The story of the political truce of the Second World War is well known. The agreement of the major parties not to contest by-elections was gradually tested by independent candidates of various stripes, many representing the desire for a more progressive society, especially after the publication of the Beveridge Report on social welfare in December 1942. The First World War had seen a similar political truce, but one that was much more strictly observed. Aside from the advance of Sinn Fein against Irish parliamentary candidates, only four seats changed hands during the whole of the world conflict. And one of those was a switch from Conservative to Liberal with the express agreement of the Tory party – the election of the historian HAL Fisher at Sheffield Hallam so that he could become president of the Board of Education in the coalition government. On the surface, at least, there was political unity.

It is all the more extraordinary, then, that the liveliest ‘British’ by-election during the War actually took place in Germany.

In 1914, the outbreak of hostilities took many by surprise. There were thousands of German citizens in Britain, many of whom had emigrated here in the 19th century and ran businesses all over the country. There was considerable harassment and violence against them, especially in Liverpool and London. There were not quite so many Britons in Germany, and their profile was very different. Although both sides considered an exchange of citizens, this quickly degenerated into suspicion and hostility. Wouldn’t those released then be free to fight against the country that had liberated them? After the British authorities interned their German captives, rumours of bad treatment became rife. The Germans, as a consequence, did the same, and, along with other more oppressive camps, Ruhleben was born.

The Ruhleben camp was sited on the eponymous racecourse just outside Berlin, next to the Spandau district (which had been home to the famous prison since 1876). The camp was to be run by the German military, and although the officers were always in charge, the prisoners were soon allowed a large degree of autonomy. Each barrack nominated a captain, and each captain sat on a committee that took charge of an astonishing range of facilities. There was a postal service, a plethora of small businesses, sporting leagues and cultural groups, educational facilities and, most important of all, camp newspapers The Ruhleben Camp Magazine and In Ruhleben Camp. There were also French and Italian language papers.

In July 1915, following the success of a mock trial, a parliamentary by-election was proposed by Israel Cohen. Cohen, a journalist, had been working for a number of English newspapers in Berlin at the time of his internment. In his book The Ruhleben Prison Camp: A Record of Nineteen Months’ Internment, written shortly after his release in 1917, Cohen confessed: “Although I had been living in Berlin three years before the outbreak of the war... I confess that I never foresaw the cataclysm that broke upon the world in the month of August 1914.”

Since no political associations had been formed at the camp, party labels were distributed in a more or less random fashion. Cohen relates that “as one reared in the city of Bright and Cobden, I readily espoused the interests of Liberalism”. The ‘Tory’ candidate was Alexander Boss, whose “portly figure and monocle seemed to have destined him for the part”, and the women’s suffrage cause – introduced, as Cohen puts it, “to impart the spice of humour into our womanless constituency” – fell to Reuben Castang, “a well-known variety artist”.

Castang was, in fact, an animal trainer and famous for his work with chimpanzees called Max and Moritz. In RW Thompson’s 1935 biography Wild Animal Mane, he records that in 1914 Castang had received an invitation to tour Russia and had decided to spend two months in Austria and Hungary before heading to the autumn fair at Nizhny Novgorod. In June of that year, they performed before the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Archduchess Sophie. Castang, Max and Moritz were received in the royal box after the show. A week later, the royal couple was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip.

A special 33-page edition of the camp magazine was issued to commemorate the by-election, and it gives a good idea of the humorous progress of the campaign. As the election could not proceed without a returning officer, the choice fell upon Walter Butterworth, probably the only genuine politician among the internees. He had been a justice of the peace and Manchester councillor, his family wealth deriving from the glass-making firm that bore their name. In 1912, Butterworth had bought bronzes from Rodin for the Manchester Art Gallery, having been chairman of the friends’ committee there, and at the outbreak of war, had apparently been attending the Wagner festival in Bayreuth.

As a side note, after the war he was nominated to the Liberal candidature in the new Manchester Rusholme constituency. As elsewhere, Mancunian Liberals were divided between those who supported Lloyd George and the coalition and those who favoured Asquith. The Mancunian electorate didn’t differentiate between the two factions and all were defeated. Butterworth was soundly beaten by the Coalition Unionist RB Stoker, while the pioneering female Labour  candidate, Mrs Pethick-Lawrence, finished a close third.

