Wodehouse’s War – Prisoner #796 and the Berlin broadcasts

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Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was born 143 years ago on 15 October 1881. He died at the age of 93, in the USA, fifty years ago, next year. The Hinterland Festival in Kells will be celebrating his work in 2025 with a number of events and in this blog I want to anticipate that commemoration by looking at one of the most difficult periods of his life, his incarceration by the Nazis during World War 2 and the subsequent furore over his five anodyne but controversial broadcasts to the USA and Britain from a Berlin radio studio in July/August 1941.

While Wodehouse has attracted a number of accomplished biographers (Joseph Connolly, Frances Donaldson, Robert McCrum, Barry Phelps, David A. Jasen et al ) The most comprehensive work on the events of 1940/41 is Wodehouse’s War by Iain Sproat. Sproat also contributed the author’s biography to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 

In 1934 Wodehouse and his wife Ethel purchased a villa in the French coastal resort of Le Touquet, not far from Boulougne. The German blitzkrieg that led to the rapid fall of France in 1940 took not only the Wodehouse’s by surprise, but the British and French authorities as well. The Wodehouses, contrary to some contemporary narratives, made two attempts to get back to Britain but were dogged by ill luck when, first their car, and then a truck, both broke down within a short distance of their villa. They had no option but to remain in Le Touquet and await the arrival of the Germans. 

On 22 May 1940 the Germans occupied Le Touquet. As a British non-combatant citizen Wodehouse was required to report at 9:00 a.m. each day to the German authorities in the nearby town of Paris Plage. On 21 July Wodehouse was informed that, because he had not yet reached the age of 60 (he was almost 59) he was to be committed to an internment camp. He  was taken to a prison in a suburb of the French city of Lille, about 70 miles from Le Touquet. Within a week Wodehouse and 44 others were brought to a nearby railway station. They and c.800 other male internees were then transported by cattle truck to Liège in Belgium, a journey of 19 hours. On the 3 August 1940 Wodehouse, along with other internees, was packed into one of a number of cattle trucks (50 men to each truck) and sent to a medieval stone fortress called the Citadel in the town of Huy. He was kept there for six weeks in vile conditions, with inadequate food rations, sleeping on straw on a stone floor, before the internees were again moved to a former lunatic asylum in the village of Tost in Upper Silesia. Although this final destination, where he remained until the summer of 1941, might sound grim, it was an improvement on the temporary accommodation afforded the internees since July 1940.  The regime in Tost was relatively mild, and Wodehouse, because he was nearing 60, was not required to perform manual labour, such as hauling coal or clearing the roads of snow.  The inmates of Tost were allowed to stage concerts and even cricket matches. In late December 1940 the camp was visited by an Associated Press reporter, Angus Thuermer, who interviewed Wodehouse. It was the first news of the writer in almost six months. Thuermer’s article emphasised that, although Wodehouse had been offered preferential treatment by the Germans, he had steadfastly refused this. 

When Thuermer’s article was published, a concerted campaign began in the, still-neutral, USA to secure Wodehouse’s release and his return to America. Wodehouse also began to receive dozens of letters from American fans wishing him well. 

A few months before his 60th birthday, on the 21st of June 1941, Wodehouse was released from Tost, sent to Berlin, and at the behest of the German authorities, housed in the Hotel Adlon in the city.  There he was joined by Ethel, who had remained in France during Wodehouse’s period of internment. The Wodehouses were then accommodated in a number of locations around Germany. This included some stays in Berlin. On the 9th of September 1943 Wodehouse and Ethel were permitted to return to France, where they lodged at the Hotel Bristol in Paris. There they remained until the city was liberated by the allies on the 25th of August 1944.

While living in Berln, shortly after his release from Tost, Wodehouse did a radio interview with the CBS correspondent Harry Flannery. This was scripted in advance, and, retrospectively, would add to Wodehouse’s grief when the controversy over his subsequent actions blew up.  It appears that, after this interview was broadcast, Wodehouse had a conversation with a former Hollywood associate of his, Werner Plack, a returned German actor who worked for the Foreign Ministry. Plack, who obviously had his own agenda, suggested that Wodehouse should do a number of short-wave radio broadcasts to the USA, describing his experiences as an internee. Crucially, as far as Wodehouse was concerned, these would not be censored. He recorded the five broadcasts between the 25th of June and the 26th of July 1941. Wodehouse was determined, in writing the scripts, not to understate the hardships and the uncertainties of the previous twelve months, but he was also intent on maintaining a ‘stiff upper lip’ and not appearing to whine. His experience had, after all, been far less onerous than that of British prisoners of war or serving soldiers. He may well have erred a little too much on the side of flippancy. However, the pieces were sufficiently subversive and critical of Germany that they were used, in written form, by the US War Department in its Intelligence School at Camp Ritchie, as excellent examples of anti-Nazi propaganda.

However, the content of the five pieces – which amounted to a humorous account of his internment – was of far less importance than the very fact of their existence. Few American listeners ever heard the short-wave transmissions, but the reaction in the UK to the idea of one of their country’s most celebrated writers broadcasting on German radio, varied from the censorious to the apoplectic. All five broadcasts were later beamed to Britain in August 1941, but the reaction had kicked in long before that. The most visceral response to Wodehouse’s decision to record these innocuous pieces (in terms of their content at least) came on the BBC on 15 July 1941 when the Daily Mirror columnist William N. Connor (who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Cassandra’) was allocated ten minutes of air time after the Nine O’Clock News to vent his spleen against Wodehouse. The decision to broadcast Connor’s script was entirely the responsibility of then Minister for Information, Duff Cooper. The BBC Governors, having studied Connor’s script in advance, were opposed to the broadcast. The BBC had monitored the first two Wodehouse pieces and found them to be apolitical and inoffensive. The corporation, however, was overruled by Cooper and because the BBC was obliged to make airtime available to the Ministry of Information, the piece was transmitted to a BBC audience, the vast majority of whom had not heard the original Wodehouse broadcasts. Accordingly, they were guided in their response by Connor’s invective. After the venom of ‘Cassandra’ their assumption could only have been that Wodehouse had been a party to an egregious piece of pro-Nazi propaganda.  

Connor’s script included the following diatribe, much of which was inaccurate and potentially defamatory.

‘When the war broke out Pelham Grenville Wodehouse was at Le Touquet – gambling. Nine months later he was still there. Poland had been wiped out. Denmark had been overrun and Norway had been occupied. Wodehouse still went on with his fun. The elderly playboy didn’t believe in politics. He said so. No good time Charlie ever does. Wodehouse was throwing a cocktail party when the storm troopers clumped in on his shallow life. They led him away –  the funny Englishman with his vast repertoire of droll butlers, amusing young men and comic titled fops. Politics, in the form of the Nazi eagle, came home to roost. Bertie Wooster faded and Dr. Goebbels hobbled on the scene. He treated his prisoner gently. Wodehouse was stealthily groomed for stardom. The most disreputable stardom in the world – the limelight of quislings. On the last day of June of this year, Doctor Goebbels was ready. So too was Pelham Wodehouse. He was eager and he was willing, and when they offered him liberty in a country that has killed liberty, he leapt at it. And Doctor Goebbels taking him to a high mountain, showed unto him all the kingdoms of the world, and said unto him: “all this power will I give thee if thou wilt worship the Führer.” Pelham Wodehouse fell on his knees. Perhaps you have heard this man’s voice reaching out to you from his luxury suite on the third floor of the Adlon hotel in Berlin. Maybe you can forgive him. Some of us can neither forgive nor forget. 50,000 of our countrymen are enslaved in Germany. How many of them are in the Adlon hotel tonight? Barbed wire is their pillow. They endure – but they do not give in. They suffer – but they do not sell out. Between the terrible choice of betrayal of one’s country and the abominations of the Gestapo, they have only one answer. The jails of Germany are crammed with men who have chosen without demur. But they have something that Wodehouse can never regain. Something that 30 pieces of silver could never buy.’

William N. Connor – ‘Cassandra’

In the House of Commons the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, criticised Wodehouse, observing that the writer had  ‘lent his services to the Nazi war propaganda machine’. Quintin Hogg, the senior Tory MP (later Lord Hailsham) compared Wodehouse to William Joyce, the infamous ‘Lord Haw Haw’,  the Irish-American fascist and nightly purveyor of Nazi propaganda and morale-sapping lies from Germany’s English language radio service. ‘While he was clowning,’ Hogg railed to the House of Commons, ‘British boys were resisting the Germans, and there can be nothing but contempt for the action of a man who, in order to live in a hotel more comfortably than his fellow prisoners, did that kind of thing against his country.’ Some MPs, and many more members of the public, wanted Wodehouse to be tried for treason.

