CHAPTER III
A total reverse of fortune, coming unawares upon a man who “stood in high degree”, happy and apparently secure.
A C Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy, 1904
Sir Edgar is what he says he is: a man who was driven into the wilderness
Sir John Simon, KC, Counsel to Sir Edgar Speyer,
4 November 1921
The war popularly supposed to be over by Christmas was going badly and had settled into the sanguinary stalemate of the trenches. Britons were experiencing a mounting succession of horrors, hitherto unimaginable, that brought home the reality of total war. The maltreatment of British prisoners-of-war in Germany, including civilian internees at Ruhleben, aroused deep anger and was debated in Parliament at the end of April 1915. German atrocities in Belgium were apparently authenticated by Lord Bryce’s report, published on 12 May. The Bryce report contained much that was exaggerated, unverified or simply untrue, but its authority lent credence to the rumour, published three days later, that a Canadian soldier had been crucified.
Yet undoubted atrocities had taken place in Belgium, chiefly in the form of mass reprisals against civilians. Nor was there any denying Germany’s wanton invasion of a small country whose neutrality she was pledged to guarantee, or her expressed intention to keep what she held. Underlying everything were Britain’s appalling casualty-lists, the relentless, interminable, mechanised daily slaughter on the Western Front, horrifically exemplified at Ypres. At the end of 1914, the death-toll approached 90,000. By Easter 1915 it had risen to 140,000.
As the war intensified, so did feeling against the 58,000 Germans resident in Britain, who became enemy aliens on the declaration of war and were increasingly liable to suspicion as spies or saboteurs. ‘Every German in London had an intolerable time’,1 Edgar recalled. The distinction between enemy aliens and the 6,500 naturalized Germans inevitably became blurred, and there was irritation at Ministers who insisted that there was a distinction. In January, Lord Crawford raised with Lord Chancellor Haldane the question of revoking the citizenship of naturalised Germans. He found Haldane ‘very unsympathetic’ and was irked at what he thought legalistic quibbling about ‘complications of international law’.2 In the Morning Post on 5 May, Lord Charles Beresford suggested that wealthy Germans should be interned as hostages.
A fresh spate of anti-Germanism erupted at the end of April with the deployment of poison gas by the Germans at the second battle of Ypres. It reached a crescendo with the sinking of the Lusitania on 7 May. The deliberate torpedoing, without warning, of a civilian liner and the death of more than a thousand passengers, including almost a hundred children, was, as Edgar said, ‘a most horrible thing to do’.3 Even if it was true, as the Germans alleged, that the Lusitania carried a cache of ammunition, this was unknown to the U-boat commander who targeted her in furtherance of the policy of unrestricted submarine warfare which was Germany’s response to the blockade. The Frankfurter Zeitung hailed the sinking as ‘an extraordinary success’.4
Popular outrage in England vented itself on German residents indiscriminately. Their shops were looted and ransacked. Top-hatted City brokers, heading a crowd of excited demonstrators, marched from the Stock Exchange to Westminster, to demand ‘the immediate internment of all alien enemies, whether naturalised or not’.5 Invading the Central Lobby of the Houses of Parliament, a precinct normally forbidden to strangers, they were harangued by Lord Charles Beresford, who declared that the most dangerous Germans were not the barbers, bakers and waiters, but those who frequented high society. ‘I would put them all behind barbed wire’,6 he said. The Royal Exchange barred its doors to those of German or Austrian birth.
Rioting across London raged in all but two metropolitan districts. The right-wing press came close to condoning this explosion of popular violence in its demands on the Government ‘to clear Germans and German influence out of England’.7 The speed and depth of the decline from normal attitudes and values brought about by nine months of war, and the effect on English opinion of a policy of ruthlessness in which Germans seemed to take positive pride, was startlingly bought out by an editorial in the Morning Post on 11 May. Echoing the German ‘Hymn of Hate’ against England,* it declared:
He who at this time does not hate Germany is incapable of hating evil and cruelty, and has no right to call himself either an Englishman or a Christian.
