August 1914: The Enemy Within? by Leslie Wilson

'Two Germans entered the tube at Belsize Park. While the train was in motion they conversed in German, but during the short periods of silence at the stations they relapsed into bad, gutteral French. Two young men, hearing a reference to carrier pigeons, broke their journey at Leicester-Square and followed the Germans through Coventry-Street to a café. '

I was given this brown scrap of newspaper by another Quaker; it comes from the archive of Edward H. Milligan, once archivist at Friends House, a man who has been a valued resource for anyone working on Quaker history for many years. He has recently moved from a house to a flat, and has had to pass on many of his impressive collection of books and documents, quite a few of which I have been lucky enough to acquire.

The zealous young men were hugely excited at the opportunity of catching German spies and fifth-columnists. Did they really hear the words 'carrier pigeons' (Brieftaube), or was the wish father to the thought? They might have been complaining about dust (Staub) for example, or mentioning that someone was deaf (taub). Or the word might have been used figuratively. (Note that the French had to be 'gutteral', a term of abuse against foreign languages that I don't get, since gutterals are just gs, ks, chs, js, etc, and English has plenty of them). One young man sat down to keep the villains under observation, while the other one rushed off to Vine Street police station to tell them what they'd discovered. He then returned, to find that the Germans were departing. The amateur detectives trailed them to Leicester Square, hemmed them in, and told them they were being watched. The Germans 'hurried on, hoping to get rid of us,' and when they saw police, tried to make their escape. Or so the young men told the police. The amateur sleuths 'marked the house which they entered, and informed the local police, who have the matter in hand.'

And all for the crime of talking German between themselves, and talking bad French at the stations.

WHOLESALE ARRESTS, proclaims another column. Two 'alleged Germans' who said they were Russians, were overheard by a teacher of German, 'talking suspiciously' in Conway, and were arrested. (They might well have been Russians of German ethnicity). In London, a German was arrested as a spy and the police seized 'several large deed-boxes' full of documents. The man was held, pending enquiries, at Moor Lane police station. The documents were maybe his business papers. Three supposed German spies were captured on the railway line at Maidstone.

German reservists were being 'arrested wholesale.' I wonder if they were really reservists, since the German reserve had already been mobilised by then, so why would 'a hundred and thirty Germans and Austrians' arrive on boats in the Mersey? Maybe the captains were staggeringly bad at navigation? Apparently many Germans were employed in the lace trade in Nottingham, and they too are described as reservists, and were being arrested 'wholesale.' I do wonder if any young men of military age were considered to be reservists.

Maybe someone has some information that could elucidate this for me?

What the last snippet does reflect is the number of Germans who had lived cheerfully and inoffensively in this country for hundreds of years up till the beginning of the war.The German Lutheran church, in London, pictured below, was founded in 1762.

German Lutheran Church, London, secretlondon 123

Like Friedrich Wilhelm Singer, pastor of the German seamen's mission at Shields, who was remanded on bail, charged with spying.

The language employed is interesting. TELL THE POLICE! urges a headline, describing how more enthusiastic citizens were informing the police about the whereabouts of German residents, who were required to register immediately, or pay a fine of £100 or be imprisoned for six months. The registration offices were the police stations, and the paper says that since the early morning they had been 'invaded' by foreigners making enquiries. So it was an annoyance (to the Evening News, at least) that the Germans and other foreign nationals were following instructions. The paper also seems to regard it as outrageous that many of the Germans were prosperous, and arrived in carriages and taxi-cabs (the implication being that they'd grown rich on payments from the Imperial intelligence agency?).

Spy fever was running high: telegraph wires were reported as being 'tampered with' by Germans, and also soldiers and sailors were said to have been accosted by Germans, eager to pump them for information about troop movements, warships and stores. There was a German who 'left England recently for Germany, who for some time served in a British regiment and obtained the rank of sergeant.' One wonders how much information he'd have gleaned, if he was a spy, serving in such a modest capacity.

