In the early hours of the morning on 3 July 1919, the left-wing journalist and future Labour MP Morgan Philips Price was arrested by the Berlin police and taken by car from his lodgings in the Charlottenburg district to police headquarters on the Alexanderplatz. There, he was interviewed and informed that he was being held under suspicion of having distributed Bolshevik propaganda, before being frog-marched the short distance to Moabit prison. On the way, he was told that if he attempted to escape he would be shot; an ominous injunction given that a little over six months previously the leaders of Germany's Communist Party, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, who Price had known personally, had been murdered on the pretext that they were trying to escape custody.
Despite never being formally charged with any offence, Price spent the next four days confined to a cell, and his demands to know why he had been detained were met with evasive replies. Indeed, there seemed some confusion even amongst the German authorities as to who had ordered Price's arrest: a statement issued by the office of the German defence ministry declared that he had been detained ‘because of his political activities in Germany’ but that the German government had ‘no particular interest’ in Price.Footnote 1 Nevertheless, the military authorities in Berlin (which remained under martial law following attempted uprisings by communist insurgents in January and March) continued to hold him, apparently against the wishes of the government in Weimar. Eventually, he was released as suddenly and with as little explanation as he had been arrested. When pressed by Price's journalistic colleagues, the German authorities asserted that ‘the whole affair had been a mistake’ and he was ‘absolved and free to continue his journalistic activities’.Footnote 2
Price always maintained that his unexplained detention had been orchestrated by the British, who, he claimed, had put pressure on the Germans to take him into custody because of his close links with the new Bolshevik government in Moscow and outspoken opposition to the Allied intervention in Russia. He even went so far as to suggest that his arrest was part of a wider capitalist conspiracy on the part of ‘certain military authorities and the secret police in Great Britain, France, Germany and the United States to prevent independent journalists from reporting what was going on in Europe’.Footnote 3 This interpretation of the affair was followed closely by Tania Rose, who saw her father's arrest as evidence of the continuation of wartime political censorship by other means.Footnote 4 However, an examination of the files kept on Price by the British security services (which were unavailable to Price and Rose and have not previously been utilized by historians) reveals not only that this interpretation was only partially correct, but also the wider significance of Price's case for our understanding of this period.
Two areas in particular are illuminated by a consideration of the British documents on the affair: the outlook and operations of the British Army in the Rhineland in the early months of the occupation and broader anxiety over the perceived threat of communism. The first of these has been the subject of surprisingly little research. Although Brigadier-General Sir James Edmonds's official historyFootnote 5 does make some reference to the disturbances within the occupying forces and operations against suspected German sedition, the more recent literature on the topic has tended to focus on the diplomatic or social history of the occupation.Footnote 6 A consideration of the Price case therefore sheds new light on the concerns of some of the senior officers of the occupying forces and the methods by which they sought to deal with actual or perceived threats to morale and security. These in themselves can be seen as exemplifying a broader set of anxieties and attitudes well attested to in the literature on the domestic situation in Britain immediately after the armistice.Footnote 7 In particular, Price's arrest is illustrative of a particular mind-set amongst certain sections of the British establishment in which Bolshevism replaced Germany as the immediate, and much more insidious, threat to the security of the British empire; and in which left-wing newspapers and propagandists were viewed as being particularly dangerous.Footnote 8 To this way of thinking, the threat of revolution could only be countered through concerted action, either in the form of military operations against Soviet Russia or a hard line against seditious elements closer to home. Within this context, Price's detention becomes understandable as a matter of expediency in keeping with military logic.
I
Born into a wealthy family of Gloucestershire landowners, Morgan Philips Price (1885–1976) was at first glance a somewhat unlikely champion of the proletarian revolution. He was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, and (his father having died when he was only a year old) he inherited the family estate of Tibberton Court on his twenty-first birthday. In 1907, he also became a director of the family timber business. Nevertheless, from an early age his mother instilled in him ‘a strong, almost religious, sense of duty to improve the lot of the less fortunate’Footnote 9 and he was brought up steeped in a family tradition of political radicalism and religious nonconformity. After leaving university, he anticipated following his father, both his grandfathers, and his maternal uncle into parliament and was groomed for a political career first by the radical Liberal MP Sir Charles Dilke and later by Francis Hirst, editor of The Economist. In 1911, he was adopted as prospective Liberal candidate for Gloucester, a post he held until the spring of 1915.
Price later described his political outlook at this point as ‘a curious mixture of Socialism in home affairs and traditionalist, almost Whig, attitude to foreign affairs’.Footnote 10 The strong opposition that he took towards the outbreak of war in 1914 was therefore something of a surprise and can be ascribed at least in part to the influence of his cousin, Charles Philips Trevelyan. Price supported the Neutrality Committee set up by Trevelyan and Norman Angell in early August and was a founder member of the Union of Democratic Control, a pressure group which argued for greater democratic oversight of foreign policy, for which he wrote The diplomatic history of the war (1914).
