‘Little Germany’s Farewell’
The German steamer “Titania” sailed from St Katharine’s Dock on Saturday night amid memorable scenes. Her German passengers, Reservists and private families, sang their National Anthem. Then a fair-haired German boy leant over the rails and, waving his hat, cried, “Three Cheers for Great Britain.” The cry was taken up with great fervour.
EAST LONDON OBSERVER, 8 AUGUST 1914
The fate of the expatriated Hochberg brothers, the Lichnowskys and the Blüchers was unfortunate, but these members of noble families were not, in 1914, in dire financial straits. Painful though it was to be deprived of all their English property and personal possessions, they had other resources. Count Hochberg, owner of Schloss Halbau, was still in a position to drive Daisy Pless out to the Döberitz camp in his splendid family coach. The Blüchers moved out of the Esplanade Hotel, following the death of Count Blücher’s father in 1916, but only so that they could take up residence at Krieblowitz, a magnificent Silesian castle overlooking woods and lakes. The Lichnowskys, in 1914, still owned Schloss Kuchelna, a shooting estate at Gratz and one of the most remarkable art collections in Europe. Daisy Pless’s cottage refuge (‘Ma Fantaisie’) in the gardens of Fürstenstein, while dwarfed by the Pless family’s castles, had four bedrooms and only one occupant. The sufferings of these men and women were deeply felt, but they were not of the kind that shortens lives.
Robert Graves’s first glimpse of what it meant to be at war was of the German side. Despatched to Lancaster in the autumn of 1914 to help guard the people who suddenly found themselves identified as enemy aliens, the nineteen-year-old Graves discovered an internment camp filled with bewildered school children, tailors, small shopkeepers and – arriving in a later convoy – forty middle-aged German waiters who had been rounded up by an efficient Manchester police force and brought to the camp in chains.
Internment was the fate of most working-class Germans, belonging to a group who had often previously acquired English citizenship, but who were now regarded as too dangerous to remain at large. The fate of those who had not yet been naturalised was not much better. Rendered unemployable and unwelcome, a legion of German bank clerks, waiters, governesses and tutors were summarily ordered to depart the country. Governesses sometimes received as much as ten pounds to cover the cost of transporting themselves to wartime Berlin. Waiters and bank clerks were seldom so well treated.
Strolling the dusty length of London’s Tottenham Court Road on the sultry morning of 10 August 1914, a Manchester Guardian reporter took note of the sort of people who were waiting in line to obtain the vital permit for departure. (A mere two weeks had been granted, following the declaration of war, during which to obtain these precious documents.) The mix was eclectic: ‘quiet looking old ladies, probably teachers, young German girl students, tourists caught without money, barbers, stockbrokers, shipping clerks . . .’
These were still the early days and the reporter’s tone was sympathetic. In the autumn of 1914, D. H. Lawrence foresaw no difficulties about dedicating his new novel, The Rainbow, to Frieda’s sister. (Advised not to increase a provocatively frank work’s chance of being censored, Lawrence eventually compromised by dedicating his book to Elsa von Richthofen by her first name only.) In September, The Times still saw no harm in reporting that newly interned German soldiers were grateful for presents of cigarettes, ginger beer, apples and cake.
Attitudes were about to change. In Germany, throughout the war, it remained possible for the King of Bavaria to amble across a public street in Munich to ask the British-born wife of his musical friend Clement Franckenstein whether she had received ‘good news from home’.1 In England, by the summer of 1915, such behaviour, demonstrated in public, and by a public figure, had become unthinkable.
Propaganda, as the Germans soon learned, was handled with considerably more skill by London than by Berlin. The propaganda masters’ task was not hard. Germany’s aggressive occupation of Belgium in 1914 (the scenes of destruction at Louvain were strikingly captured by an English camera) led to the precipitate and not entirely welcome arrival in Britain of some 150,000 homeless refugees, all of whom needed to be housed and fed. In the early hours of 16 December 1914, three massive German warships shelled three Yorkshire fishing towns, acting on the mistaken assumption that they were of military value. Hartlepool’s normal protective force of several light destroyers was not, due to bad weather, in position; Scarborough and Whitby were, as usual, completely undefended. The casualties (137 dead and 592 wounded) were reported by the newspapers as the first victims of military action in England since the Battle of Sedgemoor in 1685. Germany had handed its adversary an invaluable gift.
