Guide to war publications extract

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CHAPTER 1

T

Influencing Attitudes – Propaganda and Official Policy

owards the end of the English Civil War, the London-based petitioner movement known as the Levellers, comprising soldier ‘Agitators’ of the parliamentarian New Model Army and a number of prominent politicians, produced a draft written constitution under the title of ‘Agreements of the People’.

Their efforts were the catalyst for a series of famous debates in the autumn of 1647 held in St Mary’s Church, Putney, to decide the prospective settlement of the nation, the right of all men to have the vote and, especially, about whether Charles I had any future as the nation’s king. Charles was tried at Westminster Hall in January 1649, and after it was decided that he had ‘traitorously and maliciously levied war against the present Parliament and the people therein represented’ he was executed. So the monarch’s fate had been decided.

However, despite their best efforts the Levellers did little better and with the king out of the picture absolute power now resided with the army and in particular Oliver Cromwell, the man who was soon to become ‘The Lord Protector’. By 1650 they were no longer a serious threat to the established order and the powerful remained in power.

Satirical postcard showing the difference between the Kaiser’s apparent self-image and how others really saw him.

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But, despite this state of affairs, part of the legacy of this tumultuous period is that from the late seventeenth century Britain’s authorities could no longer assume the tacit approval of the body politic for forthcoming military adventures or expeditions. From now on the people had to be persuaded that going to war was an expedient option and that the cost and inevitable suffering incurred was a price worth paying.

A tangible method used to communicate the early official propaganda used to persuade the people of the government’s wisdom were handbills, sketches and cartoons. At first these were distributed within news-pamphlets and after the Restoration of the monarchy appeared in publications such as the London Gazette (first published on 16 November 1665 as the Oxford Gazette), and from 1702 of the Daily Courant, London’s first daily newspaper (there were twelve London newspapers and twenty-four provincial papers by the 1720s).

A curious side-effect of this dissemination was the emergence of the cult of personality. As readers were provided with information about the battles their armies were fighting, they were also given details about the commanders who led the troops.

Consequently, Marlborough, victor at the Battles of Blenheim in 1704 and Ramillies in 1706, which drove the French forces from Germany and the Netherlands during the War of the Spanish Succession, and later Wolfe, who stormed the heights below the

‘Women of Britain Say – Go!’ by E.V. Kealey. A mother and her children watch from the window of their home as some soldiers march off to war. It was originally published by the Parliamentary Recruiting Committee, London.

Patriotic German postcard from the early part of the First World War. It shows a young girl telling the Kaiser that she wants to dedicate a flower to him.

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Plains of Abraham during the Battle of Quebec during the Seven Years War and died doing so, became household names and not distant, out-of-reach, aristocrats.

Another side-effect was the emergence of satirical counter arguments which questioned official policy and ridiculed the attitudes and behaviour of many of the previously exalted worthies.

William Hogarth and other British satirists gave vent to the frustrations and incredulities of a more questioning population during this period. Although they were subsequently more famous for their novels, writers, such as Daniel Defoe, who, in February 1704, began his weekly, the Review – a forerunner of both the Tattler and the Spectator, and Jonathan Swift, the most influential contributor between November 1710 and June 1711 of the Examiner, which started life in 1710 as the chief Conservative political mouthpiece, both contributed to a growing climate of cynical observation. What electorate there was at this time still had to be convinced that their country was on the side of right.

The Seven Years War had seen the age-old colonial struggle between the British and French empires spread across two continents, extending from Europe to North America, where the westward expansion of the British colonies conflicted with the interests of France and ultimately melded with the grievances of American colonists that led to the American Revolution. Benjamin Franklin drew and published the first political cartoon in the colonies in 1747. His woodcut leaflet Plain Truth, depicting a kneeling man praying to Hercules who is sitting in the cloud, an allegory of ‘Heaven helps him who helps himself’, told the American colonists to defend themselves against the Indians without British help. Franklin’s subsequent 1754 cartoon of a snake chopped into pieces, advised the colonies to ‘join or die’, to unite against their common foe, further encouraging sedition.

