NOTES

1 Siegfried Sassoon, The War Poems (1983), p54.

2 A “Corpse Conversion” Factory, Darling & Son, London, 1917 (copy in Masterman Papers, University of Birmingham special collections).

3 Cynthia Asquith, Diaries 1915-18 (1968), p44.

4 Adrian Gregory, The Last Great War (2008), p306.

5 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), pp116-17.

6 Times, 17 April 1917.

7 Daily Express, 21 April 1917.

8 Punch, 25 April 1917. AA. Milne, the assistant editor of Punch, was attached to the General Press Propaganda section of MI7’s offices in Adelphi Court, Strand.

9 TNA CAB 23/2/48.

10 Randall Marlin, Propaganda and the Ethics of Persuasion (1999), p72.

11 Charteris collected many rumours during his intelligence work including those about the Russians ‘with snow on their boots’, the Angels of Mons and the Crucified Canadian. He refers to all of these in his memoirs At GHQ (1931) but curiously his book omits any reference to the strangest rumour of all, the corpse factory.

12 The Times (London), 4 Nov 1925.

13 TNA FO 395/148. 14 Daily Mail, 3 May 1917. 15 TNA History of MI7

(1916-18), INF 4/1B.

16 Ivor Montagu, The Youngest Son (1970), p31.

17 Pollard’s role in the creation of other WWI rumours will be discussed in a future article for FT. His SOE file at The National Archives reveals he was fluent in French, German and Spanish. It describes him “an ardent fascist” who helped to fly General Franco from the Canaries at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War. The file reveals he was recruited to work as a spy for MI6 at the outbreak of WWII but he was dismissed in 1940 for reasons that were redacted from the file. In another note a MI6 officer describes him as “definitely unreliable where money and drink was concerned”.

18 Bertrand Russell, ‘Government by Propaganda’, in These Eventful Years (1924), p380.