For Germans still residing in England, the final public relations disaster came in May 1915, when German torpedoes deliberately sank a passenger ship bound from the US for Liverpool. Of the Lusitania’s 1,959 passengers and crew, 1,195 drowned; the ship’s secret cargo, a gift to Britain from the US of 1,248 cases of shrapnel and Remington shells, remained unreported. Five days later, the Bryce Report was published.
Viscount Bryce, a former ambassador who had been educated at Heidelberg and decorated by the German Emperor, was a man whose distinguished record lent authority to the detailed account of German atrocities in Belgium that appeared under his name. The report itself, while based entirely on second-hand evidence, took care to distinguish the kindly German civilian from the brutal actions of the Prussian military; the allegations made against Belgium’s occupying force and listed in an appendix, were, nevertheless, extreme. Monstrosities were said to have included the slicing off of women’s breasts; the disembowelment of living victims; the shooting of sons in the presence of their fathers, and the bayoneting of women and babies.
Ten years after the war, Robert Graves wrote dismissively about ‘highly-coloured accounts of German atrocities in Belgium’ and declared the Bryce Report’s accusations of ‘rape, mutilation and torture’ to have been mere fabrication.2 Sassoon, his comrade at the front, also scoffed at the absurdity of some of the myths that had been allowed to pass for truth: ‘Everyone had been talking about the hundred thousand Russians who were supposed to have passed through England on their way to France.’ But neither man denied that the more gruesome tales had been believed. Just as the German newspaper readers of 1901 had dutifully absorbed the ghastly image of British soldiers twirling Boer newborns on sabre points and rifle barrels, so the British readers of 1915 accepted the possibility that German soldiers might do the same, and worse. ‘The newspapers informed us that German soldiers crucified Belgian babies,’ Sassoon recalled. ‘Stories of that kind were taken for granted; to have disbelieved them would have been unpatriotic.’3
It was possible, until the summer of 1915, to preserve a degree of rationality as an English civilian. Winston Churchill could get away with drinking German hock and joke that he was only interning it. Evelyn Blücher’s parents could feel safe enough to offer a guest room in their Welsh house to Ernest Ratibor, the princely survivor of a torpedoed German submarine. Early in 1915, Rudyard Kipling could still venture a subversive twist to ‘Mary Postgate’, his story of a woman who, after deliberately allowing a wounded German airman to die as punishment for a death that he, paradoxically, may not have caused, treats herself to a long, hot bath and comes downstairs looking – according to her bemused employer – ‘quite handsome’. The self-righteous, so Kipling’s terrible tale suggests, knew no qualms.
Humane treatment of Germans living in England had become brave and rare by the summer of 1915. Hilda Deichmann, living at Abbey Lodge during the first years of the war, admired the few English ladies who were prepared to visit an old friend whose son was serving in the German Army. Meanwhile, beyond the tranquil purlieus of Hilda’s family home, anti-German feelings escalated into displays of public violence. Writing in a May 1915 issue of the Daily Herald, the socialist paper he had founded in 1912, the celebrated pacifist George Lansbury pleaded for leniency towards ‘the helpless men and women whose only crime is that of being descendants of Germans’.4 In Parliament, speaking two days earlier, Prime Minister Asquith urged the need to prevent ‘serious injury and irreparable hardship to individuals’.5
Following the sinking of the Lusitania and the publication of the Bryce Report, even the most complacent of English-born Germans took fright. Five hundred had already changed their names, and a popular East End pub had transformed itself – with the deft flick of a brush over an inconvenient ‘P’ – into the Russian Flag. Tragically, the new surge of Germanophobia also secured the downfall of a chancellor who, in his previous incarnation as secretary of state for war, had done more than any other man in England to give Britain an army that was fit for battle.
Richard Burdon Haldane’s pro-German stance had come under attack even before the outbreak of war. Haldane’s achievements, both during his service as war minister (1905–12) and, subsequently, as a lord chancellor who quietly continued to run the War Office of which Asquith became the titular head in 1914, had been immense.
Working alongside Alexander Haig, Haldane had given England a fledgling aeronautical industry and set up the Territorial Army. He had also turned the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) into what was considered, in August 1914, to be the best fighting force ever to have come out of Britain. All of this mattered less than the fact that Haldane had privately declared his enduring affection for a remembered lecture room in Göttingen, and that he refused to disclose the contents of an entirely innocuous personal letter from a friend, the great German shipbuilder Albert Ballin. By 1915, even the news that Haldane owned a dog named Kaiser confirmed his treachery.
