Andrew Robinson. History Today. Volume 43, November 1993.
On August 17th, 1915, Archibald Primrose, Earl of ‘Rosebery and a former prime minister, received an anonymous letter about the headmaster of his old school, Eton, of which he was now a Fellow, which spoke in less than complimentary terms:
My Lord,
Are not the Governing Body of Eton going to remove that pestilent lunatic Edward Lyttelton from the position which he now disgraces? It is a humiliating and exasperating thought to hundreds of Old Etonians that a man so unbalanced in mind and with so unbridled a lust for publicity should be permitted to remain in such an office…
If this were the outburst of a crank, the letter would be inconsequential enough: but it transpired that most of the press, a large number of private individuals and clergymen, and furthermore the governing body of Lyttelton’s school had come to think in much the same terms.
The headmaster of England’s leading public school, with more than 3,000 of its old boys fighting on the Western Front, would have seemed an unlikely target for accusations that he was pro-German, a socialist or (most charitably) unbalanced. Yet at the end of March 1915, almost every daily newspaper had been full of reports of ‘an extraordinary sermon’ which had provoked ‘a flood of indignation’; that the headmaster had done wonders for German propaganda, and was the author of ‘amazing views in regard to England’s attitude towards Germany’. The story produced editorials in the Daily Telegraph, The Times, Evening Standard, Daily Mail and Morning Post, and these and other papers published excoriating letters from ‘True-born Englishman’, and ‘Disgusted Old Etonian’. It was perhaps an intervention of that paper’s controller, Lord Northcliffe, which caused the letters page in The Times for March 31st to end with the notice that the Eton term was to close early ‘owing to an outbreak of German measles’.
Before the scandal was over, it was to have involved Lyttelton’s enforced retirement, the troubling of relations with Spain, and contributions from the king, the bishops of Winchester and of Birmingham, and a sympathetic tribute from one source the headmaster was swift to shun, George Bernard Shaw. To trace the unfolding of the scandal in the spring and summer of 1915 and into the next year provides an insight into the attitudes and workings, not just of the claustrophobic and peculiar world of the governing body of Eton, but more generally the attitude of press and public opinion towards the First World War and the role of a clergyman who, as George Bernard Shaw put it, ‘happened to preach a Christian sermon’.
Lyttelton’s gilded career had seen him sail into one of the highest posts of the teaching profession. An Old Etonian himself, he was nephew of W.E. Gladstone and the brother of Alfred Lyttelton, the Colonial Secretary. His sister had been the widow of Lord Frederick Cavendish, killed by the ‘Invincibles’ in the Phoenix Park murders of 1882. Lyttelton had secured most fame himself as a cricketer, scoring a hundred off the bowling of Spofforth, the legendary ‘demon bowler’, when Australia played Cambridge University in 1878. Such was his zest for the outdoors that he wrote in one letter from university, ‘If the rain doesn’t stop I shall gravely commit suicide’. In later life, he was known as ‘The Brown Man’ from his outdoor tan, and as headmaster he and his wife (whom he had met on a mountaineering holiday) were rumoured to sleep with their bed exposed to the elemenus through a hole made in the wall of the Lodgings.
Lyttelton had taught at Wellington and at Eton, and was headmaster of Haileybury before returning to his old school in 1905. He arrived at the school conscious of the need to make changes, one of which, the vast salary consequent to the headmaster’s being paid per capita for the boys under his charge in a rapidly growing school, the Fellows altered with alacrity on Lyttelton’s appointment. It was a time of fierce controversy over the domination of Classics in the curriculum. Lyttelton caused a minor sensation by permitting a deputation of unemployed men on their way to the king at Windsor, to address the boys in 1908 and was remembered as a master with certain marked eccentricities—such as taking his classes out of doors even in the snow. One Old Etonian recalls Lyttelton gave warning to the boys at the school then that the Kaiser notwithstanding, the real peril to Europe came from the ‘Yellow Peril’.
