America 1917: 2. Promises Given, Promises Broken.

The 1916 election proved to be very close indeed. What matters in an American Presidential election is the Electoral College vote of which, in 1912, there were 530, so the winner had to reach a minimum of 266.

When the first returns from the Eastern States were announced, Republican Charles Hughes appeared to have won by a landslide. By seven o’clock on 7 November it was certain that Wilson had lost New York and the other populous Northeastern States with their heavy votes in the Electoral College followed in swift succession; New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Illinois, Wisconsin and Delaware went Republican. It was a rout.[1] Apparently.

Election extras were quickly on the streets bearing huge portraits of ‘The President Elect, Charles Evans Hughes’. As night fell on Washington, strange forces spread across the United States. President Wilson’s private secretary, Joseph Tumulty was instructed not to concede. He was reported to have received a mysterious, anonymous telephone message warning him ‘in no way or by the slightest sign give up the fight.’ [2] Remarkably the American historian and New York Herald Tribune journalist, Walter Millis wrote ‘Who it was he never knew; perhaps it was a miracle.’ Absurd. Ridiculous. Preposterous. Must we always be taken as fools? How many anonymous callers have the telephone number of the President’s private secretary or could order him not to concede the election? Malpractice was afoot.

In London, The Times pronounced, ’Mr Hughes Elected’ in a Republican landslide. Its sober conclusion was that Mr Wilson has been defeated not by, but in spite of his neutrality. [3] The Kolnische Volkrientung cheered that ‘German-Americans have defeated Wilson’, while in Vienna, the Neue Freie Presse claimed that Hughes had been elected to bring an end to an era where ‘the Steel Trust and the Bethlehem works may still make further profits and that the price of munitions shares may be whipped up still further while Morgan further extends his financial kingdom.’ [4] The inference was that the people had turned against the military – industrial profiteers. But they were all running ahead of themselves.

At daybreak on 8 November, while the New York Times conceded Wilson’s defeat, Tumulty remained unmoved. He was quietly informed that the rot had been stopped at Ohio by a margin of 60,000 votes. Colonel House ordered the Democratic Headquarters to put every county chairman in every doubtful state across America on high alert. They were urged to exercise their ‘utmost vigilance’ on every ballot box.[5] How odd that such instructions should be issued on the day following the election. What did House know that others did not? Projections of a Hughes’ victory shrank from certainty to doubt until the entire election result hung on the outcome from California. Secret Service agents and US Marshals were drafted into the largest Californian counties to guard ballot boxes and supervise proceedings. California, with 13 Electoral College votes in 1916, was pivotal to determining the winner. On 8 November, the Electoral vote stood at 264 to Wilson and 254 to Hughes.

Before the mystical, middle-of-the-night change of fortune, the Democrats had conceded California to the Republican challenger, but they declared their decision premature. After a two day recount, Wilson was declared winner by a mere 3,420 out of a total of 990,250 Californian votes cast. Talk of election-fraud and vote-buying prompted the Republican party to file legal protests, [6] but nothing significant materialised. They were effectively too late. While scrutiny of the returns showed minor vote-tallying errors, and affected both sides, these appeared to be random. Nothing fraudulent could be proved.

An angry and suspicious Republican Party refused to concede the election. The final recount in California showed that Wilson had gained 46.65% of votes cast and Hughes 46.27%. The Republican candidate baulked at accusing his rival of fraud. His final statement acknowledged ‘in the absence of absolute proof of fraud, no such cry should be raised to becloud the title of the next President of the United States.’ [7] ‘Absolute proof’ set a very high level of certainty. In New Hampshire the lead changed hands during the canvassing of returns and Wilson won the State by a mere 56 Votes. [8]

Vested interests jumped to close down the Republican options. In London, The Times could not believe that ‘the patriotic and shrewd men who manage the electioneering affairs of the Republican Party will attempt to impugn that decision [Wilson’s claim to victory] without clear and conclusive evidence.’[9] Consider the pressure that was heaped upon Charles Hughes. War in Europe raged on. A newly elected government in the United States would have brought about a complete change in all of the key cabinet posts with consequent dislocation of existing ties. Imagine the confusion if a President Hughes had to appoint new ambassadors, new consuls, new State Department staff, new White House staff and so forth.

Woodrow Wilson (left) and Charles Hughes. We will never know who truly won the 1916 election

Colonel House told the President that ‘Germany almost to a man is wishing for your defeat and that France and England are almost to a man wishing for your success.’[10] They weren’t wishing for his success, they were dependant on it. In the end, Wilson won more popular votes overall, ( 9,129,606 – 8,538,221) and no clear evidence of malpractice could be found. On 22 November Charles Hughes accepted the election result as it stood. His acquiescence did not go unrewarded. Charles Evans Hughes became United States Secretary of State between 1921and 1925, a judge on the Court of International Justice between 1928 and 1930, and Chief Justice of the United States from 1930 to 1941. His son, Charles Evans Hughes junior, was appointed Solicitor General by Herbert Hoover.

Primed by his jubilant backers, Woodrow Wilson demonstrated an unexpectedly theatrical touch at the start of his second term in office. Not since George Washington had a president delivered his first formal presidential address to the Senate itself. Wilson did this on 22 January, 1917 in a barnstorming speech which created the impression of an enlightened, benevolent master-statesman to whom the world ought to listen. He called for ‘peace without victory’ because:

‘Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a victor’s terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last.’[11]

As rhetoric, this was stout stuff. As policy, it did not last for long. He claimed that his soaring vision for peace and the future was based on core American values unshackled by entangling alliances.[12] The shining centrepiece of his dazzling new utopia was to be a League of Nations which could enforce peace. The Senate sat mesmerised and many rose to salute him at the end of an impressive performance. Democrats waxed lyrical with claims that Wilson’s speech ‘was the greatest message of the century…the most momentous utterance that has a yet been made during this most extraordinary era…simply magnificent…the most wonderful document he has ever delivered.’[13] His Republican rivals were more circumspect in their appraisal, describing it as ‘presumptuous’ and ‘utterly impractical.’

American newspapers split opinion in predictable fashion. The New York World saluted his principles of liberty and justice; the Philadelphia Public Ledger declared that Wilson’s oration was inspired by lofty idealism and the Washington Post thought it constituted a shining ideal. The conservative New York Sun caustically remarked that having failed for four years to secure peace with Mexico, Wilson had no business lecturing the world on the terms for peace with Europe, while The New York Herald warned that ‘Mr Wilson’s suggestion would lead to the hegemony of the Anglo-Saxon nations…propaganda for which ‘has been in evidence for a quarter of a century.’ [14]

In Europe reaction was naturally selfish. The British government refused to countenance his proposal first and foremost because he had added a passage on freedom of the seas which challenged their divine right to dominate the oceans. Having shed rivers of blood on the fields of Flanders and beyond, the Europeans were not attracted to ‘peace without victory’. The French novelist, Anatole France, a Nobel Prizewinner for literature, likened peace without victory to ‘bread without yeast…mushrooms without garlic…love without quarrels…camel without humps’. [15]

But Wilson strode that world stage for darker reasons. Who, one wonders, whispered in his ear that all of his visionary pronouncements could not deliver a place at the high table of international settlement at the end of the war if America was not a participant? He could not logically take part in the final resolution of the conflict unless the United States was a full partner in absolute victory. Peace without victory was an empty promise, a misdirection to the jury of hope.

On 4 March 1917, President Woodrow Wilson gave his second inaugural address to Congress and proclaimed that America stood ‘firm in armed neutrality’ but warned that ‘we may even be drawn on by circumstances…to a more active assertion of our rights’.[16 ] Twenty-nine days later, on 2 April, he again addressed a joint Session of Congress. This time his purpose was to seek their approval for war with Germany. In a lofty speech he revisited the same moral high ground with which the Secret Elite and their agents in Britain had previously gone to war. With claims about saving civilisation, it might have been penned by Sir Edward Grey:

‘It is a fearful thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilisation itself seeming to be in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts-for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.’ [17]

America was encouraged to war in order to fight for democracy. The phrase has a familiar ring. What had caused this violent swing from peace to war in barely four months?

1. Cuddy, Irish Americans and the 1916 Election, American Quarterly vol. 21, no 2, Part 1 p. 235.
2. Walter Millis, Road to War, America 1914-17, p. 352.
3. The Times, 8 Nov. 1916, p. 9.
4. The Times, 18 Nov. 1916. p. 7.
5. Millis, Road to War, America 1914-17, p. 353.
6. Foley, Ballot Battles: The History of Disputed Elections in the United States, p. 202.
7. New York Times, 11 November 1916.
8. Foley, Ballot Battles: p. 431.
9. The Times, 13 November, 1916, p. 9.
10. H. C. Peterson, Propaganda for War, p. 281.
11. Woodrow Wilson: Address to the Senate of the United States; World League for Peace, 22 January, 1917.
12. Ibid.
13. New York Times, 23 January, 1917, Scenes in the Senate .
14. New York Times, 23 January, 1917. Wilson’s Senate Speech – Press comments
15. Alfred Carter Jefferson, Anatole France: The Politics of Skepticism, p. 195.
16. http://www.firstworldwar.com/source/wilson1917inauguration.htm
17. Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Address to a Joint Session of Congress Requesting a Declaration of War against Germany, 2 April, 1917. http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=65366

A Pause to Prepare and Finalise Book Two in the Hidden History Series

We have decided to pause our current series of blogs which takes our Hidden History of the First World War up to the end of 1916 to find the requisite time for the publication of book 2. This second publication will cover all of the major topics included so far in these posts.

