Languages and the First World War

Languages and the First World War
The British Library & University of Antwerp
International Conference, 18-19-20 June 2014

The centenary of the outbreak of the First World War coincides with the fading of direct memory of the period. Few can remember the linguistic experience of wartime in the speech of those directly or indirectly involved, but the linguistic traces of combat and civilian life, in and out of war zones, remain.

The term ‘no man’s land’, for instance, came into general use in English during the First World War, referring to inhabitable areas that saw the fiercest of the fighting between the two sides of the conflict; the use of the term, many centuries earlier referring to an isolated patch of land outside the City of London, is indicative of a pattern of language-change produced by the war – by 1920 ‘Niemandsland’ was a widely used term in German. In the varied theatres of war, the home fronts, training camps, war offices, hospitals and supply trains, language shifts happened, in which the dialects and languages of the various parties involved influenced one another, and in which new language and new language use emerged through new technologies of destruction and communication.

The idea for a conference on the linguistic experience and legacy languages.fww@outlook.comof the war arose from research into the sociolinguistics of the war (especially the Western Front) and the immediate post-war period in the UK, particularly with reference to how terms had crossed linguistic boundaries, including between hostile linguistic groups.  The conference aims to be truly international and interdisciplinary.
The conference will take place on 18, 19 & 20 June 2014.

The University of Antwerp will host the first day, and the British Library will host the third. The interim day will be for travel between the two sites, with a possible visit to In Flanders Fields Museum at Ypres arranged for the morning of 19 June. There will be a book launch and public lecture at the British Library on the evening of 19 June. Eurostar travel between the two Brussels and London only takes two hours.

Abstracts of 300 words need to be sent to languages.fww@outlook.com by 1 December 2013, 4pm.

Notification of acceptance will be sent on 20th January 2014.

Papers may be given in languages other than English, with synopses available in English.

More information through the British Library.

First World War Centenary Series at Flanders House London

Successful launch event for First World War Centenary Series at Flanders House London

 

On 14 May, the Centenary Series at Flanders House were launched. In the up and coming period of First World War commemorations, Flanders House wants to act as a “Centenary Hub” in London, a base where WWI-related activities are organised (diplomatic, academic, economic, cultural, tourist,…), information is circulated and networking takes place on a regular basis.

 

The launch event was set up in partnership with Visit Flanders. It featured presentations of the Representative of the Government of Flanders as well as the Director of Visit Flanders. Additional speakers were Erwin Mortier who talked about the GoneWest programme, Christophe Declercq who discussed the topic of Belgian refugees in the United Kingdom during the war and Annelies Beck who read excerpts from her book Across The Channel, about a Belgian refugee in Glasgow. To conclude Paul Rans talked about the Passchendaele Peace Concerts and sang a song from these concerts a cappella. The programme itself was presented by Lieven Vandenhaute of VRT.

 

A calendar with all our events is soon to be published on our website, starting in September with a first event. During the next four years several other events in this First World War Centenary Series will take place at Flanders House.

Belgian Refugee Workers and WW1

In 1917, the Comité Officiel Belge pour l’Angleterre, overseeing more than 250,000 Belgian refugees in Britain, published a report on 3 years in exile during the First World War. The document is the only one which details the British factories employing Belgian workers and the Belgian factories owned and run by Belgians in Britain.

With a work force of about 60,000 men, it should come as no surprise that the Belgians in Britain contributed heavily to the war industry. Vickers in Barrow-in-Furness employed 5,800 Belgians, Jackson in Salisbury nearly 2,000 and Armstrong Whitworth in Gateshead and Glasgow together another 1,400.

The website ‘Médecins de la Grande Guerre’ covers a lot of ground about these Belgian labourers and Belgian labour colonies in Britain, including as well places such as the Pelabon factory in Richmond (what subsequently became the Ice Rink) and Kryn&Lahy in Letchworth.

The seminar will provide both a generic historical background to the story of the Belgian labourers in Britain, using documents of the time, and a more detailed look into how they related to which home front (British, Belgian, Belgian in Britain).

