Friends, Aliens, and enemies: fictive communities and the Lusitania riots of 1915.

In August, 1918, theatrical censor G.S. Street recommended for licence The Female Hun--a play due to open at the Lyceum Theater on October 2nd. "This is an ordinary melodrama, superior to the average ...," commented Street. "The 'female Hun,' passing as an Englishwoman, has married General Grant, of important position and low mental capacity ..." After conspiring with the Generals's naturalized German butler, stealing plans for a "wonderful aeroplane," and organizing the kidnaping of the play's heroine onto a German U-boat, "the female Hun is detected by the General in the act of spying ... and after a struggle is shot by him." "So all ends satisfactorily, except for the General's feelings," observed Street. "Probably there is enough excitement in the production for its success. There is nothing offensive in it ..." (1)

While Street found "nothing offensive" in the play, his matter-of-fact asides about its "ordinariness" deserve some attention for what they reveal about nationalism, nationality, and the relationship of the family to the state in wartime Britain. The play opens with three characters chatting over tea about British nationality law. Betty, an ingenue, asks Sir Archbald, a retired gentleman, about the 1914 British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act: "Did you see that about a German marrying an Englishwoman; that makes her a German?" "That is so" replied Sir Archibald, "and if a German woman marries an Englishman, that makes her English ..." "I cannot understand that," gasps Betty. "No need for you to try. That is the law of the land," replies Sir Archibald. (2) This "law of the land" will have terrifying implications in the course of the play. Thanks to the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act, which stated that "the wife of a British subject shall be deemed to be a British subject, and the wife of an alien shall be deemed to be an alien," the female Hun is able to prey on an unsuspecting British General and, through marriage, become herself a British subject by law. (3) That her legal status and her marriage in no way change her allegiance to the Kaiser is revealed through her actions. Using her place within the home, the female Hun listens to plans for an important British attack. When her shocked husband finds her she is armed and unrepentant: "I will not stop to use the information for my country." "Your country," he replies with surprise. Just as Mrs. Grant is about to shoot her husband, he snatches the revolver and fires. "Till death do us part," he mutters. (4)

In this play, and others like it, blood is clearly thicker than water. While Mrs. Grant is legally British, her heart is still German. Her husband redeems himself only by ruthlessly shooting her as a spy--national loyalty trumping marital loyalty as the affective center of a world where personal bonds were repeatedly subordinated to more abstract notions of ethnic solidarity. This paper argues that in Britain during the Great War notions of fictive kinship, based on an imagined community of blood ties and racial stock, began to undercut the living bonds of neighbourliness, familial affection, and--though far less successfully--marriage itself. In this process, a liberal notion of inclusion, based on law and individual rights, came under pressure from more popular and emotive concepts of belonging. The reassertion of what Kathleen Wilson has called the "island race," (5) after a long but fraught liberal hiatus, is evident in the Lusitania riots of 1915, a pivotal moment in the re-creation of popular concepts of national belonging and in the erosion of the power of the alien to define himself through character, community, or law.

Recently, social and cultural historians have begun to shift attention away from Benedict Anderson's powerful notion of "imagined communities" towards a more intimate examination of human relations. Richard Jobs and Patrick McDevitt, for example, have observed that "the focus on national communities has rendered invisible the tangible contact between individuals who create their own communities through the establishment and maintenance of interpersonal communities." (6) The intriguing juxtaposition between an "imagined community" of strangers and a more authentic community of what Jobs and McDevitt call "kith and kin"--those personal networks based on family, friendship, and the ties of civil society--inspired this intimate history of ethnic riots in Britain during World War I. As Panikos Panayi has shown, the Lusitania riots were the most widespread domestic disturbances in modern British history, causing over [pounds sterling]200,000 worth of damage in the London area alone and cleansing communities all over Britain of a long-standing and well-integrated foreign presence. (7) This paper explores the way narratives of crisis reorient intimate communities, undercutting legal and personal identities that have come to seem counter-intuitive to much of the public.

Massacre of the Innocents

On the eve of World War I, Britain's metropolitan centers were a patchwork of ethnic enclaves, boasting a diverse population of international immigrants, often classified by certain types of work or particular streets of residence. In the Liverpool slum where memoirist Pat O'Mara grew up, "Negroes, Chinese, Mulattoes, Filipinos, almost every nationality under the sun, most of them boasting white wives and large half-caste families, were our neighbours, each color laying claim to a certain street ..." (8) Among all these groups lived the Irish, often intermarrying with other ethnic groups and even crossing racial lines. (9)

O'Mara's Liverpool dock neighborhood seems to have existed in a sort of fractious ethnic harmony until the declaration of war in August 1914. Economically, "the slums were very happy from that night on." (10) As sailors enlisted in the Navy, "lads were stepping into their shoes and at big wages, too. All my mates--despite their preference for the sea--were making good money in the mills," recalled O'Mara. (11) On the other hand, ethnic hatred erupted, as Germans--many of them pork-butchers--came to be identified by O'Mara and his neighbors as "the enemy in our midst." While some Irish nationalists, such his father's friend "pro-German Lonnigan," applauded the Germans and took pains to defend their actions, most others, like O'Mara's mother, supported the draconian legal measures taken against enemy aliens living in port-towns. O'Mara recalls that the unnaturalized Germans living in Frederick Street were "rounded up and sent to the Isle of Man detention camp." (12) This move, however, did not cleanse the neighborhood of ethnic Germans. "There were some others ... but they had their British naturalization papers--cute rascals! I tried to reason with mother that perhaps it was a bit unfair, interning German sailormen, like Charlie Thomas, for instance, who had raised big families and had forgotten all about the Fatherland ... 'Sure it's right to breakup the families--they'd do it to us, wouldn't they?' she'd ask. Yes, I supposed they would. Then to prove her point [she] showed me reports of the latest German atrocities." (13)

The debate between O'Mara and his mother reveals a pull between the desire to treat an acquaintance like Charlie Thomas as a friend or to define him as an enemy. While O'Mara is hostile towards naturalized Germans, who used the law to cover their German identity, he is reluctant, initially, to see his friend interned. What persuades him--and his mother--is reports of German atrocities--a powerful rhetorical weapon able to resurrect long forgotten identities and to recast the meaning of "Charlie Thomas" to his neighbors and friends. Indeed, atrocity reports did much to help forge the bonds of fictive kinship with innocent victims, while rationalizing and exacerbating a visceral hatred growing up towards ethnic Germans, often of long-standing acquaintance. Nowhere is this more evident than in the torrent of emotions stirred up by the sinking of the Lusitania.