In addition we will consider the fabrications, lies and deliberate obfuscations which still surround key elements of that terrible conflict as it spiralled like a whirlwind across the world before the shocking, inhumane tactics which obligated Germany to accept the Treaty of Versailles. Our research will be focused on contentious issues including:

• American financial and business dealings which expanded through the Allied access to Federal Reserve funds
• The Balfour Declaration and the dealings behind the scenes which clearly demonstrate the reasons why this misnamed letter of intent became a matter of international contention. Who benefitted within the context of the First World War?
• The entrance of the United States into a global conflict in which so many millionaires had been created, and from which they could continue to thrive. Who changed President Wilson’s mind?
• The Russian Revolution and the American involvement in 1916-17.
• The Armistice and the horrors which followed in the Allied drive to crush the German people.
• The Secret Elite and the Treaty of Versailles.

We are grateful to our many thousands of readers, to those who have sent welcome and valuable comments and additional insight, and those who have re-blogged our posts. Please keep our link open so that we can post you direct information when book 2 is ready for publication and our blogs can restart.

Remember always that we are lied to by governments and truth is constantly abused by pliant historians. We continue to find that evidence has been torn from official documents [1] , that correspondence is missing or cannot be found, and that unaccountable omissions in original accounts and diaries are glossed over or explained by laughable excuses.

Once again, thanks for your support

Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor

[1] Barely a fortnight ago while researching Foreign Office documents at the National Archives ini London (FO 899, Cabinet Memoranda 1905-18 volume IV.) we discovered that page 685, which followed a confidential memo on the work of the Committee for Relief in Belgium and German guarantees, had been blatantly ripped from the bound documentation. What secrets once lay within? Most likely we will never know. Whatever it was, the Establishment did not want it recorded.

Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener 9: Secret Reports and Key Omissions

The Admiralty lied to the public throughout the war. It’s official reports and accounts of politically sensitive events like the sinking of the Lusitania and of the one major encounter at sea between the British Grand Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet have been discredited over the last century. [1] Nameless officials doctored ‘evidence’. Courts of Enquiry, especially that of the sinking of the Lusitania, were rigged and embarrassingly flawed. When he was First Sea Lord in 1920, Admiral Beatty falsified his own signature to battle plans concerning Jutland four years after the event. [2]

Immediately after the war the Conservative MP Commander Carolyn Bellairs wrote ‘The Jutland despatches withheld the truth about the battle; and Mr Balfour [First Lord of the Admiralty] who is said to have set aside responsible advice from within the Admiralty itself, refused to assemble a court-martial to inquire into all the circumstances. [By] Retaining Lord Jellicoe in command, he knew, and indeed asked the press, that criticism should be silenced.’ [3] This direct request to the press from the Secret Elite’s Arthur Balfour also covered the period when harsh questions were being asked about the fate of HMS Hampshire. ‘Criticism should be silenced.’ [4] What were they afraid of?

Bellairs had reached the rank of Commander after eighteen years service in the navy before becoming a journalist and politician in 1902. By 1915 he was Conservative member for Maidstone Borough and brought a great depth of knowledge and criticism to parliamentary debates on the navy. He and several other critics tackled the Admiralty’s apparent inability to answer relatively simple questions about the sinking of the Hampshire in a House of Commons debate in July 1916. [5] Despite requests that they should not raise difficult questions that might aid the enemy, many MPs wanted to know what was really going on. Firstly, why did the Admiralty reject a public enquiry into the loss of the Hampshire on 5 June at Marwick Head? Protocol laid down that whenever a ship was lost at sea, a public court-martial should be held with the survivors to ascertain precisely why. Lord Kitchener’s death commanded huge public interest and concern. Still there was no public enquiry.

Sir Richard Cooper correctly pointed out that in refusing to answer questions, the evasive Admiralty only added to wild speculation. They would not confirm whether the sea lane used by HMS Hampshire had been swept for mines. We know that it had not. Jellicoe admitted this in his own history of the Grand Fleet. [6] There was no credible answer to questions raised about the announcement of Lord Kitchener’s death. Cooper pointed out that the formal communique about the loss of the Hampshire was issued in London at 2pm on 6 June 1916, and that evening, the details of Kitchener’s memorial service at St Paul’s were made public before the War Office could reasonably assume that he had not survived. [7] Strange. The bodies picked out of the sea or caught smashed against the jagged rocks were collected and quickly buried. There was no coroner’s inquest, or since the jurisdiction was in Scotland, fatal accident inquiry. [8] It was as if the evidence had to be removed from the scene of the crime. Strange, indeed. To make matters worse, the Admiralty slapped a formal restriction on anyone going to or from the Orkneys on 7 June. Why did they want to keep journalists away from the island? Such restrictions could hardly have restricted spies, if such was the purpose. At every turn officials behaved as if there was something to hide.

The Secretary of the Admiralty issued a summary of the conclusions reached by Jellicoe’s own staff after they had interrogated the 12 survivors of the doomed ship. The Admiralty published their official statement on Saturday 10 June. [9] The narrative was brief and succinct to the point of mere repetition of what had already been published in the newspapers. It focussed on the weather, the unexpected mine and the dignity of Lord Kitchener as he bravely faced death. How fortunate that one of the witnesses, Petty Officer Wilfred Wesson [10] was able to confirm that Lord Kitchener was last seen on deck before the ship went down.

Many years later in a newspaper article [11] Wesson’s story offered food for thought. Despite the fact that the noise of storm and confusion was deafening, ‘there were orders being shouted. They were mostly being caught in the gale and lost… the wind howled ..immeasurable banks of waves burst in shivering cascades …and then Lord Kitchener came on deck. An officer shouted “Make way for Lord Kitchener”. The captain had called to him to come up to the fore bridge .. that was the last I saw of Lord Kitchener.’ [12] Putting aside journalistic license, we might well wonder how Petty Officer Wesson actually heard what he claimed to have borne witness to in the raging storm? However, what was important to the Admiralty was that they produced a witness who could confirm that Herbert Kitchener made it onto the deck, and so must have been lost with the captain and other senior officers.

During the House of Commons exchanges on 6 July 1916, the Parliamentary Secretary to the Admiralty, Dr Macnamara, insisted that ‘a full and careful Court of Enquiry’ had been held and ‘a full summary of the report published’ covering the evidence from each survivor. [13] It would appear from subsequent evidence that questions were limited to ‘do you think the Hampshire hit a mine’ and ‘did you see Lord Kitchener?’ Why? Did they have reason to doubt that HMS Hampshire hit a mine? Were they concerned that some story of an internal explosion might raise other issues? And what did it matter if the Secretary of State for War was or was not seen on deck? It was as if the sailors were being asked leading questions.

The naval authorities did not consider it worthwhile to open an investigation on the allegations from the crew of the Aberdeen trawler, Effort, that the seas were much calmer when they passed the signs of wreckage or search for information from the Dutch trawler reported to have been around the scene of the sinking. [14] Commander Bellairs was once again on his feet to suggest that ‘one of the reasons why the Admiralty of late have taken a dislike to courts-martial is that … they have been known to bring in verdicts blaming the Admiralty. [15] He made one further startling statement: ‘Recently there has been a column in the newspapers about HMS Hampshire and the Battle of Jutland: some of us know that the Hampshire was never in the Battle of Jutland.’ [16]

What? The official order of battle would disagree – but Bellairs was the naval correspondent to War Illustrated and a member of parliament who had many connections inside the Admiralty. Surely he was wrong – or was this yet another alteration made after the event by Lord Jellicoe when he was promoted to First Sea Lord? [17] The more one learns of the Admiralty’s complicity in hiding the truth, the more one wonders what that truth really was.

Yet there was a full official report. It was kept secret. When asked in Parliament where the official enquiry had been held and who conducted it, the evasive answer given was ‘at a naval base under the presidency of a captain of the Royal Navy.’ [18] No names, dates or places. Little wonder suspicion of a cover-up began within a few days of Kitchener’s death.

