Hilaire Belloc's persecution of Charles Masterman

I knew Charles Masterman had won the enmity of Horatio Bottomley, the publisher of John Bull magazine, over the Home Office inquiry into alleged abuse at the Akbar Nautical Training School at Heswall on the Wirrall.

The report of the inquiry, which Masterman led, failed to accept many of the allegations published in John Bull, with the result that Bottomley regarded it as a whitewash and used the magazine to attack Masterman ever afterwards. 

As Bottomley spent some of his childhood in a Birmingham orphanage, I suspect he might have had a better knowledge of the abuses that can take place in residential institutions than the average Home Office official.

What I didn't appreciate until recently was that Masterman was also a target of the far-right antisemites Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton, brother of the better known G.K.

Here's Peter Howarth reviewing Richard Ingrams' book The Sins of G.K. Chesterton for the London Review of Books – the “volcano” is Belloc:

The volcano’s first eruption was The Party System, an exposé co-written with Cecil, which claimed that, despite the opposition to Lloyd George’s introduction of National Insurance, the Tories and Liberals were a political cartel. 

Cecil and Belloc took particular exception to the Liberal politician and journalist Charles Masterman, an old friend of the Chesterton family, and characterised his marriage to Lucy Lyttleton (the Liberal-voting daughter of the Tory chief of the general staff and a childhood friend of Frances Chesterton) as the act of an insecure and unsuccessful journalist inserting himself into “the little governing group which has the salaries and places in its gift”. 

They issued scurrilous leaflets during the 1911 Bethnal Green by-election, which Masterman narrowly won, and joined the Daily Express in smearing him again in 1914, when he lost two by-elections (one after being appointed to the cabinet). The New Witness crowed that Masterman, as the lackey of “Lloyd George ... the Jews and their hangers-on’, should have been ‘excluded not merely from Parliament but from the society of decent honourable men”.

If Belloc was motivated by rancour at a more successful MP than he had been, Ingrams argues, the only explanation for Cecil’s venom can have been to force his brother to declare his allegiance to the attackers, not the Mastermans or his own wife. When H.G. Wells wrote to the New Witness to protest against the vendetta, Cecil replied: “I think it very probable that my brother and I should disagree to a considerable extent ... on Masterman’s character and motives.”

But G.K. could not defend Masterman in public without calling Cecil’s motives into question. “By allying himself to Belloc, and insulting Masterman in the most vicious attacks imaginable,” Ingrams writes, “Cecil could force his brother to change sides.” 

He succeeded. Chesterton had dedicated a book to Masterman less than two years earlier, and Frances and Lucy had loved to go to parties together; the friendship disintegrated when he wrote to Masterman that he could not defend him in public, since he believed “the new and mutinous camp” formed by his brother and Belloc were right.

There's a tendency to treat G.K. Chesterton as a sort of holy innocent, but I find him a perfectly worldly writer when he wants to be. So it's hard not to think less of him after reading this.