By all measures the sinking of the Lusitania was a horrific event, accounting for one of the largest losses of civilian life during a single act of war. Many of the more than 1000 dead were British, Canadian, and American citizens with ties to the United Kingdom; even more significantly, scores of the dead were women and children. (14) While the German Government had issued a warning to passengers not to travel aboard the Lusitania, few heeded this notice, reassured by Cunard officials that the Lusitania could easily out-run or ram a U-boat, that she would take a ziz-zag path, and that her hull was too thick to be sunk by a torpedo. In fact, the Lusitania was heavily armed and sported a reinforced hull, a violation of maritime law--but this fact was not widely known until many years later. (15) Even if it had been, it is unlikely that it would have mitigated the shock of so deadly and evocative a loss.

Mrs. P. Amory was one of the many amateur writers who published accounts of the Lusitania disaster, offering the world a blow-by-blow account of an event experienced by only a few. "Little did I think, on that morning of April 27th, 1915, as I purchased my ticket for sunny England, that I was destined to endure the experience of being face to face with death before returning to my Canadian home." (16) For Mrs. Amory, the suddenness of death contrasted with the luxurious experience of life on the Lusitania. "Such a beautiful dining-room I had never seen, either aboard a ship, or in the magnificent hotels that I have visited on both sides of the ocean," recalled Mrs. Amory. (17) "The pillars, extending from floor to ceiling, were as snowy white as the linen that covered the long tables. The walls and ceilings were frescoed in delicate tints, and in the centre was a round open balcony, which permitted one to stand above and gaze down upon a spectacle that I believe could not be duplicated anywhere." (18) Enjoying a congenial time aboard, Mrs. Amory socialized with her cabin mates--"very charming ladies"--sold a program for a patriotic concert to Mr. Alfred Vanderbilt, and lazily attended lunch on the "fatal day" still clad in her negligee.

Just as Mrs. Amory was about to order a salad, "there came a most terrible crash, which seemed to tear everything to pieces, and rend the ship asunder." (19) Survivor accounts describe the pandemonium that ensued, the rush for the stairs, the crush of people struggling to get on deck, while the ship listed to one side, and the heroic final moments of Mr. Vanderbilt who nobly instructed his valet to assist children, while the two of them--master and servant--waited, unwavering in their social roles, for the ship to sink. (20) According to one witness, "The screams of the women and children were terrible to hear. Wives were being torn from their husbands and lifted to the lifeboats. Children, who in the terrible crush of humans, had become separated from their parents, were being handed from man to man and into the boats. Women were fainting and falling to the deck, only to be carried overboard by their own weight ..." (21) Mrs. Amory was one of those fortunate women whose life was saved by the chivalrous self-sacrifice of a male passenger. A young gentleman gave her his life-belt and while she was saved, he was drowned. Being dragged along on the outside of an overcrowded lifeboat, Mrs. Amory raised her head "just in time to see the Lusitania disappear." "It was now [so] exceedingly quiet that I wondered at it, but the answer came to me in the mute, upturned faces that floated by ... It was terrible to look upon children, oh, such little children, floating away out there on the ocean. Children who that morning were the pride of loving parents, and who were now the dead victims of a fiendish hate for mankind in general ... These thoughts came uppermost, and for several moments I hated the race that made war on women, and war on children, and I would have given everything for revenge." (22) (See Figure #1.)

Mrs. Amory was by no means alone in feeling this way and her desire for revenge was shared by those considerably more distant to the event. On hearing of the disaster, D.H. Lawrence wrote that "I am mad with rage myself. I would like to kill a million Germans--two millions." (23) The proximity of the Lusitania to the Irish coast meant that many of the bodies of the dead were recovered and laid out publicly in Queenstown, where they were viewed, identified, sketched, and photographed--grizzly and heartrending images circulated throughout the world by the daily press. Indeed the coroner at Queenstown brought a verdict of "willful murder" against the captain of the U-boat that sank the Lusitania and the emotional response to the act and to the bodies was overwhelming, focusing particularly on the bodies of mothers and children. (24) Mr. Oliver P. Bernard, resident scenic artist at Covent Garden Theater, remembered seeing "a terrible picture--a picture of haunting horror--at a temporary mortuary at Queenstown. A number of babies--I should say about thirty--were laid out there stiff and stark. I hope these tiny mites will be fully avenged." (25) Mr. H.S. Taylor, a Cunard official at the time of the disaster, noted that "on the day following the disaster the basement of a building in Rumford Street [Liverpool] had been converted for the purpose of displaying Press type photographs of the bodies ... lying on the shore where they had come to rest as the tides receded. One I particularly remember was of a young mother still holding a baby in either arm, but many of the photographs were too horrible for words." (26)

The similarity between the emotions of an eyewitness like Mr. Bernard and an observer of photographs like Mr. Taylor conveys the power of press narratives to turn distant witnesses into intimate ones. Mr Bernard, who saw the corpses at a mortuary, describes them as a "picture," while Mr. Taylor, who saw only pictures, "particularly remembered" a young mother "still holding a baby in either arm." The elision between experiencing, witnessing, and reading about the Lusitania disaster was accomplished through the emotionally wrought, graphically illustrated, and highly novelistic coverage of the event. "[I]t was very terrible," Second Lieutenant A.M. Jameson wrote to his sister about the funeral of the Lusitania victims. "Enormous carts holding about 40 coffins each, two deep ... And there seemed to be coffins everywhere--at Queenstown you would meet them in the streets and at the station, and in Cork too--for they are still finding bodies, and a lot are being sent over to America in sealed coffins." (27) (See Figure #2.) Amidst horrors such as these the boundaries between kinship and fictive kinship became blurred. Rioting began amongst the family and friends of actual victims, in the Liverpool neighborhoods where many of the sailors had resided, but it soon spread, with no discernable difference in intensity or language, to cities and neighborhoods as far removed from the disaster as Johannesburg, South Africa. In this process, friends and neighbors became enemies and outsiders, losing the power to define themselves within their communities.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

The Lusitania Riots

Pat O'Mara recalled the moment news of the sinking of the Lusitania reached his Liverpool neighborhood. "It took about two days for the names of the drowned among the crew to be published," recalled O'Mara. "They were terrible." When the news broke, O'Mara and his mate Freddie Seegar were on their way to the music hall, clad in their best American tailored suits; they never arrived at their destination. "[W]e walked around Scotland Road listening to the cries of women whose husbands and sons had gone down with the 'Lucy' and we heard the bitter threats made against Germany and anything with a German name. We walked down Bostock Street, where practically every blind was drawn in token of a death. All these little houses were occupied by Irish coal-trimmers and firemen and sailormen on the Lusitania; now these men who, barely two weeks ago, had carried their bags jokingly down the street, were gone, never to return." (28)