Like many others on the British Left, Price was particularly concerned about Britain's alliance with Tsarist Russia and the way that it was presented in the patriotic press. He therefore conceived the idea of becoming a war correspondent in order to help ‘inform public opinion about Russia more accurately’.Footnote 11 In the early autumn of 1914, he approached C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian, who sympathized with Price's attitude towards the war and shared his unease over the alliance with Russia.Footnote 12 It was agreed that Price would go to Russia for a few months to act as a sort of informal news agency for Scott. Although he was provided with a letter describing him as ‘le correspondent particulier en Russie du “Manchester Guardian”’Footnote 13 and Scott's verbal suggestion that he ‘thought the “Manchester Guardian” [sic] would be able to receive some articles’ from him,Footnote 14 at no point was he a salaried member of the paper's staff – an issue that was later to have some importance when, after 1917, Scott sought to distance the Guardian from Price and his political views.Footnote 15
Price left England in mid-November 1914, travelling by boat from Newcastle to Bergen and then overland to Stockholm, arriving in Petrograd (St Petersburg) via Finland on 13 December. There he got in touch with leading Russian Liberals and intellectuals before going to report on the progress of the war in Poland and the Ukraine. After a few months, he headed south-east to observe how Russian forces were faring against the Turks. Price later suggested that he was driven to leave European Russia by frustration over the censorship and official interference he experienced,Footnote 16 but it is clear from his letters to Scott that it was always his intention ‘to go straight down to the Caucasus’.Footnote 17 This was more familiar territory to Price, who had travelled widely in the lands on either side of Russia's borders with Persia and the Ottoman empire before the war, but there was also less journalistic competition: in Poland and at the Galician front he was just one British observer amongst many but in ‘Asiatic Russia’ he was, as Scott acknowledged, ‘the only English correspondent in that district’ and well placed to deliver ‘scoops’ on a little known theatre of the wider conflict.Footnote 18
Price arrived in Tiflis (Tbilisi) in the first week of July 1915 and spent much of the next two years travelling throughout the Caucasus, covering ‘more than 500 miles of little-known territory’,Footnote 19 much of it on horseback and alone save for a local guide. What he witnessed during this time formed the basis of many of the 141 articles by Price that appeared in the Manchester Guardian before the outbreak of the Russian Revolution and was instrumental in changing his political outlook. Dismayed by the continuation of the fighting and deeply affected by what he witnessed of the plight of ordinary people caught up in the war, he became increasingly pessimistic, even as his political viewpoint shifted to the Left.Footnote 20
Price's political views at this point in his life are hard to pin-point clearly. In his Reminiscences on the Russian Revolution (1921), Price wrote that he went to Russia with ‘no knowledge of the teachings of Marx’ but returned a convert, ‘prepared…to interpret the events in Eastern Europe as the first phase of a social revolution which will be world-wide’.Footnote 21 Yet in his final letter to his brother before leaving for Russia, he had written that ‘I must get in touch with the Social Democrats and other brothers of the faith and see what hope there is…Wait till the dawn of International Socialism.’Footnote 22 This seems to indicate that he had already begun to move away from the ‘modest radicalism’Footnote 23 of his pre-war Liberalism towards something more clearly akin to revolutionary Socialism. Yet he was not yet the ‘convert’ he later described himself as.
