Friends of Alice Wheeldon by Sheila Rowbotham (Pluto Press, 1986) contains a useful essay: ‘Rebel Networks in the First World War’.
In January 1918 the Imperialist (later the Vigilante), a newspaper owned and edited by the MP Noel Pemberton Billing, carried an article entitled ‘The First 47,000’. It purported to be written by Pemberton Billing himself, but in fact the author was a Captain Harold Spencer, who claimed that he had been a British Intelligence agent at the time when he saw and read the Black Book in the cabinet noir of ‘a certain German Prince’.
In April this article was followed by a short paragraph entitled ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’, again purporting to be written by Pemberton Billing, and again written by Harold Spencer. This suggested that the list of subscribers to a private performance of Oscar Wilde’s Salome might contain many names of the 47,000. Maud Allan, who was to dance the part of Salome, sued Pemberton Billing for libel, since the paragraph clearly implied she was a lesbian.
The trial was presided over by Lord Justice Darling. Pemberton Billing defended himself. Having been identified early in the proceedings as one of the 47,000, Darling lost control of the court.
The star defence witness was Harold Spencer. In addition to giving free rein to his obsession with women who had hypertrophied and diseased clitorises and therefore could be satisfied only by bull elephants, Spencer alleged that many members of the Asquith War Cabinet had been in the pay of the Germans, that Maud Allan was Asquith’s wife’s lover and a German agent, that many high-ranking officers in the British army were Germans, and that persons who had the courage and patriotism to point these facts out were marooned on desert islands where they had to subsist on iron rations from submarines.
Lord Alfred Douglas, another defence witness, seized the opportunity of pursuing his personal dispute with Robert Ross, Oscar Wilde’s devoted friend and literary executor, identifying him as ‘the leader of all the sodomites in London’.
After six days of chaos in the courtroom and hysteria in the newspapers, Pemberton Billing won the case and was carried shoulder-high through the cheering crowds that had gathered outside the Old Bailey.
Later that year Harold Spencer was certified insane.
Robert Ross died of heart failure, on 5 October, aged forty-nine.
Pemberton Billing went on to have a distinguished parliamentary career.
In 1917 Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), after protesting against the war, had been persuaded by his friend Robert Graves to accept a Medical Board, which decided that he was suffering from a mental breakdown and that he should be sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh. There he came under the care of Dr W.H.R. Rivers, FRS (1864–1922), the distinguished neurologist and social anthropologist. At Craiglockhart, Sassoon reached the conclusion that, although his views on the war had not changed, it was nevertheless his duty to return to active service, where he could at least share the suffering of his men.
After a period in Palestine he returned to France on 9 May 1918. On 13 July, returning late from a patrol, he was wounded in the scalp by a rifle shot from one of his own NCOs; he was then sent back to England, to the American Women’s Red Cross Hospital at Lancaster Gate. The fact that he was ill enough for Rivers to have found it necessary to sit up with him is recalled in a letter from Katharine Rivers to Ruth Head (unpublished letters of the Rivers family, Imperial War Museum).
Winston Churchill’s and Edward Marsh’s devotion to duty while at the Home Office is mentioned in Edward Marsh, Patron of the Arts: A Biography by Christopher Hassall (Longmans, 1959).