The worst of the London riots took place next day, 12 May, spilling into the West End and not sparing Grosvenor Street. Edgar received anonymous phone calls warning that No 46 would be attacked. He applied to the Home Office for police protection. A police guard was mounted outside his house, where crowds gathered to hiss and barrack such visitors as ventured to call. Friends offered to take in his children while the disorders lasted.
The next day, 13 May, saw a significant heightening in the anti-German temper. In the Commons, Bonar Law added his voice to the storm of condemnation of aliens. His attack on naturalised Germans could hardly have come closer to Edgar without actually naming him:
There are Germans who became British subjects purely for business reasons, and who have not changed in their feelings of sympathy for Germany. These men are a danger to this country [cheers], and in my opinion, the higher the position they occupy [renewed cheers], and the greater their wealth and influence [prolonged cheers], the more power they have to injure us. Therefore there is no class which should be more closely watched than this class [cheers].8
The same day, the Morning Post featured an editorial which named Edgar outright, emphasising his family and political connections. Asserting that ‘the mob was in substance right’, it reminded its readers that Edgar Speyer was ‘a German by birth and education’ and brother of James Speyer, who was not only one of Germany’s ‘chief tools in its anti-British campaign in the United States’ but also a partner in a German firm headed by his German brother-in-law. It claimed that, like James, Eduard Beit von Speyer was close to Count Bernstorff, the German ambassador in Washington, and to Dernburg, ‘the Black Hand diplomatist’ and head of the German information office in New York, who justified the sinking of the Lusitania. Edgar had severed his partnership with the New York house, but the editorial revived an old canard in querying whether ‘he withdrew his capital’.
The editorial turned to Edgar’s friendship with Asquith and other Cabinet ministers. The Prime Minister and his colleagues, it claimed, should have broken with Edgar on the outbreak of war and should now ‘rigorously cut themselves off from communication with people like Sir Edgar Speyer’. The same day, Margot Asquith noted in her diary: ‘I get lots of violent and abusive letters saying I was pro-German. This is because I won’t drop my German friends, Sir Edgar Speyer, Cassel, etc.’9 The Morning Post declared that Edgar himself should have ‘retired into seclusion’ and ‘given no cause for resentment or uneasiness’. It concluded:
We should advise Sir Edgar Speyer and all in a similar position, for their own good, either to leave the country during the continuance of the war, or to live in such a way as to give no ground for the complaint that they exert any influence upon affairs, either personal, political or financial.
Against this fevered background there was founded a few weeks earlier the Anti-German Union, an organisation said to be ‘inundated with applications for membership’. 10 Its founding-member and secretary was a Scottish baronet, Sir George Makgill, who had been at the head of the recent march on Westminster. The Union was pledged ‘to fight against German influences in our social, financial, industrial and political life’. It called for legislation to preclude men of German birth from membership of the Privy Council and from holding any British honours or titles, and it demanded that ‘British consuls shall be British subjects’.11 This was unmistakably aimed both at Edgar Speyer and at Eduard Beit von Speyer.
The Anti-German Union was obsessed by the issue of the Privy Council. The Conservative MP Ian Colvin, a member of the Union, declared in the Commons that naturalised Germans should be expelled from the Privy Council. Among Makgill’s first actions on behalf of the Union was to apply to the High Court for a declaration that Sir Edgar Speyer and Sir Ernest Cassel, both being of alien birth, had no right under the Act of Settlement 1701 to membership of the Privy Council.
The general situation had become so alarming for German residents in England that, for their own safety, Asquith announced on 13 May a policy of wholesale arrest and internment for all enemy aliens of military age. Germans long resident in England were rounded up at a rate of 1,000 a week and sent to the Isle of Man, where some thirty thousand were eventually incarcerated. Twenty thousand others, mostly the elderly and women and children, were forcibly taken from their homes and deported to Germany by way of Holland, ten thousand of them in the aftermath of the sinking of the Lusitania. They included Englishwomen married to Germans and classified as German by the Aliens Act of 1914 but with no other link to Germany and no desire to go there. Lord Robert Cecil, later well known as a leading advocate of the League of Nations, approved the Government’s change of policy. ‘The events of the last fortnight’, he told the Commons, ‘have made a very great change’. Hitherto he had been ‘prepared to regard the ordinary presuppositions about men as being applicable to Germans’. But after the Bryce Report, the use of poison gas and the Lusitania, it was ‘absurd to suppose that we have any right to think that the Germans are not capable of any crime’.12
The Prime Minister resisted calls, some from within his own Cabinet, for the internment of naturalised Germans. ‘Nothing’ he told his colleagues, ‘would induce him to repudiate any grant of the full privileges of citizenship to all naturalised people’; and the Minister of War, Lord Kitchener himself, pointed out that not a single ‘injurious action had been traced to any alien at large’.13 Unless there was evidence to the contrary, Asquith told the Commons, naturalised Germans should be deemed to be loyal British subjects. Even the nonnaturalised ‘enemy aliens’ he believed to be honest, decent people.