There were also, apparently, armies of spies masquerading as commercial travellers. Clearly, there were German spies working in Britain at the time, but surely they'd  have had to be pretty stupid to employ such very visible agents.

In an incident that has spooky resonances of poor Jean Charles de Menezes's murder by the British police, a man 'of foreign appearance' was seen carrying an attaché case near the high level bridge over the Tyne in Newcastle. A patrol challenged him, but instead of stopping he began to run, got into a boat and pushed off. The patrol got another boat and gave chase, but 'as he still declined to stop' he was fired on and wounded. He was said to have thrown the attaché case into the river (or maybe it just fell in?) He died soon after he'd been captured. 'The authorities are very reticent', the paper says.

This story has come through two filters, that of the patrol and that of the newspaper. There are plenty of instances of modern shootings where the police account has been edited, shall we say? One wonders what was really going on there. Of course, the man could have been a quite ordinary thief.

At the same time, shopkeepers were jacking up the price of stores, and there were demonstrations against grocers and bakers in Hitchin; people were panic-buying provisions, though expressly told not to, since, for example 'mild-cured bacon does not pretend to keep like the old farmhouse kind'. People were buying a year's supply of potatoes, and also laying in butter; the paper advises against this, since 'the old-fashioned method of salting fresh butter and keeping it in jars is no longer followed. That last snippet demonstrates the usefulness for the nerdishly inclined historical novelist of reading old newspapers. So people were eating what my mother-in-law called 'sweet butter' at the time, rather than salted, which I grew up with and always supposed to be traditionally British. And anyone writing about the 19th century might like to know that salted butter was sold in jars. I wonder at what period specifically?Anyway, the uncertainty about food probably contributed to the general atmosphere of paranoia.

German missionaries interned at Alexandra Palace, Imperial War Museum

There were in fact around 50,000 Germans or Britons of German origin living in the country in 1914. German shopkeepers (even naturalised Britons) had their windows smashed in; Germans married to British women were marched off to internment camps, which were described by their inmates as 'veritable hell.'

People with German names changed them pretty quickly in order to avoid xenophobic abuse and violence; among them, of course, the Royal Family, who became Windsors instead of Saxe-Coburgs. Given that George V was the first cousin once removed of Kaiser Wilhelm, they might easily have fallen under suspicion.

What struck me, reading these ancient and fragile cuttings, was a resonance between the xenophobia and the outbreaks of racial and xenophobic abuse following the referendum result on June 23rd this year: sheer tribalism. One can only imagine the distress of all those people who had settled here and regarded these islands as their home, at what had occurred, and (because I am half German) I can imagine that many of them must have felt torn in half that their birth country and their adopted country were now at war and their neighbours suddenly hated them.



(The Evening News was part of Associated Newspapers by then, and was thus a sister paper to the Daily Mail.)


The painting of the German missionaries is the work of  George Kenner.

'Joyeux Noel', by Clare Mulley

Earlier this month I was invited to contribute to a three-hour festive marathon; Channel 5’s ‘Greatest Ever Christmas Movies’ special, which was shown on Christmas Eve. As I went in to the studios, Aled Jones came out. My specialist subject was war films. War may not typically be associated with the Christmas film feel-good factor, but it led to some merriment in our house as we tried to work out whether Christmas had featured in The Eagle Has Landed, Downfall or The Hurt Locker. In the end it turned out there was only one war film among Channel 5’s festive top 40 list: Christian Carion’s very beautiful French film Joyeux Noel from 2005, about the Christmas truces down the Western Front in 1914.

The Joyeux Noel poster (2005)

Joyeux Noel is a visually stunning film, with wonderful music – not least the singing of ‘Stille Nacht’ and ‘Ave Maria’ between the trenches. However it does rather romanticize this most powerful moment of peace and humanity amidst one of the most violent episodes in modern history, the First World War. When it was released, the New York Times film critic, Stephen Holden, neatly declared that the film was ‘as squishy and vague as a handsome greeting card declaring peace on earth’. But while it is tempting to write off Joyeux Noel as purely Christmas feel-good, with a narrow focus that does little to help widen our understanding of this remarkable moment in the war, the film does prick interest in the truly extraordinary story of the 1914 Christmas truces.

