Meeting the Enemy (13 page)

In Britain, not every incident of family crisis was given equal attention by the Foreign Office or the Home Office. Yet to any family divided by war, their own plight was of the utmost concern and their insistence on official help just as ardent. Helen ‘Nellie’ Fuchs,
née
Jordan, had married Carl Fuchs, a cellist of world renown, in 1893. Her husband was born in Germany in 1865 but had moved to Britain in 1887, receiving British citizenship in 1899. In the intervening years he had become a well-known and respected member of the Manchester community. He was Professor of Music at the Manchester College of Music and was the principal cellist with the Hallé Orchestra and reports of his superb musicianship reached the national press. He knew Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss, played under Brahms, and could count composers such as Sir Edward Elgar and the conductor Sir Henry Wood among his personal friends.

Days before the outbreak of war, Fuchs, accompanied by his family, travelled to Germany to visit his sick mother. So ill was she that Fuchs stayed by her bedside until she died in early September. By this time it had become almost impossible for a male enemy alien to leave, and Fuchs was duly arrested in November and interned in Ruhleben camp. In February 1915, Nellie and her two young sons were allowed to go home. Carl, although released from internment, was not allowed to return but was placed under effective house arrest at his sister’s residence in Jugenheim.

As soon as Nellie arrived home, she began a dedicated campaign to persuade the government to exchange her husband for Otto Blix, an elderly German stranded in Wimbledon. To support her case, Nellie pointed out to the authorities the age of her husband, forty-nine, and the fact the family was entirely dependent on his earnings. To survive financially she made it known that she drew on the support of leading institutions, such as the Royal College of Music, as well as that of Sir Henry Wood and Sir Edward Elgar, both of whom forwarded letters in support of Fuchs’s exchange.

March 1915

To the Under Secretary of State

Sir

Mr Carl Fuchs, now a civil prisoner of war in Germany, is well known to me and has been a personal friend for many years. I trust that everything possible may be done to effect an exchange for Mr Carl Fuchs who is a great artist.

I have the honour to be your obedient servant

Edward Elgar

The request was refused. In the first of a number of rebuttals, the Home Office replied on 26 March that it was ‘not possible for His Majesty’s Government to consider questions of individual exchange’. While strictly true, some flexibility was possible, as unrelated cases imply. Inflexibility was observed as and when it suited officials to stand firm. Besides, there was no reason why Fuchs could not have been added to a list of names for group exchange.

Nellie Fuchs would not be put off. She contacted the Home Office repeatedly, trying to find other avenues by which Carl could be brought home. Far from winning sympathy, she alienated the very officials she had hoped would work in her interests. The problem was that Fuchs was not interned. Being German-born and residing in the country of his birth was going to place him somewhere near the bottom of the Home Office’s list of concerns.

‘The more irons one has in the fire, the more likely is success I believe,’ Nellie counselled a sympathetic supporter. ‘And if Carl’s name is mentioned again and again from different quarters, it should make more impression. Of course what makes me uneasy, and what Carl mentions too, is the fact that naturalized Germans are not particularly in favour with the Government here at present.’

Indeed they were not. No one was about to go out of their way to help Nellie Fuchs, as she gradually came to realise.

The stress placed upon married women in time of war was extraordinary, with husbands and sons away on active service, their men’s lives in daily peril.

In 1913 Mary Newton married Arthur Harthaus, giving birth to a son the following year in Blackpool. At some point, probably around April 1915, Arthur was interned, forcing his wife to rely on eleven shillings a week in relief for herself and her child. Mary was forced to move from her home in Stockport to live with her mother near Durham. Serious domestic arguments ensued and, in October 1915, Mary took up a British government offer to ‘repatriate’ German women by birth or marriage. Mary travelled to Gotha in central Germany to live with her parents-in-law.

The move proved unsuccessful. Mary had no money of her own and her parents-in-law had little enough to provide for themselves. Within months she applied to return to England. ‘I have decided to beg of you [the American Consulate] to communicate with England regarding my return as I am so very unhappy here.’ The American vice-consul in Erfurt wrote to the American Embassy in Berlin: ‘As Mrs Harthaus is a German citizen by marriage and evidently not entitled to a British passport, I have the honour to ask if I may advance her sufficient money to defray the expenses of her return to England if she is able to obtain permission to leave Germany.’

The British Foreign Office ordered a report from the Manchester City Police Force as to whether Mary’s relatives would look after her and her son. Mary’s brother-in-law, John Sutherst, claimed that he had no objections to her coming to stay, but she had to be in a position to keep herself and this was evidently impossible. He added that in his opinion Mary should remain in Germany. She had quarrelled with relatives and in all likelihood the same state of affairs would recur once she was back in England.

Two months after making her application, Mary Harthaus received the Foreign Office reply: ‘Viscount Grey has the honour to state that His Majesty’s Government regret that after due enquiry they do not feel able to grant permission for Mrs Harthaus’ return.’

Why would the Foreign Office allow Mary Harthaus to return and become a financial burden to the state, especially when she was German and had opted to leave Britain at state expense? If this case appeared clear-cut, there were others in which absurdly punitive measures were adopted with no such rationale.

Annie Vinnicombe married an Anglophile German named Michael Reiser at a church in Marylebone, central London, in the summer of 1894. After four years of marriage the couple and their young family emigrated to Bordeaux where they set up a tailoring business called ‘New England’.

Within weeks of war, Michael Reiser was interned and the business seized. Mrs Reiser was financially secure but by February 1915 the French government decided that as she was legally a German, she could no longer reside in France and would have to go either to Spain or Switzerland. Annie Reiser had contacts in neither country and feared that, instead, she would be sent to Germany where she was not aware of having any living family; she could not, in any case, speak the language.