The measures decided on by the Government did not go far enough for the National Review, Morning Post or The Times, all of which complained that naturalised Germans were being let off too lightly, and should also be removed to places of confinement. ‘And the rich naturalised alien, too, must go’, declared Sir George Makgill. ‘There is only one safe place for him – an internment camp.’14 Even the Manchester Guardian, observing that naturalised Germans ‘seem to have taken it for granted that their British sympathies were understood’, advised them, ‘in view of recent events’,15 to give public expression to those sympathies. The playwright, Sir Arthur Wing Pinero, called on prominent Anglo-Germans, if they were not to fall under suspicion, to show their allegiance by publishing so-called ‘loyalty letters’ in the press, and many hastened to do so.
On 13 May, a women’s anti-German protest meeting took place at the Mansion House. As Margot Asquith noted with distaste, many militant suffragettes had turned readily from smashing windows and assaulting politicians before the war to handing out white feathers to young men not in uniform and to joining in the anti- German clamour. The meeting, chaired by the Lord Mayor of London, was addressed by the indefatigable Lord Charles Beresford. Beresford repeated his earlier unsubstantiated claim that ‘there was no doubt whatever that spies were in our midst’ who had tracked the Lusitania and sent word to Germany of her movements. ‘But after all’, he continued, ‘the most dangerous enemies in our midst were the rich, independent, naturalised Germans in high social positions’. ‘Such men’, he claimed, were ‘still Germans at heart’ and they were ‘not wanted here. They ought to have the good taste either to leave the country or to intern themselves somewhere’. He pinpointed ‘certain German Privy Councillors’. What, he wanted to know, were such people doing in this country? If they were naturalised Englishmen, why did they not come forward and protest against German atrocities? Not that he would have believed them if they did, because, as he said, ‘all Germans, whether naturalised or not, should be locked up’, since ‘naturalisation did not change the nature of a man’.16
The next day, Beresford attended yet another public meeting, this time at Chelsea Town Hall, chaired by Leo Maxse. Maxse denounced naturalised Germans, including Speyer, whom he did not scruple to name, as ‘opulent, sinister, powerful, truculent Prussians’. Such men, he said, not only ‘formed a sinister element in our midst’, but might be ‘a positive danger to the State on account of their intimate relations with leading politicians’ and what he pointedly called their ‘somewhat indiscreet families’, who could prove a source of ‘valuable information’. This clear allusion to Margot Asquith was confirmed when Maxse referred to Edgar’s presence at the notorious Downing Street dinner. ‘The right place for Germans’, he concluded, to cheers, ‘was Germany’, adding grimly that ‘if they did not care to go away, we should offer them the hospitality of barbed wire’.17
On 15 May, in his popular weekly John Bull, the scurrilous Horatio Bottomley came out with an infamous editorial calling for
a vendetta against every German in Britain, whether ‘naturalised’ or not... You cannot naturalise an unnatural beast, a human abortion, a hellish freak. But you can exterminate it. And now the time has come.
Naturalised Germans, he said, should be ‘compelled to wear a distinctive badge’ and none of their children ‘should be allowed to attend any school’. On 18 May, the Globe, a London evening newspaper, repeated Beresford’s complaint that neither Edgar nor Sir Ernest Cassel had acknowledged ‘their detestation of Germany’s crimes’. Two days later a loyalty letter from Cassel duly appeared in The Times.