Joyeux Noel is pegged around a rather feeble love story. A handsome and feted German opera singer has been drafted to the front. His beautiful wife, who hails from the same trade, has negotiated his return from the trenches for the night of Christmas Eve so that they can duet at the officers’ party. Our hero then forgoes a night of peaceful romance to dutifully return to the front, prompting his wife to follow. As far as I am aware, there are no reports of female opera singers performing at the Christmas truces, but the premise certainly provides lots of powerful cinematic and surround-sound opportunities. However, despite this, and a few other historical inaccuracies, the fundamental premise of the film, the most apparently unbelievable thing of all, is entirely true – there were a series of unofficial ceasefires down the length of the Western Front, during which the men who had been killing each other one day put down their arms, climbed out of their opposing trenches, and met in no man’s land for a day of shared Christmas peace.

German soldiers of the 134th Saxon Regiment
with men of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment
in no man’s land, Christmas 1914

At the start of the Great War, as it was then known, there were several localized cease-fires and some fairly accepted codes of conduct among soldiers of both sides. In late 1914, the first winter of the war, 101 British women wrote an ‘Open Christmas Letter’ to the women of Austria and Germany, hoping to promote peace. Pope Benedict XV followed their lead, calling for an official Christmas truce, sadly without success.

Nevertheless, on 24 and 25 December 1914, around 100,000 troops stopped fighting along the length of the Western Front. As in the film, along some stretches of the trenches, German soldiers set up small Christmas trees, lit with candles. Carols were sung collectively by the men of both armies, and some later met to exchange uniform buttons, photographs and gifts of wine and Christmas puddings. Over the following days the fallen were retrieved and buried in peace, religious services were held and, if not refereed football matches, there were at least informal kick-arounds.

The ceasefires were not official policy, and they were not ubiquitous. In some places the peace lasted just one night, in others several days. Some soldiers were shot under cover of the truce, and along much of the front there was no cessation of hostilities at all. Most commanders opposed the truces as did, famously, one young corporal of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry called Adolf Hitler. But the truces did take place, as hundreds of letters from both sides of the front testify.

Letter from Major Hawksley, Warwick Regiment,
27 December 1914

‘The Germans were quite friendly with us’ Lance Corporal Cooper of the 2nd Northampton’s wrote home. ‘They even came over to our trenches and gave us cigars and cigarettes and chocolate and of course we gave them things in return.’ ‘Fancy shaking hands with the enemy!’ scribbled Private B Calder of the 6th Gordons, ‘I suppose you will hardly believe this, but it is the truth’. Despite attempts at censorship the British press were quick to cover the story, some more sentimentally than others, and many quoted the soldiers’ letters. The Times endorsed the men’s lack of malice, and The Mirror regretted that the ‘absurdity and tragedy would begin again’.

The Daily Mirror: 'A Historic Group;
British and German soldiers photographed together'

Like most of those articles, Joyeux Noel is a film with an intimate focus. It does not consider the political or military causes, or wider morality, of the First World War. At most, it hints at the later public swell of feeling to never let such an atrocity happen again, which led to the establishment of, among other organisations, the League of Nations, the Save the Children Fund, and the German Youth Hostel Association, the latter founded by a returning soldier who had taken part in the Christmas truces. There is also a poignant reference to the failure of this movement, when the Iron-Cross holding German commanding officer mentions that he is Jewish.

Essentially however, Joyeux Noel is a statement about the insanity of war, the shared horror of trench warfare and, above all, about the men who found humanity in this least human of situations. Its message, that war is dehumanising, and that even our soldiers must not be made to demonise their enemies, is sadly still relevant today. With its sentimental romance, it might not make a list of top war films, but it does Channel 5 credit to include it in their Christmas list. Films about snowmen can be beautiful and important, but war, and peace, should be remembered at Christmas too.

www.claremulley.com

A different kind of remembering? by H.M. Castor

I was going to write an entirely different post today about Remembrance Day – I had it fully imagined, and even half written – but something else has swept it off my mental desk. Something that’s still about the world wars, in part, and most certainly about remembrance: it’s a juxtaposition, in fact, of three different things.