Date: 16 May 2013
Time: 16:00 - 17:00
Location: Imperial College London

Venue: S303A Sherfield Level 3
Campus: South Kensington Campus

Speaker: Mr Christophe Declercq
Audience: Open to all
Event type: Seminar
Ticket:    Drop in

Contact: Jacqueline Twitchett

Belgian Refugee Workers and the Home Front in Britain during World War 1

Belgian Refugee Workers
and the Home Front in Britain during World War 1

Date: 16 May 2013
Time: 16:00 - 17:30
Location: Imperial College London
 
Venue: S303A Sherfield Level 3
Campus:    South Kensington Campus
 
Speaker: Mr Christophe Declercq
Audience: Open to all
Event type: Seminar
Ticket:    Drop in
 
Contact: Jacqueline Twitchett

Belgian Nobel Prize winner and Belgian refugee ends his life at 95

Two days ago, Christian De Duve, aged 95, ended his life. Christian De Duve was born in Thames Ditton on 2 October 1917.

The son of Belgian refugees spent the first few years of his life in the area between SW London and Surrey. The family returned to Belgium in 1920, which is slightly peculiar as there had been a government-funded organised return of the Belgians from mid December 1918 until mid March 1919 (with an official end to the repatriation on 4 May 1919).

Together with Albert Claude and George E. Palade, he was awarded a shared Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1974. The team discovered the functioning of lysosomes and peroxisomes in cell structures.

On 1 April 2013, Christian had fallen and it had taken him hours before he managed to get any help. In an interview a week later he announced he would terminate his life himself soon. He did so on 4 May. With De Duve arguably the most renowned Belgian refugee still alive died.

Since 1988 De Duve was a member of the Royal Society. Here he talks about his parents, Antwerp and his birthplace.

21 April: verhalendag

Vredescentrum goes 14-18: Verhalendag op 21 april 2013: Breng uw familieherinneringen over Wereldoorlog I binnen, http://tinyurl.com/brjpjtl

In aanloop naar de herdenking 100 jaar Groote Oorlog lanceert het Vredescentrum, coördinator van het stadsbrede herdenkingsprogramma Antwerpen '14-'18, een Verhalendag.
Op Erfgoeddag is iedereen welkom om verhalen en anekdotes over de Groote Oorlog op te laten tekenen en foto's, brieven en voorwerpen te laten digitaliseren. Alle verhalen worden opgenomen in de internationale databank van Europeana, een project van Oxford University. Zo bouwen we mee aan het collectieve geheugen over de Eerste Wereldoorlog.

Identity cards in Britain - an early Belgian start

The continuous issue of identity cards for the British population has been foreshadowed by a similar debate during the First World War. Then "the National Registration Act of 1915 provided for a register of all men and women between 15 and 65, later used to aid conscription.  The National Register was produced by Bernard Mallet, the Registrar General of England and Wales." Mallet was the President of the Royal Statistical Society in 1916-1918 (and succeeded by Herbert Samuel). In the capacity of President of the RSS, Mallet helped publish findings on the Register of Belgian Refugees by the statistician T.T.S. de Jastrzebski.

The information demands of the war also provided an opportunity for Mallet to press forward his pre-war agenda of reforming the system of routine registration of births, marriages and deaths. His desire for reform was shaped by the pressing eugenic questions of the day - infant mortality and national efficiency - and as the war progressed, he developed his ideas to include a permanent universal register of all individuals."

Rosemary Elliot's 2008 article An early experiment in national identity cards: the battle over registration in the First World War examines "the fate of Mallet’s proposals, and shows how lack of political consensus and lack of support, even from colleagues in the General Register Office for Scotland, prevented his proposals coming to fruition."

"The General Register Office (GRO) in England and Wales, and the General Register Office in Scotland (GROS), were set up in 1837 and 1854 respectively to provide the apparatus for obtaining the vital statistics of the population. During the First World War, the administrative machinery of the two register offices was adapted for the war effort, collecting, coding and circulating information on men and women of military age in the National Register. The office also responded to requests for information on the births, marriages and deaths of Belgian refugees from the Belgian authorities, and provided details of interned Germans dying on British soil to the German government. [...]

Mallet rejected the idea of a separate numbered index to the register because of the labour involved and the possible loss of forms and duplication. This appears to be the result of lessons learnt from the creation of the Central Register of Belgian Refugees, which the GRO had set up at the request of the president of the Local Government Board in late 1914. This register was intended to ascertain numbers and particulars of the refugees and to allow them to be traced (ostensibly by family and friends, although searches in the register were also made by foreign committees, the police and the British and Belgian military authorities).

