& watched the sunrise – behind the Pantheon & the Bibliothèque Ste Genevieve – and whenever I see it, it reminds me of S. Africa & takes one by the throat as the French say … What a time it was & how we worked – & always when we were conscious of having done rather more than our hardest hoping that it would please you: I suppose I was a fool not to stay on doing your work. But as you say, it is no good regretting.
Ware might have been a fool not to have stayed, but as an ambitious man in his mid-thirties he would have been a bigger fool not to have left when, in 1905, he was offered the editorship of the Morning Post. The offer must have come as much of a surprise to him as it did to everyone else in journalism, but as the newspaper world soon found out, he was a born editor, the ideal man to take a hopelessly moribund Tory newspaper like the Morning Post and kick and bully and charm it into becoming the most influential and combative paper of its day.
The paper had no library or reference support for its journalists, no salaried leader-writers, no proper offices at this time, even, nothing but temporary wooden sheds near the Aldwych, and ‘a regular mythology of minor deities created by the old traditions’. ‘It is magnificent but it is not business,’ Ware wrote to the paper’s owner, Lord Glenesk, as he began the Augean task of modernisation,
I will take an example. The Art Critic is, I believe, actually bedridden. At any rate I have never seen him. He draws his salary and farms out the work. He does this with discrimination … But he breaks the first condition which should attach to such service and that is regular attendance at the office.
There was something else that he had learned under Milner that stood him in good stead in these early days at the Morning Post, and that was how to make use of that informal network of connections that held the British establishment together. The group of young zealots who had made up Milner’s Kindergarten had nearly all been Oxford men, and one of Ware’s first acts as editor was to write off to the Master of Balliol – Milner’s old college – to scout for talent. When the answer came back in the shape of ‘an ugly mannered but honest, self devoted young reformer of the practical kind called William Beveridge’, Ware took it and him in his stride. He asked me ‘to come on the staff completely to undertake all the articles and leaders on social questions!’ an astonished Beveridge – the future architect of the modern Welfare State – later wrote of their interview,
I told him of course that in party politics I was certainly not a Conservative and that in speculative politics I was a bit of a Socialist. He rather liked that than the reverse. I told him I wasn’t a journalist; he said there was no such thing as a journalist, that it was all practice. It was a flattering approach. I went about feeling like a beggar-boy who had just been proposed to by a Queen.
The change of regime was seldom as smooth or happy a transformation as this suggests, however. Although Lord Glenesk knew what he wanted when he appointed Ware, it is less certain that he knew what he had got. He had brought in an outsider to put an ailing business back on its feet, and over the next five ‘erratic but brilliant’ years he found that he had not so much bought himself a ‘new broom’ as a high-jacker, an unruly Milnerian cuckoo in the comfortable old Tory nest, an imperial zealot, Tariff Reformer, and universal conscript-monger, hell-bent on readying Britain and the Empire for a war with Germany that he half feared and half wanted. ‘At the time of the Delcassé incident’ – the first ‘Moroccan Crisis’ of 1905 – he later told Spenser Wilkinson, his influential military correspondent,
we threw the whole weight of the Morning Post against war with Germany. I am ashamed that I did not understand what we were doing at the time. I now believe that England ought to have fought them then – at any rate she is every month becoming less prepared relatively to Germany to fight her than she was then … It [the Morning Post] should boldly point to the German danger and use the lesson of present events to rub in the immediate necessity of universal military service and the reorganizing of naval matters.
Ware was perfectly genuine in his campaigning hatred of social injustice and sweated labour – it was all part of the Milnerian imperial package to improve the ‘race’ – but as international crisis followed crisis it was the German threat and thought of an opportunity lost for ‘urging compulsory service’ that left him awake and ‘miserable’ at night. Wilkinson ‘has been wanting to write saying that there are no causes for misunderstanding between England and Germany at the present’, he complained to Lady Bathurst, Glenesk’s daughter and successor as proprietor, as the gap between Ware and his military correspondent widened to open warfare, ‘but I won’t let him: to allay fears of Germany is to throw away our only chance of getting the people to bestir themselves’.
There were genuine strategic differences at stake: Wilkinson thought Ware’s obsessions with imperial defence and conscription woefully inadequate to the real nature of Britain’s military and naval deficiencies, but it was essentially a battle of wills between two men equally determined to get their way. Ware had already shown what a generous and imaginative boss he could be with a young man like Beveridge, but line him up against a leader-writer who had been publishing on defence issues while Ware was still a Bradford schoolteacher and the iron entered his soul. He could not bear to share authority. The Morning Post must speak with one voice and that voice was his. He had fought with Glenesk, he had battled his manager, and he was not going to give in to Wilkinson. What he wanted, when it came to issues of Empire and defence, was not an independent thinker of stature but a ‘party hack’.
‘I am to take the views that he thinks right,’ Wilkinson complained to Lady Bathurst, ‘and he even explained to me what my views, which he thinks he knows better than I do, really are.’ It was a dangerous omniscience to insist on. This time he won his battle (Wilkinson could not even bring himself to mention Ware’s name when he wrote his memoirs) but Ware’s own days at the Morning Post were numbered. In the bitter infighting within the Conservative Party over Tariff Reform he had alienated some powerful interests, and when in 1910 a fundraising appeal, sponsored by the Morning Post, to buy the nation an airship to counter the ‘Zeppelin menace’ ended in chaos, farce and serious financial embarrassment for Lady Bathurst, Ware was forced to go.
It was a grubby end to a brilliant, maverick, error-strewn age for the Morning Post and left Ware in a limbo that was both new and familiar to him. The terms of his severance gave him a measure of financial independence for the immediate future, but for a man who had been at the heart of the country’s political life for a decade – a man, moreover, with not just a wife, Anna, now but two small children and no more obvious prospects than he had when living in student poverty almost twenty years before – dismissal was a psychological blow from which it would take a war to help him recover.
In his open ‘letter’ to Milner, written in France as a preface in 1912 to his last book, The Worker and His Country, Ware bravely trumpeted the blessing of his new-found ‘freedom’, but it was the Cassandra cry of a prophet without honour in his own country. ‘The existence of the United Kingdom to-day as a first-class Power is indissolubly bound up in the integrity of the British Empire,’ Ware warned from his ‘old student quarters’ in Paris, as he contemplated a France on the brink of civil war, a Britain torn apart by strikes, political atrophy and civil unrest, Ireland on the edge of disintegration and international relations stumbling from crisis to crisis,
The gravity of the responsibilities thus incurred needs no emphasising; they will be accepted calmly by a race which has brought so large a portion of the earth within its rule … So long as patriotism is the controlling force, dominating all classes, the supreme instinct in the hour of crisis, no renunciation