Wellington House
Wellington House is the more common name for Britain's War Propaganda Bureau, which operated during the First World War from Wellington House, a building at the corner of Petty France and Buckingham Gate, in Westminster, London metropolitan area, which was the headquarters of the National Insurance Commission before the War. The Bureau, which operated under the supervision of the Foreign Office, was mainly directed at foreign targets, including Allied nations and neutral countries, especially the United States. The building itself has since been demolished, and its former site is now occupied by a block of flats that carries the same name.
History
Background
The First World War saw Germany's war declaration on 1 August 1914, whereupon the German Empire'Three days later, 4 August 1914, saw the British entry into World War I, and plans were quickly drawn up to create some form of organization which would counter the German propaganda machine. The issue was deliberated in the Cabinet of the United Kingdom, where the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, emphasized the need for an official body to inform and influence foreign opinion and to refute German claims. When the war first broke out, however, there was no singular coordination for the management of war propaganda. A number of government agencies and departments vied to produce propaganda.
After that session of Cabinet, Lloyd George approached his fellow Liberal MP, the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster at the time, Charles Masterman, to completely form and head the proposed organization in the manner to which that Masterman saw fit, which did not yet have any official name. Masterman at that time was also the chairman of the National Insurance Commission, which was headquartered out of the Wellington House Hotel building on the corner of York Street and Buckingham Gate in Westminster, constructed around 1908, and which had been purchased by the NIC in 1911. Before formally establishing the bureau, Masterman convened two conferences in Wellington House at the beginning of September to outline methods and principles for wartime publicity.
Writer's conference on propaganda (2 September)
The first of these two conferences on 2 September 1914 was organized to draw-up and design influence campaigns for implementation in fiction and literary circles. Masterman invited 25 leading British authors to the conference rooms at Wellington House to discuss ways of best promoting Britain's interests during the war. In addition to the writers, Masterman also invited Claud Schuster, 1st Baron Schuster and several representatives from the Foreign Office to participate in the discussions.As the professional writers in attendance were in the habit of keeping journals and writing letters, we know that the meeting took place in the afternoon, nearly at golden hour; the sun was described as yellow, and the conference table was described as blue. Thomas Hardy writes that they were "...confused deliberations in a melancholy manner..." Arnold Bennett writes that Israel Zangwill talked too much, that the only smart ones in the room were Wells and Chesterton, and that he was disappointed by Gilbert Murray. Apparently, Bennett and J. M. Barrie had never met before, and Barrie took the chance to make small talk.
Those 25 writers in attendance were the following:
File:Rudyard Kipling, head-and-shoulders portrait, facing slightly left LCCN90710680.tif|thumb|One of the greatest advocates for the British war effort leading up to the establishment of Wellington House was Rudyard Kipling, the author of The Jungle Book.
Rudyard Kipling had been invited to the meeting but was unable to attend, but did send a note of his complete support and readiness to cooperate fully. Arthur Quiller-Couch was also invited, but unable to make it to the meeting. Also notably absent from this meeting, and many of the following efforts of the Bureau, was William Le Queux, who had been Britain's top propagandist in the pre-war years. Joseph Conrad was out of town when the meeting was called, travelling back to England from Poland. However, the historian Peter Buitenhuis writes that: "Even without them this was probably the most important gathering of creative and academic writers ever assembled for an official purpose in the history of English letters."
All the writers who attended agreed to maintain the utmost secrecy, and it was not until 1935 that the activities of the "War Propaganda Bureau" became public knowledge. Several of the writers agreed to write pamphlets and books that would promote the government's point of view; these were printed and published by such well-known publishers as Hodder & Stoughton, Methuen, Oxford University Press, John Murray, Macmillan and Thomas Nelson. The War Propaganda Bureau went on to publish over 1,160 pamphlets during the war.
