Agent of Peace (20 page)

Tuesday, July 11th
In the morning to UDC office where I met C.R. Buxton, Chas Trevelyan, E.D. Morel, J.A. Hobson, F. Pethick Lawrence, Ramsey Macdonald, Arthur Ponsonby and Mrs Swanwick. Tried to give them a sketch of Belgium and Germany and interview with von Jagow. Utterly failed to do this either with coherence, clearness or point. Realized how mentally exhausted I was and the dreadful straight-up chairs of an office tire my heart and wholly empty my brain. Made a mess of it in fact. Mrs S. left in the middle, and recollecting that she had told her Committee contrary to the promise made me, I was obliged to ask her as she left the room to keep private what she had heard. As her reply did not satisfy me I felt obliged to write to her and explain my reason for underlining this caution and after some time a stiff apology was sent. Went away feeling I had lost a great opportunity for interesting these men. At 3 p.m. Lord Loreburn came to see me. He seemed very old and shaky with a twitching head and neck – his large blue eyes still round and candid like a child’s. I found him loquacious but difficult to talk to. Lord C. has warned me of this. He talked so much that I could not put in a word edgeways. He seemed so full of his own small experiences at his home near Deal [in Kent, south-east England] which he seemed to think in the war zone! Said he and his wife stayed there to give courage to the peasantry. Continual guns of aeroplanes of both sides. Affected his dog. Very pessimistic about the future – believed universal revolution must come at the close of the war. Said government ought to negotiate and he had said so publicly and his opinions were well known but it was useless to keep nagging. Counseled me to write down all I wished to convey to Grey – in any case to write down all that von Jagow said, not what I said – and keep it – and if I desired he would hand it to Grey and see he had it. I asked him about Lord Northcliffe and if it would be well to tell him and enlist his aid. He doubted its utility but said he believed Northcliffe to be an honest man! The talk on the whole, though with points full of interest, disappointed me. Later, Mrs Buxton came to hear as much foreign news as I could give her and I delivered Elisabeth Rotten’s message. Afterwards, other callers …

Wednesday, July 12th
Busy getting my pictures framed. Saw Mr Massingham at the Nation office and had a long talk with him over Ruhleben Camp – found him very sympathetic and lamenting impossibility of finding the truth. He urged me to see Northcliffe and gave me a letter to him. In his next issue he was splendid. I was relieved he promised to modify public feeling about Camps and to support principles of exchange and total exchange. Wrote and wrote …
9

Once again Emily had been told to write in to Foreign Office. This time it was about the needs in Belgium:

12th July 1916

Dear Lord Robert Cecil,
10

I could have told you better than I can write but I will try to go straight to the point.

Can you, as Minister of Blockade, possibly arrange to let the Belgians have more food and let them have greater variety?

Three weeks ago I watched them being fed in Brussels and had a long talk with the Belgian who organized the Communal kitchen where they come for bread and soup. He spoke of the general enfeeblement of this section of the population which was showing itself in the development of tubercular trouble attacking the glands of the neck.

There were, he said, some 400 cases in Brussels and it was on the increase. These cases need super-alimentation, and to prevent a serious state of things all those being fed by the Comité National of Belgium need greater variety of food – such as more coffee, sugar, bacon and lard. Unfortunately the Belgians don’t seem very fond of rice but they should eat more or have something which can take its place.

These people are not of the class ordinarily destitute, but respectable people who are without work owing to the war. It is true that in Brussels and to some extent in the smaller towns the German authorities have instituted works of various kinds in order to give, as they do, employment to many hundreds of women and girls, and the material for these is supplied from Germany. It remains however a sad fact that the factories where these people would for the most part be earning their livelihood are closed for want of raw material.

Would you consider letting raw material for these factories pass in like manner as the foodstuffs of the American Commission under guarantees, as then the Belgians could re-adjust their lives? I believe only their glass factories can work for which the raw material is found in the country.