First, a picture appeared last week in a newspaper’s online gallery – it was a copy of this picture of a woman and child:

This photograph is from a Victorian book called Street Life in London, which documented the lives of some of the city’s poorest citizens. It was published in 1877, with text by Adolphe Smith and photographs by John Thomson. A rare original copy is currently up for auction (hence the gallery in the newspaper).

I know this book well, because I bought a facsimile copy of it some years ago (you can find details of the same edition here). Every one of its photographs and each accompanying piece of text is fascinating but, right from the start, one image grabbed me most particularly (and painfully): this same photograph. In Street Life in London it is described, not as a portrait of “A woman and child”, as the gallery caption puts it, but as a picture of a “crawler” – a horribly vivid term. The accompanying article defines the word like this:

Huddled together on the workhouse steps in Short’s Gardens, those wrecks of humanity, the Crawlers of St Giles’s, may be seen both day and night seeking mutual warmth and mutual consolation in their extreme misery. As a rule, they are old women reduced by vice [though neither case the text goes on to describe involves any vice at all]and poverty to that degree of wretchedness which destroys even the energy to beg. They have not the strength to struggle for bread…

[Street Life in London by A. Smith & J. Thomson, p.108]

Adolphe Smith’s text then tells the stories of two widows who, through ill health, have lost their ability to work, and therefore also their lodgings.

The woman [in the picture], though once able to earn money as a tailoress, was obliged to abandon that style of work in consequence of her weak eyesight, and now her great ambition is to “go out scrubbing”. But who will employ even for this menial purpose, a woman who has no home, no address to give, and sleeps on the workhouse steps when she cannot gain admittance into the casual ward?

[Street Life in London, p.110]

(This same workhouse, Smith later notes, punishes with imprisonment and hard labour anyone who seeks refuge in its ‘casual ward’ three times in the same month.)

At the time this picture was taken, the woman was earning a little bread and tea by looking after the child pictured with her, while its mother (who had formerly been a “crawler” living on the same doorstep) worked in a coffee shop. Because the woman had no home, the child was “kept out in the streets through all weathers.” She told Smith, “it pushes its little head under my chin when it is very cold, and cuddles up to me, so that it keeps me warm as well as itself.” Smith reported, however, that the child was wheezing and coughing – its health was clearly suffering from the exposure.

The situation is almost unbearable to contemplate. And although I was glad to be reminded, through seeing this picture, of this interesting book sitting on my shelves, it was a painful reminder too.

But I mentioned a juxtaposition, didn’t I?

So, I saw this picture last week. Then, a couple of days later, I happened to read two articles by two different writers.

The first was a piece by Harry Leslie Smith, entitled ‘This year, I will wear a poppy for the last time.’ (You can read it here.) Harry is 90 years old, a survivor of the Great Depression and a WWII RAF veteran. In this thoughtful and passionately argued column, he talks, among other things, of how many of the war dead from the First World War were poor:

My uncle and many of my relatives died in [the First World War] and they weren't officers or NCOs; they were simple Tommies. They were like the hundreds of thousands of other boys who were sent to their slaughter by a government that didn't care to represent their citizens if they were working poor and under-educated.

[The Guardian, 8^th November 2013]

Harry feels that our modern view of World War I – which will feature in a lot of media coverage next year when the centenary of the outbreak is marked – is losing touch with the harsh realities of the soldiers' lives away from the trenches.

We must remember that the historical past of this country is not like an episode of Downton Abbey… I can attest that life for most people was spent in abject poverty where one laboured under brutal working conditions for little pay and lived in houses not fit to kennel a dog today. We must remember that the war was fought by the working classes who comprised 80% of Britain's population in 1913.

