GLIMPSES British Visions of War and Peace

Home , Athelas (typeface), Eric Kennington, Muirhead Bone, Ruhleben internment camp, Steve Bloomer

with a preface by

PETER STANSKY

and essays by

HOLLY DAYTON MEADE KLINGENSMITH CRYSTAL LEE MURPHY TEMPLE

edited by

Published in conjunction with the exhibition held at the Hoover Institution Library and Archives.

June 2––July 31, 2016

CONTENTS

PREFACE 7 Peter Stansky

NOTE ON THE IMAGES 9 Crystal Lee

THE OFFICIAL ART OF WAR 11 British National Morale, Domestic Propaganda, and the Official War Artists of the First World War Holly Dayton

COMRADES IN DISTRESS 30 The Ruhleben Internment Camp, 1914-18 Murphy Temple

PROPOSING FAILURE 64 The Woodhead Commission’s Maps of Palestine Meade Klingensmith

WARTIME COLLABORATIONS 77 Intelligence Cooperation and Digital Computing Crystal Lee

EXHIBITION CHECKLIST 94

PREFACE

The Hoover Institution Library & Archives are one of the world’s great research centers, containing archives dealing with many aspects of the modern world, with a special emphasis on politics, the waging of war, and the making of peace. Many nations are represented in its holdings, including Great Britain. In the 2016 spring quarter, a Stanford history department class taught by Peter Stansky, the Frances and Charles Field Professor of History Emeritus, devoted itself to making selections from the archives that deal with twentieth-century Britain. The aim was to bring to light a sampling of riches to enhance understanding of the many facets of modern Britain and highlight the richness of the Hoover collections.

The sampling examines two aspects of the First World War—the art that it produced and life in a German detention camp for British civilians—as well as how Britain helped shape the making of modern Israel; and the operation of American Office of Strategic Services personnel in Britain during the Second World War. Although only scratching the surface of what is available in the Hoover Archives, these glimpses suggest lines of inquiry that can vastly enrich our understanding of the past and inform our perception of life today.

Professor Stansky would like to express his gratitude for making the class and catalog possible to Harry Elam, the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. Crucial to this enterprise were those at the Hoover Institution itself: Eric Wakin, the Robert H. Malott Director of the Library & Archives and deputy director of the Hoover Institution, and Jean Cannon, Samira Bozorgi, and Marissa Schleicher, who taught the members of the class and its teacher how to mount an exhibition. The most important component of the enterprise was the students––Holly Dayton, Meade Klingensmith, Crystal Lee, and Murphy Temple––who in the process educated themselves and others.

PETER STANSKY

 7 

NOTE ON THE IMAGES

The images reproduced in black and white are embedded within the body of each essay, and have been labeled with Arabic numerals. Color images, however, can be found in the inset, and have been labeled with alphabet letters (i.e. Figures A–H).

CRYSTAL LEE

 9 

THE OFFICIAL ART OF WAR British National Morale, Domestic Propaganda, and the Official War Artists of the First World War

HOLLY DAYTON

1916 was a difficult year to be British. The Great War, which was supposed to be short and glorious, was dragging on and proving exceptionally brutal. Home front morale, which had been at an ecstatic high only two years earlier, was beginning to falter. At this moment, the British government mobilized to respond to the increased need for propaganda and the civilian demand for visual images of the war. Taking advantage of the willingness of professional artists to be seen as contributors to the war effort, the British department in charge of international propaganda at Wellington House and, later, the Department of Information, hired visual artists to spearhead a new domestic propaganda effort. This was the Official War Artists project, which yielded over 3,000 pieces of art and served multiple functions. Firstly, the Official War Artists presented a patriotic, reassuring view of the war effort and nearly always reinforced Britain’s determination and courage. Though the artists were never told that they were hired to create propaganda, their work served that function. Secondly, their work served a documentary function, capturing moments of the war experience for posterity. Additionally, the art of the Official War Artists was beautiful even when

 11  THE OFFICIAL ART OF WAR showing landscapes of ruins or gravestones–– and provided an aesthetic release for its viewers from the anxieties and worries of wartime. The far-reaching and diverse distribution channels for this art meant that it reached a large cross section of the British population. An examination of the Official War Artists initiative and one of the exhibitions it yielded in 1917––The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals––illustrates how the arts played a vital role in shaping public spirit at the time.

It is important to set the context of life in Britain at the outset of the war to understand why, two years into the war, a domestic propaganda campaign of visual art was deemed timely and necessary. When Britain declared war on Germany in August of 1914, it only took a few days for the nation to galvanize around the national cause. The average British citizen embraced the war effort with an eagerness and patriotism that historian Caroline Playne has described as “suicidal.”1 Everyone sought to contribute to the war effort, to follow the national impulse to do something. Young men of fighting mettle enlisted, older men went to work in munitions factories, and women volunteered to help in whatever capacity they could. Patriotic concerts were held, public charities were formed, and subscription services for war relief were founded. At this, the starting point of the war, public spirit was high. Men and women were both certain the war would be over by Christmas and the boys would come marching home victorious. There was no substantial need to run a government propaganda campaign at this time because there were more than enough private patriotic initiatives to stoke the burning fire of British patriotism.

At the start of the war, the British government saw both the visual and theatrical arts as slightly extravagant and inessential for social order. In 1914, no public funding was provided for the support of theaters, artists,

1 Caroline E. Playne, 1931, Society at War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin), p. 21.

 12  HOLLY DAYTON or artistic schools.2 When war broke out, individuals in arts professions such as artists, museum curators, art dealers, or theater professionals, were aware that they would be seen by the general population as cowardly or frivolous. Anticipating this response, artists and art administrators worked especially hard to show their commitment to the national military cause. Museum curators and art dealers responded by hosting special charity showings of contemporary works. At the start of 1915, the Royal Academy announced that, in place of the usual winter exhibition, it would host a special exhibition of contemporary British artists. The proceeds of this show were to be split evenly between the Red Cross, the Artists’ General Benevolent Association and the contributing artists.3 The event was highly successful, with over 8,000 visitors to the galleries, 167 of the 800 works on display sold and an ultimate profit of £5,463.4 This event, known as the War Relief Exhibition, would inspire future charitable painting exhibitions and sales, many executed by the Red Cross through Christie’s auction house. These events catered to the middle and upper classes, who were less affected by war conditions of rationing and were strongly socially inclined to participate in charity.5 Over time, the middle and upper classes increasingly saw artists as active contributors to the war effort, and, as an added benefit, the artists gained personal celebrity with the increase of publicity around their works.6 Many of the artists who came to be hired as Official War Artists, like John Lavery, Augustus John, and William Orpen, gained prominence in the eyes of artistic society through these sales.7

2 Jörn Weingärtner, 2006,The Arts as a Weapon of War: Britain and the Shaping of the National Morale in the Second World War, (London: Tauris Academic Studies), p. 19. 3 James Fox, 2015, British Art and the First World War, 1914-1924 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): p. 63. 4 Ibid. 5 Barbara Jones and Bill Howell, 1972, Popular Arts of the First World War (Littlehampton, Littlehampton Book Services Limited, 1972), p. 130. 6 Fox, British Art and the First World War, 1914-1924, p. 69. 7 Ibid, p. 64.

 13  THE OFFICIAL ART OF WAR

With private initiatives doing more than enough to support the public spirit at the start of the war, the British government concentrated its official propaganda internationally. The intention was to broadcast in France and particularly in America the justice of and strength behind the British war effort. This material came from Wellington House, a division within the Foreign Office.8 Wellington House was established secretly by Cabinet Minute at the end of August 1914, and was known as such because, out of a desire for secrecy, the offices were placed in one of the National Health Insurance Commission buildings in Buckingham Gate.9 The purpose of Wellington House was to generate literature by academics, journalists, and writers that was ostensibly objective in support of the war effort.10 An official schedule of material published by Wellington House includes 1,116 items that ranged from the religious– –“Christ: and the world at war, sermons preached in wartime”––to the obviously political––“Supremacy of the British Soldier, a single- page leaflet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to the editor of the “Daily Chronicle.”11 The intended socio-economic class of the audience for this official propaganda varied depending on the subject matter, but the international audience and consistently supportive view of the war did not.

The leader of this international propaganda machine was Charles Masterman. Masterman found himself at Wellington House as his star in the British government was in descent. Cambridge-educated, Masterman was elected as a Liberal MP for a working-class constituency in 1906, and

8 Harries, Meirion, and Susie Harries. 1983. The War Artists: British Official War Art of the Twentieth Century (London: M. Joseph in association with the Imperial War Museum and the Tate Gallery), p. 6. 9 Ibid. 10 Wellington House only printed through private publishing houses to conceal its government connection. 11 Great Britain. 1918. Schedule of Wellington House Literature. London: Foreign Office of Great Britain. Hoover Institution Library, Stanford University. pp. 46, 68.

 14  HOLLY DAYTON soon after became a close friend of David Lloyd George.12 In 1912, he was appointed Financial Secretary to the Treasury and in 1914 he joined the Cabinet. However, a falling out with Lloyd George in 1915 led to his voluntary resignation and acceptance of this lower-ranking position in the Foreign Office. Having led several successful political campaigns in his day, Masterman was skilled in executing political propaganda. While Wellington House was still producing exclusively internationally- focused print media, he was an informed and skillful leader.

However, the need for domestically-focused propaganda became more important in 1916. The war was dragging on and growing only more brutal; 60,000 men died in one day at the Battle of the Somme, and 300,000 were reported as dead or wounded between August and September of 1917 at Passchendaele.13 In spite of this, private efforts to bolster home front morale continued, and the popular media still covered the war in terms of sickly emotionalism and mock heroics.14 However, even propagandistic sources were forced to acknowledge the brutality of the war while arguing for the British cause.

We may doubt what of Europe may be left at the end of this gigantic calamity. We may mourn over the high hopes of progress and human welfare suddenly cut short by the indescribable calamity of war. We may count the costs in human life––the flower of the nations––young men cut off in what seemed to the ancients the height of human tragedy––before the faces of their parents. But of one thing we never had any doubt at all. We were sure of victory before we launched the ultimatum a year ago, telling Germany to clear out of Belgium or challenge the might of the British Empire. We are sure of victory today.

12 Harries and Harries, p. 7. 13 Kenneth O. Morgan, Twentieth Century Britain: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 14 Playne, p. 106.

 15  THE OFFICIAL ART OF WAR

Figure 1. “A View of Albert.” Lithograph by Muirhead Bone (1876-1953) from the series The Western Front, Part VIII (September 1917). Great Britain, Foreign Office, Wellington House Publications, Hoover Institution Archives.

A propagandistic text written by Masterman himself is exemplary:15 The wear of two years of long war on morale could not be denied, and it was beginning to be a political problem. In the summer of 1916, the British government decided to expand from the world of international propaganda into the world of domestic propaganda in order to boost patriotic sentiment.

Contemporary British culture made visual media an obvious choice of form for Wellington House’s first foray into domestic propaganda. Developments in technology in the early 20th century had made British culture increasingly visual. Though film was lowly regarded in critical circles, it was wildly popular with the British population; in

15 Wellington House, Box 7, “After Twelve Months of War” by the Rt. Hon. C.F.G. Masterman (formerly Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster and a Member of the British Cabinet). Printed in London by Darling & Son, Limited in 1915.

 16  HOLLY DAYTON

1914, weekly cinema attendance was between 7 and 8 million people.16 Increasing numbers of pictorial publications fed the British interest in seeing the world that was textually described in the newspapers or verbally relayed over the radio waves. By 1914, it had also become much easier to print images in books or newspapers through the “halftone” process, which simulated continuous tone imagery by printing a series of black dots in different densities against a white background.17 Using halftone techniques, printers were even able to reproduce paintings in full color in newspapers. In the early days of the war, the British people were obsessed with seeing what the front looked like, what the soldiers were doing, and how the fight was progressing.

It was not long after the war was declared that military men realized the potential power of this new visual world. Arthur Balfour, the first Lord of the Admiralty, advocated for use of visual media because it “reached the intelligence of the least intelligent: it required no reading: it touched on no controversial topics: it threw no strain upon the spectator’s powers of realization.”18 Photos and paintings, far more so than publications, could be targeted to wide swaths of the British population, and, unlike publications, circumvented the limitations of language. Acting on this obvious potential for propagandic success, a separate pictorial wing of Wellington House was founded in 1916 under the leadership of Ivor Nicholson. Initially, this wing specialized in collecting and printing photographs of the war in publications like Nicholson’s private War Pictorial.19 Domestic propaganda had begun in earnest, and in image.

But there was a fundamental supply flow problem for photographs

16 Fox, p. 84. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid, p. 87. 19 Ibid.

 17  THE OFFICIAL ART OF WAR during the First World War. The Official Press Bureau allowed very few photographers to go to the front lines, and only a limited number of their images were allowed to be used.20 There was a greater danger of military positions and tactical decisions being leaked to the enemy in photographs than in paintings. The lack of a constant flow of photographs from the front to meet the propaganda needs and British demand for visual material was the principal motivating factor to the founding of the Official War Artists scheme. Moreover, many visual artists were successfully arguing at the time that paintings had more moral worth than photographs.21 While a photograph could capture how the war looked, only a soldier-artist was capable of expressing reliably how the war felt.22 In the end, it was Masterman, the head of Wellington House, who made the executive call to hire visual artists to create paintings and drawings to document the war. Though Masterman was little educated in the realm of art, he was a fast learner and quickly became aware of the potential that visual art possessed for the British government.23 Visual art could function as propaganda, as documentation, and as an aesthetic release for members of the home front from the pressure of the war.

Muirhead Bone was chosen as the first, and proved to be the most prolific, Official War Artist. His background was in draughtsmanship and he had a reputation for near-photographic precision in his work. He also had a history of painting ruins, a skill that would come in handy on the front. Bone was suggested to Masterman by a prominent member of the London arts community, A.P. Watt, who heard that Bone had been called up in the spring of 1916. Watt argued to Masterman that Bone could be doing more for the war effort as a visual artist,

20 Harries and Harries, p. 7. 21 Fox, p. 95. 22 Ibid, p. 97. 23 Harries and Harries, p. 8.

 18  HOLLY DAYTON

Figure 2. “XVII Déniecourt Château, Estrées.” Lithograph by Muirhead Bone (1876-1953) from the series The Western Front, Part VII (July 1917). Great Britain, Foreign Office, Wellington House Publications, Hoover Institution Archives. chronicling the war through his paintings, than as a soldier, fighting like any other on the front.24 By mid-June, Masterman had convinced the War Office not to conscript Bone and instead to have General Headquarters (GHQ) assign him to their intelligence branch in France.