While those who witnessed or read of the disaster focused on the evocative bodies of helpless children, O'Mara's neighbors recalled the strapping maritime laborers who had cheerfully left home only days before. This loss of men like Joe Manassi, Harold May, and Alfred Gilroy--friends of long standing to the O'Mara family and, no doubt, sons of their neighbors, was felt with excruciating grief. "Listen to all them women crying!," commented Freddie to O'Mara, "with whitened face." Like so many who heard tell of this disaster, the instinct was to take revenge. In reading the documents surrounding the Lusitania disaster, it is uncanny with what great frequency the desire for revenge emerges as an overpowering emotion, among old women like Mrs. Amory as frequently as among young toughs like O'Mara and his companions. As one Birmingham vicar warned his flock, "The first impulse of the natural man is to retaliate the devil's deeds in kind. The fight must go on, yes, [but] let not indignation be converted into hatred nor the love of defending the right degenerate into revenge ..." (29) Such advice was all too frequently ignored.

Avenging the Lusitania could have taken many different forms. The most frequently expressed hope was that the United States would declare war on Germany to avenge the murder of 128 neutral citizens, most of them Americans. Indeed, hopes ran so high in this regard that a conspiracy theory, suggesting that the Admiralty allowed the Lusitania to be sunk in order to get America into the war, has persisted until this day. Great hopes were also expressed for the idea that the sinking of the Lusitania would result in mass enlistments, like that of a young newlywed who had "lost his Mary," and vowed to "become a member of the King's army, and ... never rest until I have had vengeance for the murder of my wife, or until I lose my own in attempting my revenge." (30) Indeed much newspaper commentary denouncing the riots made the point that enlisting in the army would provide a far more useful outlet for revenge than smashing shops. This, however, was beside the point. Enlistment was not an option for the many women and children who participated in the riots. Neither did such suggestions recognize the degree to which the riots provided immediate emotional satisfaction for those confronted with their own impotence. By turning their neighbors into a surrogate enemy, rioters could strike back locally at an image of Germany that was reassuringly vulnerable, reachable, and powerless. While Pat O'Mara and his neighbors didn't need to "imagine" their Liverpool dock community, they did begin to weld their ethnically diverse neighbors into an imagined community of a different sort--one that elided the butcher down the street, with the U-boat captain who sank the Lusitania, and ultimately with the Kaiser himself, the malign personification of a Prussian spirit for which local shopkeepers would now bear responsibility. Once the inexorable process of re-imagining the community had begun, individual neighbors became displaced symbols of the enemy nation.

"On the corner of Scotland Road ominous gangs were gathering--men and women, very drunk and very angry," recalled O'Mara. "Suddenly something crashed up the road ... A pork butcher's had had its front window knocked in with a brick and a crowd of men and women were wrecking the place ... everything suggestive of Germany was being smashed to pieces." (31) (See Figure #3.) Panikos Panayi has convincingly refuted the idea that the Lusitania riots should be regarded as food riots. (32) Indeed, while memoirist Robert Roberts commented of the riots in Salford that, "There would be many a breakfast table set better this morning than it has ever been," the working class diet was actually better during World War I, owing to higher wages and more evenly distributed food supplies. (33) Working class looters certainly helped themselves to the contents of butcher and bakers' shops, yet the riots seemed to have had more to do with ethnic hatred than with food shortages, since English-owned shops (when recognized as such) were carefully passed over. (34)

The term "ethnic riot," however does not fully account for the particular national bent of the disturbances. Naturalized Germans were attacked, as were ethnic English who were legally German by marriage. Families and businesses with "suspicious sounding names" were often targeted, only to discover after the fact that the proprietors were of Yorkshire, Scottish, or some other equally "friendly" stock. (35) Russians and Belgians had their shops smashed if they were in the way of the mob or went unrecognized as allies. Indeed, the riots, while primarily anti-German also had a random xenophobic quality to them--one that was about eradicating any cultural presence that hinted at or evoked thoughts of the enemy.

The bonds of friendship and even kinship rarely mitigated the attacks on Germans. O'Mara sacked the house of his own uncle and thought little of "having some bloody fun" at the expense of his former friends. (36) While occasionally someone would be passed over, like Sarah Doran, the popular Irish wife of a German boardinghouse proprietor who "allers hilped the church," few others were so lucky. "Joan of Arc" (a female chip-chopper by the name of Mrs. Seymour) led the mob on a rampage that rarely spared kith or kin. "Mr. Yaag [was] a big wholesome fellow allegedly ... born in Germany," recalled O'Mara of a butcher he knew in Great Goodge Street. "Two of his nephews at the time were with my cousin Berny and the Eighth Irish over in France. I always liked Mr. Yaag, but not quite so keenly as I liked to break his window without fear of molestation." (37) The utter surprise of some of the victims is palpably evident. "As we converged on the big shop, Mr. Yaag, arms akimbo ... came out, pipe in mouth and with his usual broad smile; this vanished instantly as someone kicked him in the belly and a volley of bricks sent in the huge windows.... 'You'll sink the bleedin' "Lucy" will you!" Yelled our Joan, waving a shillalah over his prostrate form ...'" (38)

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

The incident is telling. Laura Tabili has argued that ethnic Germans were well integrated in local communities in the period before the First World War. (39) Despite periodic waves of anti-alien sentiment, directed particularly at Eastern European Jews, anti-German sentiment had an abstract, literary quality that only rarely disturbed local communities. While invasion-scare novels and tracts decrying German economic "penetration" abounded in the early twentieth century, Germans continued to settle unmolested in English towns and cities. (40) In fact, Tabili has found that many naturalized Germans were willingly sponsored for citizenship by their native-born neighbors and men and women of German origin frequently intermarried and held positions of respect in their neighborhoods. (41) O'Mara's off-handed remark that he had always liked butcher Yaag seems to be corroborated by Yaag's friendly acknowledgment of the crowd before he was kicked in the stomach. What had changed overnight was the ability of a personal history of friendship to withstand a new narrative of war.

