Fake History 6 : The Failure Of Primary Source Evidence

Establishment historians place great value on the use of primary source evidence. This is described as ‘Narrative Fixation’ by the heterodox economist Edward Fullbrook [1] who cites Einstein’s famous aphorism:
‘Whether you can observe a thing or not depends on the theory which you use: It is the theory which decides what can be observed.’

Professor Fullbrook stated that in his academic field, by adopting a single point of view and refusing to admit alternative insights, economists deprive themselves of the means of a fuller understanding of the matters they seek to explain. But it is not just in economics that such limitations become apparent. The narrative fixation on the dialectical side of scientific development has had, and continues to have, a deleterious consequence in the human sciences. This involves all of the Humanities and Social Sciences including, as we see here, History. In any attempt to understand a complex truth, what is required is a multiplicity of points of view – a width of methodologies and epistemologies – a ‘Narrative Pluralism’ – but academic historians have a narrative fixation: No documents; no narrative. [2] In an article, The Frailty of Historical Truth: Learning Why Historians Inevitably Fail, published by the American Historical Association, Professor David Lowenthal stated, ‘Secondary sources are ipso facto unreliable.’ [3]

The fundamental problem in war history, as we and other revisionists have clearly demonstrated, lies in the fact that it is underpinned by primary sources which are unreliable – not least because so many have been systematically destroyed, falsified, altered, misrepresented, hidden or ‘lost’. In the absence of reliable primary source evidence, it is entirely legitimate – indeed it is mandatory on the part of truth-seekers – to look to other means of establishing what has occurred, what continues to happen and why. Secondary sources/circumstantial evidence are a taboo in historical research, yet they play such an important role in the criminal law courts and can literally mean a matter of life or death? In homicide cases or other serious felonies, police detectives act much like historians in searching the past for evidence. If it is considered that sufficient evidence has been uncovered, the accused is sent for trial before a jury of his peers.

The gold standard in law courts is direct evidence, but in the majority of cases there is none and only indirect circumstantial evidence is available. By way of example, direct evidence is presented if a witness states that she saw the defendant pull out a gun and actually shoot the victim. On the other hand, if she did not witness the shooting but saw the defendant enter a house with a gun, heard a gunshot and screaming and thereafter saw the defendant leave carrying the gun, it is circumstantial evidence. If two or more independent witnesses testify to this, it is very powerful circumstantial evidence.

Circumstantial evidence – and that includes fingerprints and forensic evidence presented by expert witnesses – allows for more than one explanation. When different strands of such evidence are drawn together and each corroborates the conclusions drawn from the others, we have every reason to the serious notice. For hundreds of years attorneys have talked about the ‘cable’ of circumstantial evidence. A cable is made up of many strands which individually are not particularly strong, but the more strands which are applied to the cable the stronger it becomes. In many, if not indeed the majority of legal cases, it is this cable of circumstantial evidence which solidly links an accused to the crime. Juries in the United States and elsewhere are entitled to reach a verdict on such evidence, and Judges are able to condemn an individual to death on the strength of that verdict. The U.S. Supreme Court has stated that ‘circumstantial evidence is intrinsically no different from testimonial [direct] evidence,’ [4] yet academic war historians deride its use.

Straightforward lies, concealment of important evidence, a peer review system that encourages only accounts sympathetic to the Establishment, and insistence on using only primary source documents (which in reality are generally the remnants which have survived the Establishment’s cull) are all important elements in the production of fake history.

In the early 1970s, Canadian war historian Nicholas D’Ombrain began researching British War Office records. He noted: ‘The Registry Files were in a deplorable condition, having suffered the periodic ravages of the policy of “weeding”. One such clearance was in progress during my foray into these files, and I found that my material was being systematically reduced by as much as five-sixths.’ [5] Astonishingly, a large amount of ‘sensitive’ material was actually removed as the researcher went about his business. Where did it go? He accused the establishment of systematic withdrawal of evidence. Who authorised its removal? In addition, D’Ombrain noted that minutes of the Committee of Imperial Defence and ‘circulation and invitation lists’ together with much ‘routine’ correspondence had been destroyed. [6] That D’Ombrain found five-sixths of the total files melting away in front of him demonstrated clearly that unnamed others still retained a vested interest in keeping hidden, genuine evidence of historical record.

On conducting our own research we noted that the official notice in the Public Record Office List of Cabinet Papers warns, ‘the papers listed … are certainly not the whole of those collectively considered by Cabinet Ministers.’ The gap, however, is breath-taking. No effort is made to explain why crucial records are missing or what happened to them. Nothing is included from 14 July until 20 August, 1914. Nothing. This period covered the crucial two week ‘July Crisis’ in the run up to the First World War, the British declaration of war on Germany on 4 August, and the files remain empty until almost three weeks into the war itself. [7] It beggars belief that such crucial Cabinet papers relating to one of the most significant events in British history have disappeared.

While official Cabinet papers for the time frame do not exist – presumably destroyed (the files at the National Archives at Kew in London were completely empty) we know what was going on in some detail because Prime Minister Asquith (aka ‘Squiffy’ because it was alleged that he drank a bottle of cleared each evening) was writing letters to his paramour, Venetia Stanley, and sharing secret Cabinet details with her. Had Asquith not communicated privately and very indiscreetly to his young paramour, much of what was discussed at those crucial meetings would be lost to history. His letters of August 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, contain the inner secrets of what was said by whom in those crucial Cabinet meetings whose minutes were presumably destroyed. The Letters to Venetia Stanley, essentially Asquith’s love letters [8] was collated in 1982 and therefore not subject to the post-war censor. This unquestionably saved the information from being redacted or burned.

When researching later Cabinet Memoranda housed in the National Archives, [9] pages were found to be missing. Page 685, which was in a series which included crucial confidential documents about Herbert Hoover’s Belgian Relief, has been torn out. Despite this, we had more than sufficient evidence to prove that Britain and America were secretly provisioning Germany through Hoover’s organisation in order to prolong the war. Countless documents are missing, but in fairness to the librarians and custodians of the Public Record Office, they could only catalogue what was passed to them from the Cabinet Office, the Foreign Office, the War Office and the Colonial Office. It is not the fault of librarians.

An Australian expert on Gallipoli, Harvey Broadbent, had a similar experience when researching the archives: ‘… Difficulties lie in the fact that not all Gallipoli documents seem to be present in the National Archives. There are gaps in document collections of certain events and at crucial times of the campaign.’ [10] Broadbent, though reluctant to say so in public, harbours suspicions that the 1915 Gallipoli campaign (where over a quarter of a million allied soldiers and sailors, including many from Australia and New Zealand, were killed or badly wounded) was deliberately set up to fail by the British and French governments. We gathered many individual strands of circumstantial evidence on this, wound them in to a very strong rope, and have absolutely no doubts whatsoever that it was indeed deliberately set up to fail.

The doomed project went ahead to enable greater geo-political strategies which would benefit the Secret Elite, including post-war control of oil in the Middle East and control of Palestine. Gallipoli was a disaster for the allies in 1915 and the truth had to be concealed at all costs from the peoples of colonial Australia and New Zealand or they would have reacted severely against both the ‘Mother country’ and the war. Yet the lies persist, and the Anzacs continue to cerebrate a disaster dressed as a glorious sacrifice; an honour to Australian and New Zealand youth. Lies, lies, lies.

It is evident that falsification of the history of the twentieth century has involved a wide range of nefarious subterfuge. Today, the accepted mainstream version continues to be taken as the source for new books and documentaries in film and television. The ideal of objectivity was abandoned long ago. Highly biased and selective choices were made from the infinite number of true facts. Some were given a central place, others marginalised. Facts were selected to align with the narrative which the oligarchs demanded. Many inaccurate, muddled or tainted primary sources were chosen to mislead. A range of documents might be brought into the public domain with one crucial piece of the jigsaw removed. This skewed the picture, deliberately. And there were lies, outrageous lies, levied against anyone who stood as a potential barrier to elite rule and one world government by exposing the truth. Yet all of that is merely the tip of the rotten iceberg and represents what we can actually recognise when we scrutinise the given record. Below the surface lie vast quantities of documents removed from public scrutiny and hidden away in places such as Stanford and Hanslope. It seems possible, if not indeed likely, that other as yet unknown depositories exist. It is impossible to say how many records remain concealed to this day, or have already found their way into furnaces in a factual holocaust. As an iceberg in warmer water gradually melts and recedes from the bottom up, so the records decrease in volume, unseen, unknown and unreported as more and more are selected for destruction. In the age of mass communication we have less access to the truth about history than the generations before us. This is no mistake.

As in so many other areas, when researching history a good opening question is: Cui bono? Who benefits from this systematically destroyed, falsified, altered, hidden or ‘lost’ evidence? The Elites, past and present? The court historians whose success is predicated upon conformity?

In the words of Professor Hillel Ticktin, academic economics, is ‘useless – utterly useless’. So too in any objective sense is academic history. Its value resides only in supporting the present-day elites who pay the piper and own the pipes.

If Orwell’s aphorism holds true it is imperative that we revise the entire historical record of the twentieth century. It may already be too late, but we have to dispel pessimism to stand any chance of taking control of our own future. Much has already been done by revisionists such as Harry Elmer Barnes, Antony Sutton and Guido Preparata, and not least by Carroll Quigley who provided the signposts we need on this complex journey. But the ruling elite today are more adept at burying the truth than ever – as witnessed by the vast percentage of the ‘educated’ peoples of the world who remain totally unaware of their existence, or the fact that democracy is a sham. Modern history in its entirety requires grassroots revision.

There is too another concern. The selection of approved versions of history dictates what is taught in our universities and schools. Scottish schoolchildren are taught certain aspects of the First World War but all contentious issues are absent from the syllabus. Attending a conference in Brussels several years ago we learned that Belgian schoolchildren are taught absolutely nothing about the ‘Committee for the Relief of Belgium’ which was directly at the centre and the most significant institution in the country’s First World War history. Internationally, university professors and departmental heads determine the body of knowledge from which degrees are judged. Armed with their prized degrees, those who progress to a career in history are obliged to teach from the same sacred scripture in schools, colleges or universities. No one questions this. No one dares. School and college students are then examined on their historical learning and understanding from texts blessed with institutional approval. Thus, generation after generation, we witness the perpetuation and consolidation of fake history.

It would be ludicrous to suggest that all modern historians or war historians are intentionally producing fake history, but they raise no dissenting voice against those who do. The distressing reality is that brave revisionist historians are a very rare breed indeed. Academic historians of all colours need to muster their courage to speak truth to power and stop toeing the Establishment line. The fact that it is not historians but ordinary men and women who are at the vanguard of the historical truth movement today brings shame to their profession. The verdict of history itself will surely judge them harshly.

1. E. Fullbrook, Narrative Fixation in Economics, World Economics Association, London, 2016.
2. Dr. John O’Dowd, personal communication.
3. David Lowenthal, The Frailty of Historical Truth: Learning Why Historians Inevitably Fail, American Historical Association. https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/march-2013/the-frailty-of-historical-truth
4. Holland v. United States, 348 U.S. 121, 75 S. Ct.127, 99 OL. Ed.150 [1954]
5. Nicholas D’Ombrain, War Machinery and High Policy, preface, p.xiii.
6. Ibid.
7. List of Cabinet Papers, 1880–1914. PRO booklet.
8. Michael Brock, H.H.Asquith letters to Venetia Stanley.
9. Cabinet Papers, 1905-1918 Volume IV ref: FO 899/4.
10. Harvey Broadbent, Gallipoli: One Great Deception? http://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-04-24/30630

Prolonging the Agony 2: The Full Hidden History Exposed

This is the second blog about the recently published Prolonging The Agony.

In a single volume, the real History of how the First World War was deliberately prolonged to the benefit of the charlatans, profiteers, and the Secret Elite can be fully understood.

It is impossible to pick any single scandal above the others, but one which has been studiously ignored by the history boys is the Herbert Hoover and the Commission for Relief in Belgium. This one time American mining engineer and future President of the United States, previously criticised for rampant dishonesty by the courts in London, was chosen by the Secret Elite to head an international fraud which was paid for by the Allies and underwritten by the U.S.government. It claimed to provide food for the exclusive use of the population of Belgium and Northern France which were occupied by the German army.

What we have uncovered is an enormous double-deal whereby not only did food go to Belgium, food that was often sold for profit, but supplies also went to Germany directly down the River Rhine. We know that Edith Cavell saw what was happening. As an avid letter writer whose letters were printed in the Times, she threatened to expose the scandal. This is a story of money, bankers and producers colluding to reap millions from the desperation of a hungry Europe, and in so doing prolonged the bloody war.

Yet another scandal was the complete farce of the Gallipoli campaign. Because the Russians had suffered such vast losses on the Eastern Front, the Czar demanded evidence that war was worthwhile. The promise of Constantinople was the prize which animated him most, and the Gallipoli campaign was concocted by the Secret Elite to make it appear that a serious effort was underway to attack Turkey and win Constantinople for Russia. It was set up to fail. You may think this impossible, but Prolonging the Agony provides detailed evidence that the campaign was an orchestrated farce from start to finish. But it convinced the Russians and kept them in the war. The Secret Elite had no intention of ever giving the strategically vital port of Constantinople to Russia. Ever. The story and the needless sacrifice is a disgrace. Indeed Gallipoli was an outrageous and deliberate failure, but it prolonged the war, as was required. Your reaction to this statement may well be … it can’t be true. Please read the chapters on this crucial event. They will make you uncomfortable.

And there could have been peace, several times over. But peace was not on the Secret Elite agenda. When, by 1916, the military failures were so costly and embarrassing some key players in the British government were willing to talk about peace and discuss what that might mean. This could not be tolerated. The potential peacemakers had to be ditched. Lloyd George was promoted to prime minister in Britain and Georges Clemenceau made prime minister in France. The unelected European leaders had one common bond. They would fight Germany until she was crushed. Prolonging the Agony details how the secret cabal organised the change of government without a single vote being cast. A new government, an inner-elite war cabinet thrust the Secret Elite leader, Alfred Milner into power at the very inner-core of the decision-makers in British politics. Democracy? They had no truck with democracy. The voting public had no say. The men entrusted with the task would keep going till the end and their place-men were backed by the media and the money-power, in Britain, France and America. The only end they had in mind was Germany destroyed.

