#22 The bullying of Edward Grey -
Ep 6 WW1: was it really Britain’s fault?

A right-wing anti-German contingent call their campaign for war, the weekend of 31 July-2 August a ‘pogrom’. All talks of peace are, in their words, a German-Jewish plot to keep Britain out of the war for financial reasons. They have the support of the Conservative party, the British and French military, the politician in charge of the Royal Navy, and the press. But how on earth does Grey persuade the anti-war Liberal Cabinet and Parliament?

On Saturday 1 August 1914 the British Foreign Secretary Grey and the German Ambassador to London Karl Lichnowksy, worked out the basis of a deal to avoid world war. The German Kaiser and his advisers accepted at once and cracked the champagne. The Kaiser sent a joyful telegram to his cousin, King George V of Great Britain.

It’s often said that the reason the war broke out was that, despite all this the German army was determined to fight it. Now, while there were some in the German army who wanted war, that evening they were firmly overruled by the Kaiser. Von Moltke, Chief of the German General Staff was so distraught, he went home and suffered a minor stroke.

What few histories of the period make clear is that the immediate reason the First World War broke out was not the pressure for war in Germany, but shocking and shadowy forces in Britain, and particularly in the British army, who wanted to fight it.

On Saturday 1 August 1914, the peace of the world hung in the balance. Foreign Secretary Grey and German Ambassador Lichnowsky had brokered the outline of a deal. Britain would stay neutral. The Germans would suspend their attack on France and Belgium. The Germans accepted it at once.

It was very likely that this agreement would tip the balance against the war starting at all. The British cabinet had been long, loudly and strongly in favour of staying neutral. The French government was facing domestic chaos and was likely to accept the offer of a German standoff in return for staying neutral too. There was a decent hope the Russians and Austrians would then also back down in their quarrel over the Balkans. A terrible war could be averted, at least for the time being.

But there were other forces at work in Britain that Bank Holiday weekend. They were not interested in making peace with Germany. As we’ve been witnessing in these discussions at the History Café, British foreign policy in the years up to 1914 was profoundly affected by the anti-German opinions of an opaque clique of bureaucrats at the Foreign and War Offices. Also by anti-German headlines in the popular press. These factions argued that the Germans had a secret plan to take over Europe, the British Empire, even the world. It was a fantasy. As we saw at our last discussion, German documents clearly show that German government had made no preparations even for a defensive war of more than a few weeks, let alone taking over the world. They were much more interested in doing a deal with Britain than stealing her empire. But the myth of German aggression led certain very well-placed diplomats and journalists to argue loudly that the sooner Britain went to war with Germany the better.

Even more insidious was what was going on among certain of the British generals. The British army had emerged from the Boer War in 1902 with its reputation in rags. From 1905 a section of influential British generals had therefore begun secret, unofficial talks with their French opposite numbers. Not only were these British generals taken in by the empty black propaganda about Germany. They were actually enthusiastic to start a war in order to regain the British army’s lost glory.

They believed that, if – when, as they hoped – the Germans attacked France, the British army could send across a small so-called ‘expeditionary force.’ They believed they would win a quick, cheap and glorious victory, and regain the shine on their lost reputation.

Major General Henry Wilson was the British Army’s Director of Military Operations. Ever since taking on the job, in 1910, he had been working on the plan to send the Expeditionary Force to Flanders to defeat the Germans. It had never had Cabinet backing. In fact when the Liberal Cabinet had found out about it, it had angrily made it clear it would not back it. But Wilson, notoriously irascible Ulsterman that he was, didn’t care about that. He loathed Britain’s Liberal Government - boozy Prime Minister Asquith and his wet ministers – ‘Squiff and his filthy cabinet’ as he called them.

Historian Douglas Newton has shown that, on Friday 31 July, the day before the Grey-Lichnowsky deal, with tension mounting unbearably across Europe, Major General Wilson had begun pulling in his anti-German contacts.

Directing events from his house in Sloane Square, Wilson was in close touch with Arthur Nicolson, Permanent Under Secretary and the most senior civil servant at the Foreign Office. He was also in contact with Eyre Crowe, whom we’ve met before and who was now Nicolson’s deputy. Nicolson was as anti-German as Wilson, and almost as fanatically anti-German as Crowe. Wilson seems to have coordinated his campaign with [Vee-comt] Vicomte Lanouse, the current French Military Attaché. They were also in touch with Winston Churchill, the politician in charge of the Navy, who was as anti-German as any of them, and who had done his own, also unauthorised deal, for the British Navy to fight Germany alongside the French. Finally, Wilson’s gang was working with the leaders of the Tory party, who were as out-and-out for war as anyone.

Crowe reported back on Foreign Office gossip. Grey, he said, was afraid that Britain’s trade would be ruined if they went to war. As we saw in an earlier discussion, that’s exactly what many industrialists – and the Governor of the Bank of England, with tears in his eyes – were telling him. 

In the early hours of Saturday 1 August Crowe wrote to his wife. Maybe it was with this letter he included his sketch of a crow weeping into his handkerchief we found in his papers. ‘The cabinet is in panic,’ he told her, ‘and it seems doubtful whether they will take the only honourable and absolutely necessary course and declare that they will stand by France if attacked.’ What Crowe writes next, in the middle of the night on 1 August 1914, chills the soul. The government, he said, is ‘funking owing to pressure of financial and commercial panic mongers, whom I suspect to be instigated by the German Jewish houses who are practically at the orders of Berlin.’