The Central Register of Belgians held records of some 225 000 people on a central card index and was beset by problems of duplication and erroneous records, as people registered more than once or failed to give adequate details. Stevenson had also set up a second parallel card index of Belgian refugees, coded and classified by occupation as in the 1911 census. This was supposed to be kept up-to-date through information from the labour Exchange, a plan which proved unsuccessful. This unsatisfactory experience may have had some bearing on the decision to make notification of change of address for the National Register a personal responsibility, not the employer’s."

More through 20th Century History online

Trench Talk, Words of the First World War

Trench Talk, Words of the First World War  is a richly documented book by military historian Peter Doyle and etymologyst-artist Julian Walker, published by Spellmount (Stroud, 2012). The publication details the terms that have originated from WWI (binge, bloke, guff, fed up, snapshot…) have found their way through military slang into everyday conversation.

“Fought on three continents, the war saw 14 million killed and 34 million wounded. Its impact shaped the world we live in today, and the language of the trenches continues to live in the modern consciousness.”

Belgian refugees and related entries feature in the book, not least because of Julian Walker’s affiliation to Valentines Mansion in Ilford. This is the playground as well where Pat Heron used to work, before she sadly passed away in the Autumn of 2011. Pat's website is still online and her publication on Belgians in Ilford, ‘Guests of the Nation’, is still available.

Belgian attitudes towards the German Kaiser, or the Big Willie, were “typified by the actions of a group of Belgian refugees in Ilford, East London: they rounded off their Christmas in 1914 with a performance described in the Ilford Guardian as ‘Making the funeral with the Kaiser from Germany’ (p.23).

During WWI "flag days became associated with the giving of small paper flags on pins in return for charitable donations", such as the Belgian Relief Fund. (p.70)

However, not only does Trench Talk contain entries in which Belgian refugees play an important part, references to Belgium abound (p. 16 ‘children in Belgium and France live in an atmosphere of Tommy’s slang’, p. 17 ‘A Word of Words’, p.22 the ‘Scrap of Paper’, p. 24 on Atrocity…).

You can find reviews of the book through

The Guardian,  twice even, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Sun, 

The Business Standard, India Vision, Army Rumour Service and Bright Knowledge.

In the Linkedin group ‘EFL - English as a Foreign Language’, a discussion group looks into WW1’s Effects on the English Language. Another similar thread can be found and Trench Talk is included in ESL lessons on NewsFlashEnglish too. 

Trench Talk, which made the Foreign Office MinisterialReading List 2012, is listed in the bibliography held by the Internation Society of First World War Studies (University of Birmingham), category 2 – general. 

Julian Walker has a website. You can follow Prof. Peter Doyle on Twitter too.

A typical look into Belgians, locally

In the past many weeks and months, we’ve had literally dozens of requests for information, more often than not for family history reasons. However, given the sheer numbers of Belgian refugees, that is simply not feasible. Below you can find a reply to someone from Rutland asking about general information on Belgian refugees in the area. The reply is very representative of what has been sent to other people. And if you hadn't had a reply yet, please reiterate your request.

“I'll try and reply to your request to the best of our abilities. The main problem in looking into the Belgians in Britain during WWI is the fact that much of the archive material

• has been destroyed after the war
• is scattered across various institutions in Britain and Belgium (some of it even ended up in the US)
• is not properly archived yet (such as a vast set of registration cards at the Royal Archives in Brussels, only discovered little over a year ago)

As such there is no amalgamated catalogue of what is stored where and contains which kind of information. To that end I'm afraid that for now, what is described below is what I can offer you.

The first way of looking into this is the local newspapers at your local library or local archives (http://www.leics.gov.uk/record_office.htm) . These often have the most complete information on who was sitting on which committee where and not unusually include the names of people too. Visiting the Mercury archives (http://www.stamfordmercury.co.uk/community/the-mercury/mercury-archives) will already answer many queries.

Another way of accessing newspaper archives can be done online, via the British Library Newspaper archive online, http://www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/. Slightly less local are the national dailies, most archives can be accessed through your local libary. Especially The Times is very useful in this respect.