Edgar had just resigned from the UERL. An important Bill was about to go before Parliament. Its object was to amalgamate the Underground and the London tramway companies under the single controlling authority of the UERL. The Bill was controversial. His embarrassed fellow directors put it to Edgar that in the prevailing state of opinion it was likely to incur opposition unless he resigned. A number of MPs had expressed their intention to block it. Edgar could not deny the risk. He complied, but he was cut to the quick. He had always looked on the Underground Company as his ‘child.’
I started the Company. I was with the Company through all its great troubles. The Company had great troubles. That was just the time when we were hoping that the Company would emerge into success after 12 years of hard work, and then I was asked to give it up.
‘This’, he said feelingly, ‘was the unkindest cut of all’.* 18
Edgar did not write a loyalty letter, not, at least, of the kind which Pinero had in mind. On 17 May he wrote to the Prime Minister. He had resigned from the UERL. He had given up his membership of the hospital boards and his trusteeship of the Whitechapel Art Gallery. ‘I have retired from most things after the attacks that have been made on me’,19 he reflected. Now he determined on a more drastic step. He tendered the resignation of his honours. His letter to Asquith, published in The Times on 18th, read as follows:
46, Grosvenor Street, W,
May 17
Dear Mr Asquith.
Nothing is harder to bear than a sense of injustice that finds no vent in expression.
For the last nine months I have kept silence and have treated with disdain the charges of disloyalty and suggestions of treachery made against me in the Press and elsewhere. But I can keep silence no longer, for these charges and suggestions have now been repeated by public men who have not scrupled to use their position to inflame the overstrained feelings of the people.
I am not a man who can be driven or drummed by threats or abuse into an attitude of justification. But I consider it due to my honour as a loyal British subject and my personal dignity as a man to retire from all my public positions.
I therefore write to ask you to accept my resignation as a Privy Councillor and to revoke my baronetcy.
I am sending this letter to the Press.
Yours sincerely,
Edgar Speyer
The letter caused a sensation. The veteran Liberal statesman Lord Morley, who had quitted the Cabinet in protest at England’s entry in the war, confided to Margot Asquith: ‘I admire Speyer’s letter, snapping his fingers at us all’,20 but his was a lone voice. The letter was ill received by the press, though the press had complained loudest about German Privy Councillors, so that, as the Financial Mail noted, in offering to resign, Edgar was ‘simply bowing to public wishes’.21 The press in general turned Edgar’s letter against him and mocked it as ‘childish’.22 The Times derided his ‘ludicrous mistake’23 in not knowing that only the King could revoke his honours. ‘Sir Edgar Speyer’, wrote one commentator, ‘has not enhanced his reputation by his hysterical letter to Mr Asquith’.24
Asquith himself treated Edgar’s letter with the utmost seriousness. Four days later he replied in terms of unequivocal support:
10, Downing Street, Whitehall,
May 22
Dear Sir Edgar,
I can quite understand the sense of injustice and indignation which prompted your letter to me. I have known you long, and well enough to estimate at their true value these baseless and malignant imputations upon your loyalty to the British Crown.
The King is not prepared to take any step such as you suggest in regard to the marks of distinction which you have received in recognition of public services and philanthropic munificence.
Yours sincerely
H H Asquith
This letter too was published in The Times, on 25 May, so that, as Speyer wrote shortly afterwards in reply to a message of support from Bernard Shaw, ‘“honour is satisfied”, as they say’.25 In the face of popular clamour, Asquith had taken a bold, principled stand. Four days earlier, in the same fighting spirit, he had challenged his colleagues to say whether they had ever known him to be ‘influenced one way or the other by any paper or person. Did he care one d—n for the Press then or had he ever cared?’26 Seldom, it might be felt, was the Prime Minister’s cold contempt for press demagogy more admirably exhibited than in his letter to Edgar. This, his supporters might feel, was Asquith at his best and biggest, ‘the last of the Romans’.
