CHAPTER V
This exceedingly unpleasant and repugnant investigation.
Sir Gordon Hewart, KC, Attorney-General, 17 October 1921
On 22 March 1919, the Home Office wrote to inform Edgar that the Home Secretary was considering revoking his certificate of naturalisation and had referred his case to the Committee of enquiry set up under the new Aliens Act. The Home Secretary himself, Edward Shortt, informed the House of Commons accordingly three days later. The announcement, long awaited, long promised and long delayed, was premature, however, since there were still no charges for the Committee to consider, a fact of which Shortt was keenly aware. The Foreign Office pressed the Washington embassy for evidence of Edgar’s activities in America, and the chargé d’affaires gratifyingly reported that while a full dossier was not yet complete, the information available so far ‘is not favourable to Speyer’.1 Investigations continued on both sides of the Atlantic. Much later, the Chief Assistant Solicitor in the Treasury Solicitor’s Department, the department responsible for giving legal advice to the Government, gave the game away when he ingenuously wrote that the purpose of the Home Office enquiry ‘is to obtain the denaturalisation of Sir Edgar Speyer’.2 But that had been clear from the beginning.
On 5 November 1919, Messrs Williamson Hill & Co, Edgar’s solicitors, having received no particulars of any alleged charges, wrote to the Treasury Solicitor urging him, after a delay of almost eight months, ‘either to withdraw any such charges or to deliver particulars of the same to us at once’. ‘In a case of such gravity’, they complained, ‘the particulars must either be in your possession or the charges should never have been made at all’.3 Three weeks later the Treasury Solicitor replied:
The papers in this matter are now before Counsel, and I hope to be able to let you have particulars of the matters alleged against your client within such time as will permit of the case being heard at a reasonably early date next year.4
Charges were brought in February 1920. They related to Edgar’s activities after he left England, and fell into two categories. The first category alleged that he had shown himself ‘disloyal or disaffected’ to the King by associating with pro-Germans in the United States. The second category alleged that, through his association with Speyer & Co, he had ‘unlawfully traded or communicated with the enemy’ or had been ‘associated with business which, to his knowledge, assisted the enemy’.5 Particulars of the second category of charges, drawn from sheafs of wartime telegrams intercepted in London, were not served on Edgar’s lawyers until November 1920.
A year later, Edgar obtained from the Committee an order for evidence to be taken on commission in America, where testimony was duly gathered with a view to rebutting the charges relating to his activities there. Meanwhile the authorities in England redoubled their efforts in the search for evidence against him. Yet as late as August 1921, Henry Giveen, Junior Treasury Counsel, was sceptical whether the charges would stick. In a ‘Preliminary Opinion’ Giveen wrote: ‘I have at present some doubts as to how far it may or may not be possible to establish the Crown’s case’. Referring to the costs of evidence- taking in America, however, he concluded: ‘Considerable expense has been already incurred, and it is desirable in view of this and also of the position of Sir Edgar Speyer and the notoriety which the case has already obtained, not lightly to abandon it’.6
Confident – for his lawyers so advised him – that the case against him would not hold up, Edgar returned to England in August 1921, after an absence of six years, to face the charges. This delay was not all of Edgar’s making. Before 1914 a British subject could leave or enter the country without let or hindrance or even a passport; but the powers of the Home Office to interfere in private life had been greatly extended by successive variants of the Defence of the Realm Act, a statute popularly caricatured as the bossy governess-figure of ‘Dora’. In the spring of 1918, as has been seen, the Foreign Secretary instructed Lord Reading, then Ambassador in Washington, to discourage Edgar’s attempts to return to England. Early in 1919 Edgar made a fresh application to the British authorities in America for his passport to be renewed, but, he noted, ‘it was delayed from week to week’. He wrote half a dozen times. ‘There was always some excuse made’.7 Now, almost three years later, while the Home Office at last renewed his passport, it sought to curtail his travel plans.
Edgar wished to go to France, to meet his American lawyer who was holidaying there. He planned to visit his sister in Berlin and his now widowed brother-in-law Eduard in Frankfurt, neither of whom he had seen since before the war. He also hoped to spend some time at Karlsbad, where he had last taken the cure in May 1914. The Home Secretary did not object to his seeing his lawyer, but could see ‘no reason for granting facilities to enable him to travel abroad for other purposes’. The Home Office did not want to be criticised for ‘comforting and assisting a man whose certificate is being questioned’.8 So much for any presumption of innocence. The Foreign Office, however, took a more enlightened view and Edgar’s passport was endorsed accordingly.