Booed in public, reviled in the right-wing press, targeted by letters of abuse and mocked from the stage in a music-hall ditty, Haldane offered to resign. Asquith, who had known and loved Haldane since boyhood, refused. A few allies rallied around. ‘We have to search our memory in vain’, an anonymous writer pleaded in the Westminster Gazette of 8 January 1915, ‘for an attack on a public man which has been more ungenerous, more ungrateful and more unfounded.’
The supporters were in the minority. By February 1915, Haldane’s two chief enemies in the right-wing press, Arnold White of the Daily Express and Leo Maxse of the National Review, were congratulating each other upon the support they had received from the Unionist Party for their increasingly vicious attacks upon the Chancellor. Writing to Maxse on 4 February, White told him that three leading Unionists (Edward Carson, Andrew Bonar Law and Walter Long) were eager for the moment ‘when the plump body of the Member for Germany swings in the wind between two lamp posts’.6
It is possible that Asquith changed his mind without any outside influence being exerted upon him. It is also possible that he sincerely believed Haldane’s poor health and the pressures of a hostile press might render retirement welcome. It’s even possible that he did – as Asquith later assured his dismayed wife, Margot – indeed put up a last stern fight to retain the services of his long-serving ally. The truth has never been entirely clear. However, when a new coalition government came to power in May 1915 – with Andrew Bonar Law leading the Conservative element and Asquith clinging on as the Liberal prime minister – it was announced that Richard Haldane was to be replaced as lord chancellor by the almost entirely insignificant figure of Stanley Buckmaster.
Hostility towards Haldane did not diminish during the war. In 1918, after the former chancellor had been advised not to show his face at the Victory March, one celebrated fellow Scot decided to demonstrate his allegiance. Calling at Haldane’s London home that evening, dressed in all the splendour of his field-marshal’s uniform, Alexander Haig presented a book of dispatches. It carried a personal tribute, written on its flyleaf, where Haig had expressed his admiration for ‘the greatest Secretary of State for War England has ever had’.
Haig’s view has, for almost a hundred years, held true.
Richard Haldane was not alone in being sacrificed on the altar of Germanophobia. In October 1914, Winston Churchill, as first lord of the Admiralty, had to undertake the disagreeable task of asking the First Sea Lord to resign. Prince Louis of Battenberg’s undeniably German origins had become too controversial an issue for him to stay at the helm of a British Navy. Comforted by the assurance that he would return to his old position after the war, Louis took his leave and embarked on writing a three-volume history of naval medals. In January 1919, he gracefully acknowledged that a German sea lord – even one who now bore an English name – remained, after the war, an unacceptable proposition to the British nation.
Louis had shown more humour than most of his royal relations when the news came, in 1917, that a change of names was in order. Visiting his son, freshly transformed into the Earl of Medina, the new Marquess of Milford Haven offered a skittishly astute response in the family’s guest-book: ‘Arrived Prince Hyde; departed Lord Jekyll.’7
Name-changing had nearly become de rigueur among Germans living in England since the autumn of 1914, when some 500 German families underwent a hasty process of Anglicisation. In 1915, Ford Madox Ford dropped his father’s Germanic ‘Hueffer’ and turned to his pre-Raphaelite grandfather (Ford Madox Brown) for a new identity. Robert Graves’s regimental colleagues performed the task for him themselves, converting the ‘von Ranke’ that had given such pride to Graves as a boy into the jocular ‘von Runicke’.
The wonder was that it had taken three long years of war to bring about a similar alteration in the country’s leading family. Understandably, Victoria and Albert’s descendants remained attached to their traditional titles; still, as Wilhelm II would mischievously observe, a staging of The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was unlikely to inspire confidence in the English crown. Plantaganet, York, Lancaster, Fitzroy and England had all been put forward as candidates for a more British sounding family surname; Windsor, connecting the monarchy to the only home for which their loyal subjects felt real enthusiasm, won the day.