[The Guardian, 8^th November 2013]

Harry argues that it behoves us at this time of commemoration to consider the home lives of the soldiers, and the lives of the families they left behind, both during the war and afterwards. Those soldiers, after all, came from the same society in which the “crawlers” lived. Although 37 years separated the publication of Street Life in London from the beginning of the First World War, no revolution in social care had occurred in the meantime, and many people still lived in life-threatening poverty. In Love and Toil – Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 (OUP, 1993), Prof. Ellen Ross says that “starvation deaths continued to be a regular occurrence even in the kinder years after 1870.” Indeed, the cases detailed in her book show just how often poor mothers went without sustenance in order to feed their children – or the children of their neighbours. In the summer of 1905, for example, when a poor widow named Annie Higgs was found dead of starvation in Long Street, Shoreditch, it was discovered that her three young children had been kept alive for many weeks by food offerings from the surrounding poor households.

Can we truly imagine, now, the life of the “crawler” or of poor Annie Higgs? Can we truly imagine the type of country this was before the creation of the welfare state, when people were found dead in the street for want of food? Looking at the abject poor in other countries, perhaps we can. But even in this country, those lives and deaths occurred not so very long ago. One of my great-grandfathers was killed in an industrial accident one day in May 1909, leaving his wife with five children to support, and no income – no pension, no compensation, no child benefit, no help of any kind whatsoever. They got through – goodness knows how – without recourse to the dreaded workhouse, but my grandmother (who was 9 at the time of the accident) bore the psychological scars of the experience to the end of her days.

Many of the Tommies Harry Leslie Smith writes about returned from the unimaginable horrors of the trenches, only to be faced with unemployment and homelessness; the governments of the 1920s were unable to deliver a “land fit for heroes”. No wonder that, two decades later, the overwhelming feeling following the end of the Second World War was that the whole of society must take responsibility for the whole of its citizenry. The push for social reform and the creation of a welfare state gained huge support in 1945, not least from members of the armed services, and resulted in a shock defeat at the polls for Winston Churchill – despite his huge achievements as wartime leader.

Would it be fair to say that the generation that fought in World War II decided that life must be viable for all citizens: for the child born to the poorest family; for the aged and the infirm; for those permanently disabled by war – and for all people with disabilities; for those whose mental health had been damaged by war – and for all people with mental health problems?

And yet… back to my juxtaposition. There was the photograph of the Victorian “crawler”. There was the article on poverty behind the trenches. And the third thing?

The third thing was an article by the journalist Polly Toynbee, about the current government’s 'benefit sanctions' system, which is a system of docking benefits or taking them away altogether from claimants who are deemed unworthy (you can read the article here). The Department of Work and Pensions has recently published statistics showing that, for example, nearly 600,000 jobseeker's allowance claimants had their benefits docked or stopped in the eight-month period up to June 2013.

The idea behind this new, tougher system is to make sure people are actively looking for work. Toynbee, however, has discovered from speaking to job centre staff that they are specifically encouraged to find ways to stop people’s benefits regardless of the situation. Staff are given sanction targets to meet, and punished if they fall below them. Toynbee writes:

"You park your conscience at the door," [one job centre worker] tells me. "Sanctions are applied for anything at all to hit the targets."

…People are often sanctioned for a no-show at appointments they never knew about. If they call to rearrange an appointment, "we don't answer the phones, so that's a bit tricky". A flowchart on the wall shows how to raise a successful sanction.

…Someone with a disability who is knocked off employment support allowance can reclaim while awaiting an appeal. "But we are explicitly forbidden from telling them that – in black and white in the briefing pack – so these often very ill, quite confused and low-capability people are easy meat."
[The Guardian, 8^thNovember 2013]

The effects of these sanctions can be utterly disastrous. I don’t think I’ll ever forget reading about the case two years ago of Mark Mullins and his partner Helen, who killed themselves rather than carry on with their lives of desperate struggle. And, tragically, they have not been the only ones.

Now, two years later, the number of people in situations of desperate difficulty is rising. As people lose their income, too often – like the “crawler” in John Thomson’s photograph – they also lose their homes. The charity Crisis says on its website:

After years of declining trends, 2010 marked the turning point when all forms of homelessness began to rise. However, it is likely that homelessness will increase yet further, as the delayed effects of the economic downturn, cuts to housing benefit and other reforms all start to bite.

