Myths and Legends of the Second World War (24 page)

The witness was understood to assent with the qualification ‘public career'. She expressed her belief that the Prime Minister had done immense harm, was a source of mischief particularly to the working classes, and had been the occasion of the sacrifice of thousands of lives. She considered that he ought to be punished, severely punished. She did not remember saying that the ******* should be killed to stop it. She admitted that she had spoken of the Prime Minister in very obscene terms, and admitted that one particularly foul expression put to her by the Attorney-General was a favourite mode of her expressing her disapproval. She had said he ought to be killed. Pressed on the point, however, she said she did not think it now, adding ‘We often say in our bitterness things we do not mean.' She meant it at the time.

In further cross-examination, Alice Wheeldon said she did not think that from first to last anything was said to Booth about dogs. She denied that she had ever said that Walton Heath would be the best place to catch Lloyd George with an air gun. At that time she did not know that Mr Lloyd George's house at Walton Heath had been burned down by Suffragettes.

The trial lasted five days, which included the re-opening of the case before a reconstituted jury owing to the illness of one of the original members. In his summing-up, defending counsel, a Mr Riza, submitted that the prosecution was ‘scandalous, vile and vindictive' and an affront to public justice. Riza made much of the fact that ‘Alec Gordon' had not been produced to the court, and ventured that the employment of ‘mysterious secret government agents' was un-British. Bizarrely, Riza then suggested that in keeping with the odd and somewhat farcical nature of the case, the proper mode of trial should be trial by ordeal:

Mr Riza concluded by saying that the prisoners were English to the backbone. It was ridiculous to suggest that Mr Lloyd George could have been killed by poisoned arrows or darts. He claimed a verdict of acquittal.

The jury took just 30 minutes to return verdicts of Guilty against Alice Wheeldon, Alfred Mason and Winnie Mason, who received terms of imprisonment of ten, seven and five years respectively. Harriet Wheeldon was acquitted. In passing sentence, the judge observed that he could not think of a worse case, and that Alice Wheeldon had been convicted on evidence which could only have brought the jury to one conclusion. Turning to Alfred Mason, Mr Justice Low declared that but for the recommendation to mercy from the jury, he too would have received ten years' penal servitude. Of Winnie Mason he said that he took her upbringing into account, and that her position was due largely to the ‘bad and wicked' influence of her mother. The coarse language habitually and admittedly used by all three women greatly irritated the judge, who, in noting that Harriet and Winnie were teachers, informed the jury he wondered whether elementary education was such a blessing after all.

After sentence had been passed, Sylvia Pankhurst was allowed to enter the witness box to deny that the Suffragette movement had ever spent £300 on a plot to murder the Prime Minister. Alice Wheeldon and the Masons each served two years in gaol before being released after a Home Office review, conducted at the express request of Lloyd George. In recent years commentators have observed that the defendants were convicted on doubtful evidence, although it should be borne in mind that traffic in lethal poisons was admitted, only the purpose being disputed. Alice Wheeldon's fanatical zeal for gesture politics had certainly run too far to avoid prosecution. Weakened by a meagre prison diet, hard labour and a succession of hunger strikes, she succumbed to influenza shortly after her release from custody in 1919. However, her legend lives on in the realm of fiction, informing both a play by Sheila Rowbotham (
The Friends of Alice Wheeldon
), and in
The Eye in the Door
(1993), the second volume of the acclaimed
Regeneration
trilogy by Pat Barker.

If aspects of the Wheeldon trial bordered on the ludicrous, it paled when compared to another case heard at the Central Criminal Court a year later, in June 1918. The nature of the action was unusual enough: the private prosecution of an MP by a dancer for criminal libel, following the staging of a banned play by Oscar Wilde. But it was the allegations which formed the background to the case that truly set it apart: that the Hidden Hand was seeking to undermine the British fighting spirit by propagating vices which ‘all decent men thought had perished in Sodom and Lesbia', and to render the British army ineffective by the deliberate spread of venereal disease.

The background to this inglorious yet celebrated legal episode requires no little elaboration. In 1918 Noel Pemberton-Billing, the Independent MP for East Hertfordshire, had held his seat for two years and gained a reputation as a prominent demagogue. Billing, or ‘PB' as he preferred to be known, was a man of many talents. A former repertory actor and singer, Billing was also an incorrigible inventor whose unlikely creations ranged from a pencil which calculated ‘as you write' to a machine for making and packing self-lighting cigarettes, as well as the ‘Digit Typewriter' and the ‘Proxy Phone'. Billing also tried his hand at magazine publishing, farming, property development and a career at the Bar, all without conspicuous success.