When, in the spring of 1798, twenty years after the end of the American War of Independence and the loss of the colonies, General Bonaparte’s ‘Army of England’ massed along the Channel coast of France, the House of Commons again called the country to arms. Anti-Napoleon propaganda abounded in Britain and caricatures by the names of James Gillray and George Cruikshank flooded not only the British market but influenced German and French anti-Napoleonic sentiment in occupied territories as well. In Britain such satire not only aroused patriotism it raised awareness against possible French invasion, and drove enrolment in the army or navy and many towns raised volunteer groups of infantry and cavalry. This invasion crisis ended with Nelson’s victory over the French Fleet, graphically depicted by Gillray who published caricatures showing John Bull eating the French ships, and a badly punished and bruised Napoleon, with a wound on his chest, labelled Nelson.

In July 1853 Tsar Nicholas’s occupation of territories in the Crimea previously controlled by Turkey’s Ottoman Empire encouraged Britain and France to declare war in an attempt to halt such Russian expansionism. The Crimean War was one of the first wars to be documented extensively in written reports and photographs, most notably

by William Howard Russell, who wrote for The Times newspaper, and the photographer, Roger Fenton, whose images brought the reality of war into the living rooms of ordinary civilians. In his reports of the battles and especially of the Siege of Sevastopol, Russell said ‘Lord Raglan is utterly incompetent to lead an army’ – this 17

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was the first time such divisive comment about Britain’s military commanders had appeared in the press. Revealing the sufferings of the British Army during the winter of 1854, his accounts even upset Queen Victoria who described Russell’s writings as ‘infamous attacks against the army which have disgraced our newspapers’. Lord Raglan complained that Russell had revealed military information potentially useful to the enemy. But coupled with the observations of Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale, the correspondent’s reports that British soldiers were dying of cholera and malaria motivated a public outcry and led to resignations in government.

This revolution in the ability of newspapermen and social commentators to file upto-the-minute reports was largely facilitated by the electric telegraph and was a foretaste of modern war. It is also an early example of how the media could influence public opinion in the way TV showing images of body bags of dead GIs being unloaded from cargo aircraft returning from Vietnam in the late 1960s encouraged the United States to pull out of that costly war.

By the time of the South African, or Second Boer War, which began in October 1899 and continued until May 1902, developments in communications technology had further improved so that newspapers were able to keep their readership in Britain up to date with the twists and turns of the bloody conflict taking place 5,500 miles away.

British householders read of the underhand hit and run tactics of the Boer fighters of the semi-independent South African Republic (Transvaal) and the initially, at least, scarlet-clad ranks of British soldiers. Soon Tommy Atkins adopted many of the methods of his adversary and readers discovered that British troops had swapped their high-visibility tunics for more discreet khaki uniforms and had gradually became better Britain and France were confident that the Entente Cordiale agreements they’d signed on 8 April 1904 would see them safely through the war.

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‘To Willie with Compliments – Our grand artillerymen like to address a shell before they fire it. This shell, being one of the biggest size, is addressed to the biggest Hun.’

equipped to deny the rebellious claims of their volunteer enemy. Anxious Britons greedily consumed any news from South Africa, and news of the relief of Mafeking on 18 May 1900 was so deliriously received it encouraged street parties and public celebrations the likes of which had never before been seen.

As the tide of the war gradually favoured the British, thousands of Boer families were forced into concentration camps, leading to the death of more than 25,000 Boer women and children as well as 20,000 native Africans. The biggest scandal of the war, the camps began to influence British public opinion; the Manchester Guardian blamed the deaths on British brutality while pro-government newspapers such as The Times argued that they were caused by poor hygiene on the part of the Boers. Altogether nearly 30,000 whites died in the concentration camps, more than twice the number of fighting men, on both sides, who died in battle.

In 1906 the Boers were granted self rule and in 1910 the Union of South Africa was formed. Ironically, many Boer generals fought alongside their British comrades during the Great War and it was during this conflict that Britain used every aspect of modern communications to get its message across both in terms of inspiring new recruits to the armed services but also to reassure the public at home that their men were fighting the good fight on the side of might and right. Interestingly, like it had done successfully during the South African War, when it demeaned and denigrated the rebels and families of the breakaway provinces, accusing the Boers of brutish and underhand methods and their women folk of ignorance and stupidity, Britain also placed significant emphasis on atrocity propaganda as a way of mobilising public opinion against Germany during the First World War. The ‘Hun’ was depicted as a beast, a despoiler of women and a murderer of children.

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