Bone was sent to the front with the honorary rank of Second Lieutenant and received an annual salary of £500.25 After spending nearly two months at the front, he returned home having made over 150 drawings. These were then published in installments of 20 images apiece in a large collection entitled The Western Front, accompanied by captions written by propagandist C.E. Montague. These installments were priced at two pounds apiece and marketed through the middle class publication Country

24 Ibid, p. 9. 25 David Boyd Haycock, A Crisis of Brilliance: Five Young British Artists and the Great War, (London: Old Street, 2009), p. 270.

 19  THE OFFICIAL ART OF WAR

Life.26 The introduction to the completed version of the collection was written by none other than Field Marshall Sir Douglas Haig himself, who framed the collection as a series of images of the horrors that the British had suffered in order to achieve a superior tactical position. Haig wrote that Bone had made “drawings of victory in the making, and of the saving of hundreds of thousands of British lives.”27 “The Western Front” attempted to serve as documentation of the war and as propaganda, and was marketed to wide swath of the British population. Though this would seem to be a highly effective marketing strategy, Bone’s work in subscription collection format was not widely embraced by the middle class, and shockingly few copies of “The Western Front” were sold. Bone’s images worked well in newspapers, where they functioned to illustrate the events of the war, but were not successful as a form of commercial art among the middle classes, who sought either bolder visions or more dramatic styles. Still, the sheer mass of his work was helpful for Wellington House and his mission to the Western Front was considered a triumph.

Though Bone’s success as a producer of propagandistic materials convinced the War Office of the value of the Official War Artists scheme, the War Office was frustrated with the slap-dash way that Wellington House had organized his contract. On February 19th, 1917, Wellington House was subsumed into a new combined domestic and international propaganda division: the Department of Information.28 Masterman was demoted to Assistant Director of Literature and Art, and John Buchan, a past military journalist and well-known novelist,

26 “The Front Line,” 1916, Box 8, “The Western Front,” Wellington House Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. 27 “The Western Front,” 1917, Box 3, “Muirhead Bone,” Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University. 28 Harries and Harries, p. 20.

 20  HOLLY DAYTON was made Director in his place. Though fast losing power to direct British propaganda strategy, Masterman was able to convince Buchan of the value of the War Artists scheme. Buchan then pushed for the War Office to create a permanent artists’ establishment with well furnished facilities close to the front for British writers and artists. Buchan also established a new contract to formalize the role of the Official War Artists. This “Agreement with Artists” explained that artists would not be paid a salary and that the British government retained any pictures produced at the front, but that artists could determine case- by-case payment contracts and would be able to keep possession of their works, retaining the right to sell them after the war.29 After this transition to the Department of Information and the formalization contract policy, the size of the Official War Artist cohort began to swell.

The actual experience of being an Official War Artist on the front was odd. Some of the realities of life at the fighting lines were as true for the artists as they were for the fighting men. As artist John Nash remembers from his own experience, “one had to keep a constant lookout” and being at the front was a “test of endurance.”30 The sound of falling shells, the stench of death from fallen soldiers above the trenches whose bodies had not yet been recovered, the feeling of intermittent thuds in the earth, and the taste of lingering gunpowder in the air were all as real for the artists as they were for the troops. Though some artists were prolific at the front, none made much art at the site of battle. Nash remembers having made notes on the backs of letters to remember the scene, but that he was discouraged from drawing while in the trenches because he could have been taken for a spy.31 However, artists did have some special privileges.

29 Ibid, p. 30. 30 John Nash, Interview by Joseph C. Darracott, Imperial War Museum, 1974, Sound, Accessed http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/80000322, Reel 1. 31 Ibid.

 21  THE OFFICIAL ART OF WAR

Figure 3. “A Ship-yard (ca. 1917).” Lithograph by Muirhead Bone (1876-1953) from the series The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals (1917). The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals Printed Material, Hoover Institution Archives.

Figure 4. “Where the Guns are Made.” Lithograph by George Clausen (1852-1944), from the series The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals (1917). The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals Printed Material, Hoover Institution Archives.

 22  HOLLY DAYTON

They were given chauffeur-driven cars while at the front and allowed to stay in VIP accommodations. When C.R.W. Nevinson was sent to the front lines, he stayed at the Chateau d’Harcourt and was known for his excellent stories around the dinner table.32 Most artists felt uncomfortable navigating this double-life and worked hard along the lines. Nevinson was described by Masterman as “anxious to crawl into the front line and draw things full of violence and terror.”33 Like Nash, he did not draw at the front, but made notes and later created his drawings. He explained,34 Nature is far too confusing and anarchic to be merely copied on the spot. An artist’s business is to create, not to copy… To my mind, creation can only be achieved when, after a close and continuous observation and study of nature, this visual knowledge of realities is used emotionally and mentally.

Artists in the war were able to get close enough to the fighting to intently study it, yet retained the ability to retreat to a critical distance to create their art. The Official War Artists scheme served the twin purposes of generating propaganda and for documenting the war.35 It would seem that those two interests would come into opposition and that censorship would often ensue, but this was rarely the case. Though the Defense of the Realm Act of 1914 gave the government the power to censor articles, telegrams, publications, and the visual arts, this power was infrequently exercised on the Official War Artists. As a publication from Wellington House itself explained, the purpose of censorship in the British Press was to prevent sensitive information from reaching the enemy and to prevent the Press from printing anything that would “give assistance to him.”36

32 Harries and Harries, p. 40. 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid. 35 Haycock, p. 270. 36 “The Press Censorship: - An Interview given by Sir Edward T. Cook to the Associated Press,” 1916, Box 3, “The Press Censorship,” Wellington House Collection, Hoover Institution Archives, Stanford University, p. 9.

 23  THE OFFICIAL ART OF WAR

War Artists were rarely censored because they rarely violated either of these conditions. It was a rare, singular incident when one of John Nash’s works was censored for showing geographic details of troop presence that the government wished to remain secret.37 Drawings by other artists were occasionally censored for the same reason, but infrequently and in such a way that did not give offense to the artists involved.38 As for “giving assistance to the enemy” in other capacities, the selection process for Official War Artists made this an unlikely problem. The Official War Artists were chosen with several criteria, some of the most significant being patriotism and commitment to the war effort. These individuals wanted to produce bolstering images of the war, the kind of images that would not need to be censored. Artist John Nash said he never felt pressured to draw anything other than that in which he was interested; he was selected because what interested him was what Wellington House wanted.

There were a few cases in which Wellington House tried to censor artists’ images because of the way they depicted British troops. C.R.W. Nevinson’s painting, A Group of Soldiers, was nearly withheld by War Office higher-up Major Arthur Lee. The painting was termed “degenerate” for presenting a group of fighting men returning home with weary faces and tired bodies.39 Nevinson was passionate in his response to Lee, declaring:40 I will not paint “castrated Lancelots” though I know this is how Tommies are usually represented in illustrated papers etc... High souled eunuchs looking mild-eyed, unable to melt butter on their tongues and mentally and physically incapable of killing a German. I refuse to insult the British Army with such sentimental bilge.

37 John Nash, Interview by Joseph C. Darracott, Reel 2. 38 John Nash relates in his interview that he completely understood the censorship of his work for sensitive information, and I have not found an instance of any other Official War Artist objecting to censorship on the basis of undermining military intelligence. 39 Haycock, p. 271. 40 Harries and Harries, p. 45.

 24  HOLLY DAYTON

Figure 5. “In the Air (ca. 1917).” Lithograph by C.R.W. Nevinson (1889-1946) from the series The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals (1917). The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals Printed Material, Hoover Institution Archives.

 25  THE OFFICIAL ART OF WAR

Nevinson was not attempting paint an anti-war image, but rather to honestly document the effect of war experience on the British soldier. Though the War Office and Masterman were both still against the image, Nevinson’s fundamental patriotism and documentary impulse eventually convinced the head of the Department of Information, John Buchan to allow it and the picture was not censored.41

By tracing the history of the Official War Artists, the little-known exhibition The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals gains more historical significance. There are sadly few documents still extant around the planning of the event, as almost all of the records of the collection were destroyed in a fire in the 1960s, but some do survive.42 The 66 prints of the exhibition, executed by 18 different Official War Artists, were originally shown at the Fine Art Society in July of 1917. But these lithographs were not kept exclusively within the walls of the gallery––the series was also widely reproduced in the press and proofs were offered for sale in limited edition runs of 200 prints. The “Efforts” prints sold for £2 2s (£100 in modern currency) each and the “Ideals” for £10 (£500) each.43 44 The original lithographs also toured around Britain and were displayed in Paris, New

41 One of Nevinson’s later paintings, Paths of Glory, which showed several corpses in the foreground, was successfully censored on the justification that the sight of dead bodies hurt home front morale. Harries and Harries, p. 45. 42 Harries and Harries, p. 78. 43 “The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals,” National Museum Wales, Accessed April 16, 2016. http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/articles/2014-08-02/The-Great-War- Britains-Efforts-and-Ideals/. 44 The Official War Artists project also served a minor economic function, as the sales of prints of the works went to fund the war effort. Admittedly, the War Artist project never made up more than a tiny percentage of the overall accounting for the Department of Information. However, impressions may have been more important than reality in this case. To go to a gallery, buy a print of war art, or invest in a subscription to Muirhead Bone’s The Western Front, was to engage in a patriotic act that united the individual to a larger community of Britons.

 26  HOLLY DAYTON

York, and Los Angeles.45 These works of art were used as propaganda in the newspapers, as aesthetic objects in the gallery, and as fundraising material through their limited printings. The diverse images of the collection served a host of purposes for different members of the Allied community. The explicit objective of the collection was to give “concerted artistic expression to themes which are of deep and widespread moment in our national life.”46 Reading between the lines of this broad statement, the Department of Information wanted to showcase art that would, through its diverse styles and subjects, resonate as propaganda with a large cross- section of Allied populations––the art-lover and the art neophyte alike.

The art was separated into two categories: “Ideals” images, which spoke to Britain’s motivations in the war and its goals, and “Efforts” images, which displayed some of the activities of the war effort. There were twelve images in the “Ideals” section, mostly printed in color and almost all utilizing strong themes of allegory and symbolism. These images served as art and propaganda, but were not as representative of the general work of the Official War Artists––images that held aesthetic appeal, served a propagandistic function, and also documented the war experience.

The “Efforts” section of the display performed that combined function of documenting, propagandizing, and aesthetically elevating the war. The nine subsections, each executed by a separate artist, were inspired by different divisions of the war effort. Some focused on domestic war production, such as the series by George Clausen on “Making Guns,” Muirhead Bone on “Building Ships,” C.R.W. Nevinson on “Building Aircraft,” A.S. Hatrick on “Women’s Work,” and William Rothenstein on “Work on the Land.” Others focused on the front line war experience,

45 Harries and Harries, p. 81. 46 Ibid.

 27  THE OFFICIAL ART OF WAR such as the series by Eric Kennington on “Making Soldiers,” Frank Brangwyn on “Making Sailors,” Claude Shepperson on “Tending the Wounded,” and Charles Pears on “Travel by Sea.” Few of these artists had much experience with the lithographic form, which was fading from common use at the time, but it was chosen because it presented the advantage of easy reproducibility.47 The common form of the lithograph allowed each artist to showcase their individual styles in a way that was highly marketable for the Department of Information.

The methods of artistic expression within the exhibition differed dramatically because the artists featured in The Great War collection came from very different backgrounds. Brangwyn was Welsh, the son ofa farmer; C.R.W. Nevinson came from a sophisticated, Bohemian family and attended a series of art schools; and Claude Shepperson got his start in the art world drawing humorous cartoons for the illustrated magazine Punch.48 Each painted the war experience in a slightly different way, and the diversity of their styles––from the very realist sketches of Muirhead Bone to the impressionistic drawings of George Clausen––appealed to a variety of audiences. Though sales from galleries had limited economic success, the pictures from this exhibition were highly successful in print media. The public adored the work of the Official War Artists.

The Artists continued to be prolific in the years of the war after the exhibition at the Fine Arts Society in 1917. By the end of the war, the Department of Information had commissioned over 3,000 paintings,

47 Lithographs are made by drawing a design on a flat, smooth surface with a greasy substance. Ink is then applied, which sticks to the greasy drawing and is repelled by the non-greased surface. Paper is then placed on the surface and the whole system is rolled through a press. The technique of lithographic printing can mimic the style of watercolors, charcoal, pencil, or crayon, and can be done in color as well. 48 “The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals,” National Museum Wales, accessed April 16, 2016. http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/articles/2014-08-02/The-Great-War-Britains- Efforts-and-Ideals/.

 28  HOLLY DAYTON drawings, and sculptures from the Official War Artists. These artworks were printed in newspapers and books, shown in galleries, sold in portfolios, and released in limited runs of posters, plates, and postcards.49 The proliferation of potential images that the Artists provided for use as art, as documentation, and as propaganda proved a goldmine for the Department of Information. The success of the Official War Artists scheme had large implications for the future of relations between professional artists and the British government. As the government became aware of the important role the arts could play in shaping the national spirit, public support for the arts boomed. The Official War Artists scheme was even reinvigorated in the Second World War. Though many of the names of the Official War Artists have been lost to the records of war history, it is worth unearthing their story to examine the fundamental role they played in recording the war, propagandistically improving the nation’s morale, and providing a touch of art to beautify the dark times.

49 Fox, p. 88.

 29  COMPANIONS IN DISTRESS The Ruhleben Internment Camp, 1914-1918

MURPHY TEMPLE

During the First World War, over 110,000 enemy civilians were held captive in German internment camps. Between November 1914 and November 1918, over 5,000 of these prisoners were housed at Ruhleben (“quiet life,” in English), a camp built at a former horse race course two miles outside Berlin.1 The Ruhleben prisoners were men of military age (17-55) with British citizenship who had been living, working, studying, or traveling in Germany when the war broke out.2 They were given a great deal of social and recreational freedom in the camp, and Ruhleben became a microcosm of British society in both its demographics and its customs. Prisoners came from a wide range of social ranks, professions, and races, and they passed the time gardening, playing cricket, taking classes, writing and singing camp songs, staging plays, and voting in mock parliamentary elections.