Asquith’s defence of Speyer was the more remarkable in that it appeared amidst one of the gravest political crises of his premiership. The war continued to go badly. The Government, and the Prime Minister in particular, were blamed for what critics perceived as a lack of pace, vigour, foresight and grip. Asquith himself gave the appearance of slackness and complacency. There were insistent calls for greater effort, sterner measures, the more energetic deployment of national resources and the introduction of conscription. Bonar Law warned Asquith that unless the Government was radically reconstructed, he could no longer restrain his Conservative backbenchers from an out-and-out attempt to bring it down. That same day, the day that Edgar wrote to Asquith, Asquith himself had written to his Cabinet colleagues requiring their resignation, and was ensconced with Bonar Law in the formation of a coalition that would put an end to the Liberal administration which had held office since 1906. ‘Our wonderful Cabinet gone!! Smashed!’27 Margot Asquith wrote to Haldane, chief victim of this sudden political revolution.
By including Haldane himself in his clean sweep, Asquith bowed to the demands of his Coalition partners for the Lord Chancellor’s dismissal as the price of their cooperation and of his own survival as Prime Minister. No one had done more than Haldane as Minister of War to ensure the military readiness of the British Expeditionary Force. The nation owed him an immeasurable debt of gratitude: yet Haldane had long been the butt of popular clamour, amplified in the press, for his respect for German culture and the much-quoted remark that Germany was his ‘spiritual home’. Bonar Law himself, as it happened, was also an admirer of German culture, but the press made nothing of that, and Asquith summarily sacrificed his Lord Chancellor in order to assuage Bonar Law’s supporters and to ensure his own retention of power at the head of a Coalition in which, at his contrivance, the chief offices still remained in Liberal hands.
Haldane was, as Asquith admitted, ‘the oldest personal and political friend that I have in the world’.28 Yet while requiring his immediate resignation without a word of public apology or any acknowledgment of the unjust prejudice against him, the Prime Minister went out of his way to publish a forceful and defiant vindication of Edgar Speyer, whom Bonar Law had publicly denounced only four days earlier. This strange contrast in Asquith’s conduct calls for consideration and will be returned to later.
One of the few to preserve a sense of proportion and decency amid the turbulent waves of wartime passion was the King. On the forced resignation of his cousin, Prince Louis of Battenberg, he had at once shown what he thought by appointing Prince Louis to the Privy Council. With the ousting of Haldane, the King once more demonstrated his own sense of values by awarding him the Order of Merit. Against this record of steadfast principle, we may be sure that in Edgar’s case, Monarch and Prime Minister were at one in rejecting his offer to resign his honours.
The King was less successful in resisting the removal from St George’s Chapel, Windsor, of the banners of German and Austrian Knights of the Garter, including his cousin, the Kaiser, the Emperor of Austria and half a dozen other crowned heads and princes, all of whom were now expelled from the Order. This he did on Asquith’s advice and under pressure of agitation in John Bull and the Daily Mail, and for fear that ‘the people would have stormed the Chapel’.29 The King himself, a Coburger and Hanoverian by descent, his wife the daughter of a Duke of Teck, was not invulnerable to criticism.
Meanwhile the pressure on Edgar continued. H A Gwynne, describing Edgar’s relations with the Prime Minister as ‘a disgrace’, expressed his intention ‘to peg away at it’30 in the Morning Post. Among the arguments he urged on the Government in an editorial headed ‘The Case of Sir Edgar Speyer’,31 it was suggested that in German law Edgar might still be a German subject. Then Sir George Makgill’s action against Speyer and Cassel was listed for preliminary hearing in the Royal Courts of Justice.
By this time Edgar was in the United States. On 26 May, accompanied by Leonora and the children, he set sail on the American liner SS Philadelphia, arriving in New York on 3 June. They escaped by a few days the appearance of the first zeppelins over London. But the malice of his detractors pursued him across the Atlantic. ‘Sir Edgar Speyer has journeyed to New York’, the Financial Mail proclaimed, ‘for which London is truly thankful’.32 From Australia came a withering attack on him as a German agent who had worked insidiously within the Liberal Party against those who warned of Germany’s intentions. He had been ‘a friend and flatterer of the fatuous Lord Haldane’.33 Leo Maxse denounced him as ‘Herr Speyer’ and trumpeted the ‘widespread conviction that German Plutocrats have been substantial contributors to Party funds – which would explain their immunity’.34 It would have made no difference to Maxse and his like that a month after reaching America, Edgar donated a further £27,000 to the British War Loan.