Although Price was an enthusiastic supporter of the Russian Revolution of March 1917, his initial impressions of the Bolsheviks were not favourable. He wrote disparagingly of ‘the demagogy of Lenin and Trotsky’Footnote 24 and that their policy of ‘All Power to the Soviets’ demonstrated that ‘the inner character of the Bolshevik movement’ was ‘not socialism at all but syndicalism’.Footnote 25 Shortly afterwards, he told his brother that although he applauded their policy of withdrawing Russia from the war, they were ‘nevertheless incapable of constructive work. They are destructive Jacobins who believe that by flaming decrees, passionate speeches, terrorism, and the guillotine they can create a worldly paradise. They will have to go and make way for more constructive people.’Footnote 26
However, within weeks Price's view of the Bolsheviks began to undergo a dramatic volte-face. Though he still expressed his doubts about the ‘methods of high-handed coercion and terrorism employed by the Bolsheviks’,Footnote 27 his articles in January and February 1918 expressed a new belief that they were also building ‘a new Government of the working class aiming to reorganize society on a Socialist basis’.Footnote 28 By April 1918, he was praising Bolshevik ‘statesmanship’ in seeking to bring an end to the war while consolidating and defending the revolution.Footnote 29 Later, in a letter to his aunt, he lauded Lenin (branded ‘the Anarcho-Syndicalist dictator’ the previous DecemberFootnote 30) as ‘the most courageous statesman in Europe at present’ and ‘one of the greatest brains of the period’.Footnote 31
This change of heart may have been occasioned in part by the fact that not only were his views on the Russian situation now in great demand by Western newspapers,Footnote 32 but also that he was being courted by the Soviet leadership. At the end of November, he wrote that he had been given ‘a desk at the Smolny Institute, where the revolutionary [govern]ment is centred’ and was drawing much of the information that went into his dispatches from the Soviet press bureau.Footnote 33 Considering that only weeks before he had been reporting on the progress of the revolution in the Volga region, this represents a dramatic move from the periphery to the centre of events and demonstrates how useful the Soviet leadership considered his copy to be. In January 1918, he met the Bolshevik People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Georgy Chicherin, who both ensured that Price was ‘given all facilities’ to continue his journalistic work because his dispatches ‘were, along with those of Arthur Ransome to the Daily News, the only fair and objective reports on Russian affairs coming to the West’, and arranged for Price to gain access to money from England.Footnote 34
However, what finally persuaded Price to take the decision to ‘sink or swim with the Russian Revolution’Footnote 35 and embark on a course of action that some back home regarded as tantamount to treason was the fear that Russia's ‘revolutionary democracy’ would be crushed by foreign troops. In March 1918, with the agreement of the Bolshevik government, the Royal Navy landed 2,500 troops at Murmansk in the far north of Russia, ostensibly to defend Allied supplies stockpiled there from the Germans. This force was strengthened with additional troops throughout the following months, until it numbered around 5,000 men supported by a similar number of Americans and around 1,000 French. The relationship between the British and the new government in Moscow was always uneasy and as the spring and early summer went on tensions on the ground rose against a backdrop of diplomatic manoeuvring and domestic pressure to take a hard line against the Bolsheviks. Finally, the Allies went on the offensive and on 1 August occupied the strategic city of Archangel. At the same time, the commander of the intervention force, General F. C. Poole, was ordered to take to the field alongside White Russian forces.
Price's immediate response to these developments was twofold. On the one hand, he accepted the offer of a job as translator and propagandist for the Soviet foreign office in the hope, as he said, of ‘breaking down the cordon of lies and calumny which barred the Russian Soviets from the outer world’. On the other, he ‘went down to the headquarters of the International Legion of the Red Army…and offered myself for enlistment’.Footnote 36 The Bolsheviks evidently thought he was more use as a propagandist, and rather than being dispatched to the front he was set to work translating pamphlets ‘appealing to the Allied soldiers not to fight but to go home’.Footnote 37 These were soon followed by similar works distributed through the Soviet Department of International Propaganda (Sovprop). Around this time, he ‘joined the party’ and in September he helped found the Group of English-speaking communists, made up of British and American sympathizers of the Bolshevik regime resident in Moscow.Footnote 38 He also wrote for, and possibly edited, The Call, a newspaper published by the Soviet government ‘with the object of convincing its English-speaking fellow workers that the interests of all workers of all lands are the same, and urge the need for establishing that solidarity of international labour, upon which alone the peace of the world can be secured’.Footnote 39
II
By this time, Price's activities in Russia had already attracted considerable attention back home in Britain. Official interest seems to have originated with a letter in which Price described himself as ‘up to my neck in the revolutionary movement’Footnote 40 and from June 1917 ‘a large quantity of his correspondence’ was intercepted by the British censor.Footnote 41 In July, it was suggested that ‘perhaps a hint to the Editor [of the Manchester Guardian] would bring about Price's recall’,Footnote 42 but there is no record of this suggestion being acted upon until the following year. Even so, by August 1917, the security services had decided that Price's correspondence and writings sympathetic to the Russian Revolution demonstrated that he was ‘actively disloyal, or, at best, an ill-balanced visionary, and therefore dangerous, especially in Russia just now’.Footnote 43 In September, after three letters ‘of a highly pernicious nature’ from Price had made it past the censor, MI5 wrote to the Foreign Office stating that ‘we are of the opinion that an immediate stop should be put to his activities’.Footnote 44 Later that month, the Foreign Office contacted Sir George Buchanan in Petrograd to ask ‘whether it would be possible to induce the Russian Government to expel Mr Phillips [sic] Price from Russia’.Footnote 45 Buchanan replied on 30 October that the Russian foreign ministry ‘would expel him if requested by us’ but that the unstable political situation that existed in Russia meant that ‘it is quite doubtful if they are able to do so, and, if they did, Mr Price would have little difficulty in escaping en route. In any event, he would probably become a popular hero and give all concerned a good deal of trouble.’Footnote 46 The Foreign Office was forced to conclude that ‘it is impossible at the present moment to take any action which would conduce to silencing Mr Phillips [sic] Price’.Footnote 47
