Myths and Legends of the Second World War by James Hayward Read Free Book Online Page A

breaking blackout regulations. Gray was fined, but Lawrence was ordered to leave Cornwall within three days, to avoid living in any prohibited area, and to report to the police whenever he moved. Lawrence recorded his feelings on the train journey back to London as he sat ‘feeling that he had been killed; perfectly still and pale, in a kind of after-death’.
    On at least one occasion persecution of this kind led to tragedy. In the Suffolk village of Henham, near Beccles, a schoolmaster was suspected of being a German agent, apparently because some years earlier a German friend of his son had stayed at the family house. Although the teacher had been born in Devon and lived a blameless existence in Suffolk for thirty years, the rumours persisted until he was ordered by the police to leave the parish, on the basis that the presence of ‘suspicious persons’ in coastal areas could not be tolerated under DORA. The threat of expulsion weighed so heavily on his mind that the man took his own life shortly before he was due to leave. In the view of Lord Stradbroke, the main landowner in the area, the locals had, by spreading untruths, killed their victim just as surely as if ‘they had drawn the knife across his throat with their cowardly fingers’. His innocence was posthumously established.
    The military were not immune, as Thomson records in Queer People :
    Near Woolwich a large house belonging to a naturalized foreigner attracted the attention of a non-commissioned officer, who began to fill the ears of his superiors with wonderful stories of lights, or signalling apparatus discovered in the grounds, and of chasing spies along railway tracks in the best American film manner, until even his general believed in him. Acting on my advice the owner wisely offered his house as a hospital, and the ghost was laid.
    Sometimes the disease would attack public officials, who had to be handled sympathetically. One very worthy gentleman used to embarrass his colleagues by bringing in stories almost daily of suspicious persons who had been seen in every part of the country. All of them were German spies, and the local authorities would do nothing. In order to calm him they invented a mythical personage named ‘von Burstorph’, and whenever he brought them a fresh case they would say, ‘So von Burstorph has got to Arran,’ or to Carlisle, or wherever the locality might be. He was assured that the whole forces of the realm were on the heels of von Burstorph, and that when he was caught he would suffer the extreme penalty in the Tower. That sent him away quite happy since he knew that the authorities were doing something.
    Perhaps the most ludicrous spy myths were the broadly conspiratorial type which held that numerous royals, peers, financiers and magnates had been imprisoned in the Tower of London on charges of treason, and even shot. Probably the first such report concerned the Crown Prince, Louis of Battenberg, who was Austrian by birth, but generally supposed to be of German origin. Mountbatten had been appointed First Sea Lord in 1912 after a distinguished career in the navy, but resigned in October 1914 following a spiteful campaign led by a London evening paper, the Globe , which hinted darkly that the navy was not playing its expected role in the war. According to Horatio Bottomley in John Bull :
    Blood is said to be thicker than water; and we doubt whether all the water in the North Sea would obliterate the ties between the Battenbergs and the Hohenzollerns when it comes to a life and death struggle between Germany and ourselves.
    Mountbatten nevertheless managed to find some black humour in the fact that he was reported to have been shot at dawn, and no doubt took some comfort in being sworn to the Privy Council by the King. Famously, in 1917 the Royal Family would substitute the name Windsor for Saxe-Coburg.
    An equally fantastical report from a newspaper in Pittsburgh in January 1916 held that