The Imperial WarMuseum holds many archive material on Belgian refugees through the Women's Work Collection, some of which is uncovered through www.1914.org. They do hold a few things on Ketton and Stamford.

The Ketton plaque refers to the names of Kieckens and Verbeeck and their family (from Aalst / Alost), is it not? Through the National Archives in Kew, it might be possible to retrieve registration cards for those people, provide they are included: about 165,000 people are recorded in the MH8 series, whereas about another 100,000 came to Britain. The plaque also mentions the honorary secretary of the Belgian refugees committee at Ketton, Miss M.E. Molesworth.

The Albertina library in Brussels allows you to run a keyword search on digitized newspapers from the time, most importantly L'Indépendance Belge, a newspaper published in exile.

As you probably know, there has been reference to the Royal carriages in the Rutland Record issue nr. 15, http://www.rutlandhistory.org/rutlandrecord/rrindex11-20.pdf. I'm also certain that Katherine Storr's book 'Belgian Refugees in Lincolnshire and Hull, 1914-1919' includes many relevant references to the Rutland area.

Research on Belgian refugees

Despite the hundreds of publications with substantially relevant sections and the tons of references in newspapers, local and national ones but also those published in exile, the story of the roughly 250,000 Belgians in Britain has been overlooked for a long time. Surely the nearing Centenary is triggering a plethora of events, activities, research (both professional and personal/family) but in the end it remains difficult to gauge the credit due to Peter Cahalan.

Peter Cahalan is an Australian who studied at McMaster, Hamilton, Canada when he discovered a niche in history that would suit his PhD thesis well. Under the supervision of Dr. R.A. Rempel, Cahalan graduated in December 1977 with "The Treatment of Belgian Refugees in England During the Great War". This PhD thesis can be downloaded from McMaster Digital Commons, expect a 24MB file.

In 1982, Garland Publishing (New York) published a book of his thesis. You can access "Belgian refugee relief in England during the Great War" through Google Books, but only for searching purposes.


Peter Cahalan now works in Australia, keeping a focus on a historical approach in tourism.

Other PhD theses, available through McMaster Commons too, supervised by Rempel, himself keen on Bertrand Russell, and arguably of interest to people with a passion for WWI are:

• Demons and domesticity: A history of women and the London gas industry, 1889--1939
• The Women of Red Clydeside: Women Munitions Workers in the West of Scotland during the First World War

The latter will bring us on a post on Katherine Storr soon.

Herbert Samuel: from the slums of Whitechapel to Palestine via destitute Belgians

As a chancellor for the duchy of Lancaster in 1909-10 and 1915-16 (for the latter preceded by Winston Churchill), Herbert Samuel (1870-1963) was one of the first Jewish members of the British cabinet. He put forward the idea of establishing a British Protectorate over Palestine in 1915 and his ideas influenced the Balfour Declaration and is arguably most renowned for being the first British high commissioner for Palestine (1920–25), when he greatly improved the economy of the region (and therefore supporting increasing harmony among the religious communities).

Early career

While at Oxford (Balliol College), Samuel took an active part in university Liberal activity and joined George Bernard Shaw and others at weekends on the Oxfordshire countryside to unionize agricultural labourers. During the 1890s Samuel developed the radical Liberal outlook to which he clung for the rest of his life. Greatly influenced by the progressive social ideas of Graham Wallas and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, he wrote some Fabian pamphlets and joined J. Ramsay MacDonald, J. A. Hobson, Charles Trevelyan (his closest friend), and others in a radical discussion group, the Rainbow Circle. This sought to define a ‘new Liberalism’ (the title of a paper read by Samuel to the circle in November 1895) with a reformist and interventionist social agenda. In 1902, Samuel produced a comprehensive formulation of his political philosophy, Liberalism: its Principles and Proposals, in which he provided an intellectual foundation for many of the social reforms subsequently enacted by the Liberal governments after 1905.

