When we think of the things that affected public opinion during the First World War, the chances are that the first thing to come to mind is atrocity propaganda or the iconic 'Your country needs you' recruitment posters. In comparison, relatively little is known about the attempts to control the newspaper coverage of the War, nor about the heroic efforts of journalists to frustrate them.
When I came to writing a biography of the First World War newspaper correspondent Basil Clarke, I found it surprising, for example, that reporters who wanted to report from the Front had to risk being arrested to do so. Lord Kitchener, the man on those famous recruitment posters, had such a deep loathing for journalists that, when he was appointed Secretary of State for War at the start of the conflict, they were promptly banned from the war zone.
Instead, a Press Bureau was established at Charing Cross in London to keep newspapers supplied with war news. Not surprisingly, journalists were less than happy with not being able to report for themselves on what was one of the biggest news stories in history and the bureau became known by reporters as the “Suppress Bureau” for the way it proved better at censoring news than providing it.
The collective response from journalists was admirably defiant. Many simply ignored the ban and stayed near the Front anyway, sending their stories back to London. Basil Clarke was one of these journalists. He used subterfuge to get to Dunkirk and was one of the last two journalists in the war zone when he was finally forced to return home in January 1915.
His life in Dunkirk, like the lives of all those journalists who defied the ban, was hard. He spent as much energy avoiding the attention of officialdom as he did looking for news stories. Also, getting his articles back to his employers at the Daily Mail proved a constant struggle, while it was an existence that was not without danger. According to one of his fellow journalists, Kitchener “talked wildly” about having reporters shot, while another reporter was held under arrest for 10 days and warned that he would be put against a wall and shot if he dared to return to France.
Despite these difficulties, the three months Clarke spent as what he called a “journalistic outlaw” included some significant achievements. He was the first reporter into Ypres after the German destruction of it in November 1914; wrote a memorable description of the atmosphere in Dunkirk after the Allies finally gained the upper hand in the Battle of the Yser; and his report on the bloody fighting on Christmas Day, 1914, gave a very different account of the day than the stories of the Christmas Truce that have passed into history.
Eventually, Clarke’s luck ran out. He caught a boat back to England just hours before he was due to be arrested. All the other journalists in Flanders suffered broadly the same fate. But while their defiance was eventually overcome by the Government, in the final months of 1914 Clarke and his colleagues played an important role in ensuring the public had access to independent, if heavily censored, news. And in the long-term, newspapers won the argument about the role journalists should play in war. The Government finally relented following concerns that the only detailed war news the American public was hearing was from the German side and the first accredited reporters arrived in France in April 1915 and stayed there, more or less, for the rest of the War.
Clarke got the chance to see the other side of war reporting when he became one of these accredited reporters in late 1916. The experience was quite different from that of 1914, as he stayed in a chateau with the other journalists and had a driver to take him to report on stories.
But though he was as effusive in his praise for the ‘excellent press arrangements’ he enjoyed in 1916 as he had been critical of the decision to ban reporters in 1914, later in life it would be his days as a “journalistic outlaw” that he would look back on with special nostalgia. “Flanders seems afar now; its worries and discomforts all faded and remote,” he wrote 20 years later. “There remains supreme over all other things, that exulting thing, the quest for which made reporters of us and will continue throughout time to make reporters – that feeling of life lived; life sought out and faced; life hot, strong and undiluted; the Male animal’s conception of romance.”
From The Front Line: The Extraordinary Life of Sir Basil Clarke, is the first biography of Clarke. Richard Evans expertly portrays the life and character of this extraordinary man − a man who risked his life so that the public had independent news from the war and who became the father of the UK’s public relations industry.