The Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede | |
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 Ponsonby in 1934 | |
| Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster | |
| In office 13 March – 25 August 1931 | |
| Prime Minister | Ramsay MacDonald |
| Preceded by | Clement Attlee |
| Succeeded by | The Marquess of Lothian |
| Parliamentary Secretary to theMinistry of Transport | |
| In office 1929–1931 | |
| Preceded by | The Earl Russell |
| Succeeded by | John Allen Parkinson |
| Member of Parliament forSheffield Brightside | |
| In office 15 November 1922 – 1930 | |
| Preceded by | Tudor Walters |
| Succeeded by | Fred Marshall |
| Member of Parliament forStirling Burghs | |
| In office 1908 – 25 November 1918 | |
| Preceded by | Henry Campbell-Bannerman |
| Succeeded by | Constituency abolished |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 16 February 1871 |
| Died | 23 March 1946(1946-03-23) (aged 75) |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 (Elizabeth andMatthew) |
| Parents |
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| Alma mater | Balliol College, Oxford |
Arthur Augustus William Harry Ponsonby, 1st Baron Ponsonby of Shulbrede (16 February 1871 – 23 March 1946), was a British politician, writer, and social activist. He was the son ofSir Henry Ponsonby, Private Secretary toQueen Victoria, and Mary Elizabeth Bulteel, daughter ofJohn Crocker Bulteel. He was also the great-grandson ofThe 3rd Earl of Bessborough,The 3rd Earl of Bathurst andThe 2nd Earl Grey.The 1st Baron Sysonby was his elder brother.
Ponsonby is often quoted as the author of the dictum "When war is declared, truth is the first casualty", published in his bookFalsehood in War-time, Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated Throughout the Nations During the Great War (1928). However, he uses this phrase in quotation marks as an epigram at the start of the book and does not present it as his own words. Its likely origin is the almost identical line spoken in 1917 by the United States SenatorHiram Johnson: "The first casualty when war comes is truth".[1]
Ponsonby was aPage of Honour toQueen Victoria from 1882 to 1887. From anAnglo-Irish family, he was educated atEton College. While at Eton, Ponsonby was whipped for organising asteeplechase in his dormitory.[2]
Ponsonby studied atBalliol College, Oxford, before joining the Diplomatic Service and taking assignments inConstantinople andCopenhagen.
At the1906 general election, Ponsonby stood unsuccessfully asLiberal candidate forTaunton. He was elected asMember of Parliament forStirling Burghs at aby-election of 1908, succeeding former Prime MinisterHenry Campbell-Bannerman, who had died a few weeks earlier.
In Parliament, Ponsonby opposed the British involvement in theFirst World War and, withGeorge Cadbury,Ramsay MacDonald,E. D. Morel,Arnold Rowntree, andCharles Trevelyan, he was a member of theUnion of Democratic Control, which became a prominent antiwar organisation in Britain.
Ponsonby was defeated at the1918 general election in which he stood as an "Independent Democrat" in the newDunfermline Burghs constituency.[3] He then joined theLabour Party and returned to the House of Commons at the1922 general election as member for theBrightside division ofSheffield.[3]
In 1924,Ramsay MacDonald appointed Ponsonby asParliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and he later served asUnder-Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs and then asParliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport in 1929. Ponsonby was a leader in the antiwar wing of the Labour Party, a champion of "humanitarian pacifism" which held that the First World War was a sort of conspiracy against the ordinary people of the world by capitalist elites who sough to enrich themselves via war.[4] In his 1925 pamphletNow is the Time, he deplored "the millions who have fallen in the war" and denounced the "great conspiracy" by the governments of Europe to plunge the world into war.[4] Ponsonby declared that the defining issue of the day was to establish "democratic" control over diplomacy to end the "great conspiracy" to promote "war mentality" as the prelude to another world war.[4] Like many other British socialists, Ponsonby had a strong dislike of the Foreign Office, which was dominated by the scions of the British aristocracy, as a secretive and elitist group who he believed served only the interests of "the Establishment" instead of ordinary British people.[5]
In 1928, he published the bookFalsehood in Wartime, an elaboration of the thesis that he presented inNow is the Time that the First World War was far from being the crusade against evil that it was presented as in the United Kingdom at the time.[4] Ponosonby argued that the war was instead merely a cynical exercise by the British government to lie to its own people to start and sustain a war intended only to enrich the arms industry.[4] Ponsonby examined the causes of the war and the war aims of the belligerent powers, but his main focus was in rebutting allegations of German atrocities during the war to prove his thesis of the "great conspiracy".[6] He was especially concerned to rebut the "rape of Belgium" story as he claimed that the reports in British newspapers during the war about widespread German atrocities during the invasion of Belgium in 1914 were all lies and the German Army had behaved in a honourable and noble fashion towards the Belgian people.[7] His book had chapters dedicated to rebutting the stories about the "mutilated nurse", the "Belgian baby without hands", the story of the Canadian soldier crucified during the Second Battle of Ypres in April 1915, and the "corpse factory" story of 1917 that claimed the Germans were turning the bodies of slain Allied soldiers into soap.[7] The book concluded that "the international war is a monster born of hypocrisy fed on falsehood, fattened by humbug, kept alive by superstition, directed to the death and torture of millions".[7]