On 17 October 1921, the three members of the Certificates of Naturalisation (Revocation) Committee, to give it its full title, took their seats in Court 5 of the Royal Courts of Justice to hear the case of Sir Edgar Speyer. Nominally a judicial enquiry held at the instigation of the Home Secretary under the Aliens Act, this was in reality a full-dress state trial, prepared for the Law Officers of the Crown by the Treasury Solicitors as agents of the state in political prosecutions; and while the lawyers on both sides began by fastidiously shunning the word ‘charges’ in favour of ‘heads of enquiry’, the Law Officers deprecating the very idea that they were ‘prosecutors in any sense at all’,9 this flummery was soon forgotten in the familiar ardour of adversarial contest. Both sides referred openly to ‘the Crown’ and the Committee was referred to as ‘the Court’. The Committee was armed with all the powers of the High Court, and though formally a ‘witness’, Edgar was as much on trial as if he were in the dock.
To all intents and purposes, then, this was a criminal trial, in which a guilty verdict would mean that Edgar was liable to suffer one of the most formidable sanctions available to the state: deprivation of citizenship – or, as it is sometimes called, ‘civil death’. The proceedings were held in the King’s Bench Division under the presidency of a High Court judge, Mr Justice Salter; an elderly County Court judge named Francis Radcliffe and Lord Hambledon, a layman with a high reputation for public spirit. Proceedings were held in camera.
The hearings had already begun when fresh evidence against Edgar was introduced. After pertinacious searches, the dusty shelves of the Admiralty archives had yielded up their secrets in the shape of transcripts of long-forgotten wireless messages, intercepted by Naval Intelligence during the war. These finds were gold-dust for the authorities, enabling fresh charges to be lodged as late as 21 September, the evidence itself emerging piecemeal and, as Edgar’s Counsel complained, ‘at the 59th minute of the eleventh hour’.10 These charges alleged Mr Edgar’s complicity in trading with the enemy before as well as after his departure for America.
‘However learned in law... reached unjust conclusions on insufficient evidence’. Edgar Speyer
The main charges against Edgar may be summarised as follows: that he had shown disloyalty during the war (1) by continuing to do business, directly or indirectly, with Germany, (2) by violating the censorship regulations, (3) by communicating with Germans and (4) by assisting Germans; (5) that he had befriended and assisted pro-Germans in America; and (6) that he had formed the intention of settling in Germany.
The case for the Crown was opened by the Attorney- General, Sir Gordon Hewart, and the Solicitor-General, Sir Ernest Pollock, soon to become, respectively, Lord Chief Justice and Master of the Rolls. They were assisted by Henry Giveen. Edgar was represented by two eminent KCs, Sir John Simon and John Henry Roskill. Roskill had appeared for him six years before in the Makgill case. Edgar’s legal costs, consisting chiefly of his lawyers’ fees, were said to exceed £20,000. Edgar was present throughout and gave evidence. He was cross-examined and re-examined. His other main witness was his junior partner in Speyer Bros, Gordon Leith.
For much of the hearing, the Attorney-General did not attend. He was needed at Downing Street, to assist in negotiations for a peace treaty with Ireland. His mastery of the facts in the Speyer case, however, suffered no diminution from his preoccupation with Irish issues and his opening cross-examination of Edgar was brutally efficient.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: When was it that you decided to prefer British allegiance to German allegiance?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: You mean when I became naturalised?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: No. I am asking you of the state of mind, not of an overt fact like that.
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: I decided that about two years before I came to England.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: That you preferred to be a British subject?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: You came to England when?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: I came to England in 1887.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: So that about the year 1885 you decided that it was preferable to be a British citizen?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: And you have remained of that mind ever since?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: I have.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: For example, during the late war did you ardently desire that England should succeed?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: And you ardently desired that Germany should fail?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: You never wavered in that at all?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: No.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: Were you throughout prepared to do whatever you could to bring about that result?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: I was.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: And to abstain from anything whatever which might conduce to the opposite result?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: You became a member of the Privy Council in the year 1909?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: Five years before the war; and you took the oath of a Privy Councillor?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: I did.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: ... Did you ever have the curiosity to read it?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Certainly.11
Hewart then read aloud two passages from the Privy Councillor’s oath and invited Edgar to confirm that he had abided faithfully by his sworn obligations to the Crown.