1 In Britain, 26,000 German civilians of military age were housed in internment camps. Though the German government hoped to use the Ruhleben men as a bargaining chip, the British government saw little benefit in exchanging 26,000 potential German combatants for only 5,000 British citizens. Matthew Stibbe, British Civilian Internees in Germany: The Ruhleben Camp, 1914-18 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008), pp. 2 & 23-4. 2 Stibbe, p. 41.

 30  MURPHY TEMPLE

Figure 1. A group of prisoners poses in a Ruhleben barrack. Percy Brown is pictured in the center of the photograph, arms crossed, seated to the right of the man with the pipe and short black tie. (Percy Brown Papers, Hoover Institution Archives).

The Hoover Institution Archives house two collections that form a small but rich body of sources on Ruhleben: the Percy Brown papers and the F. F. Beer Collection.3 Percy Brown (Fig. 1) was a peculiar character whose eccentric life included a three-year stint in Ruhleben. Born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, in 1885, Brown trained as a carpenter. He left England for San Francisco in 1906, where that year’s infamous earthquake had created many jobs for craftsmen and builders. After the Panic of 1907, work was more difficult to come by, so Brown returned home to England on the Lusitania, the passenger liner that German U-boats would famously torpedo a decade later. Despite having no skating experience, Brown took a job as a roller-skating instructor at the Olympia exhibition

3 Percy Brown papers, Hoover Institution Archives, and F. F. Beer Collection, Hoover Institution Archives.

 31  COMPANIONS IN DISTRESS center. After quickly learning the sport, he traveled around Western Europe teaching and performing. His travels ended abruptly in Paris, where he fell and badly injured his back during a dramatic stunt called the “Fire Dive.” Brown was hospitalized for several months, but when England declared war in 1914, he sought to enlist. “War was an amazing healer,” he explained in a memoir.4 Though he was turned away from the recruiting office because of his injury, Brown was determined to get to the front lines: “[I]f I could not get into the army,” he wrote, “I would get on a newspaper.”5 Thus he decided, despite a complete lack of journalistic experience, to buy a camera and become a war photographer.

Brown took to the camera quickly. After some networking, he became an official correspondent for the London Daily Graphic, photographing Belgian refugees and the brutal realities of trench warfare. As he recalled in an article published in December 1914, he had numerous close calls with censors and guards on the front lines:

I have lied my way from Ostend to Antwerp, out beyond the Nethe and back to Dunkirk, then through Furnes and to Ypres and back again. I have passed sentries by showing them the seal on an ordinary English registered envelop, bluffed others into letting me through by professing a complete inability to understand French, got out of tight corners by asking the official who was holding me up “What time is it, monsieur?” until he was too tired to cope further with me.6

The story of Brown’s Ruhleben internment, however, ironically begins outside the militarized zone. In 1915, he traveled to Switzerland in search of material for exclusive features. In Schaffhausen, a city near the Swiss-

4 Percy Brown, Round the Corner (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1934), p. 155. 5 Ibid, p. 156. 6 Brown, “At the Front with a Camera: How I Secured My War Photographs,” Penny Pictorial, 12 Dec. 1914, Percy Brown papers, Box 1, Hoover Institution Archives.

 32  MURPHY TEMPLE

German border, he met a German hotel porter who informed him that “eight hundred British officers were to be exchanged for eight hundred German officers” the next day.7 Thinking that the prisoner exchange would make for interesting photographs, Brown woke early and boarded a train to the border, where he discovered that the porter, thinking he was a spy, had tricked him. The exchange of prisoners had been a ruse. The train crossed the border into Germany, where Brown disembarked and immediately began to walk back towards Switzerland. Before he reached neutral ground, he was captured and taken to Ruhleben. Though prisoners were not technically allowed cameras in camp, the guards responsible for transporting Brown used his money to buy beer along the way, and “after an hour’s steady soaking they allowed [him] to carry [his] camera and did not remember to take it back at the end of the journey.”8 Thus the Percy Brown papers contain several photographs he took during his internment in Ruhleben, along with newspaper articles he wrote about the camp and a copy of a small book entitled My Visit to Ruhleben by Herbert Bury, Anglican bishop for Northern Europe, who was allowed to visit the camp in 1916. After Brown left Ruhleben in 1918, he traveled around the continent observing the aftermath of war and photographing European monarchs. Sometime around 1950, he returned to San Francisco with his wife Perle, where he worked a variety of odd jobs as a photographer’s assistant, doorman, salesman, and carpet cleaner. He died in San Francisco in 1967.9

The F. F. Beer Collection is much smaller. It contains a single item, a sketchbook containing illustrations of camp life, all made by Ruhleben prisoners. The illustrations vary in style and content. Some are matter-

7 Brown, Round the Corner, p. 223. 8 Ibid, p. 247. 9 “Social Security Death Index,” database, Ancestry.com, entry for Percy Brown, accessed 13 May 2016.

 33  COMPANIONS IN DISTRESS of-fact, draughtsmanly depictions of camp buildings, while others are poignant portraits — memorials, in some cases — of Ruhleben prisoners. There are impressionist landscapes, as well as comics that simultaneously draw attention to and make light of unpleasant living conditions. Most of the pieces are undated, and while many pages bear signatures — the names Sylvio De Mayo, Robert Walker, and Gus Charles Scholl appear repeatedly — some are unsigned. The biographies of these prisoner- artists are mysterious, as are the biographies of most of the men who were their subjects. The sketchbook raises many questions: who were the artists? Who were the subjects? How did the sketchbook come to fruition? Who was F. F. Beer, and why did he or she have the sketchbook? Were the sketches made for public or political purposes, or were they primarily for entertainment? While the F. F. Beer Collection is riddled with mystery and ambiguity, the sketchbook nevertheless provides a useful and beautiful body of visual sources on the culture and living conditions of Ruhleben.

Though the historiography of Britain’s cultural experience of the First World War is rich, spanning a wide range of topics, internment generally and Ruhleben specifically have received little attention. While there have been a few newspaper articles on the camp — in 2014, for instance, the Daily Telegraph published an article about gardening in Ruhleben — the only scholarly work on the camp is Matthew Stibbe’s 2008 book British Civilian Internees in Germany: The Ruhleben Camp, 1914-18.10 Drawing on Benedict Anderson’s work on “imagined communities,” Stibbe emphasizes the “unique cultural institutions” and “forms of self-representation” that developed within the camp.11 He also argues that Ruhleben’s absence

10 Ed Cumming, “Ruhleben: The WW1 Camp Where Gardening Blossomed,” Daily Telegraph, 1 Feb. 2014, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/gardening/10606906/Ruhleben-the- WW1-camp-where-gardening-blossomed.html, accessed 6 May 2016, and Stibbe. 11 Stibbe, p. 2.

 34  MURPHY TEMPLE

Figure 2. A scene at Ruhleben with Fred Pentland (left) and Steve Bloomer (right) in the foreground. (Percy Brown Papers, Hoover Institution Archives). from popular historical memory is due to the fact that the camp was “very rapidly superseded by a focus on grieving families and the men who did not return.”12 Despite his thorough exploration of Ruhleben life, Stibbe did not consult the Hoover sources, and it seems that the Brown and Beer collections have not been used in any scholarly work on the camp. Stibbe’s book provides indispensable context for the analysis and exhibition of the Hoover collections on Ruhleben.

While much might be said about Ruhleben in the context of humanitarianism, diplomacy, propaganda, British nationalism, or civilian internment camps more generally, this essay will focus on the cultural life of the camp. It will use the Hoover’s holdings as a means of

12 Ibid, p. 163.

 35  COMPANIONS IN DISTRESS understanding the demographics and physical conditions of the camp, as well as the ways in which the prisoners used theater, art, study, sport, and camaraderie to stave off boredom and overcome malaise.

CAMP DEMOGRAPHICS The Ruhleben men, though united by British citizenship, were not a monolithic bunch. They came from a wide range of socioeconomic backgrounds and professions. Some were wealthy and hired other, less fortunate prisoners to work as their valets. Bury made special note of the presence of the educated upper classes in the camp: “There are members of our own nobility,” he writes, “Oxford and Cambridge dons, men who had just left the public schools and entered upon their University course, some of whom had only just arrived in Germany when the war broke out for a little holiday or walking tour; and others who had come for cures or to health resorts.”13 Although these upper-class voices tend to dominate primary sources from the camp, they were actually a minority of the Ruhleben population. According to statistics from March 1915, only 18% of the camp’s 4,098 prisoners were “professionals,” including musicians, professors, and students. Workmen made up 16.5% of the camp’s population, while “jockeys, waiters, and domestic servants” accounted for 7%. The largest class of prisoners was composed of “sailors and fishermen” who had been captured off the German coast. They made up 34.5% of the camp.14 Bury also noted the presence of these men, writing, “Then there are […] those who have been taken prisoner […] at sea, captains on merchant ships and trawlers, officers, and sailor lads. The mercantile marine, as well as the trawlers and mine-

13 Herbert Bury, My Visit to Ruhleben: With 25 Illustrations and a Plan of the Camp (London: A. R. Mowbray & Co., Ltd., 1917), p. 33, Percy Brown Papers, Box 1, Hoover Institution Archives. 14 Stibbe, p. 15.

 36  MURPHY TEMPLE sweepers, are very well-represented.”15

This seafaring faction of the Ruhleben population brought racial as well as occupational diversity to the camp. Bury notes that the imprisoned sailors included “negroes from West Africa, East Africa, the West Indies, Barbados, Singapore, Liberia, and other places.”16 Brown’s writings also reflect this heterogeneity. In a undated newspaper article entitled “My Three Years in Rat-Infested Ruhleben,” he explains, “When I wanted a change I joined Jim Doe in his barracks, that of the colored men, the happiest and cleanest in the camp.”17 Brown also alludes to the presence of high-caste Indian prisoners who “felt their position keenly, being bundled into internment with negroes and half-breeds.”18 Though visual sources of Ruhleben tend to depict a more racially homogenous white prisoner community, Robert Walker’s sketch “The Canteen” includes a black man who waits in line at the canteen alongside a number of white prisoners (Fig. A).

While race relations within the camp seem to have been relatively good, all prisoners did not stand on equal social footing, as the existence of segregated barracks suggests. It seems that black internees, in particular, were seen as incapable of governing themselves, and white prisoners were responsible for overseeing black barracks. In language reflective of the paternalistic racial logic of an imperial age, Bury reports that

[t]he Negroes are in their own barrack, and have two of our number in charge; but as it is they have just what the two races need — the white chivalrously helping the black, giving

15 Bury, p. 33. 16 Ibid. 17 Brown, “My Three Years in Rat-Infested Ruhleben,” n.p., n.d., Percy Brown papers, Box 1, Hoover Institution Archives. 18 Ibid.

 37  COMPANIONS IN DISTRESS

Figure 3. G. Jones, “Ruhleben Camp,” December 1915. In Ruhleben Camp, pp. 24-5.

leadership and sympathy, and the black looking up to the white, confident of getting a really helpful and friendly lead.19

Jewish prisoners were also housed in separate barracks, ostensibly to ensure that they could be given kosher rations. Stibbe notes that some German guards engaged in “petty harassment” of these Jewish prisoners, but that to compare Ruhleben to “the German treatment of Jews in the 1930s and 1940s would be a gross exaggeration.”20

There were also differences in national identity and sentiment among the interned population. Most Ruhlebenites were pro-British. Portions

19 Bury, p. 34. 20 Stibbe, p. 59.

 38  MURPHY TEMPLE of the camp were given familiar names like Trafalgar Square and Bond Street, and Bury recalls hearing prisoners sing “God Save the King” and cheer “for King, for Queen, for Home.”21 Some internees, however, had spent all or most of their lives in Germany and had no real sense of British identity. Stibbe notes that approximately one-fifth of the men were “openly pro-German in outlook (deutschgesinnt).”22 These pro- German prisoners were housed in separate barracks.23 Others had deep social ties to Germany — often in the form of German wives — and were seen as deutschfreundlich, “friendly to Germany without necessarily supporting the German war effort.”24

There were a number of renowned figures in the camp, including Sir John Balfour and Sir Timothy Eden, nephew of former Prime Minister Arthur Balfour and brother of future Prime Minister Anthony Eden. Famous cellist Carl Fuchs and conductor Sir Ernest MacMillan were interned at Ruhleben, as were journalists Israel Cohen and Robert Smyllie, who would go on to become editor of the Irish Times. Other notable prisoners included professional football players-turned-coaches Fred Pentland and Steve Bloomer (Fig. 2), actor George Merritt, and businessman Wallace Ellison (Fig. B), who would go on to become an MI5 officer and adviser to Winston Churchill during his 1919-22 term as MP for Dundee.25

CAMP CONDITIONS Primary sources have much to say about physical conditions in the camp. They suggest an odd juxtaposition of privation and discomfort with surprising luxury. Descriptions of barracks, for instance, emphasize

21 Bury, p. 78. 22 Stibbe, p. 2. 23 Ibid, p. 59. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid, pp. 2-3.

 39  COMPANIONS IN DISTRESS

Figure 4. “Untitled (Ruhleben Barrack).” 1915. Pen and ink wash by Sylvio De [Mayo?], F. F. Beer Collection, Hoover Institution Archives.

 40  MURPHY TEMPLE tight, dark quarters and muddy floors, while a diagram of the camp drawn by G. Jones and printed in the camp magazine (Fig. 3) depicts several small barracks situated next to a building housing a shoemaker, a barber, a classroom, government bread stores, and a piano practice room. Overall, conditions in Ruhleben were quite good relative to other German internment camps of the time, and especially compared to the camps that would develop during the Second World War.