To get the context of Lyttelton’s later remarks it is necessary to look at his school in wartime. Etonians returning to school in September 1914 would have found their numbers significantly reduced, especially among the older boys. More than fifty had gone straight from the summer corps camp to regiments. Survivors talk of a mood in which everyone wanted to join up as soon as possible. Quite a number of the younger masters disappeared as well, their places taken, it seemed to some, by some curious specimens. One master wrote to a friend:
The turmoil of war dims everything else. The boys flock prematurely to the Front, and House Masters will soon be in a tight corner. Strange supplementary dons take Fourth Forms whose masters have gone to the Front, and two dozen Belgian boys fraternise amicably with ours and go into school in knickerbockers …
The arrival of refugees, and the first news of casualties—nine days after the beginning of the school year the first list of the Etonian war dead was published in the school Chronicle must have brought events in France and Flanders closer to boys at Eton. An emphasis was placed on the sufferings of ‘gallant little Belgium’ but the presence of Belgian refugees and distinguished outside speakers Austen Chamberlain came to speak on ‘some broader aspects of the war’ in December 1914—cannot have pressed the realities of war on the school so forcibly as the mounting list of its dead. A section ‘Etona Non Immemor’ with a Roll of the latest dead appeared in the Chronicle, along with a list of those Etonians fighting. There were 736 combatant by the New Year in 1915, and 1,400 a year later, with 160 already killed. Obituary notices sometimes appeared in the Chronicle, reporting the apparent manner of death. John Scudamore, a lieutenant in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, left the school in 1914 and was killed at Loos aged nineteen, on September 25th, 1915. Scarcely a year earlier Scudamore had been playing cricket at Eton with his old headmaster who was still turning out for the Ramblers against the Eleven in his fifties.: [Scudamore] was killed instantaneously leading his men to the assault, and had all but cut his way through the German wire. The fact that he was well in front of his men shows the gallantry with which he went forward.
Peter Parker has written of the influence of the spirit of organised games on the attitude of public schoolboys to war in 1914-18, and certainly it is present in the extract above. Their thoughts did not entirely match the headmaster’s as to the priorities of the conflict. In that same year Logie Leggatt, an Old Etonian King’s Scholar also serving in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, had written from France. He called on his old schoolfriends to send football jerseys and shorts to the Front so that a programme of sports could be arranged. When on OTC activities, boys used football rattles to simulate machine gun fire. A recruiting poster for the Public Schools Battalion exhorting its viewers ‘Come on boys! Fill the ranks’ shows a Boys Own hero astride a trench, a pile of captured pickelhaube—at his feet. The message of such a poster to those reared on games was clear; it was matched by efforts to persuade working-class men to follow their footballing heroes to the Front. But it is a mistake to think this was the only way in which boys thought about the war. Elsewhere in the school Chronicle the following was published:
My inside is turned still after that beastly gas; it really is more than the limit … I have seen Ypres a roaring mass of flames from end to end, a most extraordinary, magnificent sight; I also passed through the place at 3am, when there was absolute desolation—the fire burnt out, and not a living soul to be seen … I have also seen that place of despair known as Hill 60.
Like a significant proportion of Edwardian schoolmasters Lyttelton had taken Holy Orders, and was accustomed to giving sermons not just in term time but away from Eton during the holidays also. One such address he gave at St Martin’s Overstrand, near his home in Norfolk, at the outbreak of the First World War, on August 9th, 1914, was published as a pamphlet with the title, ‘What we are fighting for’. Those who were to wring their hands at the headmaster’s offerings in March 1915 might have found a premonition here. Notwithstanding a castigation of the German military spirit, ‘a people sedulously taught to believe that brute strength established their empire and made them a great People’ and an assertion of the need to believe Britain to be fighting for the rights of the Belgians, ‘a task involving huge self-sacrifice mainly for the sake of a moral principle’, Lyttelton wanted to be sure we were at war on Christian principles. To him this was a God-given opportunity to prove that the purposes of empire lay beyond commerce and force:
Travellers and missionaries all tell the same tale of China, India and Japan. Those swarming hordes of coloured people have felt their own old solution—such as it was—of the eternal problems of duty and inclination, hope and despair, joy and cynicism, shattered by the impact of Western life. [… ] All our outward actions are based on the conviction that naked competition, the outwitting of your neighbour by trickery and force is the Secret of progress, happiness and natural strength.
Here was a chance to prove otherwise: Britain could match Germany’s militarism by a tangible adherence to the gospel instruction to love our enemies. It was perhaps as well for Lyttelton’s career at this point that he put his suggestions as to how this might practically be done in an appendix and not in the sermon itself:
A noble letter was written a few days ago in The Times, which urged that we should ‘make war like gentlemen’. This we have already begun to do. But I would go further. If we have any lady nurses to spare, why should we not send some over to work for the wounded Germans? There is no other way of dealing with barbarians and brutal warfare which ought to be considered for a moment by the War Office of a Christian country—except of course, fair fighting.