It is a numbing allegation and it hangs starkly and grotesquely in the historical mind’s eye. That night Eyre Crowe, deputy head of the British Foreign Office, quietly put in writing his belief that talk of peace was a Jewish plot. He accused British Jews of working on orders from Germany, and of stirring up British trading interests to oppose the war.

Major General Wilson, who openly scoffed at ‘that awful thing, an open mind,’ noisily agreed with Crowe. The Foreign Secretary Grey, he maintained, was being bullied by British Jews trying to protect their German business partners. That’s why he had launched his campaign, pulling on all his anti-German contacts. They would head off what he openly declared to be a Jewish plot for peace and make sure Britain declare war. In a ghastly reference to the grisly anti-Semitic persecution that had blighted Eastern Europe for generations, Wilson openly called his war campaign that weekend a ‘pogrom.’

Wilson’s men sent cars, and messengers by train, to get the Conservative Party leadership back from its weekend playing tennis at Henley. The French Embassy offered to help. The Sloane Square men also sent messages to Charles a Court Repington, the military correspondent at The Times and to their other friends in the right-wing press, telling them to post the most warlike headlines they dared.

Wilson’s anti-Semitic gang apparently decided that they would have to bully the Foreign Secretary Grey into submission. Crowe told his wife that he had been ‘pleading hourly with Grey who is undecided and tired.’ Crowe had then stayed up writing ‘a strong and outspoken memorandum and sent it to Grey.’

That Saturday evening, 1 August 1914, the Kaiser had been drinking champagne, sending his telegram to Buckingham Palace, believing the war with France was off. But in London’s Foreign Office, Arthur Nicolson had been threatening to resign if Britain remained neutral. Now he stormed into Grey’s office. They could not, he shouted, go back on their promise to fight alongside the French.

Now we doubletake. What promise? You may well ask. The only promise ‘to fight alongside the French’ was the one that the British army had, without any authorisation from anyone, covertly made to the French army. Oh, and also Winston Churchill’s madcap scheme for the two navies to divide up the seas between them. The British cabinet had repeatedly declared that the British were under no obligation whatever to help the French, either from the Anglo-French entente of 1904, or from these endless and unauthorised army talks, or from Churchill’s navy plan.

Grey could have shouted back in Nicolson’s face that there never had been any such ‘promise.’ There was an army contingency plan, and a Naval proposal, nothing else. None of it committed the British to anything at all. That was what the Cabinet had clearly set out over and over again in writing. It could not have been clearer. Instead, Grey apparently just gave Nicolson a despairing look.

‘You,’ bellowed the foreign office mandarin Arthur Nicolson, ‘will render us a by-word among nations.’ Nobody, he implied, would ever trust the British again if they stayed neutral now.

It was an outrageous scene. But Grey seems to have been shaken up it, as well as by Crowe’s endless memos. He left his office and went to his club, Brooks’s in St James’s Street. There he met Arthur Murray his Parliamentary Private Secretary. Grey and Murray found a billiards table. Over the game Grey told Murray that he had made a decision. After all his peace-making talks with Lichnowsky, and despite all the telegrams to Berlin offering British neutrality, and whatever had been agreed in Cabinet he’d been persuaded by Nicolson, Crowe and the anti-German clique. Grey told Murray that, he would send the Army to fight alongside the French in Flanders. With peace in his grasp, he had decided to precipitate a war.

Suddenly a summons arrived for Grey to report to the King at Buckingham Palace.

In the course of Saturday 1 August 1914, a phalanx of  British army generals and highly placed bureaucrats at the Foreign Office launched a ferocious campaign to persuade the foreign secretary Edward Grey to abandon the peace talks that had led the Germans to suspend their planned attack on Belgium and France. They called it a ‘pogrom’. What we were never taught at school is that these officials were not only convinced, without any evidence, that the Germans were bent on world domination but that any talk of peace was a Jewish plot to get the British out of the way.

In the middle of the evening, of 1 August 1914, the German Kaiser, believing war with France and Britain to have been averted, sent a delighted telegram to his cousin, King George V of England. When he received it, King George summoned Edward Grey, the Foreign Secretary, to Buckingham Palace.

What’s this? he wanted to know. Grey had lied to the cabinet about his talks with the Germans and had not told the king anything about them. Obviously the king did not want war. He just needed to know what to reply to cousin Willy. (Villy)

What happens next is hard to believe. Grey had spent much of the day in talks with Prince Lichnowsky, forging a way to avoid, at the last moment, a catastrophic war. But since then Grey had been shouted at and bombarded with hostile memos by the anti-German civil servants at the Foreign Office. So now he mumbled to the king that Prince Lichnowsky had got it all wrong. No peace had been negotiated with the Germans.

Grey sat down then and there and drafted a reply for the king to send. It began, ‘there must be some misunderstanding….’ Britain could not accept the German offer. Grey had nothing to suggest except another meeting with Lichnowsky. In just a few words, scribbled late on the evening of 1 August 1914 at Buckingham Palace, without any authorisation whatever from anyone, and certainly no discussion with the British cabinet, Grey had just destroyed the best chance of negotiating peace in Europe.

Telegrams from the King of England got through quickly. Just before midnight, Berlin time, General von Moltke, Chief of the German Army’s General Staff, was ordered back to the Kaiser’s palace. He found the Kaiser in bed. ‘Now you can do what you want,’ he said.  

Germany’s army was back on schedule for war with France.

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