After the apportioning of committee rooms, the formal adoption of the candidates took place on 27 July. A packed meeting heard the agents all swear to long association with their candidates and patronage of local institutions, tactics that the camp paper’s report treated with appropriate cynicism, and the audience with the campaign song “There was a cow climbed up a tree. Oh, you blooming liar.” This memorable tune was later recorded by John Brophy and Eric Partridge in their Dictionary of Tommies’ Songs and Slang 1914-1918, so it seems likely that it came from the many merchant seamen detained in the camp.

Israel Cohen proposed that beer should be brewed, Alexander Boss that all taxes on beer, spirits, tobacco and tea should be abolished and imposed on mineral water instead. “Cohen promises you beer, I promise you champagne.” Castang, surrounded by ‘suffragettes’, put it to the electors that this was an opportunity to show how much they missed their mothers, wives and sweethearts (all German-based dependents having been left to fend for themselves by the authorities), though he promised them nothing if he got to the Commons: “They would get something. What that something would be, they must wait and see, as Asquith said.” Cohen commented that Castang soon made it clear that “he was less concerned with women’s lack of votes than about the camp’s lack of women”.

Butterworth asked if the meeting wanted to propose independent candidates, but although a Hendriksen was proposed as a sailor’s candidate, he declined and backed Cohen. A Delbosq was put forward as a socialist candidate, but his proposal that “everybody in the camp should share all he had... with everybody else...” did not attract sufficient support for him to go to the poll.

The campaign continued in a well-mannered fashion. The candidates and their supporters stuck to their party colours of blue, red (this being the Liberal colour then in many parts of Britain) and violet. Enthusiastic public meetings were eventually curtailed by the German authorities, who asked that the noise and tumult should end. A poster wall emerged on the side of Barrack 12, and a candidate coconut shy was popular at the ‘Bank Holiday fair’.

Some of the posters and cartoons are preserved, on which mnemonics were particularly popular: “Conscientious Original Honourable Eloquent Natural/ Biblious Ostentatious Slippery Swanker” (Liberal), and “Best Original Sensible Sociable/ Creeper Obnoxious Horrible Evil Nuisance” (Tory). Some of the cartoons are a bit close to the mark. One shows Cohen forcibly dragging some of the African merchant seaman to the polls, and another has his picture beneath a slogan reading “Lost Tribes/ Voters of Israel”, while Boss “enters into the Promised Land”. It’s worth noting that although they were not particularly maltreated, the Jewish prisoners were accommodated in separate barracks, as were the black prisoners.

It’s clear that the Tory and Liberal candidates saw each other as the main rivals, or at least affected to do so in the spirit of a normal British election. When the votes were counted on 3 August, however, Castang had triumphed with 1,229 votes to Cohen’s 924 votes and Boss’s 471 votes. (Boss could probably have counted on the votes of John Balfour, a relative of the Tory prime minister Arthur Balfour, and Timothy Eden, elder brother of future PM Anthony Eden.) Seventy-four voters had spoilt their ballots, which meant that almost two-thirds of the electorate had turned out to vote. It seems quite likely, as Professor Matthew Stibbe says in his 2008 book on the camp, that the internees were both trying to demonstrate the importance of democracy in the face of Prussian militarism and to signal to the politicians at home that their plight was being ignored. It’s interesting that Joseph Powell, elected camp captain in 1917, does not mention the by-election in his book The History of Ruhleben, although he does reproduce the result of his own election as a full-page plate. The German press (with, Cohen felt, a notable lack of humour) thought that the prisoners were, instead, showing displeasure with the previous year’s declaration of war. If they wanted a clear signal of how the British population felt, the Merthyr Tydfil by-election of November 1915 would have given it to them. On the death of Keir Hardie, who was against the war, the official Labour candidate was beaten by pro-war Labour independent Charles Stanton. 

Stanton’s victory did Castang no good in the short term. Cohen and Boss were released in June 1916, but Castang had to wait until May 1918, when the Hagenbeck-Wallace Circus, which had originally brought him into Germany, petitioned successfully for his release. He worked in front of German audiences before the end of the war, then went to Hollywood in 1922. There appears to be no further trace of Boss, although the museum at Harvard Library still has one of his election favours, with ‘Vote for Boss’ on one side and ‘Hung round the neck of geese’ on the other. Cohen became a famous journalist and Zionist writer, documenting the soon-to-be obliterated European Jewish communities of the 1920s.

Tags: By-election, Germany, Ruhleben, World War Two