What were clergymen—especially Church of England clergymen—to make of the First World War? It is undoubtedly the case that Lyttelton’s stand was not universally shared. One of the most extreme views often cited was that of the Bishop of London, Winnington-Ingram, pulling on uniform as chaplain of the London Rifle Brigade at the age of fifty-seven, a friend of General Sir John French and of Admiral Jellicoe. The bishop addressed recruitment drives from the steps of St Paul’s Cathedral, and wrote the following lines in an Advent sermon in 1915, republished two years later:
At first we see Belgium stabbed in the back, then Poland, and then Serbia, and then the Armenian nation wiped out—500,000 at a moderate estimate being actually killed; and then as a necessary consequence, to save the freedom of the world, to save Liberty’s own self, to save the honour of women and the innocence of children, everything that is noblest in Europe, everyone that loves freedom and honour, everyone that puts principle above ease, and life itself above mere living, are but to save the world; to kill the good as well as bad, to kill the young man as well as the old, to kill those who have shown kindness to our wounded, as well as those fiends who crucified the Canadian sergeant, who superintended the Armenian massacres, who sank the Lusitania, who turned the machine guns on civilians of Louvain—to kill them lest the civilisation of the world should itself be killed.
The things clergymen were prepared to do in the name of this war for Christian civilisation surprised some of them when then they had occasion to recollect in later years. One, C.L. Wart, the Minister of St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh, recalled:
The first thing I did myself when I went to St Paul’s (Greenock) was to have a huge Union Jack and the national flag of Scotland displayed upon the east wall of the chancel. Being young, and owing to the inflamed feelings of the times, I said many things from my pulpit during the first six months of my ministry that I deeply regret. It is no excuse to say that many preachers were doing the same thing. I still feel ashamed when I recall declaiming on one occasion—about the time of Haig’s ‘Our Backs to the Wall’ message—that anyone who talked of initiating peace negotiations with the rulers of Germany was a moral and spiritual leper who ought to be shunned and cut by every decent-minded and honest man!
Equating the demands of patriotism with the demands of the Christian gospel was proving, by 1915, a tricky business. The archbishops were in considerable difficulties—especially Lang of York, much criticised for his recorded ‘sacred memory’ of the Kaiser in prayer. Publicly, the Archbishop of Canterbury produced a pastoral letter at Whitsuntide in 1915 in which the church seemed to be virtually put at the service of the state. Privately, Archbishop Davidson wrote to Asquith to protest at British use of poison gas. But by early 1915, most things were apparently believed of the Germans in their alleged atrocities in Belgium, even the crucifixion of the Canadian sergeant referred to above.
Press opinion was a little less bothered with the facts, especially in the papers owned or controlled by Lord Northcliffe. For several months in 1915 a number of letters had appeared in The Times complaining about the very feeble attitude of the Church of England in regard to the war. In February the Rector of Franfield had complained of ‘the feebleness of the English parson … and the inadequacy of his leaders in this colossal crisis had been beyond words.’ The controversy was concentrated on the refusal of the bishops to allow their clergy to enlist as combatants, but could spread more widely. On the same day as the Lyttelton scandal broke, Northcliffe’s Daily Mail published a letter concerning ‘Munition-making clergymen’, having discovered one, Reverend Stuart Robertson, who did this sort of thing on his weekdays.
It was in this climate that Lyttelton ventured to speak at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, on March 26th, 1915. Even from a distant perspective, Lyttelton’s views seem controversial. He said that it was his view that if we were going to act as a Christian nation we were bound to apply the principle of Christian charity on a scale to which we had never risen before. It was necessary so to act in order to give a reasonable chance of sixty millions of people being saved from their own vindictiveness.
This had to be proven by some sincere act on the part of Britain, to clear her from the German persuasion that ‘we were always talking about morals and never acting them’. He later discussed a proposal made, and then rejected, by ‘men of weight’ of internationalising Gibraltar as a balance to the proposal that at the end of the war the Kiel canal might be internationalised. He commented of this:
If we intend to hold fast to everything we have gained in the past—and some of them possessions which have been gained by very questionable means and we say that we are not going to part with a single inch of territory or a single privilege, all I can say is we are abandoning the principle of Christianity and taking once more our stand on the principle of competition.
It was to earn him instant condemnation from the papers. In the Daily Mail:
Of what avail will benevolence be to a nation which has tasted the blood of France and Belgium? The Germans have still vigour and petroleum left, and if Dr Lyttelton would cure them effectively of their vindictiveness, let him invite them to these shores, that they may wear out their hate in rapine and murder. There are women and children here to kill and outrage, as there are in Belgium. Oxford and Cambridge will make an admirable exercise-ground for those who left Louvain in ashes. And if these be not enough, then Eton itself may be offered up a willing sacrifice.
