Fatal Fortnight: Arthur Ponsonby and the Fight for British Neutrality in 1914

303 Pages·2014·10 MB·English

by  Marlor

Fatal Fortnight:
Arthur Ponsonby and the Fight for British Neutrality in 1914
This edition published in 2014 by Frontline Books, an imprint of Pen & Sword
Books Ltd, 47 Church Street, Barnsley, S. Yorkshire, S70 2AS
www.frontline-books.com
Copyright © Duncan Marlor, 2014
Foreword © Frederick Ponsonby, 2014
The right of Duncan Marlor to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act
1988.
ISBN: 978-1-47382-286-3
eISBN: 9781473838123
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Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede
Introduction
Prologue
1: Spectators Only?
2: A Balkan War Begins
3: ‘Close the Ranks’
4: ‘That Hateful Medieval Survival’
5: ‘Many People Seem to Have Gone Crazy’
6: ‘The Crime and Folly of Joining in’
7: ‘The War Fever Beginning’
8: ‘Hideous and Terrible’
9: ‘The Fatal Afternoon’
10: ‘The House that Jack Built’
11: ‘More Like a Book by Conan Doyle’
12: ‘Protest is Futile’
13: ‘I do not Want my Country to be Beaten’
14: Afterwards
Notes
Bibliography
Illustrations
Plate 1: Arthur Ponsonby aged about eight; Arthur Ponsonby, c. 1900;

Shulbrede Priory, from a drawing by Arthur Ponsonby.
Plate 2: Arthur Ponsonby as prospective Liberal candidate at Taunton;

Ponsonby with Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman.
Plate 3: Labour MPs on the Terrace of the House of Commons, 1909.
Plate 4: Charles and Molly Trevelyan (National Trust); the Trevelyans and
their children, 1910 (Trustees of the Trevelyan Family); Arthur
Ponsonby at the start of his parliamentary career.
Plate 5: A Punch cartoon of the House of Commons as a zoo; Punch’s view

of Ramsay MacDonald’s oratory.
Plate 6: Thomas Edmund Harvey (National Portrait Gallery); Arnold
Rowntree (Getty Images); Richard Denman (National Portrait
Gallery).
Plate 7: Sir Hubert Parry.
Plate 8: Keir Hardie speaking at a Labour peace rally (Getty Images); Philip
Morrell, 1910 (National Portrait Gallery); Robert Leonard
Outhwaite (Staffordshire Evening Sentinel).
Plate 9: Sir Edward Grey in the House of Commons (Getty Images); ‘Bravo

Belgium’, Punch cartoon.
Plate 10: Crowds outside the Houses of Parliament (Getty Images); crowds in

Trafalgar Square (Getty Images).
Plate 11: Leonard Outhwaite’s view of the war in his Ghosts of the Slain

(illustrator Joseph Southall).
Plate 12: Ramsay MacDonald at Shulbrede Priory; the Parry and Ponsonby

families, July 1915.
Plate 13: Dolly Ponsonby.
Plate 14: Punch depiction of Josiah Wedgwood speaking in the House of

Commons; Punch’s view of Richard Holt.
Plate 15: Newspaper advertisement for Government candidates in the 1918
General Election; the Trevelyan family 1919 (Newcastle University,
Robinson Library).
Plate 16: Arthur Ponsonby at his Foreign Office desk, 1924; Arthur

Ponsonby sketch giving advice to his youthful self.
Acknowledgements
The genesis of this book goes back over more than a decade and a large debt of
gratitude is owed to many people. First and foremost I must thank the Ponsonby
family for its unfailing support, especially Laura Ponsonby and Kate Russell,
Arthur Ponsonby’s grand-daughters, both for their generous hospitality at
Shulbrede Priory and their considerable help with the Shulbrede archives, and
valuable suggestions, including the diary of Sir Hubert Parry, which had not
occurred to me but which turned out to be priceless. Also I must thank Frederick,
Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede, great-grandson of Arthur Ponsonby, for the
foreword that he has kindly provided, which gives a present day
parliamentarian’s perspective on his ancestor’s story.
I thank Robin Dower, grandson of Sir Charles Trevelyan, for his kind help
with details of the Trevelyan family; Wallington Hall, Northumberland,
especially Lloyd Langley; and the Robinson Library, Newcastle University,
especially Geraldine Hunwick, Archivist and Special Collections Librarian, for
help with Trevelyan family archives and visual material and to the Trevelyan
Family Trustees for their permission to use this.
Thanks are due to Mark Outhwaite, great-grandson of Robert Leonard
Outhwaite, for help in respect of details of the Outhwaite family; and to Edward
Milligan, former Librarian of Friends House for his assistance, insights and
personal memories regarding Thomas Edmund Harvey.
I am grateful to David Kynaston for reading through the material and for his
helpful suggestions. I thank Sir Tam Dalyell, former Father of the House of
Commons for his interest over some years and for sharing family insight into Sir
Edward Grey.
Special thanks also are due to Colin Harris, Superintendent of Special
Collections at the Bodleian Library, Oxford, for his kind help over some years
regarding the Ponsonby Papers and other collections. In thanking him I thank the
many librarians and archivists who have made possible the researches on which
this book is based.
At Frontline/Pen and Sword I would like to thank Michael Leventhal, Kate
Baker his assistant, and their colleagues, for their support for this project and
their excellent work and guidance in bringing the book to publication.
Foreword
By Frederick Ponsonby,
4th Baron Ponsonby of Shulbrede
DUNCAN MARLOR’S ACCOUNT of the lead-up to the First World War tells the story
of the role of backbench MPs in the parliamentary debates that led up to war.
Arthur Ponsonby, my great-grandfather and at the time a Liberal backbencher,
led the fight for British neutrality. The book challenges the sense of inevitability
and unity of purpose which political leaders of the day, pro-interventionist
newspapers and many historians sought to present to subsequent generations. As
Duncan Marlor says, there was real drama in the parliamentary debates and
votes that set Britain on course for war.
In writing this foreword some 100 years later and with memories of
parliamentary debates on recent wars in my mind, it is interesting to try and
draw some comparisons. I shall limit myself to three.
The first is a question of the scale of the proposed wars: while in 1914 few
could have predicted the true horror of the war to come it was nevertheless true
that the British government and British people were ready to sustain losses far
higher than would ever be contemplated today. Senior officers and many MPs
would have fought a number of wars in their careers and while there had not
been a general war in Europe involving Britain since Napoleonic times, they
would have been steeped in the military history of large-scale European wars.
They would have considered that war was to protect British interests through its
empire and maintaining the balance of power in Europe. Contrast that with
today’s wars where the fight is not between nation states acting in alliance to