In 1912, to which year I have now come in these anecdotes of
journalistic life, England was not without troubles at home and abroad,
but nothing had happened, or seemed likely to happen (except in the
imagination of a few anxious and farseeing people), to touch more than
the surface of her tranquillity, to undermine the foundations of her
wealth, or to menace her security as a great imperial Power.
It was a very pleasant place for pleasant people, if they had a social
status above that of casual, or sweated, labor. The aristocracy of
wealth still went through the social ritual of the year, in country
houses and town houses, from the London season to Cowes, from the
grouse moors to the Riviera, agreeably bored, and finding life, on the
whole, a good game, unless private passion wrecked it.
The great middle class, with its indeterminate boundaries, was happy,
well-to-do, with a comfortable sense of ease and security, apart from
the ordinary anxieties, tragedies, failures, of private and domestic
life. People with “advanced” and extraordinary views made a lot of
noise, but it hardly broke into the hushed gardens of the country
houses of England. Labor was getting clamorous, with mock heroic
threats of revolution, but was no real menace to the forces of law and
order. Women were beginning to put forward claims to political equality
with men, but their extravagance of talk had not yet been translated
into wild action. The spirit of England was, in the mass, rooted to
its old traditions, and its social habits were not overshadowed by any
dread.
As a descriptive writer and professional onlooker of life (writing
history and fiction in my spare time), I had, perhaps, some deeper
consciousness than most people outside my trade, of dangers brewing in
the cauldron of fate. I touched English life in most of its phases,
high and low, and was aware, vaguely, perhaps a little morbidly, of
undercurrents beating up strongly below all this fair surface of
tranquility. As I shall tell later, I came face to face with three
bogies of threatening aspect. One was Ireland in insurrection. Another
was industrial conflict in England, linked up with that Irish menace.
A third was war with Germany. Meanwhile, I chronicled the small beer
of English life, and described its social pageantry--royal visits,
the Derby, Henley, Fourth of June at Eton, the Eton and Harrow match,
Ascot, Cowes, the Temple Flower Show, garden fêtes, Maud Allen’s
dancing, the opera, the theater, fancy dress balls.
There was a new passion for “dressing-up,” in that England before the
war. It seemed as though youth, and perhaps old age, desired more color
than was allowed by modern sumptuary laws.
I attended a great fancy dress ball at the Albert Hall--one of many,
but the most magnificent. All “the quality” was there, the most
beautiful women in England, and the most notorious. I went, superbly,
as Dick Sheridan, in pale blue silk, with lace ruffles, a white wig,
white silk stockings, buckled shoes, a jeweled sword. It was strange
how different a man I felt in those clothes. The vulgarity of modern
life seemed to fall from me. I was an eighteenth-century gentleman, not
only in appearance, but in spirit. I was my own great grandfather!
London that night was a queer sight anywhere within a mile of
Kensington. Sedan chairs, carried by sturdy porters in old liveries,
conveyed little ladies in hooped dresses and high wigs. Columbines
flitted by with Pierrots. Out of taxicabs and hansoms and old
growlers came parties of troubadours, English princesses with horned
headdresses, Spanish toreadors, Elizabethan buccaneers, Stuart
cavaliers.
At the ball I saw the faces of my friends strangely transfigured.
They, too, were their own ancestors. One of those I encountered
that night was a fellow journalist named “Rosy” Leach. He swaggered
in the form of a Stuart gentleman, and said, “What a game is this
life!” The next time I met him was when he wore another kind of fancy
dress--khaki-colored--with high boots caked up to the tabs in the mud
of the Somme fields. “Death is nothing,” he said, after we had talked
a while. “It’s what goes before--the mud and the beastliness.” He was
killed in one of those battles, like many others of those who danced
with Columbine and the ladies of the gracious past.
This dressing-up phase was not restricted to London, or rich folks.
There was a joyous epidemic of pageants, in which many old towns and
villages of England dramatized their own history and acted the parts
of their own ancestors. I was an enthusiast of this idea, and still
think that for the first time since the Middle Ages it gave the people
of England a chance of revealing their innate sense of drama and color
and local patriotism. In most of these pageants the actors made their
own costumes, and went to old books to learn something of ancient
fashions, heraldry, arms and armor, and the history of things that
had happened on their own soil and in their own cathedrals, churches,
guild houses, and ruined castles, whose stones are haunted with old
ghosts. The children in these pageants made fields of living flowers.
