Meeting the Enemy (9 page)

German music was removed from concert programmes, often from fear among the management of halls and churches that audiences would boycott an evening’s musical entertainment if German composers were included. One who spoke out against the trend was Charles Eshborn, born in Urmston in Lancashire but the son of German parents living in Manchester. In late September he wrote in disgust to the editor of the
Manchester Guardian
.

What have these poor composers done? The family of Ludwig van Beethoven, as the name implies, is traceable to a village near Louvain in Belgium. He lived at a time when England and Germany were supporting each other, and his fame in England was often a source of great comfort to him, especially after his last illness, when the London Philharmonic Society assisted him when he was in very straitened circumstances and all help in Germany had been refused. Wagner was for a period an exile from Germany and in 1855 conducted concerts of the Philharmonic Society with great success. Handel left Germany at an early age, and, as everybody must know, became a naturalised Englishman. Bach, Gluck, Haydn, Mozart and Mendelssohn all lived in times when England was a most staunch supporter of Germany. Besides, what is to be gained by banning such great music as that of the above composers? Probably most of the people who are demanding the exclusion of these composers are perhaps under the impression that some of them are in command of some German Regiment destroying ancient churches and killing women and children.

The
Manchester Guardian
published the piece but exercised its editorial judgement and cut the last sentence. Given the excited times in which he was writing, Charles Eshborn also asked that they use his
nom de plume
‘Thomas Lorei’.

The excising of Germans from British life continued unabated. By October 1914 there were announcements analogous to advertising, confirming to customers that no Germans or Austrians were in the employment of the Savoy, Claridge’s and Berkeley hotels, nor, indeed, at the Strand Palace Hotel, J. Lyons and Co. and the Palmerston Restaurant. Another press announcement made it clear that ‘No Germans or Austrians, whether naturalised or not, remained in the employment of the Carlton and The Ritz Hotels, and the Princess Hotel and Restaurant.’ Diners could rest assured that food was uncontaminated by enemy hands, diners’ ears spared foreign musicians, conversations no longer eavesdropped by spies.

One who felt the icy winds of change was Richard Noschke, an East End German living in the borough of Newham. The capital had been his home for twenty-five years and he had married an English girl in the 1890s. Noschke was typical of those described by Joseph King MP in the Commons as being ‘much more British in sentiment than German’; indeed, so good was Noschke’s English that nobody except his works manager knew he was German. After the outbreak of war, Noschke dutifully registered himself with the police at Limehouse police station, being warned not to travel further than five miles from his home without a special permit and subjecting himself to a 9 p.m. curfew. Despite these restrictions he continued to work at the pharmaceutical company in which he had been employed for many years.

‘The newspapers soon started their campaign of hatred against all Germans in England,’ wrote Noschke. ‘Everybody was termed a spy, and every employer was warned not to employ any German as they were all spies.’ This agitation became so strong, according to Noschke, that eventually, out of fear, his boss discharged him. His next job lasted just four days before he was sacked once more.

I looked around for work, almost frightened by the attitude of the people, it was no easy matter, as most places had notices up that no German need apply, and most shops had notices in their windows, ‘No Germans served here,’ the feeling of the lower classes became so bitter by this time that they would almost throw a man from the top of an omnibus or out of a running train if they knew he was a German. At last one morning at Canning Town Labour Exchange I received a card to go to a place where a man was wanted [to make varnish], the official put my name on the card and said to me, ‘your name sounds Russian,’ I said, ‘Yes, it is,’ and he put right across the card Russian subject.

Thirty-seven-year-old Richard Druhm was in similar difficulties. A German by birth, he had lived in London for fifteen years, working long hours to establish his hairdressing salon, moving from Camden to Hampstead as his hard work paid dividends. He married a London girl, Ethel Norris, in April 1905 and they had a daughter, Elfreda, born in September 1910.

My father had arrived at the turn of the century and had done extremely well. He had never gone back to Germany, because he liked it here. Then he met my mother and they were married; both my parents worked in the ladies’ hairdressing shop. I know that my grandmother, Elizabeth Norris, didn’t approve of the match. She, as well as my aunts, strongly frowned upon the engagement, and in revenge they didn’t go to the wedding. Well, there wasn’t a wedding really, it all had to be hush-hush because nobody wanted her to marry a German.

Our shop was smashed within weeks of war breaking out and we had to leave because there was so much hostility. I was there but I can’t say I remember it happening as a proper memory as I was in bed, but I do know that we cleared out of that house very suddenly. Father was taken away and interned, and Mother left at the same time. We had nowhere to go and we had to find furnished rooms quickly. Mother never said much about that night as it was a very painful part of her life. She had to leave everything behind. There was one relative who tried to help, a husband of my aunt, and he helped dispose of certain things, the furniture and the lease on the shop. He sold the furniture but got very little for that. My grandmother lived nearby as did one aunt, but they did little to help, which caused a lot of bad feeling for years.

My mother tried to find work telling the truth, saying who she was, why she was looking for a job and where her husband was. Nobody would help because she was married to a German, even though she was totally English and had only once stepped out of the country. So she changed her name to Miss Norris, her maiden name, and as soon as she went as Miss Norris she was employed at a salon in Oxford Street.

Newspaper stories of battlefield atrocities helped keep army recruitment high in September, October and November and continued to poison public opinion of Germans and Austrians living in Britain. One of the few who took a more objective view of the newspaper reports was a seventeen-year-old Kitchener volunteer, Charles Carrington. Like many boys of his age he could not wait to get into the army and had lied about his age to do so. He was also mature enough to have a healthy and sceptical view about some of the more lurid stories – Belgian babies bayoneted to church doors, for example – emanating from France and Belgium. ‘German atrocities are being taken absurdly seriously and I get much abused if I remind people that our Allies include the slave drivers of the Congo [a reference to an influential report condemning Belgian atrocities in the African colony], the Cossacks and the Serbians.’