I venture to ask this help for those unfortunate people because I feel sure the guarantees given by the German authorities there are faithfully kept. No food brought in by England’s permission passes to Germany nor is it given to her occupying troops. I believe the head of the Political Department Baron von [der] Lancken and his colleagues Count Harrach (cousin of Lord Acton) and von Moltke to be men of the highest honour and I had to see a good deal of them.

The request I am making comes, however, from the Belgian of whom I spoke – and from my own observations in going about the country. If factory work were resumed, at least in part, it would help solve the food question as people could earn money to buy the food which the country itself produces.

I have etc. etc.

One official at the Foreign Office wrote:

This lady is a person with whom we must be very much on our guard. She acts as a German agent and there is a question of her being interned. In these circumstances I suggest that we should limit ourselves to saying politely that since we deal direct with the American Commission, her intervention is unnecessary.’
11

So the reply came as the same flat disinterested answer from the Foreign Office. It arrived on 22 July – in a curt note addressed to ‘Madam’. In fact in the Foreign Office, at the instigation of the American Commission, they had been willing to send raw materials to Belgium but said the Germans had turned down the scheme:
12

Thursday, July 13th
In the morning Emergency Camp Committee escorted thereto by Mr Rollo Russell. Astonished to find Thompson Elliot
*
of old Tokenbury days Chairman. Large number present and very sympathetic. Confined my remarks almost entirely to Ruhleben Camp and food in Germany. After lunch Prof. Battin
**
came to see me and we had a delightful talk. He brought from Holland Aletta Jacob’s message – she not having fully understood the letter I had written her from Berne. I explained. Lady Lyall was to have come but did not. We agreed to meet again.

Mr Morel came about 4 p.m. and we talked about his book being now issued and he promised me a copy. He looked tired and over-worked. He asked more details that I had given at the UDC and urged also that I should write all down. Then followed Chrystal MacMillan who was very friendly and ere she left May Ellis full of sympathy as usual. Both longing to know about my talk with von Jagow in Germany, but characteristically Chrystal asked and May did not.

Friday July 14th
I kept quiet in the morning preparing to talk to Lord Northcliffe at 3.30 p.m. Went to Blackfriars by bus – the old house very interesting early Georgian. As I could not do stairs, Lord Northcliffe came down very good-humouredly to see me in a long, quiet room. I sat in the window seat and he somewhat troubled by the light faced me, shading his eyes. He asked what I wanted. Then burst into a wild and unreasonable attack upon the Germans, their habits and their characters. Said he knew them well … I waited quietly till this outburst was over – it wasted some ten minutes of the interview and was like a nasty froth which had to be given off before he calmed down and became quite a sane, normal man. He scanned my face intently all the time but I never moved a muscle. I think it was partly done to try what position I should take. Nevertheless, I find it a habit in most of the belligerent countries, this necessity of working off their hatred and animosity after which they become human and normal.

When sane he seemed a commonplace, good-humoured man, capable, businesslike, with a broad, low forehead and no height to his rather boyish head – means well and quite unaware there are such things as ideals. Asked how I got to Germany – said he sent two men every week and had from the beginning of the war and received back two men every week. ‘Bribery,’ he said, ‘they are a people that will do anything for money.’ I thought the man who bribes is even worse than the man who accepted it but I said nothing – merely that I went openly.

I spoke of Ruhleben and at first he said what did it matter! only 3,500 men; why, that moment he had received a wire that this number had fallen today. I said, ‘Yes, but they are soldiers and go voluntarily. These are civilians trapped against their will. Those might lose life or limb, these were losing reason’. I told him of Lord Newton and the negotiations going on and the government’s fear of public opinion – First making that opinion by misguidance and wrong information and then when it was excited, saying they must be guided by it. I told him I was asking the Press to keep as quiet as possible about our civilians and to restrain and modify public opinion lest the public were excited and demanded reprisals and the government would give in.

He then went off at a tangent about the Govmt, running down all the Ministers – knew them all – wretched set of fellows – would go for all of them – muddled everything.

Here the Diary ends.