Youth was lovely in its masquerade. Some of the pictures made by the
massed crowds were unforgetable, as in the Oxford pageant, when Charles
held his court again, and in the St. Albans pageant, when the English
archers advanced behind flights of whistling arrows. If one had any
sense of the past, one could not help being stirred by the continuity
of English life, its unbroken links with ancient customs, its deep
roots in English soil. At Bury St. Edmunds there was a scene depicting
the homage of twenty-two gentlemen to Mary Tudor. Each actor there bore
the same name and held the same soil as those who had actually bowed
before the Tudor lady. It is why tradition is strong in the character
of our race, and steadies it.
There was a comic and pitiful side to these shows, mainly caused by
the weather, which was pitiless, so that often the pageant grounds
were quagmires, and ancient Britons, Roman soldiers, Saxon princesses,
Stuart beauties, had to rush for shelter from rain storms which
bedraggled them. But that was part of the game.
London dreamed not at that time of darkened lights, prohibited hours
for drink, the heavy hand of war upon the pleasures and follies
of youth. Was there more folly than now? Perhaps vice flaunted
more openly. Perhaps temptation spread its net with less need of
caution--though I doubt whether there has been much change in morals,
despite the park pouncing of policemen. There was more gayety in
London, more lights in London nights, more sociability, good and bad, a
great freedom of spirit, in those days before the war. So it seems to
us now.
I was never one of the gilded youth, but sometimes I studied them in
their haunts, not with gloomy or reproving eyes, being tolerant of
human nature, and glad of laughter.
One wild night began when the policeman on point duty in Piccadilly
Circus thought that the last revelers had gone home in the last taxis,
but he was a surprised man when life seemed to waken up again and there
was the swish of motor cars through the circus and bands of young men
walking in evening dress, not, apparently, on their way to bed, but
just beginning some new adventure. They advanced upon the Grafton
Galleries singing a little ballad that marks the date:
“Hullo, hullo, hullo!
It’s a different girl again!
Different hair, different clothes,
Different eyes, different nose....”
This affair had been kept a dead secret from press and public. It was a
“glorious stunt” which had for its amiable object the introduction of
all the prettiest girls of the theater world to all the smartest bloods
of the universities and clubs. It was entitled the Butterfly Ball.
Certainly there were some astoundingly beautiful girls at this
assembly, and not a few of them. The university boys were, for a time
abashed by so much loveliness. But they brightened up, especially when
the most famous sporting peer of England--Lord Lonsdale--led off the
dance with a little girl dressed, rather naughtily, as a teetotum.
By the time I left--a kind of Pierrot looking on at the gayety of
life--there was a terrific battle in progress between groups of boys
and girls, with little white rolls of bread as their ammunition. Not
commendable. Not strictly virtuous, nor highly proper, but in its
wildness there was the spirit of a youth which, afterward, was heroic
in self-sacrifice.... So things happened in London before the war.
A series of articles appearing in _The Daily Mail_, by Robert
Blatchford, once a Socialist and still on the democratic side of
political life, disturbed the sense of security in the average mind
by a slight uneasiness. Not more than that, because the average mind
had its inherited faith in our island inviolability and the power of
the British Navy. There were articles entitled “Am Tag,” which is bad
German, and they professed to reveal a determination in the military
and naval castes of Germany to destroy the British fleet, invade
England, and smash the British Empire.
Some of the evidence brought forward seemed childish in its absurdity.
There were not many facts to a wealth of rhetoric. But they created a
newspaper sensation, and were pooh-poohed by the government, as we now
know, with utter insincerity--for there were members of that government
who knew far more than Blatchford how deep and widespread was German
hostility to Great Britain, and how close Europe stood to a world war.
One fantastic little incident connected with those articles of
Blatchford’s amused me considerably at the time, though afterward I
thought of it as a strange prophecy.
I called on W. T. Stead one day in his office of _The Review of
Reviews_, which afterward I was to edit for a year. It was just
before lunch time, and Stead had an engagement with Spender of _The
Westminster Gazette_. But he grabbed me by the arm, in his genial way,
and said, “Listen to this for a minute, and tell me what you think of
it.”
It appeared that he had been rather upset by Blatchford’s articles.
He could not make up his mind whether they were all nonsense or had
some truth at the back of them. He decided to consult the spirit world
through “Julia,” his medium.
“We rang up old Bismarck, Von Moltke, and William II of Prussia. ‘Look
here,’ I said, ‘Is there going to be war between Germany and England?’”
The spirits of these distinguished Germans seemed uncertain. Bismarck
saw a red mist approaching the coast of England. Von Moltke said the
British fleet had better keep within certain degrees of latitude
and longitude--which was kind of him! One of the trio--I forget
which--said there would be war between Germany and England. It would
break out suddenly, without warning.
“When?” asked W. T. Stead.
A date was given. _It was the month of August._ The year was not named.