The family member who was hit hardest by the overnight transformation was the one who had no option but to be excluded. Charles Edward, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, was thirty-three in 1917. Following in the footsteps of Grand Duke Ernst of Hessen-Darmstadt, Charlie Coburg (as he was known to his friends) had refused to take part in a war against his own family. His reward for loyalty was to learn that King George V had, acting with extreme reluctance, disowned the Duke as a member of the family. By July 1917, Charlie Coburg’s strong connection to England had shrunk, through no desire of his own, to a discreet correspondence with Alice, his sister (newly transformed into the Countess of Athlone). As mementoes of far-off times, the Duke still possessed a Claremont bed and a painting of himself, aged seven or eight, parading as a miniature Scotsman for the entertainment of Queen Victoria, a doting grandmother.
Name-changing offered little help to the large number of prominent financiers and bankers who had settled in England long before the war. While the Prussian-born Sir Ernest Cassel survived with his honours and property untouched (Cassel had contributed to the British arms industry by overseeing the amalgamation of Vickers-Armstrong), Sir Edgar Speyer, a generous funder of Scott’s 1912 expedition to the Antarctic, was driven out of the country by a hate campaign. Speyer returned to America. In 1921, he was stripped of his honours, following unfounded allegations of his having traded with the enemy.
Hilda Deichmann belonged to this group by virtue of the immense banking interests she had inherited following Baron Deichmann’s death in 1907. Hilda, up to the very eve of war, had enjoyed a life of considerable social prestige. On 22 July 1914, she gave a dinner party for the Lichnowskys at which the Prince, still elated by his Oxford doctorate, had talked about the improvement in Anglo-German relations ‘with great satisfaction’.8 Three days later, Hilda lunched at Eastbourne with two of the German Emperor’s sisters, leaving only after she had promised to visit the friendly Princesses at their respective homes in Greece (Sophie) and Germany (Mossy). And how – she wondered sadly, looking back – just how could any of their happy little group have imagined the crisis that was about to tear that comfortable – and, in retrospect, complacent – little world apart?9
The impact upon Hilda’s personal life was not immediate. By May 1915, however, she realised that several old friends were keeping their distance. By 1916, it was deemed unsafe for the mother of a German officer to live alone in central London. Abbey Lodge was closed up, while Hilda, gladly accepting an invitation from her husband’s niece, Emma Deichmann, moved into the comfortable house that Emma and her husband Bruno Schröder inhabited at Englefield Green, on the edge of Windsor Great Park.
The move proved timely. Hilda would have found it devastating to be alone when her brother Maurice came to deliver the terrible news that her only son had been killed in action. (News of Wilhelm von Krause’s survival and capture by French troops arrived later in the year.) Hilda was equally thankful for the companionship of the Schröders when it was reported that some awkward questions were being raised in the House of Commons, and that they concerned the legitimate status of the Deichmann bank, of which Hilda was now the owner.
Confiscation was a useful strategy for raising funds in wartime. Hansard’s Parliamentary Report for 16 November 1916 demonstrates the shocking vindictiveness with which attempts were made to enforce that policy. Sir Henry Craik, rising to question Mr Pretyman (parliamentary secretary to the Board of Trade), proposed that Horstmann and Co, formerly under the ownership of Adolph Deichmann and now owned by his wife, should have its licences withdrawn, prior to immediate confiscation. It was pointed out that two of Baroness Deichmann’s daughters were married to German officers, while her son had fought in the German Army. It followed, Craik thundered – his tone is clear from the report – that Horstmann and Co were actively serving enemy interests.
Mr Pretyman, feebly defending Hilda’s interests, chose to retreat into technicalities. The licences had been issued in December 1914, when there was a German partner, who had since resigned. Sir Henry was not satisfied; Mr Pretyman himself sounded ready, at a pinch, to throw Hilda and her bank to the wolves.
Law, nevertheless, was on Hilda’s side. Mr Pretyman, rallying at last, pointed out that the Baronness herself had been born in England, to an English mother and a half-English father. (Oddly, he failed to mention that Hilda’s brother was an esteemed British ambassador.) Adolph Deichmann, her late husband, had also taken British citizenship just before his death in 1907. Since there was no German involvement in the bank at the present time, a licence was not required. The licence could not, therefore, be removed. Sir Henry, floored and furious, sat down.10
The family bank was safe, for the time being, but the ferocity of Sir Henry Craik’s attack served as a sharp reminder to Hilda of just how tenuous her position in English society had become. In her post-war memoirs, she expressed heartfelt appreciation for the unfailing support of her brother Maurice and his forthright, kindly English wife during what she called a ‘terrible’ period. ‘Terrible’, from a mildly spoken woman of Quaker background, was a strong word.