The entire camp, excluding the racecourse itself, was less than ten acres in area, and Stibbe notes that it was possible to walk from one end of the camp to the other in under ten minutes. At the top levels, the camp was run by a military administration, whose primary purpose was to prevent escapes and censor mail and packages (which they did with a fairly relaxed hand). The prisoners themselves had a prominent role in the running of camp affairs: each barrack was led by a “barrack captain,” an internee chosen sometimes through democratic election and sometimes by nomination from the German military authorities. Internees were also responsible for the administration of many camp facilities, like the library and cinema. Facilities like the shoemaker’s and engraver’s, similarly, were the results of prisoners’ entrepreneurship within the free market that developed in the camp.26

Conditions within the barracks were not good, especially during the first year of the war. The original eleven barracks were horse stables, and the first few months of internment saw dramatic overcrowding, as 4,000 men were crammed into spaces that could only comfortably accommodate 1,500. Even after the construction of nine new barracks in June 1915, overcrowding continued to plague the camp until the war’s end. Most

26 Ibid, pp. 53 & 56-62.

 41  COMPANIONS IN DISTRESS stables consisted of 27 small “horse-boxes” that each housed six men.27 Brown writes that the men in his horse-box — “our allotted space of six feet by seven” — “built a kind of room which could be opened in day- time and closed at night.”28 They used the bunks as seats during meals and built hidden cabinets and drawers to protect against thieves. The barracks were loud, with poor ventilation and muddy floors. They could be bitterly cold or stiflingly hot, depending on the season, and natural light — necessary for writing letters, reading, and drawing — was hard to come by.29 Rats were a constant nuisance. Brown writes that there was “a colony of big dark brutes” that “ate holes in the floor between [the] beds.”30 An illustration by Sylvio de Mayo (Fig. 4) illustrates the chaos of a Ruhleben barrack in dramatic and humorous fashion. The prisoners’ belongings are strewn around the dark room, with bottles discarded on the floor, clothes hung from the rafters, and boxes perched precariously on the beams. The twelve men in the room are quite aimless: most stare at nothing, while one kneeling man seems to hunt for fleas or lice. One man, half-undressed, suggests the impossibility of privacy in such tight quarters. While some prisoners sit at tables, others are huddled on what seem to be lumps of earth, and there is no hint of a proper bed.

Food, too, is a popular subject in primary sources on Ruhleben. Though some observers quipped that Ruhleben prisoners were better nourished than German civilians, rations could nevertheless be meager and unappetizing: some prisoners, for instance, recalled drinking acorn coffee and eating dry bread.31 These camp rations, however, were often supplemented by bread provided from British Government bakeries in

27 Ibid, pp. 53, 63-4, & 66-7. 28 Brown, “My Three Years.” 29 Stibbe, pp. 64-6. 30 Brown, “My Three Years.” 31 Stibbe, p. 68.

 42  MURPHY TEMPLE

Figure 5. Ruhleben Prisoners in Costume, 1917. (Percy Brown Papers, Hoover Institution Archives).

Holland and care packages sent from home. Brown even went so far as to boast, “Thanks to the British government and relatives we were the best- fed prisoners. No matter how many ships were sunk we got our parcels.”32 Much of the Ruhleben diet came from canned food; after attending a high tea in the camp, Bury marveled, “I never knew till my visit to Ruhleben that there were so many things in tins.”33 Some industrious prisoners wrote to the Royal Horticultural Society, who provided them with seeds for a vegetable garden in the center of the racecourse.34 Brown noted that the gardeners cultivated tomatoes, cabbage, onions, beans, and beets, and he proudly proclaimed that “everyone, whether English, pro- German, or, in some cases, pure-German, could draw a dole from our

32 Brown, “My Three Years.” 33 Bury, p. 12. 34 Cumming.

 43  COMPANIONS IN DISTRESS

Government.”35 Wine was also popular, and could be purchased from a wine bar opened by a German officer under the grandstand.36 Despite the bounty of vegetables and tinned food, some foodstuffs were perpetually in short supply. Bury observed, for instance, that “an actual egg is the most difficult of all things to get in camp.”37 Walker’s sketch “The Canteen” (Fig. 2) also attests to food shortages in the camp: a merchant explains “No coffee, sold out!,” while signs insist “KEINE EIER!,” “NO EGGS,” “NO BREAD,” “NO HAM,” “NO EGGS, NO JAM,” and “THERE IS NO: BREAD, EGGS, SUGAR, HAM, CHEESE, SAUSAGE.” The alternatives — “THERE IS SOME: BOOT LACES, DARNING WOOL, PICKLES” — are decidedly less appetizing.

CULTURAL LIFE IN THE CAMP With long hours to fill and a great deal of organizational freedom, the Ruhleben prisoners turned to a variety of cultural activities for entertainment, enrichment, and health. The Brown and Beer Collections contain photographs and illustrations that span a wide range of camp culture, from football matches and theater to metalworking and scientific research. Similarly, G. Jones’s camp diagram (Fig. 3), which includes a theater, a synagogue, tennis courts, and a newspaper office, speaks to the sorts of social and cultural activities that defined life in Ruhleben. Stibbe argues that such activities emerged as a means of combating boredom and frustration. They were “a survival mechanism in the broadest sense of the term by enabling the internees to make sense of their feelings and emotions in a context where time, quite literally, seemed to stand still.”38 They also helped to establish continuity, camaraderie, and a shared language and culture that gave the men a sense of collective identity and

35 Brown, “My Three Years.” 36 Ibid. 37 Bury, p. 15. 38 Stibbe, p. 79.

 44  MURPHY TEMPLE purpose.39 Bury was particularly taken with the cultural life of the camp, writing, One thing which struck me very much was that no one need be unoccupied, that everybody could find something pleasant or interesting or profitable to do, if he chooses. Opportunities for recreation and amusement, on the one hand, for study, and progress in all kinds of efficiency, scientific and artistic, on the other, abound.40

It is important to note, however, that such diversions did not efface the fundamental fact that Ruhleben internees were held against their will for years on end, away from their loved ones, in a place that was often very uncomfortable. As Bury goes on: “Yet I am sure that many are unoccupied, listless, uninterested, out of heart, and thoroughly depressed — some from time to time and others usually and always.”41

Literary and journalistic organizations were among the first to arise in the camp. The prisoners organized a lending library, a debating society, and a fortnightly magazine called In Ruhleben Camp, which contained material ranging from humorous advertisements and reviews of camp plays to letters from readers and announcements from the camp church. As the Beer sketchbook demonstrates, there were many talented artists in the camp, and they contributed illustrations for each issue. Brown managed to keep up his journalistic correspondence with the outside world; his article “The Luck of Ruhleben Camp” was published in The Graphic in December 1917, while he was still interned.42 The fact that such an article was published may attest to Brown’s ingenuity or the laxity of the German censors; more likely, however, is the theory that the German

39 Ibid, pp. 79-80. 40 Bury, p. 42. 41 Ibid. 42 Brown, “The Luck of Ruhleben Camp: Told by Percy A. Brown, an Interned Correspondent,” The Graphic, 15 Dec. 1917, Percy Brown papers, Box 1, Hoover Institution Archives.

 45  COMPANIONS IN DISTRESS

Figure 6. Michael Pease in the Camp Laboratory, ca. 1915-18. (Percy Brown Papers, Hoover Institution Archives). authorities treated such occasional public communications with the British home front as positive propaganda. As Stibbe argues, “German propagandists were […] more than willing to advertise Ruhleben culture as an example of the Reich’s supposedly ‘humane’ treatment of prisoners and as a means of countering allied atrocity propaganda.”43

Most renowned, perhaps, of all the camp’s extracurricular diversions was its rich theatrical culture. Using a long rectangular space under the grandstand as a stage, internees produced performances ranging from Shakespeare comedies and Gilbert and Sullivan operettas to original revues and Christmas pantomimes, often inviting German officers and officials from the US embassy to attend. Sets, lighting, costumes, and props became increasingly elaborate over the course of the war, and some prisoners donated their own money to improve production quality. Ruhleben’s theatrical community also benefitted from the expertise of

43 Stibbe, p. 83.

 46  MURPHY TEMPLE interned professionals like composer Ernest MacMillan, lyricist Cyrus Harry Brooks, and John Roker, who had been ballet master at the Metropol theater in Berlin.44 Brown photographed the cast of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s 1777 comedy School for Scandal, performed in 1917 (Fig. 5), and Bury’s visit coincided with the performance of a play called Ann, presumably a Ruhleben original. Though the prisoners were concerned that the bishop would be offended by the performance’s irreverence, he found the play to be “beautifully and artistically performed.”45 He especially admired the work of one Mr. Goodhind, who played the title character and was the “prima donna of Ruhleben.”46

The Ruhleben air was often rich with song. Brown recalls that Sundays were marked by the “devout droning of hymns” outside the YMCA building, and he notes that the black barracks were a “continuous concert,” as “most of the colored men played, sang and danced.”47 In addition to the performance of Ann, Bury was also treated to a chamber music concert, which he proclaimed to be “one of the most delightful vocal and instrumental concerts I have had in my wandering life abroad.”48 On the bawdier end of the musical spectrum, Ruhleben gained an anthem of sorts in 1915 when Brooks and MacMillan collaborated to create the “Ruhleben Song.” The song’s lyrics, sung at the end of every theatrical performance, are a poignant mix of humor, homesickness, irreverence, and cheerful defiance.

44 Ibid, pp. 88-90. 45 Bury, p. 46. 46 Ibid. 47 Brown, “My Three Years.” 48 Bury, p. 50.

 47  COMPANIONS IN DISTRESS

Figure 7. Ruhleben Prisoners Selling Pendants, ca. 1915-18. (Percy Brown, Percy Brown papers, Hoover Institution Archives).

They read, in part:

Oh, and we send our love and kisses To our sweetheart or the missus And we say the life we lead is simply grand; And we stroll around the Tea-‘us [tea-house] Where the girls can sometimes see us, And we say it’s just as good as down the Strand. Yet there sometimes comes a minute When we see there’s nothing in it, And the tale that we’ve been telling isn’t true; Down our spine there comes a-stealing Just that little homesick feeling — Then I’ll tell you, boys, the best thing you can do;

[Chorus] Line up, boys, and sing this chorus, Shout this chorus all you can; We want the people there To hear in Leicester Square That we’re the boys that never get down-hearted. Back, back, back again in England, There we’ll fill the flowing cup; And tell them clear and loud

 48  MURPHY TEMPLE

Of that Ruhleben crowd Who always keep their pecker up.49

Sports, too, were very popular in Ruhleben, where prisoners enjoyed golf, rugby, cricket, tennis, and boxing. As is typical of British culture, football was particularly popular.50 A photograph taken by Brown (Fig. 2) shows famous footballers Steve Bloomer and Fred Pentland at rest during a match; the crowded line of observers in the background of the image attests to the popularity of the sport not only as an athletic activity, but also as a form of entertainment.

After watching an exhibition football match in the camp, Bury remarked, “The play was very fast and very excellent, for the teams were wonderfully matched. Steve Bloomer was said to distinguish himself even beyond his usual form, and some of the younger players who had been taken off ships played with remarkable zest and rapidity.”51 Stibbe suggests that sports also allowed the Ruhleben internees to indirectly express their British nationalism. A 1915 “sports day” that included hurdles, tug-of- war, and a relay race, he argues, was a way for prisoners to demonstrate “the ‘British’ values of fair play and good sportsmanship, combined with a symbolic display of ‘effortless’ British superiority.”52

Cultural life in the camp included plenty of opportunities for intellectual and occupational enrichment. Thanks in part to funds raised by Elisabeth Rotten, the German leader of a voluntary organization called the Auskunfts- und Hilfsstelle für Deutsche im Ausland und Ausländer in Deutschland (Enquiry and Assistance Agency for Germans Abroad and Foreigners

49 Stibbe, pp. 65-6. 50 Ibid, pp. 90-1. 51 Bury, p. 49. 52 Stibbe, p. 91.

 49  COMPANIONS IN DISTRESS in Germany), Ruhleben gained many classrooms and well-outfitted labs. Working on the principle that gifts given to British prisoners in Germany would be matched for German prisoners in Britain, Rotten helped to acquire botanical and zoological specimens, chemicals, scientific instruments like microscopes, and numerous scientific books from German professors and lending libraries.53

A poignant photograph taken by Brown shows Michael Pease, Cambridge geneticist and son of founding Fabian Edward Pease, peering into a microscope in the camp laboratory (Fig. 6). The camp also had formal classes, and student-prisoners could take courses on French, Dutch, Italian, Danish, Celtic, biology, physics, mathematics, and engineering. German was an especially popular subject, with lectures drawing as many as 600 students.54 Internees could even sit exams and earn degrees from the University of London.55 Bury remarked that the camp school reminded him of a mediaeval university:

All the equipment of higher education is there, but — suggestive of the old pursuit of knowledge under difficulties — the setting of it all seems so extraordinary. Instead of our modern lecture-rooms are the little places amongst the lofts, with seats and desks of plain, unvarnished timber. In some places there is nothing but artificial light.56

Despite this unlikely setting, Bury was deeply impressed by the camp’s academic offerings, marveling that “no one would dream, in looking over the prospectus of work for the autumn term, 1916, that it proceeded from an internment camp in an enemy’s country.”57

53 Ibid, p. 145. 54 Bury, pp. 37-8. 55 Stibbe, p. 146. 56 Bury, p. 37. 57 Ibid, p. 38.

 50  MURPHY TEMPLE

Using materials imported from Denmark and Switzerland, prisoners could also practice crafts like as bookbinding, textile dying, and leatherwork in the camp handicrafts department. Upon learning such trades, they could earn technical certificates from the Royal Society of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce, and from the London Chamber of Commerce.58 A photograph from the Brown collection (Fig. 7) depicts three prisoners alongside a table of pendants and hatpins that had been, according to a sign on the display, “designed and executed by members of the art metal class.” It is striking that these products — women’s jewelry — were of little practical use within the camp. This choice speaks, perhaps, to the artists’ yearning for the women in their lives, as well as to the potential market value of the products. As Stibbe notes, Rotten secured permission from German authorities to export Ruhleben handicrafts to the British Red Cross for sale or exhibition at home in England. The British authorities, however, vetoed this scheme until after the end of the war. In January 1919, handicrafts made in the camp were displayed in the Ruhleben Exhibition, held at Westminster Hall.59

Though prisoners could not actively speak out against Germany or engage in inflammatory political commentary, Ruhleben’s cultural and social life occasionally took a political turn. One of the most curious artifacts of the camp, for instance, is a carefully calligraphed banner signed by Walter Butterworth, the “mayor” of Ruhleben (Fig. C). The banner, which is topped with a coat-of-arms featuring rats and the motto Dum spiro spero (While I breathe, I hope), advertises the August 1915 “Parliamentary Bye-Election” for the “Borough of Ruhleben.” In a parody of traditional British elections, three candidates spent two weeks plastering the camp

58 Stibbe, p. 146. 59 Ibid, pp. 146 & 163.

 51  COMPANIONS IN DISTRESS with posters and giving open-air campaign speeches before rambunctious crowds. Prisoner Alexander Boss ran on a conservative platform, touting his aristocratic background and his 12,000-acre estate in Surrey. Israel Cohen ran as a Liberal, emphasizing his Manchester roots, promising old-age pensions for those over forty, and proclaiming himself to be a “man of the people.” Finally, Reuben Castang, who won with 46.7% of the vote, ran on a platform of “Votes for Women,” encouraging his fellow internees to “think of your wives and sweethearts and vote for Castang.” Two-thirds of the prisoner population turned out to the polls, casting 2,689 ballots.60

As Stibbe notes, this mock election has many potential interpretations. Castang’s victory demonstrates the homesickness the internees surely felt for the women in their lives. On a more general level, the election may also suggest a patriotic affirmation of the British constitution and the democratic process in the face of “Prussian militarism.” Stibbe also suggests that the election can be read as a “protest against the British government’s inaction on the internment question and its apparent failure to negotiate with Germany for an exchange of prisoners.”61 This interpretation is supported by the text of the banner, which declares that

the Burgesses of the ancient and honourable Borough of Ruhleben, by virtue of their members and their importance, both jointly and severally, are fully worthy and entitled by right, law and tradition, to be represented in the House of Commons, where their views, opinions, and interests should receive meet and suitable expression.

