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is a series of free encyclopaedias. We currently specialize in history
but we intend to branch out into other areas. This section is about
the War Office Press Bureau.
In
August 1914 the British government established the War Office Press
Bureau under F. E. Smith. The idea was
this organisation would censor news and telegraphic reports from the
British Army and then issue it to the press.
Lord Kitchener decided to appoint Colonel
Ernest Swinton to become the British Army's
official journalist on the Western Front.
Using the pseudonym, Eyewitness,
Swinton was instructed to write articles about what was happening on
the front-line. Swinton's reports were
first censored at G.H.Q. in France and then personally vetted by Kitchener
before being released to the press.
Later in 1914, Henry Major Tomlinson, a
journalist working for the Daily News,
was also recruited by the British Army
as an official war correspondent. Swinton and Tomlinson worked to strict
guidelines. They were not allowed to mention place names or soldiers'
battalions, brigades and divisions. The men were told that no article
could be passed for publication if it indicated that they had seen what
they had written about. Swinton and Tomlinson were also instructed to
write in terms of what they thought was true and not what they knew
to be true.
After complaints from the USA the British government decided to look
again at how the war was reported. After a Cabinet meeting on the subject
in January, 1915, the government decided to change its policy and to
allow selected journalists to report the war. Five men were chosen:
Philip Gibbs (Daily
Chronicle and the Daily Telegraph),
Percival Philips (Daily
Express and the Morning Post),
William Beach Thomas (Daily
Mail and the Daily Mirror)
Henry Perry Robinson (The
Times and the Daily News) and
Herbert Russell (Reuters News Agency). Before
their reports could be sent back to England, they had to be submitted
to C. E. Montague, the former leader writer
of the Manchester Guardian.
Over the next three years other journalists such as John
Buchan, Valentine Williams, Hamilton
Fyfe and Henry Nevinson, became accredited
war correspondents. To remain on the Western
Front, these journalists had to accept government control over what
they wrote.
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War
Office Press Bureau
(1)
In his book Eyewitness, Ernest Swinton
explained how he became the official reporter on the war.
Discontent
now became so great at the unnecessary state of ignorance in which the
nation was being kept that it was decided to compromise with a half-measure.
War correspondents were not allowed at the front, but their place was
to be taken by some appointed officer.
The principle which guided me in my work was above all to avoid helping
the enemy. They appeared to me even more important than the purveyance
of news to our own people. For home consumption - that is for those
who were carrying the burden and footing the bill - I essayed to tell
as much of the truth as was compatible with safety, to guard against
depression and pessimism, and to check unjustified optimism which might
lead to a relaxation of effort.
