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James B.W. Lewis. Juliet Gardiner on Michael MacDonagh

London at War

Year by year literature of and about the First World War mounts –  books on its campaigns, causes, politics and economics; memoirs by politicians and generals; diaries and letters written by ordinary ‘Tommies’, by nurses in the front line and those involved on the Home Front, from the ‘Munitionettes’ who filled shells and assembled guns to the society ladies who rolled bandages and handed out tea and buns to departing soldiers. The catalogue of the London Library currently lists 1,475 titles on the First World War, and there will be many more to come during the remaining centenary years.

But it was not in a conventional library or even a secondhand bookshop that I came across a slightly mossy, slightly foxed and jacketless copy of Michael MacDonagh’s In London during the Great War (1935). It was in a decommissioned red telephone box in a Sussex village – the idea being that when you have no more use for a book you’ve enjoyed, you leave it in the phone box for someone else to take home to read. I liked the thought of people wresting open the heavy metal and glass door and choosing a book from the precarious, knocked-up temporary wooden shelves of this small ‘library’, while leaving another behind – in effect an anonymous barter system.

I had read a fair amount about the Home Front in the First World War when I was contemplating writing a book on the subject myself, but I had never heard of Michael MacDonagh and was delighted to come across a new addition to the relatively few accounts – compared to the embarrassment of riches about the Home Front in the Second World War – that I already knew.

I discovered that the benign-looking man with wire spectacles, toothbrush moustache and wing collar in the book’s frontispiece had, before the war, been a parliamentary correspondent for The Times, had written several books, and would write more during and after the war. Several were on Parliament and i

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Year by year literature of and about the First World War mounts –  books on its campaigns, causes, politics and economics; memoirs by politicians and generals; diaries and letters written by ordinary ‘Tommies’, by nurses in the front line and those involved on the Home Front, from the ‘Munitionettes’ who filled shells and assembled guns to the society ladies who rolled bandages and handed out tea and buns to departing soldiers. The catalogue of the London Library currently lists 1,475 titles on the First World War, and there will be many more to come during the remaining centenary years.

