CHAPTER VI
Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust.
‘Two souls, alas, dwell within my breast’ Goethe, Faust
What was the tenor of Edgar’s social life in the United States? Who were his wartime associates? For these too fell to be scrutinised by the Committee. A disproportionate amount of time, based on evidence supplied by the American intelligence services, was devoted to the consideration of two charges which in the end were dismissed as nugatory. First, a temporary loan by Edgar of $5,000 to a would-be purchaser of the Boston Journal, who had latched onto Edgar while he was holidaying in Maine in April 1917. Much energy was expended at the hearing to discussing articles in the Boston Journal said by the Crown to be suspect because of a contributing reporter, thought to be anti-British. There was nothing in the charge. The Committee concluded that Edgar had advanced the loan out of ‘good nature’1 to a professional scrounger.
Then there was Edgar’s association with one John Koren, one of his Boston acquaintances, treasurer of the St Botolph Club, a professor of statistics appointed by President Wilson to represent America on the International Prisons Commission. In 1916 Edgar contributed another $5,000 in order to subsidise a European factfinding mission by Koren, which included a visit to Germany, though not to England. From the Crown’s point of view there were some suspicious circumstances to the trip, including a social call by Koren on Edgar’s sister in Berlin and his cousin, Arthur von Gwinner. The main purpose of the trip was to ascertain how far there was support for the setting up of a neutral commission after the war to investigate its causes, a project of which Edgar approved. After exhaustive examination, the Committee concluded that it would be unsafe to draw ‘any inference of disloyalty or disaffection’2 from these facts.
A friendship to which the Crown attached far more significance was that which Edgar formed with the celebrated German conductor Karl Muck, whom Edgar described with justice as ‘one of the greatest conductors in the world’.3 Appointed director of the Berlin State Opera by the Kaiser before the war and celebrated for his renderings of Wagner – his gramophone recordings are still prized – Muck had conducted regularly at Bayreuth. At the time of the Speyers’ arrival in America in 1915, he had been conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for three years. Not only was the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in Edgar’s words, ‘the finest orchestra in the United States’, but ‘there was nobody in the United States who, in the musical world, was more highly regarded than Dr Muck’.4
Edgar came to know Muck soon after he settled in Boston, as he could hardly have failed to do. As he said, ‘everyone knew Dr Muck in Boston’.5 Leonora herself had made her concert d.but with the Boston Symphony Orchestra at the age of 18 and had made Muck’s acquaintance later in London when he conducted at Covent Garden. Austere and somewhat humourless, Muck was ‘a highly cultivated man’, Edgar told the Committee, a classical scholar who ‘read Greek and Latin in his leisure time’.6 The Speyers and Dr and Frau Muck struck up a friendship. They went for drives together and regularly received one another. They enjoyed discussing music and they enjoyed performing it. There were concert-parties, at which Leonora played to Muck’s accompaniment. What could be more natural than their association? But at a time of growing tension between America and Germany it was almost bound to give rise to suspicion, especially since, as Edgar agreed, ‘we always spoke German’.7
What were Dr Muck’s sympathies in the war?’ Edgar was asked by Roskill.
‘They were undoubtedly pro-German’, he replied.
‘You knew that?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘Was there any other reason than your interest in music that made you associate with that man?’
‘None whatsoever’.
They had tacitly agreed to avoid the subject of the war. Edgar explained:
When we first met, naturally the war cropped up once or twice; but I made it clear to him, and I will say this for him, that he was not keen on discussing it with me and we did not discuss it.8
‘One of the greatest conductors in the world’. Edgar Speyer
Sir John Simon sought clarification. ‘What did you make clear to him?’ he asked.
Edgar explained that they had disagreed about submarine warfare. Muck held it to be a legitimate reaction to the British blockade and the interception of merchant ships by the Royal Navy. ‘I pointed out to him that this was not the case, that one was taking life and the other was simply interference with trade, and he then said, “Here speaks the Englishman”’. In any case, said Edgar, Muck preferred ‘to talk about music and art. He wanted to get away from’9 the subject of the war.
