Dead Sea fruit: Edmund Allenby, the First World War and the politics of personal loss

Abstract

On 28 April 1936, two weeks before his death, Field Marshal Lord Allenby delivered his last public address as the newly elected rector of Edinburgh University. ‘The glory of conquest is departing’, he urged Edinburgh’s students, ‘its gains are Dead Sea fruit.’ Allenby called for an international police force and a policy of collective security and international cooperation to prevent a second great war. This article argues that Allenby, a war hero who was popularly celebrated as the ‘conqueror of Palestine’ and ‘liberator of Jerusalem’, was changed irrevocably by the death of his only son on the Western Front in 1917 and the unstable world political situation in the inter-war period. His personal loss and world politics put him on a path towards a pacific and internationalist worldview, which was most clearly expressed from the unveiling of Belfast’s war memorial in 1929 onwards. Allenby’s political transformation came at a time when British society was becoming increasingly disillusioned with the war, and when his retirement and involvement with ex-servicemen groups made it impossible to dissociate himself from the memory of his only son’s death and the fear that another worldwide conflict would devastate Britain’s youth.

Keywords:

• Edmund Allenby
• First World War
• internationalism
• League of Nations
• mourning

Acknowledgements

Permission to use the Allenby papers was kindly granted by the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives.

Notes

1. Allenby, Allenby’s Last Message.

2. Manchester Guardian, April 29, 1936, 6.

3. Support for the British Union of Fascists often came from Conservative middle-to-upper-class Britons, the military and naval officer class, as well as Christian reactionaries and staunch Church of England members. Allenby loosely fit all three categories. See Linehan, British Fascism, 155–156.

4. For the difference between pacifism and pacificism in inter-war Britain, see Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain, 2–3. Veterans’ organizations closely aligned themselves with the disarmament movement in the inter-war period, see Davies, “International Veterans’ Organizations,” 187–206.

5. Ross McKibbon, Classes and Cultures, 73.

6. Savage, Allenby of Armageddon.

7. Wavell, Allenby, 5.

8. Gardner, Allenby, 261.

9. James, Imperial Warrior, 127.

10. Drinkwater, Sir Harold Nicolson; Lamb, Harold Laski; Markwell, John Maynard Keynes; Wilson, International Theory of Leonard Woolf; Trentmann, “After the Nation-State,” 34–54.

11. Sylvest, British Liberal Internationalism.

12. Holman, “World Police for World Peace,” 319.

13. Kingsley Kent, Aftershocks, 60; Ball, “Mosley and the Tories,” 445–459; Barr, Lion and the Poppy, 151–153.

14. Ball, Guardsmen.

15. McCarthy, British People and the League of Nations.

16. Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force at the Dardanelles, General Sir Ian Hamilton, died in 1947.

17. Hinsley, Nationalism, 141.

18. Laity, British Peace Movement; Johnson, Militarism and the British Left.

19. Douglas Haig also spent much of the 1920s talking about comradeship and loyalty to the empire. See Todman, “Sans peur et sans reproche,” 1098.

20. Jeppesen, “Making A Career in the British Empire,” 33.

21. ‘Speech Day’, The Haileyburian 539, no. 24 (1926), 541–543.

22. New York Herald Tribune, May 27, 1928, 14–15; Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire, 2. Allenby’s social Darwinist approach to international politics was not at all uncommon for his time or long before. Fears of racial degradation in Britain and war as a refining activity for the national body first emerged after the South African War of 1899–1902. See Wilkinson, “The Blessings of War,” 99.

23. The Times, December 4, 1928, 18.

24. The Times, December 15, 1928, 15.

25. Typescript text of speech by Allenby at Belfast World War One memorial, November 11, 1929, Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives (LHCMA), Allenby 3/3.

26. Allenby to Mabel, July 28, 1917, LHCMA, Allenby 1/8/7.

27. Allenby to Mabel, August 13, 1917, LHCMA, Allenby 1/8/19.

28. Allenby to Mabel, August 6, 1917, LHCMA, Allenby 1/8/8.

29. Allenby to Mabel, July 28, 1918, LHCMA, Allenby 1/8/7.

30. “Can Women Outlaw War?,” New York Herald Tribune, May 27, 1928, 14.