As O'Mara reflected back on the meaning of the night, it becomes evident the degree to which the Lusitania disaster triggered a moment of civic cleansing, where a relatively stable community was re-imagined on powerful national lines. "[T]he foe for the brief moment had changed from England to Germany," recalled O'Mara. "If Germany had torpedoed the Lusitania, we certainly had torpedoed everything German in our immediate vicinity ..." (42) For the Irish slum-dwellers of O'Mara's neighborhood, the sinking of the Lusitania allowed them to refashion momentarily an Irish identity that had always been cast in opposition to England. Their German neighbors, on the other hand, lost their ability to define themselves as anything but German. Indelibly ethnicized, neither legal nationality nor lack of personal identification with Germany could protect them. An elderly couple who "had lived in Liverpool so long they looked like natives" and had "taken out naturalization papers," was attacked while singing Lutheran hymns at home in their parlour. (43) And Annie Monnigan, the Irish wife of an interned German sailor was in her "shack" surrounded by her six small children when she was attacked. "I shall never forget the hysteria of this last debacle," wrote O'Mara, "with the six young children screaming and Annie, like a good colleen, fighting back and asking no quarter." (44) While the old couple was German by birth and English by law, Annie Monnigan was Irish by birth and--through marriage--German by law. Crowds frequently showed an awareness of such distinctions, but tended to err on the side of inclusivity when deciding to wreck a premises.

The dynamic of destruction wrought in Liverpool was repeated in communities all over Britain--their virulence in no way lessened by the wreckers distance from the disaster. Viscount Sandhurst wrote in his diary for May 11th that "very serious anti-German riots" had spread across the country and to London." His next entry was even more ominous: "The rioting in E. London continued with great violence to-day--any German shops being wrecked and in some cases any with a foreign name ... Porters and carriers at Smithfield have joined the boycott, one supposed to have declared he wouldn't move a German meal if a carcase were hung round with diamonds. German butchers', bakers' and tobacconists' shops demolished and looted; troops and 30,000 special constables called out and a great deal of scuffling and many heads broken by batons ..." (45) Will Crooks, M.P. for Poplar, was also shaken by the indiscriminate nature of the violence. According to Crooks "men who have been benefactors for twenty years to their locality and put on various public bodies by their fellow wardmen have had their shops ruined and looted ... (46) Sylvia Pankhurst appealed in vain to her working class readers to stop rioting: "It is a ghastly, cruel happening, an unjust catastrophe brought down upon the innocent and helpless. But shall we revenge ourselves on other helpless people who are living in our midst, and who are no more to blame, either for the sinking of the Lusitania or for the war ... than we ourselves? ... This is no patriotism." (47)

Despite widespread horror over the riots, they brought about a number of harsh, even draconian legal acts directed against the victims themselves. Germans, including naturalized Britons, were banned from the London Stock Exchange following the sinking of the Lusitania, and new measures were passed to prevent those of German descent from changing their names. Most ominously, the Asquith government bowed to demands for the wholesale arrest and internment of male enemy aliens, ages 17-55, the repatriation of older men and German-born women, and the investigation of thousands of naturalized men and women held "under suspicion" for harboring German sympathies. (48) While liberals in the Home Office tried to halt the destruction of shops and protect the rights of those who were now British under law, far more emotionally driven conceptions of belonging displaced bonds of community that had seemed secure only a year before. As the state yielded to the power of the mob, German men were forcibly removed from their homes, often ostensibly for their own protection. In this move, family fortunes would begin to change and men and women would wrestle with the meaning of exile.

The Experience of Expulsion

In Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities the individual imagines himself as part of a community of strangers--but what of those moments when the individual loses the power to imagine himself as such? Examining the diaries and memoirs of those interned in British concentration camps after the Lusitania riots, it becomes evident that expulsion from one community, in many cases, lead to the identification with another long forgotten community, as interned men sought repatriation, often against the most ardent wishes of their wives.

Victims expressed a sense of disbelief, as those with whom they had been on cordial terms began to see them as Germans and enemies, rather than as neighbors and friends. Richard Noschke, a clerk living in East Ham, noted that "the feelings of the lower classes became so bitter ... that they would almost throw a man from the top of an omnibus or out of a running train if they knew he was a German." (49) Writing his memoirs so that his children would know of "the cruel treatment I have received in England after being a Resident for nearly 25 years," Noschke dwells repeatedly on acts of betrayal on the part of friends who, like his employer of twenty years, dismissed and disowned him because of his German nationality. "I often wonder how was it possible that the English people after me being a Resident in that Country for 25 years with an English wife, a grown up Family, the best of Character, 20 years in one situation, could turn on me so bitter ... I had made many friends ... but I am sorry to say, that nearly all ... have turned against me, even my own direct family relations never even sent me as much as a postcard all the time I was interned." (50)

This sense of bewilderment and disbelief is often found in the accounts of those cast out by their communities. Riot reports frequently tell of shopkeepers who did not flee in time because they "were respected" or "well liked" in the neighborhood and did not believe that their neighbors would target them. On occasion, individuals like Sarah Doran--who gave generously to St. Vincent's Church--were spared, but far more often than not, people like butcher Yaag, who appeared smiling at his door, found themselves "on the floor in the sawdust" while their shops were wrecked. Once general internment orders were issue by the government in May 1915, aliens began to file a flurry of legal appeals, claiming that they were not of "enemy race," while those of incontestable German origin pleaded to friends, relatives, and the literate community for help. August Cohen, a Barrister-at-Law, spoke for British subjects of German, Austrian, and Hungarian Birth when he denounced the sinking of the Lusitania, but lamented that "certain classes of British people have, at the instigation of a small section of the press and a few self-asserting politicians, given expression to this change of feeling ..." Indeed, Cohen hoped that, "the antagonism ... will disappear as the people begin to understand that character and sentiment are influenced by environment rather than by blood, and that the men who have settled here have not been subjected to the influence of the spirit which dominates modern Germany." (51)

This faith in the power of English law is evident not only in the appeals of naturalized Germans, but also in the complaints of those who were expelled. (52) An enormous dossier housed in the Home Office archives at Kew, deals with accusations by the German government that German women and children had been mistreated after the sinking of the Lusitania. (53) The accusations were based on depositions by Germans deported after the Lusitania riots and speak to the deep sense of outrage occasioned by acts that the Home Office found to be surprisingly trivial. Olga Bastian, for example, complained to German authorities that after the sinking of the Lusitania she could "scarcely leave her lodgings" without being "abused" with such expressions as "'Bloody German,' 'children killers,' 'Kill the Bloody German,' and others too low to repeat ..." A Mrs. Borkes told the German authorities that "her 10 year old son was treated with blows by other children at St. Mary's School, Barrow, because he was German," and Mrs. Anna Gerbis of Plaistow complained that she and her children "were often threatened," that "children and low women collected and threw stones" at their windows, and that the police had prevented her from carrying on the family business after her husband's internment "on the grounds that it was dangerous to the neighbourhood." (54)