Samuel had been a social worker in the slums of Whitechapel before he was elected to the House of Commons as a Liberal in 1902. A moderate supporter of the South African War, Samuel had visited Uganda in 1902 and developed a special expertise in African affairs. As a back-bencher over the next three years he attacked the inhuman regime of Leopold of the Belgians in the Congo, endorsing the charges of the former British consul there, Roger Casement, whom he called (to his later embarrassment) ‘a gentleman of the highest standing and reliability’ (Wasserstein, 1992:73). As Under-Secretary to the Home Office (1905–09), Samuel was responsible for legislation that established juvenile courts and the “Borstal” system of detention and training for youthful offenders. 

Twice Postmaster General (1910–14, 1915–16), he recognized the postal trade unions and nationalized the telephone services. As Postmaster-General, the responsible minister, he was mired in the Marconi scandal of 1912-13 (Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chesterton accused Samuel, David Lloyd George and Rufus Isaacs of corruption). Other unfounded accusations, with an anti-Semitic edge, were also made at this time against Samuel and his cousin, Edwin Montagu (q.v.), a junior minister at the India Office. In January 1916, Samuel became Home Secretary in Herbert H. Asquith’s coalition ministry. In the political crisis of December 1916 Samuel was a consistent supporter of Asquith—and paid the price in self-exclusion from office under Lloyd George. At the general election of 1918, he was opposed for the first time by a Labour candidate and as a result lost his seat to a coalition Unionist.

President of the Local Government Board

In February 1914, Samuel was moved to the presidency of the Local Government Board, a post that afforded little room for legislative radicalism. In the crisis of July 1914 he was a moderate member of the war party in cabinet and in this capacity devised the formula on 2 August that became the basis for British entry to the European war two days later. At the Local Government Board, his ambitious plans for slum clearance and urban planning, announced in a speech delivered in Sheffield in May 1914, were frustrated by the outbreak of war (on the peace wing of the party, he nevertheless supported the war when Germany infringed Belgian neutrality). He did, however, launch a major expansion of maternity and child welfare centers. His social radicalism did not extend to women’s suffrage, on which he took a cautious line, although it was on Samuel's motion that women were given the right to stand for election to Parliament in 1918. 

As president of the Local Government Board (1914-1915), Samuel was responsible for overseeing the reception of Belgian refugees and the centrally organized distress relief efforts that came with the influx in Britain of over a quarter of million of Belgians. The presidency of the Local Government Board (LGB), which had taken over supervisory functions from the Board of Trade and the Home Office, was a ministerial post, often a Cabinet position. The post was abolished in 1919, with most duties transferred to the Minister of Health. 

The Local Government Board consisted of 11 members. Presided by Samuel, other members were

-         Augustin Birrell, the Liberal MP who had been the president of the Board of Education (1905-07, he was succeeded by Reginal McKenna MP) and who was Chief Secretary for Ireland at that time. Birrell had succeeded James Bryce, notorious for the Bryce report on German atrocities in Belgium (the ‘weapons of mass destruction’ avant-la-lettre), in that position.

-         Thomas McKinnon Wood, the Liberal MP who was Secretary for Scotland at that time (1912-1916). Prior to that position, McKinnon Wood was the Financial Secretary of the Treasury. There he was succeeded by C.F.G. Masterman.

-         Charles Frederick Gurney Masterman – who associated chiefly with members of the liberal and progressive school of thought while at Cambridge, including Trevelyan, Samuel’s best friend – was a Liberal MP who lost his seat in 1914. When the First World War began, he served as head of the British War Propaganda Bureau (WPB), set up at Wellington House, London. The sole aim of the WPB was to provide support for Britain through the manipulation of information about the Central Powers. In this role, he recruited writers (such as John Buchan, H. G. Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle) and painters (e.g., Francis Dodd, Paul Nash) to support the war effort. Drawing on an extensive network of the most important and influential figures in the London arts scene, Masterman devised the most comprehensive arts patronage schemes ever to be supported in the country. By June 1915 more than 2 million books and other publications in seventeen languages had been published, almost entirely without the readers' knowledge that these were sponsored by the British government. Eventually subsumed into John Buchan’s Department of Information, and in 1918, Lord Beaverbrook’s even grander Ministry of Information, it became a template for the war art scheme in the Second World War. Masterman also played a crucial role in publicising reports of the Armenian Genocide (Lord Bryce again). For his role in this, Masterman has been the target of repeated Turkish allegations that he fabricated, or at least embellished, the events for propaganda purposes.