The entry of America into the war changed everything. The money men were covered by the Federal Reserve System. They could print dollars and finance their war in safety. Loans were guaranteed by governments. The American economy was literally underpinned by the war spending, and all on the back of the ordinary citizens and taxpayers. Millionaires blossomed. Poverty for the many grew. Even the election of Woodrow Wilson in 1916 was tainted by doubt. The manner of his re-election is ignored in mainstream accounts. It all hinged on California and the recount was itself tainted with corruption.

We examine the emergence of Zionism as a factor in the political world. From the first years of the twentieth century we have unmasked the close relationship between Zionism and the British and French Rothschilds. The background to the Balfour Declaration shows how far the British cabinet was willing to support the Zionist ambitions for Palestine. This was NOT, as it is portrayed, a simple message from the British Foreign Secretary to the head of the Rothschild family in Britain. It was the product of years of scheming and political pressure that eventually won there backing of the Secret Elite. And prolonging the war here was also important. Before the Zionist claim over Palestine could have any pertinence, they had to buy time to establish institutions and boost investment. The immense duplicity the British government and the connivance of the American administration is explained in full. And it raised serious questions about loyalties.

While the Russian Revolution might appear to have little to do with prolonging the war, it did. Did you know that the last foreign politician to meet the Car before he abdicated was Secret Elite leader Alfred Milner? Co-incidence? What transpired between the two? Milner’s behaviour and report when he returned to London was so strange that one has to conclude that he had much to hide.What promises were whispered to Czar Nicolas before he abdicated? Worse was to follow. The raping of Russia by the money-men who financed the Bolsheviks, links Wall Street to the Kremlin… and of course, since Russia had decided to end the war with Germany, the promise of Constantinople was revoked. For ever. How convenient.

When Germany surprisingly sought an Armistice to find grounds for Peace in 1918, it was on the basis of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. The myth history here is deplorable. Historians and journalist continue to this day to claim that the First World War ended on 11 November, 1918. It did not. Germany was undefeated on the field of battle. Beaten but not crushed. In a move which has been airbrushed from official history, the Allies, mainly Britain, continued to apply a full and complete blockade of Germany so that for the next eight months hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of their women and children were starved to death. The rise of Bolshevism in Germany became so dangerous that even war hawks like Lloyd George realised that Germany had to be allowed to survive in a much reduced state. Finally the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, never ratified by the American Congress, were so damaging that the causes of the Second World War were literally sewn into the fabric.

Prolonging the Agony is unique. It details the lies and malpractice through which an evil war was prolonged. The old order in Europe was swept aside and it shows how the new order emerged from a joint Anglo-American Establishment. It merged the Secret Elite in Britain with the Morgan-Wall street powers through joint policy making by a self-appointed group of ‘right-thinking’ men. We name them. We also acknowledge the impressive work of Professor Carroll Quigley in initially exposing the machinations of the evil men who aimed to take over the new world order.

And then they stole our history. Literally. All of the evidence of the gross malpractice, the profiteering, the lies and the propaganda about the cause of the war and about the running of the war was swept up and taken away from its European roots. All of the pre-war papers and documents which would have shown how far the Kaiser went to try to avoid war, disappeared. The vast quantity of international permits and papers about the running of the American Relief in Belgium, high-jacked. The key Russian diplomatic  evidence sold for a pittance was removed to America. Taken under instruction by the organisation set up by Herbert Hoover, it was removed to Stanford University and there what remains of the evidence lies under lock and key. Our history. Our truth. To be fair, our governments also burned, redacted, removed, shredded and otherwise abused the historical fact by destroying evidence of their malpractice and lies. Prolonging the Agony details as much of this destruction of history as we currently know. Breve and persistent journalists continue to push for sight of all documents. Historians do not.

You have to give time to this frank exposure. You will have questions to ask. You will be angered at the waste of life and the selfishness of the rich and the powerful dynasties. You will want to ask again and again how they managed to sweep such a litany of wrong-doing under the proverbial carpet. You will be alarmed at the manner in which we have been lied to; at the stolen history; at the way in which you have been misled. After ten years of constant research and inquiry, we still are.

Prolonging the Agony puts into your hands the awful truth behind a war which could have been brought to a reasonable conclusion in 1915. The cost in human terms of all that transpired from 1915-1919 is so horrendous, that it has been studiously kept from us. Even 100 years later, the lies persist. Read this book. There is much more to it than has been outlined here. Consider the implications. Be angry.

Now available from TrineDay Publishing in the USA and through Amazon across the world. We are delighted to announce that our German publishers, Kopp Verlag will undertake a translation in German, and our French publishers, Editions Nouvelle Terre, are currently considering a similar decision.

Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener 10: The Final Reckoning

The previous nine blogs have presented the reasons why the men of secret power wanted rid of Herbert Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War from 1914-1916 … but were unable to manoeuvre him from office. He had threatened the smooth running of Trans-Atlantic finance, had interfered with, and apparently delayed, the enormous growth in armaments and munitions, and did not agree that the war would be won by the nation which fired most shells across the barren pot-holes of the Western Front. His phenomenal contribution to voluntary recruitment could not go on forever. Its initial success in the early months of the war was unsustainable. Conscription had to be introduced in March 1916 when the Military Service Act came into force [1] just as the parliamentarians had wanted, and Kitchener did not trust politicians. He was justified in his mistrust of gossiping Cabinet colleagues. Prime Minister Asquith, for example, shared secret confidential information with his paramour [2] Venetia Stanley on a daily basis. [3] He famously stated that he would give Cabinet ministers all they information they sought ‘if they would only divorce their wives.’ [4] In this, as in many of his other beliefs, Kitchener was absolutely right. London society was a hotbed of unbridled war-gossip especially in the first two years of the conflict.

What Kitchener failed to understand was that neither he, nor the British Cabinet, called the tune. The elite Bankers and financiers, the owners of the military-industrial complex, the manipulators of power and influence, the newspaper moguls and the academic guardians of historical record, the establishment on both sides of the Atlantic had ordained the war to crush Germany and amass even greater fortunes in the process. The Secret Elite whom we have identified by name in Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, [5] and further expanded in previous blogs, [6] held this as their sole objective.

An early end to the war was not to be contemplated. Nor was the notion of a just and fair peace about which Kitchener had been talking. What use was a compromise which would have allowed German commerce and industry to remain intact with all of the advantages through which modern business practice thrived? It was inconceivable that they would allow the war to end before the American government joined the conflict. The United States had to be drawn into the war in order to offload the enormous private loans and debts accrued by the Morgan/Rothschild/Rockefeller empires through their monopolies on arms, munitions and international loans. Had Kitchener influenced a move for peace in 1916, the burden of debt would not have been shouldered by US taxpayers, and likewise, British and French tax-payers, but by the financial institutions. An honourable peace would have left Germany strong and independent. Germany had to be made to pay for a war they had never wanted. Lord Kitchener’s threatened intervention imperilled every aspect of the Secret Elite’s aim.

He knew he had enemies, clearly.

Though he himself was a very loyal servant to King and Country, Herbert Kitchener had to struggle against professional jealousy and disloyalty from his senior staff. Sir Henry Wilson, the Principal Liaison Officer between the allied forces in France, was a regular correspondent with Lord Alfred Milner, the acknowledged leader of the Secret Elite, and acted as a high level informant behind the backs of Kitchener and Asquith. The Prime Minister wrote that both he and Kitchener considered Wilson a constantly intriguing serpent [7] so there was little love lost on either side.

The Secretary of State’s enemies amongst the press included editors of the Morning Post and the National Review, but his loudest critic was Lord Northcliffe at The Times and The Mail. Ever close to the Secret Elite, The Times, through their privileged correspondent Charles Repington, had tried to bring Kitchener into public disrepute by fanning the flames of the so-called munitions crisis in 1915. [8] Far from weakening Lord Kitchener, their accusations against him damaged their reputation and underlined the strength of public support he continued to enjoy. [9] Thus Horatio Kitchener was a man with many enemies, not in the trenches, the workplace or the ordinary home, but inside the core of the Establishment. That he understood. What he could not grasp was the grand plan which had been constructed above the realm of public politics.

Asquith was obliged to shake-up his Cabinet in May 1915 and the net impact of the reorganisation was to bring more members of the Secret Elite into public office. Professor Carroll Quigley [10] identified eleven members of Asquith’s ‘coalition’ Cabinet as members of this cabal including Lords Lansdowne and Curzon, Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative Party leader, Sir Edward Carson, F.E. Smith, Walter Long, the Earl of Selborne, Robert Cecil and most importantly, Arthur J. Balfour, former Prime Minister, as First Lord of the Admiralty. The man whom they dearly wanted removed, Lord Kitchener, stood firm. Though in private they all wanted rid of him, in public he could not be criticised.

For as long as they could find reason to tolerate him, especially once his powers over munitions had been shifted wholesale into Lloyd Geoge’s court, Kitchener remained an asset both as the international figure-head for the British military and as a buffer between the Prime Minister and his detractors. However, once he began to speak privately about his role as a peace-maker at the end of the war, and share his ideals with leading figures in both the military and the government, [11] Kitchener’s days were numbered. The asset had become a liability. But how could they get rid of him? You might construct a long list of possibilities – ‘heart-attack’, ‘suicide’, a full range of ‘natural causes’ might have been actioned. Any public suggestion of his alleged homosexuality would certainly have ruined him but what possible good would have come from trashing the name and reputation of the hero of the Empire? None. Though the military and political agents of the Secret Elite schemed behind his back, it was in the interests of all to protect Kitchener’s public reputation. He had to be removed with a subtlety which brooked no backlash. What were the odds against Herbert Kitchener dying in a naval tragedy, lost at sea? No-one could have anticipated such a scenario or possibly suspect unlawful practice. Surely?

Before anyone rushes to close the account with the dismissive and entirely unfair claim that this is simply another conspiracy, re-read the volume of evidence, actual and circumstantial, which we have already presented. [12]

We have clearly established that there was no immediate need for Herbert Kitchener to visit Russia. Knowing that the Somme offensive would begin in July, he threatened to pull out of the venture as late as 2 June 1916 rather than have it postponed. [13] The central Secret Elite place-man at the Czar’s court in Petrograd (St Petersburg) was Sir John Hanbury-Williams, a close friend and associate of Alfred Milner. [14] Williams’s position as Chief of the British Military Mission to Russia from 1914-1917 was consolidated by ancestral diplomatic connections with the Empress Catherine the Great, which granted him a special place in the Czar’s more intimate circles. [15]

The Secret Elite network spun a spider’s web of influence across the globe. Hanbury-Williams had conjured the Grand Duke’s supposed appeal to the British to attack the Dardanelles [16] in 1915, and it was he who co-ordinated Kitchener’s visit to Russia in 1916. His diary shows that the Czar ‘talked over the proposed visit of Lord Kitchener with the greatest keenest and interest’ before Hanbury-Williams organised the details with the British Ambassador and the military attache, Sir Alfred Knox. [17] The plan to send Kitchener to Russia emanated from Britain, not Russia. Indeed Hanbury-Williams’s published record omitted detailed reference to the background preparations for what was transformed into ‘Kitchener’s’ visit. Allegedly, when Lord Kitchener insisted that any postponement of his visit would result in its cancellation, Hanbury-Williams took immediate steps to stress Czar Nicholas’s personal wish that the visit go ahead. [18] The plans devised by Hanbury-Williams were transposed into the Czar’s wishes. So ran the web of deceit.

Everyone personally connected with the Secret Elite whose name had been associated with the ‘mission’ to Russian withdrew. To add to this co-incidence, their reaction to the news of Kitchener’s death on HMS Hampshire was in its own right, suspicious. Lloyd George claimed that he heard the ‘startling’ news on his way to a War Council in Downing Street on 6 June. When he entered the Cabinet Room he described ‘the Prime Minister, Sir Edward Grey, Mr Balfour and Sir Maurice Hankey sitting at a table all looking stunned’. This was indeed an inner circle of powerful men who understood what had happened, yet they were unable to talk about the consequences? Remarkably, given the enormity of what had just taken place, ‘Sir Maurice and I quite forgot for the moment that had it not been for the Irish negotiations, we would have shared the same fate.’ [19] That is untrue. From the outset Hankey said he would not go, and Lloyd George’s refusal had nothing to do with Ireland. [20] How many people would have reacted with such sang-froid? He and Hankey ‘quite forgot’ that they should have been on that same ill fated ship? [21] It defied human nature.

Indeed, without breaking step or pausing for a moment to contemplate the many contributions of the now deceased Secretary of State for War, Lloyd George knew that ‘the passing of Lord Kitchener left an empty place at the War Office. I realised that this place might be offered to me.’ [22] This man of many plots, of endless carping behind the backs of others, who briefed the press, especially Northcliffe, against Kitchener, displayed an almost callous cynicism. Lloyd George did indeed accept that office on 4 July, but not before ensuring that all the powers that had been systematically stripped from Kitchener were reinvested in the new Secretary of State for War.

On hearing of Kitchener’s death, Northcliffe is reported to have burst into his sister’s drawing room declaring, ‘Providence is on the side of the British Empire’ [23] Fawning tributes dripped from the mouths of the guilty. Admiral Jellicoe solemnly declared that the navy’s grief for ‘a soldier’ whose loss ‘we deplore so deeply. It was our privilege to see him last; he died with many of our comrades’. [24] No mention was made of Admiralty culpability or unswept channels.

Look again at the depth of that culpability. HMS Hampshire was barely fit for service and its loss added little to the Navy’s post-Jutland woes. Jellicoe and his masters at the Admiralty approved the ship’s route into a known minefield. Naval intelligence at Room 40 had carefully monitored all U-Boat activity. References to the minefield and the sinking of the trawler, Laurel Rose were removed or altered to suit the cover-up ‘explanation’ when difficult questions were raised about the fate of the Hampshire. The official report was kept secret. Key documents have still never seen the light of day.

Kitchener’s murder was covered with dripping platitudes and cynically penned obituaries. In the House of Lords, Lansdowne proclaimed that Kitchener’s death ‘was a great and dignified exit from the stage upon which he had played so prominent a part during the long years of his life.’ [25] The two-faced Asquith lamented ‘his career has been cut short while still in the full tide of unexhausted powers and possibilities.’ [26] The Secret Elite’s John Buchan ordained that ‘in a sense his work was finished’ and ‘his death was a fitting conclusion to the drama of his life.’ [27] ‘Bollocks’ may not be a recognised historical assessment, but ‘bollocks’ it remains. They peddled lies as fraudsters do.