Though the suggestion that the prisoners could actually send a representative to Westminster was of course tongue-in-cheek, the feeling

60 Ibid, pp. 92-3. 61 Ibid, p. 93.

 52  MURPHY TEMPLE that “the internees had largely been forgotten by the politicians back at home” was at times quite real.62

* * *

When writing about a place like Ruhleben, with its little-Britain place names, quaint pastimes, and quirky characters, it is tempting to fall into a trap of romanticization. And indeed, in the context of the history of German internment, Ruhleben seems like an astounding anomaly. Internees were not starved, forced to work, or abused by their guards. Their relative freedom and comfort seems remarkable, and it is tempting to over-emphasize the seeming charm of the camp and its “Ruhleben spirit.” But it is also crucial to note that life in the camp could be extremely taxing, both physically and emotionally. All of the romantic elements of camp life, in fact, were a coping mechanism; they developed as a means for prisoners to bear the challenges of Ruhleben. Prisoners were exposed to the elements, and they endured extreme overcrowding. Though their food was sufficient to sustain life, rations could be meager and unappetizing, especially for those who did not receive care packages and lacked the funds to supplement their diets with items from the canteen.

Perhaps most taxing, however, were the camp’s psychological challenges. Prisoners were separated from their families, friends, communities, and occupations, often for years on end. Many accounts emphasize the toll that lack of privacy could inflict. Alongside all his praise of the camp’s theater, football, and classrooms, for instance, Bury also remarked on the prevalence of “nerves” among the prisoners, which he blamed on the fact

62 Ibid.

 53  COMPANIONS IN DISTRESS that “they [could] never be alone nor perfectly quiet.”63 He also observed that “men must have been from the very first under a very severe mental strain at Ruhleben. […] I hope it may prove that none have [broken down] permanently.”64 As Stibbe notes, many prisoners felt guilty for being unable to fight for Britain on the front lines. After their release, some prisoners, like their veteran counterparts, suffered from “flashbacks, moments of blind panic, and a general inability to mix socially with ‘normal people,’ especially women.”65

This essay has focused on the demographics and physical conditions of Ruhleben, as well as the ways that prisoners used theater, music, sports, scholarship, handicrafts, and political engagement to combat the malaise and boredom that came with long periods of interment. In the end, though, as a set of watercolor portraits from the Beer sketchbook suggests, perhaps the men’s best resources were their fellow prisoners, their “companions in distress” (Fig. B).

63 Bury, p. 39. 64 Ibid, p. 35. 65 Stibbe, p. 164

 54 

Figure A. “The Canteen.” (ca. 1915) Pen and watercolor by Robert Walker, F. F. Beer Collection, Hoover Institution Archives.

 56  Figure B. This montage of portraits is quite mysterious: the artist’s name is partially illegible, as are many of the subjects’ names. The only clearly identifiable figure is Wallace Ellison (upper right). “Companions in Distress.” (ca. 1915) Watercolor by Fred [Albermann?], F. F. Beer Collection, Hoover Institution Archive.

 57  Figure C. “Borough of Ruhleben Parliamentary Bye-Election, 1915.” Watercolor and pen by Bishop [First Name Not Given], F. F. Beer Collection, Hoover Institution Archives.

 58  Figure D. “Map of the Royal Commission’s Partition Plan, Map No. 3.” From Palestine Partition Commission Report, Command Paper 5854 (1938). J. C. Hurewitz Papers, Hoover Institution Archives.

 59  Figure E. “The Commission’s Tours, Map No. 2.” From Palestine Partition Commission Report, Command Paper 5854 (1938). J. C. Hurewitz Papers, Hoover Institution Archives.

 60  Figure F. “The A Plan of Partition, Map No. 8.” From Palestine Partition Commission Report, Command Paper 5854 (1938). J. C. Hurewitz Papers, Hoover Institution Archives.

 61  Figure G. “The B Plan: Shewing Jewish Land, Map No. 9A.” From Palestine Partition Commission Report, Command Paper 5854 (1938). J. C. Hurewitz Papers, Hoover Institution Archives.

 62  Figure H. “The C Plan of Partition, Map No. 10.” From Palestine Partition Commission Report, Command Paper 5854 (1938). J. C. Hurewitz Papers, Hoover Institution Archives.

 63  PROPOSING FAILURE The Woodhead Commission’s Maps of Palestine

MEADE KLINGENSMITH

While often understood as objectivity incarnate, maps shape spaces to conform to a particular understanding of reality, and in so doing they have the power to create that reality. They conjure borders and states where all that would otherwise exist is land and people. This is true of all maps to some extent, but it was particularly true of the maps which Europeans made of their colonies, which could create new realities with each iteration. These maps were an important ingredient in what Timothy Mitchell has described as a uniquely European way of seeing the world in the imperial age—“a world ordered so as to represent.”1 This method of seeing the world, as Mitchell writes, was singular in the “apparent certainty with which everything seems ordered and organized, calculated and rendered unambiguous—ultimately, what seems its political decidedness.”2 A blank map represents an unknown and perhaps unknowable space, but draw borders on that map and it becomes stable and legible. To Europeans—and particularly to the British—imposing order on perceived chaos was at the heart of the imperial mission. Thus,

1 Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 13 2 Ibid.

 64  MEADE KLINGENSMITH maps were a vital tool of imperialism.

This talk of ordering reality can seem abstract, but in the British Empire it could be very concrete: through partition, the British created new nations and new nationalities. This was a recurring tactic in British imperial management. The British partitioned Bengal in 1905, Ireland in 1921, and India in 1947. Beginning in the 1930s, the British deliberated over applying this tactic to Palestine. This process began with the Peel Commission Report of 1937, which first proposed the idea of partition in Palestine as a way of managing the conflict between Arab and Jewish residents of the land, which was intensifying with each wave of Jewish immigration. It culminated in a 1944 United Nations partition proposal, which was adopted but never implemented. Instead, the Zionist leadership took matters into its own hands and unilaterally declared the State of Israel in 1948. Most of the maps produced in this sequence of proposals were visions of a potential new political reality to be forged in Palestine; they were representations of Mitchell’s “political decidedness.” Yet one group of maps stands out for its unique purpose. The maps produced by the Woodhead Commission of 1938 were designed to discredit the idea of partition. They aimed to show the impossibility of a new political reality in Palestine—representations of political undecidedness. They were proposals designed to be rejected. In so doing, they offered an implicit—if unintentional—critique of the process of British partition and border-drawing writ large.

* * *

Understanding what makes these maps so unique first requires an explanation of the purpose they served—the political situation they were intended to visualize and the immediate context of their creation.

 65  PROPOSING FAILURE

Palestine had been in British hands since the end of the First World War, when the British wrenched it from the Ottoman Empire. It was formalized by the League of Nations as a Mandate administered by the British in 1922. The Mandates were territories formerly ruled by the empires dissolved at the end of the war—the Ottomans and the Germans. While nominally on the track to independence, the Mandates were to be governed by one of the victorious Allied powers—mostly the British and the French—“until such time as they are able to stand alone.”3 That is to say, the Mandates were a way of legitimating colonial spoils made palatable for an age when “self-determination” had entered the vocabulary.

Since that time, the Mandate government had been trying to manage rising tensions between the Jewish and Arab communities. However, an element of the Mandate charter itself made this difficult. This document, which provided the legal framework for the Mandate government, included the text of the 1917 Balfour Declaration which called for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”4 This inclusion created what one historian has called “a cruel dilemma”: the British required Palestinian leaders to recognize the Mandate Government in order for their claims of self-determination considered, but to recognize the Mandate Government was to recognize the validity of the Balfour Declaration and therefore Jewish national rights in Palestine, which they “felt they could not do without denying their own rights…”5 Because the Mandate Government was designed in such a way as to be inherently unpalatable to Palestinian leaders, it positioned the two sides on unequal footing and made mediating between them impossible.

3 League of Nations, The Covenant of the League of Nations (28 April 1919), Article 22. 4 Arthur Balfour, The Balfour Declaration (2 Nov. 1917). 5 Rashid Khalidi, The Iron Cage: The Story of the Palestinian Struggle for Statehood (Boston: Beacon Press, 2006), p. 33.

 66  MEADE KLINGENSMITH

In April 1936, mounting tensions gave way to an acute crisis. This crisis was triggered by the death of a popular Palestinian sheikh, Izz al-Din al- Qassam. Al-Qassam was known for his association with the pan-Arabist Istiqlal party and his traditionalist preaching. In November 1935, he and two followers killed a Jewish British policeman on a military exercise, Moshe Rosenfeld, and were killed in turn by the British police. al- Qassam’s death, combined with the discovery of a Jewish arms smuggling operation at the Jaffa port, led to widespread calls for action in the Arab community. In April 1936, the Arab Higher Committee—the umbrella organization for the Arab leadership—declared a general strike, a boycott of Jewish goods and sales to Jews, and called for attacks on both Jews and British forces. The British sent 20,000 troops to suppress the revolt, which succeeded in short order. After a pause the Arab Revolt would resume in a second, more violent phase, but it was in this lull that the British first developed the idea of partition in Palestine.6

In 1936, the British Government created a Royal Commission chaired by William Robert W. Peel, formerly the Secretary of State for India. Its mission was “to investigate the Mandate’s operations and the causes of the disturbances.”7 The Peel Commission visited Palestine in November 1936 and published its report in July 1937. In the report, the Commission concluded the British were faced with “an irrepressible conflict…between two national communities.” It proposed partition as a solution to that conflict, albeit not an ideal one: “If it offers neither party all it wants, it offers each what it wants most, namely freedom and security…Partition offers a prospect—and we see no such prospect in any other policy—of obtaining the inestimable boon of peace.”8 In particular, the Commission

6 See Charles D. Smith, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Eighth Edition(Houndmills: Macmillan, 2013), pp. 130-135. 7 Roza I.M. El-Eini, Mandated Landscape: British Imperial Rule in Palestine, 1929-1948 (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 317. 8 Palestine Royal Commission Report (London: Routledge, 1937), Cmd. 5479, p. 394-395.

 67  PROPOSING FAILURE proposed to divide Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state, with the “Holy Places”—meaning an enclave around Jerusalem with access to the Mediterranean—as a “permanent trust” administered by the British. The particular borders were only sketched in rough terms, however, as seen in a reproduction of the Peel Commission’s map in the later Woodhead Commission report [Fig. D]. Despite—or perhaps because of—this vagueness, the Peel Report became “the master partition plan, on which all those that followed were either based, or to which they were compared.”9 Even in this abstract form, this was clearly to be a radical restricting of the land; as one historian has noted, “The new boundaries were to redraw the country’s landscape, producing new places with new characteristics.”10

The idea of partition met with instant resistance, both in Palestine and in some halls of the British government. Arab leadership was strongly opposed to the plan. The proposed Arab state would have composed about 80 percent of the land, but much of the most fertile and productive land would have been in the Jewish state. One Arab leader, at a meeting of the Arab Higher Committee, noted the Arab state would be left with “barren mountains.”11 Furthermore, about 250,000 Arabs, most of them in the Galilee region in the north of Palestine, would have had to leave their homes. Jewish leadership, for its part, supported the plan in principle (though some opposed it). David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s future first Prime Minister, viewed it as an acceptable starting point for a Jewish state, to be expanded in the future. Speaking to the World Zionist Congress in August 1937, he said that though “there could be no question…of giving up any part of the Land of Israel…it was arguable that the ultimate goal

9 El-Eini p. 331. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid, p. 328.

 68  MEADE KLINGENSMITH would be achieved most quickly by accepting the Peel proposals.”12 It was, in short, a good start.

In Britain, the plan was met with polarized reactions that manifested in a rivalry between two departments of the British Government, the Colonial Office and the Foreign Office. The plan was supported by the Colonial Office, which was responsible for the governance of colonies including Palestine. As one historian noted, to the Colonial Office “partition appeared to offer the only honourable exit from what was now regarded as a colossal imperial blunder—the Balfour Declaration.”13 It was opposed by the Foreign Office, responsible for setting British foreign policy more broadly. The Foreign Secretary, the future Prime Minister Anthony Eden, was worried about the impact of Palestinian partition on Muslims throughout the British Empire. The potential for another world war loomed large, and the Foreign Office feared losing the support of Arab subjects and allies. This logic was later expressed by a member of the Committee of Imperial Defence in January 1939, who called for “the necessary measure” to be taken “in order to bring about a complete appeasement of Arab opinion in Palestine and in neighboring countries… If we fail thus to retain Arab goodwill at the outset of a war, no other measures which we can recommend will serve to influence the Arab states in favor of this country.”14 This was a not an expression of sympathy with either side of the conflict, but rather a geopolitical calculation.

In light of this inter-departmental conflict, and the recent resumption of the Arab Revolt in Palestine, the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain held a secret Cabinet Meeting on December 8, 1937 to discuss the idea of partition. The Cabinet decided to delay any

12 In Smith, p. 136. 13 Michael J. Cohen, Britain’s Moment in Palestine (London: Routledge, 2014), p. 289. 14 In Smith, p. 141.