What is striking about these cases is both their relatively minor nature, and the assiduousness with which British officials followed them up. The Home Office throughly investigated many of the charges--including an extensive correspondence to the Chief Constable and St. Mary's school in Barrow to discover whether little Hugo Borkes had been hit by his classmates. ("He never complained to me," commented the Chief Constable, though Hugo's landlady said that he refused to go back to school "as the boys beat him." (55)) While the Foreign Office felt it incumbent upon them to refute these accusation, one internal memo frankly stated that "it must ... be admitted that when every possible deduction has been made, the statement ... to the effect that 'no instance is known of any ill-treatment of any German woman or child' would have been qualified to some slight extent if some of the incidents now reported by the German Government ... had been known to the Authorities at Scotland Yard and the Home Office." (56) Indeed, a number of cases were actually corroborated in the Home Office investigations: "No 1--Story as to shop smashing true. Mob too large for police to control ... no. 16--Substantially true, except that Inspector advised him to prosecute ... no. 15--true--mob attacked the man's shop. The police did what they could. No evidence of assault except on the man ...," and, most embarrassing, case no 13., "captain's wife," "taken off her husband's ship, put in prison with her baby (16 months old)," and forced to "sleep on the floor" and "eat dry bread." (57) To this charge, the file notes that "This was a big mistake on part of HO." Following a crossed-out sentence that read "Home Office express regret for this incident," is the replacement phrase, "She said that 'they had been very nice and kind to her there.'" (58)

Several of the twenty-six cases brought forward by the German Government involved physical injury or extensive destruction, but, as the Home Office noted, most complaints were of insults, threats, and the damaging of property, testifying to the deep sense of outrage felt by those no longer accepted by their communities. The official Foreign Office response to the German Government was reported in the Times on March 10, 1916, under the heading "German Women in London--Absurd Charges of Ill-Treatment," and much was made of the fact that the Germans had complained of a school-boy fight--a complaint that "is too trivial for serious answer, but ... [is] an indication of the state of mind of those who launch indictments against the British people." (59)

Indeed, "the state of mind" of those victims displayed a deeply injured sense of justice that would become even more intense with the wholesale internment of husbands and fathers, a move that would push men towards an imagined community of a different sort. (60) As men were expelled from their British homes and placed in the liminal and communitiless environment of the camps, the emotional hold of their own families loosened and many were inexorably drawn towards emotional reaggregation in the once rejected land of their birth. While most wives never ceased to regard their interned husbands as fully their own kin, interned men, driven by powerlessness, alienation, and a need to rejoin an imagined community, reluctantly began to let go of those they loved most.

British internment policy probably caused more harm to families than the Lusitania riots themselves. Most charitable organizations desisted in offering relief to enemy aliens following the sinking of the Lusitania, leaving an overwhelming case load for the Quakers--who supplemented the often stingy or nonexistent support offered by Poor Law Guardians. While British-born wives, who were now legally German (thanks to the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act) received sympathy and fared better than their foreign-born counterparts, they too suffered from the loss of male breadwinners, the destruction of businesses, and boycotts from hostile neighbors. Many cases recorded in the Quaker archives note instances of extreme destitution, where sickly children are unable to work because they have no boots, where women in confinement give birth to children who will never know their fathers, and where dying wives are refused permission to see their husbands for the last time. (61) For humanitarian reasons, many inmates on the Isle of Man were moved to the Alexandra Palace internment camp, where they could have more contact with their families, but many men noted that their inability to help their destitute wives and children rendered these improved circumstances excruciatingly painful.

A case painstakingly refuted by the Home Office highlights the dire situation of many families who, in the words of the German Government, had been reduced to "want and tyranny." The case involved the allegation that a German baby had been allowed to die of starvation in the German Hospital in London. After thorough investigation, the Home Office concluded that the child had died of pneumonia, not starvation, but the defense is telling: "This story is untrue ... Mrs. Leopold was a very poor woman, the mother of five other children under 12 years of age. At the time of the child's death she was receiving 20s. 6d. a week from the Society of Friends of Foreigners in Distress, together with two loaves of bread a day and a hundredweight of coal a week. It is outrageous that the death of this unhappy child, in English law a British subject, should be made the foundation of a charge of anti-German brutality." (62) While the Home Office believed the level of assistance going to Mrs. Leopold to be generous, rising prices, large families, and the hostility of the Guardians often made it difficult for women alone to nourish their families adequately, and the Quaker archives document numerous cases of wives and children who succumbed to disease and death because they were suffering from malnutrition. (63)

[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]

Men in concentration camps suffered acutely from their inability to assist their families. Rudolph Rocker, an inmate who wrote an analysis of the psychological effects of camp life on interned men, noted that "the visiting hours form the brightest in the lives of the interned." But he warned that, "it would be a serious error ... to imagine that they are hours of real pleasure. In fact, I have found men who would have preferred to remain on the Isle of Man, merely to be spared the direct knowledge of the distress in which their families were placed.... [I]t was simply the acute sense of their own helplessness and inability to alleviate the lot of the dearest ones, which caused such expressions." (64)

In addition to their sense of helplessness, many men felt emotionally alienated, as their children no longer remembered them. "I have witnessed many such episodes where Prisoners, after two or three years of internment on the Isle of Man, saw their little ones again for the first time. Then it often happened that such a young child would not know its own father, having lost him as a tiny babe; and would resent his embrace with a fit of crying, as if he were a stranger. The feelings of the father in such a condition ... belong to the most poignant that can be suffered by any man." (65) According to Rocker, these children were also alienated from mothers, who had to leave them unsupervised while going out to work, and suffered torment at school since they were "not entirely spared from the general hatred of this wretched time." (66) The effect of such estrangement, is evident in verses Richard Noschke composed for his family during his internment. To his eldest child he wrote, "William my oldest boy/Remember this when older/ That I am but your father still/Even if your love for me is colder." (67)

The fear of being forgotten haunted men and also put strains on their marriages. Mothers and fathers would argue over whether or not older boys ought to be sent to relatives in Germany, mothers, unable to manage the discipline of the children, would complain of delinquency that interned fathers were unable to stop, and women would experience pressure from family and friends to abandon their husbands by returning to Germany or forsaking their husbands in the case of British born wives. (68) Wives were often distraught when husbands, unable to stand internment any longer, applied for repatriation, terrified of the prospect of joining them after the war in an enemy land or of losing track of them altogether. Yet, of all groups of kith and kin, wives were the least likely to abandon their husbands emotionally. "I cannot refrain from expressing an intense admiration for the large majority of the wives of the interned, for they have stood nobly by their husbands in the direst misfortune," wrote Rudolph Rocker. "[V]ery often they have suffered ... the ostracism of 'friends' and relatives and even parents, besides the insults of thoughtless misguided multitudes, rather than forsake their men." (69)

For the men themselves, resentment over internment began to turn them against friends, relations, and the country of their adoption. At Christmas time, 1916, Richard Noschke wrote reproachfully to his former employer--once one of Noschke's closest friends--telling him that his son had enlisted in the British Army. (70) The next year, Noschke sent his friend the following poem,

  I wish you all a happy Christmas
  as happy as can be
  I hope the time will not be long
  before I shall be free ...