The authorities, understandably, had always been deeply suspicious of Edgar’s connections with Speyer & Co; and while it was not denied that he had resigned from the Frankfurt house on the declaration of war, the Crown alleged that he remained a further two months in partnership with James in the New York house, which continued to do business with Germany and of which Eduard Beit von Speyer was also a partner. This, said the Crown, was in contravention of the Royal Proclamation of 5 August 1914, which declared trading with the enemy to be illegal. It was only after a second proclamation on 9 September that Edgar resigned from Speyer & Co, and only then, the Crown contended, after a further month’s delay. Sir Gordon Hewart pressed this home:
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: ...You knew, did you not, that transactions, joint dealings, between London, New York and Frankfurt, would be illegal after the war [began]?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes, certainly, if Frankfurt was in it.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: You knew, did you not, that unless active steps were taken to prevent them, they would be probable, they would be likely to happen?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: ...As to the illegality of joint dealings after the war [began] between London, Frankfurt and New York, let me remind you of the letter which was sent to the New York Stock Exchange, dated 5 October 1914.
The Attorney-General then read aloud a letter of 5 October 1914 from James Speyer to the Secretary of the New York Stock Exchange, in which he gave formal notice that following the Royal Proclamation of 9 September ‘it becomes necessary’ that Edgar sever his connection with Speyer & Co.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: You observe the word ‘necessary’ – ‘it becomes necessary’?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: I suggest to you that you took that step reluctantly and at the last moment. Is that right?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: I do not think so.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: Let us see. There was put in [evidence] a letter dated 18 September 1914 from your Solicitor to you?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: ...You had a long conference with your Solicitor upon the point, did you not, before that step was taken?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes, we certainly had.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: Did not you suggest to him various alternatives that might be considered to enable you to continue carrying on your business?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: What I said to him was this – please advise me what I ought to do.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: Let us see what he wrote in reply ...‘Dear Sir Edgar, I have been thinking over the question you put to me as to whether it would be necessary for you to retire from Messrs Speyer & Co if they do no further business throughout the war with anyone in the German Empire’ ...Now, pausing there for a moment, I ask you, that was the question you had put to him?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Evidently.12
The Solicitor had advised: ‘I think that strictly speaking you should not continue in the firm’, but suggested applying to the Board of Trade for a special licence to remain in partnership. The Proclamation made provision for such licences but Edgar decided not to apply. Quite apart from ‘the practical certainty that it would have been refused’, it would, he said, in the prevailing climate of opinion, ‘have made a very bad impression if I had asked for it’.13
The cross-examination continued.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: ...In other words, to put it quite plainly, I fear I must be plain—
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: I hope you are.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: It was no spontaneous act upon your part which caused you to retire from the New York House... It was the Proclamation against trading with the enemy and the legal advice you got about it that compelled you to do so, was it not?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: No doubt it was.
At this point Mr Justice Salter intervened.
MR JUSTICE SALTER: You remained a partner in Speyer & Co for about two months after the war broke out, from the beginning of August to the beginning of October. That is about right, is it not?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
MR JUSTICE SALTER: During that time, I suppose, New York was trading with Frankfurt and Berlin in its usual way?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: I expect they did.
MR JUSTICE SALTER: You so understood. You were during that time a co-partner in the firm with Mr Beit von Speyer?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
MR JUSTICE SALTER: And you and he were taking your share in the profits of that trading?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: It was arranged, of course. I did not share in the profits when I left the firm.
MR JUSTICE SALTER: I am speaking of the time before you left. So long as you remained a partner in that firm, you and he had your share of the profits, of course?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes, we certainly should have had them.
MR JUSTICE SALTER: Did it occur to you at the time as being undesirable that you should be a partner with an enemy, sharing profits with him?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: I almost immediately began to consult my lawyer as to what were the best steps to take, but he took some time considering the matter. Of course, the chief motive in my reluctance, on which such stress is laid, was this. Our credit was at stake, and I was reluctant to leave Speyer & Co at a time when our liabilities were very heavy... and I was very much afraid of the effect it might have on our general financial position. Therefore I had to act with great circumspection. The idea of profit never entered my head. It was simply a question of protecting the credit of the English House.
The Attorney-General seized his cue.