The Cassandra broadcast and the Commons statements engendered a wave of hysterical anger against Wodehouse among a British public, the vast majority of whom had not heard the broadcasts or even read a transcription of them. Some British libraries banned his books.  Despite the initial opposition of the BBC to the ‘Cassandra’ broadcast (one of the governors had even approached Winston Churchill, asking him to overrule Duff Cooper— he declined) the corporation was later to become embroiled in the anti- Wodehouse hysteria. In December 1943, when a head of steam had been built up against Wodehouse, the BBC banned the broadcast of his works, even of songs with lyrics written by him. Not until 1950 was his work reinstated, with a transmission on the Light Programme. However, the fact that Wodehouse’s works sold three million copies in Britain between the summer of 1941 and the end of the war, suggests that not everyone in the UK wanted him to face a firing squad and were prepared to reserve judgement until they had heard from the man himself. 

The Times and the Daily Telegraph devoted much space in their letters pages to a discussion of Wodehouse’s obvious faux pas and of Connor’s BBC broadcast. The great and the good became embroiled in the controversy. The humorist and novelist Edmund Clerihew Bentley (Trent’s Last Case), in a letter to the Telegraph, was one of the least forgiving.  He called for the rescinding by the University of Oxford of the Doctorate granted to Wodehouse in 1939, an honour bestowed, observed Bentley cattily, ‘upon one who has never written a serious line’. ‘Amends can be made, however,’ he continued. ‘Those who awarded the honour can take the earliest opportunity of removing it. That action would have a certain effectiveness, not only as a mark of disapproval but as a sign of repentance; and most of my fellow graduates, I believe, would heartily welcome it on both grounds.’

Edmund Clerihew Bentley

Wodehouse’s erstwhile friend A.A. Milne, a World War 1 veteran, was more ambiguous in his letter to the Telegraph, but hardly more supportive …

‘He has encouraged in himself a natural lack of interest in ‘politics’ – ‘politics’ being all the things which the grown-ups talk about at dinner when one is hiding under the table. Things for instance, like the last war, which found and kept him in America … Irresponsibility in what the papers call ‘a licensed humorist’ can be carried too far, naivety can be carried too far. Wodehouse has been given a good deal of licence in the past, but I fancy that now his licence will be withdrawn. Before this happens I beg him to surrender it of his own free will; to realise that though a genius may grant himself an enviable position about the battle where civic and social responsibilities are concerned, there are times when every man has to come down into the arena, pledge himself to the cause in which he believes, and suffer for it.’

The creator of Winnie the Pooh was being less than fair in relation to Wodehouse’s World War 1 record. In 1914, aged 32, (although resident in USA) Wodehouse had tried to enlist in the Royal Navy but had been rejected on medical grounds. In 1917, when the USA entered the war, Wodehouse volunteered at a newly established recruiting office for ex-pat British citizens but was again rejected on medical grounds.

The crime novelist Dorothy L. Sayers wrote a rather more understanding letter to the Telegraph. British people, she pointed out, had learned much more since 1940 of the depravity of the Nazi regime, than Wodehouse would have been aware of at the time of his internment. ‘But how much of all this can possibly be known or appreciated from inside a German concentration camp – or even from the Adlon hotel? Theoretically, no doubt, every patriotic person should be prepared to resist enemy pressure to the point of martyrdom; but it must be far more difficult to bear such heroic witness when its urgent necessity is not, and cannot be, understood.’

Dorothy L. Sayers

Playwright Sean O’Casey, in his letter to the Telegraph took a more literary and aesthetic approach and, in the process, coined a memorable appellation for Wodehouse. ‘The harm done to England’s cause,’ O’Casey wrote, ‘and to England’s dignity is not the poor man’s babble in Berlin, but the acceptance of him by a childish part of the people and the academic government of Oxford, dead from the chin up, as a person of any importance whatsoever in English humorous literature, or any literature at all. It is an ironic twist of retribution on those who banished Joyce and honoured Wodehouse. If England has any dignity left in the way of literature, she will forget forever the pitiful antics of English literature’s performing flea (my italics). If Berlin thinks the poor fish great, so much the better for us.’

The letters page of the Times was more focussed on the Cassandra BBC rant of 15 July 1941 than on the original broadcasts on which the diatribe was based. In a letter to the ‘newspaper of record’ Duff Cooper took full responsibility for the William Connor broadcast. The Information Minister acknowledged that, ‘the governors indeed shared unanimously the view expressed in your columns that the broadcast in question was in execrable taste … occasions, however, may arise in time of war when plain speaking is more desirable than good taste.’

Connor himself doubled down on his BBC broadcast. He responded in the Times to accusations that he had defamed and misrepresented Wodehouse, or, at best, that he had been guilty of ‘bad taste’. 

‘Since when,’ Connor wrote, ‘has it been bad taste to name and nail a traitor to England? The letters which you have published have only served as a sad demonstration that there is still in this country a section of the community eager and willing to defend its own quislings.’ Connor claimed that 90% of letters to his own newspaper, the Mirror agreed with the sentiments he had expressed in the 15 July BBC broadcast (at which point, it should be re-iterated, the five essays had not even been re-broadcast to Britain). He claimed that Mirror readers were more representative of the British population than those of the Times. He deprecated the ‘storm of protest’ which he claimed the Times had ‘so diligently fanned.’ 

Connor then took a further swipe at the Times by bringing up its record on pre-war appeasement of Hitler, asserting that the pro-Wodehouse ‘storm of protest’ … 

‘…compares favourably with the flat calm of acquiescence which was such a prominent feature of your correspondence before and up to the year of Munich. I learn with interest that the governors of the BBC share your views of what you describe as a ‘notorious’ broadcast. However, I accurately anticipated their reaction and it is to the credit of Mr. Duff Cooper that he insisted beforehand that the BBC should have no say whatsoever in the script of this talk. It would certainly not have been possible for him to have adopted this point of view, had it not been that their lamentable governorship had rendered matters of propaganda demonstrably outside their scope. To the accusation that this broadcast was vulgar, I would remind you that this is a vulgar war, in which our countrymen are being killed by the enemy without regard to good form or bad taste. When Dr. Goebbels announces an apparently new and willing propaganda recruit to further this slaughter, I still retain the right to denounce this treachery in terms compatible with my own conscience – and nothing else.’ 

After the war Connor changed his mind about Wodehouse’s culpability and was gracious enough to apologise to the author for the BBC broadcast. Duff Cooper, however, although a fan of Wodehouse’s writing, did not apologise for allowing the ‘Cassandra’ broadcast to go ahead. His main concern at the time was that the five ‘Berlin’ essays were being transmitted to a USA where the spirit of isolationism was rampant, until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour in December 1941 brought America into the war.  

It was some while after the ‘Berlin’ broadcasts before Wodehouse became aware of the adverse reaction in Britain. In a letter to the British Foreign Office on 21 November 1942 he attempted to set the record straight. He referred to ‘my unfortunate broadcasts’ and tried to demonstrate that ‘I was guilty of nothing more than a blunder’. He denied that the five recorded essays had been a quid pro quo for his release (something that was widely believed at the time) maintaining that this had come about because he was sixty years of age and was in line with German policy towards foreign internees. This was something of a white lie as he was released from Tost four months before his 60th birthday. He went on to claim that the rationale behind the radio essays was to respond to the hundreds of good wishes he had been receiving from American readers and supporters while interned. He claimed to have written the five pieces while incarcerated in Tost and to have read them to his fellow prisoners, ‘who were amused by them, which would not have been the case had they contained the slightest suggestion of German propaganda.’ Wodehouse also denied that he was ‘being maintained by the German government’ (another prevailing perception among the wider British public). He was, he insisted, supporting himself in Germany with borrowed money and with the proceeds of the sale of his wife’s jewellery.  ‘All of this I realise,’ he concluded, ‘does not condone the fact that I used the German shortwave system as a means of communication with my American public, but I hope that it puts my conduct in a better light … I should like to conclude by expressing my sincere regret that a well meant but ill-considered action on my part should have given the impression that I am anything but a loyal subject of His Majesty.’   

The liberation of Paris in August 1944 provided Wodehouse with his first opportunity to explain himself directly to British officials.  Wodehouse’s case was fully investigated, while the war continued, to see if either his behaviour or his broadcasts merited treason charges, similar to those that would be brought  in 1945 against William Joyce at the end of the conflict. A British Intelligence Corps officer, Major E.J.P. Cussen began an enquiry into Wodehouse’s wartime activities shortly after the liberation of Paris. Examining allegations that Wodehouse had, for example, made no effort to flee Le Touquet in advance of the arrival of the Germans; had collaborated with the Germans in Le Touquet by welcoming them to his villa; had sought and obtained favours from his captors while in captivity; and had offered his services to the Germans in exchange for a measure of personal freedom for himself and his wife Ethel, Cussen conducted a number of interviews with British ‘ex-pat’ residents of Le Touquet in the 1930s and 40s. He also studied German files discovered in Paris where the Wodehouses had spent most of the year prior to the liberation of the city in August 1944. In relation to the charges unrelated to his Berlin broadcasts (failure to evacuate, collaboration etc) Cussen found no supportive evidence. Wodehouse had made two failed attempts to flee Le Touquet and, like the British military authorities, had been caught unawares by the speed of the German advance. He had not fraternised or collaborated with the Germans in his Le Touquet villa, in fact his bathroom had been commandeered for the use of German soldiers. He had not sought favours from his German captors (there was substantial evidence, in the form of the Thuermer interview, that he had been offered preferential treatment but had turned it down). 

