The Great Silence (14 page)

As early as 1917 the Government had received a comprehensive report by the joint committee formed to address labour problems after the war. A committee was formed to look into the housing problem. Made up of members of the Trades Union Congress and representatives of the Labour party, it emphasised the ‘extreme urgency’ with which the shortage of housing should be addressed. The most deprived areas were in London, Liverpool, Newcastle and Glasgow. In Glasgow half the population were already living two to a room and a further third were crammed into a room shared by three adults. Three quarters of the mining and metal workers in the town of Coatbridge in Lanarkshire were living in one- and two-roomed houses. No new building had taken place during the war because of the combined shortage of materials and manpower. Landlords were getting ready to raise their rents immediately after the Armistice.

The committee urged the Government to put in hand the funding
for ‘the absolutely necessary’ building of at least a further million homes, planned for completion within four years of the release from the army and navy of bricklayers, masons, carpenters, plasterers and plumbers. This building plan would in turn provide work for hundreds of thousands of demobbed labourers. The new houses should be of’up-to-date sanitary construction, each home to be self-contained; with rooms of adequate floor space, height and window lighting, properly equipped with kitchen range with hot water fittings, stoves, sinks and gas and water laid on’. The committee further recommended that ‘every cottage must stand in its own garden of not less than one eighth of an acre’.

These ‘Dwellings of the Great Peace’ would provide a model for the next generation. The estimated cost was put at £250,000,000, the same cost as five weeks of war. The committee concluded that ‘the nation cannot afford not to do it’. But although the new Housing and Town Planning Act of 1919 propelled local councils to start clearing slum housing, the housing problem remained acute. Meanwhile rent money was out of reach of the unemployed.

Even before the war entered its final year, in an effort to address the impending housing problem in the south-east, plans had been made for a new town of desirable dwellings to be built on the Sussex Downs. In an act of astonishing insensitivity the streets at Anzac-on-Sea were to be named after the initial battles of the war in which thousands had lost their lives. The proposed avenues of Mons, Loos, Salonica and Ypres failed to attract any buyers. Only when the name of the town was changed to the soothing ‘Peacehaven’ was any interest shown. New names like Sunview, Southdown and Seaview were placed at the edge of the new avenues and they suddenly felt English and reassuring.

But there was little financial help available for the building of the houses themselves, and gradually a motley collection of shanty towns began to emerge on the beautiful downland landscape that
W
.H. Hudson, the Victorian ornithologist and countryman, once described as ‘the solemn slope of mighty limbs asleep’.

However not even a palace could have eased the anxiety felt by the British royal family at this time. The King was locked in a position
of shame and guilt. His shame concerned the behaviour of his German relations, and in particular his first cousin, the Kaiser himself. The guilt over his own negligent treatment of another first cousin, the murdered Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, continued to cause George immense pain. George had been particularly close to Nicky and their physical similarity, with their long pointed faces and matching beards, was so great that in photographs they had on occasion been confused for one another. George was anxious to lessen the guilt he felt at his failure to provide his close cousin with sanctuary when his life depended on it.

By the spring of 1919, nine months had elapsed since the Tsar and his wife and children had been shot in a scene of astonishing mass brutality, and a horse had been killed over the grave of Nicholas in violent emphasis of the hatred his assassin had felt for him. The Prince of Wales was aware that this multiple act of violence had shaken his father’s confidence in ‘the innate decency of mankind’.

Nicholas’s mother, the Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna, had escaped the serial murder of her family but had been stranded in Yalta, living in fear for her life. The Dowager Empress was the sister of George’s mother, Queen Alexandra, and George felt he should offer his help. A British warship, HMS
Marlborough
, under the command of Captain Johnson, was sent to Yalta. Until then the Dowager Empress had resisted all offers to bring her to safety, but Captain Johnson had brought a letter from Alexandra urging her to come to England. The invitation from her sister finally induced the Dowager Empress to leave. Twenty members of the imperial family boarded the ship, together with their closest servants. On the high deck fifty passengers, thirty-eight of whom were women, watched their homeland recede as four hundred members of the Russian Imperial Guard slowly circled the
Marlborough
in a British sloop. First Lieutenant Francis Pridham listened as the Russian voices drifted, unaccompanied by music but in perfect harmony, across the water, singing the now redundant words of the Russian imperial anthem, ‘God Save the Tsar’. Standing alone was the slight but still beautiful figure of the Dowager Empress, motionless and silent as she listened to the familiar words. Pridham realised that ‘none other than that beautiful old tune rendered in such a manner could have poignantly reflected the sadness of that moment’.