A less tempting prospect than Louvain and Brussels, one might think. ‘More “Spare Her” Speakers!’ was the subsequent headline, with Lyttelton’s name being linked with Canon Simpson of St Paul’s and with C. Roden Buxton. He was apparently disowned by the Rector of St Margaret’s, Canon Carnegie, who was quoted as saying ‘If Canon Lyttelton … had thought it worth while to consult me beforehand as to the remarks in his address to which exception has been taken, I should have personally deprecated his making them’. When, despite protesting letters to the Dean, Lyttelton preached at Manchester Cathedral two weeks later, crowds outside sang ‘Rule, Britannia’ and ‘God Save the King’. After the service he had to be smuggled away through a side door.
In The Times Bishop Wakefield of Birmingham, put matters regarding Germany in rather a different manner from Lyttelton:
Dr Lyttelton assumes that we are to take the German view of ourselves as being correct, and we are to take up an attitude of weakness in order that we might save sixty million people from ‘the ruin of a poisoned mind’. I am perfectly satisfied that the one thing we must do now is to bring Germany to her knees, and to show her that the ideals that have been hers ever since Prussia became the dominant power in Germany are unworthy and lead to disaster.
Lyttelton followed up his speech with a letter to The Times which was to be of a pattern with his later dealing with the Fellows; further intervention made matters worse. Lyttelton strove to support Asquith’s words on the purpose of the war, but with the proviso that ‘Unless the mind of Germany can be changed, all talk of a European partnership is a waste of words’. At the close of his letter he said:
we ought to have learnt by now that there is some use in the preparation of minds, not only of guns. It is also sheer nonsense to say that these ideas will encourage the enemy. Nothing has stiffened his resolution so effectively as the two main utterances in which we have all indulged since August last incessant sneering and empty bombast about ‘pulverising’ a great nation. We all desire the same thing. Don’t let us quarrel. But we are very stupid.
This explanation sat uneasily alongside that of the Bishop of Birmingham quoted above. It did not endear him to the newspapers—even if the Evening Standard was not utterly hostile, differentiating the ‘two Germanys’—the peaceful from the military caste—the Daily Mail continued to see Lyttelton as an excellent propagandist for the Germans:
With what exaltation will the Cologne Gazette receive this Anti-British testimony! It is the old fatuous story … The Canon and those who think like him were fatuous before the war, when they decried the expenditure on armaments; they are fatuous today in belief that Great Britain should offer expiation for the sins of Germany; they will be fatuous to the end.
Both the sermon and the letter mobilised the Fellows of Eton, and a reading of the correspondence of Lord Rosebery reveals how, at first they thought the matter of the sermon could be regretted but over-looked, but within a few weeks they had called a special meeting in London and decided that Rosebery was to write to M.R. James, Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, that he thought Lyttelton’s departure from his post at Christmas ‘neither premature or unwelcome’. It seems at one remove that this correspondence resembles the censure of angry valetudinarians, baying for Lyttelton’s blood from Spa town to Hydro, as Rosebery wrote to Driotwich, Bath and Dover in search of the Fellows.
His relatives put in a word for Lyttelton—the Bishop of Winchester, Talbot, who was his brother-in-law, wrote on his behalf. His brother, Lord Cobham, a Fellow of the College, abstained from the special meeting. But there was a serious and a sobering side to the correspondence. One of the Eton Fellows, Walter Durnford, was to lose a nephew on the Western Front in May. Lord Rosebery’s own beloved son Nell was to be killed in 1917. When the news of his ‘pro-German’ speech broke, Lyttelton had to endure a vulture-like press interest in his memorial address for a dead colleague and former Captain of the School, W.G. Fletcher, killed earlier in March. Twenty masters at the school were away on service. Lyttelton himself recorded that all but two of the leavers of 1915 had taken commissions. More than 20 per cent of Old Etonians fighting that year at Loos, at Neuve Chapelle and at Gallipoli were not to survive.
The scandal over Lyttelton’s sermon began a speculation among the Fellows that Eton fathers might withdraw their sons from the school. One letter in the Morning Post had been a tour de force on this theme, dismissing contemptuously the influence of the Pro-German Head:
The present Headmaster has no influence whatever on the feelings and opinions of Eton boys. The healthy virile tone which prevails at Eton is formed by the boys themselves, and the Head may have Socialists to preach to the boys, he may try to teach them to love Germans, but he will never succeed in making Eton boys socialists, or pro-Germans, or imbuing them with any silly fads …
Privately one Eton father did make his views known to the headmaster:
It is impossible to disguise from you that in His Majesty’s opinion your address, recently delivered at St Margaret’s, Westminster was regrettable from more than one point of view; and His Majesty fears that this impression is shared by many other parents of Eton boys.