I laughed heartily at Stead’s anecdote, especially when he told me the
effect this announcement had upon him. He was so disturbed that he went
round to the Admiralty, interviewed Lord Fisher, who was a friend of
his, and revealed the dread message that the German fleet was going to
attack in August. (It was then May, 1912).
Fisher leaned back in his chair, smiled grimly, and said, “_No such
luck, my boy!_”
In August of that year I was engaged in trouble which did not seem
connected with Germany, though I am inclined to think now that German
agents were watching it very closely--especially one German baron who
posed as a journalist and was always reporting on industrial unrest
in Great Britain, wherever it happened to break out. I had met him at
Tonypandy, in Wales, during the miners’ riots down there, and I met him
again in Liverpool, which was now in the throes of a serious strike.
It was the nearest thing to civil war I have seen in any English city.
I have forgotten the origin of the strike--I think it began with the
dockers--but it spread until the whole of the transport service was at
a standstill, and the very scavengers left their work. The Mersey was
crowded for weeks with shipping from all the ports of the world, laden
with merchandise, some of it perishable, which no hands would touch. No
porters worked in the railway goods yards, so that trains could not be
unloaded. There was no fresh meat, and no milk for babes. Not a wheel
turned in Liverpool. It was like a besieged city, and presently, in hot
weather, began to stink in a pestilential way, because of the refuse
and muck left rotting in the streets and squares.
This refuse, among which dead rats lay, was so filthy in one of the
best squares of Liverpool outside the hotel where I was staying, that a
number of journalists, and myself, borrowed brooms, sallied out, swept
up the rubbish heaps, and made bonfires of them, surrounded by a crowd
of angry men who called us “scabs” and “blacklegs,” and threatened
to “bash” us, if we did not stop work. We stuck to our job, and were
rewarded by a clapping of hands from ladies and maidservants in the
neighboring windows, so that our broomsticks seemed as heroic as the
lances of chivalry.
Some bad things happened in Liverpool. The troops were stoned by mobs
of men who were becoming sullen and savage. Shops were looted. I saw no
less than forty tramcars overturned and smashed one afternoon in that
sunny August, because they were being driven by men who had refused to
strike.
On that afternoon I saw something of mob violence, which I should
have thought incredible in England. A tramcar was going at a rapid
pace, driven by a man who was in terror of his life because of a mob
on each side of the road, threatening to stone him to death. Inside
the car were three women and a baby. A fusillade of stones suddenly
broke every window. Two of the women crouched below the window frames,
and the third woman, with the baby, utterly terrified, came on to the
platform outside, and prepared to jump. A stone struck her on the head,
and she dropped the baby into the roadway, where it lay quite still.
A gust of hoarse laughter rose from the mob, and not one man stirred
to pick up the baby. Terrible, but true. It was left there until a
woman ran out of a shop.... Wedged behind the men, but a witness of
all that happened, I was conscious then of a cruelty lurking in the
vicious elements of our great cities which, before, I had not believed
to exist in England of the twentieth century. If ever there were
revolution in England, it would not be made with rose water.
The troops and police were patient and splendid in their discipline,
despite great provocation at times. Now and again, when the mob
started looting or stone throwing, the police made baton charges,
which scattered crowds of young hooligans like chaff before them, and
they thrashed those they caught without mercy. At such times I had to
run like a hare, for there is no discrimination in treatment of the
innocent.
One afternoon the troops were ordered to fire on a crowd which made an
attempt to attack an escort of prisoners, and there was a small number
of casualties. That night I had an exciting narrative to dictate over
the telephone to the office of _The Daily Chronicle_. But, in the
middle of it, the sub-editor, MacKenna, who was taking down my message,
said, “Cut it short, old man! Something is happening to-night more
important than a strike in Liverpool. _The German fleet is out in the
North Sea, and the British fleet is cleared for action!_”
When I put down the telephone receiver, I felt a shiver go down my
spine; and I thought of Stead’s preposterous story of war in August.
Had it happened?
There was nothing in next day’s papers. Some iron censorship closed
down on that story of the German fleet, true or false.... As we now
know, it was true. The German fleet did go out on that night in August,
but finding the British fleet prepared, they went back again. It was in
August of another year that Germany put all to the great hazard.
The thoughts of the English people were not obsessed with the German
menace. For the most part they knew nothing about it, apart from
newspaper “scares,” which they pooh-poohed, and no member of the
government, getting anxious now in secret conversations, took upon
himself the duty of preparing the nation for a dreadful ordeal.
England was excited by two subjects of sensational interest and
increasing passion--the mania of the militant suffragettes, and the
raising of armed forces in Ireland, under the leadership of Sir Edward
Carson, to resist Home Rule.