But it was not in a conventional library or even a secondhand bookshop that I came across a slightly mossy, slightly foxed and jacketless copy of Michael MacDonagh’s In London during the Great War (1935). It was in a decommissioned red telephone box in a Sussex village – the idea being that when you have no more use for a book you’ve enjoyed, you leave it in the phone box for someone else to take home to read. I liked the thought of people wresting open the heavy metal and glass door and choosing a book from the precarious, knocked-up temporary wooden shelves of this small ‘library’, while leaving another behind – in effect an anonymous barter system. I had read a fair amount about the Home Front in the First World War when I was contemplating writing a book on the subject myself, but I had never heard of Michael MacDonagh and was delighted to come across a new addition to the relatively few accounts – compared to the embarrassment of riches about the Home Front in the Second World War – that I already knew. I discovered that the benign-looking man with wire spectacles, toothbrush moustache and wing collar in the book’s frontispiece had, before the war, been a parliamentary correspondent for The Times, had written several books, and would write more during and after the war. Several were on Parliament and its traditions and workings, others on Ireland, including a biography of Daniel O’Connell and those Irish soldiers who fought in the war. He was also a contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography, mainly writing entries on Irish figures including the actor and comedian Tyrone Power, though he never merited an entry himself. On the outbreak of war MacDonagh was 52, too old to fight (though he thought that ridiculous), and so he continued to work for The Times doing ‘journalistic work associated with the War’ plus some ‘useful propaganda’ for the government. Indeed, with so many of the staff of military age enlisted he was busier than ever. I think I can claim to have seen everything of importance bearing on the War for good or evil that happened in London during those eventful four and a half years, when the War was part of the texture of London’s life, domestic and public . . . What a time it was! The things unprecedented that happened were all the more amazing for their occurrence in places known so intimately for years in the daily round and common task. Frightfully destructive bombs dropped from the air close to the Strand and Fleet Street! Raiding Zeppelins brought down in flames close to London! German prisoners of war working on Surrey farms. And many other equally strange experiences. Yet the Press, ‘quite properly’ in MacDonagh’s view, was rigorously censored. No news civil or military could be published which might be of use to the enemy.  However, Everything relating to the War in London had to be ‘covered’ . . . although in the circumstances, it might produce no ‘copy’ which the Censor would pass. In fact the more an event was of consequence from a newspaper point of view, the less about it was, as a general rule, permitted to be published. Were all these extraordinary happenings – incredible, unthinkable before the War, to pass unrecorded? Surely a contemporary account of what I witnessed in London during the War . . . might be of interest and value historically when the War has become a thing of the past. So, with the ‘journalistic instinct’ working within him, MacDonagh began to keep a diary. It opens with the scene in the House of Commons on that fateful day, 4 August 1914, and ends with the tumultuous celebrations of the Armistice in the streets of London on 11 November 1918. There were, he acknowledged, many books about the War, but he was confident that his diary would provide a fresh perspective since he was writing ‘with an eye solely for what we journalists call “human interest”’. In October 1914, for example, MacDonagh noted the ‘spy mania’ that was gripping the country. ‘Germans have been caught red-handed, on the East Coast signalling with lights to German submarines . . . more damnable still, bombs have been discovered  in the trunks of German governesses in English county families! . . . The Government deny that there is any foundation whatever to these rumours’, but the alarmists argue that the Government are ‘as blind as bats to what is going on around them. Why, they have even failed to see that the tennis courts in country houses occupied by Germans were really gun platforms!’ An observant Brixton woman noticed that four women in nurse’s uniform on a tram failed to draw their legs in as women do when thrown a book. ‘They are men not women,’ the passenger concluded. She was rewarded with £50 when she reported the deception to the police, and four German spies wanted for months by the authorities were arrested. But despite public pressure to intern the Germans, the Liberal Prime Minister H. H. Asquith was more judicious, refusing to treat all naturalized aliens as spies and enemies. Most of them, he assumed, ‘were loyal British subjects, and the doubtful remainder would be carefully watched’. MacDonagh thoroughly approved of this broadminded response. In November 1916, the journalist-diarist noted the number of ‘War Shrines’ to be seen in the more residential and crowded areas of central London ‘where neighbourliness prevails’:

Usually the shrine is a decorated wooden tablet surrounded by a cross, put up at a street corner and containing the names of those from the street who are serving in the Army or Navy or who have been killed in action. There is a ledge for a vase of flowers . . . I have not noticed any shrines in suburban districts where people might live for years yet know nothing of their next-door neighbours . . . this is one of the oddities of London.

That Christmas, McDonagh noted that the ‘outstanding feature is the heavy post to and from the Front’, so heavy in fact that ‘extensive hutments have been erected for the purpose in Regent’s Park . . . the work is without precedent … some ten million letters and some quarter of a million parcels for the Front are dealt with weekly’. On Boxing Day his editor sent him to report on ‘the observance of the holiday in London’.

I found it entirely devoid of the merrymaking traditionally associated with it  . . . the only spectacle that tended to relieve the holiday from being unutterably dull was the numerous taxi cabs dashing through the streets with white satin streamers, each giving a fleeting glimpse of a bridegroom in khaki and a wartime bride in white. Army marriages continue to be very numerous.

MacDonagh’s diary was not published until 1935, after he had retired from ‘active journalism’ just four years before the start of the Second World War, when the Great War tragically lost its singular finality and became known simply as the First World War. Acclaim for the book which ‘with quiet, unhurried tread . . . walks through the war years from that radiant Bank Holiday when it was still for us to wonder if we should go to war, to that rainy day when all London seemed to be in the streets, at the centre because the Armistice had come’ was fulsome. Robert Lynd, reviewing ‘the diary of a journalist’ in the News Chronicle, wrote that it ‘makes London more real in detail than any of the books which have yet been written’. ‘What a gold mine for future historians!’ the Tatler enthused. And that is a verdict I fervently endorsed as I pondered which book to deposit in that munificent Sussex phone box, which might equally absorb, intrigue and enlighten the next person to lever open the heavy ‘library’ door.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 49 © Juliet Gardiner 2016


About the contributor

Juliet Gardiner has written extensively about the Home Front during the Second World War and is now embarking on a series of meditations on the period 1945–79.

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