Abstract
Phillip Knightley has written that during the Great War ‘more deliberate lies were told than in any other period of history, and the whole apparatus of the state went into action to suppress the truth’.3 The enormous and emotive widespread reaction to Cavell’s death provides an important example of how knowledge was constructed to serve the interests of Allied governments. Cavell’s corpse became a prop for the performance of patriarchal warfare — grounded in men fighting for king, country and empire, protecting their families from enemy invaders. This chapter picks up the immediate reaction to Cavell’s death, summarizing the major discourses, and tracing how news of the execution spread around the world. The motivations behind those expressing outrage are probed, from the state to individuals who felt a personal sense of loss — a response that was often influenced by the version of Cavell’s death that they had heard about, seen or read in newspapers, artwork and other rapidly published documents. These sources were all subject to the influences of propaganda. In particular, the use of Cavell’s death as a part of the propaganda machine for promoting recruitment and military conscription is a major theme. Other themes are how Cavell’s fate became an atrocity story linked to the sinking of the Lusitania and the Bryce Report, and the contested part that her death played in America’s entry into the war.
There was much in the surroundings of the trial and execution to stir the wrath and pity of the world — wrath against the men who had by a military technicality done a brave woman to death, and pity for the nurse who had paid the penalty of her life for her work of mercy.1
But is it possible that there is one young man in England to-day who will sit still under this monstrous wrong? …. God’s curse is on the nation that tramples underfoot and defies the laws of chivalry which once relieved the horrors of war.2
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Notes
E. Protheroe, A Noble Woman: The Life-Story ofEdith Cavell, (London: Charles H. Kelly, 1916), pp. 115–6.
P. Knightley, The First Casualty: From the Crimea to Vietnam: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist and Myth Maker (London: Andre Deutsch, 1975), p. 80.
J. M. Read, Atrocity Propaganda 1914–1919 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), p. 210.
J. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 3.
C. Haste, Keep the Home Fires Burning: Propaganda in the First World War (London: Allen Lane, 1977), p. 107.
G. S. Messinger, British Propaganda and the State in the First World War (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), pp. 8–9.
P. Knightley, The Second Oldest Pro fession: the spy as bureaucrat, patriot, fantasist and whore (London: Guild Publishing, 1987), p. 84.
P. Buitenhuis, The Great War of Words: British, American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914–1933 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1987), p. 1.
Messinger, British Propaganda, p. 44, p. 23.
M. L. Sanders and P. M. Taylor, British Propaganda During the First World War 1914–18 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982), p. 107.
Sanders and Taylor, British Propaganda, p. 31.
S. J. Potter (ed) Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire c. 1857–1921 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2004), p. 2.
Sanders and Taylor, British Propaganda, p. 2.
S. J. Potter, News and the British World: The Emergence o f an Imperial Press System, 1876–1922 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 195.
S. J. Potter, ‘Empire and the English Press, c. 1857–1914’, in S. J. Potter, Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain, pp. 39–61, p. 41 and S. J. Potter, News and the British World, p. 161.
D. Blackburn, The Martyr Nurse: the Death and Achievement of Edith Cavell (London: The Ridd Masson Co., Ltd, 1915), p. 6.
W. T. Hill, The Martyrdom ofNurse Cavell: the life story o f the victim of Germany’s most barbarous crime (London: Hutchinson and Co., 1915), p. 50.
W. S. Murphy, In Memoriam: Edith Cavell, (London: F. and E. Stoneham, Ltd., 1916).
The Times Histoly o f the War, vol. VI (London: The Times, 1916), p. 439.
R. Ryder, Edith Cavell (New York: Stein and Day, 1975), pp. 251–252.
D. Reynaud, ‘Convention and Contradiction: Representations of Women in Australian War Films, 1914–1918’, Australian Historical Studies, 113 (October 1999), 215–230, 223.
F. Wilkins, Six Great Nurses (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1962), pp. 142–143.
J. M. Bourne, Britain and the Great War (London: Edward Arnold, 1989).
Sanders and Taylor, British Propaganda During the First World War, p. 141. On Fryatt see A. C. Hughes, ‘War, Gender and National Mourning: The Significance of the Death and Commemoration of Edith Cavell in Britain’, European Review o f History, 12: 3 (2005), pp. 425–444, p. 425.
S. Malvern, ‘For King and Country’: Frampton’s Edith Cavell (1915–1920) and the Writing of Gender in Memorials to the Great War’, in D. J. Getsy (ed) Sculpture and the Pursuit of a Modern Ideal in Britain c. 1880–1930 (Aldershot and Burlington VT.: Ashgate, 2004), pp. 219–238, p. 225–226.
T. Proctor, Female Intelligence: Women and Espionage in the First World War (New York: New York University Press, 2003), p. 103.
J. M. Read, Atrocity Propaganda 1914–1919 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941). In the preface he doesn’t think the US entered the war because of propa-ganda. See also Sanders and Taylor, British Propaganda During the First World War.
Hoehling, Edith Cavell, p. 138.
E. Grey, Friend Within the Gates: The Story of Edith Cavell (London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1960), p. 185.
A. De Leeuw, Edith Cavell: Nurse, Spy, Heroine (Toronto: Longmans Canada Ltd., 1968), p. 94.
David W. Lloyd, Battlefield Tourism: Pilgrimage and the Commemoration of the Great War in Britain, Australia and Canada, 1919–1939 (Oxford and New York: Berg, 1998), p. 1.
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© 2007 Katie Pickles
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Pickles, K. (2007). Thrills of Horror and Waves of Outrage: Diffusing Propaganda. In: Transnational Outrage. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286085_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230286085_4
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