Off the coast of Maine lies the fashionable island townlet of Bar Harbor. Set among wooded mountains, it was the holiday resort of several well-known American families – an American equivalent of Overstrand – and it was here that Edgar and Leonora came annually for the summer. Bar Harbor was also a focus of musical life, ‘a kind of Mecca’, said Edgar, ‘where everybody went to hear music ... a unique gathering of eminent musicians’, 10 which included Kreisler and Paderewski. It boasted a splendid neo-classical concert hall, prominently situated on a pine-clad hillside. In 1917 Edgar had taken for the summer the modestly named Birnam Cottage, in fact a large Italian-style mansion. Other participants in the annual musical pilgrimage to Bar Harbor rented accommodation five miles away at another picturesque locality, Seal Harbor.
In June 1917 Karl Muck was thinking of renting a cottage at Seal Harbor. America and Germany had been at war for three months. Muck had not been interned, for technically he was a citizen of Switzerland, but the letting-agent hesitated to let to a foreigner who made no secret of his pro-German convictions. At this point Edgar and Leonora intervened. They were keen to secure Muck as a near neighbour for the season. ‘We were very anxious that Dr Muck should join the musical coterie there’, Edgar told the Committee. ‘His being there made a tremendous difference to the life of the neighbourhood’.11 They determined to bring their influence to bear. They drove to Seal Harbor and descended on the estate agent. They assured him that Dr Muck was Swiss, not German. Eventually the deal was clinched. Edgar invited the Mucks over to Bar Harbor for a celebratory dinner at Birnham Cottage. The Boston Sunday Globe described them as ‘guests of honour’12 at the Speyers’. The Crown sought to throw suspicion on Edgar’s role in this episode, but Sir John Simon submitted:
If it be a reproach that a man who is a British subject and who is interested in music should want to have one of the great musicians near him during the summer in the musical circle, so be it.13
With America at war, Bar Harbor was rife with the kind of rumours that had shrouded Overstrand in 1914. Dr Muck’s cottage was said to conceal traces of a radio transmitter, in fact parts of a wireless installed by a former tenant, a radio-ham. Intelligence agents kept watch on the Speyers and the Mucks. They reported small-town rumours of signalling to ships at sea from the island’s mountain-tops, of boats putting out from the shore to rendezvous with German submarines and the handing over of papers.
In the autumn of 1917 the name of Karl Muck suddenly achieved nation-wide notoriety in the United States. It was widely but falsely reported that he had refused to conduct ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at a public concert in Providence, Rhode Island. He had in fact been instructed not to perform it; but the story, scooped by the Providence Daily Journal, was syndicated from coast to coast, and publication of Muck’s opinions in a subsequent interview with that paper did nothing to give the lie to it. Like Robert Newman in 1914, Muck boldly defended the universality of music. ‘Art is a thing by itself’, he declared, ‘and not related to any particular nation or group’. So far so good; but it would have been wiser had he not added, referring to what was now the American national anthem: ‘It would be a gross mistake, a violation of artistic taste and principles’ for the Boston Symphony Orchestra ‘to play patriotic airs’. He concluded, according to the Providence Daily Journal: ‘To ask us to play “The Star-Spangled Banner” is embarrassing. It is almost impertinent... The public has no right to demand it.’14
Worse was to come. It turned out that Muck was conducting a torrid extra-marital intrigue. A safe deposit box containing a cache of his love-letters was broken into by the authorities, and these billets-doux revealed as much his devotion to the German cause as to his inamorata. He defended unreservedly the sinking of the Lusitania. He wrote in contemptuous and abusive terms of America and its leaders, including the President, of his scorn for the tuxedoed and bejewelled society audiences before whom he performed and of a day of reckoning for the United States. He was known to be in regular contact with the German consul in Boston and the ambassador, Count Bernstorff. He was thought to have links with German agents. He was suspected of complicity in plots to sabotage American railways and factories. No charges were ever brought against him but in April 1918 he was interned in a camp for enemy aliens and subsequently deported.
Edgar denied any previous knowledge of Muck’s alleged pro-German activities. When he learned of them, he professed himself ‘absolutely dumbfounded’.
