stopped, they bought newspapers, and their gloom lifted. “On the facts as known to us there seemed no likelihood of Britain going to war. It was fantastic, utterly needless and groundless. Apart from the overwhelming repugnance of the mass of the people to war (not to mention the reiterated pacific intentions of our Government) there was no reason for it.”
II
“The first sign of war that we heard of was on the wedding day,” Alan Brooke wrote on board ship in mid-August. He had sailed to England from India in June, in a full four-berth cabin ‘no larger than a dog kennel’. In the mornings he studied German and an ‘excellent new book on tactics’. His main homework was to marry, in Ireland, Jane Mary Richardson. His bride, like him, was a child of County Fermanagh. “Day all went off splendidly,” Brooke wrote on Wednesday July 29, the day after the wedding. They drove to St Michael’s Church, Trory, by brougham (a closed carriage drawn by a single horse) and left by hired car. Just as the couple’s change of transport showed a world on the brink between real horse-power and machines, so the weather was a sign of a hopeful future. The sky cleared, Brooke wrote, ‘and the sun was shining brightly on us when we came out of the church’. The guests, who had decorated the car with slippers, pelted the Brookes with rice. “It was a great relief to get off, away from the crowd and to find just the two of us breezing through space. It was quite one of the happiest moments of my life,” Brooke wrote.
Army officers had to make the most of all-too-brief months at home - the Brookes had been planning to marry for six years - compared with years in India. After a reception at his wife’s family home at Rossfad, they took the train to Gweedore Hotel, in neighbouring County Donegal. They honeymooned quietly. On the evening of August 1 they went out to fish the river running past their hotel, ‘and I caught a few small trout, but nothing worth keeping,’ Brooke wrote. They planned to stay a week, return to Rossfad, and pack their presents, and Brooke would sail back to Bombay on August 11. A hint of war was on their wedding day, when a guest from the Royal Navy had to leave after the ceremony, ‘but of course that was more or less of a precautionary measure’.
III
If Ireland was near to civil war - so near, said Lord Harrowby to Unionists in Stafford in April, that they might hear any day of a massacre of Ulstermen - how did a Ulster couple manage to marry, in Ulster, without any mention of it? If anywhere in Ireland would see conflict, it would be Fermanagh: then, as now, it was one of the most mixed counties of Protestant and Catholics. So was Ireland on the brink, but Alan Brooke kept quiet about it in letters, so as not to worry his mother in France? Or were the only ones talking of war the English, who had nothing better to do than poke their nose into other people’s business; and a few Irish politicians, such as the Ulster Unionist Sir Edward Carson, who were boosting their careers? Guy Paget admitted after the war: “I was on the fringe of the gun running with Carson and the Ulstermen. How near we were to civil war during those months will never really be known. The powder was ready and lots of people were striking matches all over the place.” At the time, some feared that war, or the danger of it, in Ireland might tempt unnamed foreign powers to attack England. When continent-wide war came, some claimed that Germany took advantage of England giving all its attention to Ireland. This was crediting Germany with more cunning than it had, and assumed, wrongly, that foreigners worried about England before they made their moves. Certainly neither the Unionist nor Home Rule sides in Ireland held back in case of what foreigners might do. As Paget admitted, men like himself made civil war more likely by sending weapons to Ireland; and not all for the Unionist side.
On Sunday July 26, a 29-year-old Army officer, Gordon Shephard, on leave from his regiment, took the tram from Dublin to the fishing port of Howth. There he directed the landing of guns by boat for the Nationalist Volunteers. He wrote in a letter soon after that “the whole was carried out in a most orderly manner though there was some scrimmaging at the start. The Volunteers marched off when all was over.” Private armies were against the law, and had been since the Wars of the Roses, for good reasons. The Nationalists knew they were doing wrong: a ‘Cycle Corps’ of their men watched for the police. Yet the day could not have been that secret, because newspapers ran photographs of the cyclists; and of Volunteers in their Sunday best suits, marching with rifles over their shoulders.
Shephard had an impeccable background. Named after the imperial hero Gordon of Khartoum, he combined his love of sailing with some amateur spying on German harbours. He may have aided the Irish Nationalists because he had become a Roman Catholic; yet the reason he offered in a letter was one more, daft and irresponsible, example of an Englishman’s wish for life to be like sport. He reckoned that because the Unionists had guns, it was ‘fair play for nationalists to have a counter-consignment of weapons’.