Hilda, by 1917, knew that Wilhelm was alive but imprisoned. No such comforting news was on hand for her hosts at the Dell. In the summer of 1914, Emma and Bruno Schröder’s eldest boy had gone straight from school in England to receive six months’ training at the Hamburg branch of the family bank. When war broke out, the young man was conscripted for the German side. Captured near Vilnius on the Eastern Front in 1916, the Schröders’ son was never seen or heard of again.
Bruno Schröder’s own bank escaped confiscation, in part because Bruno himself had prudently acquired British nationality ahead of time, and in part because his long-standing business partner, Frank Tiarks, was British. Nevertheless, despite the fact that five of the Schröders’ British-born bank staff were killed in action while fighting the Germans, Bruno himself was perceived as one of the enemy. Helmut, his younger and surviving son, was persecuted at school. At Englefield Green, the decorative hothouses used for the cultivation of rare orchids were destroyed by vandals who claimed, most unconvincingly, that the Schröders had been using the buildings for their secret hoard of coal.
Rumour, once started, proved hard to quell. The walls around the Schröders’ estate were eyed with suspicion. Was it possible that they concealed a battery of guns, all trained upon the windows of Windsor Castle? Richard Haldane’s nemesis, Leo Maxse, started a hare in the National Review by declaring Schröder to be a leading supporter of the Unseen Hand, an evil – and entirely imaginary – group of foreign financiers who planned to broker a secret and lucrative deal with Germany.
Nothing could have been further from the truth, but it was undeniable that Bruno Schröder, as much as Hilda Deichmann, felt torn. In 1915, ordered to make a public declaration of his allegiance to England, Bruno confessed that he found it impossible to choose which country was dearer to him. ‘I feel’, he said with desolate candour, ‘as if my mother and father have quarrelled.’11
Throughout the war, Bruno Schröder continued to invite anger and suspicion by his quiet determination not to be bullied out of either his loyalties or his beliefs. All of the English-based financiers gave funds to help the German internees, of whom there were some 33,000 by the end of 1915. Edgar Speyer donated £5,600; Ernest Cassel produced a generous £27,833. Schröder, dwarfing their contributions at a time when both his bank and home remained at daily risk of confiscation, gave £92,000: a staggeringly generous sum.
The Schröders’ chief act of wartime philanthropy was to ensure the survival of the great London institution that their family had supported from its earliest years. In 1914, as war was declared, an emergency meeting was called at the German Hospital and agreement reached to receive patients of all nationalities. The attitude taken by the English towards the hospital proved, in turn, to be surprisingly enlightened. The German nurses were granted permission to remain at their posts and Sir Hermann Weber’s son Frederick (Parkes-Weber) served as a consultant physician throughout the war. When doctors from captured German ships were brought into the country, several of them took up the offer to provide their services to a sturdy working hospital that shone out, in hateful times, as a beacon of humanity.
Among the few records to have survived from the hospital’s war years, one offers a memorable cameo account of a German patient and his own small attempt at reconciliation.
Baron Anton von Horst, like Edgar Speyer, was a German-born American. In 1914, he was returning with his family to Germany. Unfortunately for Horst, the liner had just docked at an English port when war was declared. Interned as an enemy alien, Baron Horst nevertheless managed to get his children and wife sent safely home to Coburg (where he would eventually rejoin them). Meanwhile, having been afflicted by a form of paralysis during his lengthy internment, Baron Horst was eventually brought to London and given remedial treatment at the German Hospital.
It’s likely that the Baron was simply missing his own children. The hospital records report only that, following his partial recovery, and when the weather permitted, Anton Horst would hobble down to the front gate of the hospital. Here, he became beloved by every small slum child in that impoverished area of London for his willingness to shell out the princely sum of two shillings apiece, to be earned by any girl or boy willing to compete in a race along the short stretch of road leading from the hospital to Dalston Lane. All the children got prizes: winning – outside the field of mortal combat – played no part in this tiny Olympics. Every entrant was a victor.12
Here, at the centre of a world engulfed in hatred, misery and all the horrors of war, a tiny echo can be detected of the behaviour of that good-natured old King of Bavaria, a man who never forgot to cross the road in wartime Munich, just to ask a wistful member of the enemy nation whether she had received good news from home.