by Mark Rowe
The Mist Procession: The Autobiography of Lord Vansittart (1958)
I
Britain going to war against Germany ranks as one of the most memorable pieces of news of the century, like the assassination of President Kennedy, and the death of Diana, Princess of Wales; or indeed the ends of wars in 1918 and 1945, or the start of war again in 1939. As with any object, however, news needs speed - as well as mass - to have force. People remembered the start of the second war by the speech on the radio by Neville Chamberlain - or claimed to, because some wrongly thought Churchill was the prime minister they heard. Nineteen-fourteen had no such broadcast to unite listeners in a common memory.
The navy and - above all - ships at sea, were the exceptions. Civilians had all the time they wanted to let the news sink in, or to ignore it; sailors had to do as they were told. They assumed fleets would clash as soon as they found each other, the same as the armies on land. If anything, sailors wished for that great battle, to get it over with. G C Harper, a cadet in Devonport who joined HMS Endymion on August 1, admitted to a ‘temporary depressing feeling’ on the evening of Monday August 3, ‘that perhaps after all England would remain neutral’. His ‘frightfully old’, 20-year-old, cruiser put to sea at 10am on the Tuesday, weighed anchor at 5pm, ‘and went off at 15 knots around Land’s End and up the Irish Channel’. Harper was in charge of two of the ship’s four searchlights. An officer told him that Britain was going to declare war on Germany at midnight.
So when the end of the watch came and eight bells struck I thought, at last we have begun war with Germany after all these years of talk; now we will see. There was a ripping kind of air of perfect calm and efficiency about it. We knew that the Navy had been preparing for a week and everyone was ready. I thought of all the novels and scare-mongering magazine articles which all without exception prophesised a surprise and a very bad one for us when this war came off. But it struck me it was more of a surprise for the Germans.
Harper arrived at Scapa Flow, the navy’s harbour in northern Scotland, on the Thursday afternoon, August 6. Also on its way to Scapa Flow was HMS Marlborough, whose wireless officer, James Somerville, heard earlier on the Tuesday that war would be declared. “Revolvers and ammunition were served out to the officers today; I think I shall wear mine after all because I am the only officer on the main deck and if things go badly at any time there may be a panic; not my own people, they are too intelligent, but among the hoi polloi such as stokers etc.” As that line suggested, Somerville felt under strain already - ‘I hardly dare sleep for fear of something going wrong with the WT [wireless transmission]’, he admitted in his diary. He expected ‘to be blown up at any moment’ as the ship steamed towards Norway. At 11pm, Somerville received from the Admiralty the king’s message telling of war. “Somehow it seemed rather banal ...” he wrote, evidently by now too tired to feel much; he went to sleep at 1am and had to turn out again at 4am, ‘dead to the world’.
Typically people learned of the war in their own time, by a routine act - by reading a newspaper; or, even less dramatically, by having the news read to them. Those on holiday might well not have heard the news until hours after everyone else, which would make the event feel even flatter.
William Pickbourne, the Northamptonshire preacher, felt the war as much as anyone; his son Frank, as a Territorial, was called up. Pickbourne and two of his other sons had travelled overnight, uncomfortably, from London Paddington to Ilfracombe, arriving on Saturday August 1. “With the war news about however we felt we had better be getting home,” he wrote; yet the Pickbournes carried on their holiday, taking a coastal pleasure ship to Clovelly on the Wednesday, the first full day of war, and only left Devon on the Friday. By the Monday, August 10, he was telling his diary ‘a horrible crisis has arisen’, and how his son Frank, camping in a schoolyard in Northampton, was about to go to Derby for training. Plainly it took a few days for the war to sink into Pickbourne - or he had not liked to leave the boarding house he had already paid for.
Once you heard of the war, what were you supposed to do? If you had been in uniform, you might expect to join in. Frank Balfour, back in his office in Berber after his trek by camel, let out his disappointment in a letter to the society belle Irene Lawley:
I got back here to read a week’s old Reuter’s and find all the world in a blaze. And tonight comes the news that we have gone to war - and here am I consigned to simply carry on in this cesspit without a chance of a show at all. All leave is stopped. The one thing I’ve prayed for was a chance of a little real soldiering, and I’ve got to miss it and merely do what I’m paid for.