His potential treason came down to the issue of the five Berlin broadcasts. Did they amount to Nazi propaganda? There was no denying that Wodehouse had recorded the broadcasts and that they were, at the very least, unwise, naïve and even reprehensible. But were they overt Nazi propaganda knowingly designed to undermine the morale of British listeners? Were they critical of British policy, or of the British war effort? 

In fact the broadcasts were entirely apolitical and, if anything, subtly antagonistic towards his German ‘hosts’.

In his first essay, for example, Wodehouse wrote …

‘I have just emerged into the outer world after forty-nine weeks of civil internment in a German internment camp and the effects have not entirely worn off. I have not yet quite recovered that perfect mental balance for which in the past I was so admired by one and all … Young men, starting out in life have often asked me how can I become an internee? Well, there are several methods. My own was to buy a villa in Le Touquet on the coast of France and stay there till the Germans came along. This is probably the best and simplest system. You buy the villa, and the Germans do the rest. At the time of their arrival, I would have been just as pleased if they had not rolled up. But they did not see it that way, and on May the 22nd along they came, some on motorcycles, some on foot, but all evidently prepared to spend a long weekend. The proceedings were not marred by any vulgar brawling. All that happened, as far as I was concerned, was that I was strolling on the lawn with my wife one morning, when she lowered her voice and said, ‘Don’t look now but there comes the German army.’ And there they were, a fine body of men, rather prettily dressed in green, carrying machine guns …’

In terms of the content of the five pieces—as opposed to the unpalatable fact that a British subject was broadcasting from Berlin to the USA, and later to Britain—grave exception was taken by many to what they interpreted as the amicable tone of the writing when it came to descriptions of the Germans and Wodehouse’s relationship with them. Little account was taken of the obviously facetious references to the ‘fine body of men, rather prettily dressed in green’. This, and many other allusions, was taken at face value, as is often the case where the humourless reader is concerned. 

While the notion that Wodehouse was a Nazi-loving fascist propagandist died a quick death after the war—this after all was the creator of the ridiculous Mosley-lite Roderick Spode, in the Jeeves and Wooster stories, Spode being the leader of the fictional British fascist movement the ‘Black shorts’—the question remained, did Wodehouse trade his celebrity and his craft for preferential treatment by the German government? The answer is almost certainly ‘No’

The entirely fictional fascist Roderick Spode

The fact was that the release of Wodehouse was brokered by the German Foreign Ministry in an effort to impress the USA (that was his friend Werner Plack’s agenda) and because, as he would turn 60 on 15 October 1881, he was due for release anyway from the Silesian internment camp. In addition to the Flannery/CBS radio interview Wodehouse had written an article, while interned, for the Saturday Evening Post magazine entitled ‘My War With Germany’. As it was difficult to obtain transcripts of his five broadcasts, Wodehouse was largely judged on the content of the interview (in which he had made an ill-advised reference to ‘whether Britain wins the war or not’) and the SEP article. To many of his critics neither was sufficiently pugnacious. Wodehouse, ever the self-deprecating humorist, did what was expected of him by his audience in both the interview and the article. He was lighthearted and lacking in the sort of gravitas that might have been more appropriate in the circumstances and could have made his subsequent trial in the ‘court of public opinion’ somewhat less distressing. He was not helped when, post-war, Flannery wrote a book, Assignment to Berlin, about his experiences in Berlin, in which Wodehouse came in for hostile treatment. Flannery wrote that, ‘It was one of the best Nazi publicity stunts of the war, the first with a human angle … Wodehouse was his own Bertie Wooster.’

The Flannery/Wodehouse interview and SEP article included comments such as …

‘I never was interested in politics. I’m quite unable to work up any kind of belligerent feeling. Just as I’m about to feel belligerent about some country I meet a decent sort of chap. We go out together and lose any fighting thoughts or feelings.’

CBS interview.

Harry Flannery

‘A short time ago they had a look at me on parade and got the right idea; at least they sent us to the local lunatic asylum. And I have been there forty-two weeks. There is a good deal to be said for internment. It keeps you out of the saloon and helps you to keep up with your reading. The chief trouble is that it means you are away from home for a long time. When I join my wife I had better take along a letter of introduction to be on the safe side.’

Saturday Evening Post article, ‘My War With Germany’.

‘In the days before the war I had always been modestly proud of being an Englishman, but now that I have been some months resident in this bin or repository of Englishmen [the Tost internment camp] I am not so sure. …The only concession I want from Germany is that she gives me a loaf of bread, tells the gentlemen with muskets at the main gate to look the other way, and leaves the rest to me. In return I am prepared to hand over India, an autographed set of my books, and to reveal the secret process of cooking sliced potatoes on a radiator. This offer holds good till Wednesday week.’

Saturday Evening Post  article,‘My War With Germany’.

After the broadcast of the Flannery interview on the CBS network in the USA, Wodehouse was asked by the German Foreign Ministry would he be interested in doing some radio pieces (the declared intention was that they would be for American broadcast only) in the same light-hearted vein. His release, however, was not dependent on his agreement. Where Wodehouse came unstuck was in the fact that there was an ongoing rivalry between Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda and the German Foreign Ministry of von Ribbentrop. When the Propaganda Ministry became aware of the adverse reaction to the broadcasts in Britain (before anyone had even heard them) they appropriated the recordings, transmitted them to Britain on the German English language radio service and did nothing to discourage the belief that Wodehouse was a Nazi sympathizer. This was precisely the reverse of the intention of the Foreign Ministry. Americans would have been unimpressed by the Berlin broadcasts of a known British Nazi fellow traveller (such as William Joyce). The fact that Wodehouse was not pro-Fascist but was still allowed to make light of his experiences in a German internment camp was a far more valuable propaganda coup for the Foreign Ministry. The intervention of the Ministry of Propaganda spoiled their rival ministry’s scheme and bathed Wodehouse in an altogether different light than a series of innocuous broadcasts aimed, not at Britain, but at the USA. Later when the Propaganda Ministry asked Wodehouse to make a broadcast about the Katyn massacre (the murder of 4000 Polish officers by the invading Russian army) he refused and told the Foreign Office in Berlin that he would prefer to return to Tost than make any further broadcasts. This was long before he had become aware of the negative reaction to his talks in Britain. 

After the liberation of Paris, Wodehouse reported to the American authorities and asked them to alert the British as to his whereabouts. He was visited by the writer and broadcaster Malcolm Muggeridge, then working in British intelligence, who interrogated/interviewed him and came to the conclusion that any charges of treason against Wodehouse would be misplaced, and that he ‘was ill-fitted to live in an age of ideological conflict having no feelings of hatred about anyone, and no very strong views about anything. … I never heard him speak bitterly about anyone — not even about old friends who turned against him in distress.’ A few days later, on 9 September, Wodehouse was subjected to a four day interrogation session with Major E.J.P. Cussen of the Intelligence Corps who had been sent to investigate Wodehouse’s wartime activities on behalf of MI5. Cussen filed his report on 28 September 1944 although his investigation continued into 1945.  The report was kept under wraps until 1980. Iain Sproat finally managed to obtained a copy that year, after repeated requests. 

On the basis of Cussen’s investigation and report—he described Wodehouse’s behaviour as ‘unwise’ but not treasonous—the British Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP), Theobald Mathew, issued a memorandum informing MI5 that ‘there is not sufficient evidence to justify a prosecution of this man. It is possible that information may subsequently come to light, which will establish a more sinister motive for this man’s activities in Germany but, having regard to the nature and content of his broadcasts, there is, at the moment, nothing to justify any action on my part.’ 

The Attorney General’s announcement of the DPP’s decision in the House of Commons was, however, less than effusive in its assertion of Wodehouse’s innocence. It suggested that there was some fire in the smoke but that there just wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute. That, in effect, condemned Wodehouse, in the court of public opinion, to a lengthy post-war sentence of censure, condemnation and vilification, such as the Daily Worker editorial of 24 November 1944. The socialist newspaper, in its excoriation of Wodehouse, also reflected a profound antipathy towards the perceived betrayal of Britain by an ‘appeasing’ pre-war British aristocracy that had more than a sneaking regard for the anti-labour and anti-democratic sentiments regularly expressed by Hitler.  