MR ROSKILL: Did he ever make the slightest, even tentative, approach to you in the matter of any pro-German act of his?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Never.15
Sir John Simon strove once more to convey sympathetically to the Committee the character of Edgar’s relationship with Muck from his client’s perspective:
He was in retreat. He endeavoured to get such comfort and consolation as he could from what is the great artistic passion of his life, music. He found himself in the association of a number of musicians and undoubtedly was a good deal in their company.
Sir John emphatically repudiated ‘the suggestion that the communications which he was holding and the friendships he was making were communications and were friendships which could possibly be regarded as indicative of disloyalty or treachery’.16
There was no evidence that Edgar knew Muck to be suspected of being a German agent, and this the Committee accepted; but he knew that Muck was an outspoken pro-German, and that, for the Crown, was enough. On these grounds the Solicitor-General, Sir Ernest Pollock, submitted that he ‘can have done this country no good by that association’.17 As a British subject in the United States, let alone a baronet and Privy Councillor, it behoved him to be especially scrupulous as to how his conduct might appear in American eyes. The Solicitor- General instanced the reaction of the Providence Daily Journal, which he put in evidence. ‘Dr Muck’, this newspaper informed its readers when breaking the story of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’, ‘has been one of the active heads of German propaganda in Boston, and the constant companion of Sir Edgar Speyer’.18 On the basis of such evidence, Pollock invited the Committee to conclude that Edgar had shown himself ‘disaffected and disloyal’ as charged under the Aliens Act:
He may have been fond of Karl Muck’s music and musical genius; but in looking at what Sir Edgar Speyer has done, and what it was his duty to do, I say we have proved fully that he has associated himself with a man who was of German interest and German sympathies and in doing that, he committed a breach of the duty which is laid upon him and referred to in the Act.19
The Committee agreed, and condemned Edgar outright and categorically:
We think that this frequent and friendly intercourse with an avowed enemy of his country would have been repugnant to any loyal subject... We think that he should have known – he should have felt – that his open and friendly intimacy with a well known enemy of his country could not fail to be prejudicial to the British cause in the United States.20
Of all the charges levelled against Edgar one of the most damning arose from a letter to him from Eduard. The letter was discovered when a neutral vessel bound for America was stopped by the Royal Navy and the mail searched. The letter, dated 26 January 1916, was in response to a request from Edgar in which he asked Eduard to make certain enquiries of Arthur von Gwinner. Gwinner, who was Edgar’s cousin by marriage, was a man of great consequence in Germany, a leading Berlin financier and a director of Germany’s leading bank, the Deutsche Bank, with which Speyer Bros had done business before the war. Gwinner had been instrumental in financing the Berlin-Baghdad railway, for which the Kaiser had ennobled him and raised him to the Prussian Upper House. It appeared from Eduard’s letter that Edgar contemplated settling in Germany in the event of a German victory and had sought Gwinner’s advice as to a position in finance in Berlin. In a further letter to Edgar in March, Eduard confirmed that he had asked Gwinner what Edgar ‘could do in Berlin if he came back after the war’.21
This was undeniably evidence of the most damaging character. When the Crown put it to him that in seeking Gwinner’s advice ‘you could not have got, if you had desired it, a more competent person upon the question of what would be your financial prospects in Berlin’,22 Edgar could not but agree. He denied, however, the imputation placed upon the correspondence. He agreed that Eduard had interpreted his intention in the same way as had the Crown, but he maintained that this was a complete misunderstanding of his true intention. At a time of depression, in virtual exile in America, he had indeed sought Gwinner’s advice. His enquiries had been aimed, however, not at the possibility of taking up a position in Berlin, but of settling in the Tyrol or Italy, where, he said, he aspired to a life of retirement given over to literary pursuits.