ATTORNEY-GENERAL: In other words, your own financial interests?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: If you want to put it so, yes.14
The Committee’s findings on this charge were damning. It held that, acting ‘with obvious reluctance and on compulsion’, Edgar had ‘preferred his private financial interests to the prompt discharge of his duty to the State’. Such censure reflected the Committee’s view of the ‘considerable time’15 during which he remained a partner in a firm that traded with Germany, and in partnership with a German, and its assumption that he shared in the profits of such trade.
Edgar described the findings as ‘amazing’.16 In the first place, as he rightly claimed, the first Proclamation, issued the day after war was declared, had given rise to much uncertainty. War had come as a bolt from the blue. Its precise legal implications were far from clear, even in official circles. The world of business and finance was taken wholly aback. The Government had no thought of impeding British trade: rather it hoped that the blockade of Germany might open up German markets to British entrepreneurs. A Liberal Government was not minded to curtail freedom of trade more than appeared strictly necessary, still less to abolish it by proclamation. As late as November 1914, in a speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet, Churchill famously invoked the slogan ‘business as usual’17 to indicate the tenor of Government policy. The Proclamation itself was ambiguous: while forbidding transactions with persons resident in Germany, it placed no restriction on trade with German firms in neutral countries, a distinction which required a ruling by the Lord Chief Justice to clarify.18
In these circumstances, business with Speyer & Co appeared to remain lawful, and, as Edgar protested, not he alone but ‘thousands of loyal British subjects’ retained ‘with perfect propriety’19 their connections with American concerns which traded with Germany. In this he was staunchly supported by his English partners. In a letter to the press in his defence, they confirmed the lack of clarity at the start of the war ‘as to the correct action for those with international banking interests’. ‘Any businessman’, they wrote, who recalled those days, would ‘appreciate the difficulties and perplexities with which Sir Edgar was confronted.’ To the Committee’s findings, they declared, ‘we attach little importance’.20 The legal position remained obscure until the proclamation of 9 September. Even then, its application was a matter on which Edgar was surely entitled to seek legal advice? The Committee’s cut-and-dried verdict reflected the stricter view on trading with the enemy which evolved in subsequent wartime legislation rather than the vague and less sharply defined view prevailing in 1914.
Edgar was also justified in maintaining that his delay in resigning from Speyer & Co was of one month’s duration, not two. Given the Committee’s harsh strictures, the point was important but appears to have escaped his own Counsel as well as the Committee. The sequence of events was as follows. The solicitor’s advice was dated 18 September 1914, seven working days after the second Proclamation. Four days later, on 22 September, Edgar wrote to James to communicate his resignation from Speyer & Co, backdated to September 9, the date of the Proclamation. He wrote promptly and with no obvious sign of ‘reluctance’:
I am advised by my lawyers that under the Proclamation of September 9th last, my continued partnership in your firm has become illegal, and I therefore give you notice that my partnership in your firm terminated from that date [my emphasis –AL].21
Cables to America could not be relied on. The letter of severance went by sea. It would take about ten days and would therefore reach New York around 2 October. James notified the secretary of the New York Stock Exchange on 5 October. However long it took for Edgar’s letter to arrive made no difference to its retrospective effect. So much for the Committee’s finding of ‘considerable delay’.
As for the profits which Edgar allegedly drew from Speyer & Co across two months, the Committee’s censure was misplaced. At most, it could only have related to a single month. In fact, Edgar insisted that since the declaration of war he had ‘derived no profit from this partnership’ and he might well protest that ‘there was no proof whatever’ to support the Committee’s ‘gratuitous conclusion’.22 The Committee’s withering condemnation, which received prominent coverage in the press, was baseless and unjust.
The next charge related to April and May 1915, before Edgar left for America. It alleged indirect trading with the enemy in the course of currency dealings. Such dealings were potentially lucrative in wartime because of unusually violent fluctuations in currency values, and provided they were not conducted directly with the enemy and were not intended to benefit him, they were not prima facie unlawful. Edgar encouraged Speyer Bros to participate in them, though they played a minor role in the firm’s business overall. In some of these transactions the principals were the New York house and Teixeira de Mattos of Amsterdam: Speyer Bros acted as a clearing-house, receiving and paying out moneys as agent. In other transactions Speyer Bros traded jointly with Teixeira, and the New York firm was the clearing-house.