Now that both sides had the means to fight, men who denied civil war could happen were as dangerous as the likes of Lord Harrowby, who merely made themselves look silly by exaggerating the risk. In Ireland in July 1914, the same as before or after, it made no difference to most people where they were ruled from. They wanted a quiet life; they no more thought of spoiling the Brookes’ honeymoon than the newly-weds thought of it being spoiled. It would only take a few hot-heads, drunk from the feel of a rifle in their hand, or plain drunk, to upset the other side, and the other side hitting back, harder, and it would be like a schoolyard or a pub fight - no-one asked for it, or remembered how it started, but once a punch stung you, you would not be satisfied until you had unstung yourself by hurting someone else. That was how wars began. In what looked to some like the last effort for peace, King George V hosted talks with English and Irish politicians at Buckingham Palace between July 21 and 25. Even this offended some Liberals, as the King appeared to lack confidence in his Government. In any case, the conference came to nothing; the elite of politics and London in general had their summer holidays to head for, starting with the race meeting at Goodwood. Paget was right not to know where interfering with Ireland would end.
IV
William Swift, the retired Gloucestershire village schoolmaster with the injured aunt, rose a little earlier than usual, before 6am, on Monday July 20, the day that Sarah Pick wrote, no doubt painf
ully, her letter to him. He was ‘busy at housework most of the morning’ and had jobs to do for St Andrew’s, his parish church, drawing out cheques for coal and ‘vino sacre’, and for Walter Organ, the village’s young coal haulier. Swift sent cheques to a local solicitor and parishioner, John Henry Jones, to sign. In his diary Swift wrote: “He goes to Ireland probably next Friday or Saturday; he told me this yesterday,” presumably at church. “He thought the Irish might very fairly be trusted with Home Rule. ‘Look at Canada with several parliaments, and why not Ireland?’” So Swift quoted Jones as saying. “Germany got on very well in the matter of religious fairness and why not Ireland? &c.”
Swift’s daughter-in-law Annie came in the afternoon for a couple of hours, to pass on gossip. “She said it was reported that Uncle William had applied for relief to the Guardians so as to make his son ‘brass up’.” This offers an interesting insight into family thinking; that old uncle asked for state help, not so much because he was poor, but so as to shame his son into looking after him better.
Swift, who turned 73 in 1914, was slowing. In the last two years he had had ‘faints’ and ‘swoons’; ‘housemaid’s knee’ from kneeling; and lumbago. In February, when he asked Boots in Gloucester for something for his rheumatic pains, the chemist had told him about new tablets: Aspirin. In May, he had to stop when walking because of a tight chest. It is given to no man to know the hour of his death, and Swift was not to know that he, like Gerald Legge, was in the last full year of his life.
He kept his routine. He rose around 6am, cleaned and swept - women’s work, but his wife Rosena had died in 1907. On Saturday July 18, he picked the last of the broad beans for Sunday meals and dug some of his potatoes. He had to ask a neighbour, Mrs Gilkes, to get some earth out of his left eye: “She then sat for half an hour.” Emily Gilkes, the wife of Daniel the village railway stationmaster, gave Swift some gossip too, about the renovation of her house: “Then of scandalous behaviour of our young neighbour. CP aged 14 and three lads at the school. L upon hearing of CP received the complaint with great apathy and indifference. Lastly that the children at the school did not learn their tables. And Dorothy Locke had just lost L chance of good employment in consequence of this and bad spelling; this is a blot on our school.” Wisely - though Mrs Gilkes was moaning about the school Swift had run for three decades - Swift did not, at least not in his diary, become angry about something that was no longer his affair. Who ‘L’ was, is a mystery, but ‘CP’ was probably Cyril Phelps, the eldest son of another neighbour, Hubert Phelps the baker and his wife Priscilla.
Like the householders around him, Swift had a physically demanding life, helping and helped by neighbours and family. Dorothy Hill, the young niece of Mr and Mrs Gilkes, picked the last of the raspberries and currants. Though busy, Swift had time to read good books: the Bible, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, Shakespeare, and the French fairy stories the Contes de Fées, which on July 22 he finished for the 45th time, as dated by him on the cover. As a man of habit, thanks to such attention to detail, he had kept a diary for more than 50 years; a Pepysian feat, one of the great unappreciated recordings of English life. If he had great emotions, he seldom gave way to them in writing. What he had to say was the unexciting stuff of a village; of attending near-deserted church services (on that July 22, he and Mr Phelps were the only ones in church that morning, apart from the vicar); and of occasional train journeys into Gloucester to buy the few things the village could not provide. Swift and the people around him had no quarrel with Ireland, or Germany, or anywhere.
V
The Army officer Donald Weir was scratching around for news all July for his weekly letter from India to his mother at home. He had little to do except run the regimental rugby team in the afternoons, and go through the usual rounds of dinners and golf. He was playing a long game; when the colonel asked if he wanted to go ‘to the depot’, in England, he said he was not keen: “For one reason only,” he admitted to his mother, “that I hope to be in for a year’s leave next February or March though I have little hope of getting more than nine months, whereas if I went to the depot I might get three months at Christmas and that is all.”