The full panoply of State and Church gathered at St Paul’s Cathedral on 13 June to hold a service of remembrance for Lord Kitchener and his staff. The King and Queen accompanied by Queen Alexandra, the Lord Mayor in his black and gold robes, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop of London, and assorted Aldermen and Sheriffs all gathered to pay their final respects to the former Secretary of State for War and champion of the Empire. They sang ‘Abide with me’, recited the ‘De Profundis’, read from the liturgy, said Prayers for the Country at War and thanked God for a brave and courageous life. The service ended with all three verses of God Save the King. [28] Thus with a great sense of theatre, Kitchener’s memory was consigned to the annals of received history. How quintessentially British.

No-one has ever been held to account for the murder of Lord Herbert Horatio Kitchener and over 700 other men.

[1] Conscription: the First World War – UK Parliament
http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/private…/conscription/
[2] Asquith’s complex relationship with the much younger Venetia Stanley has intrigued commentators over the century. Whether or not they were lovers remains unproven.
[3] Michael Brock and Eleanor Brock, H.H. Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, Oxford University Press, 1982.
[4] Viscount Hankey, The Supreme Command, Vol. 1, p. 221.
[5] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, Mainstream, 2013 pp. 12-16 onwards, Appendix 1, p. 362 and Appendix 2, pp. 363-9.
[6] Secret Elite, Blogs 1-3, posted June 15-17, 2014.
[7] Brock and Brock, H.H. Asquith, Letters, p. 342, (Asquith to Venetia Stanley 28 Dec 1914.)
[8] see blog; Munitions 6: Crisis, What Crisis? posted 8 July 2015.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Professor Carroll Quigley, author of The Anglo-American Establishment, initially identified and named the secret cabal who controlled British foreign policy from the early years of the twentieth century.
[11] Randolph Churchill, Lord Derby, King of Lancashire, pp. 209-10.
[12] previous blogs posted from 4 May, 2016 – 29 June 2016.
[13] George Arthur, Life of Lord Kitchener, Volume 3, pp. 350-1.
[14] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 56.
[15] John Hanbury-Williams, The Emperor Nicholas II, as I knew him, p. 1.
[16] See blog, Gallipoli 9, posted 20 March 2015.
[17] Hanbury-Williams, The Emperor Nicholas II, p. 94.
[18] Ibid., pp. 98-9.
[19] David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, vol.1, p. 456.
[20] Stephen Roskill, Hankey, Vol. I, p. 269.
[21] Hankey Diary 6 June 1916, quoted in Roskill, Hankey Vol 1, pp. 279-80.
[22] Lloyd George, War Memoirs, p. 456.
[23] J Lee Thomson, Politicians, the Press and Propaganda, Lord Northcliffe & The Great War, 1914-1919, p. 101.
[24] The Times, 14 June 1914.
[25] Lord Lansdowne , Hansard, House of Lords Debate, 20 June 1916 vol 22 cc315-22.
[26] House of Commons Debate, 21 June 1916 vol 83 cc145-51.
[27] John Buchan, Episodes of the Great War, pp. 246-7.
[28] The Times 14 June 1914.

Ireland 1916, 10: The Legacy Of Easter 1916

With the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising fast approaching (24-29 April 2016), the events of that awesome week will be celebrated throughout Ireland with parades, bunting and speeches with an emphasis on those who gave their lives in the cause of liberty. Politicians will, as ever, line up to be photographed and, by association, linked to the men who fell. 1916 was a year of atrocious bloodletting across the battlefields of Europe, but there is an essential difference between those millions sacrificed to an Empire’s war in a determined drive to crush Germany and those who took part in the uprising in the expectation that they would sacrifice their lives for Ireland. Indeed the Proclamation which Patrick Pearse read out in front of the General Post Office in Dublin invoked the readiness of Ireland’s children ‘to sacrifice themselves for the common good’. [1] It was an overt choice, a clear decision pledged to Ireland’s freedom from the British imperialist yoke. The consequent loss of life in Ireland cannot be compared to the horrendous carnage in the battles of attrition over the Somme from July 1916, [2] but its significance was to prove far greater than contemporary British historians and commentators have recorded.

The Secret Elite and their imperial guard in the press, the foreign and the colonial offices, the war office and the great money houses in London and New York, made every effort to downplay the actions taken by James Connolly, Patrick Pearse, Thomas MacDonagh, Sean Mac Diarmada, Eamonn Ceannt, Joseph Plunkett and the men and women who fought by their side. Because he represented an intellectual and dangerous challenge to the Empire, they promoted a devastating tirade against Roger Casement based on allegedly sexually explicit diaries which were circulated secretly to influence pro-Irish Americans.

Whatever the early success the anti-rebellion propaganda enjoyed, the rising was not a naive proposition to be dismissed by ‘Empire Loyalists’ as folly. [3] Nor was it simply the sixth in line in a series of rebellions against British domination over the previous three hundred years. It was not an aberration or a theatrically staged protest. It was a statement of intent from a small minority group which refused to follow Redmond and Dillon blindly into a war they knew was wrong and which they deeply resented. And their numbers grew, slowly at first, as men and women who initially acted in good faith to support the Empire came to terms with the unpalatable fact that yet again the British government was using them as dupes.

Though derided for their refusal to join the British army and labelled ‘cowards’, they were not. They saw the reality of the evil Empire ranged against Germany and refused to bend the knee. They were not to be fooled by false promises of Home Rule once the war was over. From an unforgiving courtroom Roger Casement caught the moment: ‘we are told that if Irishmen go by the thousands to die not for Ireland, but for Flanders, for Belgium, for a patch of sand in Mesopotamia, or a rocky trench on the heights of Gallipoli, they were winning self-government for Ireland. But if they dare to lay down their lives on their native soil, if they dare to dream even that freedom can be won only at home by men resolved to fight for it there, then they are traitors to their country.’ [4] Casement analysed it perfectly. The sacrifice of these men who joined up in 1914 did not win self-government for Ireland once the war had ended.

Just before he was executed, an unrepentant James Connolly wrote to his sister, ‘We went out to break the connection between this Country and the British Empire and to establish an Irish Republic. We believe that the call we thus issued to the people of Ireland was a nobler call in a holier cause than any call issued to them during this war…’ [5] Both men, and those who shared their conviction, acted not from narrow self-serving considerations but from a revulsion against Britain’s declaration of war on Germany. They sought no association with the barbaric war. Theirs was an act of faith whose realisation they never saw. From it came a political reawakening, fuelled by the intransigence and arrogance of the Secret Elite. Casement, Connolly, Pearce and all who sacrificed themselves for Irish independence, were the spark that lit the flame.
It need not have come to that.

Had there been a genuine will to accommodate the aspirations of the Irish people, it would have been so different. Had the Secret Elite addressed the issue of Home Rule in Ireland with a more enlightened touch, the rebellion might never have had any impact at all. In stirring Ulster for their own purposes, the Secret Elite promoted an absolute determination in the Northern Province to detach itself from any Dublin-centred national government. As we have seen in previous blogs, their parliamentary agents in the Conservative party derided the advocates of Home Rule, wallowed in the overt injustices and inequalities between the different communities and armed and trained a private army to defend Ulster. Had the Secret Elite ordained that Asquith’s coalition government, formed in December 1915, should acknowledge the great value of Ireland as part of the Empire’s war effort, Irish citizens might have felt valued. Had the War Office listened to John Redmond and his pleas for the establishment of an Irish Army Corps, which Asquith endorsed in a speech in Dublin in September 1915, but failed to deliver, there would have been a greater sense of identity with the Empire’s struggle. [6] Such pious advocacy is empty talk for the men of real power, the money power, the financiers and policy makers who acted behind the democratic front, the Secret Elite, had no intention of placating Ireland.

For the Secret Elite had caused the war, deliberately. Their purpose was to crush Germany and take control of the civilised world. They cared not a jot for the working people and the impoverished underclasses. They had no time to concern themselves about injustice in Ireland. And that is why the British establishment stuck to the mantra that Ireland could not be trusted. The irony was, it was they who could not be trusted.

Instead, the War Office engaged in ‘a systematic suppression of recognition of the gallantry of the Irish troops at the front.’ Redmond stated in parliament that: ‘I do not think that there was any single incident that did more harm to our efforts [to encourage enlistment] at that time than the suppression in the official dispatches of all recognition, even of the names being mentioned, of the gallantry of the Dublin Fusiliers and the Munster Fusiliers in the landing at V Beach at Gallipoli.’ [7] Such blatant discrimination by those in real power was indefensibly racist and counter-productive, but it represented their mind-set. Ordinary people did not matter and ordinary Irish men and women did not matter absolutely.

This suppression of national identity, this deliberate disassociation of a people with the valour and sacrifice of its fighting men because of their ethnicity and religion was a repression which rebounded and destroyed trust in Britain. How many historic prejudices were wrapped around the fact that ‘up to the time that the 16th went to the front, with the exception of two or three subalterns, there was not a Catholic officer in the Division’. [8] The final blow for many Irishmen in the South – and the biggest threat – came with the announcement of the coalition cabinet in December 1915. From that moment, recruitment to the British Army plummeted and support for the Irish Volunteers and independence, grew steadily. Home Rule was dead and buried, and a reborn Protestant ascendancy within the British government destroyed any lingering confidence in the impartiality of British rule.

Distrust and suspicion spread all over the South with the spectacle of Edward Carson taking a seat in the Cabinet as chief Law Officer. In the minds of large masses of the people, this meant that in the end, they would be betrayed. [9] The offer that was extended to John Redmond to join the Cabinet deceived nobody. While representatives of the small Unionist party in Ireland were given high office in the Coalition Government and in the Executive of Ireland, Redmond, who represented the majority of the Irish people, was offered minor post of no particular importance. It was a calculated insult.

The Secret Elite and their political agents believed that Ireland in 1916 was still a backward, ill-educated society, unable to comprehend what was happening all around its shores. Not so. People could clearly see that a Unionist executive had been installed in Dublin Castle, with a Unionist Chief-Secretary and a Unionist Attorney General. These bitter opponents of Home Rule imposed a system of universal martial law encompassing hundreds of untried prisoners, many of whom did not even know the charges of which they were accused. The political system which had apparently agreed a great measure of home rule for Ireland in 1914, was transformed into a military dictatorship. The unelected minority were in charge. Again.

Everything the London government did was unjust. Everything the War Office ordered, threatened the identity of the Irish soldier. Whether it was meant as a punishment or determined through fear, injured and recuperating Irishmen at Boulogne were sent back to the front to serve in English divisions. It was estimated that there were twenty times more Irishmen in English, Scottish and Welsh battalions than there were Englishmen, Scots or Welshmen in Irish regiments. There was no justice. There was no equality. Redmond told parliament that he had received ‘scores and scores of letters’ from Irishmen seeking transfer from their appointed regiment into the Connaught Rangers, but ‘never succeeded in a single case.’ [10]

The malignant aggression of Secret Elite imperialist ambitions used every obstacle to prevent Irishmen from being credited for the successful prosecution of the war. After 1916, young Irishmen, suppressed by a Dublin executive severely out of touch with its own populace, preached a new gospel; one in which Home Rule representatives were no longer entitled to their support. Redmond, Dillon, ‘wee’ Joe Devlin and the Irish Parliamentary Party had failed. They had failed because they stood by a government which patently failed the people. Unable to grasp the truth that stared them down, the old order in Irish politics blamed ‘prejudiced stupidity’ inside the British government for the return to pre-1910 attitudes. No, it ran much deeper than mere prejudice. The guiding force behind both Asquith’s and later in 1916, Lloyd George’s governments, unelected and full of place-men, was the Secret Elite, for whom Ireland was a mere side-show; an inconvenience which would be ironed-out in their good time. For the men and women of the Rising, an Irish Rubicon had been crossed.

The burning question is why John Redmond and virtually all of the Home Rule (Irish Parliamentary) Party, continued to stay loyal to the Empire? Was it, as Shakespeare put it, that they were stepped in blood so far, that ‘returning was as tedious as go’er.’ [11] They had never belonged to the political class of the Oxford Elite from whose staunchest ranks many in the Secret Elite were drawn. Redmond had been duped by the Asquiths into believing that loyalty to the Empire would be reflected in loyalty from the Imperial Parliament in London. He appeared to hold to the belief that in the end, even although time and again the Unionist-dominated cabinet thwarted his every good intention, he would be able to guide Ireland through the political turmoil. But his time had passed.

John Redmond continued to front parliamentary opposition to the British cabinet’s designs on Ulster though his political mandate became a thing of the past. His brother, 52 year old Major Willie Redmond, MP for East Clare, was killed in action at Messines in June 1917, a hard blow for a parliamentarian who knew he stood on shifting sands. Major Redmond’s parliamentary seat  was taken by Eamonn de Valera, whose death sentence in 1916 had been remitted solely because he was an American citizen. De Valera was adopted as the Sinn Fein candidate in East Clare and won with an enormous 70 per cent share of the vote. [12] John Redmond died broken hearted in London on 6 March 1918. [13]

The tectonic plates of political confidence in Irish politics in the South clashed absolutely. The old order shook and fell. Like an avalanche, Sinn Fein, which had been but a doctrinaire idea held by a very small number in the community, developed a giant’s strength. In the aftermath of the Easter Rising, Sinn Fein reaped a reward that many later claimed was undeserved. Be clear, Sinn Fein did not make the rising, but the rising made Sinn Fein. [14] They held no association with Britain. They had consistently rejected war. The British press repeatedly accused ‘Sinn Feiners’ of plotting the Easter Rising as if it was a mark of infamy. This badge of dishonour in British eyes became the standard for the honourable rebel. Their ranks were swollen both by participants in the rising and wrongfully deported sympathisers, freed from internment and prison in England. To paraphrase Yeats, in the aftermath of Easter 1916, ‘a terrible beauty was born.’ [15]

By 1918 Ireland was no longer the ‘one bright spot’ which had lit up Sir Edward Grey’s statement in 1914. [16] It had been transformed into one of the most doubtful and difficult spots that ever coloured the Empire. [17] Attempts by the British parliament to introduce conscription to Ireland later in the war only made matters worse. With 47% of the votes cast in the December 1918 General Election, Sinn Fein rose like a political colossus towering over Ireland. In 1910 they had no representatives; in 1918, they held 73 seats. The Irish Parliamentary (Home Rule) Party was destroyed. In 1910 it held 67 seats; in 1918, only six of their representatives were elected to Parliament. [18]

It was a disaster for the Secret Elite determination to bind Ireland to the Empire. In truth, their obduracy had blinded them to the consequences of democratic accountability.  Much like the Scottish Labour Party in 2015, an inability to divest itself from association with an English party opened the way to a nationalist revival and cast the Irish Parliamentary Party into the political abyss. And this was the legacy of Patrick Pearse and the men who signed the Proclamation of 1916; a legacy predicated upon the Secret Elite’s inability to accept that in a changing world – republicanism in Ireland had replaced the softer notion of Home Rule under the British flag. They had tried, and continued to try, to repress an idea which had found its time.