  But bitter memories I shall carry
  until my life departs from me
  as the people whom I loved once
  treated me so shabily. (71)

Following the receipt of Noschke's poem, the employer cut off all further relations with his former friend. Explaining that he had come to realize that "the German Government and the German people are one," he explained that "everything one comes in contact with that is German, produces such a deep impression and remembrances of those who have fallen, I do not mean those who have fallen in open battle, no, but those who have been gassed, brutally murdered, starved, and all those on our ships which have been brutally sank by their submarines against all international law, therefore there can be no personal ties between me and one of the race." (72)

This sense of racial exclusion also began to take a toll on the patriotic sentiments of those who had been interned. Naturalized Britons of enemy origin tried desperately to convince their countrymen that, "the doctrine of once a German always a German does not apply to Germans under British rule ..." As the naturalized speakers at one loyalty meeting asserted, "[M]any Germans have settled down in this country, have married English wives, and have brought up their children with English ideas amid English surroundings. There is no racial or essential difference between naturalized British subjects of German or Austrian birth and British born subjects." (73) Yet as characters like "The Female Hun" came to dominate the stage and innocent men were arrested and imprisoned for no crime other than the crime of birth, resentment began to mount, creating out of loyal citizens and denizens, angry men who increasingly sympathized with the enemy. (74) As Rudolph Rocker noted, "In those hundreds of cases where fathers have been interned for years, while their sons have fought, been wounded and even died for this country, and where women and children have been made destitute and subjected to the direst poverty, the embitterment is so great, that one my well-nigh despair of finding a remedy." This despair lead to precisely the sort attitudes the British feared in enemy aliens. "Such men who were mostly sympathetic to the 'Allied Countries' at the beginning of the war, have in most cases been driven to an out-and-out 'Pro-Germanism' merely from their outraged sense of justice." (75)

This gradual change in attitude is evident in microcosm as Richard Noschke describes his own repatriation in 1918. Recalling his parting from his wife, who came to visit him at Alexandra palace for the last time, Notscke notes that "it was a sad day for all of us as no one knew if we shall ever see them again ... but at the same time the thought of freedom over shadowed every thing." (76) On the morning of his departure, Noschke and 185 other prisoners were fed two potatoes each and taken to Kings Cross under heavy military escort. The train took them to an old workhouse in Spalding, a small town on the East Coast, where they were closely guarded in locked carriages. "[I]n Spalding the Public all gazed at us as if we were some wild beasts." The prisoners lived for four days in the Spalding workhouse, sleeping twenty-one men to a room on dirty blankets on the floor. Their luggage and bodies were inspected by detectives and no man was allowed to leave the room or to bring more than [pounds sterling]10 on the trip. They had no W.C. in the room and "so we 21 men had to use the coal scuttle, the rest you can fairly well guess." Because their books and playing cards were taken away, they had nothing to do but tell stories to one another about "our experiences during the years of internment." "[A]t last the day came which would set us free."

In his final journey in Britain, Noschke and his fellow prisoners were taken under guard to Boston harbour, interrogated by the port deportation official, and sent onto a waiting tugboat. Here they encountered returning British wounded, "some shouting at us some booing others saluting us," while a crowd of "thousands" of men, women and children, looked on and made threatening gestures. To Noschke, "it seems to give one the impression as if all these people thought that we were to blame for their trouble ..." (77) This observation was, perhaps, not far from the truth.

As the tug departs, the emotional tide of Noschke's narrative turns, and we begin to see the re-birth of a man who envisions being once again part of an imagined community. "We came to the open sea and could see three large ships ... which had been provided by the Dutch Government ... all snow white painted ... [T]he cheers went up form our whole party, answered by the waving handkerchiefs from those on board ... and the military guard who had escorted us all the way with fixed bayonets were left behind on the tug." In this poignant moment, Noscke writes, "At last we were free ... no barbed wire here no more bayonets no more insults ... It was like a new life." (78) Welcomed in Rotterdam by the Red Cross and the Prince of Holland, Noschke delighted in gifts of flowers, cigarettes, chocolate and writing paper. "The people in Rotterdam all seemed very friendly, everywhere our train passed they cheered us ..." Upon arrival at the German frontier station, the Commander held a reception and "made a long speech, welcoming us in the name of the German people ..."

The men had to sleep in a margarine factory "once more on straw sacks like before, and with a German soldier Guard over us ...," but, after many background and luggage checks, each man was "declared a free man" and despatched to his destination. "I arrived at the address of my brother ... after 27 years absence. This was the most eventful journey of my life." Reflecting on his sense of betrayal and abandonment by his British friends and neighbors, Noschke laments that "I am now over three years away from my family and no signs that I shall ever see them again." (79) These were the sentiments with which Noschke closed his memoirs on September 28, 1918. In his narrative, the land of his birth--even after an absence of 27 years--is the one place he is welcomed as a native son. His newfound loyalty to Germany and resentment of Britain is reflected in the final installment of his diary--His last Will and Testament written on June 21st 1940, long after he had returned to East Ham and moments before the fall of France to Hitler's forces: "When I close my eyes for ever/ and to eternal rest do go/ ... then place a stone upon my grave/ and write upon it this Epitaph/ 'A German Son he was/ and wished to remain." (80)