Addressing his feelings about another first cousin, the King had begun to confess publicly to a loathing of all things German, telling Franklin D. Roosevelt on the Assistant Secretary of the Navy’s visit to Britain in 1918, ‘I have never seen a German gentleman.’ He had written in his diary on the day of the Kaiser’s abdication: ‘I look upon him as the greatest criminal known for having plunged the world into this ghastly war.’ In 1917 in order to distance the British royal family from his German cousins the King had changed the family’s surname from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor. The new name, he felt, with its homely associations, would be infinitely more appealing to the British people. The Kaiser heard about the change while on his way to the theatre and jokingly announced that he was about to see a performance of’The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha’.

Up and down the country this loathing of all things German remained intense. After the war previously withheld stories about the dreadful things the enemy had done continued to filter out. Not only had the Germans been responsible for the deaths of husbands, fiancés, brothers and husbands but they had torpedoed hospital ships, and caused unbelievable suffering with chemical gas. They had, in Barbara Cartland’s words, ‘disregarded the accepted rules of war’. In the final days of the fighting Philip Gibbs was told by one officer: ‘If I had a thousand Germans in a row I would cut all their throats and enjoy the job.’ During the election campaign crowds had filled the streets yelling out ‘Hang the Kaiser’ and ‘Get Rid of Enemy Aliens’. At the beginning of December 1918 a special meeting was held in Hackney to discuss demands for all ‘enemy aliens to be thrown out of the country on the conclusion of peace’. Lloyd George’s suggestion that the Kaiser be tried at Dover Castle and if convicted be exiled to the Falkland Islands came to nothing. But the tone of the suggestion was in line with the British wish for recrimination.

On 5 January, a week-long Communist-inspired demonstration had taken place in Berlin and, running out of control, had resulted in a terrifying and violent battle and the loss of 1,200 lives. The appalling suffering of the German people both during and after the war made little impact on the general level of anger in England;
three quarters of a million Germans were estimated to have died from malnutrition between 1914 and 1919. A particularly gruesome and hugely popular film,
Behind the Door
, showed the skinning alive of a German submarine commander who had seized the wife of a German-American merchant marine captain.

Some found the prejudice directed at Germany distressing. They had not forgotten the pro-German sensibility that had existed in British society from Victorian times. Fifty-three thousand Germans had lived happily in Britain before the war. During Victoria’s reign, under the influence of her German husband Albert, it was not uncommon at a grand dinner party for conversational exchanges to be made in three languages, the guests picking their way between English, French and German, even in one sentence. An enquiry about a trip abroad demanded an agile game of linguistic hopscotch, ‘Vous étes allés chercher a change of air among die schönste boulevards?’ The streets of London were filled with itinerant German music makers and restaurants like Schmidt’s in Charlotte Street were always fully booked at lunchtime.

But the virulence of feeling against the enemy intensified in 1915, when the
Lusitania
, the British passenger liner, was sunk by a German torpedo, and a thousand civilians were drowned. The act was viewed as unforgivable and unforgettable. Anyone with a German name was targeted. In Salford a jeering crowd including many women attacked a shop belonging to Mr Herman Pratt, a respected and popular pork butcher. Breaking down the door, they threw everything they could lay their hands on into the street. Out went pork joints, crockery, chairs and bedding and finally the piano, until the remaining wreck was set on fire. There was looted bacon for breakfast in many poor homes the following morning.