Yet questions remain unanswered about the tumultuous events of Easter 1916. Given that the evidence we have previously presented proves without doubt that key members of the British establishment’s most powerful political, naval and military decision-makers knew in advance that the uprising was scheduled, why was no action taken to forewarn Dublin Castle and the Irish Executive?

Given the fact that many documents pertaining to Easter 1916 remain classified, probably hidden amongst the thousands condemned to the government’s secret repository at the high security communications centre at Hanslope Park in Buckinghamshire, [19] has the time not come for outright honesty? What better gesture to continue the process of truth and reconciliation than the release of every single remaining document covering Easter 1916? The memory of all Irishmen who were sacrificed for the Empire and those killed during the uprising, and afterwards, deserves that truth.

Perhaps we are being overly idealistic. Sad to say, the old lies persist; old propaganda continues to populate the pages of contemporary newspapers in Ireland. Incredibly, an article in the Irish Times of 2014 [20] began with this ridiculous statement: ‘The war began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28th, 1914 and ended on Armistice Day, November 11th, 1918.’ Still the myth-peddlers stick to pro-war propaganda without a blush of shame. The First World War began on 4 August 1914 when the British Empire declared war on Germany. Prior to that, it was a European war involving France and Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary. The conflict officially ended only after the Versailles Peace settlement was signed in 1919. Between November 1918 and June 1919, hundreds of thousands of Germany citizens were starved to death as the miserable food blockade continued unchecked. They apparently didn’t matter then, so they won’t matter now.

Bad though that is, we wonder why Ireland’s leaders today stand literally shoulder to shoulder with their British counterparts at war centenary commemorations in solemn unquestioning agreement which perpetuates the great lie that tens of millions died for freedom and civilization. In doing so they tarnish not only the memory of all Irishmen killed or wounded in Europe and on Gallipoli, but the Irishmen who were branded cowards because they refused to take part.

The memorable words of David Starret from the 9th Royal Irish Rifles have been carved in stone at the Irish Peace Park near Messines. He wrote home lamenting ‘the innocent slaughtered for the guilty, the poor man for the sake of the greed of the already rich, the man of no authority made victim of the man who gathered importance and wishes to keep it.’

His poignant observation describes the Secret Elite in all of their conceit.

The Irish government has to take more care lest its message infers that war was popular in Ireland and that those who stood against it acted dishonourably. They did not. Pearse, Connolly, Casement and all whom they urged into action, chose to sacrifice themselves for their country. As John Dorney pointed out ‘It is entirely appropriate for families and localities to remember their dead. But to suggest that the war for the Empire was popular in Ireland and only discredited by a malevolent plan by nationalists to ‘airbrush it from history’ is simply to twist the facts. [21]

How much more honourable to recognise that Ireland was committed to a war by politicians who believed that in the end Britain would reward the nation with Home Rule. In that, they were mightily deceived. Freedom is not a reward to be bestowed; it is a right that has to be fought for and defended. Thanks to those who sacrificed themselves for Ireland in 1916, Ireland in the 21st Century is an independent nation.

They were the few.

Do not forget those who were sacrificed and those who sacrificed themselves.

[1] Patrick Pearse’s proclamation can be viewed at goireland.about.com/od/…/Proclamation-of-the-Irish-Republic-1916.htm
[2] W. Philpott, Bloody Victory: The Sacrifice on the Somme and the Making of the Twentieth Century, pp. 81-86.
[3] Liam O’Ruaire, The Global-Historical Significance of the 1916 Rising https://theirishrevolution.wordpress.com/?s=the+global-historical
[4] Sir Roger Casement, Speech From The Dock, from The Crime Against Europe with The Crime Against Ireland, introduced by Brendan Clifford p. 167.
[5] Michael Foy and Brian Barton, The Easter Rising,  p. 355.
[6] Hansard House of Commons Debate, 18 October 1916 vol 86 cc581-696.
[7] Ibid., cc586-7.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid., cc587-8.
[10] Ibid., cc593-4.
[11] William Shakespeare, Macbeth, III. iv. 1136.
[12] Fidelma McDonnell, Riches of Clare: 1917 Rising of an Irish Political Colossus http://www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/claremuseum/news_events/1917_rising.htm
[13] Michael MacDonagh, The Life of William O’Brien, the Irish Nationalist, p.232.
[14] Warrre B. Wells, John Redmond; A Biography, p. 185.
[15] W.B. Yeats, Easter 1916.
[16] hansard.millbanksystems.com/…/1914/aug/03/statement-by-sir-edward-g…HC Debate, 3 August 1914 vol 65 cc1809-32.
[17] Matthew Keating, House of Commons Debate, 9 April 1918 vol 104 cc1412-13.
[18] http://www.ark.ac.uk/elections/h1918.htm
[19] Ian Cobain, The Guardian, 18 October 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/oct/18/foreign-office-historic-files-secret-archive
[20] Ronan McGreevy, The Irish Times, 2 January 2014.
[21] http://www.theirishstory.com/2012/11/12/opinion-remembering-world-war-i-in-ireland/#.VrjGn4R8Gi4

Ireland 1916, 4: Towards the Rising; No Justice for the ‘Rebels in Sheep’s Clothing’

Consider this. While John Redmond and his Irish Parliamentary Party colleagues paraded the length of Ireland to recruit soldiers for an ‘Irish Brigade’ of the British Army in the belief that Home Rule had already been guaranteed, the Secret Elite, who controlled Asquith’s government and the upper echelons of the British Army [1] had determined that neither would happen. [2]

Their influence over senior appointments in the British Army was virtually absolute and inside that special coterie of military commanders, Anglo-Irishmen were dominant. Field Marshal Lord Frederick Roberts, whose father was a native of county Waterford, had nominally retired from office in 1905 but in reality his imposing influence over military appointments continued unabated. [3]  He was also President of the National Service League which advocated four years of compulsory military training for every man aged between 18 and 30. [4]

Fellow members included his personal friend, Lord Alfred Milner with whom he frequently shared platforms. Sir Henry Wilson, Commandant of the Staff College at Camberley and Director of Military Operations from 1911 onwards was another very influential Irishman. [5]  He was born in Longford and his family claimed to have come to Ireland with William of Orange. Sir John French, Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force was of Anglo-Irish descent and Kitchener himself, resplendent as Field Marshal and Secretary of State for War, was raised in Ballylongford in County Kerry. They wore their ‘Irishness’ as it suited their purpose, but every one considered the Irish National Volunteers with deep suspicion. Kitchener is said to have regarded them as ‘rebels in sheep’s clothing’. [6] These senior commanders had colluded with Lord  Milner, Sir Edward Carson and Andrew Bonar Law to protect the Ulster cause from 1912 -1914. [7] When it came to Ireland, they were not impartial guardians of the nation.

Desperate to impress the British Establishment that Ireland would play her part loyally in defence of Belgium, and concerned that she would be dishonoured if the Nationalists did not support the war against Germany, Redmond went to meet Kitchener at the War Office as early as 6 August, 1914. [8] His reception was cold and friendless. [9] No-one took up Redmond’s generous offer that his Volunteers should defend the island’s coasts and the first of many opportunities to treat Ireland with a new found confidence and respect was rejected. [10] Much more was to follow. The preferential treatment which the Ulstermen had always enjoyed from the British State continued to manifest itself, especially in the army.

Prime minister Asquith appeared to promise a new approach when he addressed a great rally at the Mansion House in Dublin on 25 September. His speech was recorded over two pages of The Times, and the impression he gave promised that there would soon be an Irish Division in the South to match the Ulster Division in the North. He declared: ‘We all want to see an Irish Brigade or better still an Irish Army Corps…Don’t be afraid that by joining the colours they will lose their identity and become absorbed in some invertebrate mass, or, what is perhaps equally repugnant, be artificially distributed into units which have no nation cohesion or character’. [11] Clearly he had not discussed this matter with Kitchener who was prejudiced against Home Rule and would not countenance a distinctive Irish division with its own badge and colours, based on the Irish Volunteers.

Indeed Irishmen enlisting in mainland Britain who wanted their identity to be acknowledged in some tangible way were snubbed in like vein. [12] Despite this, Irishmen flocked to the standard in places like Tyneside where four Irish  ‘pals’ battalions were raised as part of the Northumberland Fusiliers. [13] An official request from Redmond that at least one of these battalions be trained in Ireland to encourage recruitment and pride, was summarily refused. [14] Kitchener believed, as did the Secret Elite cabal which had pushed for his appointment, [15] that if the Volunteers were trained, armed and kept together in coherent units, there would be civil war once the crusade against Germany was over, with no advantage to Ulster.

These same arguments were not applied to Carson’s Ulster Volunteers. They were treated with distinct preference and in consequence the Ulster Volunteers metamorphosed into the 36th (Ulster) Division with their own distinctive uniform and badges. Not since Cromwell’s ironsides had a military force been united by such political unity and religious fervour. [16] It was the status quo default, just one more injustice piled upon centuries of injustice.

And herein lay the reason why those few Irishmen who were not duped by the lure of London promises and spoke out against war, whose numbers grew slowly but inexorably through 1915, began to realise that the British Establishment had no intention of delivering a united Ireland once war was ended. Ireland (excluding Ulster) was being played as a fool, led by the nose with false promise and spurious argument. What was the point of fighting for Catholic Belgium when Catholic Ireland was still part and parcel of the British Empire? Why were Irishmen fighting for the rights of small nations, while the rights of the common man in the South were considered inferior to his counterpart in the North?

After the doubt came the hurt. Ireland had a strong military tradition stretching back beyond the sixteenth century. When Great Britain went to war there were approximately 20,000 Irishmen serving in the regular British Army and another 30,000 in the first line of defence. About 80,000 enlisted in Ireland in the first year of the war, around half of whom came from Ulster. Emigrant Irishmen enlisted in the armies of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. [17]  The Irish went to war in huge numbers on behalf of the British Empire in the belief that they were fighting for civilisation and a just cause – and, in the South, that the Home Rule was part of that just cause. Irish regiments fought as vital components of the British Expeditionary Force. Spread across all the major regiments of note, Irish loyalty to King and Empire was consequently ignored by contemporary historians. Only the 36th (Ulster) Division retained its identity; the sacrifice of the soldiers from the South was intentionally suppressed.

The calamitous Gallipoli Campaign of 1915 has been dissected in previous blogs. Everyone who was sacrificed in the disgraceful, half-hearted and callous attack on the Dardanelles that was deliberately set up to fail, [18] deserves to be recognised as a victim of disingenuous British foreign policy. However, the court historians have focused their attention and approbation on the Anzacs – the unbloodied troops from Australia and New Zealand – with scant mention of the many Irishmen who fought and died there. The 1st Battalion of the Royal Dublin, Munster and Inniskilling Fusiliers suffered enormous casualties at the initial landings at Cape Helles in April. In the second major assault at Suvla Bay the new service battalions of the Irish regiments were sacrificed to no advantage with appalling loss. [19] That their artillery had been sent to France and the men arrived without maps or coherent orders was, sadly, par-for-the-course from the second-rate British commanders sent to oversee the disaster. [20]

The studied down-playing of the thousands of Irishmen slain or maimed in the horror of Gallipoli was truly ignorant and inexcusable. Basically they were taken for granted, as were all the troops condemned to a horrendous fate. Despite their immense loss, the British State ignored the extent of the Irish contribution in Gallipoli. A letter to The Times in April 1916 complained that Commander in Chief, Sir Ian Hamilton’s despatches (London Gazette no. 29429) were unaccountably misprinted such that the contributions of the 5&6 Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers, the 6 Royal Irish Fusiliers and the 6&7 Royal Dublin Fusiliers were omitted. [21] Sad, and unkind as that ‘mistake’ was, it paled into insignificance when the vital contributions made by the Irish (and other British) divisions were all but ignored at the special service held in Westminster Abbey to hail the magnificent contribution from the Australian and New Zealand troops, the Anzacs in ‘the high cause of Freedom and honour’.

In the presence of the King and Queen and the most senior members of the Secret Elite including Lord Milner, Andrew Bonar Law and A.J. Balfour, every Anzac division and brigade was named individually and the imperial stamp of absolute approval was cemented by the Dean of Westminster with the words ‘In future the sons of our Empire will seek to emulate the imperishable renown of their daring and bravery.’ [22]

What of the ‘imperishable renown’ of the 10th Dublins, yet another ‘Pals battalion’ sacrificed at Gallipoli. Within two days of their landing, seventy-five percent of that gallant regiment was destroyed. [23] How did the widows of Dublin feel when everything that might arouse pride in Ireland was ignored or suppressed? Their dead were little more than spent cannon-fodder.

And still John Redmond and his Home Rulers clung to the belief that this time Asquith’s Liberals would not let Ireland down. Had they not placed Ireland firmly inside the British Empire? But Asquith’s grip on parliament was beginning to unravel. A Coalition Government was announced in May 1915 and its membership should have sounded a shrill alarm to the Home Rulers. British newspapers hailed the new non-party Cabinet for its inclusive strength, though John Redmond decided not to accept Asquith’s offer of a minor post. Given the prominent inclusion of leading figures from the Ulster campaign to oppose Home Rule, men who had openly defied the law and threatened a breakaway government in Belfast, he had no option. How could the appointment of Sir Edward Carson to the post of Attorney-General, of F.E. Smith to Solicitor-General and James Henry Campbell, a member of Carson’s provisional government, to the post of Attorney-General of Ireland [24] spell anything other than the bending of Westminster’s knee to Ulster? How ironic that British justice was placed in the hands of men who had been openly prepared to defy that rule of law [25] by raising and arming an illegal private army in Ulster [26] and taking Britain to the brink of civil war.

Others too should have given cause for concern. Andrew Bonar Law, Leader of the Conservatives and staunch defender of the Ulster cause, was promoted to Secretary of the Colonies, and several key associates of the Secret Elite were also given high office. Walter Long, the man who had passed on the cheque to facilitate the purchase of UVF guns, became President of the Local Government Board. [27]  A.J. Balfour, who claimed to have ‘made’ Carson, in that he raised him from ‘a simple Dublin barrister’ in 1887 to Solicitor General in his own government of 1900-1906, [28] took over at the Admiralty while Lord Milner’s friend, Lord Selborne, became President of the Board of Agriculture. Men who had stood at Ulster’s right hand, Lords Landsdowne and Curzon, walked into this new government. In lesser but still important posts, Milner’s proteges, Lord Robert Cecil and Arthur Steel-Maitland, were appointed Under-Secretaries at the Foreign Office and Colonial Office. [29] Asquith’s coalition government had assumed the mantle of a pro-unionist cabal dominated by the imperialist ant-Irish Secret Elite. Effectively, it was a bloodless coup.