 69  PROPOSING FAILURE immediate action for at least a year, and to appoint another commission to examine the plan and propose detailed options. Historians have since considered this meeting to have been the death of the idea of partition.15 Nevertheless, the proposal could not be dismissed out of hand; its status as the official recommendation of a Royal Commission gave it too much legitimacy and visibility. Furthermore, the idea had considerable traction in the League of Nations, in Parliament, and, as noted by the historian Michael Cohen, to some extent among the British public, “now activated by new outrages against British personnel in Palestine,” which “made it impossible for the Government to retreat openly from partition.”16 Partition could not be dismissed; it had to be discredited. Enter the Woodhead Commission.

* * *

The Palestine Partition Commission was appointed by Colonial Secretary William Ormsby-Gore on January 4, 1938. It was chaired by Sir John Woodhead, a member of the Indian Civil Service, and included three other members: Alison Russell, a lawyer, and Percival Waterfield and Thomas Reid, both also of the Indian Civil Service. From the Commission’s inception, it was the site of a power struggle between the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office. Both sides viewed it as a way of supporting their preferred outcome with a document that presented itself as dispassionate technical analysis. The Foreign Office in particular, Cohen writes, viewed it as an opportunity to have “an ‘independent’ Commission publicly declare partition to be impracticable, and thus release the Government from its previous decision.”17 The Colonial

15 Itzhak Galnoor, The Partition of Palestine: Decision Crossroads in the Zionist Movement (New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), p. 53. 16 Michael J. Cohen, Palestine: Retreat from the Mandate (London: P. Elek, 1978), p. 39 17 Ibid, p. 45.

 70  MEADE KLINGENSMITH

Office, on the other hand, saw it as a chance to reverse the clear trend of moving away from partition. The two departments thus dug in for a battle over the soul of the Commission.

The most important stage of this battle was fought over the Commission’s “terms of reference”—the instructions it would be given outlining its parameters and responsibilities. Ormsby-Gore of the Colonial Office wanted the Commission to report only on options for partition; if they found partition untenable, he wanted them to report this in private separate from the report. Anthony Eden’s Foreign Office wanted to make it as explicit as possible that the Commission could reject partition outright. The deal that was struck was clearly in the Foreign Office’s favor: Eden agreed to not include any language explicitly signaling a preference for abandoning partition, while Ormsby-Gore agreed to allow the Commission to decide against partition if it desired.18 In the end, the Commission’s official instructions were “to recommend boundaries for the proposed Arab and Jewish areas” which would “afford a reasonable prospect of the eventual establishment, with adequate security, of self- supporting Arab and Jewish states.”19 As a Technical Commission, it was “not directed, or entitled, to call in question the equity or morality of partition as a general principle.”20 Yet it was explicitly licensed to conclude that partition was in practice an impossible solution. As the Commission put it in its report, “His Majesty’s Government desire us…to produce the best scheme of partition that we can; but in so far as it may fail to satisfy any of the specified conditions, or may seem to be impracticable, to say so and give our reasons.”21 The Commission was thus primed to reject partition altogether; the Foreign Office succeeded in planting the seed.

18 Ibid, p. 45. 19 Palestine Partition Commission Report (London, 1938), Cmd. 5854, p. 7. 20 Ibid, p. 232. 21 Ibid.

 71  PROPOSING FAILURE

From there, both the Colonial Office and the Foreign Office attempted to court the Commission before it left for Palestine. Ormsby-Gore of the Colonial Office met with the members of the Commission onMarch 30, 1938. As reported by the historian Roza El-Eini, in that meeting he laid out a comprehensive vision of what the Commission’s findings should entail: Jerusalem should be a permanent Mandate, Acre should be excluded from the Jewish state due to its high Arab population, and the Negev should be excluded from the Arab state due to its strategic importance to the British.22 As will be seen, the plan that the Commission half-heartedly recommended in the end followed these guidelines to a fault.

The Foreign Office, for its part, attempted to send the Commission a memo detailing its objections to partition. This memo was intercepted by Malcolm MacDonald, who replaced Ormsby-Gore as Colonial Secretary on May 16.23 Nevertheless, it was the Foreign Office’s victory in setting the terms of the Commission that proved more decisive than these overtures. Its report had the exact effect Eden wanted.

* * *

The Commission travelled to Palestine in April 1938. Over the next few months, its members travelled about 3,000 miles throughout Palestine and Trans-Jordan. They included a map of their route around Palestine in their report [Fig. E]. The goal of these travels, as described in the report, was “to obtain as thorough a first-hand knowledge of the country as time would permit.” The travels lasted until the middle of June, when they settled in Jerusalem to conduct a series of fact-finding sessions. They solicited testimony from the public by distributing “a communique

22 El-Eini p. 332. 23 Ibid.

 72  MEADE KLINGENSMITH announcing that persons who wished to appear before us would be free to choose whether they would be heard in public or in private.”24 Fifty- five witnesses came forward, and all but two presented their testimony in private. As the Commission tersely noted, however, “No Arab witnesses came forward to submit evidence to us.”25 This was perhaps because of the Arab community’s reluctance to legitimate the Mandate Government in general. Regardless, the Commission heard no Arab voices in its investigation.

The Commission produced three plans for partition, each one accompanied by a map, while in the text of its report it declared each one impractical to varying degrees. The plans, then, were not genuine proposals but rhetorical arguments, each one tailored to demonstrate a particular flaw in the idea of partition.

The first plan, Plan A, was designed to be a direct implementation of the Peel Commission’s plan. However, since “in order to examine the Royal Commission’s scheme demographically, that is, with reference to statistics of population and land, it is necessary in the first place to draw their proposed boundaries more exactly, taking their outline as a guide.”26 Modifications included moving boundaries from the bases of hills to “some distance within the foothills” to produce “a suitable defensive boundary.”27 A comparison of the map of Plan A [Fig. F] with the Peel Commission map [Fig. E] shows the close similarities between the two plans.

The Commission rejected this plan, deeming it politically unsustainable.

24 Palestine Partition Commission Report, p. 8. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid, p. 45. 27 Ibid.

 73  PROPOSING FAILURE

Their concern was focused on Galilee, the northernmost region of Mandatory Palestine. This region, according to the figures produced by the Commission, was home to 231,400 Arabs and 77,300 Jews.28 In the Peel Commission’s proposal, it was part of the proposed Jewish state. The Woodhead Commission, however, deemed this an unstable prospect: “We believe that a decision to include Galilee in the Jewish State would be followed by an increase in disaffection leading to open rebellion, and that the British Government would be faced with the ungrateful task of taking the sternest repressive measures in order to compel the Arabs of Galilee to accept Jewish rule.”29 The area would revert back to British military occupation, and partition would have achieved nothing.

The Commission proposed a solution to the problem of Galilee in its Plan B [Fig. G]. In this proposal, Galilee, like Jerusalem, would be permanently governed by the British as a Mandate. The Commission ruled out the possibility of Galilee belonging to an Arab state on the grounds that a border between the states on the southern edge of the Galilee hills “would not constitute a suitable defensive boundary for the protection of the Jewish State if Galilee should pass under Arab control.”30 This, the Commission was “assured by the military authorities,” would mean the security of the Jewish state could not be guaranteed, and was thus rejected.31 The only solution, they concluded, was to make Galilee a permanent British Mandate. This was the Plan B proposal.

Yet the Commission rejected this plan as well on the grounds that it undermined the entire point of partition: to produce independent states. This was a “fatal” flaw, the Commission wrote: “It appears to us to be

28 Ibid, p. 109. 29 Ibid, p. 87. 30 Ibid, p. 90. 31 Ibid.

 74  MEADE KLINGENSMITH fundamentally wrong that while the Jews in the plains to the south and east are given their independence, the Arabs in Galilee or any part of it should be denied their independence in order to ensure the security of the neighbouring Jewish State. Such a denial would certainly not lead to peace between the Arabs and the Jews.”32 Together, then, the Commission’s Plan A and Plan B present Galilee as an unresolvable bind that made partition untenable. Galilee as either part of the Jewish State or the Arab State would make partition instable and eventually bring about its collapse in one way or another, while Galilee as part of a British Mandate would undermine the goal of partition in the first place. Thus, the Commission concluded, “taking all these matters into account, if we were to adhere strictly to our terms of reference, have no alternative but to report that we are unable to recommend boundaries for the proposed areas which will give a reasonable prospect of the eventual establishment of self-supporting Arab and Jewish States.”33 Partition was impossible.

The Commission did not stop there, however; having discredited partition in their “terms of reference,” they went further to develop a Plan C that expanded those terms. Looking at the map of Plan C [Fig. H], the most obvious change is the expansion of the British Mandate. In Plan C, an even larger swath of the north of Palestine would be governed by the British as a “Northern Mandated Territory,” while the Negev in the south would also be governed as a “Southern Mandated Territory” (as per the recommendation of Ormsby-Gore). The Northern Mandated Territory, the Commission proposed, would “continue in being until the Jews and Arabs in the area agree to ask that it should be surrendered, and the area be given its independence, either as part of an existing Jewish or Arab State.”34 The Commission did not specify how this agreement would

32 Ibid, p. 92. 33 Ibid, p. 243. 34 Ibid, p. 103.

 75  PROPOSING FAILURE be reached, only that the standard would be that “both the Mandatory and the League of Nations must be satisfied that the greater part of the minority race are in agreement with the greater part of the majority race.”35 The Southern Mandated territory, on the other hand, would be held by the British until it was developed, which the Commission deemed “desirable in the interests of both Arabs and Jews,” at which point “provision must…be made for the possibility that at some future date the Negev, with the consent of the minority, may acquire its independence, or may desire to unite with the Jewish State…”36 Thus, Plan C “solved” the problem of Galilee by pushing it off to the future, while ensuring Britain’s strategic position in the Negev.

Plan C’s biggest innovation, however—the one that went beyond the Commission’s “terms of reference”—was the creation of a “customs union” which would encompass all of the proposed Palestinian territories, British, Jewish, and Arab. Under this scheme, the Arab and Jewish states would effectively form a shared economy managed by the British in Jerusalem. This arrangement would provide an “assured market” which would stabilize the economic situation in the Arab state, which would otherwise suffer from its lack of quality farmland, while lessening the risk that the British Treasury would be required to prop up the Arab state. Describing its logic, the Commission wrote that “it seemed to us that it would be fair and reasonable to require the Jewish State, in return for the advantages…which the scheme would offer them, to sacrifice some portion of the customs revenue contributed by the taxpayers in the Jewish State, with a view to rectifying, at least partially, the disparity between the budgetary prospects of the Arab and Jewish States…”37 In the end, the Commission adopted this proposal—political partition without economic

35 Ibid. 36 Ibid, p. 107. 37 Ibid, p. 223.

 76  MEADE KLINGENSMITH partition—as a viable alternative to complete partition. It was, the report unenthusiastically concluded, “certainly not perfect,” but “the best which the majority of us have been able to devise.”38

Yet the Commission’s report effectively undermined even this proposal, which it formally adopted. Most significantly, while Plan C was nominally supported by a “majority” of the commission, it was in fact only supported by half. Alison Russell and Thomas Reid both added “Notes of Reservations” to the end of the report dissenting from the “majority” conclusion. Russell supported Plan B over Plan C, arguing it was “more in accord with the plan of the Royal Commission; that it makes much less complete changes; that it is more likely to secure peace; and that it is more equitable and practicable than is Plan C.”39 Reid denounced all three plans and the idea of partition as a whole, writing “I cannot envisage any scheme which would not be even more defective and lead to stranger results than that set out in Plan C, whatever formulae were laid down in our terms of reference.”40 Thus, two of the four members of the Commission dissented from the “majority” opinion in strong language.

Even in the main text of the report, however, it was clear the Commission did not have a high estimate of its proposal’s chance of success. For one, it would not be real partition: “States established under these conditions, deprived of the right to settle their own fiscal policy, would certainly not be sovereign independent states,” it acknowledged.41 Furthermore, it questioned whether the arrangement would be “wholly satisfactory to His Majesty’s Treasury” even if it were to gain the consent of the people

38 Ibid, p. 99. 39 Ibid, p. 249. 40 Ibid, p. 263. 41 Ibid, p. 244.

 77  PROPOSING FAILURE of Palestine, which was itself an unsure prospect.42 This was, in short, a half-hearted endorsement at best, developed primarily so the commission had something to report “rather than report that we have failed to devise any practicable plan…”43 One leaves with the distinct impression it was doomed to failure, and its writers knew it. The Commission discredited even its own proposal.

The Commission’s report was published on November 9, 1938. Later that month, Colonial Secretary MacDonald delivered a statement to Parliament in which he announced that “His Majesty’s Government, after careful study of the Partition Commission’s report, have reached the conclusion that this further examination has shown that the political, administrative and financial difficulties involved in the proposal to create independent Arab and Jewish States inside Palestine are so great that this solution of the problem is impracticable.”44 Though the idea was later revived during the Second World War, partition was effectively off the table. The Woodhouse Commission had played its part as well as Anthony Eden could have hoped. Palestine was never partitioned by the British, the United Nations, or any other outside power. Instead, on May 14, 1948, the same day the British unilaterally withdrew from Palestine, David Ben-Gurion declared the State of Israel. Over the course of the war that followed over 700,000 people were forced from or fled their homes.

* * *

The maps produced by the Woodhead Commission, then, provide the

42 Ibid, p. 244, 211. 43 Ibid, p. 246. 44 “Palestine Statement by His Majesty’s Government in the United Kingdom, Presented by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to Parliament by Command of His Majesty, November, 1938,” Cmd. 5893.

 78  MEADE KLINGENSMITH modern observer with unique access into the European way of seeing in the late imperial period. To borrow Timothy Mitchell’s phrase, like all maps their purpose was to render their object unambiguous. Yet the thing being rendered unambiguous here was not the land of Palestine, but the notion that the land of Palestine could be rendered unambiguous. They are pieces of an argument which add up to proclaim “there is no functional order to be made here.” Rather than making Palestine legible and categorizable, these maps were designed to show—with equal “objective” certainty—that Palestine was an illegible and uncategorizable space. Looking from one to other brings attention to the arbitrariness of the process of British border-making, even if meticulously supported with analysis. Indeed, that is the explicit rhetorical appeal of the Woodhead Commission report: any of the borders that could be drawn in Palestine would be artificial and doomed to create one catastrophe or another.