I saw a good deal of both those phases of political strife in England
and Ireland. The suffragette movement kept me in a continual state of
mental exasperation, owing to the excesses of the militant women on
one side, and the stupidity and brutality of the opponents of women’s
suffrage on the other. I became a convinced supporter of “Votes for
Women,” partly because of theoretical justice which denied votes to
women of intellect, education, and noble work, while giving it to
the lowest, most ignorant, and most brutal ruffians in the country,
partly because of a sporting admiration--in spite of intellectual
disapproval--of cultured women who went willingly to prison for their
faith, defied the police with all their muscular strength, risked the
brutality of angry mobs (which was a great risk), and all with a gay,
laughing courage which mocked at the arguments, anger, and ridicule of
the average man.
Many of the methods of the “militants” were outrageous, and loosened, I
think, some of the decent restraints of the social code, for which we
had to pay later in a kind of sexual wildness of modern young women.
But they were taunted into “direct action” by Cabinet Ministers, and
exasperated by the deliberate falsity and betrayal of members of
Parliament, who had pledged themselves at election time to support the
demand of women for the suffrage, by constitutional methods.
A number of times I watched the endeavors of the “militants” to
present a petition to the Prime Minister or invade the Houses of
Parliament. Always it was the same scene. The deputation would march
from the Caxton Hall through a narrow lane in the midst of a vast
crowd, and then be scattered in a rough and tumble scrimmage when
mounted police rode among them.
Often I saw a friend of mine walking by the side of these deputations,
as a solitary bodyguard. It was H. W. Nevinson, the war correspondent,
with his fine ruddy face and silvered hair, a paladin of woman suffrage
as of all causes which took “liberty” for their watchword. The crowd
was less patient of men sympathizers of militant women than with
the women themselves, and Nevinson was roughly handled. At a great
demonstration at the Albert Hall, he fought single-handed against a
dozen men stewards who fell upon him, when he knocked down a man who
had struck a woman a heavy blow. Nevinson, though over fifty at the
time, could give a good account of himself, and some of those stewards
had a tough time before they overpowered him and flung him out.
Round the Houses of Parliament, on those nights of attack, there were
strong bodies of police who played games of catch-as-catch-can with
little old ladies, frail young women, strong-armed and lithe-limbed
girls who tried to break through their cordon. One little old cripple
lady used to charge the police in a wheel chair. Others caught hold
of the policemen’s whistle chains, and would not let go until they
were escorted to the nearest police station. One night dozens of women
chained and padlocked themselves to the railings of the House of
Commons, and the police had to use axes to break their chains.
There was a truly frightful scene, which made me shiver, one night,
when those “militants” refused to budge before the mounted police and
seized hold of their bridles and stirrup-leathers. The horses, scared
out of their wits by these clinging creatures, reared, and fell, but
nothing would release the grip of those determined and reckless ladies,
though some of them were bruised and bleeding.
The patience and good humor of the police were marvelous, but I was
sorry to see that they made class distinctions in their behavior. They
were certainly very brutal to a party of factory girls brought down
from the North of England. I saw them driven into a narrow alley behind
Westminster Hospital, and the police pulled their hair down, wound it
round their throats, and flung them about unmercifully. It was not good
to see.
I had several talks at the time with the two dominant leaders of the
militant section, Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel, and I
was present at their trial, when they were indicted for conspiracy to
incite a riot. Mrs. Pankhurst’s defense was one of the most remarkable
speeches I have ever heard in a court of law, most eloquent, most
moving, most emotional. Even the magistrate was moved to tears, but
that did not prevent him from setting aside an unrepealed statute
of Charles II (which allowed a deputation of not more than thirteen
to present a petition, without let or hindrance, to the King’s
ministers) and sentencing Mrs. Pankhurst and her daughter to two years’
imprisonment.
I saw Christabel Pankhurst during the course of the trial, and she
asked me whether I thought she would be condemned. I told her “Yes,”
believing that she had the strength to hear the truth, and afterward,
when she asked me how much I thought she would get, I said “Two years.”
I had an idea from her previous record that she was ready for martyrdom
at any cost, but to my surprise and dismay, she burst into tears.
Her defense and cross-examination of witnesses were also marred by
continual tears, so that it was painful to listen to her. Her spirit
seemed quite broken, and she never took part again in any militant
demonstrations, although she was liberated a short time after the
beginning of her imprisonment. She worked quietly at propaganda in
Paris.
One nation watched the mania of the “wild, wild women” with a growing
belief in England’s decadence, as it was watching the Irish affairs,
and industrial unrest. German agents found plenty to write home about.