Can you wonder at the doubt that grew in the hearts of that small minority of Irishmen who could not accept the road down which John Redmond had led the nation? The impressive propaganda of an Empire fighting for the rights of small nations rang hollow. Even from within the ranks of the conservative Catholic Church in Ireland, voices publicly expressed these doubts. Something had to give. Who would take a stand?

[1] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, pp. 194-202.
[2] Pat Walsh, The Great Fraud of 1914-18, p. 22.
[3] Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, pp. 195-197.
[4] Mathew C Hendley, Organised Patriotism and the Crucible of War, p. 12.
[5] Keith Jeffery, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, A Political Soldier,  pp. 74-76.
[6] Trevor Royle, The Kitchener Enigma, p. 272.
[7] Jeffery, Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson, pp. 118-9.
[8] Peter Simkins, Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of the New Armies, 1914-1916, pp. 113-4.
[9] Royle, The Kitchener Enigma, p. 272.
[10] Freeman’s Journal, 2 September 1914.
[11] The Times, p.10, 26 September 1914.
[12] Royle, The Kitchener Enigma, p. 272.
[13] Matt Brosnan, The Pals Battalions of the First World War, Imperial War Museum at http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-pals-battalions-of-the-first-world-war.
[14] Hansard House of Commons Debate, 18 October 1916, vol. 86 cc581-696.
[15] A.M. Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, p. 240.
[16] Howard Green, Kitchener’s Army, Army Quarterly, April 1966, vol LXXXXII, no.1, p. 93.
[17] http://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/eng/Historical_Information/1916_Commemorations/Irish_Soldiers_in_the_First_World_War.html
[18] Gallipoli 1, The Enduring Myth, blog posted on this site on 11 February 2015.
[19] taoiseach.gov.ie/ …/Irish_Soldiers_in_the_First_World_War
[20] Gallipoli 17, The Blame Game Begins, blog posted on this site on 17 April 2015.
[21] Everard Wyrall, author of ‘Europe in Arms’, letter to the Times, 22 April 1916, p. 3.
[22] The Times 26 April, 1916 page 2.
[23] Hansard House of Commons Debate, 18 October 1916, vol. 86 cc581-696.
[24] Diarmaid Coffey, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/32265,
[25] Brian P. Murphy, Patrick Pearse and the Lost Republican Ideal, p. 45.
[26] Pat Walsh, The Great Fraud of 1914-18, p. 25.
[27] Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, p. 311.
[28] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 176.
[29] Ibid., p. 141.

What, No Christmas Adverts About The Trenches In 1915?

Sainsbury’s 2014 Christmas advert based on the first noel in the Flanders trenches has not been repeated this year despite the outrageous success it registered in 2014. This year, it’s ‘let’s ignore history and get back to basics’. Marks and Spencer’s Art of Christmas advert celebrates middle-class excess; John Lewis has produced a heart-tugging mini-story with a gift-ridden solution to loneliness. Asda promises glitter and traditional nonsense, Lidl offers a School of Christmas and Waitrose jazzes up Heston Blumethal. [1] More pertinently, Sainsbury’s has abandoned the trenches in favour of a feline children’s book character called Mog. [2] The British Expeditionary Force has served its commercial purpose and can once more fade into history.

The reason for the short lived homage to the Western Front will not be analysed in our blind and biased media. Memories of Christmas 1915 are to be buried with the hundreds of thousands already sacrificed in a miserable war of attrition that raged across Europe in December of that fateful year.

Of course the Northcliffe press did their best to minimise the disaster. On Christmas Eve they rejoiced that the Royal Family would again be at Sandringham and soldiers on leave were to be found pushing ‘through civilian crowds in cheerful groups, happy in their holiday’. [3] Without the slightest trace of sarcasm the Times decided that ‘The merriest centres of entertainment in the country will be the place where the troops of the new armies are at present stationed, for it is a paradox of war that most men throw off care when they put on uniform’. Finally, in order to stress the normality of Christmas in Blighty, it reported that the display of poultry at Smithfield was a wondrous sight … with the supplies of British and Irish Turkeys described as plentiful. With just a bit of imaginative manipulation, Sainsbury’s might have made something of this. British and Irish turkeys, indeed.

The reality was frightening. In France the murderous fighting in the Vosges mountains of Alsace gave rise to claims from both sides that they possessed the strategic ridge which had been the object of so many assaults over 1915. The French attacked the summit of the Hartmannsweilerkopf from December 21-23 [4] with no thought of a seasonal peace. On Christmas Eve an official message from Berlin claimed that ‘we have completely recaptured Hartmannsweilerkopf’, while on Christmas Day a French communique insisted that the Germans had launched a violent attack … but had been everywhere repulsed.’ [5]

Flanders had already descended into a quagmire ill-fitted for celebration of humanity and hope. There were no exchanges of carols or gifts between the brotherhood of man. On Christmas Eve 1915, the order was clearly understood. ‘Our men will have no fraternising tomorrow.’ [6] The British Commanders ensured that there would not be a repeat of the dangerous nonsense of the previous year. As the Times correspondent wrote: ‘Christmas Day began with rain … the aqueous roads were crowded with the traffic of war. Screened by shrubbery, I began my Christmas in the trenches by discovering the bottom of the mud too late …’ He found the salvos from British Howitzers roaring methodically from their lairs, screaming across no-man’s land towards enemy positions,‘exhilarating’. [7] Orders from the top brass ensured that there would be footballing rematches in 1915.

In an unusually frank and compassionate ending, the Times correspondent described a view which Sainsbury’s would never have attempted to commercialise. ‘We splashed and squeezed about between those stacks of hard grey bags, and ooze was everywhere, repulsive to touch and to smell. Within dark recesses of the bags I saw recumbent figures covered with new mud, fast asleep; others jammed themselves against the muck to allow us to pass as cleanly as possible … Through the indirect eye of a cautious mirror I could make out beyond the still land, ominous in its astonishing quietude, with some fantastic ruins beyond, through which showed the forlorn light of this Christmas Day.’ [8] Not the cosy image that sells product, I’m afraid.

The disaster of the Dardanelles also hung over the British Empire towards the final months of 1915 awaiting the unkind apportioning of blame. In November, with the Russians no longer a threat to Constantinople, Kitchener gave the order to abandon Gallipoli and 93,000 troops, 200 guns and more than 5,000 animals had to be spirited away from the vulnerable shores of that ill-judged target. Another sacrifice in a miserable litany of sacrifice. [9] The evacuated Australian troops celebrated their salvation that Christmas on the island of Lemnos, far from home. One miserable irony marred their brave attempt to find solace in the seasonal act of giving and receiving.

Each man was presented with a ‘Christmas Billy’ but the picture on its exterior showed a Kangaroo on the map of Gallipoli, with his tail knocking a Turk into the sea. The words beneath said THIS BIT OF THE WORLD BELONGS TO ME. Not so, though those they left behind might have made such a claim. [10] To make such misery even worse, the entire Gallipoli strategy had been a ploy to assuage the Russians and keep them in the war. [11] The loss of tens of thousands of Australian, New Zealand, Irish, French and British troops had been but the residual cost of a greater lie. Pity the dead, but even more, the widows and families torn asunder by a prolonged war.

One particular voice from the front deserves our attention. Ben Keeling, (Frederick Hillersdon Keeling) a militant socialist in his undergraduate days at Cambridge and disciple of George Bernard Shaw wrote insightful letters to friends and family from the western front. [12] These told a far different tale from the usual tripe dished out by the propaganda machines like Northcliffe’s newspapers. Keeling was a patriot, devastated by Britain’s ‘madness’ to side with France and Russia against Germany. He had no personal quarrel with Germany and ‘firmly believed that Russia had provoked the war … These accursed barbarians, Jew-baiters and upholders of gross medieval Christianity … [Russians] may stand for culture but are the enemies of civilisation.’ [13] Wait a minute. Wasn’t Britain and the Empire fighting to save Civilisation? Isn’t this the diatribe still gushing from the mouths of contemporary warmongers and First World War co-celebrants?

At Christmas 1915 Ben Keeling told it as it was in a letter to his friend R C K Ensor [14] ‘We are in a camp of tents with a very few mud huts. By the way the Chronicle published some time ago some rot from some blithering correspondent who, I suppose, drives about in GHQ motor-cars and thinks it is a wonderful thing to come under shell-fire, to the effect that all the troops are comfortably housed for the winter in nice warm huts. That sort of thing makes men swear out here. … It is a bloody shame to deceive the public and say we are in comfortable huts when we aren’t. Till the autumn we hadn’t even got tents, but generally just our waterproof sheets as roofs for bivvy shelters … In our brigade a man is damned lucky if he gets a dozen hour’s sleep in three days in the trenches … And then people think that it is mud and wet we mind; that is nothing, absolutely nothing compared with the nerve-wracking hell of bombardment.’ [15]

Consider his words. Life at the Front at Christmas 1915 was barely tolerable, but the stories published back home devised images of comfort and warmth. This was no misrepresentation; it was a damned lie. It was a myth concocted to assure the public that all was well and the troops were content in their safe sanctuaries. And it was a lie promulgated from the pulpit. The great prelates of England struggled with the concept of Peace on Earth, interpreting the message of Christmas 1915 as a reinforcement of the propaganda about righteousness, honour and truth. The Archbishop of Canterbury peddled the promise that victory would make ‘no such fighting either necessary or possible in years to come.’ [16] A century on such words must be embarrassing; best not to ponder that Christmas message as we lay plans to rip Syria apart at Christmas 2015.

Dean Inge of St Paul’s, the Church of England’s personal military recruiter rallied his congregation with a timely reminder of the duty of sacrifice, as in – other people being sacrificed. The Church did not approve of Chaplains at the front. [17] With the certainty of a race-patriot he extolled the qualities of ‘our race at its best’ and took a swipe at the militant unions and ‘cliques, factions and classes’ who made plots against public order. Bishop Inge did not clarify whether he meant the engineering strikes, the rent strikes which protested against mothers and their children being thrown onto the streets while their men folk fought in the trenches, [18] or the conscientious objectors.

Bearing all this in mind, we can appreciate why Sainsbury’s have not turned to Christmas 1915 in their latest advert. Images of hellish bombardment, physical and mental deprivation or soldiers cursing those who deliberately misrepresented their plight will not sell the merchandise they so desperately need to protect their market share. So it’s back to Christmas schmaltz. Mog might just prove to be a winner. Simple economics, you see. Last years’s romanticising of the unofficial Christmas ‘truce’, was simple economics, not patriotism. It was made for profit, as was the miserably prolonged first world war.

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/11970490/Watch-Waitrose-Christmas-advert-2015-why-emotion-makes-the-tills-ring.html
[2] http://www.westerndailypress.co.uk/Watch-Sainsbury-s-just-beaten-John-Lewis-battle/story-28179081-detail/story.html
[3] The Times, Friday 24 December 1915, p. 3.
[4] John Howard Morrow, The Great War: An Imperial History p. 75.
[5] http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/59981658
[6] The Times, 27 December 1915, p. 7.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid.
[9] firstworldwarhiddenhistory.wordpress.com Gallipoli Blogs 1-19 posted from 4/2/2015 to 24/4/2015
[10] http://www.gallipoli.gov.au/anzac-timeline/events-of-the-gallipoli-campaign/november-december-1915.php
[11] Gallipoli, The Untold Story, in New Dawn, No. 149, March-April 2015.
[12] F.H. Keeling, The Keeling Letters and Recollections, with forward by H.G. Wells, https://archive.org/details/keelinglettersre00keeliala
[13] Ibid. p. 181.
[14] Robert Ensor worked for the Daily Chronicle during the war and was later commissioned to write a volume of the Oxford History of England covering 1870-1914.
[15] Keeling, The Keeling Letters and Recollections, pp. 258-9.
[16] The Times, 27 December 1915, p.10.
[17] firstworldwarhiddenhistory.wordpress.com The Unholy Spirit, Blog posted 24/9/2014
[18] The Glasgow Rent Strikes of 1915 were an embarrassment to Asquith’s Liberal government
[https://remembermarybarbour.wordpress.com/mary-barbour-rent-strike-1915/] as were the demands from unions involved in Munitions. The prime minister had to send Lloyd George in person to try to calm the agitation amongst engineers and munitions workers on Christmas Day 1915.†

The Great Gretna Train Disaster: A Disaster Within The Gallipoli Disaster

Left to official reports, whitewashed investigations and government-influenced findings, the inconvenience of history has regularly been swept aside to be forgotten, ignored or reduced to a marginalised footnote. That might well have been the fate of the tragic events of 22 May 1915 when the greatest railway disaster in British history unfolded just north of Gretna Station at a signal box at Quintinshill. A troop train carrying around 500 officers and men of the 7th Royal Scots bound for Gallipoli, ran headlong into a stationary local train and moments later the entangled wreck was hit by the night express from London. 214 officers and men were subsequently killed and over 220 injured. It was a nightmare which could not be quashed by the Defence of the Real Act, no matter how convenient that might have been to Asquith’s failing government. Journalists from Dumfries and Galloway, and Carlisle [1] reported the awful events in great detail and, with professional determination, gave an unflinching account of a national tragedy that filled newspaper columns. Naturally the consequent Board of Trade investigation and the legal proceedings focussed attention on the railway workers convicted for negligence, but from the War Office to the Caledonian Railway Company, from the elites who had approved the Gallipoli Campaign to the manipulators of the Scottish justice system, it was a disaster whose blame was quickly shifted onto the shoulders of two shattered signalmen.