-         Walter H. Long was a Conservative MP. He succeeded Herbert Samuel as president of the LGB in 1915 and was succeeded himself in 1916 by William Hayes Fisher, a former secretary to Arthur Balfour another Conservative MP. In 1916, Walter Long on his turn succeeded Andrew Bonar Law as the Secretary of State for the Colonies. In 1919 Long became First Lord of the Admiralty.

-         Ramsay McDonald, the first ever Labour Prime Minister of Britain, was an MP for Leicester at that time and Treasurer of the Labour Party. Sidney Webb, a member of the first Labour government in 1924, sat on one of the subcommittees of the LGB.

-         Wedgwood Benn was a Liberal MP (he became Labour later on) who soon after the war started left the LGB and served with the Royal Naval Air Service.

The Belgian refugees

From 1902 until 1961, Hansard recorded 10734 contributions by Herbert Samuel. His first contribution recorded since the First World War had started concerned relief of distress (28 August 1914), mainly for British people out of work because of the circumstances. The first speech of the president of the Local Government Board on Belgian refugees concerned a note on 31 August about the health of the Belgians arriving in Folkestone, at that time in small numbers still. Samuel was also instrumental in streamlining the funding for charities and how these initiatives related to the Prince of Wales Fund and the Local Government Board (September 1914)

On 14 September 1914 J.D. Rees MP asked Samuel “whether an index can be made and kept up containing the names of the Belgian guests of the nation in order that they may be the more easily traced by their compatriots in this country?”. Herbert Samuel confirmed that a “record as complete as practicable is being kept of all persons for whom accommodation is provided”. 

However much the war had been going on for six weeks already, the measures in places for registering the Belgians became inadequate around the time of Samuel’s statement in Parliament. The influx simply was too big to comprise, the points of entry too numerous. The inaccuracies in registration upon arrival must have been what was on Rees’s mind as he continued to ask Samuel “if a careful scrutiny is made lest enemies might come in under the guise of Belgians?”, to which Samuel confirmed, albeit briefly. (Hansard, 14 September 1914)

Further intricacies of the reception of the Belgians burdened the president of the LGB even more. Mr. Bathurst MP asked “whether male Belgian refugees are available for employment, either permanently or during the period of the War, as agricultural workers; whether they include any Protestants; and, if not, whether Roman Catholics will accept employment in districts where the services of a Roman Catholic priest are not available?”. Samuel’s answer perhaps was another proof of not entirely reading the scale of the Belgian immigration well: “The Government cannot anticipate that none of the Belgian refugees in this country will obtain agricultural occupation, but, in view of the state of the labour market in this country, they do not contemplate taking any steps, unless the circumstances are exceptional, for providing them with employment. I have not sufficient information to enable me to answer the latter part of the question.” (Hansard, 17 September 1914)

After the fall of Antwerp first and of Ostend a few days later (10 and 15 October respectively), the Belgian refugees no longer came from what had become occupied Belgium, but via the Netherlands and France. Through the LGB and the War Refugees Committee hospitality was extended to those Belgians as well, especially those in the Netherlands. Mr. Goulding MP asked “whether, in view of the number of offers of hospitality at the disposal of the War Refugees' Committee, the proper authorities would be prepared to give facilities for bringing over to this country a further number of the destitute Belgian refugees at present in Zeeland and Brabant, for whom adequate provision cannot, in view of their numbers, be made?”, to which Samuel confirmed that arrangements were being made. (Hansard 23 November 1914).

The issue of able men among the destitute Belgian did not become a political problem. Only in early February 1915 did Mr. Thorne MP asked “what the Government are doing in regard to Belgian refugees of military age?”. Samuel was rapid in shrugging off the issue which was increasingly causing discontentment: “The question is not one for the Government, but for the Belgian military authorities and the Belgian refugees themselves.” (Hansard 8 February 1915) Not soon thereafter, with the Shell Crisis, would the Belgian able men in Britain be mobilized as labour forces in the war effort, employed in munitions factories and related industries.