On the Tuesday, Guy Paget in Paris gave up trying to reach his wife in Aix - ‘the military had monopolised all the trains’ - and decided to return to England to get a job. To smooth his way home, he had what he recalled was ‘a very important looking passport covered all over with stamps of eagles and things from having had it in Russia’. As Paget had met ‘a Gordon Highlander called Hamilton’ with a wife, maid and dog, Hamilton ‘indented’ his wife and maid over to Paget, whose passport was ‘made out for those commodities’. Paget’s other weapon was upper-class cheek:
Together we approached the Gare du Nord and ignoring the sentry we progressed to the office of the chef de Gare and demanded an interview. My French is limited but emphatic. They said the chef was busy and saw no-one. I replied dites lui Monsieur Paget est ici ... allez vite.’ The clerk was impressed and alleyed all right. We followed on his heels into the office. Who the clerk said we were whom he had let break unannounced into the great man’s presence I know not but should not be surprised if it were the Prince of Wales incog. Flourishing my passport as if they were an order from the President I bowed and explained that under the present difficulties I should not insist on a special train but if the chef would have a first class reserved for me on the next train it would just do, but only just ... The bluff came off! At 2pm I found an armed soldier at each door of my carriage into which a bowing official in gold lace deposited me cum spurious wife and maid and what he supposed to be I think my ADC.
The train took them only as far as Rouen, where they had to change and go third class to Dieppe. Once at London Victoria on the Thursday, August 6, Paget drove straight to his old regiment, the Scots Guards, and to the adjutant Roger Tempest. “He greeted me with, ‘Where on earth have you been? You are the only one we had not heard from,’” Paget recalled. As a free man not on the reserve, Paget asked the Guards to have him back. Tempest, going by the deaths in Britain’s last war, against the Boers, reckoned it would be 18 months to two years before Paget could reach a battalion, because they were already full. “I said that the war might be over in six months at the most, so might I look for a job ... Roger agreed.” Paget soon had all the work he could take, and never did join the Guards again.
II
The Army officer Donald Weir, writing his weekly letter from India to his mother in England on August 4, was following the crisis, Reuter’s telegram by telegram, and guessing that war would come by ‘the next wire’. They had been arranging mobilisation for three days in case of any sudden order, and all leave was stopped: “But this has no meaning for us as we will not leave India,” Weir predicted.
The Army at home must be overjoyed at the chance of going for the Kaiser’s dirty Germans and to fight side by side with the French. It is most disheartening for us out here to think that we are so absolutely out of it out here and that the latest joined warts and squirrels at home will probably be experiencing their first taste of war. Every soldier longs to see some fighting and here is the chance of a lifetime to have a dig at the Germans whom we have so long despised. It is doing something for one’s country and in the event of being killed which is by no means necessary one can not wish for a more glorious death. This war will probably be the last of any size for years to come at any rate during our lifetime as soldiers and yet we in India can take no part in it, as we are compelled
to remain out here and look after these dirty lieing blacks whom we hate so much that one would revel in shooting them down by the hundred daily.
“Am just going to pop off to the telegram office,’ Weir went on brightly, “only 50 yards away to see if there are any more wires. No more news,” he continued after that pause. “It appears the cable via Suez is the whole while taking government messages so something serious must be taking place. The cable via Germany, Russia and Teheran has been cut.”
Chapter 9
Spies
Spying is no more ignoble than shooting; the cause is the thing that counts.
Spy, by Bernard Newman (1935)
I
George Rose lived in a flat in north London, worked as a clerk in an office, and at weekends went to his family home at Chipping Ongar in Essex. He played the piano, and was learning to paint and sketch. By late July the sensitive young man was wondering, over a map of England, where to go on holiday: on a caravan tour; or to Maldon, by the Essex coast? He packed on Friday July 24, and painted in the fields around Ongar at the weekend. On the Monday he and his family took the train from London King’s Cross to Friskney, in the Lincolnshire Fens, where his brother Ted was marrying a farmer’s daughter and George Rose was best man.