In April 1915 the Leith Battalion of the Territorials (more properly called the 7th Royal Scots) was relieved of local duties and joined with the 156 Brigade of the Lowland Division at Larbert near Falkirk to prepare specifically for the Western Front. [2] The men expected to be deployed to France, and their preparation was predicated on that understanding, but following the first disastrous landings on Gallipoli, the stalemate obligated a late War Office rethink. As was his want, Kitchener diverted the troops at the last moment, and the fate of the Leith Battalion was sealed. Botched preparations had become synonymous with Gallipoli, but none previously had caused such immediate anguish. The Scottish troops had been ready to move on Wednesday 19 May but a combination of shipping mishap and railway company incompetence delayed their departure for Liverpool. The troop ship Aquitania, scheduled to take the Battalion to Alexandria had run aground in the River Mersey and an alternative had to be found. Furthermore, the Caledonian Railway claimed to have insufficient carriages to transport the troops and a further forty-eight hour delay meant that they did not entrain until 3.42 am on Saturday 22 May, 1915.  The railway network was uncommonly busy and the Caledonian line strained to meet its conflicting duties; the war-effort and profit.

Although the government had assumed control of the railways in August 1914, [3] the individual companies continued to manage their own lines subject to instructions from the executive committee. Indeed the railway companies’ first move on 5 August was to inform passengers that they no longer guaranteed responsibility for goods lost in transit. The Caledonian Railway Company ran the west coast line from Glasgow to Euston Station in London and had full responsibility for the troop trains which ran on its lines. On such a profitable, busy weekend the Caledonian was required to muster four trains to carry the Royal Scots to Liverpool. The ill-fated train was a rag-tag compilation of fifteen coaches in which the soldiers travelled with five trucks for baggage, stores and ammunition  behind. Most of the carriages were ancient rolling stock, [4] lit by high pressure gas stored in cylinders beneath the floors. These were cheap and nasty. Inexpensive compared with alternative sources, the German Pinch gas which they used was clean and clear. Unfortunately it was readily combustible. [5] In every-day parlance, these coaches were not fit for purpose.

The officers were housed in more comfortable coaches, while the ORs (other ranks, such a neat way to differentiate the ordinary soldiers) were squeezed into outdated carriages. Eight or nine fully equipped men were squashed into compartments without a corridor or toilet facility. Even although the troops deserved priority, the train moved haltingly at first, and lost twenty minutes in its proposed schedule. At 6.49 am it crashed into a local train which had been ‘parked’ in the wrong direction just north of Gretna. Under normal circumstances the local train would have been held in one of the loops beside the Quintinshill signal box, but at that moment both loop lines were occupied with goods trains. The troop train overturned and the ancient wooden carriages smashed onto the north-bound track. Fifty-three seconds later the Glasgow-bound express ploughed into the wreckage and the gas cylinders exploded. [6] Carnage ensued. Men dazed and disorientated by the first collision were trapped in a burning inferno, some killed outright, some maimed and burned in horrific circumstances. The sheer hell of war erupted in the quiet Scottish border countryside. Such was the anguish of those trapped at the centre of the flames, unreachable, condemned to agonising death, screaming to be put out of their misery, that at least one officer emptied his pistol chamber into their midst in order to end the suffering. [7] Mercy-killing is not an act that any military man wants to acknowledge but it was a necessary act of compassion for those in extremity. [8]

According to the Royal Scots archives, three officers and 213 other ranks were killed, with five officers and 215 men injured. Only seven officers and 55 men emerged physically unscathed and continued to Liverpool. God only knows what they had witnessed, the trauma they suffered, the anguish and the guilt that they felt.  The survivors, the shocked remnants of a proud, proud fighting division were kept at Quintinshill until 4.00pm before being taken to Carlisle Castle. Denied even a night’s rest they were marched to Citadel Station in Carlisle and shunted off to Liverpool where the Empress of India had replaced the stricken Aquitania. Incredibly, they were put to work to salvage equipment before the War Office, possibly alerted to the public outcry from Scotland, ordered them from the ship. The Royal Scots Regimental History records that it was at the insistence of the Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Peebles that all but he, and a handful of officers, returned to Edinburgh. Officers were urgently needed in Gallipoli, but given all that they had been through it was desperately hard on them. [9]

Scotland stood in shock. So great was the impact on Leith, and the Burghs of Portobello and Musselburgh, now firmly attached to the city of Edinburgh, that the whole population was stunned in an unfathomable grief, so horrendous, so numbingly unbelievable that work came to a halt.

Lists of the dead were called out from parish pulpits on Sunday 23rd. Relatives of the missing or injured were taken by special train to Carlisle in the hope of finding their loved ones whole. How could a man be posted missing in his own country? Was he under the wreckage still? No-one could comprehend the depth of this awful tragedy. The coffins were sealed. Permanently. Some held bodies, some bits of bodies, some a mixture of ashes of what once were bodies. The funeral procession in Edinburgh on Monday 24th May, when the first 102 victims were laid to rest in a communal grave, took three hours to pass from the drill hall in Dalmeny Street to the cemetery at Rosebank in Pilrig Street. [10]

All of these young men set out to fight for ‘God, King and Country’ in a war for ‘civilisation’, but they were not considered equal in death. Prejudice against the Catholic population in Edinburgh extended to the grave.  At the close of the Presbyterian service in the battalion’s Drill Hall, Father J. O’Rourke was permitted to recite prayers for the dead, but no consideration was given to any Catholic Church involvement at Rosebank Cemetery where the Moderators of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church conducted the service. [11] On the following day, ‘inasmuch as three were members of the Roman Catholic community,’ a concession was agreed and Canon Stewart was permitted to offer prayers at the graveside. [12]

And who to blame? The authorities had to hand two ready-made culprits, Signalmen James Tinsley and George Meakin. Yes, they had broken company rules. Indeed Tinsley should not have been working due to what  doctors later diagnosed as epilepsy. But the practices used to accommodate the huge volume of traffic pounding along that stretch of railway line were known to their line manager, to the stationmaster at Gretna and railwaymen in general.

The signalmen had no command over the condition of the coaches, the safety of antiquated rolling stock travelling at high speed or the volume of traffic on that particular day. All of these factors contributed to the tragedy. The Board of Trade inquiry and the secret internal Caledonian Railway inquiry, the Coroner’s inquiry and the court hearings in Edinburgh focussed only on the signalmen. Officially it was the fault of Tinsley and Meakin who were sentenced to three years penal servitude and 18 months respectively. Those in power wanted to close the chapter on Quintinshill, file it away under the title  of the  Great Gretna Rail Disaster, and put it all down to culpable homicide. Under serious pressure from the railway-workers’ unions, who knew well that blame should have been fairly distributed elsewhere, the government had Tinsley and Meakin released from prison one year later. Both were re-employed in different capacities by the Caledonian Railway. Strange, indeed. Railway companies did not usually employ ‘convicted criminals’.

There was to be no permanent respite for those who survived. Lieutenant-Colonel Peebles and his five surviving officers sailed for Alexandria with the remainder of the Division and arrived at Gallipoli on 12 June 1915. The other two battalions of the regiment served with distinction in the battle of Gully Ravine on 28 June where  241 officers and men were killed, wounded or missing (presumed dead). Following normal practice, the surviving members of the 7th Royal Scots were merged with the 4th Royal Scots under Lieutenant-Colonel Peebles. On 13 August many of those who had been injured in the Gretna crash arrived at a second blistering hell in Gallipoli and were reunited with their compatriots.

The record shows that on 22 May 1915, 31 officers and 1026 other ranks left Larbert station in good spirit to fight for king and country in far off Turkey. Most had no idea where that was. Next day, only 20 officers and 477 men embarked from Liverpool. Of these 18 officers and 458 men landed in Gallipoli on 12 June. By 15 July only 6 officers and 169 men remained fit for action. In other words the 7th Royal Scots from Leith had an 86% casualty rate taken from their complement before it left Larbert. With the 23 officers and 440 other ranks added as reinforcements, the Regimental War Diary of the 7th Royal Scots states that  casualties at Gallipoli totalled 34 officers and 1,110 men or, astonishingly, 108% of their entrained strength. [13] What loss. It was tragedy layered upon tragedy for the three burghs. It was unwarranted hell for these men.

They were all victims of the lie that is Gallipoli. All sacrificed to keep the Russians out of Constantinople and focused on the eastern front. There were no medals for the brave men who were scalded and burned, desperately trying to save their comrades at Qunitinhill. No medals either for the Royal Scots who, disregarding their own safety, hauled away the ammunition wagons at the rear of the burning train despite the danger of imminent explosion. No lasting consideration for the shattered communities of Leith, Portobello and Musselburgh. No lingering compassion for the grieving friends and families. Almost immediately, Quintinshill was relegated to a footnote in history. Find it, if you can, in Sir Lawrence Weaver’s book, The Story of the Royal Scots, published in 1915. Turn to the chapter on the Dardanelles and there on page 244 you will see the sole reference to the tragic disaster… in a footnote. [14]

[1] Newspapers which have proved invaluable in their coverage of the events are the Dumfries and Galloway Standard, Carlisle Journal, Weekly Scotsman, Edinburgh Edinburgh News ]
[2] http://www.theroyalscots.co.uk/page/the-quintinshill-gretna-train-crash-22-may-1915
[3] Railway Government Control, Hansard House of Commons Debate, 27 August 1914, vol. 66, cc131-2.
[4] Jack Richards and Adrian Searle, The Quintinshill Conspiracy, p. 12.
[5] Peter Sain Ley Berry, The Ill-fated Battalion, p. 20.
[6] http://www.cwgc.org/media/108844/quintinshill_final.pdf
[7] Berry, The Ill-fated Battalion, p. 101.
[8] Richards and Searle, The Quintinshill Conspiracy, p. 30.
[9] Ibid., p. 48.
[10] Edinburgh Evening News, 24 May, 1915.
[11] The Scotsman, 25 May 1915.
[12] The Scotsman, 26 May 1915, p. 9.
[13] http://www.theroyalscots.co.uk/page/the-royal-scots-territorials-in-the-dardanelles-campaign-1915-16
[14] https://archive.org/stream/storyofroyalscot00weavuoft#page/n5/mode/2up

Gallipoli 19: Anzac Day; Perpetuating The Myth

In 1916, when the British government set up the Dardanelles Commission, they turned first to the most important member of the Secret Elite, Viscount Alfred Milner. Prime Minister Asquith and conservative leader, Bonar Law, both asked him to be its chairman, [1]  but Milner turned the offer down in favour of more immediate work with Lord Robert Cecil at the Foreign Office. [2] Anyone could supervise a whitewash. Alfred Milner’s influence want well beyond that of a commission chairman and he could ensure the conclusion without the need for his personal involvement. They turned to another friend and associate of the Secret Elite, Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, who accepted the position knowing full well that ‘it will kill me’. [3] And kill him it did. He died in January 1917 and was replaced by Sir William Pickford.

Others volunteered willingly. The position of Secretary to the Commission was taken by barrister Edward Grimwood Mears, who agreed to the post provided he was awarded a knighthood. [4] He had previously served on the Bryce Committee which falsified reports and generated volumes of lies about the extent of German atrocities in Belgium. [5] The British Establishment trusted Mears as a reliable placeman. Maurice Hankey, Cabinet Secretary and inner-circle member of the Secret Elite [6] ‘organised’ the evidence which politicians presented to the Commission. He rehearsed Lord Fisher’s evidence, and coached Sir Edward Grey, Herbert Asquith and Lord Haldane. [7] Asquith insisted that War Council minutes be withheld and thus managed to cover up his own support for the campaign. Churchill and Sir Ian Hamilton collaborated on their evidence and planned to blame the disaster on Lord Kitchener. [8] Unfortunately for them, that strategy sank in the cold North Sea when Kitchener was drowned off the coast of Orkney in 1916, and was henceforth confirmed for all time as a great national hero; an untouchable.

Churchill informed the Commission that Vice-Admiral Sackville-Carden’s telegram (in which he set out a ‘plan’ for a naval attack) was the most crucial document of all, [9] but there is no acknowledgement in the Commission’s findings that Churchill had duped Carden into producing a ‘plan’ or had lied when telling him that his ‘plan’ had the overwhelming support of ‘people in high authority.’ [10] Every senior member of the Admiralty had advised Churchill that a naval attack on its own would fail, but he made no reference to that and scapegoated the ineffective Carden. General Hamilton conveniently added that the only instructions he had received from Kitchener before his departure was that ‘we soldiers were clearly to understand that we were string number two. The sailors said they could force the Dardanelles on their own, and we were not to chip in unless the Admiral definitely chucked up the sponge.’ [11]

Criticisms in the Commission’s interim report in March 1917 were ‘muted and smudged’. The War Council should have sought more advice from naval experts; the expedition had not succeeded but ‘certain important political advantages’ had been secured. In the final report, delayed until the peace of 1919, criticism was again polite, bland and vague. ‘The authorities in London had not grasped the true nature of the conflict’ and ‘the plan for the August offensive was impractical.’ [12] Stopford received a mild reprimand. Major-General De Lisle suggested that politicians were trying to pin the blame on the soldiers. The Commission ostensibly investigated the campaign’s failings, but effectively suppressed criticism, concealed the truth and neither wholly blamed nor vindicated those involved.

Far more important than covering up individual culpability, the greatest fear of the London cabal was that, should the report come close to the truth, it would irrevocably damage imperial unity. Gallipoli had served to lock Australia more firmly into the British Imperial embrace. Before the final report was published, Hamilton warned Churchill that it had the potential to break up the Empire if it ‘does anything to shatter the belief still confidently clung to in the Antipodes, that the expedition was worth while, and that ‘the Boys’ did die to a great end and were so handled as to be able to sell their lives very dearly. …If the people of Australia and New Zealand feel their sacrifices went for nothing, then never expect them again to have any sort of truck with our superior direction in preparations for future wars.’ [13] This was the crux of the matter, even in 1919. The truth would threaten the unity of the Empire, run contrary to the Anzac mythology and expose the lies that official histories were presenting as fact. Prior to the final report, Hamilton wrote again to Churchill that the Commission’s chairman, Sir William Pickford, should be warned about the imperial issues at stake. He, Churchill, should ‘put all his weight on the side of toning down any reflections which may have been made.’ [14] In other words, it had to be a whitewash. The warning was heeded. The following year, Pickford was raised to the peerage as Baron Sterndale. It was ever thus for those who served the Secret Elite.

The truth about Gallipoli was buried and pliant historians have ensured that it stayed that way for nearly a century.

Surely a whitewash was impossible given that the Dardanelles Commission included Andrew Fisher, former Australian Prime Minister and then High Commissioner in London? But he too had bought into the big lie and made no attempt to question or refute its conclusions.