Rumours ran rife. All of these muddied the waters with suggestions of foul play which ranged from an internal explosion masterminded by Sinn Fein in reprisal for the Easter Rising, to slack talk in Russia which had alerted the Germans who sent a submarine to sink the Hampshire. Such nonsense turned the public away from the most certain of facts. The Admiralty was at fault to the extent that we have every right to suggest complicity. Ten years after Kitchener’s death his friend and biographer, Sir George Arthur, had suffered so many queries about the ‘truth’ surrounding the sinking of the Hampshire that he wrote a public letter to the Editor of The Times [19] in which he exposed the Admiralty’s duplicity:

‘…early in 1920 the First Lord of the Admiralty (the late Lord Long)  invited me to read the secret , or unpublished, report on the sinking of the Hampshire, on the understanding that I would not divulge a word of it to anybody. I declined to read the document under these conditions, as my object was to give in my “Life of Lord Kitchener” the correct version of the tragedy – and this I could not do if material were in my hands which I was not allowed to use. I told the First Lord that I should submit in my book that neglect, or at any rate carelessness, must be charged to the Admiralty, or the Commander of the Grand Fleet, in the arrangements made for Lord Kitchener’s voyage. The reply of the First Lord was, “I do not think you could say otherwise.” [20]

The impact of this revelation hit the Admiralty like a naval broadside. There had been a secret report. There were ‘versions’ of the tragedy. ‘Neglect’ or ‘carelessness’ had been covered-up. George Arthur forced the issue. The Admiralty was obligated to print the official narrative of the sinking of the Hampshire in the form of a White Paper [21] which could be bought for sixpence in August 1926. It added little to the information which had dripped into the public domain save repeating statements already published. Indeed, having considered the lack of new revelations you would have to ask why this had not happened much earlier.

There is another important but contentious fact. According to naval records, HM Drifter Laurel Crown was one of eight boats in a flotilla crossing the site of the Hampshire’s sinking, when she was struck by one of the U-75’s mines on 22 June 1916, some seventeen days after the tragedy. There were no survivors. No-one to tell the tale. A number of concerns emerged.

The first was how could a small 81 ton drifter, literally a fishing boat pressed into minesweeping service, hit a carefully located mine placed some seven meters from the surface? [22] One of the most important factors that seemingly explained HMS Hampshire’s fate was that her weight and displacement on the surging seas combined to take the ship to sufficient depth to cause the collision of mine and cruiser. In theory the German trap laid by U-75 was set to catch much bigger fish than even the Hampshire. Yet a tiny drifter hit one of these mines? How bizarre.

Secondly, there is a clear difference in official records concerning the date of the Laurel Crown’s demise. In the document, ‘Navy Losses, 1914-1918’ published in 1919, the hired drifter Laurel Crown is recorded to have been “Sunk by mine west of Orkneys on 2.6.16”. [23] The official German naval history, [24] described the U-75’s voyage in May 1916 and recorded that ‘on June 2nd the drifter Laurel Crown ran into one of U75’s mines and was sunk.’ Thus both official records from the major combatants clearly stated that the Laurel Crown was sunk on 2 June, 1916. [25] Given that these official naval records corroborate each other, the Admiralty must have known of U75’s mine barrier. It would have been abundantly clear to the authorities at Scapa Flow that there was a minefield sewn across the path of HMS Hampshire. Are you prepared to believe that in the confusion after the Battle of Jutland, reports of the trawler’s sinking were delayed, ignored, or otherwise unknown to the senior staff in Scapa Flow?

However, records from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for the crewmen of Laurel Crown give their date of death as Thursday 22 June 1916. That is the same date recorded by the Court of Inquiry held in Kirkwall a week later [26]. Have these too been adjusted to suit the Admiralty’s cover-up? The sinking of Laurel Crown is not included in the official British naval history, “Naval Operations, Volume IV” written by Henry Newbolt and published in 1928. [27] How odd. Official dates, altered dates, strange omissions. For reasons that have never been challenged, the sinking of the Laurel Crown has been relegated to claims and counter claims about the date of its demise.

If, as is surely the case, the official records in Britain and in Germany are correct, Lord Kitchener, his party, and around 700 seamen were sacrificed to ensure that he was lost at sea. Do not be dissuaded by the enormity of the cost. Barely one month later on the killing fields of the Somme, hundreds of thousands more brave men were  needlessly sacrificed in the name of civilisation. Crushing Germany was all that mattered. One more ship was easily lost in the fog of Jutland’s confusion.

[1] Carolyn Bellairs, The Battle of Jutland, The Sewing and the Reaping. 1919.
[2] John Brooks, The Battle of Jutland, p. 307, footnote 198.
[3] Bellairs, Jutland, Preface, p. X.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 6 July 1916 vol 83 cc1796-813.
[6] Viscount Jellicoe, The Grand Fleet (!914-1916): Its Creation, Development and Work, p. 427, where he states that had he ordered the seas ahead of HMS Hampshire swept, Kitchener would have lost three days in consequence. Alas it was his life that was lost.
[7] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 6 July 1916 vol 83 cc1796-813.
[8] In Scottish Law a fatal accident inquiry would have been the appropriate means of investigation. This legal process would take place before a Sheriff and does not require a jury.
[9] Details given in Parliament. See House of Commons Debate 22 June 1916 vol. 83 cc316-3.
[10] Wesson’s service number was PO201136(PO). A full list of survivors and their identification number was published.
[11] Sunday Express, 8 July, 1934.
[12] Jane Storey, HMS Hampshire, Survivors and Their First Statements, http://www.bjentertainments.co.uk/js/survivors.htm%5D
[13] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 6 July 1916 vol 83 cc1813.
[14] see previous blog
[15] Hansard, House of Commons Debate, 6 July 1916 vol 83 cc1813
[16] Ibid.
[17] http://www.channel4.com/programmes/jutland-wwis-greatest-sea-battle
[18] Hansard House of Commons Debate, 27 June 1916 vol 83 cc732-3.
[19] The Times, 10 February, 1926, p.10.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Cmd. 2710.
[22] Fregattenkapitän Oskar Groos. Der Krieg zur See 1914-18, Nordsee Band V pp. 201-2.
[23] National Archives ADM 137/3138.
[24] Groos, Der Krieg zur See 1914-18, Nordsee Band V.
[25] https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ahUKEwj6-fzEvfrMAhVLDsAKHU30Am4QFggdMAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.rbls-kirkwall.org.uk%2Fmemorials%2FBur%2FGeorgePetrie.doc&usg=AFQjCNFPMO_PWaZWiQp6oJ3o_ONhNn72Ig&sig2=XPyFHttCwB_DkKyUPnrp_Q
[26] National Archives ADM 137/3138
[27] Henry Newbolt, History of the Great War, Based on Official Documents. Naval Operations, Vol IV, pp. 1-21.

John Buchan 4: A Troubled Legacy That Should Be Resolved

Buchan’s fiction-writing about a world of spies and counter-intelligence was a reflection of his real-life experience, as was the South African background he gave to many of his heroes. It was based in fact laced with nostalgia and propaganda. There is no doubt that both directly and indirectly he was intent on winning the propaganda battle in the war against Germany, both at home and in America. He was after all Director of Information. Buchan had been approached by Charles Masterman, who was married to his wife’s cousin, to be part of the massive propaganda assault on Germany. It was a task he relished from his sick-bed in 1914 to his numerous post war publications. His world of fiction was sucked into the vortex of justification for Britain’s declaration of war and John Buchan’s eponymous creation, Richard Hannay, [1] became the ultimate hero of First World War espionage and counter-espionage. Hannay, as his invention, was the man Buchan wished he had been: a gentleman, the outdoor – type, at home in the Veldt and on the Scottish moors; honourable, an Empire loyalist and fighting soldier, who survived Loos, though wounded, and the hell that was the Somme. Richard Hannay was the boy’s own hero that Buchan never was. Oddly enough, though he never fired a rifle or fought in the trenches, Buchan ended the war with the rank of Colonel [2] while Hannay made it to Brigadier. [3]

Richard Hannay was, from the opening sentence of The Thirty-Nine Steps, ‘pretty well disgusted with life’ and had ‘got his pile’, as a mining engineer in South Africa. Looking for an adventure Hannay became engaged in a world of spies, of the looming danger of war in Europe and of German plots to destroy the British fleet. Buchan penned the ‘shocker’, as this short novel was them termed, while confined to bed in 1914. It was published in Blackwood’s Magazine in instalments between August and September 1915, and in book form in October. How many of us who read the gripping tale before we reached our teens realised that it was written as part of a propaganda campaign? And because of that, what influence did it have on our understanding of the causes of war? It is important to consider that question seriously. In 2014, The Thirty-Nine Steps was voted number thirty-two in the Guardian newspaper’s top one hundred novels written in the English language. [4] It is still read in innocence.

From within the text of a boys-own adventure, Buchan gave his hero knowledge of the coming war and occasionally betrayed information that had been openly denied in Parliament. Hannay, ‘just happens’ to meet a French Staff Officer on a boat coming back from West Africa who assured him that despite ‘all the nonsense talked in Parliament, there was a real working knowledge between France and Britain, and that the two General Staffs met every now and then, and made plans for joint action in case of war’. [5] By 1915, Buchan could dismiss the lies to Parliament about secret alliances which had been repeated by both prime minister Asquith and foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey from 1906-1914, with implied approval and acknowledged good sense. It was a subtle and clever move which presumed that by 1915, the reader would appreciate the value of senior elected politicians’ hoodwinking parliament.