One of the final contributions by Samuel recorded in Hansard (Samuel Long took over as president of the LGB in the 1915 Cabinet reshuffle), Samuel was asked by Mr. Hogge MP about “what progress is being made with further provision for Belgian refugees; and what is the total number to date in this country?”. Samuel provided a long and detailed answer:

" The Registrar-General estimates that the number of Belgian Refugees (excluding soldiers) now in this country is about 180,000. Of these it may be roughly estimated that the number of employable men is about 29,000, of whom about 17,000 have already been placed in employment, and efforts are continually being made to find occupation for the others. Of 17,000 employable women about 3,000 are employed. Several thousands of refugees, not included in the figures of employment, have enlisted in the Belgian Army. The number of refugees awaiting hospitality has so far diminished as to allow of my being able to close the Alexandra Palace as a refuge and to arrange for the transfer of the buildings to the War Office. About 2,400 refugees remain in other refuges, and further offers of hospitality would be gladly received by the War Refugees' Committee at Aldwych. (Hansard 29 April 1915) 

Samuel also acknowledged that at that time already a large number of Belgians were employed in the armaments industry, something that would soon be overseen by Winston Churchill as the newly appointed Minister of Munitions.

Post LGB career

When the coalition government was formed in 1915, Herbert Samuel was temporarily dropped from the cabinet, returning to his old job at the Post Office, but upon Churchill's resignation in November he was restored to the cabinet and in January 1916 became home secretary. Conditions of war, however, were held to preclude the introduction of any reformist measures: the only notable innovation was the introduction of daylight saving time and the related unification of British and Irish time (until then Irish was twenty-five minutes earlier than British).

As home secretary Samuel was obliged to deal with a number of delicate civil liberties issues and made several decisions that posterity judged illiberal. After the Easter rising in Dublin, he was briefly responsible for Irish affairs and for the heavy-handed repression that followed. In England conscientious objectors were maltreated, and Bertrand Russell and Fenner Brockway were imprisoned for anti-war propaganda. Roger Casement was hanged after landing in Ireland from a German submarine—Samuel declined to recommend mercy for his former ally in the Congo agitation. Other former allies such as Graham Wallas bitterly criticized what they considered Samuel's betrayal of his earlier principles.

Before Samuel moved to Palestine, he had been Special Commissioner for Belgium for a few months in 1920. After his time in Palestine, Herbert Samuel presided (1925–26) over the royal commission on the coal industry and helped to settle the general strike of May 1926. 

One of Samuel's early acts as high commissioner for Palestine, in August 1920, was to visit Transjordan (at that time a political vacuum, owing to the French ejection of the emir Faisal from Damascus). Without authority, and rather against the spirit of Foreign Office instructions, he effectively annexed the territory, quadrupling the area under his control. The foreign secretary, Curzon, initially repudiated Samuel's action. That December, however, the region passed under the aegis of the Colonial Office and in March 1921 the colonial secretary, Churchill, visited Jerusalem and confirmed the addition of Transjordan to the mandatory area—with the proviso that it would be under the nominal rule of the emir Abdullah and would not form part of the Jewish national home established west of the River Jordan.

As the Liberals' chairman early in 1927, Samuel took charge of the arthritic party machine and succeeded in reviving it as an effective political force. Samuel faithfully served under Lloyd George's leadership and joined J. M. Keynes, Walter Runciman, and others in producing the Liberal ‘yellow book’, Britain's Industrial Future (1928).

Reentering the House of Commons in 1929, Samuel joined Ramsay MacDonald’s national coalition government in 1931 as Home Secretary. Being a free trader himself, he soon resigned in protest against import tariffs (1932). Herbert Samuel led the Liberal Party from 1931 to 1935, but his actions widened the division within the party. Created viscount in 1937, he led the Liberals in the House of Lords (1944–55). Later in 1937 Samuel, although Jewish, aligned himself with Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's appeasement policy towards Adolf Hitler, urging that Germany be cleared of its 1914 war guilt and recommending that Germany's former colonies be returned to her (even after the war he continued to believe that this was the correct course). He declined a later offer by Chamberlain to return to government. In 1938 he supported the Kindertransport movement for refugee children from Europe with an appeal for homes for them.

From 1931 until 1959 Samuel was president of the British (later Royal) Institute of Philosophy and in that period he published books such as Practical Ethics (1935) and Belief and Action (1937; new ed. 1953).