These were the charges that were laid three weeks before the Enquiry opened, the evidence being lodged after proceedings had begun. At the time, according to Edgar, ‘these new charges... appeared so trivial and so readily susceptible to explanation that... Counsel decided to proceed in spite of the disadvantage that they were first sprung at the hearing’.23 Sir John Simon argued that Speyer Bros’ operations had been ‘quite legitimate exchange transactions... but which may, incidentally and unintentionally, touch Germany’. ‘That’, he contended, ‘is not trading with the enemy’.24
The case for the Crown was that the real object of the transactions was to transmit funds to Germany. Teixeira traded regularly with Germany, and the Committee held that ‘as an expert financier’, Edgar ‘should have known’, and did know, that the transactions would enable Germany to acquire Dutch florins and other currencies of use in purchasing war materials from neutral states. ‘Knowing this’, the Committee concluded, ‘he shared the profits of such trading.’25 When Speyer Bros acted as agent for the New York and Amsterdam banks, their commission was 1/16 of the profit on the transaction; when Speyer Bros were joint speculators with Teixeira, the total profit accruing to the two firms from April to June 1915 was £1,920. Of Speyer Bros’ £960 half share of this, Edgar’s personal entitlement was some £300 – in Sir John Simon’s words ‘a comparatively trumpery profit’.26
Under cross-examination Edgar let his temper show. ‘I had much more important things to do’, he said, ‘than to worry about than these two-penny-ha’penny Amsterdam transactions, which did not interest me in the least’.27 The Crown professed to be shocked at the vehemence of this expression. Invited to explain himself, Edgar pointed to his overriding concern to alleviate the problems of Speyer Bros’ responsibility to British investors in the failing railway companies, involving many tens of thousands of pounds:
The transactions that mattered to me were transactions that concerned British investors, that is, the Manila Railway, the Underground Railway, the Brazil Railway, the San Francisco Railway, the M[issouri], K[ansas] and T[exas] Railway. Those were important things compared with which these were two-pennyha’penny transactions.28
The Committee was not impressed by Edgar’s explanation. It concluded as follows:
We are clearly of opinion that Sir Edgar Speyer engaged in these transactions with Teixeira with knowledge that they involved benefit to individual Germans and assistance to the enemy in the war.29
Edgar denounced these findings as ‘grotesque’ and ‘not sustained by a vestige of proof’. He was bitterly ironic about the £300 by which he was supposed to have benefited – ‘Just think of the incentive here disclosed for disloyalty on my part!’30 He maintained that the charge of trading with the enemy had ‘failed utterly at the hearing and has no foundation whatever’. In transmitting funds to neutral countries, including Spain, Sweden and Switzerland, as well as Holland, through banks known to trade with Germany, ‘Speyer Brothers did no more than was done by loyal British bankers’. If the Government wished to prohibit such transactions, ‘they should have said so’. On the contrary, to their knowledge, ‘they were participated in by every great British banking house throughout the war without protest by the Government’.31
His partners fully supported him. Gordon Leith was recalled to testify that Lazard Bros, Seligmans, Rothschilds and the London County Westminster and Parr’s Bank among others all took part in exchange dealings. Such traffic had not been considered a crime at the time, Leith told the Committee, ‘and I do not consider it a crime today’.32 To have enquired of Teixeira de Mattos as to the ultimate destination of moneys sent to them for currency purchases would have been wholly contrary to banking practice, even in wartime. It was not even certain that specie which found its way to Germany would actually remain there rather than moving on in the course of further currency deals. Such advantage as would accrue to Germany if the chain of transactions did end there was, so to speak, adventitious. If the aim of Speyer & Co had been to transfer money from New York to Berlin, they could have sent it directly: there was no need to go through Speyer Bros at all. Edgar’s partners protested that if the dealings held against him were to be classed as ‘trading with the enemy’, then ‘hardly a bank or banking house in London can escape condemnation’. They went further:
Sir Edgar has nothing to reproach himself with, since all the transactions of his firm were with neutral countries, viz, Holland and America; and to suggest that he, personally, engaged in this particular class of business with the knowledge that these transactions would ‘involve benefit’ to individual Germans and assist the enemy in the war is, in our opinion, a grave injustice to him.33
It had been no less in Britain’s interest than in Germany’s to acquire neutral currencies – for the purchase of munitions in the United States, iron ore in Sweden and Spain and dairy products in Holland. As Leith told the Committee, ‘if exchange transactions had been forbidden, the world trade would have stopped, so we should have been in trouble too.’34 The Government even connived at the sale of British goods to Germany through neutrals under cover of undertakings, more or less spurious, by the latter, that they would not sell on. British exports to Germany through Holland were notorious. They ranged from cocoa to cotton and included such wartime essentials as rubber, nickel and aviation fuel. British cement for the formidable German blockhouses reached the western front by the same channel. As for those detected in this trade, some were treated leniently while the law reached out to those with German connections or German names. Bringing this charge against Edgar was selective.35
Five of the 14 pages of the Committee’s Report – more than one third – related to evasion of the censorship to which all communications leaving or entering the British Isles were subject. The day after war broke out, Britain severed Germany’s submarine cables in the English Channel, after which almost all telegraphic communication between Germany and America passed through London and came under the scrutiny of the War Office censor. Wireless messages were the province of the Admiralty censor. From November 1915 mails conveyed by sea on neutral vessels were liable to interception under the stop-and-search procedures of the Royal Navy.