I want to suggest here that Palestine is not exceptional in this regard. It is not a uniquely illegible space, uniquely resistant to the type of problem- solving-through-categorization the British were so fond of in the late imperial period. Rather, all places are resistant to this type of imposition. Borders, like nations, never just existed; they were always made. The only thing exceptional about Palestine was that the British showed an awareness of this fact, if only in one report. By discrediting the notion of border-making in Palestine, the Woodhead Commission Report stands as an effective rebuke of British border-making in general, produced from within the British government.

The Woodhead Commission did not set out to do this, of course. These maps were drawn in a contingent environment produced through a blend of bureaucratic in-fighting and momentous outside events (the Zionist movement, the looming specter of another world war). But the result of the pressures put on the Commission was the unintentional exposure

 79  PROPOSING FAILURE of the irrationality of British efforts to create a more rational, legible world by drawing lines on paper and declaring it reality. The Woodhead Commission’s proposals of failure are thus both unique, and at the same time perhaps a perfect encapsulation of late British imperialism.

 80  WARTIME COLLABORATIONS Intelligence Cooperation and Digital Computing

CRYSTAL LEE

In a show of Anglo-American political cooperation in the two weeks following Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill braved a dangerous transatlantic journey on the HMS Duke of York just in time to spend Christmas at the White House. In the public eye, Churchill’s three-week visit to America epitomized the British “bulldog” fighting spirit and served to strengthen the alliance that was borne out of necessity and mutual interest.1 On one particular occasion during Churchill’s stay, so the story goes, Roosevelt entered his guest’s room only to find the Prime Minister emerging freshly from the bath. Just as Roosevelt attempted to withdraw from the room, however, Churchill famously waved him off, declaring, “The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to conceal from the President of the United States.”2

While Sir Winston has long since denied this anecdote and the truth

1 Churchill and the Great Republic. Irene Chambers, chief of exhibition. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress. Online catalogue of an exhibition at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. from January 1 to July 10, 2004. Web. http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/ churchill/wc-overview.html 2 Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins: An Intimate History (New York: Harper Brothers, 1948), p. 46.

 81  WARTIME COLLABORATIONS of it has been widely disputed, the long-lasting popularity of this story serves to capture some integral aspects of the Anglo-American “Special Relationship” that is celebrated on official occasions with suitably hyperbolic prose. For Margaret Thatcher, the Special Relationship became something of an axiom in foreign policy, and for a brief period leading to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the much-vaunted Special Relationship discourse enjoyed a revival between Tony Blair and George W. Bush. As such, the public narrative of the Special Relationship has been conventionally portrayed as something of a “ripening of relations” cemented by a cultural unity between two peoples in language, literature, and in the law. However, the political reality was hardly inevitable and rarely smooth, particularly in times of war.

This essay seeks to contend that the relationship was in fact anything but inevitable, and that initial pronunciations of the relationship were in fact prescriptive rather than descriptive. In other words, that Winston Churchill first coined the phrase in order to speak of greater cooperation between the United States and the United Kingdom—especially in the form of intelligence cooperation—was not necessarily a description of the political realities that existed at the time, but was in fact an aspirational tenet for his government. By introducing the term “Special Relationship” into the political discourse, Churchill—along with many of his successors—hoped to will the “specialness” of the relationship into reality. The broader historiography in fact shows that contrary to Churchill’s insistence, American preferential treatment of the United Kingdom began to truly take form only after the war in the absence of a truly common enemy.

The evolution of British and American intelligence in particular during the Second World War has long been the subject of high academic and

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Figure 1. One of the most secret airfields during the Second World War, Tempsford was a Royal Air Force station that was home to the Special Duties Squadrons who dropped collaborating agents from Britain’s Special Operations Executive and the US Office of Strategic Services into Nazi-occupied France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. (Carl Bartram Photograph Collection, Hoover Institution Archives). popular interest because of the wide availability of stories that seem to be both the stuff of fiction and of fact. The exposé of the Cambridge traitors against the backdrop of MI6—whose existence was never publicly acknowledged by the British government until 1994—along with its more famous counterparts in James Bond and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy have often created an aura of impenetrable mystique that undoubtedly works in the organization’s favor. Indeed, so pervasive was this belief even in the 1930s and 40s that both Truman and Roosevelt believed that the British intelligence community was nearly omniscient.3 While the CIA—and its predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—has not necessarily achieved the same type of cultural glamour epitomized

3 Christopher Andrew, “Intelligence and International Relations in the Early Cold War.” Review of International Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (July 1998), pp. 321-330.

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Figure 2. “Colossus Computer in Action (Station X, Bletchley Park, 1943).” Carl Bartram Photograph Collection, Hoover Institution Archives. by Bond’s shaken-not-stirred martinis, the popularity of Tom Clancy novels and narratives about the CIA’s sordid past seem to suggest that intelligence agencies have gained a type of cultural capital that marks the introduction of intelligence studies as the femme fatale of security studies.

This essay represents a brief exploration into the history of wartime collaborations between the British and American intelligence agencies during the Second World War, with a particular focus on developments in wartime computing and tactical collaboration. That the Special Relationship could take a more material form beyond Churchill’s pronouncements should be expected, but even in these circumstances, expectations that the Special Relationship could remain as such were primarily aspirational. In this light, the history of cooperation between the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and GCHQ (the main collector of signals intelligence) with the American OSS provides a prism into one of the closest diplomatic and strategic alliances within the history

 84  CRYSTAL LEE of the Second World War, and complicates the thesis on the inevitability of the Special Relationship. While historians and political scientists alike have argued that the Anglo-American intelligence cooperation has been one of the centerpieces of the Special Relationship—with the State Department itself clarifying in 1968 that “the most concrete proof that the United States and the United Kingdom are each other’s favored partner is found in the fields of nuclear weaponry and intelligence”4—in reality, the discourse on the Special Relationship in particular often led to disagreements within the fog of war.

In particular, this essay will explore the range of collaboration efforts between the two countries during the Second World War by examining two important parts of any military operation: the intelligence collection process and the tactical operation such intelligence later informs. To explore these two themes within the confines of this short essay, I will focus on two case studies: first, the development of the some of the world’s first digital, electronic, and programmable computers—British COLOSSUS and the American ENIAC—which were used in order to calculate the angle of ballistic missiles and crack German codes. Then, I will draw on memoirs of former OSS operatives in the United Kingdom to illustrate the extent of cooperation between the SOE and OSS in Operation Jedburgh—where SOE and OSS agents were dropped into Nazi-occupied territories to help local Resistance forces against the Germans—during the Second World War. Both of these cases are heavily informed by primary research conducted at the Hoover Archives, which houses rich collections on both Operation Jedburgh and the development of signals intelligence cooperation between the United States and Britain.

To illustrate this argument about the Special Relationship and its basis

4 Ibid. For the President’s Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (London: Routledge, 1995), pp. 199-200.

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Figure 3. “Postwar Harrington, UK (1959).” Carl Bartram Photograph Collection, Hoover Institution Archives. in intelligence cooperation, however, I will proceed in three major parts: first, I begin by providing some historical background as to the genealogy of the term “special relationship” both during and after the war, paying particular attention to its definition and circumstances where it has been used in official literature (e.g. from the Foreign Office or Whitehall writ large). Next, I explore the broader historiography of the relationship, and explain how both British and American historians alike created a somewhat revisionist view that reflected the time in which the histories were written as much as it did the broader diplomatic relationship. Here, popular explanations of the “special relationship” have pointed to the politics of decolonization, Britain’s desire to remain connected to global power, and the British desire to remain slightly removed from continental Europe to illuminate this phenomenon. Finally, I evaluate whether or not the relationship is truly “special” in nature. In this part, I show that the power balance shifted to become highly unequal in the face of

 86  CRYSTAL LEE new financial and political realities, rendering the broader diplomatic relationship both rocky and often difficult to heal.

Before jumping directly into these case studies and the argument at hand, however, I will first present a short review of the primary scholarly literature on the Special Relationship and intelligence cooperation to which these stories contribute new perspectives. A vast majority of the historical narratives about the emergence of the OSS-SOE relationship primarily focuses on the emergence of the Soviet threat after the end of the Second World War5: extensive scholarship has been conducted on the covert operations between British and American intelligence officers to maintain nuclear secrecy, and to ensure that foreign elections were never dipped in red. In fact, Hugh Wilford—an intellectual historian of the United States and the cultural Cold War—has argued that the lead in mounting an anti-Communist propaganda offensive was often propelled by the United Kingdom, which led to Frank Wisner (chief of political warfare for the newly created CIA) to create what he called the “mighty Wurlitzer”: a large cultural movement that supported noncommunist leftist unions, students, and intellectuals through a series of front organizations in Europe and in the burgeoning “Third World.”6

However, vast narratives about the extent to which the Special Relationship hinged upon cooperation between the intelligence agencies often focus on topics other than the collection of signals intelligence, which has seen recently seen an uptick in scholarly interest because of researchers working in the history of computing like Janet Abbate,

5 See, for example, Richard Aldrich, “British Intelligence and the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’ during the Cold War.” Review of International Studies 24.3 (July 1998); C.J. Bartlett, The Special Relationship: Political History of Anglo-American Relations Since 1945 (London: Longman, 1992). 6 Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).

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Nathan Ensmenger, and Paul Edwards,7 and many of the memoirs published by former SOE and OSS officials have not necessarily found their way into the discourse of the Special Relationship, but have instead remained firmly within the realms of general military histories. In this sense, this essay represents an initial attempt at understanding how signals intelligence cooperation—and tactical experiences in Operation Jedburgh and other military collaborations—influenced the broader geopolitical framework of cooperation between the United States and Britain.

Historical background of the “Special Relationship” While the term proper was first coined and jealously guarded by Winston Churchill during his speech at Fulton in the winter of 1946,8 the conceptual embryo of Anglo-American cooperation dates back to the turn of the century, when Britain was beginning to confront a number of rival powers in Europe along with the growth of American influence during the First World War. As both a diplomatic and a military strategy, there was a growing concern among the British political elite—which was voiced particularly loudly by Lord Robert Cecil in 1917 and later by Lord Halifax in 1940—that British diplomats should exploit the unique cultural connection between the two countries to help manage a new and unpredictable actor on the world stage.

Confident that the Americans could be convinced to follow the British, as “they have the money bags but we have the brains,”9 Lord Robert

7 See in particular Janet Abbate, Recoding Gender, MIT Press, 2012; Nathan Ensmenger, The Computer Boys Take Over, MIT Press, 2012; Paul Edwards, The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1996. 8 David Reynolds, “A ‘Special Relationship?’ America, Britain, and the International Order Since the Second World War.” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944–) 62.1 (Winter, 1985-1986): p. 10. 9 Richard Gardner, Sterling-dollar Diplomacy in Current Perspective. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980, p. xiii.

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Figure 4. Cooperation between the United States and the United Kingdom included the delivery of materiel, such as when Office of Strategic Services agents collaborated with the Royal Air Force to provide clandestine supplies of weapons and propaganda leaflets to Allied and resistance forces. (Carl Bartram Photograph Collection, Hoover Institution Archives). Cecil wrote that “there is undoubtedly a difference between the British and the Continental view in international matters,” but argued to his Cabinet colleagues that “if America accepts our point of view in these matters, it will mean the dominance of that point of view in all international affairs.”10 While this largely failed at the outset particularly with the American Senate’s rejection of the League of Nations and their subsequent refusal to aid Britain in the 1931 Manchurian conflict, there remained a pre-eminent inclination of British policy makers that a close relationship between the two countries was both possible and necessary despite the persistent naval and financial rivalry between the two.

Particularly after the American entrance into the First World War and

10 Cab 24/26, GT 2074, Cecil, memo, 18 September 1917 (London: Public Record Office). Quoted in Reynolds, “America, Britain, and the International Order”: pp. 2-3.

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Figure 5. The tenth director of the Central Intelligence Agency, William E. Colby (far right), began his career by serving in the Office of Strategic Services, the Central Intelligence Agency’s predecessor. As a twenty-four-year-old major in charge of the Norwegian Special Operations (NORSO) group, he led operations with other European intelligence agencies to infiltrate enemy lines with OSS agents Glen Farnsworth (far left) and explosive expert Tom Sather (center, facing camera). The operation on which they are about to embark left from an unidentified airfield similar to Tempsford operated by the Special Operations Executive in Britain. (Carl Bartram Photograph Collection, Hoover Institution Archives). subsequent Allied victory, that this penchant for Atlanticist policy would become more and more popular within the British Isles is perhaps best epitomized by the British response to French defeat. As early as 1940, Lord Halifax (then Foreign Secretary) spoke in official letters about the “possibility of some sort of special association with the USA as a future goal of British Policy,” with similar views expressed by multiple voices within the confines of Whitehall. 11 Though most of these sentiments

11 Halifax to Hankey, 15 July 1940, FO 371/25206, W9602/8602/49. Public Records

 90  CRYSTAL LEE were more or less expressed in secret minutes that were later released in the 1960s and 70s, Churchill himself would speak publicly about the “fraternal association” between Britain and America at a speech to Harvard University in September 1943 and call for the need to preserve Britain’s Special Relationship with the United States over the atomic bomb.

Particularly given the reversal of financial roles between the UK and the US in the aftermath of the Great War, British reliance on American money during both conflicts created a sense of financial dependence and the anticipation that America’s economic potential might finally be translated into military might. At this point, in the words of Churchill, “the only thing worse than fighting with allies is fighting without them.” 12 For many members of the British government, that the United Kingdom would not actively pursue a close political partnership with the United States was unthinkable given the practical advantages to a special relationship. Even aside from the strategic benefits to a close Anglo- American alliance, however, both Churchill and Fairfax envisioned a somewhat grander intellectual aspect to the Special Relationship that could be attributed to the former’s American heritage: Churchill had envisioned the relationship to transcend both individuals and governments, as a distinctive shift in the intellectual conversation.

At the same time, however, this zealous brand of Atlanticist policy was not for everyone; a number of “Keep Left” MPs in 1947 loudly denounced Churchill’s Fulton speech and called on leaders to “kill the Tory idea of bolstering up the British Empire with American dollars and

Office. Controller of HM Stationery Office, quoted in David Reynolds, “Rethinking Anglo-American Relations.” International Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944–) 65.1 (Winter, 1988-1989): pp. 89-111. 12 Reynolds, “Rethinking Anglo-American Relations,” p. 101.

