Reporter in Fiction Week 3
WW1
Press accused of under-reporting the
scale of soldiers’ suffering
• Here for example, is an account of a gas attack during the Battle of
Ypres, spring 1915, as reported in The Times newspaper: ‘A Match
for German Chemicals: The wind however was strong and
dissipated the fumes quickly, our troops did not suffer seriously
from their noxious effects..’ Compare this to Wilfred Owen’s
account of a gas attack in his famous poem Dulce et Decorum est:
• ‘…someone was still yelling out and stumbling
• And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime…
• Dim through the misty panes and thick green light
• As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
• In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
• He plunges at me guttering, choking, drowning.’
• The Times May 3 1915
Soldiers’ letters home
• Max Plowman, to Janet Upcott, August 13 1916
• ‘I find there’s very little one can read out here. The newspapers on the war
are nauseating…whether the general censorship is to blame or not I don’t
know but it’s all unreal – the horror and the terror and the misery are all
‘written down’ or covered with sham heroics by cheap journalism…I’m not
grumbling – no doubt these things are unavoidable but they look foolish
from here and the armchair critic is made ridiculous. Truth has been sunk
so deeply down the well now one wonders how long it will take to draw
her up again…Of course only fools believe the newspapers – I mean
believe the Germans are cowards who won’t face bayonets – believe
soldiers enjoy this kind of war – believe each British soldier who’s killed
finds a beautifully tended grave and all the rest of the rot. One hates the
vacuum that’s created [by the absence of truth] and the journalistic
blather is like a grinning mask on the face of death.’
• (From letters of Max Plowman ed D L Plowman, Bridge Into the Future,
1944, Andrew Dakers Ltd)
• British Newspapers were readily available to soldiers in the
trenches – England was just a short boat ride across the
Channel so they were easily able to see how events on the
front were being reported. It is clear that soldiers and
junior officers felt betrayed by the lack of honest reporting
in the British press:
•
• ‘…as I opened a daily paper one morning and very
deliberately read a dispatch from ‘War Correspondent’s
Headquarters: ‘I have sat with some of the lads, fighting
battles over again, and discussing battles to be,’ wrote
some amiable man who had apparently mistaken the war
for a football match between England and Germany
(Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer)
‘Literature of Correction’
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Robert Graves’s poem ‘A Dead Boche’ shows he has had enough of idealised
images of the War:
To you who’d read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame…
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:
Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.’
Published in the collection Fairies and Fusiliers published by Heinemann
November 1917
Trenches newspapers mocked or
criticised the war correspondents
• The Wipers Times and the BEF Times. Beach Thomas,
for exampled was nicknamed ‘Teech Bomas’ and here
his style, describing tank movements is lampooned in
the BEF Times:
• How could one fear anything in the belly of a
perambulating peripatetic progolodymythorus…every
wag of our creature’s tail threw a bomb with deadly
precision and the mad, muddled murderers melted
• Kemmel Times: ‘Things we want to know: Whether the
London press are aware that there are a few British
troops on the Western Front???’
Jingoistic Propaganda
• In the first of his George Sherston trilogy,
Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man Sassoon recalls
some of the stories that abounded of German
atrocities: ‘The newspapers informed us that
German soldiers crucified Belgian babies.
Stories of that kind were taken for granted. To
have disbelieved them would have been
unpatriotic.’ Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man by
Siegfried Sassoon, 1928
Some Press ‘atrocity stories’
• ‘Baby Bayoneted…an infant callously dragged from its sick mother
and thrown from the window to bayonet point’ (Daily Express, 10
October, 1914: 4);
• ‘German Atrocities...One man whom I did not see told an official of
the Catholic Society that he had seen with his own eyes German
soldiery chop off the arms of a baby which clung to its mother’s
skirts,’ (Times, 28 August, 1914: 7);
• ‘Murdered priests – Germans’ appalling record…27 priests in the
Bishopric of Namur killed and 12 missing’ (Telegraph, 16 December
1914: 10);
• ‘The Germans and their Dead…There is a sickly smell in the air as if
glue were being boiled. We are passing the great Corpse Utilisation
Establishment (Times 19 April 1917: 5).
Targeting Germans living in England
• Newspapers whipped up hysterical antiGerman propaganda – naturalised Germans
had to go into hiding and many had their
businesses destroyed.
• ‘Those papers were the witch-finders.’ (p.420)
• All Our Yesterdays, by H M Tomlinson,
published 1930
Edward Thomas – hated jingoism in
the Press
• Edward Thomas, an established writer by 1914 enlisted in the
Artists Rifles in July 1915 and in December of that year, while
waiting to sail to France, wrote This is no case of Petty Right and
Wrong, attacking the black-and-white portrayal of the struggle, as
painted in the newspapers:
• ‘…I hate not Germans, nor grow hot
• With love of Englishmen to please newspapers.
• Beside my hatred of one fat patriot
• My hatred of the Kaiser is love true:• …Dinned
• With war and argument I read no more
• Than in the storm smoking along the wind
• Athwart the wood. Two witches cauldrons roar.