There, the matter rested for almost a year, though the security services continued to monitor Price's activities. However, once reports of his involvement in propaganda activities directed against the troops of the Allied forces in northern Russia began to reach London, Price gained a new notoriety. He was the subject of five questions asked in parliament between October 1918 and March 1919 and Cecil Harmsworth, undersecretary of state for foreign affairs, stated that ‘Information has been collected in regard to the activities of Mr. Philips Price, and will be available in the event of his return to this country, and of a decision being taken to take action in this case.’Footnote 48
Under increasing pressure from the backbenches and amidst growing panic over the possible spread of Bolshevism, the government explored various methods of censoring Price. In October, MI7 wrote to the Foreign Office reviving the idea of ‘inducing’ the Manchester Guardian to recall Price, or, ‘failing appropriate action by the proprietors of the “Manchester Guardian”, Major General Thwaites would suggest that Mr Price's passport may be withdrawn if it is possible to communicate with him’.Footnote 49 On 5 November 1918, Major A. W. Foster at MI5 asked if Price's ‘actions…would justify action being taken against him if found in the British zone in Russia, or on return to this country?’Footnote 50 The Foreign Office sought legal advice and Herbert William Malkin, assistant legal advisor to the Foreign Office, replied that a prosecution under the Defence of the Realm Act was unfeasible as Price's activities had been committed abroad, and that while a case of ‘high treason committed abroad could be alleged…I doubt whether the facts as disclosed…could be held to amount to this’.Footnote 51 However, he recommended that the case be referred to the director of public prosecutions for his opinion. When this duly arrived on 17 December, Sir Charles Matthews stated that although a prosecution under the Defence of the Realm Act might have been possible if Price had been on British soil, ‘As the matter stands…there is no evidence of the commission of any offence punishable by the Courts of this country, because within their jurisdiction no offence has, thus far, been committed.’Footnote 52
Meanwhile, false reports that Price was to be sent to Britain to conduct propaganda on behalf of the Bolsheviks attracted the attention of Sir Basil Thomson, assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police and from 1 May 1919 head of the short-lived Directorate of Intelligence at the Home Office. Thomson clearly felt that MI5 and the Foreign Office were not being pro-active enough and took steps of his own to try to limit Price's effectiveness as a propagandist, if not his activities themselves.Footnote 53 On 20 December 1918, he wrote to Scott at the Manchester Guardian pointing out Price's role as a propagandist with the apparent intention of choking off both Price's funding and his main outlet in the British press.Footnote 54 Sensitive to accusations of pro-Bolshevik bias and no doubt alarmed by a letter from Aylmer Maude, his special correspondent with the intervention forces, accusing Price of activity ‘which is obviously treasonable’,Footnote 55 Scott wrote to Price gently asking him to ‘discontinue your correspondence’ with the Guardian on the grounds that ‘it doesn't do for you, as our correspondent, to be carrying on Bolshevik propaganda’.Footnote 56 This communication apparently never reached Price who, despite declaring that ‘I am not going to bother my head anymore about the Manchester Guardian’ in August 1917,Footnote 57 continued to send them dispatches from Russia and Germany until the beginning of 1919.
III
Up until this point, the security services had been largely frustrated in their efforts to silence Price. However, in the spring of 1919, he came within reach of the British authorities for the first time since he had left for Russia nearly five years previously. On 2 December 1918, British troops had crossed into German territory and established their zone of occupation in the Rhineland centred on Cologne. Almost simultaneously, Price took advantage of the confused political and military situation in Eastern Europe to cross into German territory and head straight to Berlin. According to his own later account, he did so because he thought that from the German capital he could better ‘communicate a true account of the situation in Russia to friends in England and thereby probably escape the British censor’.Footnote 58 However, as Tania Rose has suggested, it is ‘inconceivable’ that Price was acting alone in this. ‘Indeed, in an account of this period found among his private papers he wrote that it was [head of the Central European Department of the ministry of foreign affairs Karl] Radek's idea that he should go.’Footnote 59
Germany in the winter of 1918 was a nation in turmoil. The smouldering discontent that had been growing for over a year was fanned into flame by a mutiny among sailors of the High Seas Fleet at Kiel on 3 November. This unrest spread first to dockworkers and soldiers of the local garrison before rapidly engulfing the whole nation. On 7 November, the Bavarian monarchy fled Munich, leaving it in the hands of a revolutionary parliament that elected the left-wing journalist Kurt Eisner as prime minister. Two days later, the revolution reached Berlin and the chancellor, Prince Max von Baden, announced the abdication of the Kaiser before handing the reins of power to the Social Democrats. In the confusion, two separate republics were proclaimed (the radical socialist Karl Liebknecht called for a soviet republic at roughly the same time as the Social Democrat Phillip Scheidemann declared the formation of a republic headed by a united ‘labour government’ in an effort to persuade the crowds threatening to storm the Reichstag to disperse), and on 10 November, a six-man Council of Peoples’ Representatives (Rat der Volksbeaufragten) was formed pending elections to a National Constituent Assembly.