31. Wavell, Allenby, 171.

32. Allenby to Mother, August 31, 1917, LHCMA, Allenby 1/8/14.

33. Allenby to Mabel, August 26, 1917, LHCMA, Allenby 1/8/12. Coincidentally, the chaplain was killed in Flanders just days after Michael. The Tablet, April 13, 1918, 15.

34. The Larne Times and Weekly Telegraph, November 16, 1929, 5.

35. Watson, Fighting Different Wars, Chapters 5 and 6.

36. Paris, Warrior Nation, 153–184; Bracco, Merchants of Hope.

37. Gregory, Silence of Memory.

38. Daily Mirror, April 30, 1928, 6; Western Daily Press, November 9, 1931, 10.

39. Daily Mirror, June 18, 1926, 3; Daily Mirror, July 5, 1926, 13; Daily Mirror, November 4, 1927, 1; Manchester Guardian, April 25, 1927, 17; Manchester Guardian, May 9, 1927, 10; Manchester Guardian, May 11, 1929, 8; The Times, July 8, 1932, 11. Unfortunately, Allenby left no diary (if he ever wrote one) and correspondence material is sparse after 1922.

40. Edinburgh Evening News, November 19, 1931, 6.

41. Yorkshire Post, March 20, 1933, 6.

42. Allenby to Mabel, August 26, 1917, LHCMA, Allenby 1/8/12.

43. Allenby to Mabel, August 26, 1917, LHCMA, Allenby 1/8/12. Roper, Secret Battle, 219.

44. King, Memorials of the Great War, 220.

45. Winter, Remembering War.

46. Taylor, Bonar Law, 12; Lloyd George, War Memoirs, 428.

47. Quoted Davidson, Downing Street blues, 121.

48. Davidson, Downing Street Blues, 117–121.

49. Cannadine, “War and Death,” 216.

50. Hunt, Memory, War and Trauma, 149–152.

51. Allenby to Mabel, August 6, 1917, LHCMA, Allenby 1/8/8.

52. Roper, “Re-Remembering the Soldier Hero,” 184.

53. Allenby also acknowledged the threat that aerial bombing posed for civilians. He felt that any future war would result in massive civilian casualties. See Sunday Referee, April 13, 1930, 9.

54. The Observer, September 23, 1928, 19.

55. Manchester Guardian, October 13, 1930, 14.

56. Pugh, Liberal Internationalism, 169.

57. The Times, November 9, 1931, 9.

58. Lancashire Evening Post, November 11, 1931, 4.

59. King, Memorials of the Great War, 194, 202.

60. Daily Mirror, November 13, 1931, 1.

61. Daily Mirror, November 16, 1931, 4.

62. Horne, “Beyond Cultures of Victory,” 207–208.

63. Allenby Speech at Portmadoc, August 27, 1932, LHCMA, Allenby 3/4.

64. Observer, July 14, 1935, 19.

65. Laity, British Peace Movement, 217–218.

66. Barr, Lion and the Poppy, 153.

67. Barr, Lion and the Poppy, 168–71.

68. Observer, September 18, 1932, 19.

69. Few letters between Allenby and Hamilton survive. Those that do are short telegrams sent around the time of Allenby’s rectorial appointment.

70. Jeffrey, British Army and the Crisis of Empire.

71. Robbins, Abolition, 213–216.

72. Observer, July 22, 1934, 16.

73. Observer, June 23, 1935, 25.

74. Unknown to Archibald Wavell, May 1940, Middle East Centre Archives, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford, Allenby 2/2, DS.43.64.

75. Original emphasis. Allenby Speech to YMCA, Jerusalem, April 1933, LHCMA, Allenby 3/5.

76. Allenby, Allenby’s Last Message.

77. Morning Post, May 15, 1936, 12; Manchester Guardian, May 15, 1936, 5; Daily Express, May 15, 1936, 5.

78. See Mulligan, Great War for Peace and Cabanes, Great War and the Origins of Humanitarianism.