 91  WARTIME COLLABORATIONS fighting America’s battle with British soldiers,” since the UK should be “friends, not satellites, of America.”13 Particularly in the postwar era, Labour dissidents continuously expressed a desire for continued British independence in a bipolar world for fear of further subjecting the needs of the British Empire (or what remained of it) to burgeoning American demands. The suggestion that the relationship should transcend these strategic initiatives and become part of a larger intellectual shift was therefore an anathema to these groups: alliance with growing American hegemony would only be yet another symbolic blow to the presumed greatness of the British enterprise.

On a more material level, the Anglo-American collaboration in special intelligence—especially in terms of SIGINT and exchanges of cryptologic expertise—were based primarily on mutual advantage, rather than on Churchill’s loftier ideals of transnational brotherhood. While confidence between the two countries grew as the Second World War progressed, neither country would ever release any information to the other unless the action would benefit the other directly. In many ways, benefits always needed to be evaluated against the risks of information sharing, and the United Kingdom almost always viewed US security interests as fundamentally secondary to the protections she required for special intelligence.

The beginning of the collaboration in signals intelligence began on July 11, 1940, Henry L. Stimson—then Secretary of War—established the following position on US-UK intelligence collaboration, which stipulated that the US government “give all information possible to the British to aid them in their present struggle, and furnish them such material assistance

13 Geoffrey Bing,Keep Left (London: New Statesman, 1947), p. 46.

 92  CRYSTAL LEE as will not interfere seriously with our own defense preparations.”14 The actual exchanges of information with cryptanalysis were approached only with a great deal of hesitation, however. While the British were, by 1941, able to produce SIGINT from high-level communications of the German Wehrmacht, their successes were often limited and required further analysis from outside sources as the British Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) continued to work on intercepting Abwehr (German Secret Intelligence) cryptosystems.15 In order to facilitate developments in the cryptosystems, and through Stimson’s directive, the GCCS agreed to receive four US cryptologists (two each from the Army and the Navy), who would bring with them an electromechanical analog device from the United States—code named PURPLE—in order to aid in the interception of German messages.16

While the PURPLE system was a promising start to improving British abilities to read German naval Enigma traffic in 1941, there was considerably more progress that was facilitated by sharing information from Bletchley Park to OSS agents. The development of the bombe, which would later decrypt messages from the three-wheeled Enigma from 1939-1941, enabled analysts at GCHQ and the OSS to convert encrypted messages into plaintext German easily until the development of the four-wheeled encryption Lorenz machine. Thus, as the intelligence intercepted by the UK declined in quality, so too did trust between the two countries. US naval authorities were initially unaware of the switch

14 A joint letter from the Secretary of War and the Secretary of the Navy to the National Defense Research Committee, quoted in the Memo for the Chiefs of Arms and Services from AG, 4 November 1940, Subject: Interchange of Technical Information with British Representatives. Memo from CSA (General George C. Marshall) to Brigadier General George V. Strong, Asst CIS, War Plans, 19 July 1940, Subj: General Interchange of Secret Technical Information between the U.S. and British Governments. 15 National Security Agency. “American Signals Intelligence in Northwest Africa and Western Europe.” United States Cryptologic History. Series IV, World War II, Volume 1. Bradley F. Smith Papers, Hoover Archives, Stanford University: p. 145. 16 Ibid, pp. 145-146.

 93  WARTIME COLLABORATIONS between the two machines on the German sides, and concluded instead that the British were not meeting the obligations to which they had agreed under the original terms of the cryptologic reciprocity agreements.17 The slowdown of intelligence traffic strained the relationship until US Navy officers went to GCCS to observe the processing of naval Enigma traffic, after which the United States began its own preparations to produce special intelligence since the British seemed to be withholding reciprocal cryptanalytic assistance.

Thus, by November 1942, the Army Special Intelligence Service (SIS), in collaboration with Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL) began to design a bombe that used relay switching—rather than rotary machines—in order to improve the bombe used in previous British and US Naval operations. While the GCCS then attempted to cash in on the previous agreement to send Alan Turing to the United States in December 1942 to improve the devices for machine processing developed by the GCCS, the United States suspected Turing of attempting to slip in the facilities rather clandestinely. Indeed, the Anglo-American discussion preceding Turing’s visit continued to be strained, as the Americans believed that the British were not fulfilling their roles in a “full and free exchange.”18 While the incident was later resolved when the British prime minister and military leaders at the US Army’s European Theater of Operations (ETOUSA) granted Turing the necessary credentials to visit the United States, this vignette illuminates the pragmatic tensions between the GCCS and the US Army in the specifics of cryptologic collaboration.

17 Ibid, p. 147. 18 Ibid, p. 151.

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Revisionist views of the relationship Despite interparty dissonance on the future of the Anglo-American partnership in the early 1950s, that the partnership existed continued to occupy a significant and largely unquestioned place in the historical narratives that emerged in the postwar economic boom ushered in by the Marshall Plan. Perhaps the most comprehensive study of Anglo- American relations in the 1950s was H. C. Allen’s Great Britain and the United States: a History of Anglo-American Relations, in which he argued that the “tale of closeness and intimacy [was] unparalleled in history” and that “common heredity, environment, and will [has] developed an increasing similarity, and even sometimes identity, of opinion and action.”19 Echoed by scholars on both sides of the pond, this argument seemed evident particularly with the onset of Harold Macmillan’s rapprochement with Dwight D. Eisenhower, not to mention the creation of a nuclear alliance that became sealed by the British purchase of the Polaris missile in 1962. This view—that Americans and Britons were inextricably conjoined in heredity, language, and the law—would serve as a benchmark for historical attitudes particularly in the early years of economic recovery. However, it would also provide a larger backdrop for the discourse of British decline and American growth that would dominate public and private conversations about the state of rampant decolonization and its implications for the special relationship.

By the 1960s, historical paradigms of the alliance began to shift in favor of a more skeptical view that became lost in the Whiggish narratives of “ripening cultural relations.” As with most historiographical shifts, this particular one was a result of changes both in the intellectual climate in Great Britain and with changes in the available evidence. The somber introduction of the word “decline” into daily British vocabulary and

19 H.C. Allen, Great Britain and the United States: A History of Anglo-American Relations. London: Odhams, 1954, pp. 27, 983, 29, 33, and 128.

 95  WARTIME COLLABORATIONS consciousness, along with a similar American disenchantment with the Vietnam War and US foreign policy, led historians to become increasingly critical of the traditional narrative of diplomatic closeness between the US and the UK that became only reaffirmed with the introduction of new archival evidence from 1939.20 Here, a second revisionist school of thought on appeasement developed, which emphasized that Britain’s diminishing economy could not withstand the combined Axis powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan. The United States’ economic power was thus crucial to the war effortdespite the persistent rivalry between the Royal and US Navies. With the discourse of decline permeating the public discussion about the nature of decolonization and its implications for Great Britain, the current economic pressures that stemmed from the dissolution of the Lend Lease Agreement and the American transformation into the world’s leading source of investment expertise and liquid capital only hastened the skeptical view of the relationship as one that is made out of economic necessity, not cultural inevitability.

What makes the “Special Relationship” special? Ultimately, evaluating the Special Relationship on the part of both countries requires a certain distinction to be made between the quality and importance of the alliance. Given the wide extent and nature of an integrated “English-speaking intelligence community” with the NSA- GCHQ and CIA-MI6 partnerships, the impact of alliance politics upon the intelligence collection progress and the significance of strategic cooperation as a whole still places Britain in a much more subordinate position within the overall relationship. 21 In this respect, the relationship

20 Richard Aldrich, “British Intelligence and the Anglo-American ‘Special Relationship’ during the Cold War.” Review of International Studies 24.3 (July 1998): pp. 331-351. [Harold Wilson’s announcement that the closure period would be reduced from fifty to thirty years made the remaining records for the First World War made available in one batch in early 1966, and the wartime documents were made available within a mere six year period.] 21 Ibid.

 96  CRYSTAL LEE remains special in quality given the high volume of information that is transferred between the two countries, and because of the close personal network that remains within the intelligence community itself. However, it may be argued that the relationship is no longer truly special in importance (both to America and to the wider global community)—and arguments about personal rapport between administrations miss the essential point. The United Kingdom and America—by fate or by engineering—simply do not have similar strategic interests in the same regions, which is a point that becomes further bolstered by the American strategic rebalancing towards the East. This is not to become preoccupied with Britain’s decline, or to become mired in the fact that the UK remains the leading direct foreign investor in the US. However, with all unanticipated consequences, Britain’s main orbit today is undoubtedly much more European than the discussion about the “Special Relationship” had originally suggested.

 97  EXHIBITION CHECKLIST

THE OFFICIAL ART OF WAR PROPOSING FAILURE Curated by Holly Dayton Curated by Meade Klingensmith

Muirhead Bone (1876–1953) Palestine Partition Commission A Ship-Yard The Commission’s Tours, Map No. 2 1917 From Palestine Partition Commission Facsimile (original: Lithograph, 20” x 16”) Report, Command Paper 5854 The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals 1938 Collection, Hoover Institution Archives Facsimile (original: 8.375” x 10.25”) J. C. Hurewitz Collection, Hoover George Clausen (1852–1944) Institution Archives Where the Guns Are Made 1917 Palestine Partition Commission Facsimile (original: Lithograph, 15.25” x Map of the Royal Commission’s 20.25”) Partition Plan, Map No. 3 The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals From Palestine Partition Commission Collection, Hoover Institution Archives Report, Command Paper 5854 1938 C.R.W. Nevinson (1889–1946) Facsimile (original: 17.5” x 9”) In the Air J. C. Hurewitz Collection, Hoover 1917 Institution Archives Facsimile (original: Lithograph, 20” x 15.375”) Palestine Partition Commission The Great War: Britain’s Efforts and Ideals The A Plan of Partition, Map No. 8 Collection, Hoover Institution Archives From Palestine Partition Commission Report, Command Paper 5854 Muirhead Bone (1876–1953) 1938 LXIII. A View of Albert, from the Facsimile (original: 13.75” x 11”) series The Western Front, Part IX J. C. Hurewitz Collection, Hoover September 1917 Institution Archives Facsimile (original: Lithograph, 5.5” x 8.5”) Palestine Partition Commission Wellington House Collection, Hoover The B Plan: Shewing Jewish Land, Institution Archives Map No. 9A From Palestine Partition Commission Muirhead Bone (1876–1953) Report, Command Paper 5854 XXIV. Déniecourt Château, Estrées 1938 From the series The Western Front, Facsimile (original: 16.75” x 11”) Part VII J. C. Hurewitz Collection, Hoover July 1917 Institution Archives Facsimile (original: Lithograph, 6” x 8.25”) Palestine Partition Commission Wellington House Collection, Hoover The C Plan of Partition, Map No. 10 Institution Archives From Palestine Partition Commission Report, Command Paper 5854 1938 Facsimile (original: 16.75” x 11”) J. C. Hurewitz Collection, Hoover Institution Archives

 98  COMPANIONS IN DISTRESS WARTIME COLLABORATIONS Curated by Murphy Temple Curated by Crystal Lee

Sylvio De [Mayo?] Postwar Harrington, UK (1959) Untitled (Ruhleben Barrack) Facsimile (original: Photograph, 4” x 6”) 1915 Carl Bartram Photograph Collection, Facsimile (original: Pen-and-ink wash, Hoover Institution Archives 12.75” x 9.375”) F. F. Beer Collection, Hoover Institution Tempsford Airfield, Bedfordshire, UK Archives Facsimile (original: Photograph, 4” x 6”) Carl Bartram Photograph Collection, Percy Brown Hoover Institution Archives Untitled (Ruhleben Prisoners Selling Pendants) Colossus Computer in Action (Station Circa 1915-18 X, Bletchley Park, 1943) Facsimile (original: Photograph, 8” x 10”) Facsimile (original: Photograph, 4” x 6”) Percy Brown Papers, Hoover Institution Carl Bartram Photograph Collection, Archives Hoover Institution Archives

Robert Walker OSS NORSO Group Operation The Canteen Facsimile (original: Photograph, 6” x 4”) Circa 1915 Carl Bartram Photograph Collection, Facsimile (original: Pen and watercolor, Hoover Institution Archives 9.375” x 25.5”) F. F. Beer Collection, Hoover Institution OSS Operation Group Harrington in Archives Northamptonshire, 1944 Facsimile (original: Photograph, 4” x 6”) Percy Brown Carl Bartram Photograph Collection, Untitled (Prisoner-Actors in Costume Hoover Institution Archives for School for Scandal) 1917 Facsimile (original: Photograph, 8” x 10”) Percy Brown Papers, Hoover Institution Archives

Fred [Albermann?] Companions in Distress Circa 1915 Facsimile (original: Watercolor, 12.75” x 9.375”) F. F. Beer Collection, Hoover Institution Archives

Bishop [first name not given] Borough of Ruhleben Parliamentary Bye-Election 1915 1915 Facsimile (original: Watercolor, ink and pencil, 9.375” x 12.75”) F. F. Beer Collection, Hoover Institution Archives

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CONTRIBUTORS

HOLLY DAYTON is a Senior majoring in History, focusing on modern European cultural and social topics. She is currently writing an honors thesis on commercial theatrical performances in London during the First World War. In addition, she is highly involved in student theatricals on campus, and will be serving as the Executive Producer of Ram’s Head Theatrical Society 2016-2017.

MEADE KLINGENSMITH is a Ph.D. student in modern British history at Stanford, specializing in the social and cultural history of the British Empire in the Middle East. He received his B.A. from Oberlin College in 2012 and his M.A. from the University of Kent, where he was a Fulbright Scholar in 2013-2014.

CRYSTAL LEE is a Ph.D. student in the History, Anthropology, and STS (HASTS) program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She received her B.A. with high honors from Stanford in 2015 and her M.A. in 2016, both in the history of science.

MURPHY TEMPLE is a Ph.D. student in history at Stanford. She studies modern British history with a focus on spiritualism and the First World War. She received her B.A. in history from Yale University in 2012 and her M.Phil. in modern European history in 2013 from the University of Cambridge, where she was a member of St. John’s College.