This certainly seemed a tall story. ‘What on earth was the value of Mr von Gwinner’s advice as to whether you could settle down in Italy?’ the Crown asked sceptically. ‘To me of very great value’,23 replied Edgar. ‘Gwinner’, he explained, ‘is a man who, in addition to being a very prominent man of business, is keenly interested in art and literature’.24 He had sought Gwinner’s advice, he said, not as a ‘man of business’ but as a relative and close friend who shared his artistic and aesthetic interests, a man of wide erudition and cultivated tastes. Was this, as the Committee found, partly from Speyer’s ‘own demeanour as a witness’,25 pure fantasy? Or could he have meant it? Certainly Edgar had a taste for versification. Several of his letters to Eduard included copies of his poems. As for Gwinner, he was known to be a man of unusually broad culture who quoted Shakespeare and Moli.re as readily as Goethe.
The Committee rejected Edgar’s explanation and found that his intentions were as alleged. It is difficult to fault their conclusion. Edgar’s original letter to Eduard was never produced. After the trial, Edgar submitted another letter, claiming that it was the original even though it was dated five months before Eduard’s; Mr Justice Salter considered this proposition ‘quite absurd’26 and dismissed the evidence of the letter as utterly implausible.
The inherent unlikelihood of Edgar’s explanation was brought out by a further piece of evidence. In the same envelope as Eduard’s original letter was a second letter, from Eduard’s wife, Lucie, Edgar’s sister. This letter, also dated January 1916, was written at a time when the Central Powers were masters of the Balkans. The Allies had just abandoned the Dardanelles. Serbia lay crushed beneath the heel of the Austro-German and Bulgarian forces. Her defeated army was in full retreat. The Bulgarians had captured the strategic town of Nish, which brought the Berlin to Constantinople section of the Berlin-Baghdad railway under complete German control. Lucie’s letter contained a cutting from a German newspaper, marked ‘for Edgar’, reporting a triumphant speech from Nish by the Kaiser after reviewing Bulgarian troops.
Lucie’s letter was itself exultant. ‘Our military situation,’ she wrote, is ‘excellent and wonderful’.27 When the Allies evacuated Gallipoli, she and Eduard had had the house festooned with bunting. The Crown argued that Lucie would never have written to Edgar in such terms had she not felt certain that he would welcome it. It was consistent, as the Attorney-General put it to Edgar, with the belief on her part that ‘camouflage apart, you were really a devoted German and ardently desired the success of the German arms and the defeat and humiliation, if it might be, of England’.28
Would Eduard, the Attorney-General asked, have entertained even the possibility of Edgar’s settling in Berlin after the war, ‘if Eduard really thought that Sir Edgar was a patriotic Englishman’?29 The conclusion seems irresistible: not only had Edgar contemplated the possibility of a German victory – he could not be blamed for that — but he had also thought about what his own position would be in that eventually, and had put out feelers in Berlin. On these grounds the Committee found that
Sir Edgar Speyer had ceased to entertain any feeling of loyalty to His Majesty or affection for this country, and that he desired (at least in the event of a German victory) to substitute for his British citizenship a German allegiance and association.30
It was not an unreasonable conclusion. Perhaps it was the only tenable one. A British subject cannot entertain a contingent loyalty, an allegiance which shifts with the fortunes of war. He is either for or against his adoptive country. Allegiance is a state of mind and heart, and as such is as much a fact as any other, equally susceptible of forensic determination.
And yet, precisely in Edgar’s case, the Committee’s verdict, even if legally correct, may not have been the whole picture. A man in Edgar’s situation might well, as a matter of fact, entertain dual or divided loyalties. It was natural, it was inevitable for him to speculate on what would become of him if Germany won. He had, at that time, no desire to remain indefinitely in America. America had been a temporary place of refuge, not his permanent residence, nor even, as will be seen, except in a strictly legal sense, his domicile of choice. In his mind, England, however ill she had requited him, remained his homeland; but was it conceivable that he, Leonora and the children could resume life in an England defeated and perhaps occupied by the Germans? What future could there be for him, returning, as would inevitably be said, on the heels of a victorious German army? All that he had endured before would be as nothing compared to what he would inevitably encounter in those circumstances. Yet how serious and above all how lasting was the intention he formed to settle in Germany? Was it a fixed and settled intention or had it gone any further than an enquiry? If his intention was serious, it was not enduring, to judge by what he said and did later.