Much distressed, she appealed for help to the British Consulate in Bordeaux. Arthur Rowley, a consular official, replied informing her that any British-born wife of an enemy alien interned in France would be given permission to return as long as they lived with relatives and were not a drain on state resources.

Annie had a brother and two sisters in England. Her brother, George Vinnicombe, a carman working for the London, Brighton and South Coast Railways, was contacted but he said that he was not in a position to support his sister and her children under his roof.

Annie might have moved in with her sisters but there was a further problem. Both lived within twenty-five miles of the coast, in areas prohibited to ‘enemy aliens’. One sister lived near Falmouth, the other near the village of Chailey in East Sussex. In a letter to Annie, the Home Office refused permission for her to live with either sister and consequently her return to Britain was effectively blocked.

The official rejection was sent at the end of February with a note suggesting the best solution would be if the French authorities allowed her to stay in Bordeaux. On 16 April 1915, the French government informed the British Embassy that they considered it impossible for her to remain as it would set an ‘awkward precedent’. She would thus be removed to an internment camp. The British government then lost all interest in Annie Reiser. Their only concession was to allow her two oldest sons, as British-born subjects, to return home. Twenty-year-old Michael Reiser went to Paris and enlisted with the British artillery. Cecil, the second son, followed a year later and was posted to the 30th Middlesex Regiment, embarking for the Western Front in April 1918. Despite her sons’ patriotism, Annie Reiser remained in France with her youngest son. She does not appear to have been sent to an internment camp.

In contrast to the British government’s attitude towards Annie Reiser, the rights of German-born ‘British’ women to enter Britain were not restricted. David Russell’s German-born wife might have had a miserable time in Britain but there was no question about her not being admitted. Elfride Robson,
née
Frick, was another arrival. Her position was much healthier than Mrs Russell’s: Elfride had English relatives with whom she could stay in Birkenhead. Being on the coast, it was a restricted area for aliens but then, of course, Elfride was not considered an alien.

Elfride had met her English husband Alan in Hamburg where he was working as a company manager. They married and had a daughter, Muriel, born in 1915. Apart from a total of six weeks’ holiday in England, Elfride had never been overseas and Muriel, owing to her father’s internment, had had little or no contact with him. Mother and daughter spoke only German. In October 1918 as the tide of war flowed irrevocably against Germany, Alan applied for his wife and daughter to come to England. The government’s reply arrived within a couple of weeks: ‘His Majesty’s Government have the honour to state that they have no objection to the issue of a passport to Mrs Robson to enable her to return to the United Kingdom with her daughter as soon as she has obtained permission from the German Government to leave Germany.’

Mother and daughter left Germany for Britain on 6 November.

By the start of 1915 the entire east coast and most of the south coast of Britain had been designated an area prohibited to enemy aliens. A surprise enemy naval raid on England in December 1914, and the bombardment of towns including Hartlepool and Whitby, fuelled suspicion that enemy agents were signalling to German ships in the North Sea, increasing pressure on the government to remove any Germans still near the coast. Around 2,500 enemy aliens were living in prohibited areas at the beginning of the New Year, with their continued occupation at the discretion of county Chief Constables. Permits were granted to those Germans considered unreservedly loyal or whose work was of such national importance that their presence inside the prohibited area was of more use than their expulsion. Permits were also given to enemy aliens who were elderly, blind or bedridden or who were confined to a hospital or asylum. In February, the Home Office explained these arrangements to MPs.

On grounds of mere humanity, lone women with nowhere else to go . . . may be made exceptions . . . In rarer cases financial loss or ruin which might follow an expulsion may perhaps be accepted as a reason for indulgence, but in all cases the main factor is that the alien is an enemy, and, if any interest is to suffer it must be that of the individual and not of the country.

This statement should have reassured ‘lone women’ like Julia Jacobitz, the retired German school governess whose only wish was to be left in peace in her Bournemouth home. However, since registering with local police she had been systematically harassed. Within days of registration she received a letter requiring her to move, being given twenty-four hours to comply or face a fine she could not hope to pay. She remained where she was, only to be served with a further demand to go: this time she was threatened with up to six months in prison. Once again she ignored the order; she had no choice:

Since my very existence as a decent human being was bound up with this little house of mine, to leave it would have amounted to being rendered homeless, destitute and ruined for life and I could therefore not comply with such an order any more than I could be expected to conform with one to commit suicide. I had therefore to prepare for imprisonment. For a whole day and night I sat up at the appointed time without food, or sleep, expecting every moment to be taken away.

Julia was given a reprieve but made subject to the five-mile travel restriction imposed on all enemy aliens. No sooner had she heard that she could remain in Bournemouth than she became the subject of a Deportation Order. Miss Jacobitz applied for an exemption, being obliged to reply to questions she felt ‘far exceeded the requirements of the official application forms’. Only after she had endured five months of uncertainty was permission granted for her to remain, whereupon she was served with two further notices to move.

In exasperation, she wrote to the American Embassy’s German Department asking for help.

Having done no wrong whatsoever to justify proceedings against me, I beg to invoke [the] intervention of the Embassy on my behalf in their capacity as temporary protectors of Germans’ interests, to prevent my being forcibly removed from my house. Ever since the beginning of the war, I have been kept in a state of permanent anxiety and suspense: the present being the fourth official order to leave my house. For a woman of 65 years, like myself, weakened in health and placed in exceptionally difficult position by absolute loneliness, having to go through this nerve-racking experience all alone and unaided, passes torture in itself.