The Irish historians Alan Kramer and John Horne wrote that the specific examples that Ponsonby cited were true, but that his book ventured into historical negationism with its sweeping claims that all of the stories about German atrocities against French and Belgian civilians were lies.[7] Ponsonby was indeed correct inFalsehood in Wartime that the British newspapers during the war had run many false stories about German atrocities with for example the stories that the Germans routinely cut off the hands of Belgian children having no basis in reality.[7] However, Ponsonby was cavalier and callous in dismissing all of the stories about the massacres of Belgian and French civilians by German forces out of hand as lies.[7] Ponsonby's methodology inFalsehood in Wartime was that if it he could be prove that some of the stories published in the British newspapers about German atrocities in the "Rape of Belgium" were false, then all of the stories about German atrocities must be false.[6] During the war, German newspapers had frequently run stories that accused Belgian and Frenchfrancs-tireurs of atrocities against German soldiers such as cutting off their hands. Ponsonby did not mention inFalsehood in Wartime that most of the stories in the German newspapers about atrocities by thefranc-tireurs were false, thereby leaving the impression it was only the British government and newspapers that had engaged in dishonesty in reporting the news.[7] Ponsonby like many other people in the United Kingdom during the interwar period believed that the Treaty of Versailles was too harsh towards Germany.[8]
The theme inFalsehood in Wartime that all of the reports of German atrocities were fabrications suggested that Germany was not the aggressor nor had Germanhy committed war crimes, which in turn was intended to suggest the Treaty of Versailles was morally wrong.[8] Like many other people at the time, Ponsonby represented the Treaty of Versailles as the result of a quasi-judicial process that resulted in a sort of collective criminal conviction for Germany, and the purpose ofFalsehood in Wartime was to prove that Germany had been wrongly "convicted".[8]Falsehood in Wartime was a best-seller when it was published in 1928 because it fitted into thezeitgeist of the 1920s.[9] During the First World War, to justify the sacrifices and suffering imposed by the war, politicians had painted a picture of the post-war world in very utopian terms as the only promise of a better tomorrow provided the necessary hope to sustain the war.[9] When the promised post-war utopia failed to occur after the victory of 1918, there was a strong mood of disenchantment and hurt with the general feeling in the United Kingdom being the expected rewards for wartime suffering had failed to occur and that the promise of a "land fit for heroes" after the war was a cruel joke. In such a climate, a book such asFalsehood in Wartime that portrayed the entire war as the product of a cynical public relations campaign based on duplicity and dishonesty struck a chord.[9] The British historianDavid Reynolds wrote that Ponsonby inFalsehood in Wartime professed to condemn both sides equally, but in fact almost all of his book was devoted to debunking allegations of German atrocities in the Allied and especially British newspapers while only a few pages were given over to debunking allegations of Allied atrocities in the German newspapers.[10] Reynolds describedFalsehood in Wartime as a "polemical" book which despite its claims of neutrality in fact mostly condemned the Allies while portraying Germany as a wronged nation, the victim of lies told by the British newspapers.[11] Reynolds wrote that Ponsonby inFalsehood in Wartime was engaged in the same sort of propaganda that he had denounced in others as he sought to deny that Germany had committed war crimes during the invasion of Belgium and France.[10] Reynolds wrote that many of the stories in the British newspapers at the time such as the claim that the Germans cut off the hands of Belgian children were not true, but that the claim the Germans had massacred thousands of innocent civilians in Belgium and France was not, and Ponsonby was completely wrong when he sought to deny that the "rape of Belgium" had occurred.[10]
In 1930, Ponsonby was raised to thepeerage as a hereditarybaron, taking the title Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede from his home atShulbrede Priory in Sussex. He served as leader of the Labour Party in theHouse of Lords from 1931 until 1935, resigning because he was opposed to the party's support for sanctions againstItaly for itsinvasion of Abyssinia.
In 1937–1938, Ponsonby ran a significant Peace Letter campaign against British preparations for a new war, and from 1936 he was an active member of thePeace Pledge Union, contributing regularly toPeace News.
Ponsonby opposed the initiative ofLord Charnwood andCosmo Gordon Lang,Archbishop of Canterbury, to ask his Majesty's Government to react against the genocidalHolodomor policies of the Soviet Government.[12][13]
From 1935 to 1937, he was Chair of theInternational Council of the War Resisters' International. Ponsonby as the leader of the antiwar wing of the Labour Party was opposed to all wars in principle as evil, which led him to oppose British rearmament in the 1930s.[14] During theDanzig crisis, he spoke out against the British "guarantee" of Poland as likely to cause another world war.[15]
In May 1940, Ponsonby resigned from the Labour Party, opposing its decision to join the new coalition government ofWinston Churchill.
He wrote a biography of his father which won theJames Tait Black Memorial Prize in 1942:Henry Ponsonby, Queen Victoria's Private Secretary: His Life and Letters.
Ponsonby died on 23 March 1946 and was succeeded by his sonMatthew Henry Hubert Ponsonby.
On 12 April 1898, he marriedDorothea Parry, daughter ofHubert Parry and Elizabeth Maude Herbert (1851–1933), a daughter ofSidney Herbert, 1st Baron Herbert of Lea. They had a daughter,Elizabeth (1900–1940), who during the 1920s became well known as a leading figure of theBright Young People,[16] and a son,Matthew (1904–1976), who became the 2nd Baron.
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| Court offices | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Page of Honour 1882–1887 | Succeeded by |
| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
| Preceded by | Member of Parliament forStirling Burghs 1908–1918 | Constituency abolished |
| Preceded by | Member of Parliament forSheffield Brightside 1922–1930 | Succeeded by |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by | Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs 1924 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Under-Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs 1929 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport 1929–1931 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster 1931 | Succeeded by |
| Party political offices | ||
| Preceded by | Leader of the Labour Party in the House of Lords 1931–1935 | Succeeded by |
| Non-profit organization positions | ||
| Preceded by | Chair ofWar Resisters' International 1934–1937 | Succeeded by |
| Peerage of the United Kingdom | ||
| New creation | Baron Ponsonby of Shulbrede 1930–1946 | Succeeded by |