This letter from Lord Stamfordham, the king’s Private Secretary, thus revealed that Lyttelton had fallen into royal disfavour. The king’s younger son, Prince Henry of Gloucester, was at Eton in the war years, much photographed engaged in war work at Didcot, or in Slough. The son of King Albert of the Belgians was also an arrival as an evacuee in September 1914; it was a curious coincidence at the time of his arrival that Lyttelton chose that month to forbid boys to enter the Roman Catholic church in Eton.
A later letter from Lord Stamfordham, this time to Lord Rosebery, lent credence to what the papers had said regarding the propaganda value of Lyttelton’s remarks for Germany among neutral nations. The British ambassador in Spain, Sir Arthur Hardinge, reported that when his wife had talked with the Spanish king at a luncheon the conversation had been of Lyttelton and Gibraltar:
The Spaniards are slow to comprehend the sentimental altruisms which influence certain types of mind in England, and Canon Lyttelton’s suggestions respecting Gibraltar which were widely advertised in the press here merely conveyed to many of them the idea that the Gibraltar question had, thanks to Germany’s action, at length entered the domain of practical politics and that Englishmen now recognised that they might really have to give up the Rock.
It seems improbable that Hardinge’s report led directly to Lyttelton’s enforced resignation. The Fellows were coming to regard his position as untenable; either he undertake to them privately to make no more public utterances, in which case the governing body would look inactive; or such an undertaking would itself have to be made publicly, in which case the headmaster would look ridiculous. Certainly in the correspondence there is an element of making away with one who had shown himself a consistent nuisance. Peter Parker has written of the public school ethos in time of war, and it would seem that 1915 had made the Fellows markedly less tolerant of Lyttelton’s eccentricities than in peacetime. The propaganda value of Lyttelton’s remarks was not lost on a hostile press; in the Morning Post it was reported that his remarks were being circulated in Switzerland by the German propaganda agency, the Wolff Bureau.
Lyttelton did not resign until the summer of 1916, by which time he had again featured in headlines after further sermons in Norfolk in the summer and a supposed ‘German Maid Affair’ in February 1916, when a housemaid of his was fined for attempting to send an entirely innocent message to her German married sister. The Times reported this under the headline ‘Fine for a Secret Message’ and in so doing showed the phenomenon which had perhaps been Lyttelton’s undoing, as he acknowledged:
If I had been less wholeheartedly favourable to the cause of this Country in the War, or had not expressed so freely in public my abhorrence of the spirit and tone of our German enemies, I should on the occasion in question have been more guarded. Or if I had realised how my words to a quiet congregation were likely to be brought before the public in an imperfect tone and with suggestive headlines, I should certainly have expressed myself differently.
Throughout the affair Lyttelton appears to have been well-intentioned if naive not to have discerned either the mood of the times or the disposition of the newspapers. A number of clergymen clearly thought upon the lines he did; but others, especially in the early months of the war, did not.
A number of individuals and probably quite a number of Etonians approved perhaps more of Lyttelton’s approach. In the school Chronicle for October 15th, 1914, it was reported that:
The Headmaster made a most impressive speech in which, after pointing out the absurdity of modern war in which half our energies are diverted towards killing as many people as possible and the other half towards keeping them alive, he declared that there could be no hope of lasting peace unless the nations adopted a new attitude and abandoned all selfish patriotism.
Considerably later in the war an Old Etonian, the observation pilot, Thomas Hughes, was to record his views on the state of things in the New Year 1918 in terms which Lyttelton might well have approved, if he were alert to irony:
We have—er—held our own against the numerically and morally inferior hordes of our assailants. We have—er—shown the whole world that Britain is fighting as she has always fought—in India, in Ireland, South Africa and elsewhere—to uphold the rights of the smaller nationalities to determine their own destinies and forms of government, and to redress the ways of the weak. We have from time to time set before ourselves many noble aims, modified from time to time by our inability to carry them out or by our realisation of their unprofitable nature.
It was one thing to write like this in private. To make public statements about exchanging Kiel for Gibraltar and not incurring the hatred of sixty million Germans in 1915, the year of Edith Cavell and the Lusitania, in England, the land of J.L. Garvin and Lord Northcliffe, was quite another. Lyttelton’s speech in an age of a mass-circulation, strongly partisan press was highly unwise, and he was destroyed by it. But George Bernard Shaw wrote that Lyttelton, unlike the vast body of priests, who had in his view resigned Christianity and ‘put it on Mars’, had ‘happened to preach a Christian sermon,’ and we might wonder if there was something in that.