A second theme which began in The Thirty-Nine Steps was that the old Liberal political thinking was ‘the most appealing rot’. When Liberals dismissed the “German Menace” and saw it as a Tory invention to cheat the poor and restrain the great flood of social reform, Buchan’s hero shook his head sadly. With that glorious strain of upper-middle-class superiority, Hannay dismissed the appeal for peace and reform with the patronising aside that ‘you could see the niceness of the chap shining out behind the muck he had been spoon-fed.’ [6] Later, the same Liberal character is described as ‘as good a chap as ever breathed, but his idiot of an uncle has stuffed his head with maggots’. [7] The propagandist view was that the well-intentioned, but fundamentally flawed pacifist and anti-war movement, was for the weak-minded. It was all part of the high-powered justification of the war. Consequently, a century later the unsuspecting reader receives biased views on the causes of the war expressed as truth, though the facts have been roundly criticised in the light of historic evidence, and does not realise that she or he is one more victim of propaganda.

His Richard Hannay novels offer a unique insight into the minds of the Secret Elite and their friends as the war progressed. In Greenmantle, (published 1917) enclosed within the dust-jacket of what was taken as fiction, he revealed the Foreign Office fixation with the Ottomans, the vast array of spies and business links that fed information to London and expounded the trusted views of the British Establishment. Thus the complex machinations behind British policy towards Turkey at the start of the war, where two dreadnoughts, built in Britain for the Turkish navy were commandeered, and the German battlecruiser Goeben, and light battlecruiser, Breslau, were literally shepherded into the Bosphorus to protect Constantinople from the Russians, is presented as how Turkey ‘had left the rails’; [8] not as part of an analysis on why Turkey had allied itself to Germany. The Young Turk leader, Enver, is described as a ‘Polish adventurer’, and his colleagues as ‘a collection of Jews and gypsies’ who took control of a ‘proud race’ by dint of German money and Germany arms. Racial and religious prejudice is excused today as ‘how it was’ without a blush of apology.

The over-riding theme was that a Jehad was in the offing and the wicked Germans were orchestrating evil. ‘Islam is a fighting creed, and the mullah still stands in the pulpit with the Koran in one hand and a drawn sword in the other’. [9] Sadly Buchan would find many of his countrymen nodding in agreement at such stereotyping a century later. And what would be endangered was the British Empire; India, in particular. Readers were assured that ‘Germany’s like a scorpion: her sting’s in her tail and that tail stretches way down into Asia’. [10] In Mr Standfast, (published 1919) the real enemy is a German super-spy who is trying to influence the world toward a peace settlement which will end the war before Germany is crushed. But Buchan used the novel to attack anyone and everyone who stood against the war or argued for an end to the conflict. One older man was described as being ‘the sort who, if he had been under fifty, would have crawled on his belly to his tribunal to get exempted’. [11] When asked to play the role of a pacifist, Hannay ‘looked forward to it with naked shame’. Criticism of generals like Buchan’s friend from Oxford, Field Marshall Douglas Haig, was ‘idiotic’ and the critic was dismissed was an ‘honest crank’ who had somehow ‘lost his self respect.’ [12] This was the world of the ‘half-baked, the people whom this war hasn’t touched or has touched in the wrong way’. [13] And we read it as truth.

Like Milner, Buchan had an intrinsic faith in the soundness of the British working man whom he considered decent, loyal and sensible. He  made no detailed reference to the expendable nature of troops sacrificed by his employers at Loos or the Somme. The carnage and true horror of war was softened into warm words and platitudes which brooked no criticism of the military elite. This fondness for the stout hearted Tommy found expression both in his novels and in his historical works where he repeatedly stated that the war was won by the rank and file. [14] While he had no time for the philosophy of pacifism, and especially for the notion that the war should be brought to a peaceful end, Buchan expressed sympathy for certain individual pacifists who died in the fighting.

In Mr Standfast, the misguided Fabian, Launcelot Wake, finds redemption, [15] in Buchan’s eyes, by serving at the front as a non-combatant conscientious objector whose ‘only weapons … were his brains’. [16] Wake never fired a shot, but was invaluable in carrying vital messages between endangered wings of an assault. Even so, most of Buchan’s fictional heroes came from the ranks of privilege; from Eton, Oxford and the London clubs from where his lasting friendships emanated.

Was any other figure so magnificently placed to be a true and loyal servant of the Secret Elite? He literally chose who and what to include in his histories thus guaranteeing that the powers behind the decision-makers in government remained unnamed.

Professor Carroll Quigley explicitly placed John Buchan in the outer circle of Society of the Elect, the group whom we have expanded into the Secret Elite. [17] Like every other major contributor to the legacy of Rhodes and Milner, John Buchan received his due reward. As we demonstrated in our previous blog, after a relatively undistinguished political career as a Tory MP in the post-war period, Buchan was elevated to the peerage and appointed by a grateful monarch to be the Governor General of Canada in 1935. His qualification for the highly prestigious post as the King’s representative in the great Dominion was his service to the Empire’s cause. He was the right sort. He belonged to the secret cabal that held absolute power in the foreign office and the colonial office. His was a safe pair of hands.

But what of his propaganda? His prodigious histories of the war [18] are now largely ignored, and the suggestion that the concentration camps in South Africa were turned into health resorts, [19] conveniently forgotten. This has always been the establishment’s way of burying the truth; ignore it, even when it is a despicable lie. But his novels? They are still reprinted regularly in the twenty-first century, still promoted as adventure stories for, though not exclusively for, the younger reader. Richard Hannay in particular is the star of at least three films and an exceptionally funny stage play. At no point do the publishers or producers give warning that the content originated in war-time propaganda. But the notion that Germany caused the war, that ‘right-minded’ British and overseas soldiers fought for ‘civilisation’, that those who sought peace were somehow disloyal and weak-minded, pervades the novels, as secure in its rigid certainty as the Highland moors over which Buchan’s hero trod.

It’s time to come clean. This work is grounded in propaganda.  A century on, should our children not be made aware of the primary purpose of these novels?

[1] The Complete Richard Hannay Stories published as a Wordsworth Classic, is a compilation of all five Hannay adventures. The Thirty-Nine Steps, (1915) Greenmantle, (1916) Mr Standfast, (1919) The Three Hostages (1924) and The Island of Sheep (1936). The first three are riddled with war-time propaganda and written with this in mind.
[2] Kate MacDonald, Reassessing John Buchan, chapter by Hew Strachan, John Buchan and the First World War, p. 79.
[3] Ibid., p. 84.
[4] Robert McCrum, The Guardian, 7 July 2014.
[5] John Buchan, The Complete Richard Hannay Stories, The Thirty-Nine Steps, Wordsworth Classics, p. 38.
[6] Ibid., p. 43.
[7] Ibid., p. 71.
[8] Buchan, The Complete Richard Hannay Stories, Wordsworth Classics, Greenmantle, p.104.
[9] Ibid., p. 105.
[10] Ibid., p. 205.
[11]  Buchan, The Complete Richard Hannay Stories, Wordsworth Classics, Mr Standfast, p. 308.
[12] Ibid., p. 317.
[13] Ibid., p. 319.
[14] MacDonald, Reassessing John Buchan, chapter by Hew Strachan, John Buchan and the First World War, p. 84.
[15] MacDonald, Reassessing John Buchan, chapter by Nathan Waddell, Buchan and the Pacifists, p. 99.
[16] Buchan, The Complete Richard Hannay Stories, Wordsworth Classics, Mr Standfast, p.550.
[17] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p. 313.
[18] John Buchan wrote A History of the War published by Thomas Nelson from 1914-1918, A History of the Great War in four volumes, published in 1923, The Battle of Jutland, published in 1916, The Battle of the Somme, published in 1917, Britain’s war by land, published in 1915, Days to Remember,: The British Empire in the Great War, in conjunction with Henry Newbolt and published in 1922.
[19] John Buchan, Memory Hold The Door, p. 108.

John Buchan 2: The Secret Elite’s Special Propaganda Weapon.

During his time in South Africa, where his success in glossing over and deflecting criticism of the horrors of the concentration camps earned him the trust and gratitude of Alfred Milner and the Secret Elite, Buchan became acquainted with senior military figures under Lord Roberts and Lord Kitchener. By 1914 these men constituted the High Command of the British Army, though Roberts had nominally retired. [1] His friendship with Richard Haldane, the creator of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) and Secretary of State for War from 1905-12 opened doors for him at the War Office. His friends included such luminaries as General Sir John French, who was to command the BEF and General Sir Henry Wilson, the architect of the British Expeditionary Force’s preparations in Belgium.