Price reached Berlin during the lull between the revolution's first, largely bloodless, phase and its second, more violent, stage. He lost no time in contacting the leaders of the extreme-left Spartakus-Bund, and his activities at this time were mainly focused on the struggle for supremacy within the German Left. His earliest reports for the Daily Herald were on the meeting of the Congress of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Councils at the Busch Theatre in December (which produced a victory for the moderates who favoured Western-style parliamentary democracy over Soviet communism) and the clash between government-backed paramilitaries and the revolutionary People's Naval Division over Christmas. Once again, he was in the thick of things: attending (along with Radek) the founding Congress of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (Communist Party of Germany, KPD) and he narrowly avoided serious harm when government-sponsored paramilitary Freikorps stormed the offices of the Social Democratic newspaper Vorwärts during the January Uprising.Footnote 60 In his diary, Price expressed his shock at the news of the murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg and noted that ‘several of my friends disappeared’ in the subsequent ‘white terror’.Footnote 61 He also found a new regular outlet in Britain for his views, offering his services to the newly established Labour newspaper the Daily Herald, in January 1919.Footnote 62
Price's presence in Germany was the cause of some alarm for the British. Following the toppling of the Russian monarchy, the fear of revolution increasingly haunted the imaginations of many of Britain's leaders.Footnote 63 The morale and reliability of British troops was a particular concern. Not only were the armed forces regarded as the last line of defence in the event of civil unrest (particularly following the police strikes of 1918 and 1919), but senior commanders were acutely aware of the role played by mutinous servicemen in sparking the Russian and German revolutions. The move into a nation in the grip of political unrest only seemed to make the situation more fraught with danger, and insulating the troops from seditious ideas and propaganda was a key concern.
The demands of total war had transformed the British Army from a small, professional fighting force into a vast ‘citizen army’, and by 1917–18 the few ‘Old Contemptibles’ of 1914 that remained were vastly outnumbered by volunteers and conscripts. Although there were no major mutinies amongst British troops as there had been in the French Army in the summer of 1917, military intelligence painted a disturbing picture (to senior officers at least) of an increasingly restive army as the war entered its fourth year.Footnote 64 If anything, things grew worse after the armistice. With the war to all intents and purposes over, the majority of British troops regarded their duty as done and naturally wished to return to their homes and families as soon as possible. However, Field Marshal Douglas Haig estimated that a peacetime army of over a million men would be needed to fulfil Britain's post-war commitments. It was therefore necessary to keep a considerable number of men under arms in the short term while a reorganization of British forces took place and orderly plans for demobilization were drawn up. This led to frustration amongst the men, and in January 1919, troops in Folkestone mutinied when ordered to re-embark for France. This disturbance was followed by similar ‘soldiers’ strikes’ throughout the country and amongst British forces in continental Europe.Footnote 65
Although the details of the extent to which this unrest affected the 3·5 million troops occupying Cologne are unclear, there was particular concern about the reliability of these men.Footnote 66 Even before the British had crossed the frontier there had been some apprehension about how the troops would behave on German soil. Once across the German border, continuing delays and confusion over demobilization, together with poor infrastructure and a consequent shortage of supplies, combined to undermine the morale of British troops.Footnote 67 In addition to this, the ‘pitiable situation’ of the Rhinelanders, who continued to suffer from food and fuel shortages as a result of the continuing Allied blockade, also badly affected morale, to the extent that some observers reported that British troops took to ‘feeding the women and children surreptitiously’ in defiance of the official prohibition against ‘fraternization’ with the German population.Footnote 68
