Living the Great Illusion: Sir Norman Angell, 1872-1967
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
LIVING THE GREAT ILLUSION This page intentionally left blank Living the Great Illusion: Sir Norman Angell, 1872–1967 MARTIN CEADEL 1 3 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With oYces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York q Martin Ceadel 2009 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2009 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire ISBN 978–0–19–957116–1 13579108642 For Dickon This page intentionally left blank Contents List of Photos ix Preface xi Abbreviations xv 1. Introduction: Living the Great Illusion 1 2. Conforming, Rebelling: December 1872 – December 1891 21 3. Experiencing Misfortune, Diagnosing Patriotism: December 1891 – July 1904 47 4. Serving NorthcliVe, Inventing International Polity: July 1904 – July 1914 87 5. Attempting Neutrality, Achieving Notoriety: July–December 1914 153 6. Engaging America, Defying Militarism: 1915–18 191 7. Exploring Politics, Enjoying Rehabilitation: 1919–31 235 8. Leading the LNU, Caballing with Churchill: January 1932 – September 1939 301 9. Making Propaganda, Leaving a Legacy: September 1939 – October 1967 357 10. Conclusion: Cowboy as Dialectician 411 Bibliography 419 Index 429 This page intentionally left blank List of Photos Groom Lane (grandfather)* 10 Thomas Angell Lane (father)* 22 Mary Ann Lane (mother)* 23 Carrie Sheehan-Dare (sister)* 26 Tom Lane (brother)* 27 Harry Lane (brother)* 28 Norman Angell c. 1896* 59 Angell in Paris, editing either the Daily Messenger (1898–1904) or the Continental Daily Mail (1905–12)y 69 Angell in London, c. December 1912y 126 Angell in London, c. December 1912y 126 Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale* 251 * Reproduced by permission of Alice Angell Everard. y Reproduced by permission of The William Ready Division of Archives and Special Collections, McMaster University. This page intentionally left blank Preface To an unusual extent this book is an exercise in self-criticism. That I am here my own whipping boy, a representative of discredited orthodoxy to my own revi- sionist, is a predicament I owe to my late friend Colin Matthew, who invited me to write on Sir Norman Angell for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biog- raphy. I became aware while distilling the received wisdom on Angell’s life into my entry that much of it rested on shaky foundations, and so covered myself with the warning: ‘A comprehensively researched biography is still much needed.’1 I did not then expect to undertake this myself, but on subsequently doing so discovered that my entry had been much wider of the mark than I had feared. Embarrassment was mitigated, however, by enjoyment. Angell’s public and private existences turned out to be more intriguing, and therefore more fun to investigate, than the standard accounts had indicated. Biography proved, moreover, to be a singularly pleasurable format. In particular, having in much of my previous work dealt with the multiple and complexly interacting lives that collectively comprise peace movements, I found it restful to have but one personal narrative in which to immerse myself. It helped too that I came to like and admire my subject so much, even while having to expose him as a frequent source of misinformation and muddle. Despite Angell’s high intelligence and good intentions, his over-exuberance and under- education produced both an impatience with fact-checking and a propensity to combine incompatible opinions. Because certain resulting aberrations were so fundamental, because they help to explain my title, and because they may consti- tute the book’s most important revelations to a reader interested in Angell as an international theorist, I meet them all head-on in the introductory chapter. Although this fully acknowledges his considerable strengths too, it may come across as a litany of lapses, so a reader interested in Angell as a human being, who would prefer to be introduced to his foibles gradually and in context (as responses to the problems and challenges of a stressful career), may prefer to read the narrative set out in Chapters 2 to 8 before turning back to the introduction. When starting research in autumn 2004, I feared a paucity of evidence; and there are indeed predictable gaps in the record that prevent a biographer knowing, for example, why Angell’s marriage was childless, what his relations with certain women were, or what caused many of his health collapses. But overall there turned out to be a profusion of personal papers: indeed, Angell himself had regarded ‘the quantity of materials which remained’ even after some of these were damaged by German bombing in 1940 as one of his ‘main diYculties’ in producing an autobiography.2 It was their fragmentary or obscure quality, as will be explained in the introduction, that had previously prevented the writing of a full biography. The Angell collections could be used to put Xesh onto bones, but only after a xii Preface skeleton had been painstakingly reconstructed using sources extending well be- yond them. To change metaphor: a gigantic jigsaw had to be almost completed, at great eVort, before mysterious pieces could be recognized for what they were. Thus it was not until I had acquired suYcient context to establish the provenance of a number of heartfelt but undated letters that I made the dramatic transition from ignorance even of where Angell was at certain times to knowledge of not only his whereabouts but his innermost thoughts. This exacting research beneWted from numerous lucky breaks. My good friend Christine Ferdinand hails from, and still has hospitable relatives in, BakersWeld, California, where Angell once attempted to make a youthful fortune. She checked some archives there with me and others for me, and also read my text: without her expertise and sharpness I could neither have disentangled Angell’s American land deals nor made sense of several other areas of his life, so her assistance has been invaluable. No less serendipitously, my retired colleague Frances Henderson happened to know the purchaser of Angell’s retirement cottage in Haslemere, Ann Jordan, who described the conditions in which he lived out his last decade and a half. She was also able to put me in touch with his god-daughter and great- niece, Alice Angell Everard: she gave me access to family papers, granted permis- sion to reproduce family photographs, and, with her husband George Everard and sister Judith Angell Gregory, shared her memories of Angell in a remarkably helpful way. My doctoral supervisor three decades ago, Sir Martin Gilbert, edited the collection of essays in which Angell’s Wnal publication appeared: he not only supplied the correspondence relating to it but discussed the episode with me. While under Gilbert’s supervision, I had interviewed the late F.M. Hardie, who had Wrst encountered Angell in 1933 and went on to produce his original entry, which I read for him in draft, for the Dictionary of National Biography:3 my memories of, and jottings from, our conversations in the 1970s proved unex- pectedly useful for this biography. My former student Thomas Richard Davies was able to track down material for me during his own conveniently placed research trips, particularly to Geneva and Stanford. And a chance approach from G. Peter Winnington, a Lausanne-based scholar currently working on the Fuller family, produced invaluable information on its multifarious contacts with Angell. My topic also caught the imagination of family and colleagues. David, Graham, and Deborah Ceadel applied their lawyerly exactitude to my manuscript to its considerable beneWt; and the last mentioned also established who owned the house in which Angell lived for most of his retirement. In our weekly sessions in Blackwell’s coVee shop Ross McKibbin found himself discussing Angell as much as his own Ford Lectures, with which admittedly there was a good chronological Wt, and, once these were delivered, kindly vetted my text. And, having helpfully got her teeth into some of my knottier bibliographical problems, Wilma Minty used her library contacts and foreign visits to explore a