According to historian Les Carlyon, the Australian government did not welcome an inquiry into the disaster because ‘the Anzac legend had taken hold and Australia didn’t want officialdom spoiling the poetry.’ [15] The ‘poetry’, the ‘heroic-romantic’ myth, was created in the first instance by writers such as Charles Bean, Henry Nevison and John Masefield who glorified the Anzac sacrifice within the myth of Gallipoli. [16] Masefield’s effusive cover-up stated, ‘I began to consider the Dardanelles Campaign, not as a tragedy, nor a mistake, but as a great human effort, which came more than once, very near to triumph …That the effort failed is not against it; much that is most splendid in military history failed, many great things and noble men have failed. …This failure is the second grand event of the war; the first was Belgium’s answer to the German ultimatum.’ [17] Of Suvla Bay, where thousands died from thirst and dehydration, Masefield made the astonishing assertion: ‘The water supply of that far battlefield, indifferent as it was, at the best, was a triumph of resolve and skill unequalled yet in war.’ [18] This British apologist and purveyor of nauseating historical misrepresentation was rewarded with gushing praise from Lord Esher, member of the Secret Elite’s inner-core, together with a Doctorate of Literature by Oxford University, the Order of Merit by King George V and the prestigious post of Poet Laureate.

The British, French and Anzac troops who perished at Gallipoli are portrayed by mainstream historians as heroes who died fighting to protect democracy and freedom, not as ordinary young men duped by a great lie. Barely mentioned are the quarter million dead or maimed Ottoman soldiers who defended Gallipoli and the sovereignty and freedom of their homeland against aggressive, foreign invaders. The myths and lies that saturate the Gallipoli campaign are particularly prevalent in the Antipodes. ‘No-one could pass through the Australian education system without becoming aware of Gallipoli, but few students realise that the Anzacs were the invaders. Even after all these years, the Anzac legend, like all legends, is highly selective in what it presents as history.’ [19] And it is a well preserved and repeatedly inaccurate account that is force-fed to these impressionable youngsters.

Commemoration should respectfully educate people about what really happened at Gallipoli, but strategic analyst and former Australian Defence Force officer James Brown writes angrily about a cycle of jingoistic commemoration rather than quiet contemplation, with individuals, groups and organisations cashing in on Anzac Day. ‘A century after the war to end all wars, Anzac is being bottled, stamped and sold. …the Anzac industry has gone into hyperdrive. …What started as a simple ceremony is now an enormous commercial enterprise. …Australians are racing to outdo one another with bigger, better, grander and more intricate forms of remembrance.’ Even the Australian War Memorial has devised an official “Anzac Centenary Merchandising Plan” to capitalise on “the spirit.”’ [20] The myth has been rebranded to mask the pain of the awful reality of Gallipoli. The emaciated, dehydrated victims have been turned into the bronzed heroes of Greek mythology.

A number of Australian historians remain deeply concerned about the relentless militarisation of Australian history, and how the commemoration of Gallipoli has been conflated with a mythology of white Australia’s creation and the ‘manly character’ of its citizens. That mythology is submerging the terrible truth about why so many were sacrificed and has become so powerful and pervasive that to challenge it risks the charge of inexcusable disrespect for the dead. ‘To be accused of being “anti-Anzac” in Australia today is to be charged with the most grievous offence.’ [21] A few brave historians have dared to voice their deep disquiet.

Professors Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds believe that Australian history has been ‘thoroughly militarised’, and their aim is ‘to encourage a more critical and truthful public debate about the uses of the Anzac myth.’ Dissent, they say, is rarely tolerated and ‘to write about what’s wrong with Anzac today is to court the charge of treason.’ Anzac Day has ‘long since ceased to be a day of solemn remembrance and become a festive event, celebrated by backpackers wrapped in flags, playing rock music, drinking beer and proclaiming their national identity on the distant shores of Turkey.’ [22] Their forefathers were duped into volunteering a century before at a cost they never foresaw. It is clear that many of those young Australians who travel en-masse to the shores of Gallipoli every April have also been duped. Should there not be a moral outrage against these obscene celebrations; a moral outrage that these young people have been so misled by the Gallipoli myth that the irony of guzzling beer on the shores where their forefathers died from thirst and dehydration is lost on them.?

Professor Lake revealed that after a radio broadcast, she was subjected to personal abuse and accusations of disloyalty. Harvey Broadbent, another Australian historian who questions the myth, has also been subject to similar comments by some fellow Gallipoli historians that ‘has come uncomfortably close to abuse.’ Like us, Broadbent proposes that ‘it was the intention of the British and French governments of 1915 to ensure that the Dardanelles and the Gallipoli Campaign would not succeed and that it was conceived and conducted as a ruse to keep the Russians in the war and thus the continuation of the Eastern Front.’ [23] Exactly. Their aim was to keep Russia in the war but out of Constantinople. And they succeeded, but at a terrible cost.

The heroic-romantic myth, so integral to the cult of remembrance, has survived, perpetuated by compliant historians and politicians. As James Brown has written, Gallipoli and the Anzac sacrifice, is like a magic cloak which ‘can be draped over a speech or policy to render it unimpeachable, significant and enduring.’ [24] Norman Mailer pointed out that ‘Myths are tonic to a nation’s heart. Once abused, however, they are poisonous.’

Gallipoli was a lie within the lie that was the First World War, and peddling commemoration mythology as truth is an insult to the memory of those brave young men who were sacrificed on the merciless shores of a foreign country. The Australian government is outspending Britain on commemoration of the First World War by more than 200 per cent, and commemorating the Anzac centenary might cost as much as two-thirds of a billion dollars. Just as in Britain, the Government of Australia seeks to be the the guardian of public memory, choreographing commemoration into celebration. [25] Nothing attracts politicians more than being photographed, wrapped in the national flag, outbidding each other in their public display of patriotism.

These hypocrites ritually condemn war while their rhetoric gestures in the opposite direction. [26] The War Memorial in Sydney’s Hyde Park proudly exhorts, ‘Let Silent Contemplation Be Your Offering’, yet the deafening prattle of political expediency mocks the valiant dead with empty words and lies. Don’t be fooled.

Those young men died at Gallipoli not for ‘freedom’ or ‘civilisation’, but for the imperial dreams of the wealthy manipulators who controlled the British Empire. They died horribly, deceived, expendable, and in the eyes of the power-brokers, the detritus of strategic necessity.

Please remember that when you remember them.

[1] Milner Papers, Bonar Law to Milner, 25 July 1916.
[2] A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, pp. 350-1.
[3] Roger Owen, Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul, pp. 388-9.
[4] Jenny Macleod, Reconsidering Gallipoli, p. 27.
[5] see previous blog;  The Bryce Report…Whatever Happened To the Evidence? 10 September 2014.
[6] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 313.
[7]  Stephen Roskill, Hankey, p. 294.
[8] Macleod, Reconsidering Gallipoli, pp. 28-9.
[9] Martin Gilbert, Winston S Churchill, p. 248.
[10] Alan Moorehead, Gallipoli, p. 40.
[11] Martin Gilbert, Winston S Churchill, p. 347.
[12] L A Carlyon, Gallipoli  p. 646.
[13] Macleod, Reconsidering Gallipoli, p. 33. [14] Ibid. [15] L A Carlyon, Gallipoli, pp. 645-7.
[16] Macleod, Reconsidering Gallipoli, p. 4.
[17] John Masefield, Gallipoli p. 2.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Kevin Fewster, Vecihi Bagram, Hatice Bagram, Gallipoli, The Turkish Story, pp. 10-11.
[20] James Brown, Anzac’s long Shadow, The Cost of Our National Obsession, pp. 17-20. [21] Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History, p. xxi.
[22] Ibid., pp. vii-viii.
[23] Harvey Broadbent, Gallipoli, One Great Deception? http://www.abc.net.au/news/2009-04-24/30630
[24] James Brown, Anzac’s Long Shadow, p 29.
[25] Ibid., pp. 19-22.
[26] Lake and Reynolds, What’s Wrong With Anzac?, p. 8.

Gallipoli 18: Keith Murdoch And The Great Witch-Hunt

Popular wisdom and official histories would have us believe that Sir Ian Hamilton’s career and the Dardanelles offensive were brought to an end by an unknown junior Australian journalist, Keith Murdoch. [1] In Australia, his role has been given iconic status amongst the myths surrounding Gallipoli, but as we have detailed in the previous blog, the decision to remove Hamilton had already been taken on the recommendation of Maurice Hankey, aided and abetted by Major Guy Dawnay. The intervention of Keith Murdoch did play a vitally important role in that it deflected attention away from Hankey and the Secret Elite, making it appear that the truth about the Gallipoli disaster was suddenly exposed by a tenacious journalist. As Alan Moorehead observed in his masterly history, Murdoch’s ‘entry into the explosive scene is one of the oddest incidents in the Gallipoli campaign.’ [2]

So who was Keith Murdoch and how was he able to gain access to the heart of the British Establishment? A Son of the Manse, his father was a Scottish Presbyterian Minister who had emigrated to Melbourne in 1884. Murdoch sought a career in journalism but was handicapped by a serious speech defect. He went to London in 1908 in an attempt to break into Fleet Street and have his impediment cured, but unlike any other young aspirant newspaperman he had ‘ a sheaf of introductions’ from the Australian Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin. [3] One year earlier, Deakin had attended the Colonial Conference in London and was befriended by Alfred Milner with whom he formed a close bond. [4] Milner was the acknowledged leader of the Secret Elite and the most influential spokesman on Imperial affairs. Given his own journalistic connections, Alfred Milner would have been a natural contact to advance the young Murdoch’s career. On his return to Australia in November 1909, Keith Murdoch became Commonwealth parliamentary reporter for the Sydney Evening Sun and was soon in close contact with Deakin’s successor as Prime Minister, Andrew Fisher, and other leading Labour Party Ministers. He helped found the Australian Journalists’ Association (AJA) in 1910 and was totally sympathetic to the developing ideas of Milner and his Round Table associates. [5]

Murdoch had sought the position of Australian Press War Correspondent but was beaten into second place in the AJA election by Charles Bean who later became the official Australian War Historian. Disappointed by this failure, Murdoch sought new horizons, and was ‘told privately’ that a job associated with The Times in London was his if he wanted it. [6] The 29 year-old, left Melbourne again on 13 July 1915 to become editor of the United Cable Service at The Times offices in London.

Official accounts relate that he was asked by the Australian government to break his journey at Egypt in order to enquire into complaints about delays in soldiers’ mail. It was odd that for such a unremarkable task, Murdoch carried letters of introduction from both the Australian Prime Minister (Andrew Fisher) and Minister of Defence (George Pearce). The Prime Minister’s letter specifically stated that ‘Mr. Murdoch is also undertaking certain enquires for the Government of the Commonwealth in the Mediterranean theatre of war.’ [7] How peculiar. A journalist had been asked to conduct an investigation on behalf of his government rather than his employers. There were many Australians at Gallipoli who could have undertaken such a mundane inquiry, which begs the question of Murdoch’s real purpose. What was he sent out to do? What were his private instructions from the Australian government?

On arriving at Cairo in mid- August, he wrote to Sir Ian Hamilton and was duly given permission to visit  Gallipoli and speak to the Australian troops. Hamilton somewhat gullibly wrote in his diary that Murdoch ‘seems a sensible man’ [8] but wondered why his duty to Australia could be better executed with a pen than with a rifle. [9] Keith Murdoch spent four days there and met Charles Bean and two other Australian Journalists. Given that there were at least three other independent Australian journalists already there, why was Murdoch given his rather bizarre task of investigating mail? More pertinent to all that followed, he held confidential meetings with Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, the British war correspondent. According to Murdoch’s biographer, Desmond Zwar, Ashmead-Bartlett was disgusted by Hamilton’s handling of the campaign and asked Murdoch if he would take a sealed letter addressed to Prime Minister Asquith and post it when he arrived in London. [10] Ashmead-Bartlett, on the other hand, related a different story. According to his recollections, Murdoch, fearful of the impact on Australian morale of a winter campaign, ‘begged’ him to write a letter to the authorities which he would carry uncensored to London. Ashmead-Barlett coached Murdoch on what to say when he reached England, ‘but he wants something definite under my own signature.’ [11] Why did Murdoch need a signed statement, and what had any of this to do with the mail?

On 8 September Ashmead-Bartlett agreed to write a letter to Asquith informing him of the true state of affairs at Gallipoli. Men had been sacrificed in impossible conditions. No adequate steps had been taken to keep them supplied with water. ‘In consequence many of these unfortunate volunteers went three days in very hot weather on one bottle of water, and yet were expected to advance carrying heavy loads, and to storm strong positions.’ Within four weeks, nearly fifty thousand men were killed, wounded or missing. The Army was in a deplorable condition and the men thoroughly dispirited. ‘The muddles and mismanagement beat anything that has ever occurred in our military history… At present the Army is incapable of a further offensive… I am convinced the troops could be withdrawn under cover of the warships without much loss… We have not yet gained a single acre of ground of any strategical value.’ [12] This was not news to the British Cabinet or War Office, for Hankey and Dawnay had already revealed the full extent of the disaster.

When Murdoch reached Marseilles he was met by a British intelligence officer with an escort of British troops and French gendarmes and ordered to hand over Ashmead-Bartlett’s letter. [13] It has been suggested that another journalist, Henry Nevison, was eaves-dropping during their private conversation and betrayed them to the authorities, but to this day no convincing explanation has been forthcoming as to how British Intelligence learned of the letter. Murdoch arrived in London on 21 September, made his way directly to the offices of  The Times, and began typing up a report for his own Prime Minster which was highly critical of Sir Ian Hamilton. [14] His first contact just happened to be The Times editor, Geoffrey Dawson, a man at the inner-core of the Secret Elite. [15] According to the Australian historian, Les Carlyon, Murdoch ‘might just as well have been walking around with the sign ‘Pawn’ on his back. Powerful men who wanted Britain out of the Dardanelles, would push him all around the board’. [16] While Carlyon is correct about the powerful men behind the scenes, was Murdoch simply an unwitting pawn or had he already bought into their witch-hunt against Hamilton?

Over the following days Keith Murdoch met with numerous individuals who had been responsible for initiating the Gallipoli disaster including Asquith, Sir Edward Grey, Lord Kitchener, Sir Edward Carson and Winston Churchill.

In an accompanying letter to Asquith, Murdoch criticised Hamilton and the General Staff for ‘disastrous underestimations and stubbornly resisting in the face of hopeless schemes’ and ‘gross wrongdoings’. [17] No mention was made of Hamilton being starved of the men and munitions needed to successfully undertake the campaign or the countless requests that Kitchener studiously ignored. Without checking the accuracy of Murdoch’s accusations, or giving Hamilton a chance to respond, Asquith had them printed on Committee of Imperial Defence stationary and distributed to the Cabinet. [18] Consider the implications. Members of the Cabinet were formally issued with Murdoch’s unsubstantiated report to his own Prime Minister in Australia, as if it was an official British Government document. Was this not fraud?