Whatever weight should be given to the rest of the evidence against Edgar, much, in retrospect, hangs on the letters from Eduard and Lucie. They may be said to be the pivot of the whole case. Was it so certain that, as the Committee held, he ‘had ceased to entertain any... affection for this country’? Other facts speak in his favour: the pro-British sentiments he expressed to Muck, the good deeds which, as will be seen, he continued to perform for British friends in 1917 and the greater part of 1918, when Britain’s prospects of survival were bleak. Above all, the Committee’s finding was wholly inconsistent with his repeated efforts to obtain permission to return to England in the spring of 1918.
‘The real question’, said Sir John Simon, in his final submission to the Committee, ‘is a question of motive’.31
The important thing at each stage is to say: What light does this really throw on the final issue? Is there something which is anti-British, pro-German, something which, if not actually treacherous, at any rate is warmly resentful of the whole British cause and warmly adhering to the enemy? That is the real thing.32
Sir John pleaded for leniency for Edgar: ‘Whatever his shortcomings may be, I submit that he ought not to receive the fearful condemnation which an adverse decision in a report of your Committee would involve.’33
The last word, however, was with the Crown. Proceedings ended on 7 November 1921 after almost 11 days of testimony and argument. Judgment was delivered in the form of a Report submitted by the Committee to the Home Secretary on 28 November and published as a parliamentary White Paper on 6 January 1922.
Of the nine formal charges laid against Edgar, three were dismissed and one was upheld with mitigating factors. But the Committee concluded, with ‘no doubt whatever’:
(1) That Sir Edgar Speyer has shown himself by act and speech disaffected and disloyal to His Majesty;
(2) That Sir Edgar Speyer, during a war in which His Majesty was engaged, unlawfully communicated with subjects of an enemy state and associated with business, which was to his knowledge carried on in such manner as to assist the enemy in such war.34
Edgar returned to America immediately after the hearings, apparently confident that he would be vindicated. On learning the result, he asked for a re-hearing, mainly on the grounds that some at least of the Committee’s conclusions were unsupported by the evidence. He sought leave to introduce further evidence in rebuttal. He would call Eduard and James to testify in his favour.
Inevitably the request was refused. Mr Justice Salter pointed out, not unreasonably, that Edgar could at any time have called further witnesses. If necessary an adjournment would have been granted. He had chosen not to. Even if Eduard and James had testified, Mr Justice Salter observed crushingly to the Home Secretary, ‘the conviction which I formed during the hearing would not have been altered’.35 The case was closed, and, the Home Office confirmed, ‘cannot be reopened’.36 ‘Autolycus’ in The Sunday Times made sneering reference to Edgar’s ‘bombarding the authorities... for rescission of the verdict’, and a Cabinet Minister, Sir Robert Horne, made a classical witticism at his expense: dum spiro, spero.* 37
In a letter of protest, released to the press, Edgar challenged the authorities to publish the full evidence on which the findings were based. He defied ‘any fairminded man’38 to justify them. The challenge might sound heroic: but in fact the Home Office, after some debate, agreed that he was free, if he wished, to publish the documents himself. The authorities doubted that many would be tempted to scrutinise the voluminous mass of papers or that, if they did, it would convince them that the verdict was wrong.
Was Edgar fairly tried and were the charges against him brought home? Sir John Simon went to the heart of the matter when he invited the Committee to reject the contention that ‘in no genuine sense was he other than his country’s enemy and his country’s enemy’s friend. That is the real question’.39
A brief retrospect may be permissible to assist the reader to decide that question for himself or herself. From this retrospect two charges are omitted which have been shown to be unfounded but to which the Committee attached great importance: Edgar’s alleged delay in resigning from Speyer & Co and his alleged drawing of profits from the company. Leaving these aside, let it be allowed, for the sake of argument, that the Committee’s principal findings of fact were justified. What did they add up to? In sum, they amount to this:
(1) that Speyer Bros, like other British banks in the first year of the war, had dealt in a number of currency transactions, a by-product of which, to Edgar’s knowledge, accrued to Germany’s benefit;
(2) that Edgar had repeatedly and openly evaded the censorship despite a personal undertaking not to do so;
(3) that he had associated openly in America with Karl Muck, a known pro-German;
(4) that he had maintained a correspondence on business as well as family matters with ‘the enemy’ in the person of his brother-in-law; and
(5) that he had at one point formed the intention to settle in Germany if Germany won the war.