His faith in Douglas Haig also dated back to South Africa, and of course his Oxford connections, [2] though that is hardly justification for the slant he put on Haig’s military capability. Just as he gave his loyalty to Alfred Milner, John Buchan stood by Haig and defended him from his worst detractors, describing the Field Marshal as ‘first and foremost a highly competent professional soldier’. Some would disagree. [3] Whether it was simply through friendship and loyalty that John Buchan steadfastly defended the incompetence and failures of the British High Command during and after the war we will never know, but it was certainly a constant feature of the propaganda he presented as  history.

Buchan experienced an extraordinary period in his life between 1914-1918 embroiling himself in recording a version of the official history of the war, reporting from the Western Front for The Times, in propaganda work of a more general nature, in military intelligence, where part of his remit included writing speeches and communiques for Douglas Haig, and as the government’s Director of Information. Many readers will have assumed that he was just a Scottish story-writer. Not so. The war made him a household name as a novelist and as a historian. [4] The rest of the multi-layered duties he undertook for the Secret Elite were hidden from the public eye.

John Buchan operated within the most powerful group of men in the British Empire. He breakfasted with Sir Edward Grey two days before the declaration of war on Germany [5] and later praised the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in glowing terms: ‘Sir Edward Grey played under supreme difficulties a part which must rank amongst the most honourable achievements of British statesmen ‘ [6] He claimed that ‘It is not too much to say that the honour and liberty of our race’ were saved by our rushing to the assistance of our, as he put it, martyred ‘little neighbour.’ (Belgium) [7] Even although these words were penned in 1936, the propaganda machine held to the old lie of innocent Belgium.

He was quite ill in 1914 when war broke out. At thirty-nine Buchan was too old for enlistment, but his ineligibility to join the ranks was caused by serious digestion problems which developed into a duodenal ulcer. He was confined to bed for ‘three miserable months’. [8] It was a malaise which plagued him throughout the rest of his life. Buchan was a workaholic; of that there can be no doubt and his restless nature did not easily lend itself to inaction.

Buchan claimed that by 14 August 1914, he came up with the idea to write a popular history of the war for the publisher, Thomas Nelson and Sons, in order to keep the workforce fully employed. [9] He had been invited to become a partner in the firm in 1907 on the personal invitation of his Oxford friend, Tommy Nelson [10] and served as their literary adviser. Strange that he began writing Nelson’s History of the War to keep men in work at the point when so many had enlisted for the war. A cynic might wonder if his family ties to Charles Masterman, who had been appointed head of the secret War Propaganda Bureau had more bearing on the decision. In fact, Masterman secured the services of both John Buchan and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle along with other popular authors like H G Wells, Thomas Hardy, Ford Maddox Ford, Rudyard Kipling and G K Chesterton to promote and support the war through propaganda [11]

Buchan became an integral figure in the propaganda machine. He quickly found that the foremost  limitation on what he could write was the truth. In his own words, he knew too much ‘and was often perplexed as to what I could print.’ [12] This is an unusually frank confession from a propaganda-insider. John Buchan confessed that he was unable to write the truth for an official history of the war. How much credence, therefore, should one give to his account of proceedings? And it was a widely read account. His Nelson’s History of the War appeared in fortnightly parts. It was published in instalments of 50,000 words and had by far the largest circulation of any war commentary at the time. [13]

The Canadian academic, Professor Peter Buitenhuis holds a very clear view on Buchan’s writings. ‘His entire History of the War is a work of propaganda, consistently giving the most positive slant to news from all fronts of the war. Through embellishing tales of advance and suppressing reports of staff incompetence, Buchan … consistently  falsified the British Military situation on the Western Front. The gulf between what he knew and the content of his narrative turned Nelson’s history into a propaganda text.’ [14] This is unquestionably true.

1915 was a profitable year for Buchan. He gave a series of popular lectures on the course of the war, [15] to huge gatherings at the Beckstein Hall in London, at which he was regularly accompanied  by high profile members of the Secret Elite including Sir Edward Grey and former prime minister, Arthur Balfour.  His journalistic career blossomed when The Times asked him to visit the front line troops and pen a series of articles exclusively for their readers. The first of these ‘On A Flemish Hill’ combined a panoramic view of landscapes which had suffered war and bloody battle for 2,000 years with the illusion of Ypres which from afar ‘looks like a gracious and delicate little city in its cincture of green hills.’

His shock at finding Ypres doomed beyond hope with its Cloth Hall in ashes and the skeletal remains of the famous towers of St Martin’s church threatening to fall any moment, brought a different kind of reality to The Times readership. [16] But John Buchan was not employed to charm the middle class with fine description. It was his conclusion which mattered. ‘It [Ypres] will stand as a symbol of unity within our race and unity within our Western civilisation, that true alliance and that lasting unity that are sealed by a common sacrifice.’ Rousing stuff, aimed to reassure the Empire, but fiction nevertheless.

Buchan’s work for Northcliffe’s newspapers continued from May till October 1915 from the otherwise restricted confines of the British Army Headquarters in France. Even his entirely one-sided accounts could give offence to the military censor, and his despatch from the Front on 7 October was withheld, an infringement which was criticised in Parliament. Apparently his writings provided the enemy with too much relevant information and too many accurate maps. And that is the problem with John Buchan. His use of fact, in this given instance troop movement, might have been accurate, but the praise that he lavished on the military commanders was so unjustifiably gilt-edged that he wandered into falsehood. We acknowledge that every country at war indulges in propaganda to favour its actions, but the real problem begins when those in charge repeatedly lie to cover-up the horror they have created, deny their failures and hoodwink the public.

Throughout the war, John Buchan continued to work for the upper reaches of government. While in France he was promoted to major in the intelligence corps and prepared military summaries and communiques which shed the best possible light on the British commanders. In 1916 he was regularly employed by the Foreign Office on matters of intelligence for his friend, Sir Edward Grey, and reported directly to him. He was also attached to Douglas Haig’s staff in France and made numerous visits to his headquarters. [17]

He was with him during the critical weeks of the Somme and wrote most of Haig’s dispatches during that period. He claimed that on the first day of the Somme, the Germans ‘had fallen into every trap we [Haig and his advisors] have laid.’ [18] With hindsight it seems a ludicrous comment, though Haig had hoped to use the battle on the Somme as a feint which would pull German reserves from Flanders and weaken them there. In a war of  attritional stupidity, the Somme stands as testament to brutal obstinacy. A million British and German casualties were sacrificed in an area of seven square miles. John Buchan wrote the communiques for Haig’s General Headquarters without a word of criticism about Douglas Haig’s incompetence. At no point did he allow personal loyalty to be undermined by fact.

When the Secret Elite at last removed Herbert Asquith from the post of Prime Minister in December 1916, Buchan’s mentor, Lord Alfred Milner joined the inner war-cabinet led by David Lloyd George. John Buchan’s star rose accordingly. He was summoned directly to the War Cabinet at 10 Downing Street where he renewed old friendships [19] and accepted the challenge of ‘improving’ propaganda. His proposals on reconstructing its policy was delivered within one month and the Secret Elite network put its own man in charge. Lord Milner proposed that Buchan be appointed director of a new department of information on 9 February 1917, and it was created by a cabinet minute that very day. He liaised directly with the prime minister and was given a salary of £1000 p.a. [20]. A Private on the line received just over £18 per year. John Buchan, who never faced a bullet, was well paid for his services.

He proved to be a moderate innovator. Buchan divided the department of information into four sections: (1) art and literature, (2) press and cinema, (3) intelligence, (4) administration, which he located inside the Foreign Office. He increased the scale of government propaganda considerably and developed the use of film in British propaganda to condition the home population and convince it of the noble cause of the ‘war for civilisation’.

The two large-scale propaganda films were D. W. Griffith’s Hearts of the World (1917) and Herbert Brenon’s The Invasion of Britain (not completed until the end of the war and never shown). Many newsreels were added to capture the imagination of cinema audiences. He commissioned a film about the Battle of the Somme, brought in professional writers, created a department of information in New York, sent out lecturers, and tirelessly organised every avenue of propaganda. Behind the façade of the gentlemanly amateur, Buchan was a tough and professional propagandist. [21]

In March 1918 the department became a ministry under Lord Beaverbrook, and John Buchan, by then a Colonel, became director of intelligence. Ironically, at the end of the war Buchan was appointed ‘liquidator’ of the Ministry of Information, which he closed down on 31 December 1918. It is an interesting concept, is it not? Liquidator of the Ministry of Information sounds too close to a special section from 1984. What did they immediately want rid of, or required to be shredded, shelved in secret places, removed, withdrawn and otherwise destroyed? Strange that an author should take on such a task.