Moral Economy of Violence

While the Lusitania riots of 1915 were the most widespread and serious riots of modern British history, they have claimed little scholarly attention. Despite Panikos Panayi's splendid work documenting the experiences of Germans in England, the disturbing episodes surrounding the sinking of the Lusitania remain one of the least know events of the First World War, and Panayi himself almost the sole authority to have explored them in any depth. This relative silence results, perhaps, from their tendency to disturb more familiar narratives of victimhood and violence. The riots lack an edifying political message, as the English Working Class abandoned class solidarity and a "moral economy" in favor of patriotic fervor and ethnic hatred. Resembling the "church and king" mobs of the eighteenth century more than the political assemblies of the nineteenth, the riots disturb a teleology of progressive and responsible working class politicization. Neither have the victims themselves inspired particular sympathy, perhaps because of the far greater atrocities perpetrated by the Germans during the Second World War or by the British themselves in Ireland and the Empire. In a century dominated by the specter of genocide, the wrecking of shops--and German ones at that--is difficult to fathom as an "atrocity" of any real note. Indeed, during the riots, few people were killed and--to the astonishment of British authorities--no accusations of sexual assault were brought by the German Government against any rioters. (81) While premises were looted and wrecked, victims usually walked away with minor injuries and the crowd, at times, could even be reasoned with--such as in the case of Mr. Schneiderman, a popular Jewish costumer who produced his naturalization papers, causing the wreckers to disperse. (82) Despite its seeming recklessness, the British crowd was restrained by its own moral economy--an economy that, while violent and brutal, appears to have drawn the line at sexual assault and murder. Working class Britons wanted to get rid of the Germans but not to annihilate them; their ethnic cleansing was social and economic--targeting homes and business--rather than genocidal and sexual, targeting bodies and wombs. Indeed, the riots, as appalling as they were, were not pogroms.

Officially, the Home Office defended the rights of naturalized Britons against the public, Conservative MPs, the War Office, and MI5. The horror of internment and repatriation is palpable in the stories of Richard Noschke and Rudolph Rocker, but the objective of the State was expulsion rather than eradication, and some of those deported returned after the war. Paul Cohen-Portheim, an unmarried internee, insisted that "[c]ompared to life at the front, life in a concentration camp was undramatic; there was no danger, there was no heroism ... It was monotonous, it was drab, it was futile, and in that futility lay its tragedy." (83) Perhaps it is the seemingly "undramatic" nature of this "tragedy" that has caused it to be passed over by all but a few scholars--as though it were somehow unseemly to dwell on the petty suffering of those from whence would come much greater suffering. Economic envy, terror of spies, and hatred towards "the enemy" turned friends and neighbors into objects of violence, but their bodily survival has deflected attention from their loss. As ethnic Germans, of often longstanding position in their neighborhoods, came to be imagined as a community of outsiders, the state lost control of its ability to define and protect them. While the crowd observed unspoken boundaries between hurting and killing, popular and Conservative notions of what it meant to be an "outsider" would reshape the law. After a long liberal interlude, the "island race" reasserted itself, not by exterminating its enemies, but by legislating against them. (84) This mixture of restrained violence, police intervention, and legal coercion succeeded in cleansing many British communities of an unwanted alien presence and their diminution during the inter-war period seems to have excited relatively little comment, even from Germans themselves. Indeed, Paul Cohen-Portheim is one of the few Germans to have left a published account of his internment and his experience, cushioned by financial means and the absence of dependents, lacks the emotional resonances of those torn from their families.

The history of private life, as John Gillis has long reminded us, can therefore give substance to events more emotionally comprehensible in the microcosm than in the macrocosm. "People are genuinely shocked or grieved when one aeroplane smashes or when there is a pit disaster and a few human lives are destroyed," wrote Paul Cohen-Portheim in the introduction to his memoir. "[B]ut when thousands of aeroplanes are shot down and hundreds of thousands of men blown up by mines the scale of horror transcends imagination and people cease to care." (85) The study of "Kith and Kin" may, perhaps, stimulate the imagination and help us to care again.

Department of History

Durham, NH 03824

ENDNOTES

I wish to thanks Patrick McDevitt, Rick Jobs, Matt Matsuda, Eliga Gould, Lucy Salyer, Tammy Proctor and Laura Tabili. The staff at the Imperial War Museum, Ms. Wendy Thirkettle at the Manx National Heritage, and the Trustees of the British Library kindly facilitated my use of crucial documents and photographs.

1. G.S. Street, Censor's Report, 31 August 1918. Filed with Walter Melville, "The Female Hun," [unpublished ms, 1918] in Lord Chamberlain's Plays, 1914-1918, British Library, London, Manuscripts Room, 1918/16.

2. Walter Melville, "The Female Hun," [unpublished ms, 1918], Act I, p. 6 in Lord Chamberlain's Plays, 1914-1918, British Library, London, Manuscripts Room, 1918/16.

3. See M. Page Bladwin, "Subject to Empire: Married Women and the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act," Journal of British Studies (October 2001): 522.

4. "The Female Hun," Act III, p. 26.

5. Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003).

6. Richard I. Jobs and Patrick F. McDevitt, eds, "Where the Hell are the People?" in this issue. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983, 1991).

7. Panikos Panayi, The Enemy in Our Midst: Germans in Britain during the First World War (Oxford: Berg, 1991): 223-258; Panikos Panayi, "Preface" and chapter 1, "Anti-immigrant Riots in Nineteenth and- Twentieth Century Britain" in Panikos Panayi ed., Racial Violence in Britain, 1840-1950 (Leicester, 1993): ix; 11; Laura Tabili, "'Having Lived Beside Them All the Time:' Negotiating National Identities Through Personal Networks" in this issue.

8. Pat O'Mara, The Autobiography of a Liverpool Slummy (London, 1934): 11. See also Laura Tabili, "We Ask for British Justice:" Workers and Racial Difference in Late Imperial Britian (Ithaca, 1994).

9. O'Mara, 12.

10. O'Mara, 140.

11. O'Mara, 173-4.

12. O'Mara, 174.

13. O'Mara, 174.

14. David Ramsay, Lusitania: Saga and Myth (New York, 2001): 296.

15. Ramsay, 200.

16. Mrs. P. Amory, The Death of the Lusitania (Toronto, 1917): 7.

17. Amory, 14.

18. Amory, 14.

19. Amory, 18.

20. Amory, 18-19; A.H. Adams, The Lusitania Crime and the Escape of the Orduna (Winnipeg, 1915): 63.

21. Amory, 20.

22. Amory, 25.

23. Quoted in Panyai, Enemy, 286.

24. Mr. A.H. Adams, an electrician traveling from Winnipeg to Liverpool remembered watching a little girl drown. She had been clinging to the captain, but was abandoned and later "bourne off before out eyes. For some time we could hear the sweet, clear, childish, voice raised in a well-known hymn ..." A.H. Adams, 24-25.