How far can these findings, singly or in aggregate, be said to justify the Committee’s conclusions of disaffection and disloyalty?
The temptation should be guarded against of transposing today’s standards on those of a century ago. After so terrible a war, narrowly won and at such cost, anti- German feeling remained understandably high. Yet the peaks of hysteria had passed. The war had ended three years before. The autumn of 1921 was not May 1915 when, as Kipling wrote, the English began to hate; or the summer of 1918, when that hate became an epidemic. Moreover, the Committee was a court of law. Whatever animosities might continue to rage outside, its function was to act judicially.
The Committee’s proceedings partook of both enquiry and trial. It was inquisitorial and accusatorial. This enabled and indeed obliged the chairman to intervene more often and more actively than in a conventional trial. Mr Justice Salter’s interventions were persistent, pertinent, and penetrating, and they were invariably on the side of the Crown. The impression of his attitude throughout is of hostility. Judge Ratcliffe and Lord Hambledon sat mute: they were book-ends. It is not to impugn the integrity of Edgar’s judges to observe that a different tribunal, or, to be frank, a different chairman, with a different scale of values, might have reached a different verdict. Nor is it irrelevant to note that all three members of the Committee were Conservatives, and that until his appointment to the Bench in 1917, Mr Justice Salter had for 20 years been MP for the Basingstoke division of Hampshire.
The Committee’s final conclusion, which flowed from their other findings, was that the continuance of Edgar’s certificate of naturalisation was ‘not conducive to the public good’. ‘On this point’, said their Report, ‘we can feel no doubt’.40 Invited to reconsider the Committee’s findings when Edgar submitted further evidence, Mr Justic Salter informed the Home Secretary: ‘So far as I am concerned, I do not desire to alter a word in the Report.’41
‘Not conducive to the public good’ – the expression dates back several centuries – was the formulaic test laid down in the Aliens Act, 1918. To this day it remains the test in deciding whether or not an alien should be deported. Under the Aliens Act of 1918 the test was additional to, not merely, as the Committee held, consequent on, the findings of fact: it was required to be demonstrated that ‘in any case [my emphasis – AL] the continuance of the certificate [of naturalisation] is not conducive to the public good’. Did the Committee’s findings, assuming them to be more or less correct, justify or lead of necessity to the conclusion reached? Was this really an exercise of judicial discretion or was the decision in essence political? Here it seems fair to question the Committee’s judgment. That Edgar had not lived up to the high honour of a Privy Councillor may be admitted; but the question – at least the question before the Committee – was not whether his conduct made him unfit to remain a Privy Councillor but whether it warranted his disenfranchisement as a British citizen. Proof of his pre-war munificence and numerous acts of generosity during and after the war was presented in court – his lawyers made sure of that, even against Edgar’s own inclination. The Crown played down such evidence. Generosity in a wealthy man might be taken for granted, said the Attorney-General, adding: ‘We are not concerned in this case with the musical or charitable gifts of Sir Edgar Speyer, but with his conduct, and with his real sympathy.’42 But were not ‘musical or charitable gifts’ valid examples of his ‘conduct’ and relevant evidence of ‘his real sympathy’?
Mr Justice Salter confirmed that generosity was largely irrelevant. Perhaps he was right in the sense that the Committee’s task was to establish the truth of the facts alleged by the Crown and to report on them; but was it not also its duty, in determining whether the continuance of Edgar’s certificate of naturalisation was ‘conducive to the public good’, to consider and evaluate his record as a whole and decide whether as a whole it amounted to disloyalty?
Consider this portion of Roskill’s examination-inchief, aimed at eliciting from a patently reluctant Edgar details of his assistance to Englishmen and women during the war:
MR ROSKILL: Again, in defiance of your own wishes, I must ask you... First of all Mrs C, who had a son fighting for this country–
SIR EDGAR SPEYER (to Mr Justice Salter): My Lord, is it necessary that the name should be handed in? I only want to protect my friends, that is all.