[1] John Buchan, Memory Hold The Door, p. 111.
[2] Both men attended Brasenose College at Oxford and had family roots in the Scottish Borders.
[3] Without a doubt, Denis Winter,’s exposure of Douglas Haig is the clearest indictment of the failures of that British commander. We recommend his book, Haig’s Command.
[4] Kate MacDonald, Reassessing John Buchan, p. 78.
[5] Janet Adam Smith, John Buchan and his world, p. 61.
[6] John Buchan, Episodes of the Great War, p. 23.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Buchan, Memory Hold The Door, p.164
[9] Smith, John Buchan and his world, p. 61.
[10] Buchan, Memory Hold the Door, p. 137.
[11] [http://www.firstworldwar.com/bio/masterman.htm
[12] Buchan, Memory Hold the Door, p. 167.
[13] H C G Mathew, Buchan, John, First Baron Tweedsmuir, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[14] Keith Grieves, Nelson’s History of the War, John Buchan as a Contemporary Military Historian, Journal of Contemporary History, Vol. 28, no.3, July 1993, p. 533.
[15] The Times, 21 April, 1915, p. 5.
[16] The Times, 17 May, 1915, p. 9.
[17] Smith, John Buchan and his world, p. 65.
[18] Denis Winter, Haig’s Command, p. 181.
[19] Buchan, Memory Hold The Door, p. 169.
[20] Gary Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War, p. 89.
[21] Mathew, Buchan, John, First Baron Tweedsmuir, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

The Oil Story 2: Romania And Russia – Whose oil is it anyway?

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Rothschilds

In the decades before the outbreak of war the German government, companies and banks understood the vulnerability of the country’s dependence on imported oil.

Supplies from the rich Russian fields at Baku on the Caspian Sea were piped 450 miles overland to the port of Batum on the Black Sea, shipped by tanker to Romania, then taken in barges up the River Danube to Germany. Romania itself was fortunate to have major oilfields and since it was much closer to the industrial power-house of central and northern Germany, it became Germany’s main supplier. Romanian oil was first registered in international statistics in 1857 when 250 tons were produced. [1]

Development was initially slow, but by the turn of the century international oil magnates, banks and investors descended like vultures who reaped rich pickings as it became the third largest oil producing country in the world. Its main commercial advantage lay in the fact that Romania was comparatively close to most European capitals and the river Danube offered a relatively straightforward route for transportation. The major fields at Ploesti and Campina, some 80 kilometers north of Bucharest, had their own refineries and storage installations. By 1900 production had risen to 250,000 tons, and by 1914 it stood at around 1.8 million tons. [2] Growth was spectacular. One might think that Romanian oil was controlled by the state. It was not. Ownership belonged to foreign investors who had their own agenda and profits flowed abroad rather than to the Romanian people.

One of the major Romanian fields, Steaua Romana, was bought over by German capital in 1903, and Germany thus appeared to have control of some 35 per cent of Romanian production. The Romano-Americana complex was gobbled up by Rockefeller’s Standard Oil in 1904, and Astra Romana, the second largest, in 1910 by British interests in the Royal Dutch Shell company. By 1914, Romanian oil had been thoroughly internationalised [3] with British, Dutch, French and American interests controlling a majority of the wells.

It is important to understand who actually owned the companies that controlled Romanian production and supplied Germany throughout the war. In 1913 Germany imported 125,000 tons of oil per year from Romania, approximately 10 per cent of its total production. The advent of war cut Germany off from her other suppliers and she then needed every barrel that could be squeezed from Romania. Apart from small and rapidly diminishing Galician supplies, this became the only major source of oil available to Germany. [4]

German investment gave them a nominal 35 per cent control of Romanian oil by 1914, but behind this bland fact lies the question: what precisely did German ownership mean? Was it the German government or German industrialists, merchant banks and investors? Or were there other ‘owners’? While Germany, through the Deutsche Bank and the Disconto Gesellschaft bank, appeared to have a considerable stake, Disconto Gesellschaft was in fact a Rothschild concern [5] and so under British and French influence rather than German. Nathaniel Rothschild, as we have shown in previous blogs, was a leading member of the Secret Elite in London. Disconto bought up three substantive Romanian companies, Concordia SA, which drilled for oil, Vega, which refined it and Creditul Petrolier which stored and transported it. In reality, Germany only controlled around 20 per cent of Romanian oil, far less than the statistics might suggest.

Who then were the decision-makers who permitted the commercial agreements and understandings that directed the supply of oil before and during the war? The dark and murky world of international business stood ready as always, to shed patriotism for profit, and it is important to examine some historical facts. The greatest name in global oil in the nineteenth century and around the time of the First World War was J D Rockefeller in America. His Standard Oil Company had not only been vulnerable to the American anti-trust lobby which in 1911 demanded its dissolution into smaller parts [6], but had been stalked by more dangerous predators, the Rothschilds. Before the turn of the century the Rothschilds had no intention of allowing Rockefeller to monopolise European oil fields, and they moved swiftly to take control of Russian oil at Baku on the Caspian Sea.

Oil had been discovered in the Baku district of Russia (now Azerbaijan) in the1850s. Such was the extent of these massive fields that in 1901 Russian production outranked American output but that situation was rapidly reversed. The problem of limited investment in Baku was neatly summarised by Prince M. Golitsyn, Governor-General of the Caucasus: “The situation in the Caucasus is unique. Without participation of Russian capitalists, it is difficult to solve. The lack of free capital, the limited industrial infrastructure, the low level of agriculture, the lack of technical knowledge and weak business initiative of the resident population are long term obstacles to the economic growth of the region. Under such circumstances, the participation of foreigners in the economy in the Caucasus should not be rejected. In addition, the prohibition on purchasing real estate could lead to a stoppage of foreign capital inflow, and to unavoidable damage to its economic interests.”  [7] It was an open invitation that attracted some very big investors, amongst whom were the Nobel Brothers, Robert and Ludvig, as well as the ubiquitous Rothschilds.

The Nobels came originally from Sweden. Their father, Immanuel, moved to Russia and invented an exploding sea mine which greatly impressed the Tzar, but he went bankrupt in 1859. Robert and Ludvig converted the failed business into a small arms company that sold rifles to the Russian Government. Their rags to riches story involves the rather fanciful tale of Robert travelling through Russia in search of rare walnut timber for rifle stocks, and chancing upon Baku where he immediately grasped the commercial potential of the oil wells. The brothers founded the Branobel Oil company in 1876, purchased oil wells near Baku and constructed an eight mile long pipeline to carry the oil to the Caspian Sea. They also built the world’s first oil tanker, the Zoroaster, to transport the raw product for export. Within a few years the Nobels had built a railway system with hundreds of tank wagons and a network of storage depots. Branobel became a dominant company in the Russian oil market, and, remarkably, it managed to keep Standard Oil at arms length. [8] This systematic and expertly co-ordinated development was the complete antithesis of what was happening in Austrian Galicia. So, how did the Nobel brothers manage to fund such an awesomely expensive investment? They didn’t.

It was the Rothschilds.

Reports filtered back to Standard Oil that the Nobels could not meet their obligations and were heavily in debt to the Paris Rothschilds. [9] The Rothschild Dynasty had built much of its massive fortune by rescuing and secretly taking over potentially successful companies and banks which had overstretched themselves. While the Nobel brothers appeared to control Russian oil in Baku, they operated as an important front for Rothschild interests. The main advantage the Nobels had in gaining their original foothold in Baku was their good relationship with the Tzarist government. [10] The advantage that the Rothschilds had over Rockefeller and Standard Oil was that they served as official bankers to the Tzar. In any event, by the turn of the century the Rothschilds had amassed vast and highly profitable investments in Baku, and there was little space left for Standard Oil.

At least that is how it seemed. While the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers were apparently engaged in the ‘oil wars’ of the 1890s, grasping control over whatever oilfields and companies that could be drawn into their clutches, relationships were different behind the scenes. Certainly there were periods of ‘blistering competition’ [11] but there was also a will to divide the spoils and share out the market.

In 1892, Baron Alphonse de Rothschild accepted Rockefeller’s invitation to go to New York for secret talks behind the closed doors of Standard Oil’s headquarters on Broadway. As Rockefeller’s biographer saw matters ‘Beneath the competitive veneer, the Rothschilds were keen to come to terms with Standard Oil. [12] No doubt the Rothschild version of events would reverse that order, for clearly both saw mutual benefit from monopolistic collusion.  Standard Oil’s chief spokesman, John Archbold, reported directly to Rockefeller that they had quickly reached a tentative agreement (without being sufficiently indiscreet to add its precise nature), but stressed that ‘it was thought desirable on both sides that the matter be kept confidential’. [13] Indeed, Alphonse de Rothschild thought it desirable to keep the Nobel brothers out of the discussion, and Standard Oil executives were instructed to deal exclusively with them. Thus, in the pre-war years, much of the great rivalry between Rothschild and Rockefeller was a convenient façade, though both would have the world believe otherwise.

These were the powers who dominated the oil industry and endlessly continued to grasp more and more of the global market. Powers that were deeply involved in the close-knit Anglo-American cabal, the Secret Elite, who planned to crush Germany. Ironically, in order to do so they would provide her with oil, as our future blogs will show.