There was no doubt that Edgar did evade the Censor. He made no attempt to deny it and he admitted at the hearing that it was wrong. Speyer Bros was an enterprise operating in both hemispheres, dependent for its daily transactions on telegraphic contact and already facing daunting financial challenges on the eve of war. Its business came to a virtual standstill when the authorities took control of the means of communication. From the moment of his arrival in New York, Edgar found that cables which he sent to Speyer Bros in London and cables to him from Speyer Bros were not getting through. He was in error, understandably so, in attributing this to the malice of the British authorities against him personally, and aimed at bringing about the ruin of his House.
Speyer Bros had indeed been singled out for special surveillance, but for reasons of which Edgar was completely unaware. Once again his brother James had been playing him false. Since April 1915, Speyer Bros had been used as an innocent intermediary in exchange dealings between Speyer & Co and Germany. Speyer & Co acted in collusion with Teixeira. Disguised in a code privy to the New York and Amsterdam houses, messages from Speyer & Co to Teixeira, passing by cable through Speyer Bros in London, concealed important transactions with Germany. The code was broken by British intelligence. The authorities, including Asquith and Sir Edward Grey, were informed and the Home Secretary placed an embargo on the receipt and transmission of cables by Speyer Bros, pending investigation. It was further to the discovery of these transactions that Speyer & Co was placed on the Black List. Speyer Bros, and Edgar in particular, came under suspicion of complicity in the subterfuge practised on them by James, but were cleared by a Home Office enquiry in June 1915. The Committee of Enquiry, however, reopened the whole issue.
Ignorant in 1915 of the stratagem played on him by James week after week behind his back, Edgar had reacted indignantly to the blocking of his communications, as he told the Committee:
I was very much incensed about it, and inasmuch as my telegrams were all telegrams which concerned British interests, and very important British interests – urgent telegrams dealing with financial affairs of Companies in which a great many British people were interested; I thought it was of the utmost importance that they should go through, when I thought it was unwarranted that they did not.36
To Edgar in New York, trying to resume his normal business activities, the Censor’s interference was ‘quite intolerable’ and ‘absolutely inexcusable’.37 He had contrived to evade it by addressing cables to his British partners at their home addresses and requesting them to cable him through American intermediaries, adding openly ‘and I do not mind if the Censor should open this letter, if he reads it, as we cable nothing that he need not see’.38
When his partners demurred at this attempt to flout the regulations, Edgar responded forthrightly:
There is nothing that I cable, or that I ask you to cable, which need not be seen by the Government or anybody in authority. I simply want to attend to my business, and if for some reason of red tape or unfounded suspicion, some official chooses to hold up our cables, I consider I am justified to try and get a message through if I can through some friend. I do not mind anybody reading this, or anything else. I consider I am within my rights. If the Censor will tell us, or me, why he holds up our cables, we shall know where we are; but in the presence of what I consider unjustifiable proceedings I personally shall not hesitate to try and get in communication with my firm, if that is at all possible, by what you call ‘indirect means’.39
The Attorney-General picked this up. ‘Are not you really saying’, he put it to Edgar, ‘that in this matter you regard yourself as above the law?’40
Edgar’s Counsel strove to repair the damage. ‘What was your object in doing this?’ Roskill asked him.
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Simply to get my telegrams through.
MR ROSKILL: Had you anything to conceal? SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Nothing whatever.