During the war the Kaiser was blamed for everything possible that went wrong. Victoria Sackville, enraged by reading in the newspaper of a price rise in milk, pushed the article from her in disgust. ‘Ce sale Kaiser – voila qu’il a upset the milk.’ Even after the war, everyone from the King downwards remained vocal in hatred of the Germans. Cinemas and newspapers disseminated the prejudice. An advertisement in
Vogue
asked its readers, ‘Why drink German Hocks or Moselles when France our ally offers us the produce of
her choicest vineyards at the Moseloro estate, superior in quality to German Hocks and Moselles shipped to this country before the war?’ Nicknames in frequent use by both ex-soldiers and civilians for the German people included Squarehead and Boche, from the French word
Caboche
, meaning Cabbage Head. The British press ran headlines repeating Lloyd George’s objective that the Germans should be squeezed until ‘the pips squeak’. As the troops sat out the long wait for demobilisation papers, propaganda continued to strengthen the feeling against the defeated enemy. The film
Shoulder Arms
starred Charlie Chaplin, dressed in khaki instead of the more familiar tramp outfit, trying to capture the Kaiser while disguised as a tree. The film was shown in stables and village halls across France wherever a screen could be erected.

A story by Rudyard Kipling written in 1915 entitled ‘Mary Post-gate’ continued to enjoy popularity. In the story a woman watches as a German airman dies of thirst in front of her as she refuses him water. Kipling’s approval of her behaviour is left in no doubt. But one curious anomaly in this hostile view of all things German was found in the post-war passion for breeds of German dog.
The Times
noticed that it was ‘as easy to buy an Alsatian as to rent a house or flat in London’. Some of the best-trained dogs had been looted from German prisoners, and their vigilance, fidelity and suspiciousness towards strangers were attributes highly prized by lonely widows and people of a nervous disposition.

Most people, including the King, looked forward to the restrictions and conditions that the Peace Conference would impose on the country they had been fighting for the last four years. By the end of the war, as a result of harassment and deportation, the number of Germans left in Britain had dropped to 22,000, under half the pre-war figure.

The feelings shared by the King and his subjects on the future fate of Germany did not extend to Russia, the country so recently ruled by George’s cousin Nicholas. The powerful influence of the revolutionary movement was growing by the week. British grievances were undercut by an incipient sympathy with the men whom many thought of as their Russian ‘comrades’. Talk of the Bolshevik threat was known
in the popular press as the Red Scare, while Communist sympathies were referred to in the army and in hospitals as going ‘Bolo’.

The red threat (red was the colour of the Communist flag) was on the increase in America too. In December a bomb had exploded in the New York apartment of the Acting Superintendent of Police while the oblivious owner was asleep. Captain W. B. Mills woke up amazed to find himself ten foot from his bed, and sprawled in the corridor of the apartment where he had been hurled by the explosion. A few months later a maid at the home of a Senator in Seattle opened a package addressed to her employer. The bomb that was contained inside blew off both her hands.

Back in England the Bishop of Durham was convinced that England was already ‘making its first advance towards the dictatorship of the proletariat’. The remaining monarchies of Europe, and in particular the murdered Tsar’s English cousin, continued to shudder at the thought of what might happen next.

Spring 1919

Queen Mary was distressed to notice that her hair had begun to turn grey. The first few months after the end of the war had been difficult. Unlike almost every family in the country, she had been spared the death of a close relation but she had an instinctive fear of suffering and of illness. The appearance of so many of the wounded men that she had visited in hospital during the ‘single long dark winter’ of the last four years had filled her with sadness. And the tip of her husband’s beard, she also noticed, but withholding comment, was starting to gleam white.

Mary was conscious of her tendency to withdraw from any engagement with life and, when under the strain of events she was persuaded to go to bed for the day, she was liable to refuse all food and to lose her voice. This was a dangerous state of mind for Mary who tried to ensure that she was constantly occupied, whether with charity work or reorganising and shopping for additions to the collections of furniture, paintings, silver and porcelain that had been stored at Windsor during the war. Her fascination with and passion for the acquisition of ‘things’, and her much praised eye for unusual and lovely decorative objects, helped physically and symbolically to fill spaces in her life. She began to discover that if she lived in the present and concentrated on ‘things’ while blotting out the past she had a better chance of getting through the day.