[1] http://www.150deanidepetrol.ro/history.html
[2] Ibid.
[3] Keith Hitchins, Rumania 1866-1947,  p. 192.
[4] Daniel Yergin, The Prize, p.163.
[5] 61st Congress, 2nd session, Senate Document 593, National Monetary Commission, the Economic Development of Germany by Dr J Reisser. http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc2.ark:/13960/t7cr5qn19;view=1up;seq=432
[6] New York Times 16 May 1911. Articles explain the decision of the Supreme Court. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9900E5DA1431E233A25755C1A9639C946096D6CF
[7] MYM Babayev, Baku Baron Days, http://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/magazine/ai122_folder/122_articles/122_foreign_investment.html
[8] Professor Robert W Tolf, The Russian Rockefellers, pp. 90-92.
[9] Ron Chernow, Titan, p. 246.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid., p. 247.
[12] Ibid., p. 248.
[13] Ibid.

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.†

GUEST BLOG: Major Scandal In Great Britain About Hidden World War 1 Documents

From Peter Hof, author of Our Century.

As recently as 18 October 2013, the Guardian carried an article by Andrea Sevetson which proved that the British government continues to lie about its own official documents and mislead historians about their very existence. This presents a perfect example of the problem described by Docherty and Macgregor in their Hidden History, and fits their thesis hand-in-glove. The complete article read as follows:

“Foreign Office hoarding 1m historic files in secret archive”

“Justice secretary signed authorisation to place retention of files – some created in 19th century – on legal footing for 12 months.”

The Foreign Office has unlawfully hoarded more than a million files of historic documents that should have been declassified and handed over to the National Archives, the Guardian has discovered. The files are being kept at a secret archive at a high-security government communications centre in Buckinghamshire, north of London, where they occupy mile after mile of shelving.

Most of the papers are many decades old – some were created in the 19th century – and document in fine detail British foreign relations throughout two world wars, the cold war, withdrawal from empire and entry into the common market.

They have been kept from public view in breach of the Public Records Acts, which requires that all government documents become public once they are 30 years old – a term about to be reduced to 20 years – unless the department has received permission from the lord chancellor to hold them for longer. The secret archive is also beyond the reach of the Freedom of Information Act.

The Foreign Office is not the only government department that has been unlawfully hoarding files. This month the Guardian disclosed that the Ministry of Defence was unlawfully holding more than 66,000 historic files at a warehouse in Derbyshire, including thousands of files from the army’s Northern Ireland headquarters.

However, the Foreign Office’s secret archive, which is estimated to hold around 1.2m files and occupies around 15 miles of floor-to-ceiling shelving, is believed to be far larger than the combined undisclosed archives of every other government department. One of Britain’s leading historians describes its size as “staggering”.

A basic inventory of the hidden archive gives a clue to its enormousness: batches of files are catalogued according to the length of shelf space they occupy, with six metres and two centimetres dedicated to files about Rhodesia, for example, and four metres and 57 centimetres holding files about Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, the KGB spies who operated inside the Foreign Office and MI6. There are 50 metres of files on Hong Kong, 100.81 metres about the United States and 97.84 metres of “private office papers”.

No length is given in the inventory for other categories such as Colonial Office files or records from the permanent under-secretary’s department, the point of liaison between the Foreign Office and MI6.

The inventory says there is one bag of records from the Foreign Office’s now notorious cold war propaganda unit, the Information Research Department. And buried away within the archive, wedged between files from the British military government in post-war Germany and lists of consular officials, are papers about the treaty of Paris, which concluded the Crimean war in 1856.

The Foreign Office’s realisation that it would eventually need to admit to the existence of such a vast repository appears to have come at a time when its lawyers were waging a court battle with a group of elderly Kenyans. It was a battle that it eventually lost, with the result that it was obliged to issue an unprecedented apology and pay millions of pounds in compensation to thousands of men and women who suffered severe mistreatment during the 1950s Mau Mau insurgency.

During those proceedings the Foreign Office repeatedly denied the existence of a much smaller secret archive of 8,800 colonial-era documents, known as the migrated archive. It was eventually obliged to admit that this did exist, and that its contents corroborated the Kenyans’ allegations about widespread acts of murder and torture by the colonial authorities.

As a first step, the Foreign Office gave its colossal secret a name, the Special Collections. Then last November the justice secretary, Chris Grayling, was asked to sign a blanket authorisation that is said to have placed the retention of the files on a legal footing for 12 months. No announcement was made.

Finally, a written statement about “public records” by the Foreign Office minister David Lidington was quietly issued in the Commons on a Friday afternoon. The statement included two sentences that referred to a “large accumulation” of documents. As a result of the manner in which the matter was handled, the existence of the archive has remained all but unknown, even among historians. Anthony Badger, the Cambridge history professor who has been overseeing the declassification of the migrated archive, has written that he believes “it is difficult to overestimate the legacy of suspicion among historians, lawyers and journalists” that resulted from the concealment of those 8,800 files.

The discovery that the colonial-era documents are just a very small part of a hidden archive of more than a million files is certain to cause enormous damage to the Foreign Office’s reputation among historians and others. A Foreign Office spokesperson said the archive had accumulated over time and that “resources have not been available to review and prepare” them for release.

The handful of historians who have become aware of the archive are deeply sceptical about this claim, however. Richard Drayton, Rhodes professor of imperial history at King’s College London, said the size of the hidden archive was staggering, and it was “scandalous” that papers of such significance could be concealed for such a long time. “It’s a working archive, for a department which believes it has a long-term, historic interest in many parts of the world,” he said.

It was unclear whether there is any “truly explosive” material within the files, Drayton said, or whether officials were attempting to manage the country’s historic reputation. “It may be that from the perspective of the state, 50 years is a short time. But the idea that the British state today has an obligation to protect the reputation of the British state of 50 years ago seems to me wholly inappropriate. It would be a manipulation of history, which we associate with iron curtain regimes during the cold war, regimes that managed and controlled the past.”

Mandy Banton, senior research fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, said it was “extremely likely” that the archive had been culled to remove material that would most damage the reputation of the UK and the Foreign Office. Banton, a Colonial Office records expert who worked at National Archives at Kew, south-west London, for 25 years, said she had been “very angry” when she discovered that the migrated archives had been withheld. “I would have been incandescent had I learned while still working there. In lying to me, the Foreign Office forced me to mislead my readers.”

Freedom of information campaigners believe that the hoarding of such a huge amount of papers is symptomatic of a culture of secrecy and retention at the Foreign Office and across many other UK government departments. Maurice Frankel, director of the Campaign for Freedom of Information, an NGO that works to ensure the Freedom of Information Act is properly implemented, said: “The FoI system depends on people knowing what they hold and being transparent about what they hold.”

The archive is kept at Hanslope Park, a sprawling Foreign Office and MI6 outstation in the heart of the Buckinghamshire countryside. Sometimes referred to by Foreign Office staff as “Up North” – although it is only 60 miles north of London – Hanslope Park is also home to Her Majesty’s Government Communications Centre, a facility where hundreds of government scientists and technicians develop sophisticated counter-espionage measures.

They include measures intended to protect the UK government and its allies from the sort of surveillance that Edward Snowden’s leaks have shown to have been perfected by the National Security Agency and Britain’s GCHQ.

Two wire fences, one 10ft high and topped with razor wire, encircle the cluster of buildings at Hanslope Park. Between them is a no man’s land with intruder alarms. CCTV cameras are positioned every few yards and the entire perimeter is covered by floodlights. Inside, posters on the walls carry the half-joking warning: “Careless talk costs jobs.”

Curiously, many of the offices are said to house row after row of typewriters rather than computers, with incinerators at the end of each room for the disposal of typewriter ribbons – a measure to reduce electromagnetic emissions, which can travel for hundreds of yards and be deciphered by foreign governments.

Hanslope Park is not only a highly secure facility, it is also a place that appears to be accustomed to handling – and destroying – large amounts of paperwork. This, possibly, explains why the special collections have been held there.

The blanket authorisation signed by Grayling put the secret archive on a legal footing for 12 months, during which time the Foreign Office is expected to devise a plan for its declassification and transfer to Kew. A spokesperson said a plan would be presented next month to a committee that advises the National Archives and the Ministry of Justice.

It will be quite a task. Declassification of the migrated archive has taken two and a half years, with the final tranche of documents due to arrive at Kew next month. At that rate, clearing up the special collections would take around 340 years.”