MR JUSTICE SALTER: It is quite right that these things should be mentioned, not because generosity is of any materiality at all, but helping British subjects might be useful.
MR ROSKILL: Who is Mrs C, you know whom I mean?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
MR ROSKILL: Is she a lady whose son was fighting in the British Army?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
MR ROSKILL: Was she the widow of one of your oldest friends here?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: She is.
MR ROSKILL: A very well known English gentleman and hunting man?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
MR ROSKILL: Did you take over her securities for a sum of over £6,000?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: I did.
MR ROSKILL: At a time when they showed a depreciation of 80 per cent, which they still show?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes...
MR ROSKILL: The Queen’s Hall Orchestra Endowment Fund had suffered severe losses in its investment?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: It had.
MR ROSKILL: Was that a Fund to provide the members of the orchestra with pensions?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: It was to provide payment when they left. It was not exactly a pension fund. It was not big enough for that.
MR ROSKILL: Did you pay the Fund £2,500 in order to take over from them depreciated securities worth £1,900?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: If it is stated so.
MR ROSKILL: Were these particulars got out by Mr Greene, your secretary?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
MR ROSKILL: The fund, I believe, was originated by a payment from you of £500, and you gave an annual subscription of £100 to it?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: I suppose so, if it is stated there.
MR ROSKILL: You have had in your firm for many years an Employees’ Benevolent and Pensions Fund, which was also invested in securities?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
MR ROSKILL: Did you make up the depreciation in those securities in the month of June, 1920, by a gift of £10,000?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: I did.
MR ROSKILL: To enable the distributions to be increased?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
MR ROSKILL: I come now to D, an English lady whose depreciated securities were £460, taken over by you in September 1919 for a payment of £600.
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: I daresay. I really do not remember these things.
MR ROSKILL: You have had these extracted?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes. I am sure they are all correct.
MR ROSKILL: Extracted at your Solicitor’s request and at your Counsel’s insistence?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
MR ROSKILL: Then Mr X. Is Mr X a friend in bad circumstances, and did you help him by giving him £1,000 a year from 1914 to 1919 to enable him to keep up his insurance policy?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: I did.
MR ROSKILL: ... Without going through them in detail, did you give over the whole of the war years some 16 friends in this country an average of £250 a year to recoup them for loss of interest on falling investments?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: If my Secretary says that, I must have done that.
MR ROSKILL: Your chef was killed in the war?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: And I sent his widow something.
MR ROSKILL: You sent his widow 3,000 francs?
SIR EDGAR SPEYER: Yes.
Giveen interjected for the Crown: ‘Are all these after the war?’ Roskill replied: ‘Yes, they are all after the war’. Mr Justice Salter intervened to clarify: ‘You mean after the beginning of the war?’, to which Roskill assented, but Salter observed: ‘Some were after the end of the war’, to which Roskill replied: ‘Yes, but none of them before the war’.43
All this was to no avail. The reader who has had the patience to follow these interchanges cannot fail to have noted the extent of Edgar’s generosity to British citizens during the war. He might be thought to have done his ‘bit’, but Mr Justice Salter’s comments, brief but suggestive, confirm that they had no influence with him. As for Edgar’s more than 20 years of good works before the war, far from being weighed in the balance, they too counted for nothing. The Committee’s Report dismissed them in a single sentence.
It is true that the Committee was bound by its own precedents. In 15 other cases referred to it by the Home Office 15 naturalised aliens had their citizenship revoked. The Committee stressed that it must measure Edgar’s case against verdicts passed on smaller fry and not treat with any less severity ‘the case of a man in high position, who is not only a subject but a servant of His Majesty’.44 Those other cases too were heard in camera. Their particulars were not divulged and comparisons are not possible.