The conference of notable journalists and publishers (7 September)
Five days after the gathering of the fiction writers, on 7 September 1914, Masterman held a second meeting at Wellington House, attended by the leading newspaper editors and publishers of the age.Official establishment
On 5 September 1914, the Cabinet approved the creation of an organization to coordinate British propaganda abroad. Masterman was officially appointed as the director of the new bureau. Because the new organization was established out of Wellington House, it adopted the name as an official cover. For the following two years, Wellington House functioned as the principal centre for British propaganda activities. Its operations were conducted with considerable effectiveness and secrecy, to the extent that even members of Parliament were largely unaware of its existence. Many of the officials who served under Masterman at the National Insurance Commission joined him in the new organization, while additional specialists from outside government were recruited to contribute their expertise in various fields. James Headlam-Morley, Arnold J. Toynbee, Lewis Namier, and Anthony Hope were some of these additional experts. The name of the War Propaganda Bureau was kept in complete secrecy, so secret that even members of Parliament were not informed of its existence. Certain MPs did occasionally ask why Masterman's paycheck was so high, considering that he was no longer working in the Cabinet, to which the reply was that he was working on private work for the Prime Minister.Author's Declaration (1914)
One of the chief objectives of Wellington House was to cultivate support for the British war effort in the United States. Among its earliest initiatives was the publication of the Authors’ Declaration, a manifesto written by Masterman and signed by leading British writers and academics. The statement affirmed the justice of Britain’s cause, defended the neutrality of Belgium, and condemned the German invasion as an act of aggression. Several signatories noted that, although they had previously been sympathetic to Germany, the outbreak of war had altered their views.The document, bearing more than fifty signatures, was transmitted by cable to The New York Times, which printed it on 18 September 1914. A second, expanded version appeared on 18 October, presented as a full-page feature with facsimiles of the signatures and explanatory notes identifying the contributors for the American audience.
The signatures featured on that page, signed in alphabetical order, were the following:
Professor Nick Milne, from Oxford University, notes that this list of signatories reveals a literary hierarchy very different from today's academic canon. The declaration presented a sort of unified cultural front of the mainstream literary establishment of 1914. The brief descriptions accompanying each name on the declaration are telling of the different status these authors maintained in their day. For instance, Thomas Hardy is praised as the "greatest living novelist," ignoring his pivot to poetry, while H. G. Wells is noted for social novels like Tono Bungay, not his famous science fiction.
However, its purposeful exclusions and the subsequent fading of many once-famous names show that this unity was both selective and transient. Notably absent were many of the Modernists and the anti-war Bloomsbury Group, who were either not established or not ideologically suitable. Even the famous George Bernard Shaw was deliberately excluded for his controversial views.
In a 1914 letter, W. B. Yeats refused to sign the Declaration at the request of Sir Gilbert Murray. Yeats rejected the Declaration as an insincere manifesto, and derivative of what he considered lying newspapers, writing: "I long for the defeat of the Germans but your manifesto reads like an extract from the newspapers, and newspapers are liars. What have we novelists, poets, whatever we are, to do with them?" He expressed skepticism about who was truly to blame for the war, citing "secret diplomacy," and doubted the document's power to influence anyone. He dismissed contemporary reports of Germany's atrocities as unproven propaganda, and suggested that investigation should wait for an impartial post-war tribunal.
The declaration did, however, include several prominent women, such as Mary Augusta Ward and May Sinclair, whose propagandistic work is often overlooked today. Sinclair, as one of the more popular Suffragettes, found herself distanced from the bulk of her pacifist comrades in the Suffrage movement. Only ten days after the Declaration was first published, on 25 September 1914, Sinclair joined the Munro Ambulance Corps, a volunteer medical unit organized to assist the Red Cross in Belgium.
While the list features currently popular names like Rudyard Kipling and Thomas Hardy, it is also filled with figures now obscure to most students, such as E. V. Lucas and Alfred Sutro. Their inclusion highlights the gap between their then-significant popular reputations and their current standing, a perspective obscured by the later triumph of Modernism.
In response to the Authors’ Declaration, the German government organized the Manifesto of the Ninety-Three, a statement signed by a larger group of German intellectuals, artists, and scientists. The document rejected all accusations of misconduct by German forces in Belgium and defended Germany’s actions during the early stages of the war. It also included statements alleging that the Allied powers had encouraged non-European troops to take part in the conflict.