The British Propaganda Effort 1914-1919

Stephen Badsey

There is still a surprisingly widespread belief that British official propaganda had considerable influence over the outbreak, the conduct, and the outcome of the First World War. Even books written quite recently imply that the British government had a well organised propaganda apparatus in place before the war. It is further implied that this official propaganda apparatus was used first to deceive British men into volunteering to fight, and then to hide the true and awful nature of the war from the public at home. It has also been claimed that British propaganda successfully demonised Germany in the eyes of British and neutral peoples; and that the lies of British propaganda played a leading part both in the United States’ entry into the war in 1917, and then in the defeat of Germany in 1918 by undermining its people’s will to fight. All this, it is widely believed, was done by the British through cynical exploitation of deceit and misrepresentation, with disastrous consequences in promoting and prolonging a destructive and tragic war.

Even before the war’s end, very large claims were made about the impact of British propaganda, including by some of the propagandists themselves, notably those from the 'Crewe House' organisation, headed by Lord Northcliffe (born Alfred Harmsworth), the highly influential press baron who owned The Times newspaper and several others. The view of British propaganda as both effective and deceitful was reinforced in the 1920s by some British politicians who hoped to promote peace in Europe, and who placed particular emphasis on what they saw as the wartime abuse of 'atrocity propaganda' in creating an artificial blood-lust by depicting the enemy as barbaric or inhuman. The most influential of these was the Member of Parliament (MP) Arthur Ponsonby (Labour Party), whose book Falsehood in War-time, published in 1928, attributed almost every wartime tall story he could find to intentional government propaganda [1]. By the 1930s, with the great depression and the growing likelihood of another European war, the idea that the First World War had been nothing other than a pointless catastrophe grew in strength, reinforcing the view that wartime propaganda had been deceitful and wicked. In the United States these views were popular with isolationists, and with the German-American and Irish-American lobbies. The fear that a British propaganda campaign had drawn the United States into the First World War and might do so again was an important contributory factor to the Neutrality Acts from 1935 onwards, forbidding foreign propaganda on American soil.