‘We do not dispute that Wodehouse is as petty and contemptible as the ruling class characters portrayed in his best sellers’ claimed the Daily Worker, ‘But since when has amiability and bone-headedness been an excuse for serving Goebbels? The sloppy Wodehouse broadcasts from Berlin were deliberately selected by the subtle German propagandists. Better a famous British author expressing doubts about the victory of his own country than a second Haw Haw churning out fantastic lies. Wodehouse represents the rottenness that infected a section of Britain in the years preceding the war. His day is over.’

In official circles the impact of Wodehouse’s lukewarm exoneration by the Churchill government was accentuated by the fact that Cussen continued his investigation into 1945, although he did not produce another report. This was probably because the later testimony he received only served to reinforce his original findings of innocence on Wodehouse’s part. The problem, from Wodehouse’s point of view, was that Cussen was not obliged to release, or even to record, additional exculpatory evidence, of which he found much in 1945. His job was simply to establish if there was a prima facie case against the writer. It was the possibility of coming across some damning evidence, previously overlooked, that extended Cussen’s enquiry beyond the presentation to MI5 of his initial report.  There was no damning evidence against Wodehouse in 1944 and that did not change as the investigation continued in 1945. But with no need to amend the September 1944 Cussen report, or to outline the new evidence in the Home Office file on Wodehouse, there was no fulsome exoneration of Wodehouse. 

Ironically Cussen became so convinced that Wodehouse was innocent of all the charges levelled against him that he encouraged the writer to campaign to clear his name before the British public. Aside from a couple of newspaper interviews, Wodehouse, influenced by advisers and, principally, by his publishers, chose not to do so. He revealed in a letter to the entertainment weekly, Variety, on 8 May 1946 that he had begun to write a memoir of his time as an internee. It was to be called Wodehouse in Wonderland, and included a chapter on the Berlin broadcasts. However, he also had a new Jeeves book coming out in 1946 (Joy in the Morning) and his publishers, Herbert Jenkins in GB and Doubleday in the USA, advised him to put off the publication of this memoir. It never subsequently emerged, much to their relief, as they believed that it would impact the sales of his novels and short stories. They preferred that Wodehouse let sleeping dogs lie, which, arguably, did him a considerable disservice. 

The whole controversy is broached in the ironically titled 1953 publication Performing Flea (thank you Sean O’Casey!) a collection of correspondence with his friend Bill Townend from 1920-1953. This included a number of letters about the broadcast controversy. These, however, were not carefully argued apologias setting out the case for the defence. They were generally light-hearted missives, between good friends, in the style and sprit of the broadcasts themselves. The sole exception is a letter of 18 April 1953 in which Wodehouse formally gave Townend permission to publish their correspondence. In this letter he addresses a number of the wilder allegations levelled at him over the years. He admits that ‘I ought to have had the sense to see that it was a loony thing to do to use the German radio for even the most harmless stuff, but I didn’t. I suppose prison life saps the intellect’ and he added in a rider to Townend … ‘You ask do I approve of your publishing this book with all the stuff about my German troubles? Certainly. But mark this, laddy, I don’t suppose that anything you say, or anything I say, will make the slightest damn bit of difference. You need dynamite to dislodge an idea that has got itself firmly rooted in the public mind.’

One of Wodehouse’s most prominent post-war defenders was George Orwell. In a 1946 essay, published in Windmill magazine, entitled ‘In defence of P.G.Wodehouse’, Orwell picked apart some of the misapprehensions and outright fabrications that had grown up around the broadcasts.  ‘Wodehouse’s main idea in making them,’ Orwell wrote, ‘was to keep in touch with his public and — the comedian’s ruling passion — to get a laugh. Obviously, they are not the utterances of a Quisling of the type of Ezra Pound …’ [The American poet, based in Italy, was a notorious fascist and anti-semite]. Orwell essentially gave Wodehouse a fool’s pardon, asserting that the cloistered and apolitical author, ‘cannot have realised that what he did would be damaging to British interests.’ 

George Orwell

Orwell pointed out that, in 1940, British attitudes towards the coming conflict were …

‘… noticeably tepid … eminent publicists were hinting that we should make a compromise peace as quickly as possible, trade union and Labour Party branches all over the country were passing anti-war resolutions. Afterwards, of course, things changed … By the middle of 1941 the British people knew what they were up against and feelings against the enemy were far fiercer than before. But Wodehouse had spent the intervening year in internment, and his captors seem to have treated him reasonably well. He had missed the turning-point of the war, and in 1941 he was still reacting in terms of 1939. He was not alone in this. On several occasions about this time the Germans brought captured British soldiers to the microphone, and some of them made remarks at least as tactless as Wodehouse’s. They attracted no attention, however.’

Orwell also cited the timing of Wodehouse’s release from Tost prison, a few days before the invasion of Russia. He posited the theory that Wodehouse’s broadcasts were a small but significant element of German diplomatic efforts to keep the USA out of the war. 

‘The release of Wodehouse was only a minor move, but it was not a bad sop to throw to the American isolationists. He was well known in the United States, and he was — or so the Germans calculated — popular with the Anglophobe public as a caricaturist who made fun of the silly-ass Englishman with his spats and his monocle. At the microphone he could be trusted to damage British prestige in one way or another, while his release would demonstrate that the Germans were good fellows and knew how to treat their enemies chivalrously.’ 

Orwell went on to observe, in the spirit of the Daily Worker editorial of November 1944, that the British upper classes ‘were discredited by their appeasement policy and by the disasters of 1940, and a social levelling process appeared to be taking place. Patriotism and left-wing sentiments were associated in the popular mind, and numerous able journalists were at work to tie the association tighter.’ Among the ‘able journalists’ was William ‘Cassandra’ Connor, hence the deluge of working-class support for his 15 July 1941 BBC anti-Wodehouse philippic. Orwell continued …

‘In this atmosphere, Wodehouse made an ideal whipping-boy. For it was generally felt that the rich were treacherous, and Wodehouse — as “Cassandra” vigorously pointed out in his broadcast — was a rich man. But he was the kind of rich man who could be attacked with impunity and without risking any damage to the structure of society. To denounce Wodehouse was not like denouncing, say, Beaverbrook. A mere novelist, however large his earnings may happen to be, is not of the possessing class.’ 

Orwell concluded the article by appealing for forgiveness for someone who ‘became the corpus vile in a propaganda experiment’

‘In the case of Wodehouse, if we drive him to retire to the United States and renounce his British citizenship, we shall end by being horribly ashamed of ourselves. Meanwhile, if we really want to punish the people who weakened national morale at critical moments, there are other culprits who are nearer home and better worth chasing.’

Wodehouse remained in France until 1947 and never returned to the UK from the time he and his wife moved back to the USA (April 1947) to the time of his death in 1975. He did not renounce his British citizenship, however, and he continued to write about an England which, he candidly admitted in a 1950 interview, was ‘gone … some people think [it] never existed’. (Orwell had dated its demise as being as early as 1915). Even when Wodehouse was in his 90s British journalists, in interviews to promote his work, much to his annoyance (but hardly unexpectedly, and with absolute validity) continued to ask him about the Berlin broadcasts. 

In 1975 the UK government made restitution/acknowledged his innocence/said ‘let bygones be bygones’ (delete as appropriate), when he was awarded a Knighthood of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) thanks to the intervention of Labour party prime minister Harold Wilson. This had already been proposed on a number of occasions since the mid 1960s but had been vetoed by civil servants. The Times wrote of the announcement in the January 1975 Honours List that it marked ‘official forgiveness for his wartime indiscretion. … It is late, but not too late, to take the sting out of that unhappy incident.’ Wodehouse lived for barely a month after the announcement, dying of a heart attack in a Long Island hospital on 14 February 1975, aged 93. 

In much the same way as his contemporary and compatriot, Charlie Chaplin, regained the affections of the American people and received an honorary Academy Award (and the longest standing ovation in Oscar history) after his own self-imposed exile in the wake of allegations of being a communist fellow traveller, Wodehouse slowly regained the esteem of his fellow countrymen. If the work of the patently antisemitic fascist sympathiser, Ezra Pound, was rehabilitated [his poetry is still taught on third level literature courses] it stood to reason that the gentle humour of the apolitical Wodehouse would be likely to weather the storm of often ill-informed, if generally valid, criticism and condemnation. Most of the work of Wodehouse is still in print and he is as popular today as he was in the pre-war era, and again at the time of his death, almost fifty years ago. He may, as George Orwell observed, have been ‘his own Bertie Wooster’ when he unwisely agreed to allow himself to become a minor tool of the Nazi propaganda machine, but his readers, including a generation unborn at the time of his broadcasts, (including the current writer) while not offering him a free pass, allowed him a fool’s pardon. Given his own reaction to his appalling decision-making in July 1941, Wodehouse was happy enough to accept this qualified absolution. As he put it himself, ‘The whole thing is an example of what a blunder it is to let your feelings get the better of your prudence.’   