Lord Northcliffe wrote to Emily from
The Times
on 17 July
13
to say that he had gone ‘at once’ to the American Ambassador who told him that the Germans had refused ‘the very terms of exchange you mentioned to me’. As he, Northcliffe, was leaving for France the next day he said he was ‘reluctantly obliged to defer further help till he got back’. He had tried to telephone her. As an afterthought he suggested she contact General Booth of the Salvation Army, which she did.

*
      Lord Devonport who was to become Minister of Food Control, was the first Chairman of the Port of London Authority and founder of the International Stores.

**
    Mrs J.R. Green had helped Emily after the Anglo-Boer War in setting up Home Industries in South Africa.

*
      To Lord Newton’s credit he had done a complete change around. In May he had considered such action as hers ‘perfectly monstrous’.

**
    Both Sir Lewis Mallet and Sir Horace Rumbold were career diplomats. Horace Rumbold was later to replace Grant Duff as minister in Switzerland.

*
      Jowett was Chairman of the Independent Labour Party.

*
      Elliot lived not too far from the Hobhouses in Cornwall.

**
    Battin was an American professor, international organiser for the World Alliance for Promoting International Friendship through the Churches.

1
.    TNA FO372/894; Kaminski p. 304

2
.    Ibid., p. 314

3
.    Lord Newton diaries,

4
.    JHB collection

5
.    Ibid.

6
.    Kaminski p. 315; FO 372/894

7
.    JHB collection

8
.    TNA FO 372/894

9
.    Kaminski p. 315

10
.  JHB collection

11
.  Kaminski p. 316; FO382/1167

12
.  Ibid.

13
.  JHB collection

W
e do not know why Emily’s Diary ended abruptly on 14 July though on 16 July Emily went to see Lord Newton and will have told him about her interview with German Foreign Secretary Jagow. Lord Newton was much more sensible and amenable than the fossils who had been in the Foreign Office for years.

Newton’s letter of invitation to Emily was as follows:

6 Belgrave Square, SW

July 12 1916

Private

Dear Miss Hobhouse,
1

If it is any satisfaction to you, I shall be very happy to see you privately and unofficially as you suggest.

If it is not inconvenient to you, perhaps, if you happen to be in London you will call here on Sunday, at any time between 10.30 and 2.    

Believe me, Yours very truly  

Newton

What Lord Newton thought of the story of her German visit we do not know. But to have put his upper-class Belgrave Square home at Emily’s disposal, on a Sunday, his only day off, must have meant he had a sufficiently good opinion of her to make the effort. Lord Newton kept a diary but there is no indication about this meeting in it, nor what he did with the information. (From Emily’s notes we know the meeting took place at 10.45 a.m.) Newton was a trained diplomat and a good public servant, so he will have passed on the information, possibly at the same time cautioning Emily to silence. Perhaps as Emily could not tell the whole tale it seemed a little unbelievable.

However, Emily knew ‘how to cross her t’s’. The next day she wrote:

Dear Lord Newton
2

Thinking over our talk yesterday I rather fear one point may not have been clear.

The idea of a possible private meeting was not his but purely my own very commonplace (though I think commonsense) suggestion.

I should regret any misinterpretation about that – though I incline to think there would be no difficulty should occasion arise.

Yours very truly

E Hobhouse

In his diary, where his tiny writing is difficult to read, Lord Newton talked of the problems he was having over the camps. Ministers from the different departments attended the meetings, each with their own view which was not always relevant. It was interesting that a trickle of internees was returning from the camps all the time and each was interviewed:

July 10:
Heard from Gerard [US Ambassador in Germany]. Encloses very sharp note to German Govt on refusal to allow visits and also with ref to Ruhleben.

July 12:
Conference about prisoners in [?]Grey’s room. R. Cecil, Curzon, [?]Walter Long, [?]Thorp, [?]Belfield, Hall etc. Inconclusive as usual. Curzon and Long knowing nothing about it, want to mix up civilians and military cases which would lead to hopeless confusion. Hall, as usual, will not consent to anyone going. Says he has about 100 submarine men, whom he cannot part with.