• Published in Six Poems, 1916
War Correspondents’ point of view
• ‘…I saw British infantry, in the early weeks of that war,
swinging along towards it, singing ‘Tipperary.’ The song
was not sung in France after the September of that
year, though it remained a favourite at home. To this
day when I hear that foolish and sentimental air, I know
very well why a man has been known to go apart, to
think over what might have been, and what is, and to
weep in secret…Perhaps here I had better bear in mind
an Arab proverb, reminding us that it is good to know
the truth, but better to know it and talk of palm
trees…’(pp.144-5)
• From H M Tomlinson’s memoir, A Mingled Yarn
From Philip Gibbs Adventures in
Journalism (1923)
• Most war correspondents saw it as their duty to
censor their reports, highlighting the good and glossing
over the bad, as Philip Gibbs writes in his
autobiography Adventures in Fleet Street: ‘As far as the
five war correspondents were concerned…we
identified ourselves absolutely with the armies in the
field... There was no need of censorship of our
dispatches. We were our own censors.’
• Ahh but did they identify with the armies in the field,
or the officers behind the lines? (Editorial Impressions)
Some attempts to report the truth
• There certainly were attempts by individual journalists to report the
truth – the famous ‘Amiens Despatch’ by Arthur Moore which
appeared in the Sunday Times on August 30 1914 referring to
‘broken bits of many regiments’ and ‘terrible losses’ is not the only
example and both newspapers and journalists expressed their
frustration of the hand of the Censor. This article in The Times, of
November 9 1915, covering a Lords debate is typical of countless
such articles referring to the over-heavy hand of the Censor:
• ‘Lords on the Censor: doctored news. Lord Loreburn made a very
strong appeal for a fuller publication of news, a more generous
confidence in the newspapers on the part of the
Government…British war news, Lord Milner said, had been
constantly ‘doctored’ in an optimistic sense and many times he had
been pained to hear officers from the front say that on the whole
German official reports of engagements had been more
trustworthy than the British.’(p.9)
Officers contemptuous
• It was not just the ordinary soldiers who viewed the
correspondents with contempt – the officers did too:
‘The press was tolerated at GHQ, but only just; indeed
a group of staff officers including Lieutenant Colonel
James Edmonds…regarded it as amusing to pass false
information to the reporters as a test of their credulity
• John Buchan’s Greenmantle (1917) ‘Oh my sainted
aunt,’ said Sandy…’Have we to tout deputations of
suspicious neutrals over munitions works or take the
shivering journalist in a motorcar where he can
imagine he sees a Boche?’
• In All Our Yesterdays, Tomlinson paints a picture of the
atmosphere at the ‘Chateau de Rollencourt,’ where the
narrator and the other press correspondents are
based. It is set in woodlands on a beautiful secluded
estate, with a trout stream and the sound of the guns a
far-distant throbbing (p.437). It is a gilded cage, where
alongside generals and politicians, the correspondents
are waited on by white-gloved servants, and amuse
themselves by playing the piano and measuring
quantities of barbed wire. But they are treated with illdisguised contempt by the officers and with
undisguised contempt by the politicians. They are
clearly viewed as inferior by both.
The truth always comes out in the
end…
• All Our Yesterdays does contain some of the most vivid descriptions
there exist, in prose, of what the reality of the War was like, as if,
finally, Tomlinson allows himself to report the truth, something he
failed to do , or was prevented from doing, during the war:
• ‘He came, wearily, to an area of disrupted trenches, a dissolving
maze of stagnant ditches and mounds, and no place in it for a
foothold. The air had a sweetish sickly smell, for the slough was a
compost of old wire, rags, clay, bones, flesh and burst sandbags. A
boy’s alabaster face, all Maynard could see of him, hung backwards
out of a heap of trash, what was left of his fair hair washed flat by
rain, his eyes open to the indifferent sky, and his mouth gaping in
astonishment and pain that belonged to the past. The offal was all
human.’
The Press had abandoned ‘Fourth
Estate’ journalism
• The overwhelming feeling amongst writers, soldiers, and
the newspaper reading public was that the press was not
performing its sacred Fourth Estate duty, ‘to obtain the
earliest and most correct intelligence of the events of the
time and instantly, by disclosing them, to make them the
common property of the nation.
• Vera Brittain alludes to in her memoir Testament of Youth:
• ‘As usual the Press had given no hint of that tragedy’s
dimensions, and it was only through the long casualty lists,
and the persistent demoralising rumours that owning to a
miscalculation in time thousands of our men had been shot
down by our own guns, that the world was gradually
coming to realise something of what the engagement had
been.’
Another example of civilian confusion
in H G Wells’s Mr Britling Sees it
Through (1916)
• ‘the defeated Germans continued to advance’
(Wells, 1916: 142). Britling and his son Hugh,
spend one Sunday reading the Observer,
noting with astonishment that the Germans,
who, according to despatches ‘had been
mown down in heaps’ were closing in on Paris
(Wells, 1916: 142).