LAND IS ALL THAT MATTERS: THE AUTHOR’S CUT 2 – The Resident Magistrate

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(Another piece that didn’t make it into the finished work)

The ’satrapy’ of Clifford Lloyd.

‘When constabulary duty’s to the done (to be done)A policeman’s lot is not a happy one (happy one)’(W.S. Gilbert, The Pirates of Penzance)  

‘As in the Indian Mutiny the officers of Sepoy regiments refused to believe in the treachery of those among whom they had passed their lives, and remained at their posts until shot down in their mess-rooms, so the gentry in Ireland who remained in the country were loath to believe individually that their doom had been decreed, and that the executioners were to be found among their own tenants’. [1](Clifford Lloyd, Ireland Under the Land League)

 

Clifford Lloyd 

Another significant Land War memoirist did not dawdle for as long as Samuel Hussey before pouring out his spleen in print. Within a decade of his departure from Ireland, Special Resident Magistrate (SRM) Clifford Lloyd had recorded his impressions of a Land War in which he had played a pivotal policing role. His writing was as robust as his policing. Since he was far removed from Ireland when his volume was published—it actually came out after he died— he had no need to censor himself. Nor did he. He reserved his most cantankerous brickbats for the Land League and the Irish Republican Brotherhood, but he was under no illusions about the nature of the police force upon which he relied heavily during his decade-long tenure in Ireland. ‘The Royal Irish Constabulary,’ he wrote, ‘can best be described as an army of occupation, upon which is imposed the performance of certain civil duties’. [2]  Michael Collins could not have put it more pithily. The fundamental difference between these two warriors was that Lloyd had no problem whatsoever with the idea of an occupied Ireland whose elite was being protected by a 12,000 strong paramilitary force with associated surveillance and intelligence duties. A force that shifted itself, now and again, to such unrelated banalities as closing down public houses for entertaining customers after hours, or investigating the occasional burglary.                 Lloyd, born in Portsmouth in 1844, graduated from Sandhurst, worked for the Burmese police for a decade, and was called to the bar in 1875, a year after being appointed a Resident Magistrate in Ireland. It was in that role that he appears to have found his true calling in life. The avocation of Irish Resident Magistrate has been entertainingly romanticised in the three ‘Irish RM’ books of Somerville and Ross (aka Edith Somerville and Violet Florence Martin) in which Major Sinclair Yeates moves from England to take up such a position, a magistracy being ‘not an easy thing to come by nowadays’.[3] While the three books of the adventures of Major Yeates are not entirely apolitical (one of the stories in The Irish RM and his Experiences is entitled ‘The Whiteboys’), the narrative is largely one of japes and jiggery-pokery, laced with dollops of cultural cringe—Yeates is slow to adapt to rural Ireland—rather than the humourless realities of such an avocation in the late nineteenth century.

   

 During the First Land War there were 72 resident magistrates in Ireland. They were not required to have any awe-inspiring qualifications (Lloyd was one of the few with a legal background) and ‘many gentlemen obtained these appointments, not on account of their capacity, intelligence or experience, but as a reward for political services rendered to the government of the time by those who supported the candidates’ applications.’ RMs tended to be drawn from the ranks of the RIC, the Colonial Service, or the military. Before the onset of the Land War duties were relatively light—this was reflected in a salary of between £425 and £675 in the 1870s— and usually of a judicial nature, although RMs also had some responsibility for public order and for keeping the Castle informed of criminal and political developments in their bailiwicks.             

Lloyd, however, was no run-of-the-mill RM. He was an über-magistrate, who, along with four other appointees, became an elite Special Resident Magistrate (SRM) in early 1882. Initially these five trouble-shooters were to be called ‘commissioners’, but that idea was dropped after objections to such nomenclature by Crown lawyers in Dublin Castle, some of whom were opposed to the creation of these enhanced portfolios in the first place. Lloyd, whose experience had been as an ordinary resident magistrate in Down and Longford, was allocated Clare, Limerick and Galway as his sphere of operations. The other four were appointed to Kerry, Cork, King’s and Queen’s Counties (Offaly and Laois), Leitrim, Westmeath, Roscommon, Waterford and Tipperary, counties where ‘outrage’ had become a way of life. The creation of the new SRM role was an attempt by W.E. Forster, the beleaguered chief secretary, to come to grips with the radically changed role of the RIC. As Lloyd put it himself: ‘The police were harassed to the last degree … their legitimate work had become quite neglected. They procured little or no information, and murders were of frequent occurrence, while it can hardly be said that  any serious effort was being made in detecting criminals’.  Hence the reliance placed on the quasi-military supervisors of five sub-districts to monitor security in their area and take responsibility for co-ordinating the activities of the police (12,000) and military (30,000) when it came to curtailing and punishing the perpetrators of agrarian violence and protecting the obvious targets of ‘moonlighters’.              

In his brief foray as an SRM Lloyd succeeded in becoming persona non grata #1 with the Land League leadership, Irish Party MPs, tenant agitators west of the River Shannon, and United Ireland. He managed to conjure up a formidable array of enemies, while retaining the loyalty of Forster for his insistence on ‘the law being obeyed and order preserved’.               

His first claim to notoriety came shortly after his transfer from Longford to Limerick in May 1881. His earliest test came in the environs of Kilmallock and Kilfinane, rich dairy country with relatively few indigent tenants. Here the roost was ruled by the famous ‘Land League priest’, Father Eugene Sheehy, president of the Kilmallock branch of the Land League. Lloyd’s assessment of the status quo in the area was terse. ‘In this district there had been no murders, for landlords and agents alike had been driven away, and even those loyally disposed among the people prudently bowed to the authority of the Land League in preference to being shot for opposing it … I found myself face to face with a state of affairs recognised to be bordering on civil war’.            Lloyd did not temporise. Within a fortnight of his arrival, he had despatched to jail Sheehy and most of the committee members of the troublesome Kilmallock and Kilfinane Land League branches (‘the hostile power in occupation’). Sheehy thus became the first priest to be arrested during the Land War and his incarceration became both a cause célèbre and a warning to other militants that Lloyd meant business. Lloyd supervised the arrest of Sheehy personally. An attempt was made by the RIC to roust the priest out at 5.30 a.m., but he declined to put in an appearance until 7.00. By this time the street outside his house was ‘already thronged with an excited crowd of people’. Lloyd anticipated bloodshed. Instead, Sheehy, as he was led away peacefully, was treated to displays of extreme deference. ‘The people fell upon their knees as he passed, and seized his hands and the skirts of his clothes, while begging his blessing before he left them. Shouts of defiance and awful loud curses greeted my appearance as I walked towards the barracks through the people.[4]After the release of the Kilmallock and Kilfinane ‘suspects’ in the autumn of 1881, Sheehy did not let up in his invective against Lloyd. In her ‘war diary’ of the tenure of her father as chief secretary, Florence Arnold-Forster, an admirer of the Clare SRM (‘I cannot help having a strong feeling for Mr. Clifford Lloyd’) recorded Sheehy, in an entry of 30 September 1881, as ‘foaming at the mouth in personal abuse of Mr. Clifford Lloyd, whom he described as being like Richard III in mind and body.’ The reference to the last Plantagenet King was because of ‘some rheumatic stiffness in Mr. Clifford Lloyd’s neck which gives him rather a high-shouldered look’. The chief secretary’s daughter, however, asserted boldly that Lloyd ‘has the mastery of Kilmallock’.[5] In deriding his physical appearance United Ireland was less oblique than Sheehy, referring to Lloyd as ‘the hunchback’. [6]            

William O’Brien’s newspaper waged a war of attrition against Lloyd long before he painted a target on his own back by becoming one of the country’s first Special Resident Magistrates. In its debut edition, United Ireland was already describing Lloyd as a ‘tyrant’. Later he would mature into a ‘satrap’. While Lloyd would obviously have rejected such categorisations, he would have viewed the hostility of United Ireland as a badge of honour. United Ireland itself does not merit a single mention in Lloyd’s memoir of the Land War, although we cannot be certain whether that is a subtle gesture of contempt, or an indication of painful memories best forgotten.            

