ARTHUR MEE AND THE STRENGTH OF BRITAIN
by Maisie Robson
ISBN 978-0-9542318-4-2 (2006) A5 pbk., 64pp. £2.00 Distributed on behalf of the Eynsford Hill Press
When intemperance is growing, Stop the tap! If through barrels ever flowing, All the nation's strength is going, Stop the tap!
If you would exalt the nation Stop the tap! Raise the low from degradation, Take away the strong temptation, Stop the tap!
In the dark days of the Great War, these Temperance sentiments (courtesy of the Band of Hope) struck a chord with Arthur Mee, champion of the Empire, Journalist in Chief to British Youth, and doughty Temperance campaigner.
Although raised in extreme poverty in Victorian Nottingham, Arthur was blessed with staunch Nonconformist parents and took to his heart the principles of the Baptist church which formed the basis of his education. He remained faithful to these principles when he became internationally famous as a journalist; and in the crisis of the First World War, he used his influence to found the Strength of Britain Campaign which is the subject of this latest book from the King's England Press.
The Temperance Movement was one of the most striking political engines of the Victorian Age, spawning a whole industry focussed on Temperance hymn books, novels, plays, pledge cards, hotels and hospitals, lecture tours and summer schools. Drink was scorned as "the devil in solution" and an Irish campaigner, Father Mathew, described public houses as "these pestiferous erections"! Many Nonconformist Christians attained their first taste of public speaking and political responsibility in organising this massive campaign.
Arthur Mee counted no less a figure than David Lloyd George among fellow Temperance campaigners, and Lloyd George's commitment to the cause gave heart to many "water drinkers" during the 1914-18 conflict. At a political meeting in Bangor, one Sunday afternoon in February 1915, Lloyd George warned that "drink is doing more damage in this war than all the German submarines put together". By October of the same year, he was expressing himself even more violently: "We are fighting Germany, Austria and Drink, and as far as I can see, the greatest of these deadly foes is Drink."
King George V, ever mindful of his duty in time of war, indicated that he would abstain from alcohol for the duration of the way if this was deemed necessary in the national interest. Lloyd George magicked this conditional assent into a positive statement that the King was a teetotaller, God bless him, and that the country would do well to follow suit. The King's decision was given wide publicity and was eagerly celebrated by the Temperance movement, as the pages of Arthur Mee and the Strength of Britain clearly demonstrate.
Fortified by his friends and many powerful figures in the land, Arthur launched the Strength of Britain Movement at the Hotel Cecil in June 1916. A "Memorial", or petition, was signed by 2448 men and women of influence and delivered to the Prime Minister in Downing Street on 5 April 1917. Arthur turned himself into a one-man Temperance pamphlet factory, working from his beautiful hilltop home in Eynsford Hill, Kent, and the introductory volume Defeat? (later reissued as Defeat or Victory?) was swiftly followed by The Fiddlers and The Parasite. Hundreds of thousands of these pamphlets were sold, although they were considered so inflammatory that they were banned in Australia and South Africa, and simply owning a copy in Canada was an offence punishable by five years in jail.
Among the Memorial's signatories was Lloyd George's own wife, which must have given him pause, and for modern readers, the ambiguous position of women is one of the more intriguing themes revealed in Arthur's pamphlets. Although he strongly approved of the war work undertaken by patriotic British women in munitions factories, other contemporary writers were alarmed at this development and felt that women earning money outside the home would lead to sin - and drunkenness. The vicar of fashionable All Saints Church even suggested that the Great War was itself God's punishment on a nation that let decent women go out to work. Nor were the middle classes best pleased by the granting of generous "separation allowances" to soldiers' wives, believing they were all too prone to spend these grants on beer, not baby clothes.
Arthur, however, is compassionate in his accounts of the trials of working class women - his own mother raised ten children - as indeed he is understanding about the horrors to which teenage boys were being exposed in the trenches of Flanders. Arthur had reported from France as a journalist: he'd been there and wrote of what he knew. England's "little people" were, as always, bravely doing their best under very trying circumstances. It was the bloated beer barons, some of whom held seats in the House of Lords, that Arthur Mee had in his sights. Ordinary people, trying to rub along on very few shillings, were having their pockets picked, their health destroyed and their morals corrupted by greedy men a hundred times worse than our ostensible enemies, the Germans.
Ninety years after the outbreak of the Great War, it is well to consider the fate and the sufferings of the British civilians who silently endured it. This selection of Arthur's contemporary writings, edited by Maisie Robson plunges us back into those terrible days and tells the truth about the war as seen from the kitchen sink, the munitions factory, the humble clothes line and the market stall. Arthur Mee's fight against the drink trade was one of the strangest battles of that terrible conflict, and these contemporary documents are a moving testimony to his integrity, patriotism and love of the common people.
Now read about Maisie Robson's other books:
Family Fables: how to write and publish your family's story
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