Matters were made worse, as far as the authorities were concerned, by the proximity of British troops to the ‘Bolshevik “cholera area” of the Ruhr’.Footnote 69 Many in the government noted the similarities between the unrest in Britain and that which had affected the German Army in November 1918 and concluded that ‘the Germans were in some way responsible’.Footnote 70 Medical metaphors abounded in both official and journalistic discussions concerning the spread of the ‘Red menace’ and there was an intense anxiety that ‘Bolshevism’ could be passed from person to person like a plague.Footnote 71 Orders were issued by the military authorities in Cologne banning public meetings and demonstrations and ordering the workers’ and soldiers’ councils to ‘cease their political activities in the localities and immediately leave all public buildings’.Footnote 72 One of the most important duties of the intelligence officers attached to the Army of the Rhine was ‘the detection of attempts to spread anti-Ally propaganda’Footnote 73 and the whole Army was instructed to be on alert against German agents in plain clothes whose aim was ‘to spread revolutionary ideas amongst the troops and induce the formation of soldiers’ councils’.Footnote 74 The continuing political turmoil in Germany fuelled rumours of Spartacist uprisings in February and March 1919 but although there was serious unrest in Düsseldorf and other towns and cities bordering the occupied area there were no major disturbances in the British zone. Even so, the intelligence section of the Army of the Rhine continued to be on high alert throughout 1919. Seven Spartacist ‘agitators’ were arrested in Düren in February and ‘the records show that 43 [sic] such persons were arrested in one month’ during the early stages of the occupation.Footnote 75
This culminated in the breaking up of a supposed Spartacist cell operating out of Düsseldorf in June 1919. Eight German citizens, including Ernst Seidel, ‘Chief of the Police Spartacists in Dusseldorf [sic]’, were charged with ‘having between the 1st January 1919 and the 11th day of June 1919 [sic] joined a conspiracy to cause mutiny and sedition among the Allied forces’.Footnote 76 It is notable that this case centred around the supposed infiltration of the local police by Spartacist agents which no doubt rang alarm bells amongst British observers who must have been aware that the event which sparked the Spartacist uprising in January was the dismissal of Berlin's left-wing police president Emil Eichorn. One of the chief witnesses for the prosecution was an American intelligence officer, Lieutenant J. Siegfried, who infiltrated the group posing as a deserter. As part of his evidence, Siegfried recalled a meeting in the office of the chief of police in which he was introduced to ‘two English speaking gentlemen’, one of whom was identified as the American cartoonist and journalist Robert Minor, the other ‘introduced himself as Philip [sic] Price’.Footnote 77 At a later meeting, Siegfried witnessed Minor writing a propaganda leaflet aimed at American troops, Siegfried himself providing some of the information on which it was based. While this was going on, Price ‘was talking to Seidel in German’, and although Siegfried did not witness Price himself engaging in any propaganda activities, he was clear that the Englishman was implicated, if only through his close association with Minor.Footnote 78
The Army of Occupation was already aware of Price. On 6 March, the Army of the Rhine telegraphed to London requesting ‘any information about philips price, a British journalist who is suspected of Bolshevism’,Footnote 79 and later that month the Home Office reported that the military authorities in the Rhineland ‘had taken steps to prevent Price obtaining visas to cross the French and Italian frontiers’Footnote 80 on the grounds that he was ‘an undesirable anti-British propagandist’.Footnote 81 However, despite various appeals for information there was considerable confusion as to his whereabouts. Rumours circulated that he was in or en route to Stockholm, Switzerland, various parts of Germany, even Britain. It was even falsely reported by Reuters that he was a prisoner of the British in northern Russia.Footnote 82 One MI6 operative in Switzerland wrote with some irritation in March 1919 that ‘we have been rather bombarded with enquiries about him [Price] lately – apparently the FO circulated a note saying that he is Switzerland. He is not, and has not been in Switzerland, and we know nothing whatever about the man except from information sent…from London.’Footnote 83 The evidence of Lieutenant Siegfried placing Price in Düsseldorf cleared up the confusion and was at the same time alarming news and an opportunity. On the one hand, the presence of a well-known Bolshevik sympathizer on the edge of occupied territory was the cause of some disquiet. On the other hand, it placed him tantalizingly within reach of British justice for the first time since 1915.
On 10 June 1919, Basil Thomson wrote to the War Office noting that Minor has been arrested by the French for ‘having, in the company of Philips Price, been concerned in an attempt to subvert the loyalty of British and American troops in the Area of Occupation’ and asking them to obtain from GHQ in Cologne ‘as detailed account as possible of the case against philips price’.Footnote 84 In response, the head of intelligence of the Army of the Rhine, Major Tangye, travelled to London eight days later and met with Thomson and ‘C’ (Sir Mansfield Cumming, head of the Secret Intelligence Service or MI6), apparently to detail the case against Price in person.Footnote 85 There are no minutes of this meeting in the file but it seems clear from later correspondence that it was agreed that action should be taken against Price so long as it could be done swiftly and without too much fuss, and, most crucially, by the military authorities in Cologne.