 Lloyd, as one might expect, faced constant threats against his life as he went about his work. In his memoir of the Land War he recorded the receipt of dozens of death threats after the committal to prison of Father Eugene Sheehy and his Kilmallock allies:              ‘From this time I was closely watched by policemen. A man slept at my door, even in the barrack; a sentry was under my window by day and night; if I went into the street,  there were always in plain clothes two men close behind me, others at a little distance off, before, behind me, and on the other side of the street; if I went for a walk to get a little fresh air, even after a hard day’s work, 10 men with loaded rifles followed me; if I rode, a mounted escort was with me; and if I drove, ten men followed me on cars.’[7] 

 Naturally, moving around the countryside accompanied by such a retinue was represented by Irish parliamentarians as ‘a passion for theatrical display’. In the House of Commons in August 1882 IPP MP Thomas Sexton accused Lloyd of having been ‘appointed to play the part of despot’ and of travelling around Clare and Limerick ‘amidst the glittering of spurs and the clattering of sabres’.[8] Six months previously a notice posted in Tulla, Co. Clare had offered a ‘£10,000 reward for the corpse of Clifford Lloyd’.[9] No specific reward was offered for the body of Lloyd’s brother, Wilford, an officer of the Royal Horse Artillery, seconded to Clare as a temporary magistrate, but in February 1882 six shots were fired at him as he rode towards Tulla. One of the bullets struck home and severely wounded a policeman accompanying Wilford Lloyd.[10]             

The physical and mental strain on Lloyd was clear to Florence Arnold-Forster when she met the SRM in Cruise’s Hotel in Limerick in January 1882. ‘He looked ill,’ she wrote in her diary on 7 January, ‘which is not surprising.’[11] Unlike many of his peers Lloyd tended to be proactive rather than reactive. This served to increase his unpopularity. His attitude towards public Land League assemblies and the provision of huts for evicted tenants were two cases in point. Lloyd never saw a Land League or Irish National League meeting that he approved of: ‘The violent, disorderly, and seditious public meetings of the Land League were palpably illegal, and were followed by crime, bloodshed, and anarchy …. [12]Like his colleagues in the magistracy, Lloyd was under government orders, however, not to prohibit bona fidegatherings. As he might have done with Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, however, he did not believe such a phenomenon existed as a Land League meeting summoned for peaceful purposes. In a letter to the successor of the ill-fated under-secretary Thomas H. Burke, Sir Robert Hamilton, he was unambiguous in his rejection of the notion of public gatherings for ‘political’ purposes, asserting that ‘they mark the cessation of all true freedom in the districts in which they are held and in which the local ‘Leaguers’ are raised to the position of dictators’.[13]All Land League meetings, in Lloyd’s book, had a subversive intent and were inimical to the maintenance of public order. Whenever feasible, he ignored the political exigencies that dictated Dublin Castle’s approach to public gatherings and proclaimed as many as possible. Before his premature death in 1891, he waxed nostalgic in his memoir about the legal process relating to the right of assembly which he subsequently encountered in the colonial service in India. There, the officer in charge of a district, the equivalent of the Irish Special Resident Magistrates of the Land War era, was solely responsible for public order. ‘Had such a system been in force in Ireland,’ he wrote, ‘we should not have had to deplore a long succession of civil disorders and abortive revolutions’.[14]              

In the case of the installation of huts by the League, and later by the Ladies Land League, Lloyd was equally chary. These small huts were intended to house temporarily families that had been subjected to eviction and who had not been readmitted as caretakers on their land. While this facility had a clear charitable intent, there is no doubt that the huts could also be used for a nefarious purpose. They were often erected close to the ‘evicted’ farm in order to maintain around the clock surveillance and ensure that no ‘land grabber’ occupied the farm from which the hut dwellers had just been turned out. In the case of a number of evicted tenants in the troublesome district of Tulla, Lloyd chose to believe that intimidation lay behind the construction of a number of huts in the disturbed district. In the House of Commons on 18 April 1882, IPP MP Thomas Sexton rose to inform the Irish attorney general, W.M. Johnson, in the unlikely event that he was unaware of the development, that: ‘Mr. Clifford Lloyd interfered to-day, stating that the building of the huts was illegal, and ordered the builder to leave the place this evening, and informed him that unless he left he would be arrested’. Sexton wanted to know if this was government policy or a particular quirk of Lloyd’s. He got no satisfaction from the attorney general, whose response was supportive of any course of action the SRM deemed it wise to pursue. Lloyd’s cause was not helped by the fact that one of the evicted Tulla tenants, John Canny, died shortly after losing his farm. An attempt by Irish MPs to highlight this tragedy received short shrift from the administration. It was pointed out in the House of Commons that Canny was not one of the tenants denied access to the huts of the Ladies Land League, and that he was seventy-four years of age and in bad health before his death.[15] 

 Although Lloyd was better known for the prevention and prosecution of public order offences—he proved adept, for example, at securing the services of platoons of soldiers from reluctant military commanders—than for the red-handed apprehension of ribbonmen and moonlighters, this was largely because his tenure in Ireland coincided with coercion legislation that allowed the authorities to imprison those suspected of committing ‘outrages’. This could be done almost summarily, without resort to the traditional method of disposing of malefactors: trial by jury. Although he unquestionably benefited from this practice when it came to covert ‘ribbon’ activity, Lloyd was not greatly enamoured of the frequent employment by the RIC of the ‘internment without trial’ provisions of the Protection of Person and Property Act. He considered the ‘lifting’ and subsequent incarceration of suspects to be lazy policing. His preference was for the procurement of evidence usable in a court of law. That said, he was well aware that RIC investigators were frequently forced to adopt such a strategy because of the difficulty of obtaining convictions in trials involving partisan ‘home’ juries.             

Attempts by Irish parliamentarians to imply that, despite his fearsome reputation, his presence in Limerick, Clare and Galway had little actual impact on crime statistics, and to suggest that he had signally failed to clear those counties of its ‘hard men’ were brushed off by W.E. Forster’s successor as chief secretary, George Otto Trevelyan. Trevelyan, in response to gibes from Irish MPs that Lloyd had been merely abrasive and autocratic while being simultaneously ineffective, pointed out that, before his appointment in 1882, ‘outrages’ in Clare in the last quarter of 1881 had been at a high of 148. By the spring of 1882, three months after Lloyd’s appointment, they had declined to 86. Results in Limerick, another county within his tri-county bailiwick, had been similar.     

Whether or not Lloyd felt that his continued presence in Clare, Limerick and Galway was rapidly becoming counterproductive, given increasing local and national antagonism towards him; whether he became disillusioned after the apparent concessions of the Kilmainham Treaty and the principled resignation of his patron, William E. Forster; or whether he had simply had enough of the threats and the constant strain of his work, Lloyd began to seek alternative employment in May 1882. Nothing was forthcoming from a government that, in light of the Phoenix Park murders and the passage of the draconian Crimes Act, was not yet ready to dispense with his services in Ireland. Towards the end of 1882 he again applied for a transfer. It was not until the middle of 1883, when the government reorganised the magistracy and dispensed with the role of Special Resident Magistrate, that Lloyd was allowed to move on.             

He was retained pro tem as an ordinary magistrate but he secured extended leave to work in the Egyptian police and prison system. Nationalist newspapers gloated over his departure, and raised raucous protests at his precipitate return when his Middle Eastern idyll did not work out. United Ireland, coming up with yet another imaginatively scornful appellation for Lloyd (‘tyrannical bashaw’) crowed at his minor humiliation in having proved unacceptable to the Egyptian authorities. ‘Mr Clifford Lloyd,’ O’Brien exulted, ‘is not to rid Ireland of his presence after all. The cholera is too virulent in Egypt at present for gallant heroes of the SRM type’.[16]Lloyd was reassigned to Derry as an ordinary RM, an apparent demotion, while, like Mr. Micawber, he waited for something to turn up. In 1885 an opportunity finally presented itself.  It was not the colonial governorship to which he aspired, and which he felt was his due, but the lieutenant-governorship of the island of Mauritius. There he quickly fell foul of the Irish-born governor and future nationalist MP for Kilkenny, Sir John Pope Hennessy. After transferring to the Seychelles, Lloyd resigned from the colonial service in 1887. He died prematurely of pneumonia, six days shy of his forty-seventh birthday. While historian Stephen Ball, an acknowledged expert on nineteenth century policing policy, describes Lloyd as ‘perhaps the sternest of Forster’s Special Resident Magistrates’,[17] the chief secretary’s daughter, Florence Arnold-Forster, herself beguiled by both Lloyd’s personality and his methods, acknowledged that ‘with all his vigour Mr. Lloyd is a little too impulsive, too much up and down’. Her father placed more trust in one of Lloyd’s four SRM colleagues, Captain Plunkett (‘Pasha’ Plunkett to United Ireland) who would continue to function as a resident magistrate well into the Plan of Campaign era of the late 1880s. ‘Father is inclined to think Mr. Plunkett is the best for his work’ Florence confided to her diary in February 1882 after a long walk with her harassed

parent.[18]

 Lloyd may well have been more mercurial and not quite as quietly efficient as the more durable Plunkett, but his profile, during his brief tenure in his specialist role as a potent stipendiary magistrate, was higher than that of his colleague. His acerbic and unsurprisingly self-aggrandising memoir of the Land War—which devotes much space to his rivalry with a combative Eugene Sheehy—reveals a man of considerable moral and physical courage whose determination to maintain law and order was as strong as his obsession with the preservation of the prevailing status quo in rural Ireland. Clifford Lloyd was never plagued by self-doubt, neither was he a public service cipher or a disillusioned mercenary. He was a champion of the rights of private property who deprecated the impertinence of the Irish peasantry, affluent and indigent alike, in seeking the overthrow of their landlords. His undiscriminating vigour; his penchant for tarring political activism and agrarian violence with the same brush; and his proclivity for aggressive policing rather than diplomacy, rendered him a rapidly wasting asset to a government whose ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ May 1882 volte-face (notwithstanding the introduction of the Crimes Act after the Phoenix Park murders) signalled a desire for accommodation rather than confrontation. An assertive magistrate with Lloyd’s record became supernumerary once the Liberal government chose compromise over conflict.            