Northcliffe and Beaverbrook given
Government jobs
• Daily Mail becomes the target of some of the
most savage anti press criticism
• Smile Smile Smile
Non-Combatants
• H G Wells Mr Britling Sees it Through (1916)
• ‘And then came the Sunday of The Times
telegram, which spoke of a ‘retreating and a
broken army.’ Mr Britling did not see this but
Mr Manning brought it over in a state of
profound consternation. Things, he said,
seemed to be about as bad as they could
be…Mr Britling was stunned. He went to his
study and stared helplessly at maps.’ (p.140)
Timing of the change, around 1915/16
• D H Lawrence identifies it in his 1923 novel
Kangaroo as the winter of 1915/16 when the
‘…the genuine debasement began, the
unspeakable baseness of the press and the
public voice, the reign of that bloated
ignominy, John Bull…’Other commentators
give surprisingly similar timing
Idea of the popular press as ‘debasing’
• These fears will be expressed particularly shrilly
by the likes of T S Eliot, Ezra Pound and Virginia
Woolf in the twenties and thirties – with Pound
placing the ‘press gang’ deep in his Hell Cantos
for the crime of betraying the English language:
‘…the press gang/And those who had lied for
hire; the perverts, the perverters of
language,/the perverts who have set moneylust/Before the pleasures of the senses; howling,
as of a hen-yard in a printing-house,/the clatter
of presses…
Rose Macaulay’s Non-Combatants and
Others (1916)
• Soldiers at the Front send poignantly upbeat letters
back home: ‘My company is in the trenches now;
commodious trenches they are; best in the line, but
rather too near the people opposite for comfort’ (Basil
Doye to Alix, p.20) while keeping to themselves the
horror of seeing a young man with his arm blown off,
his clothes ‘a red mess’ and not having any morphine
tablets to ease his suffering (p.199). Those on leave talk
of abundant food and jolly times in France. Yet Alix’s
cousin John, after a pleasant evening back home
having been discharged from hospital, has such violent
nightmares that afterwards Alix, who witnesses one, is
sick:
John has a damaged tongue and
cannot speak properly
• ‘He was saying things from time to time…muttering
them…Alix heard. Things quite different from the
things he had said at dinner. Only his eyes, as Alix had
met them through the daffodils, had spoken at all like
this; and even that had not been like this. His eyes
were now wide and wet and full of horror beyond
speech.’(p.30)
• For John any kind of speech is difficult: his wound has
resulted in nerve damage to the tongue: ‘Alix, watching
from the garden, saw the queer way his throat worked,
struggling with some word. (p.17)’
• What is the significance of the injury to his tongue?
The comfort of the non-newsy
periodicals
• In Non-Combatants and Others the women’s
periodicals offer some genuine helpful
information about how to make do with old
clothes and a bare pantry; the weekly Home
Chat provides within its pages patterns for
making home made garments (p.47)
• Others offer tips on what to do with leftovers
• But the reading public is painted as being
rather too gullible most of the time (handout)
Daily Mail Food Bureau
• Daily Mail’s women’s page editor during the War, Mrs
Charles Peel notes in her memoirs that she received
grateful letters from English prisoners of war in
Germany who used her recipes in the camps:
• It was evident they received the Daily Mail with
considerable regularity…They asked for help to cook
their scanty rations in such ways as would make them
palatable and nourishing (Peel, 1933: 221)
• Mrs Peel also notes that before the war was over she
and her team had received, and replied to millions of
letters, mainly from mothers and wives asking for
recipes (Peel, 1933: 222).
Journalists as class traitors
• The unfair portrayals of working class ‘loafers’ would come back
and haunt journalists after the War. There is a particularly outraged
report in The Journalist, the National Union of Journalist’s in-house
paper, from the Trade Union Congress of September 1920, as the
delegation from the NUJ gets continually heckled by other unions:
• ‘One speaker was Mr John Bromley, Secretary of the Associated
Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen, and in the course of
his speech said: ‘It is necessary for every trade unionist at this
Congress to put up with the general misrepresentation, vilification
and abuse of the capitalistic press. We know, unfortunately that the
brains of the members of the Journalists’ Union here are bought
and paid for to be used against members of their own class.’
• The Journalist, October 1920, NUJ archives
The press and the ‘manufacture of
consent’
• After the war, sociologists tried to work out why the
war was so widely supported, even though tens of
thousands of British youth were being mown down on
a daily basis.
• They decided the press had conspired in
‘manufacturing’ public consent for the war.
• There is an allusion to this in ‘Smile, Smile, Smile’.
• In ‘Fight to a Finish’ the press and politicians are linked.
• Rose Macaulay refers to it to: ‘Lord Northcliffe says so
doesn’t he?’ Basil Doye replies when someone
questions why conscription is needed.
The undermining of the written word
• So it comes that each of several million exsoldiers now reads every solemn appeal of a
Government, each beautiful speech of a
Premier or earnest assurance of a body of
employers with that maxim on guard in his
mind- “You can’t believe a word you read.”
• (C E Montague Disenchantment, 1922)