25. Quoted in A.H. Adams, 56.

26. H.S. Taylor, Reminiscences of the Great War 1914-1918 [unpublished typescript, 1978] Imperial War Museum, London, Documents, 80/19/1, p. 1

27. 2nd Lieutenant A.M. Jameson to My Dearest [?], 19 May, 1915, Imperial War Museum, London, Documents, 98/13/1.

28. O'Mara, 224.

29. Rev. E.J.E. Schreck, M.A., The Torpedoing of the Lusitania: A Sermon Delivered on May 9, 1915, the Sunday before Ascension Day, at the Wretham Road Church, Handsworth, Birmingham (London, [nd]): 5.

30. Amory, 29-30.

31. O'Mara, 225.

32. Panayi, Enemy, 235-237.

33. Robert Roberts, The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century (London, 1990): 155; Jay Winter, The Great War and the British People (Cambridge, 1986): 213-215.

34. O'Mara, 225.

35. O'Mara, 227.

36. O'Mara, 226.

37. O'Mara, 226.

38. O'Mara, 226-27.

39. Tabili, '"Having Lived Beside Them All the Time" in this issue.

40. Such anxieties seem to have been generated by diplomatic and economic rivalries between the two nations. Panayi, Enemy, 30-39; I.F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War, 1763-1984 (Oxford, 1966).

41. Tabili, '"Having Lived Beside Them All the Time" in this issue.

42. O'Mara, 229.

43. O'Mara, 227-8.

44. O'Mara, 228.

45. The Rt. Hon. Viscount Sandhurst, P.C. From Day to Day 1914-1915 (London, 1928): 197-98.

46. Sadhurst, 199-200.

47. E. Sylvia Pankhurst, "Let Us Not Be Cowards," Women's Dreadnought, May 15, 1915, 246.

48. Panayi, Enemy, 45-131; Sandhurst, 200.

49. Richard Noschke, First World War Memoirs [ms. 1918] Imperial War Museum, London, Documents, 336; R. Noschke, 4.

50. Noschke, 53.

51. August Cohen, Some Aspects of the War as Viewed by Naturalized British Subjects (London, 1916): 22-23.

52. Such faith was not entirely ill-founded. Not only were many of those (particularly British-born women and elderly persons) who requested humanitarian exemption from repatriation granted it, but many Germans were eligible for monetary compensation under the Riot Damages Act to help them re-build destroyed businesses. Given war-time restrictions against "Trading With the Enemy," public hostility to "coddling the Germans," and the rapid internment and eventual repatriation of many business owners, it is not clear whether German shopkeepers were actually compensated. No study that I am aware with deals with this issue.

53. "Alleged maltreatment of German women and Children in UK 1915-1916," National Archives, Kew, HO 45/10787/298199.

54. "Aliens Restriction. Alleged Maltreatment of German Women and Children," cases no. 2, no. 5, and no. 10, Public Record Office, Kew, HO 45/10787/298199.

55. Chief Constable Barrow-in-Furness to HO, February 12, 1916 and deposition by Elizabeth Moore, landlady, Public Record Office, Kew, HO 45/10787/298199.

56. Mr. Fisher-Williams to HO, Jan 13, 1916, National Archives, Kew, HO g0545/10787/298199.

57. "Aliens Restriction. Alleged Maltreatment of German Women and Children," case no. 13, Public Record Office, Kew, HO 45/10787/298199.

58. "Summary of Charges by the German Government and Replies of the HO as to Alleged Ill Treatment of German Women and Children in England," no 13, National Archives, Kew, HO 45/10787/298199.

59. Times, March 10, 1916.

60. There is relatively little work on the internment of enemy aliens in Britain during the First World War. The most thorough scholarly account is J.C. Bird, Control of Enemy Alien Civilians in Great Britain, 1914-1918 (London, 1986). See also, David Cesarani and Tony Kushner eds., The Internment of Aliens in Twentieth Century Britain (London, 1993) esp. essay by Panikos Panayi, "An Intolerant Act by an Intolerant Society: The Internment of Germans in Britian During the First World War,": 53-75. For an interesting comparison see, Matthew Stibbe, "A Community At War: British Civilian Internees at the Ruhleben Camp in Germany, 1914-1918" in Jenny Macleod and Pierre Purseigle eds., Uncovered Fields: Perspectives in First World War Studies (Boston, 2004): 79-94.

61. "Friends Emergency War Victim's Relief Committee (1914-1919)," Society of Friends Library, London, FEWVRC/EME 01-09.

62. Times, March 10, 1916.

63. "Friends Emergency War Victim's Relief Committee (1914-1919)," Society of Friends Library, London, FEWVRC/EME 01-09.

64. Rudolph Rocker the Elder, "Alexandra Palace Internment Camp in the First World War, 1914-1918" [unpublished typescript, 1918] Printed Books, i 21 9086, p. 47, BL, London, p. 47. Quoted by permission of the British Library.

65. Rocker, 49.

66. Rocker, 50.

67. Noschke, 69.

68. Rocker, 40

69. Rocker, 48-9.

70. Noschke, 54.

71. Noschke, 54-55.

72. Noschke, 56.

73. F. Eckstein, Esq., The Case of Naturalized British Subjects: Meeting at the Memorial Hall in Farrington London 27 May, 1915 (London, 1915): 14-15.

74. Rocker, 44.

75. Rocker, 44.

76. Noschke, 40.

77. Noschke, 40-46

78. Noschke, 47-8.

79. Noschke, 48-57.

80. Noschke, 78.

81. A. Fisher-Williams, January 13, 1916, notes on "Allegations of Ill-treatment of German Women in the UK Transcript copy of note from US ambassador with Enclosure ..." in "Alleged maltreatment of German women and Children in UK 1915-1916," Public Record Office, Kew, HO 45/10787/298199.

82. Hakney and Kingsland Gazette, May 21, 1915, p. 3.

83. Paul Cohen-Portheim, Time Stood Still: My Internment in England 1914-1918 (New York, 1932): 2.

84. In addition to the internment and repatriation of Germans, the post-war period saw a tightening up of immigration laws, particularly directed at aliens from former enemy nations. For a thorough discussion of post-World War I immigration policies regarding race, see, Tabili, British Justice, passim; For an indispensable account of British nationality law see Ann Dummett and Andrew Nicol, Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others: Nationality and Immigration Law (London, 1990): 107-109.

85. Cohen-Portheim, 1.

By Nicoletta F. Gullace

University of New Hampshire