Lloyd, however, remained unrepentant. His valediction in Ireland Under the Land League was stark and unapologetic. ‘Blood the Land League wanted,’ he wrote in the final paragraph of his memoir,  ‘and blood it caused to flow, with a cruelty and savageness unsurpassed in history’.[19]   It was typical hyperbole from a distinguished member of the establishment officer corps, but it contained more than a grain of truth.   

[1] Clifford Lloyd, Ireland Under the Land League, (London, 1892), 60-61.[2] Lloyd, Ireland Under the Land League, 70.[3] Edith Somerville and Martin Ross, The Irish RM and his experiences (London, 1948), 7. [4] Lloyd, Ireland Under the Land League, 44, 226, 27, 81, 97, 89-90.[5]T.W.Moody and R.A.J.Hawkins (eds.) Florence Arnold-Forster’s Irish Journal (Oxford, 1988), 465, 254.[6] United Ireland, 7 January 1882. [7] Lloyd, Ireland Under the Land League, 92. [8] HC Deb 10 August 1882 vol 273 cc1414-70. [9] Clare Independent, 25 February 1882.[10] Clare Freeman, 18 February 1882. [11] Moody and Hawkins, Florence Arnold-Forster’s Irish Journal, 345.[12] Lloyd, Ireland Under the Land League, 99-100.[13] Clifford Lloyd to Sir Robert Hamilton, 2 Sept 1883, NAI CSORP 1883/2040.[14] Lloyd, Ireland Under the Land League, 101.[15] HC Deb 04 May 1882 vol 269 cc.95-695.[16] United Ireland, 11 August 1883.[17] Stephen Andrew Ball, Policing the Land War: Official responses to political protest and agrarian crime in Ireland 1879-91 |(PhD thesis Trinity College, Dublin, 2000), 30. [18] Moody and Hawkins, Florence Arnold-Forster’s Irish Journal, 382.[19] Lloyd, Ireland Under the Land League, 243.  

Land Is All That Matters – The Author’s Cut 1

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Land Is All That Matters comes in at around 700 pages. It could have been longer but I agreed to cut a couple of chapters to keep costs down. So, here, over the next few days, is the ‘deleted material’, which, when added back in constitute The Author’s Cut.

THE AGENT

‘Anti-Christ and Orangeman’ – The land agent, Samuel Murray Hussey

‘This Hussey is of English origin and was formerly a cattle-dealer, and practised usury as far back as 1845. If all Ireland were to be searched for a similar despot he would not be found. He is a regular anti-Christ and Orangeman at heart, and, in fact, he acts as agent for all the bankrupt landlords in Kerry.’[1]

(Daniel O’Shea, letter to the New York Tablet, 1880)

The difference twixt moonlight and moonshine 

The people at last understand, 

For moonlight’s the law of the League 

And moonshine is the law of the land.[2]

(Doggerel quoted by Samuel M. Hussey in The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent) 

Samuel Murray Hussey

Samuel Murray Hussey’s autobiography, Remininiscences of an Irish Land Agent, appeared in 1904, just in time to allow him to fire off some artillery shells at the Land Purchase Act introduced the previous year by the Tory chief secretary, George Wyndham. No provision had been made for lost agent income in legislation designed to bid adieu to as many Irish landlords prepared to ‘take the shilling’ and depart. The author was suitably aggrieved and didn’t hold back.

            Hussey, after the hapless Boycott, is perhaps the best-known agent of the Land War era. Such celebrity in the 1880s was not, of course, a function of popularity. During the Land War, agents were not ‘celebrated’ or ‘famous’, they were, deservedly or not, ‘notorious’ or ‘infamous’.

            It is important to get Sam Hussey in some perspective. He was undoubtedly a Land League bete noire, but the raw figures belie his reputation for cold-bloodedness. On the estate of Lord Kenmare, Samuel Hussey’s primary responsibility, permanent evictions (where tenants were not readmitted) between 1878 and 1880 were of the order of 4 per cent of the 2,000 or more tenants. Even in 1880, at the height of the Land War, in the first six months of that year, five tenants out of a total of 4,160 under his agency in Kerry were evicted, and two of those were given paid passage to the USA.[3]However, we should be under no illusion that the relative paucity of evictions on estates under Hussey’s regulation had anything to do with moderation or excessive leniency. Hussey had made a simple economic calculation: there was no income to be extracted from an empty farm, and the power of the boycott had ensured that few if any evicted farms would be occupied in the short term at least. He said as much in his 1904 memoir: ‘Suppose twenty men were tenants on a townland …. Unless caretakers at a cost of about three times the rent were put in under excessive police protection, all the nineteen farms would promptly become derelict’.[4]

 Given the low level of eviction on his Kerry estates, why, therefore, was Hussey the most reviled agent in the country at a time when it was open season on members of his profession? The tone of his memoir, Remininiscences of an Irish Land Agent, offers some explanation. Hussey was pugnacious and highly combative. He was a profoundly and self-consciously alienating figure. Furthermore, he positively revelled in his notoriety. The ‘substance’ in Hussey’s case was comparatively inconsequential, his eviction record lagged behind many of his less well-known peers. But with Hussey ‘style’ was as important as ‘substance’. Where wholesale clearances were financially impractical, the optics of house-burning at the few ejectments that did take place assumed additional importance. While it attracted widespread excoriation, burning the cottage of an evicted farmer acted as a powerful psychological disincentive for tenants to default. Public opprobrium did not concern Hussey, not in 1880 and not in his declining years when he doubled down on his record in his self-serving memoir. 

Born in 1824 Hussey had experienced the horrors of the Great Famine (at second hand) and was in his prime as an agent when the First Land War began in earnest in 1879 with the founding of the Irish National Land League. Hussey’s memoir is as opinionated as it is entertaining. It is also utterly myopic and partial, almost beguilingly so. Hussey writes of facing death at the hands of moonlighters with the sort of insouciance of a curmudgeonly Great War British battalion commander describing how he regularly despatched ‘the Hun’ to their eternal reward. Hussey began his career as an agent in County Cork in 1845 as an assistant to his brother-in-law. In his reminiscences he observed that he had ‘thus really embarked on the profession of my life, one which, on the whole, I have most thoroughly and heartily enjoyed’. Never has the phrase ‘on the whole’ been required to work so hard. Shortly after this assertion Hussey pointed out the inherent thanklessness of a life as the landlord’s factotum: ‘Lord Derby received threats that if he did not reduce his rents, his agent would be murdered. He coolly replied: ‘If you think you will intimidate me by shooting my agent you are greatly mistaken’.[5]

Lord Derby could well afford to be so cool in his response.  As a landlord he was not required to face a fraction of the physical risks of his agent. Furthermore, as prime minister no one was likely to get close enough to him for an accurate shot, although, admittedly, that had not saved the life of one of his predecessors, Spencer Perceval.  

            Hussey, however, largely shrugged off the copious ill-will towards him, observing of the ubiquitous threatening letter that, although he had received over 100 of such missives,  ‘I’ll die in my bed for all that’.[6] That is what almost happened to him and his entire family when the Hussey household in Edenburn, Ballymacelligott, near Castleisland, Co. Kerry was the subject of a dynamite attack in the early hours of the morning of 6 December 1884. The would-be killers were able to plant the dynamite despite the presence of a permanent three-man RIC guard on the house.  The ManchesterGuardian offered a graphic description of the event: 

‘A large aperture was made in the wall, which is three feet thick. Several large rents running to the top have been made, and it now presents a most dilapidated appearance. The ground-floor, where the explosion occurred, was used as a larder, and everything in it was smashed to pieces, the glass window-frames and shutters being shivered into atoms. On the three stories above it, the explosion produced a similar effect.’[7]

Hussey’s phlegmatic temperament asserted itself in the minutes after the explosion. His first laconic observation was to his wife, ‘My dear,’ he told her, ‘we can have a quiet night at last, for the scoundrels won’t bother us again before breakfast.’ With that he returned to bed. A couple of days later he received a claim for compensation from a neighbour about half a mile distant. The force of the explosion had knocked some of the plaster off her wall. This had then fallen into a pan full of milk, spoiling it. It was probably the least of his worries.[8]

            The dynamiters were prepared to kill up to sixteen people in order to end Hussey’s life, which suggests an extraordinary level of both callousness and determination. It was this attack, blowing away much of the rear of his house, which finally persuaded Hussey that it was time to move to London.  