The same website states that rough-sleeping figures for London have shown a 62% rise in the last 2 years.

Harry Leslie Smith argues that though we wear poppies and pay our respects to the dead of the two world wars (as well as other conflicts), we are in grave danger of forgetting the ideals of his generation, of undoing their hard-won achievements and of ignoring their hard-earned wisdom.

The “crawler” photograph is a picture of what poverty looked like before that same wartime generation decided – through the social reforms made after World War II – that a civilized society cannotview its members solely as economic units (worthless unless able to produce financial capital), and must care for its most vulnerable citizens. How can we say we are truly remembering and honouring that generation when we are dismantling precisely what they – who sacrificed so much – worked so hard to build?

Photograph by Alan Stanton (Nation Wide, Nation Deep)

[CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org
/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The website for Shelter (England) is here.
The website for Shelter (Scotland) is here.
The website for Crisis is here.
Homeless Link's website is here.



www.hmcastor.com

Scouting locations by Eve Edwards

One of the joys of being a writer is that you have a job that includes all the best roles in film making.  The script writing part is obvious.  As director, you plan the story, the look of your concept, set the tone for the whole.  You cast your movie without having to worry about including the latest flavour-of-the-month hottie even if he is not suited to the part.  The only fly in the ointment preventing this being a one person show are the equivalent of the studio producers and distributors: the publishers and the shops. But, hey, I suppose us authors have to be kept in check somehow, don't we?

In the gallery at the Globe

One of the jobs I enjoy most is location scout.  Sometimes this is straightforward: I have an idea and go and seek out the places that I know I am going to use.  For example, when writing about Tudor London, I took the decision to include the first theatre - helpfully known as The Theatre - in the third book of the series.  I had the star-crossed lovers idea at the heart of the book.  The heroine was to be a daughter of an early English Puritan household so her opposite is, naturally, one of the players.  In this era, Puritans denounced the stage as the work of the devil and blamed them for all social ills and the earthquake of 1580 with which I start the book (The Rogue's Princess).  The Tudor theatre is not hard to find thanks to Sam Wanamaker's Globe.  Although located north of the river, The Theatre was the same structure that was dismantled and reassembled as the Globe (see a brilliant account of this in James Shapiro's 1599), so a trip to the South Bank was obvious.

Chocks away!

Some research trips take a little more planning.  I'm now writing a two part series for the anniversary of the outbreak of World War I.  The first part, called Dusk (out Summer 2013), entailed a trip to the Somme area.  If you are interested in this period, I can't recommend too highly the museum at Peronne. As well as a clear narrative, they have full kit for different kinds of soldier, officers and men, laid out as if for inspection and lots of very personal items that bring the individuals into focus.

 For the second part Dawn (which I'm in the process of researching at the moment) I intend to use some of the experiences of the early aviators.  Well, naturally, there was only one thing for it: find out what it was like to fly in an open cockpit.  I went up in a Tiger Moth in June - designed in the Twenties so fairly close to the planes my characters would use.  I hope you like the full Amy Johnson look.  And to prove that, yes, I really did go up, here's a shot from the air.  It may look as if I'm the pilot but in fact I'm in the observer's seat - the pilot sits behind in these two-seaters.  Alex, my guide for the day, entered into the spirit of the thing as we looked for 'Jerry' over the Cotswolds.

These were planned locations but very often the chance-met location inspires the story that follows.  We are fortunate in the UK to live in a country seeded liberally with little historic gems.  The manor at Snowshill owned by the National Trust provided me with unexpected inspiration when I went there with my family on an Easter egg hunt.  It suggested what life in the ranks below the highest would have been for Tudor gentlemen.  It wasn't the manor itself but the hidden corners that spoke to me about the texture of this life - here the studded nails and horse shoes.  This set the tone for my inner director and was used in The Other Countess.

Perhaps you have a favourite location.  If so, do tell me about it.