On Wednesday July 29 he wrote a few lines before lunch, “as I will be playing in a football match this afternoon and after that I have got fids of work to do so much so that I am going to make a night of it, not dine in mess but have cocoa and biscuits in my quarters and work up to one or two o’clock if needs be. Anyway I have to get answers written to a number of Mil History papers and hand them in on Saturday so there is little time to spare.” Beyond that, he knew his next few months: rugby tournaments in Lucknow and Calcutta, then to Delhi, then manoeuvres. As for the news from home, he called it ‘pretty bad’:
what with the trouble in Dublin and the possibility of a general conflagration among the different European powers. I am afraid our King cannot feel very happy at the way matters are going alone just now. The remarks about the King in the Radical press after the conference at Buckingham Palace are disgraceful. Of course we only get just the general outlines of events in the daily telegrams; so much goes on at home which we do not hear about until a fortnight later. We have been having incessant rain for days past now but it makes the air so cool and though rather depressing I like it.
Weir still had home leave on his mind. “All said and done I have only had eight months leave in six and a half years out here so feel entitled to a winter at home especially as I get that bally hay-fever in the summer.”
VI
Frank Balfour had a routine as much as William Swift; plans for a holiday as much as Donald Weir; an Eton education like his near-contemporary Gerald Legge; and marriage on his mind as much as Alan Brooke, though more in hope. Otherwise his life had little in common with any of them. On his hunting expedition early in 1914, Legge may have passed Balfour, who worked as the inspector of Berber district in Sudan, beside the Nile north of Khartoum. Having returned to Sudan in December 1913 after leave in England, Balfour wrote that he was ‘up to the neck’ with:
taxes, trade, prices of grain and animals, cattle-plague, sanitation (if any), schools, crime, markets, the state of the river, date trees, police, and all the thousand and one things one has to deal with here. One falls straight into it at once - even my dog greeted me as if I’d been away four days, not four months, and barring the big difference of having run up against you, I feel as if I’d never been away at all.
The ‘you’ was ‘my dear Irene’, the Honourable Irene Lawley, an aristocratic beauty he had evidently fallen for the previous autumn. For the next months, and indeed years, he had just about enough maturity, and good humour, to express in letters how he felt about being thousands of miles from her, and the rest of civilisation; without going too far by becoming too self-pitying or menacing. At times it was a close call; he admitted he tore up some of his replies, and on June 2 was reduced to ‘collecting all the back Tatlers in the club, and going into the deserted Billiards Room’, to search for her picture, ‘for a clue as to your whereabouts’. On June 23, he received a 12-day-old letter from her, “as I sit sweating under the office punkah [swinging fan], and I can’t do any work till I’ve answered it. I salve my conscience by using the cheaper brand of Government paper.” He had plotted to ‘lure’ her to the Austrian Tyrol. Instead, she was planning to travel to America. He hoped to meet someone called ‘Baffy’ early in August, probably at Salzburg, “and drift home. I want to see Munich among other places. I was choked off it last year by home-sickness and a Wagner festival.” The dream of meeting her again plainly kept him going, though he managed to keep his tone playful: “I hate the idea of having to wait till September to see you, and I’m not sure I shan’t pursue you to America ... I only ask you for a chance - I’m not in a hurry and I won’t hurry you or pester you with what the Victorians called ‘attentions’!”
In fairness, it sounded as if he was indeed pestering her with (already a quaint term) ‘a
ttentions’. Why did she put up with it? She may have liked him. They did have friends in common; on July 26 he reported that ‘Baffy tells me that you are going to have an operation to your nose which horrifies me’. It must have crossed Balfour’s mind that he was probably not the only smitten young man writing to her; nor was he. As the sort of rich young lady who had nothing better to do than be seen in places where Tatler magazine might photograph her, she might have enjoyed reading and answering letters of the sort that ended “I am, if possible, rather more ‘yours’ than usual, Frank.” His letters, besides, told of a genuinely out-of-the-ordinary life, an odd mix of the exotic and the leisurely European - he had ponies to ride, ‘and very good tennis every afternoon’ he reported on July 3; again using works notepaper, this time from the Governor’s Office. A week later he described enduring two hours of the ‘haboob’:
First a little bright yellow cloud on the horizon across the desert to the east - in ten minutes it covers all the sky in that direction ... - in the interval you stow away everything that could possibly break loose, double mooring ropes and drive in the pegs. Then it falls on you in a hill of wind and sand against which you shut doors and windows in vain - there is nothing to be done but sweat in misery till it’s over, and then go and wash the mud out of your eyes and ears.