Hussey’s main employer, Lord Kenmare, a Roman Catholic landlord, was relatively popular in Kerry. More than a year after the founding of the Land League, in November 1880, 5,000 of his tenants demonstrated in his favour after he had received a letter threatening his life.[9] However, in September 1880 Hussey succeeded in damaging his employer’s status, while reinforcing his own reputation for ruthlessness, by burning the house of an evicted tenant in what was seen locally as an unnecessarily provocative act. Timothy Harrington’s Kerry Sentinel suggested that Kenmare was ‘playing the second fiddle’ to his single-minded agent.[10] By the outset of the First Land War Hussey was agent to Kenmare’s estate of almost 120,000 acres in Kerry, Cork and Limerick and headed a land agency firm that supervised 88 estates and was responsible for collecting around £250,000 in rent per annum.[11] This placed him at the top of the Kerry ribbonmen’s ‘most wanted’ list. Although claiming in his memoir to have been personally responsible for the eviction of only ten tenants over a six-year period from 1879, Hussey’s life was under permanent threat. He admitted that: ‘I never travelled without a revolver, and occasionally was accompanied by a Winchester rifle. I used to place my revolver as regularly beside my fork on the dinner-table, either in my own or in anybody else’s house, as I spread my napkin on my knee.’

Hussey also took the precaution of gifting his daughter a revolver. She slept with this under her pillow and would have been well capable of using it had the need arisen as, during the Land War in the Hussey household, Sunday afternoons were reserved for weapons training and target practice. The agent proudly laid claim to the nickname ‘Woodcock’— so christened by the editor of the Daily Telegraph—on the basis that ‘he was never hit, though often shot at’.  Hussey claimed, that even living in London, he was still unsafe, although, he added, ‘if a man shoots me in London he’ll be hung, and every Irish scoundrel is careful of his own neck’. [12]

            Hussey’s memoir is interesting in its assessment of the composition of the leadership of the Land League (‘The Land League agitation generally originated with the publicans, small shopkeepers, and bankrupt farmers, rather than with the actual land occupiers’) and his observation that of the six Poor Law districts in Kerry, the most violent agitation took place in the wealthiest (Tralee) and in the most prosperous part of the Tralee Poor Law district, Castleisland (‘which shows that poverty was not the cause’).   

            Hussey, in ‘there but for the grace of God’ mode, also discusses the murder of the prominent Kerry landlord Arthur E. Herbert. This killing took place near Castleisland in March 1882. The picture Hussey paints of the murder victim is less than flattering. 

He was a turbulent, headstrong man, brave to rashness and foolhardiness, and too fond of proclaiming his contempt for the people by whom he was surrounded. As a magistrate, sitting at Brosna Petty Sessions, he expressed his regret that he was not in command of a force when a riot occurred in that village, when he would have ‘skivered the people with buckshot’. 

In describing the death of Herbert, Hussey must have been well aware, that, in different circumstances, he might well have shared the deceased landlord’s fate. He certainly did not lack for potential assassins.  Like Hussey, Herbert never travelled abroad without a revolver in his pocket. On the day of the fatal ambush in which he died, he even had an armed guard for the first mile of his journey between Castleisland and his home in nearby Killeentierna House where he lived with his eighty-year-old mother. It was after the RIC constable turned back home for Castleisland that Herbert was attacked and killed. The killers made certain of their quarry as ‘The body was almost riddled with shot and bullets’.[13]

            A piece of contemporary doggerel offers some indication of the esteem in which Herbert was held by his tenants. 

            A for poor Arthur who thought he was smart, 

            B for the bullet that went through his heart;

It goes on …

            G for the groan he made when he fell,

            H for the hurry he showed going to hell,

            I for the Irish who will laugh at the sport.[14]

When it came to tenant marriage Hussey was not as oppressive as his fellow Kerry agent, William Steuart Trench—who insisted on being approached for permission by tenants who wished to marry. Hussey’s memoir also offers a revealing insight into one of the consequences of the end of the practice of subdivision. Although marriage patterns changed post-Famine—with men who were no longer entitled to a share of their father’s farm tending to postpone connubial bliss until they could support a wife and children by some other means—family numbers still remained relatively high. Something had to be done for the sons who were not going to inherit. Hussey described how, in this context, the dowry acquired an even greater importance than in pre-Famine days. The marriage prospects of the son who was due to inherit (not necessarily the eldest) became of vital importance and interest to the rest of the family. In many cases the dowry he received before his nuptials would not accrue to himself but to the disinherited members of the clan, in compensation for their bad fortune.    

Hence, if the eldest son were to marry the Venus de Medici with ten pounds less dowry than he could get with the ugliest wall-eyed female in the neighbourhood, he would be considered as an enemy to all his family. A tenant of a neighbour of mine actually got married to a woman without a penny, a thing unparalleled in my experience in Kerry, and his sister presently came to my wife for some assistance. 

My wife asked her: ‘Why does not your brother support you?’  And she was answered:  ‘How could he support any one after bringing an empty woman to the house?’ 

To marry ‘an empty woman’ was to commit a crime of the first water. Another tenant of Hussey’s approached him after the death of his (the tenant’s) father, and sought to have his name inserted in the rent book as his father had left him the farm and its stock in his will. 

‘What’s to become of your brother and sister?’ says I.  ‘They are to get whatever I draw,’ says he. ‘That means whatever you get with your wife?’  ‘That is so.’  ‘Well, suppose you marry a girl worth only twenty pounds, what would happen then?’ 

‘That would not do at all,’ very gravely. ‘Is there no limit put on the worth of your wife?’ ‘Oh,’ says he, ‘I was valued at one hundred and sixty pounds.’ I found out afterwards he had one hundred and seventy with his wife.[15]

While it is easy to abhor the supercilious arrogance that pervades Hussey’s memoir it is hard not to admire his mordant sense of humour. For example, when asked by the Earl of Lansdowne’s agent, J.Townsend Trench (son and successor of that other agent/memoirist, W.S. Trench, writer of Realities of Irish Life ), ‘How is it, Hussey, that you have not got shot long ago?’ Hussey responded sardonically, ‘I have warned them that if they shoot me, you will be their agent’.[16]

            Samuel Murray Hussey, described in his Times obituary as ‘one of the best-known land agents in the United Kingdom’, was as good as his word. He did succeed in dying in his bed—without the assistance of dynamite—at Aghadoe House near Killarney in 1913, nine years after the publication of his self-serving, often thought-provoking, and always highly diverting memoir. 

[1] S. M. Hussey, The Reminiscences of an Irish Land Agent (London, 1904), 210 

[2] Hussey, Reminiscences, 131.

[3] Donnacha Seán Lucey, Land and popular politics in County Kerry, 1872–86 (PhD thesis, Maynooth University, 2007), 75

[4] Hussey, Reminiscences, 190

[5] Hussey, Reminiscences, 40.

[6] Hussey, Reminiscences, 61.

[7] Manchester Guardian, 7 December 1884.

[8] Hussey, Reminiscences, 240-242.

[9] Kerry Sentinel, 16 November 1880.

[10] Kerry Sentinel, 1 October 1880.

[11] Dictionary of Irish Biography, Vol 4, 860.   

[12] Hussey,  Reminiscences, 67, 255, 130-131.

[13] Hussey, Reminiscences, 208, 214, 226, 227.

[14] http://www.odonohoearchive.com/castleisland-and-the-herbert-family/ – Accessed 22 March 2022.

[15] Hussey, Reminiscences, 228, 143-44.

[16] L. Perry Curtis Jr. The Depiction of Eviction in Ireland 1845-1910 (Dublin, 2011), 176.  

VIDEO – The Bodyke Evictions – Co. Clare June 1887

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One of the most notorious Irish mass evictions of the turbulent 1880s took place around the small County Clare village of Bodyke in June 1887 on the 5000 acre estate of Colonel John O’Callaghan, which supported around 100 tenants. The landlord lived in the splendid Maryfort House in nearby Tulla. O’Callaghan had inherited the estate from his father in 1849.Through much of the 1880s O’Callaghan’s property was closely guarded by armed members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. This was because he had conducted a series of evictions in 1881 at the height of the Land War during which the land arbitration court reduced his rents by a whopping 35%.In 1887  O’Callaghan went to war again with  tenants unable to pay even the already reduced rents. Arrears of £2000 had built up. The tenants offered O’Callaghan £900, which he refused. Instead he called in the bailiffs, who were protected by a large force of Royal Irish Constabulary and military.On the side of the tenants, and visiting Bodyke to observe proceedings were future MPs Michael Davitt, founder of Land League in 1879 and Henry Norman, at the time a journalist working for the liberal London evening daily the Pall Mall Gazette, who  would write a lengthy account of the evictions in a  book.    

The O’Halloran sisters of Bodyke  

Land Is All That Matters – Video explainer on Vimeo

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