Rose began sketching the farm soon after arriving, but soon met the bridesmaid, her mother and sisters. Alice, a 17-year-old ‘with clean cut features and sweet grey eyes’ he knew from a photograph in Ted’s room, ‘and I have always been charmed by it,’ he wrote later in his diary. “Now I am not a whit disappointed by meeting her in the flesh (not much flesh either!).” He played tennis with her and other ladies, before the wedding, addressed cards after, and after tea ‘made a bad drawing of her’. He wrote that he was sad to leave on the Wednesday: “I have received enough invitations to allow me no time for anything else for the rest of my life if I followed them to their logical conclusion. But I shall not for the inviters only expect me to commit matrimony.”
What made this talented young man, who plainly found Alice as interesting as she found him, so ungallant? Insecurity did not explain it, though he was unsure of himself. He had an ambition that women would only get in the way of; he longed to be an artist. As he may have seen it, he had little enough time free from work, without having a woman too. As a sign of his priorities, in his diary for Tuesday August 4 - by now, holidaying at Maldon - he noted the war with Germany, then wrote all about his afternoon outing with his friend, Duncan, to Osea Island nearby. First they had ‘a good tea in a village shop’; “also we found corn fields both reaped and growing. Best of all was a family of little sandpipers in a dyke which we watched but better even was the grey harmony of colour when the moon was behind the white sailed yacht which followed us home.” On the edge of Essex, with Germany beyond the sea, visitors with eyes only for scenery stuck out. On the Thursday they painted Maldon church tower all morning:
and in the afternoon we walked to Heybridge Basin where we had tea at the Old Ship Inn and sat in the comfortable window all the evening whilst it rained and we sketched and listened to the long-shoreman talking about the War News. After supper at our own inn I still had enough energy to start a sketch by the church tower, Duncan with me. We were then inconvenienced and much annoyed by being locked in the churchyard and accused of being German spies and we had to give our identity to the police and show all our works at the Swan Hotel to them. After this performance we stood drinks to the officers and went to bed.
Couldn’t anyone with suspicions have talked to the artists, and seen they were genuine and harmless? As the wrongly accused, should the artists, not the police, have been the ones offered a drink? The most obvious hurt Rose felt was on the Monday: “Back to office after a fortnight’s leave,” was all he put in his diary. Rose knew his ache for more freedom, dulled weekdays by the routine of work, too well to put it into words.
At least his accusers knew they were at war. William Page of Burton-on-Trent and two friends, visiting Grimsby docks on Bank Holiday Monday, on the last full day of peace, tried to take photographs of warships in the bay. Soldiers with fixed bayonets took them to the Customs offices, where the trio showed their excursion tickets. “They could not have been satisfied with what we had told them, for before long we found ourselves being followed by an officer with his hand on a revolver which was, no doubt, loaded,” Page reported later. The officer told him to stop smoking his pipe; why, Page did not know: “... and it was only by taking refuge on an excursion steamer and disappearing down into the hold in double quick time that we eluded our pursuer.” If the officer thought Page was a spy, why let him go? Why believe his story; couldn’t a spy buy an excursion ticket the same as anyone else? The soldiers were doing their job of guarding; you suspect, besides, that they enjoyed the chance to bully civilians, if only to make a change from the boredom.
In Walsall Wood, they didn’t chase Germans; they punched them. On Monday evening, August 10, an 18-year-old miner, Bert Faulkner, went to have a look at the ‘German’ in his street. The stranger asked Faulkner (with swear-words) what he was looking at; and had he lost his dinner? Faulkner may not have grasped that someone with such command of sarcasm in English, was hardly likely to be German; or, the insults may have provoked Faulkner to hit the stranger twice, hard enough to fall on a doorstep. The ‘German’ was Edward Evans, a labourer from Barrow in Furness, who told Walsall magistrates he had walked from West Hartlepool seeking work. As a magistrate told Faulkner: “Why don’t you join Lord Kitchener’s Army?”