We have already waited for a hundred years. With “Hidden History” I hope that we need not wait another 340 years for the truth about WW1 and its causes.

https://www.facebook.com/peter.hof.56

pjhof@hotmail.com

216.115.249.72

The Conquest Of Oxford

From the very earliest days of the First World War, the Secret Elite in London set about fabricating history in order to conceal their guilt and heap responsibility on Germany. Their version is still presented as truth in the present day and regurgitated by generations of undergraduates for the simple reason that it was written by professors at Oxford University, reputedly the greatest academic institution in the world. Professor Carroll Quigley revealed, however, that Alfred Milner (the most influential leader within the Secret Elite) and his faction had such power and control over Oxford University that it was able to completely monopolise the writing and the teaching of the history of their own period. [1]

It is a brave man indeed who questions the veracity of history as recorded by the eminent men within Oxford’s ivory towers. One courageous historian who attacked their myths and worked wholeheartedly on behalf of the truth, Professor Harry Elmer Barnes, was ostracised from academic circles and saw his life’s work trashed. It was a harsh lesson that has been heeded since by those intent on academic careers in modern history. Professor Barnes died before the term ‘conspiracy theory’ was invented as a term of contempt for critical thinkers who examined explanations other than those presented by the establishment. Coined in the 1960’s by the CIA, it was a means to discredit independent researchers like the New Orleans District Attorney, Jim Garrison, who bravely questioned the official narrative of the Kennedy assassination. Indeed our own book which challenged and frequently dismissed establishment accounts of WW1 has been subjected to this abusive term but, as the American author Peter Hof succinctly responded: ‘the conspiracy theory pejorative is a favourite refuge for the misinformed’.

Professor James Tracy of the Florida Atlantic University stated that ‘conspiracy theory’ is a term that strikes fear and anxiety in the hearts of almost every public figure, particularly journalists and academics. Since the 1960s the label has become a disciplinary device that has been overwhelmingly effective in defining certain events off limits to inquiry or debate. [2]

Fearing for their livelihoods, historians have place themselves in academic straitjackets while, much to the discomfort of the powers that be, a new breed of independent investigator has pushed the boundaries in revealing the truth. Prof. Tracy added that research carried out by the hoi polloi and independent researcher ‘is a clear danger to those who wish to wield uncontested political authority. Indeed, the capacity to freely disseminate and discuss knowledge of government malfeasance is the foremost counterbalance to tyranny. Since this ability cannot be readily confiscated or suppressed, it must be ridiculed, marginalized, even diagnosed as a psychiatric condition. [3] Knowing that the establishment would ridicule their work with the tired ‘conspiracy theory’ label, dismiss them as cranks and ruin their careers, most historians have failed to challenge the Oxford accounts of the First World War. The problem that they will always face is caused by their inability to accept justified reason unless they have the documented evidence. This means that in stealing, shredding and otherwise destroying the evidence about the First World War, the establishment view is all that they can accept. It is surely a most uncomfortable straight-jacket.

Secret Elite control of Oxford was firmly established long before the outbreak of war. In 1905, Alfred Milner had returned from South Africa and constructed a ‘propaganda and patronage machine’ at the university [4] where he was a Fellow of New College. Oxford had long been the spiritual home of the cabal, and from the 1890s its central power-base was All Souls College which comprised well-to-do, upper-class and frequently titled men, many of whom were educated at Eton and Harrow, schools at the hub of the English ruling class. Professor Quigley had no hesitation in stating that by the mid twentieth century the secret cabal (we term them the Secret Elite) had been the most powerful single influence in All Souls, Balliol, and New College at Oxford for more than fifty years. [5]

All Souls, unlike Balliol and the other Oxford Colleges, had no undergraduates, and its members were rarely there to study for a higher degree. It had been founded in 1437 by a substantial endowment from Henry Chichele, Archbishop of Canterbury, but by the nineteenth century it had established itself as a very select club of like minded individuals from, or acceptable to, the English ruling class. Entrance was strictly limited and tightly controlled. The College gathered information about candidates from a variety of ‘distant sources’ and election of ‘fellows’ was decided in an informal meeting in the Common Room. The discussion focussed not so much on the results of examinations but on personal habits and social connections. Did the candidate dress well? Did he possess friend in high places? Did he have impeccable manners? Was he an agreeable companion? In short, would he make a suitable member of a refined and aristocratic society? [6] It is safe to assert that that the Fellow of All Souls was a man marked out for a position of authority in public life. Many had common undergraduate associations, close personal relationships, similar interests and ideas, and surprisingly similar biographical experiences. By 1900, the Milner group was the chief, if not the controlling influence at All Souls [7] abetted by its warden, the influential Sir William Anson.

The aristocratic Anson was educated at Eton and Balliol, where he gained a double first in Classics and had himself been elected as a Fellowship of All Souls. Elected Warden of All Souls from 1881 until his death in 1914, Anson was the most influential figure in the management of its fortune and selection of its members. Now widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent public figures of Edwardian England, Anson also served as Oxford’s Vice-Chancellor. During his tenure he transformed All Souls ‘from an inert academic backwater into a valuable mediator between the university and the outside world, and a recognised citadel for studies of History and Law.’ [8] All Souls was a relatively poor college, and during the 1880’s a lack of funds prevented it from fully implementing an earlier promise to promote higher scholarship. Suddenly circumstances changed. Co-incident with the Milner Group takeover, All Souls grew rich. The official version of events was that  ‘good fortune’ struck. The College had long owned large estates which, over a century of extended suburban growth, had turned into north-west London. Unlike all of the other colleges at Oxford, its income rose markedly between 1889 and 1909.  [9]

In reality, the ‘good fortune’ arrived at All Souls door when the Secret Elite saw in this academic backwater a means through which they could take control of Oxford University. They rapidly converted it to a ‘citadel’ of ‘academic excellence’ through which they could turn their long-term plans into action and control the writing and teaching of history. Through considerable investment and active self-promotion the college was presented as a national institution of enormous prestige. When the Secret Elite began planning their great war to destroy Germany, Sir William Anson set about providing the means through which the college would control the writing and teaching of the history of the war. All Souls had enjoyed no great reputation over the previous 400 years and had been considered irrelevant by many Oxford academics. Once Milner and the Secret Elite took control, money poured into its coffers and professorial chairs were established for hand-picked trusted historians who would write the war’s history, and others who would lend them academic credence. Few, if any, academics would ever dare challenge the veracity of such allegedly ’eminent’ professors who had instant access to the Oxford University Press and guaranteed approval from the Times Literary Supplement.

The ‘gift’ of new chairs in history at that time offers a perfect example of Milner’s men in action. Alfred Beit, South African millionaire and inner core member of the Secret Elite [10] set the pace by establishing the Beit Trust which paid for the Beit Professorship and Beit Lectureships. The first Beit Professor of Colonial History at Oxford was Hugh Egerton (1905-1920). A contemporary of Milner’s at Oxford, Egerton was a member of the Secret Elite and their Round Table Group. He constantly supported Milner in his professional work and remained committed to the cause until his death in 1927. [11]

Just how far reaching their power over Oxford extended can be gleaned from the following list of Chancellors of the University: Lord Salisbury (1869-1903), Lord Goschen (1903-1907), Lord Curzon (1907-1925) Lord Milner (1925), Lord Grey of Fallodon (1928-33) and Lord Halifax (1933). All were very senior members of the Secret Elite’s inner core. [12]

According to professor Quigley, ‘the Beit Chairs at Oxford had been controlled by the Milner Group from the beginning,’ and ‘both have interlocking membership with the Rhodes Trust and the College of All Souls’. (likewise controlled by the secret Elite) By controlling All Souls and the two professorships, the Milner Group included five out of seven electors to the Beit professorship.’ [13] Quigley added, ‘the Milner group never intended to influence events by acting through any instruments of mass propaganda, but rather to work on opinions of the small group of ‘important people’ who in turn could influence wider and wider circles of persons. This was the basis on which the Milner group itself was constructed; it was the theory behind the Rhodes scholarships; it was the theory behind the Round Table and the Royal Institute of International Affairs; it was the theory behind the efforts to control All Souls, new College, and Balliol, and through these three to control Oxford University…’ [14] This was also the theory behind their ownership of the Times. What mattered to them was the influence they commanded over ‘important people’ and by controlling Oxford, the Secret Elite were able to control the writing and teaching of history. They had achieved that already in the official Times History of the Boer War. In 1914 they began the assault on truth through the immediate publication of the Oxford Pamphlets.

[1] Carroll Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p.197.
[2] James F Tracy, “Conspiracy Theory”: Foundations of a Weaponized Term. Subtle and Deceptive Tactics to Discredit Truth in Media and Research. http://www.globalresearch.ca/
[3] http://www.globalresearch.ca/cracking-conspiracy-theorys-psycholinguistic-code-the-witch-hunt-against-independent-research-and-analysis/5383108
[4] Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p.84.
[5] Ibid., pp.5-6.
[6] S.J.D. Green and Peregrine Horden,  All Souls and the Wider World, pp.14-15.
[7] Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp.21-22.
[8] Green and Horden,  All Souls and the Wider World, edited by pp.1-2.
[9] Ibid., p.7.
[10] Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, p.313.
[11] Ibid., p.87.
[12] Ibid., p.99.
[13] Ibid., p.88.
[14] Ibid., p.113.