Under Section 7 of the Aliens Act, the Committee’s decision took the form of a report to the Home Secretary, Edward Shortt, to whom responsibility for the final issue now passed. Sir John Pedder, the influential Home Office lawyer with special responsibility for aliens, was not slow to proffer his opinion. He advised Shortt that revocation of Edgar’s citizenship was ‘almost automatic’. The Home Secretary, wrote Pedder, had ‘practically no choice. He must revoke if satisfied as to disloyalty, and he could not, except for very strong reasons and with great difficulty, fail to be so satisfied... On this report’, he concluded, ‘the certificate must be revoked’.45
This was begging the question. The Committee had confined itself strictly to the allegations presented to it. It had signally, almost ostentatiously, failed to take any account of Edgar’s long record of public and charitable munificence. It was open to Shortt – one is tempted to say it was his duty – to call for evidence of that record and to review the case as a whole before determining that for Edgar to retain British nationality was ‘not conducive to the public good’. Shortt was not obliged, as Pedder urged, to rubber-stamp the Committee’s recommendation. On the contrary, he was bound, in the exercise of his discretion, to form an independent judgment, to make up his own mind. This is clear from the debate in Parliament on the Aliens Act. Rejecting a proposed amendment that would have allowed for appeal to the High Court, the previous Home Secretary, Sir George Cave, had pointed out that under the Act the procedure was two-tiered and contained its own built-in safeguard by way of what was in effect an automatic appeal to the Home Secretary from the Committee’s findings. He stressed that the final decision lay with the Home Secretary and that: ‘The act is the act of the Secretary of State, and not of the Committee.’46
The Committee’s Report was forwarded to the Home Office on 28 November 1921.47 On 30 November Pedder drafted his advice for Shortt’s consideration. Shortt was a Liberal and a lawyer. Until lately he had held judicial office as a recorder. As Home Secretary he was said to be ‘somewhat indolent in the routine work of the office and in detail’.48 Be that as it may, on 1 December he signed an order under the Aliens Act directing that Edgar cease to be a British national. The order reproduced verbatim the conclusions of the Committee, by which Shortt pronounced himself ‘satisfied’.49 The order was of immediate effect. Edgar’s comment was brief and bitter: ‘the Home Secretary simply dared not give me the vindication to which I was entitled.’50
The Committee’s report said nothing about Leonora or the children. Nor could it have done. Against them, of course, no charges had ever been brought. No shred of evidence, at least against the children, could be offered. The Aliens Act left that decision too in the hands of the Home Secretary. Since Leonora was American-born and had acquired British nationality only by marriage, there was no difficulty about including her in the revocation order. ‘It is the general practice’, Pedder confirmed, ‘when a certificate is revoked, to deprive the wife also if possible of British nationality, so as to avoid her being of a different nationality from that of her husband’.51 Few tears were shed for Leonora, for she was thought to have courted the stigma by her unconcealed contempt for English attitudes; and had the Home Secretary not revoked her nationality, loyalty to Edgar would no doubt have impelled her to repudiate it anyway.
Leonora’s fate having been decided, the question was whether the sins of the father, if sins they were, should be visited on his three teenage daughters. Some qualms were expressed. All three were true-born British subjects. Their right to British citizenship was indefeasible at Common Law. The usual practice in such cases was to spare the children, ‘unless’, as Pedder wrote, ‘in special cases it is desirable to eradicate the British nationality of the whole family’. Pedder evidently thought it was desirable. He noted that under the Act ‘the whole family may be ousted at once’.52 His colleague, Oscar Dowson, assistant legal adviser to the Home Office, disagreed. In the absence of compelling reasons, it was, he remonstrated, ‘at least unsatisfactory’ to deprive them of it by the use of statutory powers. ‘On the whole’, he concluded, ‘I am inclined to think they should not be included in the Order for revocation’.53
The Home Secretary, on Pedder’s advice, decided otherwise. Pedder, while professing to share Dowson’s ‘great reluctance’ to deprive the children of their nationality ‘by means of naturalisation machinery’, concluded: ‘I think it ought to be done here and I think it is in the best interests of the daughters’, since otherwise ‘they remain fixed willy nilly with British nationality while their parents are deprived of it.’ Pedder felt that ‘the whole family would prefer to be cast out together’.54 The supposition was reasonable. The metaphor, suggestive of scapegoats, was apt.