Carrington wrote to his mother that ‘distraught refugees and drunken “Tommies” will tell all sorts of tales’, and that he had never heard an authentic account of an atrocity at first hand. ‘The papers are full of witnessed accounts,’ he penned, ‘but the papers have to get copy from somewhere.’

Enemy aliens were not completely cut adrift. In August 1914 the Society of Friends, the Quakers, set up the ‘Emergency Committee for the Assistance of Germans, Austrians and Hungarians in Distress’. It launched a national appeal for funds and raised an initial but useful £5,500, including donations from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, Sir Edward Goschen, the last pre-war ambassador to Berlin, and Viscount Richard Haldane, the Lord Chancellor and former Secretary of State for War; Haldane was later ousted from office in 1915 after being accused of pro-German sympathies.

The Friends’ Emergency Committee (FEC) set up in offices lent to them in St Stephen’s House, a building overlooking London’s Embankment and so close to Parliament as to be in the shadow of Big Ben. Ironically, the FEC shared the building with the newly established Parliamentary Recruiting Committee but there was little friction despite a growing number of Germans, who, in pursuit of help and protection, spilt out of the FEC’s offices into communal corridors and stairwells. In 1920 a record of the FEC’s work at St Stephen’s House was published. Written by a leading light of the organisation known only by the initials ABT, it gives a detailed and frank account of the charity’s work.

Hundreds of discharged waiters flocked to us begging for work. Many of them had excellent references showing years of service in the best London hotels. Now in response to popular clamour they were destitute. Many had lost not only their jobs but their lodgings too, and were sleeping in the parks. Fortunately, August of 1914 was fine and warm, but soon the autumn rains of an exceptionally wet winter set in, and these poor people suffered. We arranged a soup kitchen for them and strove to help them in other ways.

Whole families came to us also, father, mother and little children. Sometimes they were faint for want of food, for many would not ask for help whilst they had a crust remaining. We saw people in the pangs of hunger - people who fainted whilst being interviewed - people who looked at us with sad despairing eyes and burst into tears at the first kindly word. Careful arrangements were made for investigating the truth of their stories and we required at least two reputable references before giving anything beyond an emergency grant.

To meet the first needs we were able to obtain a considerable number of offers of hospitality, and many Friends and others entertained these distressed people for days, weeks or even months at a time. Two furnished houses were used by the Committee as hostels, and a lady furnished a roomy garage as a temporary shelter for some of the cases when delayed in London waiting for their travelling permits.

Many of those the FEC helped were holidaymakers caught out by the declaration of war; others were attending summer schools as teachers or students. As German banks in London closed, many Germans were stranded without access to funds; they would have to be housed while travel permits were obtained. Like Britons trapped in Germany, these visitors were susceptible to irrational fears; they heard that railways in France and Belgium had been destroyed: they would be turned out into the fields to walk; there were agents of the white slave trade working on Dutch trains preying in particular on young girls. More credible were threats from fraudsters and opportunists, including one who came to the attention of the FEC. This man wrote to desperate aliens claiming to have been commissioned by their families in Germany to bring them home although an upfront fee of £10 would be required if he was to help them.

For every unfortunate visiting Britain, far more, like Richard Noschke and Richard Druhm, were permanently domiciled in London or the provinces. Of those helped by the FEC, eighteen years was the average length of residence in their adopted home.

The FEC was not the only charity helping enemy aliens; others included the Central Council of United Relief Societies, the International Women’s Relief Committee and the Prisoners of War Relief Agency, all remarkable organisations swimming against the fast-flowing river of public resentment and animosity. Their impact was generally to ameliorate the worst effects of government policy particularly in respect of internment and the effects that imprisoning the chief breadwinner had on family life.

Unfortunately, much of the government’s policy of internment was fashioned without much thought as to the practicalities of imprisoning thousands of enemy aliens. After the period of grace granted to all Germans to leave Britain, the procedure that August was to intern all male enemy aliens of military age, seventeen to forty-two. The numbers interned rose gradually. From just 4,300 at the end of the month, the figure accelerated as news reached Britain of the BEF’s military setbacks in Belgium and France, and the public grew correspondingly nervous. The numbers rose again to 6,600 by the second week of September and then almost doubled to 11,000 seven days later. The press reported the numerical rise just as the authorities ran out of available accommodation, the War Office suspending the arrests of civilians as figures, including prisoners of war, touched 14,000 by 23 September.

Ironically, it was because enemy aliens were hounded from their homes and jobs that internment became the best and most practicable option. It would be far easier to feed and clothe enemy aliens in one place and to grant allowances to their destitute families than to have them spread out in the wider community and at the mercy of the more troublesome elements of society.

Kitchener recruit Charles Carrington went to view one of the earliest camps at Deepcut in Surrey mistakenly assuming that it was for German spies only.

There were several hundred of them [Germans]. They live in tents in a huge square on the top of a moor with the finest air in England and one of the finest views. They are protected by two barbed wire entanglements. The whole space is I should think 300 yards square. The inner fence is 10 feet high of tight barbed wire guarded at the top by live electric wires. At each corner are platforms for sentries and at intervals inside the outer fence which is a barbed wire entanglement five feet high and thick, are arc lights on poles. Inside are tents and a few sheds and plenty of room where the men were playing football. Some of the better class Germans looked fed up already. We were allowed to walk round and stare.