The question remained of how exactly this could be accomplished given that by this time Price had returned to Berlin. At this point, the suggestion that the German authorities be asked to detain Price and hand him over to the British for trial was apparently made. Hand-written notes on Price's file dated 13 and 16 June 1919 reveal that there was some unease over this course of action and concern over the precedent that might be set. The author acknowledges that it is unlikely that Price would come to Cologne of his own volition, but also states that ‘we have gone into the question of demanding Germany to hand over these renegades. – It cuts both ways & [sic] we might have to do the same!’Footnote 86
Simultaneously, MI5 dispatched a précis of their information on Price to Major Tangye in Cologne, including a ‘List of Philips price’s associates…and also [a] plan showing connections between price and trotsky’.Footnote 87 This apparently did not arrive promptly, as two days later GHQ in Cologne was frantically telegraphing to London to say that information about Price was ‘urgently required’.Footnote 88 The reason for this urgency was made clear by their next dispatch which stated that Price was ‘now in German custody. He is to be brought to cologne by Commander in Chief's instructions and will then be sent under escort to england.’ A hand-written note on this cable dated 7 July indicates that Thomson was apparently somewhat taken aback by the sudden prospect of having Price sent to the UK, and that the case had ‘nothing to do with us’.Footnote 89 He immediately sent a telegram to Major Tangye stating bluntly ‘Philips Price not wanted in England. It was understood that you had sufficient evidence for trying him by Court Martial.’Footnote 90 The Army of the Rhine now acknowledged the limited nature of this evidence and on 7 July sent another urgent request for further instructions from London as Price ‘is expected here in the next two days’ but that as things stood ‘he will not be kept under arrest here as there is not sufficient evidence of offence against Rhine Army’.Footnote 91
Meanwhile, the War Office and the Foreign Office who had apparently been kept in the dark about Price's arrest began to try to get to the bottom of the mess. Joining the flurry of telegrams passing back and forth across the North Sea on 7 July was a demand from the War Office to know who had ‘instigated’ Price's detention and what the evidence against him was, together with a warning not to take custody of him until instructed otherwise.Footnote 92 This was followed the next day by explicit instructions that ‘should the German Govt. wish to hand him over to you, you should refuse to receive him for the following reasons (1) there is not sufficient evidence against him to secure conviction (2) that he is an undesirable person to be in Occupied Territory’.Footnote 93 This order was made in response to an unsigned cable from GHQ Cologne dated 8 July (presumably from Tangye) saying
The arrest of Price took place at my instigation with a view to his being dealt with by Military Court by which four of his associates were tried and convicted. His arrest was not in time for this court…Charge proposed is as follows: - committing an offence that is to say conspiring to promote sedition and mutiny amongst allied troops in occupation of enemy territory.Footnote 94
At the same time, the attention that the affair was gaining in the British and American press was causing concern in the Foreign Office. Alarmed and incensed by Price's summary arrest, not least because it implied that their own freedom to report events in Germany might be imperilled, British correspondents in Berlin led by J. G. Hamilton of the Manchester Guardian protested to the German foreign ministry in the Wilhelmstrasse. Indignant at what they regarded as ‘an insulting attempt to intimidate them into silence’ by a representative of the German defence minister Gustav Noske, several reports of the affair, some of which embarrassingly hinted at collusion between the British and the German military authorities, appeared in the British and American press.Footnote 95 In response to enquiries from the Foreign Office General Thwaites sent a brief factual account of the affair,Footnote 96 but the whole debacle was evidently considered serious enough for Thomson to compile a longer ‘special report’ which, significantly, was circulated to the whole cabinet rather than just the secret service committee that had been formed in February 1919. In this, Thomson was keen to stress the ‘evidence’ against Price while downplaying the seriousness of the incident, suggesting that Price ‘was liberated a few hours’ after his arrest and concluding that
It will thus be seen that though there may be a technical difficulty in proving the charge of conspiracy between Philips Price, Robert Minor, and the German, Seidel, to cause mutiny and sedition among the Allied forces, yet there is evidence to show that these three persons have been associated in such a conspiracy.Footnote 97
Nevertheless, although MI5 continued to keep a file on him until the early 1950s (by which time he had renounced communism and been a Labour MP for nearly thirty years), no further attempts were made to curtail Price's activities either as a journalist or political activist. In September 1919, it was noted that ‘since he was discharged from prison he [Price] has lived very retiredly [sic]’ and that ‘He does not do anything away from his house but is engaged in writing in his rooms.’Footnote 98 A memorandum on Price written at the end of the year demonstrates a very different perspective to that expressed by Thomson less six months before. The author states that while Price
Has a long history of revolutionary propaganda work and of extreme views generally…I do not find that he has expressed any particular hostility to this country or that any definite offence, apart from the propaganda work, can be traced to him…Not a case for further action.Footnote 99
