1915_ The Death of Innocence - Lyn Macdonald [18]
Real indignation was reserved for the judge who had the temerity to find in favour of a plaintiff accused of trading with the enemy. This unfortunate man was an American who must have regretted, in the present circumstances, that he had ever taken out British citizenship. He was manager of the London branch of an American firm which also had a branch in Frankfurt, managed by his brother. There was a large sum of money owing and, at his brother’s request, the London manager had found a means of sending it to Germany via Holland. He was caught in the act and had spent six uncomfortable weeks in prison before the case came up. The judge took into account some extenuating circumstances and set him free. The extenuating circumstances, ironic to say the least, were that the Frankfurt manager had also been jailed for pro-British activities. But the irony was lost on an indignant British public who clung to the axiom that there was no smoke without fire.
The Trading with the Enemy Act was a godsend to some British firms who held large stocks of German goods – as yet unpaid for – which, in the present climate of anti-German feeling, they had little prospect of selling. The matter of mouth organs was a case in point, and it was a tricky one. Mouth organs were in demand. There was a dearth of mouth organs at the front and the relatives of soldiers were scouring the shops to obtain them. They were cheap, they were small enough to be easily packed in parcels, and nothing was more likely to cheer the troops in the monotony of life in the trenches. But, mouth organs were almost exclusively of German manufacture and it would never do to boost enemy trade – even retrospectively! – by buying pre-war stocks of goods made in Germany, let alone be so crassly unpatriotic as to send them to the boys who were being shot at by the mouth organ makers themselves. Wholesalers scoured every possible neutral source of supply and eventually found enough mouth organs in Holland to fill the gap until a Birmingham firm was persuaded to take up the cause and meet the demand. This boycott of German goods, like the taboo against buying toys of German manufacture at Christmas, was not based entirely on blind prejudice, for it was widely known that the bombs which the Germans were hurling at British trenches had been made in many cases in toy factories, and that the fuses were manufactured in Bavaria by makers of clocks and watches. Cuckoo clocks were removed from walls on which they had sometimes hung for decades and anxiously scrutinised to make sure that they had originated in neutral Switzerland and not in hateful Germany, and the once-proud owners of expensive Bechstein or Steinway pianos were torn between reluctantly closing the lids for the duration of the war or trumping the enemy by abandoning Mozart and Handel in favour of British patriotic songs thumped out endlessly on their German keys.
Patriotic songs were all the rage at home and some starry-eyed idealists were a little disappointed that they were not equally popular with the troops. Some newspapers took up the cause. Teach them the songs of Agincourt,’ suggested one enthusiastic patriot without, however, specifying what particular songs these were or where they were to be found. ‘English folk songs,’ suggested another, ‘would be more appropriate, to be sung with gusto!’ The strains of ‘Greensleeves’ were seldom heard on the lips of the Tommies, and if the kind of songs they sang as they endlessly route-marched round the country bore little resemblance to those such innocent civilians would have preferred to hear, it only reinforced their missionary zeal. It seldom struck them that the bawdy dirges that cheered the troops on the long training marches in all probability faithfully echoed the sentiments of the songs that had cheered foot-soldiers on the road to Agincourt centuries before.
Music was in the air. Sheet music poured from the printing presses, ‘Tipperary’, the hit of the previous summer which had found favour with the troops, had gone into umpteen editions, and ‘Sister Susie