Murdoch may well have played the role of willing pawn in the Secret Elite’s grand game, but one fact remains irrefutable. From 1915 onwards he was intimately connected to the most powerful men in the British Empire; men who valued his contribution and whose values he shared.

Meantime, Ashmead-Bartlett had been ordered home by General Hamilton, and on his arrival in London immediately met with Lord Northcliffe, another powerful figure closely associated with the Secret Elite. [19]  ‘The snowball was now gathering momentum.’ [20] The witch-hunt continued. He told Ashmead-Bartlett  that a great responsibility rested on his shoulders to inform the government, and the country, of the true state of affairs at Gallipoli.  [21]

On 11 October 1915 Bulgaria entered the war on the side of the Central Powers, and a direct route was opened between Germany and Turkey. It was time to get out. Three days later in the House of Lords, Lord Alfred Milner gave his blessing to a withdrawal from Gallipoli: ‘To speak quite frankly, I should have thought that whatever evils had resulted from the disastrous developments in the Balkans there was at least this advantage, that it might have given us an opportunity which may never recur of withdrawing from an enterprise the successful completion of which is now hopeless.’ [22] Milner had spoken. That very night the Dardanelles Committee decided to recall General Hamilton because ‘he had lost the confidence of his troops,’ [23] Hands were reaching down to push him under the water [24] and ’Kitchener was asked to do the drowning.'[25]

On 17 October the chief scapegoat boarded HMS Chatham to begin the long journey home. He was replaced by General Sir Charles Monro who almost immediately recommended evacuation. When Hamilton returned to England he received a very cold reception and people ‘cut’ him and his wife in the street. [26] The Secret Elite made a spectacular gesture in recalling Hamilton and ensuring through their pawns, Murdoch and Ashamed Bartlett, that his career was over. He was dubbed the man responsible for the disaster; responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of men. In truth, no one could have succeeded at Gallipoli under the conditions that Kitchener and the rest of the cabal imposed. But remember, the plan was set to fail. Constantinople could not be given to the Russians.

In the event, the nightmare was not yet over. Kitchener went in person to Gallipoli in early November and saw for the first time the impossibility of the task. He advised General Birdwood that ‘quietly and secretly’ a scheme should be devised to withdraw the allied forces. [27] On 23 November the War Committee officially decided to evacuate the whole peninsula on military grounds. Three days later the troops, who were still without winter kit, were faced with hurricane force winds and the heaviest rainfall and blizzards to hit the Dardanelles in forty years. Sentries froze to death still clutching their rifles, and five thousand men suffered frostbite. Flood water filled the Allied trenches carrying the rotting corpses of pack horses and Turkish soldiers washed out from their shallow graves. Two hundred British troops drowned. ‘Survivors could think of nothing but getting away from that accursed place.’ [28] On 12 December the men at Suvla and Anzac were told for the first time that they were being taken off. By 9 January the last man stepped safely onto a boat at Helles.

Questions remain unanswered about how the withdrawal was completed without a single casualty.

[1] Denis Winter, Haig’s Command, A Reassessment, p. 291.
[2] Alan Moorehead, Gallipoli, p. 305.
[3] http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/murdoch-sir-keith-arthur-7693%5D
[4] A M Gollin, Proconsul in Politics, pp. 136-7.
[5] The Round Table was the name given to Milner’s organisation which promoted imperial ideals and aimed to influence the Dominions and other territories.
[6] Desmond Zwar, In Search of Keith Murdoch, p. 20.
[7] Ibid., p. 22.
[8] Sir Ian Hamilton, Gallipoli Diary Vol. II, 2 September, 1915.
[9] Zwar, In Search of Keith Murdoch, p. 25.
[10] Ibid., p. 28.
[11] Ellis Ashmead-Barlett, The Uncensored Dardanelles, p. 239.
[12] Ibid., pp. 240-243.
[13] Moorehead, Gallipoli, p. 309.
[14] Travers, Gallipoli, p. 274.
[15] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 312.
[16] Carlyon, Gallipoli, p. 599.
[17] Harvey Broadbent, Gallipoli, The Fatal Shore, p. 246.
[18] Carlyon, Gallipoli, p. 496.
[19] Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, pp. 146-7.
[20] Zwar, In Search of Keith Murdoch, pp. 40-41.
[21] Ellis Ashmead-Barlett, The Uncensored Dardanelles, pp. 254-5.
[22] Hansard, House of Lords Debate 14 October 1915 vol 19 cc1045-62.
[23] Travers, Gallipoli, p. 275.
[24] Carlyon, Gallipoli, p. 502.
[25] Ibid., p. 503.
[26] Ibid., 504.
[27] Ibid., p. 619.
[28] Moorehead, Gallipoli, p. 327.

Gallipoli 17: The Blame Game Begins

Most of the critical mistakes made in the original landings on Gallipoli in April were repeated in the August offensive. [1] Thousand of men were again sacrificed to little of no purpose and the commanding heights of the peninsula remained in the hands of the Turkish defenders. The attack at Lone Pine alone cost the Australian force 2,000 dead. General William Birdwood had taken command of the Anzacs in December 1914, but his confidence was not backed by military success. Like other contemporary senior commanders, Birwood failed to understand the debilitating effect of dysentery and other illnesses on his Anzac troops [2] and as a consequence lost more than 10,000 men. The horrors were repeated. Thousands of wounded were left for days under a scorching sun without water. [3] Bloated and rotting corpses lay everywhere and the stench of death sickened the living. When it seemed that the horrors of Gallipoli couldn’t possibly get any worse, hundreds of wounded men on the slopes of Scimitar Hill were condemned to an agonising death, unable to escape the flames of a raging grass fire. War correspondent Ashmead-Bartlett wrote, ‘When the fire passed on, little mounds of scorched khaki alone marked the spot where another mismanaged soldier of the King had returned to mother earth.’ [4] These lads were denied the glorious, noble death for civilisation concocted in the post-war era to justify their slaughter. Sick, wounded and abandoned, betrayed by hapless commanders, they were sacrificed without remorse.

Throughout August the surviving troops continued to suffer from dysentery or a virulent form of paratyphoid. Hardly anyone escaped. Eventually, more than a thousand sick and dying men were evacuated on a daily basis. [5] The Anzacs, who had arrived in peak physical condition, shrank before their commanders’ eyes, thin and gaunt with sunken cheeks. The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps was ‘melting away through disease at the appalling rate of 10 per cent per week,’ and nearly 80 per cent of the Allied troops on the Peninsula suffered from debilitating sickness. When GHQ offered advice on steps to be taken to avoid the infestation of flies, an embittered Australian doctor responded that he ‘might as well have spat on a bushfire.’ [6] At the end of August, Captain Aspinall reported that Allied casualties totalled 89,000 and Turkish morale had risen. [7] It was a different story for the commanders. Hunter-Weston had returned to England to nurse his dysentery, and the bungling Stopford was relieved of his duties and sent home.

Maurice Hankey, Secretary to the War Council, member of the Secret Elite [8] and the man who originally conjured the mission, was sent out to Gallipoli to gather ‘first hand information’. He held the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel and was given a ‘very unusual’ directive from the Prime Minister to go wherever he wanted and be at liberty to report directly to Downing Street. Before Hankey left London, Kitchener reassured him that he did not intend to allow the army to advance on Constantinople even if they were victorious on the peninsula. [9] It was a stunning admission, a clear indication of the true nature of the campaign of which Hankey was aware. From the outset the stated objective had allegedly been to take control of the Straits and seize Constantinople on behalf of the Russians. It was not. Constantinople was never to be handed to Russia. Tens of thousands of men had been, and continued to be sacrificed for a political lie. What mattered was that the Russians believed it.

Hankey arrived at Lemnos on 25 July and spent three weeks on conducted tours. He watched the disaster of Suvla Bay unfold much as Nero watched Rome burn. On 14 August he telegrammed the Prime Minister and Kitchener that the ‘surprise’ attack had ‘definitely failed. … Already enemy is entrenching within 3,000 yards of Suvla Bay.’ [10] Were these coded messages? There could have been no surprise attacks. The Turks were well entrenched, dug-in deep like the Germans on the Western Front. Every piece of evidence that Hankey had to hand stated explicitly that only a joint naval and military attack with legions of men, had any chance of success. Even his phraseology, ‘definitely failed’ carried no element of disappointment or surprise. It was exactly as expected.

While hovering around the Gallipoli shores, observing and recording the ongoing tragedy for a very select audience, Hankey made contact with a number of old acquaintances. Foremost amongst these was Major Guy Payan Dawnay, a member of Hamilton’s general staff at Gallipoli. Dawnay spent three years working with Hankey on the Committee of Imperial Defence and served in the War Office from September 1914 until March 1915. [11] With such close and direct association with both Hankey and Kitchener, it seems fair to speculate that Dawnay had been sent to keep a careful watch on Sir Ian Hamilton on their behalf.

Poor Hamilton was more than naive in his assessment of Maurice Hankey whom he welcomed into his headquarters ‘as a real help’. Hamilton believed that the Secretary to the War Council and close confidant of the Prime Minister would set the record straight. ‘From my personal standpoint, it will be worth anything to us if, amidst the flood of false gossip pouring out by this very mail to our Dardanelles Committee, to the Press, to Egypt and to London Drawing Rooms, we have sticking up out of it, even one little rock in the shape of an eye-witness.’ [12] He was to be sorely disappointed.

Hankey returned home via Athens, where he had long discussions with Sir Valentine Chirol, a member of the Secret Elite [13] and an ‘old friend’, Admiral Mark Kerr. [14] Kerr had played an important role in enabling the Goeben and Breslau to reach the safety of the Dardanelles at the outbreak of war. [15] Both men were deeply involved in Foreign Office intrigues in the Balkans, where the future involvement of Greece and Bulgaria in the war still lay in the balance.

When Hankey reached London on 28 August he had sufficient first hand evidence to recommend that a pretext be found for a withdrawal from Gallipoli. The chances of ‘a reasonable prospect of achieving success’ depended on a heavy investment in men and equipment, exactly as Sir Ian Hamilton had repeatedly requested, but Kitchener had refused. In a ‘very secret’ part of his report he wrote that, ‘ The Government may well ask themselves whether they are justified in continuing a campaign which makes so tremendous a toll on the country in human life and material resources.’ [16] Other options were completely unpalatable; there could be no repeat of the naval attack or an embarrassing diplomatic arrangement with Turkey and Russia. [17]

Maurice Hankey, who had originally brought the idea of an attack on the Dardanelles to the War Council for ulterior motives, knew by the end of August 1915 that the ploy had worked. Four Russian Officers had witnessed the Sulva Bay landings and informed Hamilton that his actions had saved the whole Army of the Caucuses, ‘and the Grand Duke knew it.’ They added that the Czar ‘ bitterly regretted’ that lack of supplies had prevented his army corps from ‘standing by to help.’ [18]. Russia remained committed to the war in the belief that Britain had sacrificed tens of thousands of men in a gallant effort to capture Constantinople on her behalf. It was job done. Next step was to arranged a strategic withdrawal, and ensure that a sacrificial scapegoat was prepared.

The man responsible for creating that scapegoat was Maurice Hankey though he was careful to conceal his role from the public domain. As ever, the Secret Elite used others to do their dirty work. Shortly after speaking with Hankey, Major Guy Dawnay left Gallipoli for London. General Hamilton harboured a misplaced trust in Dawnay who had convinced him that someone had to go and put the case for reinforcements directly to the government. Kitchener had remained deaf to Hamilton’s pleas and rumours of exaggerated military success were proving counter-productive. Dawnay was the true viper in Hamilton’s nest. A friend of the royal family and Prime Minister Asquith, Major Dawnay had access usually restricted to high-ranking members of the Secret Elite. On his arrival in London he was treated in a manner no other had enjoyed.

He told his story of Gallipoli incompetence to the King, and was permitted to present an unexpurgated analysis to Cabinet. It was, as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography recorded, ‘exceptional for a young staff officer to advise ministers to overrule his own C-I-C.’ [19] His audience included Asquith, Lloyd George, Bonar Law, Curzon and ‘just about everybody else with influence’. [20] Sir Ian Hamilton was being set-up to take the blame for the failure of the Gallipoli Campaign and as the case against him gathered pace in London, one final twist of the knife was to come from an unexpected source which would deflect attention from the secret cabal.

[1] Robert Rhodes James, Gallipoli, p. 222.
[2] Robert Rhodes James, ‘Birdwood, William Riddell, first Baron Birdwood (1865–1951)’, ref. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online May 2009 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/31898.
[3] Edmond Delage, The Tragedy of the Dardanelles, pp. 216-7.
[4] Michael Hickey, Gallipoli, p. 319.
[5] Delage, The Tragedy, p. 222.
[6]  James, Gallipoli, p. 222.
[7] Tim Travers, Gallipoli,p. 273.
[8] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p 313.
[9] Stephen Roskill, Hankey, p. 189.
[10] Ibid., pp. 198-9.
[11] Dawnay had been a student at the Staff College at Camberley. His imperialist credentials were celebrated in his co-founding the Chatham Dining Club in 1910, [Richard Davenport-Hines, ‘Dawnay, Guy Payan (1878–1952)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; ] a seed-bed for those who shared the Secret Elite philosophy of British Race supremacy. Guest speakers between 1910 and 1914 included many of the most senior members of the Secret Elite including Leo Amery, Robert Brand, William Waldergrave Palmer, Earl of Selborne, Walter Long and George Lloyd. Maurice Hankey was amongst the first club members.  http://www.chathamdiningclub.org.uk/speakers/
[12] General Sir Ian Hamilton, Gallipoli Diary, Vol.II, chapter XVII, 19 August 1915. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22021/22021-h/22021-h.htm#Page_144
[13]  Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 313.
[14] Roskill, Hankey, p. 204.
[15] See Gallipoli Blog 4. Fumbling Incompetence…And Too Few Stokers
[16] National Archives PRO CAB 42/3.
[17] Roskill, Hankey, p. 207.
[18] General Sir Ian Hamilton, Gallipoli Diary, Vol.II, chapter XVII, 30 August 1915. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/22021/22021-h/22021-h.htm#Page_144
[19] Richard Davenport-Hines, Dawnay, Guy Payan (1878–1952), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004.
[20] John Laffin, The Agony of Gallipoli, p. 189.