by
Les May
I
was brought up to believe that World War One, known until 1939 as
the Great War, started in August 1914 and ended on 11 November 1918.
It didn’t, it ended on 28 June 1919 when the peace treaty was
signed. The 1918 date refers to when an armistice was signed and the
warring armies ceased shooting at each other.
This
is not me being pedantic, it matters because the difference between
the two date embraces a period when things happened which brings no
credit to the British state and the politicians of the time.
At
the battle of Jutland in 1916 the German High Seas Fleet came off
rather better than the British ships sent to intercept it. But the
Kaiser was in no mood to risk his favourite toy in another encounter,
so effectively ‘Britannia Ruled the Waves’
and the naval blockade of Germany, which had been in place since
1915, continued. Unable to produce enough food and no longer able to
import it, Germans slowly starved as their daily intake fell to less
than 1600 calories in 1916/17. Food, or lack of it, had become a
weapon of war.
The
Armistice required the German’s to hand over to Britain and France
their navy and their weapons, which they did. With Germany
effectively neutralised one might have expected that the British and
French would agree to the German request that the naval blockade be
lifted. They refused. Even after fighting stopped, the British
government continued to blockade German ports, creating the
conditions for famine. The
economic blockade of the Central Powers was to continue until a peace
treaty was signed.
One
woman who thought this was wrong was Eglantyne
Jebb.
She
had leaflets printed showing the effect of the continuing blockade on
children in Austria and Germany. One of these showed an Austrian
child two and a half years old. It weighed 12 pounds 2 ounces. It
should have weighed 16
pounds
more.
Another
showed two children looking like the images we associate with the
liberation of Belsen in 1945. In
her poster Eglantine asked ‘What
does Britain stand for? Starving Babies; Torturing Women; Killing the
Old?.’
When
she put
up her poster and handed
out her
leaflets she was arrested under the Defence of the Realm
Act. At her trial she conducted her own defence. The Crown
Prosecutor, Sir Archibald Bodkin did not spare his condemnation of
her; she was found guilty and fined £5. Before
the court was cleared Bodkin went over to her and pressed a £5 note
into her hand. Next day the story was on the front page of the Daily
Herald
complete with pictures of the offending leaflets and the poster. She
may have lost the case but she had scored a moral victory.
Not
everyone saw it like that. At a meeting held in the Albert Hall many
of the audience arrived with rotten fruit and vegetables to throw at
the ‘traitor’ who wanted to give succour to 'the enemy’. It
did not happen. Eglantyne
asked ‘Surely
it is impossible for us, as normal human beings, to watch children
starve to death without making an effort to save them’.
The
crowd turned out to be ‘normal human beings’ and a spontaneous
collection
was taken. It
was enough for Eglantyne and her sister to invest in a herd of dairy
cows to provide a sustainable source of nutrition to the children of
Vienna.
Today
we routinely see nations using the tactic of a blockade to enforce
their will on others. Ironically Eglantyne
Jebb went on to found the organisation ‘Save
the Children’
which
runs the Health Facility in the
Yemeni port city of Hodeidah which
came under attack a few days ago. Yemen of course is blockaded by
the Saudi and United
Arab Emirate
forces, and is a country where millions are in danger of famine.
Save
the Children are also
active in Gaza
another place which
is blockaded.
The continued blockade of German
ports after the Armistice in November 1918 is not one of the most
glorious events in our history. But who are we to judge? A
hundred years on
Eglantyne Jebb’s
rhetorical question,
‘What does
Britain stand for? Starving Babies; Torturing Women; Killing the
Old?’,
still
lacks a convincing answer.
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