Samuel papers can be found in the Parliamentary Archives (House of Lords Record Office), the Israel State Archives, Oxford University, Southampton University, London School of Economics (a.o. correspondence with E.D. Morel), Cambridge University, Durham University, National Library of Wales, British Library, Churchill Archives, Bodleian Library (a.o. correspondence with Lord Lugard), Welwyn Garden City Library, Newcastle upon Tyne library.

As he surveyed in old age a career in Liberalism that stretched from the era of Gladstone to that of Jo Grimond, he deeply regretted the decline of his party: his lasting achievement, none the less, was the preservation of historic Liberalism as a significant current in British political life. Samuel died at his London home, 32 Portchester Terrace, Bayswater, on 5 February 1963, and was buried in Willesden Jewish cemetery, close to St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery in Kensal Green, where Belgian refugees are buried.

SOURCES

Herbert Louis Samuel, 1st Viscount Samuel. (2013). In Encyclopædia Britannica. Retrieved from http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/520827/Herbert-Louis-Samuel-1st-Viscount-Samuel/6396/Additional-Reading

President of the Local Government Board. (2013). In Wikipedia Online. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President_of_the_Local_Government_Board

Herbert Samuel, 1^st Viscount Samuel. (2013). In Wikipedia Online. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbert_Samuel,_1st_Viscount_Samuel

Biography of Viscount Herbert Samuel. (2013). In Liberal Democrat History Online. Retrieved from: http://www.liberalhistory.org.uk/item_single.php?item_id=16&item=biography

Mr. Herbert Samuel. (2013). In Hansard 1803-2005. Retrieved from: http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/people/mr-herbert-samuel/

Wasserstein, B. (2011). ‘Samuel, Herbert Louis, first Viscount Samuel (1870–1963)’. In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2011. Retrieved from http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/35928

Wasserstein, B. (1992). Herbert Samuel: a political life. Oxford University Press.

Local Government Board. (1915) Report on the special work of the Local Government Board arising out of the war. House of Commons Parliamentary Papers.

Charles Masterman. (2013). In Wikipedia Online. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Masterman

Calendar of events

Calendar of events in 2013:

Thursday 17 January. Belgian refugees in Britain during World War One. Dinner paper @ Orde van den Prince, Chelsea, London. (in Dutch, private)

Saturday 16 March.  Remembering Herbert Hoover & the Commission for Relief in Belgium. Exhibition at In Flanders Fields Museum. Ieper/Ypres. Until 21 May 2013.

Sunday 17 March. Out of the Ordinary: Belgian Refugee Children in Britain during the First World War. Conference paper @ Approaching War: Childhood, Culture and the First World War. Newcastle University. (in English)

Tuesday 19 March. Belgian refugees in Britain during World War One. Seminar @ Menin Road Museum, Zillebeke. (in Dutch)

Sunday 21 April. Title to be confirmed. Seminar @ Verhalendag (Erfgoeddag), Vredescentrum, Antwerp. (in Dutch)

Tuesday 23 April. Belgian refugees in Britain during World War One. Seminar @ Studiedag ‘De Groote Oorlog in de klas’. Herinneringseducatie. Brussels. (in Dutch)

Thursday 16 May. Belgian refugee workers. Research seminar @ Imperial College London. (in English)

Information about Belgian refugees in Britain

The main purpose of this blog is to offer a platform on Belgian refugees in Britain. This can happen in several ways.

We hope that information cascade here is relevant. However, one of the earlier mentioned reasons is that several blog posts that had been produced have been valued as publishable and have made their way into the world as such. We aim to publish more blog posts soon.

We would like to publish anecdotal stories and or requests for information by other, interested parties. So feel free to contact us and we'll publish your story and/or request.

In the past years that the Belgian refugees has been a topic of research many requests were sent, usually via email, about family members at various locations and whether we could help out. Sadly enough, however, tracing ancestors for over 250,000 Belgians at the time (imagine how many family members that would be now) is impossible and needs a more coordinated effort for which there is currently no funding.

The renowned and wonderful In Flanders Fields Museum issued a request to submit the last witness testimonies and further archive material about a decade ago. A lot of that was used for the seminal exhibition Vluchten Voor de Oorlog / Strangers in a Strange Land. This is now aimed for by the Europeana project. As such the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ieper/Ypres dealt with the digitisation of family history material at a Collection Day in December 2012.