MR ROSKILL: Were those telegrams solely in relation to matters and securities that you had issued?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Absolutely.
Mr Justice Salter, who clearly attached high importance to strict and unquestioning compliance with wartime regulations, and was not disposed to take a lenient view of any kind of evasion, seized on the point.
MR JUSTICE SALTER: If you sent a message in such a way that the authorities would not know that it was to Speyer Bros, and therefore would not look at it, would that in your opinion be an evasion of their wishes?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes, I think it would be an evasion, but a different kind of evasion than changing the names in the telegrams themselves. The message was en clair; there was nothing in the telegram which was changed.41
Mr Justice Salter took a grave view of what he described as Edgar’s ‘repeated and systematic attempts’ both to evade the censor and ‘to seduce his English partners to do the same’42 and of his recalcitrance in justifying his conduct:
It does not appear to have occurred to his mind that the duty of a loyal subject in a time of great national danger and anxiety is not to impede and defeat the efforts of the Government, but to cooperate with them, even at some personal inconvenience.43
Sir John Simon pleaded that evading the Censor, however reprehensible, ‘is not treachery. It is not disloyal. It is not a reason for losing citizenship’.44 It was essentially no more culpable, Sir John suggested, than drinking out of hours in breach of wartime licensing regulations. The Committee was not amused and it was not persuaded. Mr Justice Salter was adamant in holding Edgar’s conduct to be ‘inconsistent with any feeling of loyalty to His Majesty or of affection for the British cause’.45
At intervals during the war, and in undeniable breach of the censorship, Edgar was in correspondence with Eduard and Lucie at Frankfurt, and through Eduard with his sister in Berlin. In March 1915, this had come to the notice of the Home Office, which requested an assurance that all correspondence with ‘persons in enemy country’46 would cease. Edgar gave the assurance. The correspondence nevertheless resumed after he left England. His letters touched on business as well as family matters. Edgar and Eduard had exchanged complaints about the interference of the British censorship and the disagreeable sense of someone looking over their shoulders.
Mr Justice Salter regarded with great severity such exchanges, in which Edgar had indulged – the Committee noted reprovingly – as though Eduard were ‘a fellow-subject or a neutral’.47 The fact that Eduard was his brother-in-law, that Lucie was his own sister, did not strike Mr Justice Salter as mitigating circumstances. Sir John Simon again pleaded that, after all, the Aliens Act ‘does not say that a man is to lose his British nationality because he tries to get past the Censor’.48 Mr Justice Salter was adamant:
This correspondence is plainly unlawful communication with the subject of an enemy State during the war. It was in breach of Sir Edgar Speyer’s oath as a Privy Councillor and in flagrant and habitual violation of his personal undertaking. In our opinion, such a correspondence would have been impossible to any loyal British subject.49
In one particular the Committee appeared willing to make allowances. Several of Edgar’s communications to Eduard took the form of requests to make small payments to distressed friends in Germany and Austria. Dr Weiss was a Karlsbad masseur who had ministered to Edgar before the war. ‘I was in poor health’, Edgar explained, ‘and this man restored me to health... I felt that I could not let a poor man to whom I owed so much, starve’. Hugo Becker, cellist, composer and professor of music at Berlin, had been a close friend of Edgar since their schooldays. ‘The idea’, said Edgar, ‘that one of my oldest friends should be in want was very painful to me’. Becker’s sister-in-law, an artist named Tilly Struth, ‘also a very old friend of mine’, was in a similar plight and ‘not in very good health’.50 In Vienna another friend, a Frau Hossner, was destitute. Before charges were brought in relation to these persons, Sir Basil Thomson of Special Branch had been asked to verify through the German police that Dr Weiss, Professor Becker, Frau Struth and Frau Hossner really existed and were not code-names.
These friends had confidently deposited their savings with Speyer Bros before the war, with no suspicion that they might one day be at risk. War once declared, Edgar scrupulously reported these holdings, as he was obliged to do, to the Custodian of Enemy Property, and they were duly sequestrated. Finding themselves suffering real hardship, the friends appealed to Eduard in Frankfurt for advances against what were after all their own funds. Eduard had raised the matter with Edgar, who approved the advances. Edgar conceded that his action was unlawful, and the Committee agreed that ‘if the matter stood alone, we should attach no great importance to it’.51 In the circumstances, however, Edgar’s acts of friendship were counted against him as part of his record of illicit communication with the enemy.