In April 1921, it was decided that ‘there appears to be no need to maintain a check on Philips Price’.Footnote 100 No attempt was made to prevent him from returning to the UK in order to contest the Gloucester City seat in the 1922 general election or otherwise to impede his movements. Price finally returned to live permanently in Britain with his German wife and young family in 1924. By this time, he had left the Communist Party of Great Britain and although he continued to be active on the left of the Labour party (and an occasional apologist for the Soviet Union) until his death in 1973, it tended to be his connections with Germany that were to cause him the most trouble before the onset of the Cold War.Footnote 101
IV
Morgan Philips Price never made any secret of his political sympathies or of the fact that he was prepared to lend his pen to the Bolshevik cause. In later life, he wrote extensively about his conversion to revolutionary Socialism and freely admitted both that he had ‘joined the Party’ while in Russia and written pro-Bolshevik propaganda aimed at the troops of the Allied Intervention. The Price papers contain thirty propaganda leaflets, pamphlets, and posters, of which around eleven can be reliably said to have been authored by Price himself.Footnote 102 However, none of these relate to the Allied occupation of Germany. Neither of the two English-language pamphlets presented as evidence in the trial of Ernst Seidel and the other members of the Düsseldorf Spartacist cell to which Price was linked can be reliably said to be his work.Footnote 103 That Price was in Düsseldorf and met with Minor, Ernst Seidel, and other German communists is corroborated both by a group photograph presented as evidence during the Seiberg trialFootnote 104 and a diary entry for 24 February 1919 in which he mentions a ‘Long talk with the Chief of Police Düsseldorf. Hot stuff – Communist.’Footnote 105 However, it is notable that while he was happy to admit to having worked as a propagandist in Russia, and that he was in close contact with the German Left after 1918, he never mentioned undertaking any propaganda work aimed against Allied troops in Germany. Even the evidence against him presented by military intelligence demonstrated little more than that he had been on friendly terms with and talked to Seidel and his confederates. The evidence that Price was engaged in any sort of seditious activity amongst troops of Allied occupation of Germany is therefore thin and circumstantial at best, as the authorities themselves came to admit.
This is perhaps because Price's real agenda was far more ambitious than the Army of Occupation realized. All the evidence (including some of Price's own later autobiographical writings) suggests that he went to Germany with the collusion of the Soviet authorities to help ferment revolution in Germany as the first step on the path to a world revolution. To this end, he cultivated contacts with the leading figures of the German Left and worked with Radek to oversee the formation of the KPD in the hope of steering the German revolution along the path followed by the Bolsheviks in Russia. The presence of British forces in the Rhineland was entirely incidental to this aim. Indeed, in both his political activities and his journalism, Price ignored the occupation altogether at this stage.
Although his ideals might therefore have been said to represent a threat to the British social system in an abstract way, the direct threat that Price posed towards British forces in the Rhineland was negligible. His arrest was an opportunistic overreaction that stemmed from the deep-seated antipathy towards Socialism felt by a cadre of intelligence operatives and military men who both shared and fed wider anxieties concerning the prospect of revolution at home and abroad. As such, it is evidence of the prevailing mind-set amongst senior military and security officers in this period – what Uri Bar-Joseph has called ‘a solid right-wing Weltanschauung and an extreme anti-Bolshevik bias’.Footnote 106 As has been demonstrated, the British authorities had long been aware of Price's views and had previously explored various options for curtailing his activities. His presence in Germany offered an opportunity to do so, but without furnishing any hard evidence that he had committed a crime under British law. It can be inferred from Tangye's meeting with Thomson and ‘C’ on 18 June and the subsequent telegraphic correspondence between London and Cologne that they were well aware of the legal advice that no charge could successfully be brought against Price in a British court and their aim was to try him quickly and quietly by Court Martial. Perhaps if Price had crossed into occupied territory and been arrested there, the military authorities would have succeeded in their aim of silencing him, but his return to Berlin prevented his being tried alongside Ernst Seidel and the other members of the Düsseldorf cell, thus necessitating the elicitation of German aid and attracting unwelcome publicity to the affair. It is equally clear that Price's arrest was orchestrated by the intelligence section of the British Army of the Rhine and was quickly disavowed once it became known in London.
To this way of thinking, Price was a problem to be ‘dealt with’ rather than a person with legal rights. He and his views were a threat to the Army of Occupation and by extension the whole British way of life. As such, there was a certain military logic to the decision to move against him, even considering the flimsiness of the case against him: it was, in a sense, a pre-emptive strike to remove the threat before it could do too much damage. Perhaps the Manchester Guardian’s Berlin correspondent best summed up the affair when he wrote ‘Anyone of Price's type is persona ingratissima [sic] to the military mind, and he must be quarantined out of harm's way either in a German gaol or outside Germany, preferably in a British prison at Cologne.’Footnote 107
