This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ Control and censorship of the press during the First World War. Lovelace, Colin John The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. 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Oct. 2021 -1- CONTROL AND CENSORSHIP OF THE PRESS DURING THE FIRST WORLD WAR BY Cohn John Lovelace Kings College London Submitted in fulfilment of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of London April 1982 -2- ABSTRACT ]Xiring the late nineteenth century and early part of the twentieth, the Service Departments (Admiralty and War Office) had wanted compulsory government control of the press in war-time; they discovered both before and during the war that a rigid system of control requiring the submission of press material before publication along Continental lines was unnecessary in view of the generally cooperative attitude of most newspapers towards the military and other authorities. There was no official government control ot the press during the First World War in Britain as there was in France and Germany. But the press became subject, in August 1914, to a system of press censorship which was an uneasy compromise between compulsory government control and censorship of international cables and the censorship of voluntarily submitted press material. The thesis examines how such a system came into being, its objectives, its organization through the Press Bureau and its effectiveness, particularly through the operation of instructions and requests to the press known as D Notices. bst newspapers and journals cooperated with the censorship authorities; some did not and the thesis traces the Press Bureau's unsuccessful attempts to achieve departmental status with a view to imposing a nre rigid control over a newspaper press hich for the most part, remained free to publish its news, opinions and criticisms through- out the war. Despite this relative freedom, newspapers remained highly critical of 'the censorship', regarding it as uufair,inefficient and in the light of their own self-censorship, an unnecessary impediment to the successful prosecution of the war. -3- CONTENTS Title Page. 1 Abs tract 2 Table of Contents 3 Acknowledgements Preface 5 Chapter I Origins 13 Chapter II Early Days 33 Chapter III The Press Bureau Chapter IV Effectiveness 100 Chapter V A Free Press in Chains? 126 Chapter VI Self - Censorship 162 Chapter VII Conclusion 200 Po s t script 210 Bibliography 213 Addendum British Press Censorship (In Pocket) during the First World War (from Boyce, C., et al. Newspaper History : from the 17th Century to the Present Day (London, Constable, 1978).) -4- ACKNOWLEDG4ENTS I am grateful to the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, University of London who have given me permission to see the Garvin collection of manuscripts to which they hold the copyright and the Trustees of The Times archive for permission to see the Dawson, Northcliffe and Repington manuscripts to which they hold copyright. -5- PREFACE '... censorship is no fourth grade subject'. Robert E. Suniners, Wartime Censorship of Press and Radio (New York, H.W. Wilson Co., 1942) p.23. Studies about the press and related subjects in this country have until recently been left almost entirely to journalists. Many of these accounts, like those of A.G. Gardiner, Tom Clarke or Kennedy Jones hue recalled their editorial days in Fleet Street in terms of great personalities and racy anecdotes. A few journalists, notably Norman Angell, Francis Williams and more latterly John IThale have sought to redress the balance with more scholarly accounts of press behaviour and influence but it has only been in the last decade or so that academics in this country have been turning their attention to the press which as Cohn Seymour-Ure has written in The Press, Politics and the Public is 'widely believed by those who care about politics to have an important political function'.1 Just how important that function is in the formation of public opinion and its effect on political decisions is the subject of endless debate among historians and sociologists but a principal component of that function as identified by Seymour-Ure is the way 'newspapers help choose the subjects a we have views about', a point made by H. Hamilton Fyfe, a former editor of the Daily vil and one of the 'grat personalities' school of journalistic writers in appropriately anecdotal form. In his book, Sixty Years of Fleet Street, Fyfe recalls how a northern editor, upon being asked by a visitor to his office if he was the man who put things in the 3 paper ,replied 'No madam, I 'in the man who keeps things out'. In other words ,censorship is an integral part of any study of the press for in the words of Nicholas Garnham : 'All news is censorship. That is to say, it is the imposition of a structure of significance on inchoate reality' 1. Cohn Seymour-Ure, The Press, Politics and the Public, (London, Methuen & Co., 1968) p.14. 2. ibid, p, 27. 3. H.H. Fyfe, Sixty Years of Fleet Street (London,W.H..A].len,1949 p.96. 4. The Sunday Times 3rd September 1978. -6- We are all censors in the Freudian sense of excluding certain subjects or forms of thought from our minds. In most societies a cultural censorship exists which frowns upon or excludes some forms of behaviour or expressions. It is possible to belong to a group or organization in which particular subjects are not easily discussed - Christian ethics would not usually be discussed at branch meetings of the Comunist Party but they would be freely discussed elsewhere. Climates of opinion can exist in a society in which pressure is brought to bear to avoid the mention of certain subjects - Lord Lansdowne's difficulties in finding a newspaper to publish his letter advocating peace negotiations in 1917 is an example as is George Orwell's problems in finding a publisher for Animal Farni in the pro-Soviet climate of 1944. While we must bear these categories in mind as ever present forces at work upon journalists, particularly during a period of heightened tension such as a war, there are two further categories of censorship which are of particular relevance to the present study of press censorship during the First World War. They are voluntary group censorship and legal censorship imposed by government authority. In 1912 newspaper organizations representing the national and provincial press agreed to participate in a voluntary censorship of Defence subjects operated by a ccininittee of Press and Service representatives known as the Admiralty, War Office and Press Coimnittee, (but known more generally as the Joint Ccinmittee, a title used throughout the present study). This was the beginning of a voluntary code of group censorship which continued to operate during the war and has existed in one form or another to the present day. As for the legally imposed category, plans existed in the War Book quite apart from the operation of this voluntary system, for the official censorship of cables arid wireless messages during a war which would inevitably affect international press cablegrams. The principal object of such a censorship was to prevent any information of possible value to an enemy from being published in the press. The Service Departments would have preferred to have had the power through a Parliamentary Bill 5. These categories of censorship are largely taken from the work of the fimerican sociologist, William Albig bdem Public Opinion, (New York, MGraw 1939), pp. 243-6 -7- to take control of the press in the event of a war. The 1912 voluntary agreement was the closest they came to getting this in peacetime and after 1912 not much thought was given to what role the voluntary agrent and its committee would have in relationship to the legal machinery and organization set up to operate the cable censorship. A situation ripe for confusion and misunderstanding which duly materialized lilhen war broke out in August 1914, the War Book plans for the censorship by the War Office of cables and the censorship of wireless messages by the Admiralty went into iimnediate effect causing unexpected delays and a temporary shortage of hard news. Defence of the Reaim Regulations (D.O.R.A.) were instantly passed by Parliament, several of which directly affected the press and which on paper looked extremely severe. The Joint Committee, without an executive staff and with its Service members heavily engaged in urgent war preparations, was besieged with enquiries frcm editors both for up-to-date information and for guidance over D.O.R.A.