II
Evans had, so the court heard, been the talk of the street as a strange-talking ‘German’. If Faulkner felt so keen to take the fight to Germans, what stopped him joining the army? As an excuse of sorts, Faulkner had said that he had ‘only had three days to pick up this week’, meaning three days of work. Short-time working was common in coal mines and factories where demand for their goods changed with the seasons. The poverty, and the ignorance that made Faulkner and his likes take a northerner for a foreign enemy, meant that Faulkner would never feel strongly about the rights of Belgium, or anywhere.
Not that only common people mistook their countrymen for foreigners. A Mr Durose, an accountant from Nottingham, reported to his local police on August 6 that while at Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire he found a German prince was staying at the Clay Hotel, ‘who was constantly receiving and sending telegrams etc’. Nottingham police passed the tip on, and the local force evidently checked, because a Superintendent Corden reported back that the man was Prince Frederick Duleepsingh, of Blow Foston Hall, Thetford, Norfolk, ‘who is an exile prince from India who has come to Woodhall Spa for the last eight years and he has offered his services to the War Department’.
For every hothead like Bert Faulkner and nosey-parker like Mr Durose, many more people minded their own business. What did Mr Durose think he was playing at? Did it not occur to him that the hotel staff would have noticed a suspicious guest? Could he not have asked around the hotel, or indeed politely made conversation with ‘Prince Frederick’, before going to the police (and why wait until he was home?). Mr Durose may have wanted badly to do some good, and did not know how to. Seeing hidden enemies cost nothing. Anyone in uniform, a soldier on guard or a police constable, would always take a sighting seriously. The only sure way they could then stay out of trouble was to act on a complaint, no matter how foolish. Newspapers gave the Mr Duroses of every town their excuse. Fears in print sold more papers, and newspapers knew they could never be proven wrong. A Burton Daily Mail editorial late in August, for example, urged readers to join the ‘hunt for spies’, claiming that 50,000 able-bodied Germans and Austrians were at large in Britain - 30,000 of them in London. Germany had bred, the Burton Mail reckoned,’ the most astute and unscrupulous class of spy yet known to Europe’. What, then, of the real Germans and Austrians in Britain?
III
As early as August 1, the order went from Lincolnshire p
olice chief constable Captain Cecil Mitchell-Innes, a former soldier, to have Anthony Strenge, a marine engineer of May Villa, Barton upon Humber, ‘carefully watched during the present crisis’ as he was suspected of being an ‘evil-disposed person’. Even before the war, clearly the authorities had some suspects, whether agents gathering information or waiting for the outbreak of war to blow up things. At 10.10pm on the Wednesday, August 5, Mitchell-Innes sent a telegram went to all his police divisions to “keep special watch to prevent aliens travelling by night by motor car for purposes of committing outrages. Motor cars belonging to Germans may be seized ... warn Motor Garages not to hire out cars to aliens.”
Any Germans in Lincolnshire, a county facing Germany, were a risk not only for the mischief they might do, but in case they guided invaders. The military sent Lincolnshire police two significantly related telegrams on the evening of Friday August 7. First, the army wanted notices along the county’s 60 miles of coast, from Grimsby on the Humber to Sutton Bridge on The Wash, warning people not to go on beaches between sunset and sunrise, ‘as they might be shot’. Why else would the army guard the coast - or say it was guarded - unless it feared a German landing? Next, the army asked for the arrest of all Germans able to bear arms. Fears persisted in Lincolnshire, even as the Germans attacked in Belgium. On August 12, Lincoln police headquarters rang the police stations near the coast, at Spilsby, Alford and Louth. Police were shortly to tell the owners of horses and cattle to drive their animals behind the wolds - in other words, well inland - if, after a naval battle in the North Sea, enemy ships beached on the coast: “and of course the obvious thing to do would be for them to land and do useful work for their point of view”. Here was one of two dilemmas for enemy-facing counties in two world wars: in an invasion, should you stay put, and risk enemy capture and having to do his bidding? Or should you flee (but where?), and risk getting in the way of the defenders, and being called a coward? In both world wars, as this first time, the authorities made some daft compromise. Farm animals would flee, but villagers were best to stay at home, and (the police added hopefully) ‘should not get alarmed nor go rushing about’.