In 1912 PB took a crash course in flying, obtained a pilot's licence, and founded the Supermarine Aircraft Company at Southampton, later to produce the Spitfire. Success was slow in coming for the company, however, and after war broke out PB decided to pursue a parliamentary career. Rejected by the Conservatives as a maverick, Billing stood as an Independent in the Mile End by-election, his stated aim being a ‘strong air policy'. After losing to a Coalition candidate, and vexed by the lack of official interest in the designs generated by Supermarine, Billing enlisted in the Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS). His service career is somewhat mysterious: he was said to have taken a prominent role in the planning of the first bombing raid on Germany in November 1914, which targeted the large Zeppelin base at Friedrichshafen on Lake Constance, and to have risen to the rank of Squadron Commander. Later, official sources would claim that Billing had spent only 12 months in the RNAS, had never flown on a raid or in the face of the enemy, and never rose beyond Flight Lieutenant. Whatever the truth, in March 1916 Billing fought and won the East Hertfordshire by-election, again as an Independent candidate, and with rude enthusiasm set about fulfilling what he described in his autobiography (published a year later) as ‘the self-appointed task'.

By virtue of persistent questions in the Commons on air policy, Billing became known as the ‘Member for Air', an ironic sobriquet which acknowledged his verbal profligacy, be it on the subject of spies, aliens or any other mild or serious cause for complaint. Billing vigorously promoted his self-image of a man of action, drove a lemon-yellow Rolls Royce, dressed in unusual clothes, and expressed a preference for ‘fast aircraft, fast speed-boats, fast cars and fast women' – and kept quiet the fact that his wife, Lilian Schweitzer, was half-German. To further his cause for a greater degree of ‘purity' in public life, and to root out the ‘mysterious influence' of the Hidden Hand, Billing founded a small-circulation subscription-only journal called
The Imperialist
, which he initially ran at a loss from his Hertford base, and which carried inflammatory articles intended to provoke libel writs, and thus self-serving publicity. For this reason no advertising revenue was forthcoming for the magazine, although a measure of financial backing was provided by Lord Beaverbrook. In June 1917 Billing also founded the Vigilante Society, and proved himself to be a combative character in a more literal sense. A month afterwards, a slighting reference to army officers made in the Commons triggered a confrontation with Colonel Archer-Slee, which ended that evening in the two men exchanging punches on the grass in New Palace Yard. Escapades of this kind failed to impress his political superiors, who regarded Billing as a loose cannon. Indeed, in the opinion of David Lloyd George: ‘This man is dangerous. He doesn't want anything.'

Although Billing and his self-appointed task appeared patriotic to a fault, his vision was clouded by something far darker. Many of the political radicals from whom he drew inspiration, and who were employed or published by his magazine, were engaged in developing what is identified by author Philip Hoare as a virulent strain of British fascism. Henry Beamish, who ran the Vigilante Finance Committee, was a hardened anti-semite who preached that the German jews, or Ashkenazim, had infiltrated British society at all levels. Dr J.H. Clarke, another founding Vigilante, was chief consulting physician at the Bloomsbury Homeopathic Hospital; his self-proclaimed mission was to protect England from the Church of Rome. No less unpleasant was Arnold White, an elderly editor of the
English Review
whose ideas embraced the forced Jewish colonisation of Argentina, and whose books included
The Modern Jew
,
Efficiency and Empire
,
Is the Kaiser Insane?
and
The Hidden Hand
. The latter, published in September 1917, was particularly popular, its lurid black cover and shocking red lettering offering a stern warning to all right-thinking Britons. On the subject of pervasive treachery, White wrote:

You deny the existence of the Hidden Hand. I have seen the criminal finger-marks of the Hidden Hand in Downing Street, in the Foreign Office, in the Home Office, in the Admiralty, in the Board of Trade, in the Local Government Board, in the headquarters of the County Constabulary, and in the Cabinet itself. The difference between an educated man and a half-educated man is the difference between perception and detection of truth and willingness to believe what one wants to believe. Disinterested study of evidence is the touchstone of statesmanship. You aver that the Hidden Hand is a myth. Lawyers and party politicians are no less liable to error than disinterested students of public affairs.

White goes on to quote from a letter written by him to the Home Secretary, Herbert Samuel, in February 1916:

For the last year I have had incessant complaints from Brighton and Hove of the extent to which Germans and pro-Germans are encouraged. The enclosed postcard, insulting the British Army, was bought to me in the presence of two witnesses on Saturday the 19th inst., at a shop of a German who was interned last year. On his internment he placed his brother in charge – a pure German. This man has recently been in Scotland, and has been granted an armlet to excuse him from service.

From this underwhelming (and unspecified) evidence, White concluded:

If there is no Hidden Hand, what was the force that enabled the Brighton Hun to affront the people of Sussex by insult to the British Army and then boast of his immunity?

A later article by White on the subject of ‘Efficiency and Vice' so impressed Billing that it was reprinted in
The Imperialist
in December 1917. The gist of this curiously garbled call-to-arms was that the combination of German efficiency and decadence amounted to a moral invasion of England, by which the ‘stamina' of Britain's youth was being undermined. White warned of unspecified ‘vices of the Cities of the Plain', in respect of which ‘Palestine taught nothing to Potsdam': Germany was said to be in a state of total moral degeneracy owing to the all-pervasive power of homosexuals, referred to as ‘urnings'. According to White, at London District Command, a dedicated team of ‘very able Intelligence officers' was engaged in fighting the infection of Londoners, and troops in particular, with the doctrines of the German urning: