Believing The Unbelievable The Myth of The Russians With 'Snow On Their Boots' in The United Kingdom, 1914

Cultural and Social History
The Journal of the Social History Society
ISSN: 1478-0038 (Print) 1478-0046 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rfcs20
Believing the Unbelievable
Catriona Pennell
To cite this article: Catriona Pennell (2014) Believing the Unbelievable, Cultural and Social
History, 11:1, 69-87
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.2752/147800414X13802176314528
Published online: 01 May 2015.
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BELIEVING THE UNBELIEVABLE

THE MYTH OF THE RUSSIANS WITH ‘SNOW ON THEIR
BOOTS’ IN THE UNITED KINGDOM, 1914
Catriona Pennell
Department of History, University of Exeter
ABSTRACT In the opening months of the First World War, a rumour spread across the United
Kingdom that Russian soldiers – identified by the ‘snow on their boots’ – had landed in Scotland
Downloaded by [Deakin University Library] at 13:55 14 November 2015
en route to the Western Front. Despite being relegated to history’s footnotes as a comical but
meaningless episode, this article takes the rumour seriously. Unconcerned with questions of
‘truth’ (the rumour was dismissed as fantastical by late October 1914), it will argue that the real
value of this story lies in what it reveals about British society at the outbreak of war. The rumour
emerged as the British Expeditionary Force entered its first big test of the Great War – the battle
of Mons – which would result in Germany’s first great victory and thousands of casualties. As
such the rumour can be interpreted as a form of ‘secular apparition’ bringing consolation to
many. It was one of the ways ordinary people made sense of their newly threatening world.
Keywords: rumour, myth, apparition, Russians, First World War, morale
INTRODUCTION
On 9 August, five days after Britain entered the First World War, the small British
Expeditionary Force (BEF) embarked for France. The 70,000 strong force arrived in
France on 14 August as the Belgian army was retreating and while the French were
being pushed back on the southern end of the front. By 20 August it had arrived in its
concentration zone in south Mons.1 On 22 August the 2nd Corps of the BEF set up
defensive positions along a salient formed by the Mons-Conde canal with orders to
hold the German advance for twenty-four hours. At 6 a.m. the following morning, the
Battle of Mons – the first engagement between British and German forces on the
Western Front – began. The BEF were heavily outnumbered by their German
opposition and the small British army suffered severe losses. On hearing of the
withdrawal of the French Fifth Army, leaving the British troops open to certain
destruction, along with the imminent fall of Namur, Sir John French – Commander-
in-Chief of the BEF – ordered a strategic retreat on 24 August to the British second
line of defence. These days of retreat were characterized by fear and anxiety, heightened
by the sight of refugees streaming towards the coast and the sound of German guns
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edging ever closer to the British rear.2 At the Battle of Le Cateau on 26 August the
German forces inflicted almost 8,000 casualties upon the British rearguard. John
Address for correspondence: Dr Catriona Pennell, Department of History, University of Exeter, Penryn
69
Campus, Treliever Road, Penryn, TR10 9EZ, UK. E-mail: C.L.Pennell@exeter.ac.uk
Cultural and Social History, Volume 11, Issue 1, pp. 69–88 © The Social History Society 2014
DOI 10.2752/147800414X13802176314528
French ordered an extended retreat, although he agreed, under Kitchener’s orders, to

keep the BEF in contact with the French forces at the Marne which they crossed on 3
September 1914. It was the crisis of the campaign; the Germans were fighting the
French at the outer reaches of Paris.
The outbreak of war had sent shock waves through all communities in the UK.3 The
opening weeks of the war were characterized by an unprecedented period of dislocation
and frenetic activity. Uncertainty featured in all aspects of life. Regular soldiers were
immediately mobilized and seen off at railway stations and ports across the country by
distraught and anxious relatives, unsure of when they would see their loved ones again.
Volunteers responded in their thousands to Kitchener’s repeated calls for men but were
met with a system in utter chaos as the army’s administration sagged under the weight
of volunteers in August and September 1914.4 Those who could not fight, whether
owing to gender or age, tried to anchor themselves to the national cause by supporting
humanitarian and philanthropic efforts such as fundraising, hosting Belgian refugees,
and knitting socks. In these opening weeks, contemporaries described a sense of chaos
exacerbated by the lack of available news to help explain the situation. Although
censorship in Britain during the war was far from repressive, the Press Bureau,
established on 8 August, in cooperation with patriotic newspaper proprietors and
journalists and new legislation encompassed in the Defence of the Realm Acts
(DORA), did exercise a considerable measure of control to try to ensure no
information useful to the enemy was published.5 Unfavourable news was passed over
in silence or delayed. News of particular battles and troop movements was censored,
while details of specific local regiments were rigidly suppressed. If any information was
provided, it was usually after the event.
However, the system was not watertight, particularly in the opening weeks. On 30
August Sidney Herbert, from Stonehaven, near Aberdeen, sent an urgent letter to the
Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener. In it he stated that the Lord Lieutenant of
Kincardine had ordered a telegram to be read from the pulpit of the local parish church
that morning stating that ‘the British Expeditionary Force had been practically cut to
pieces’. He appealed to Kitchener to quell such pessimistic reports because of the
impact upon the local population: ‘When I left Stonehaven knees were shaking and
hearts quailed.’6 This horrific news was not confined to the Highlands. Owing to the
infamous ‘Amiens Dispatch’ published in The Times on 30 August, the rumour of
annihilation of the British army spread.7 The atmosphere of panic and potential defeat
prevalent amongst the British forces at Mons and the subsequent retreat across the
Marne had filtered into the British civilian population.
It was precisely during these chaotic, anxious and uncertain days, following the
departure of the BEF to France, that a ‘Great Rumour’ spread across the United
Kingdom that Russian troops had landed in Scotland on their way to the Western
Front.8 At one of the tensest periods of the early fighting, mysterious trains were
allegedly passing through English villages carrying hordes of between 10,000 and
250,000 Russians to join their British and French comrades in fighting the Germans.
The cargo was identified owing to foreign accents, grey uniforms, long, shaggy beards
70
and, above all, ‘snow on their boots’, despite it being late summer. No town was left
out of the saga; the rumour spread from north to south and east to west, from Aberdeen
to the Isle of Wight and from Tralee in the south-west of Ireland to Folkestone on the
south-east coast of England. Chronologically, the rumour first appeared in
contemporary sources on 21 August, reaching its peak on 1 September, before slowly
fading out by October/November. The Appendix illustrates the extensive geographical
spread of the rumour. It indicates where the rumour was discussed and communicated
to (for example, if the rumour was discussed in a letter, then the locations of the writer
and recipient have been included), where people believed the Russians had been in
Britain, and even records fifty-seven cases where people believed they had actually seen
the Russians themselves.
Strange stories such as this one did not begin and end in the autumn of 1914.
During the decade that preceded the outbreak of the First World War, British society
was ‘awash with rumours and fears’, most of which were directed at an ‘imagined’
enemy within.9 From 1909 claims of widespread German espionage and phantom
Zeppelin airships hovering above the English coastline were circulated by
newspapers.10 Fears of invasion by foreign hordes had been bubbling since the mid-
nineteenth century, as evidenced by the popular response to publications such as
William Le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910, first published in serial form in the Daily
Mail in 1905.11 These fears, often expressions of contemporary anxieties about Britain’s
defensive capabilities, reached boiling point following Britain’s entry into the war
against Germany in August 1914.12 The war rapidly became a breeding ground for
some truly outrageous stories that were believed by many, at the time, to be true. Some
notable examples include the numerous atrocity myths (although it must be noted that
those atrocities committed against French and Belgian civilians in the opening months
of the war, whilst exaggerated, were grounded in fact); the Angel of Mons (its origins
identifiable in Arthur Machen’s short story published in the London Evening News on
29 September 1914 but which was transformed, over the spring of 1915, and took on
a life of its own); the Crucified Canadian; and perhaps the most notorious atrocity
myth of the war – the Corpse Factory – which alleged that the Germans were recycling
the bodies of their own dead for use in the war effort.13 These rumours, and more, were
angrily dismissed in 1928 by Arthur Ponsonby, the Liberal, later Labour, MP, as the
result of the unruly excesses of wartime lies and propaganda.14

It was precisely the laboratory of European war that first attracted the now renowned
historian of ‘mentalities’, Marc Bloch, to the subject of rumour (fausse nouvelle). Bloch
served as an infantry soldier during the war. Already fascinated by the production of
misinformation and collective psychology, he was provided by the war with a unique
position from which to study the dissemination of fausses nouvelles, culminating in the
publication of ‘Réflexions d’un historien sur les fausses nouvelles de la guerre’ in
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1921.15 This consisted of a review of four recent studies of rumours during the Great
War and the tale of the notorious reservist from Brème, a memorable event from
Bloch’s time on the plateau of the Chemin des Dames in the late summer of 1917.16
He sought to apply a critical method to the production and dissemination of fausses
nouvelles, whilst also using these ‘collective representations’ to penetrate the deeper
71
realities of the epoch in which they were created and spread. Bloch concluded that such
rumours were not spontaneous occurrences. They mirrored the fearful, suspicious
collective consciousness of the moment.17 Unlike Ponsonby, Bloch was not interested
in the issue of truth or falsehood. Bloch regarded concerns about propaganda and lies
as trivial and obvious; he wished to explore the error that was propagated as fact. What
can a critical analysis of myths reveal about the culture and society that produce them?
A number of scholars, influenced by Bloch’s methodology, have taken this question
as a starting point for their own examination of rumours and myths across centuries
and societies. David Blackbourn and William Christian have highlighted the value of
examining localized religious apparitions in nineteenth-century Germany and
fifteenth-century Spain, respectively, rather than explaining them ‘away’ or ignoring
them entirely.18 They demonstrate that a careful reading of visionaries’ accounts placed
within the context and structures of the societies in question can reveal deeper
meanings about the significance of these ‘supernatural’ events. Modern apparitions

were commonly triggered by larger events, such as periods of wartime distress or
postwar disjuncture. A link can be seen between the apparitions, political upheaval,
material distress and social change. By ‘zooming in’ on a small case study at a local level,
both Blackbourn and Christian are able to draw out the larger historical patterns and
meanings woven into it.
George Lefebvre and Clay Ramsay overcome the inherent methodological
difficulties of studying rumours in the past19 to demonstrate the value of analysing, in
detail, a rumour-fuelled panic unfolding at grass-roots level over a short period of
time.20 At a moment of national crisis, such as war or revolution, rumour-mongering
is mediated by strong anxieties. Because individuals are forced to close ranks in
confronting a common danger, such as roaming brigands, grain-stealing bandits or an
invading foreign enemy, collective sentiments are aroused. When crisis leads to
heightened emotions, the critical ability of much of the population is decreased or
suspended.21 War is the quintessential situation for producing apprehension and
ambiguity. Rumours have been associated with wars since earliest times: ‘the Homeric
beginnings of war reporting show that Greeks before, at the time of, and after their
battles – and above all in their pauses – were aware of rumours, and viewed them as a
power bound up with the gods’.22 Consequently, war is the ideal breeding-ground for
rumour-mongering and scare stories; ‘rumour and war are inseparable twins’.23
Finally, David Clarke’s work on UFO sightings provides a twentieth-century
example of rumours and apparitions that appeal to long-established beliefs and
traditions. The UFO phenomenon is the most widespread and culturally embedded
supernatural belief system to emerge in the Western world during the latter half of the
twentieth century and holds much in common with the Russian rumour under
examination in this article. Just as the study of UFOlogy is not the study of UFOs –
there are no UFOs to study, only reports of UFOs – so there were no Russian soldiers
making their way across Britain in August to September 1914. Therefore, in a similar
methodology, this article seeks to deal with the Russian experience of 1914 in relation
to the people who witnessed, discussed and reported the Russians’ presence. It seeks to
study the people who ‘saw’ them and believed in them, and the mechanisms by which
72
the myth was promulgated, in order to establish what this reveals about how British
society entered the First World War.24 Half a century later, Paul Fussell returned such
wartime rumours to the central arena of the experience of the war itself, seeing the
Angel of Mons as part of a ‘plethora of very un-modern superstitions, talismans,
wonders, miracles, relics, legends and rumours’ that emerged as a reaction to the
horrors of the battlefield.25 In a sense, this article seeks to establish the Russian rumour
as a similar rumour that emerged as a reaction to the chaos and uncertainty of the
opening weeks of the conflict.
Yet, in First World War studies, the rumour of Russians with ‘snow on their boots’ has
either been ignored or treated as nothing more than a footnote, a comical episode amidst
the horror of war. Until now, there has been no substantial examination of the rumour
and what it reveals about British wartime society in the opening months of the war.
Jamie H. Cockfield has utilized the myth as a tantalizing title for his operational history
of the Russian Expeditionary Force sent from Russia to France in 1916.26 Nigel Watson
and Granville Oldroyd provide detail on the chronological evolution of the rumour in
the British and American press but with no accompanying sense of what the rumour can
tell us about British society in 1914.27 James Hayward gives a narrative account of the
rumour but only as one amongst many wartime stories such as the Angel of Mons and
the Crucified Canadian. Furthermore, he seeks to uncover the ‘truth’ behind such
rumours, and thus discredit them, rather than assessing them for their own value.28
Historical investigations should not be restricted to ‘empirically verifiable truths’
alone.29 Furthermore, ‘historians … should not seek easy amusement at the expense of
historical actors, or instruct them of their errors’.30 Instead, tracing emotional reactions
and perceptions provides yet another ‘window’ through which to view attitudes held in
common by a wide range of people. As this article will demonstrate, the ‘Russian
rumour’ resonated within British society during the opening months of the war. It did
so precisely because it provided a language in which to express some of the fundamental
reactions to the outbreak of the war – notably that of fear, particularly the fear of
invasion and the fear of the unknown.31 This article thus seeks to explore what I
describe as the ‘secular apparition’ of Russians with ‘snow on their boots’ that appeared
in the opening months of the First World War in Britain.32 Whilst I am cautious not
to overstate the similarities between the Russian rumour and religious sightings, there
is value in approaching these events in a similar manner. By bringing witness testimony

to the forefront of this study, I can explore what the rumoured ‘sightings’ of Allied
troops on British soil meant for contemporaries. I will unpack the ‘event’ itself – how
and where the rumour emerged and its vectors of communication – as well as trying to
draw out its larger significance. In particular, this article contributes to the
historiography of rumour by illustrating that rumour can act as a positive force.
Rumour is too often seen, in most societies, as a force for negativity. Yet here is an
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example where rumour acted as a unifying force, bringing people of all ages, classes,
occupations and locations together through sharing a belief in a story that inspired
hope at a time of crisis. Finally, this article will demonstrate that while the rumour
found its way into official circles, it was not triggered from above. Instead, many elite
figures became as embroiled in the story as members of the public, and no significant
73
efforts were made to quash or deny the rumour until mid-November.

THE ORIGINS OF THE MYTH

No evidence exists to suggest this rumour was devised at elite level and implanted in
the minds of a suggestible population, susceptible to the puppetry of wartime
propaganda. In fact, any explanation that seeks to write the myth off as part of a cynical
process of deluding ordinary people misreads the dynamics of propaganda.33 The
origins of the story are unknown despite attempts by both contemporaries and
historians alike to rationalize and explain. For Austen Chamberlain, who wrote
scathingly from London to his stepmother, Mary, in Birmingham on 2 September
1914, the rumour ‘appears to have originated in one or two Highland Battalions talking
Gaelic which were moved from the north of Scotland. Everywhere I hear (at second
hand) of people who saw and even of people also, being linguists, talked with Russians.
Such is that lying jade Rumour!’34

Ponsonby attempted to understand the origins of the rumour as early as 1928. For
him, possible explanations included a telegram announcing a consignment of Russian
eggs; a tall, bearded individual declaring from a train window that he came from ‘Ross-
shire’; and a French officer with an imperfect grasp of English who approached the
Western Front demanding ‘where are ze rations’.35 According to Cockfield, the rumour
began with the presence of a few Russian officers in Scotland who had arrived to take
up staff positions and buy munitions.36 Other explanations circulated at the time, and
considered after the war, linked the rumour to a food wholesaler in London who had
received a telegraph that 200,000 ‘Russians’ were being dispatched via Archangel, with
reference to eggs rather than soldiers. Hayward substantiates this explanation, after
looking at declassified MI5 files in 1997: ‘eggs’ was in fact a code-word for troops used
by pre-war German spies.37 The explanations are all speculative, and almost as
fantastical as the myth itself.
THE MYTH AT ELITE LEVEL

Whilst not implanted from ‘above’, the myth did make its way into ‘official’ circles.
Politicians and naval officials did genuinely discuss the rumour, simultaneously with
the rest of the population. Scotland Yard’s CID Chief Basil Thomson recalled ‘Mr
Asquith saying that, from a legal and evidential point of view, nothing was ever so
completely proved as the arrival of the Russians’.38 People who perhaps should have
known better were also verifying the rumour. For example, Sir George Young was
convinced of the story by Sir Courtenay Ilbert, a clerk to the House of Commons, who
found the many circumstantial accounts too persuasive to reject.39 Tempting as it may
be to believe that military propagandists fostered the rumour as a way of boosting
morale, there is no evidence to suggest that it was deliberately implanted or fuelled
from above. In a ‘note’ attached after the war, Lord Wemyss, rear admiral commanding
the Channel-based 12th Cruiser Squadron in 1914, suggested that the contemporary
understanding was that once the rumour had got about, ‘the Government found it
convenient not to contradict it’.40 Yet, more often than not, in official circles the
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rumour was unquestionably denied. Brigadier-General John Charteris, working as one

of Haig’s intelligence staff in 1914, asked at British GHQ in France about the rumour
‘and was told, of course, that it was rubbish. They could not get here and would have
nowhere to go, if they did.’41
The rumour was not officially denied by the Press Bureau until 15 September, when
the decisive victory at the Battle of the Marne was reported. The Times published this
denial, yet the story was not denied in Parliament until 18 November.42 Harold
Tennant, the Under-Secretary of State for War, responded to a question from a
backbench MP by flatly denying that any Russian troops had been conveyed across
Britain to the Western Front. However, it is interesting to note that he added that he
was unsure whether this news would ‘gratify or displease my honourable friend’,
highlighting the tensions and hopes pinned on this bizarre story.43 Unsurprisingly,
given such brief statements, official denials were not always believed, and these self-
perpetuating stories of Russian ‘sightings’ continued into October.44 There was perhaps
a conspiratorial notion of a ‘double bluff ’, and Basil Thomson resolved that ‘[t]here was
nothing to be done but let delusion burn itself out’, which it did by October.45
There is, therefore, no evidence to suggest the story was ‘planted’ in the press. The
rumour was featured in some newspapers, denied by others, and ignored by the
majority. On 1 September the Daily News carried two stories on the rumour.46 A week
later, when a telegram from Rome gave official confirmation to the presence of 250,000
Russian troops in France, the Press Bureau neither admitted nor denied the report.47
For the Daily News this was the green light they had been waiting for: ‘The official
sanction to the publication of the above [telegram] … removes the newspaper reserve
with regard to the rumours which for the last fortnight have coursed with such
astonishing persistency through the length and breadth of England.’48 The Times,
however, did not feature the story until it was officially denied by the Press Bureau.
Michael MacDonagh, a journalist for The Times who believed the rumour, rationalized
why the story was absent from the very newspaper he worked for. It had to be kept
secret until all the Russians had arrived safely at their destination on the Western
Front.49 This lacuna added fuel to the rumour; for Thomas Hope Floyd, a schoolboy
in Bolton in 1914, the very fact that it did not feature in most newspapers enhanced
its legitimacy.50
Overall it would appear that the press did not contribute significantly to the
acceleration or relay of the rumour. Instead the rumour was oral and interpersonal,
spread by word of mouth. It provided a community of shared experience (even if that
experience was indirect, via a friend-of-a-friend). This is understandable in the context
of 1914. With very little reliable news being printed in the newspapers, individuals were
forced to close ranks in confronting a common danger – the German enemy – allowing
collective sentiments, such as the Russian rumour, to be aroused.51 It was neither a
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government-induced myth nor a propaganda tool invented by a manipulative press.

Although the origins of the rumour are impenetrable, it most likely started as a joke that
appealed to a deep well of belief and tradition invoked in times of national crisis. It
rapidly transmuted into a phenomenon that I wish to explore below. For the rest of this
article I will argue that the significance of the rumour lies at the grass-roots; that
75
amongst ordinary British people it was a genuinely believed story that was perpetuated
spontaneously and spread across the United Kingdom, indiscriminate in age, gender and
class. This myth provided a much-needed boost of morale to the British people at a time
when their prized BEF were floundering on the Western Front and the German army
was moving closer to the Channel coast. The real significance of the myth lies in what
it tells us about how ordinary British people entered the war in 1914.
‘THE RUSSIANS HAVE LANDED’: THE MYTH SPREADS

Having established that the rumour was not a top-down implantation from above, the
next section examines the rumour from the bottom up: how the rumour spread, who
it spread to, and where it spread in order to demonstrate the reach of this wartime
rumour. It touched all parts of the UK, including Ireland, and weaved its way into the
imaginations of people from a variety of backgrounds and ages.

Like many rumours in the pre-internet age, it was common to learn about the
rumour via hearsay and gossip rather than actually witnessing the Russian
entrainment.52 However, a small number of people (fifty-seven) in the witness sample
claimed to have seen the Russians themselves.53 Donald Price, a schoolboy in Greater
Manchester in 1914, insisted that he had seen trainloads of Russians going past his
bedroom window from Warrington to Manchester in 1914.54 Similarly, Lady
Haworth, a schoolgirl also living in Greater Manchester in 1914, recalled seeing
Russian soldiers at Altrincham station:
one day I was in Altrincham swimming baths which are immediately opposite the
railway station. When I came out there was a great noise of cheering and I climbed on
to the seat of my bicycle so as to be high enough to look over the station wall. I was
astonished to see a train going very slowly through the station crammed with soldiers
wearing curious grey uniforms and with luxuriant black beards. This, I assumed, was
the Russian steam roller.55
Euston Station was said to have been closed for thirty-six hours while the Tsar’s soldiers
detrained.56 During the week of 24 to 29 August Phillip A. Leicester, aged 27 in 1914
and living in Worcester, heard ‘curious rumours … of troops trains passing thro [sic]
Spetchley station night after night crammed with men. It was said they wore strange
headgear, were heavily bearded and of foreign appearance.’57 For others, it was hearing
a foreign language that alerted them to the possibility of a Russian ‘invasion’. Lydia
Miller Middleton, wife of a civil servant living in Ealing, London, was recounted the
story by her husband. According to a work colleague’s brother, who had seen trainloads
of soldiers passing through a station at night, ‘he heard them talking a foreign language.
Father suggested Gaelic but he said no it wasn’t that … nor was it French … Then they
both (Father and the man) thought of Russian.’58 The rumour even spread to Ireland,
suggesting a more unified early war experience within the United Kingdom than has
previously been appreciated.59 On 28 August Helen Duffin, a young woman in
Newcastle, County Down, wrote to her mother, in Belfast, how there was ‘no doubt’
that ‘a strong body of Russian troops’ had been transported from Russia to Scotland
76
and ‘through England by train and are now in France and probably in Ostend which
is a startling move and a good one’.60 On 1 September Thomas Moylan, a lunatic

asylum clerk in Dublin, recorded the rumour in his diary and interpreted it as a
counter-weight to German prowess on the battlefield.61
There are frequent references to the rumour in the correspondence between
encamped soldiers in Britain and their families. Family members frequently asked their
solider-sons or brothers if they had actually seen the Russians where they were
stationed. On 6 September Lieutenant-Colonel Heath of the Royal Garrison Artillery,
stationed in Plymouth, received a letter from his mother, in Exmouth, asking: ‘Have
you seen any Russians down at Plymouth? Everyone is telling everyone else how the
trains have been running about full of them.’62 Charteris recorded how the rumour was
in wide circulation amongst the troops in France: ‘a lot of men here have got hold of
the idea – all from home letters’.63 There was a clear exchange of information between
the two communities, as people desperately tried to piece the story together and
validate their facts.
The rumour ‘attacked all classes indiscriminately, and seemed even to find its most
fruitful soil in sober, stolid, and otherwise truthful people’.64 According to a
contemporary historian, ‘nine out of ten people who heard it [the rumour] believed the
story’.65 For Lewis Gielgud, encamped in Tidworth Gennings in September 1914,
there was no question that the Russian rumour was true.66 George Heenan, Private
Secretary to the Inspector General of the Royal Irish Constabulary in Dublin Castle,
was also convinced. On 1 September he recorded in his diary: ‘Reports are current that
large numbers of Russian troops are landed at Scotland and dispatched to the seat of
war via London. No mention is made of this subject in any of the newspapers; all the
same I believe it is true.’67 For B.M. Trefusis, an upper-class lady living in London, and
many others, the rumour gained further foundation ‘when the Oceanic was sunk
somewhere in the north of Scotland, it was rumoured that she was bringing all their
ammunition’.68 In fact HMS Oceanic had run aground off the Shetland Islands on 8
September owing to bad seamanship and not because of the hostilities.
Polite ‘society’ and the world of politics were not unaffected by the rumour. Lady
Betty Balfour’s diary entry on 2 September confirms how widely and high up the
rumour had spread. Despite the authorities denying the rumour, she had heard
contrary opinions from no less than the King, her brother Arthur Balfour and the
Archbishop of Canterbury.69 However, not everyone who heard the rumour was
convinced. From Paris, Lord Francis Bertie, the British ambassador to France, quickly
dismissed the rumour, scolding ‘there is hardly anything that the people will not believe
or invent’.70 Others did not believe the story because they did not want it to be true.
For Annie Chamberlain, wife of future Conservative prime minister Neville
Chamberlain, any truth in there being 40,000 Russian troops on Salisbury Plain would
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mean the British troops were still waiting for back-up: ‘I hardly believe it and anyway
hope its [sic] not true and that the Russians are on the other side now.’71 Some were
sceptical of the story because they feared the Russians would side with the Germans
once they had crossed the Channel.72
Some people accepted the story with a wry smile, conscious of being deceived.73
77
Winifred Tower, in London, remarked, with a heavy dose of irony, that although ‘there
were some sceptics who said that a large force could not possibly be embarked at
Archangel … [their] ridiculous ideas were quickly suppressed’.74 Others, undoubtedly,
would have passed on the rumour ‘tongue in cheek’, finding it an amusing distraction
to the seriousness of wartime life. Some spread the story not knowing what to think.
However, the evidence suggests that, despite possible doubters (and jokers), the
majority of people chose to believe the rumour. The author Arthur Machen recalled
how ‘great numbers of people made up their minds that the story was true from
beginning to end’.75 To question the validity of the rumour was risky. For example,
Charteris heard the rumour via a fellow officer who was ‘full of stories of Russians
passing through London; says his sister saw them, and when I said I didn’t believe it,
retorted, “Do you mean to say my sister is a liar!” So that ended that discussion.’76
More seriously, ‘those who disbelieved … were suspected of being pro-German’.77
A rumour does not necessarily have to be a calculated ‘implantation’ from above in

order to spread. Social psychologists have identified that emotional arousal, whether
due to the state of collective excitement within a society or to the trait of chronic
anxiety, is essential for rumour transmission.78 Uncertainty and chaos allow for the
suspension of disbelief, a denial of reality as established facts.79 Rumours are an attempt
to provide structure in an uncertain situation.80 When a press service is actively
withholding news, rumours spread like wildfire. Civilians have a desire to know their
circumstances; when the sources from which they receive information are not
functioning adequately, then they tend to theorize independently and through
acquaintances. As B.M. Trefusis noted in her diary on 21 August: ‘One has so little
news from authentic sources, that one seizes any odd rumours with glee – crumbs to
live on.’81
The rumour was most commonly spread, therefore, by word of mouth. Although
the story traditionally had its origins with an anonymous railway porter, as depicted in
Punch on 23 September, multiple vectors were involved in its transportation and
dissemination.82 A classic description can be found in the diary of a young VAD cook
with the Red Cross, Miss G. West, from Selsey, Gloucestershire. On 10 September she
recorded:
There have been rumours for weeks that large numbers of Russian troops have been
brought down from Edinborough [sic] to Portsmouth and thence to France. Several
people have seen porters and station masters who have seen them go through, or have
even watered their horses. The Workman of Woodchester says that boats that should
have returned from Norway with wood for his sawmills have been commandeered and
sent to Archangel and for what purpose if not to bring over troops? Miss Leddon has
a sister – a nun in Belgium. There have been Belgian soldiers quartered at the convent.
One of the officers told her he had orders to go to the coast and guide the Russians to
their ports.83
Annie Chamberlain had the story confirmed to her by a clergyman who had just
returned from Norway.84 For Lady Betty Balfour the story was passed on via her friend
Joan, whose cousin had just returned from serving on a British destroyer for four weeks,
78
sweeping the North Sea for mines.

The more people you heard the story from, the more likely you were to believe it was
true. The historian Charles Oman attached little credence to the accounts of Russians
in England until he received eyewitness accounts. One friend wrote from South
Gloucestershire saying that there were Russians at Avonmouth. A second wrote from
the Isle of Wight that he had been watching steamers with Russians on board emerging
from Southampton Water. A third wrote from Oxford that numerous troop trains
laden with Russians had been passing through Oxford station on their way to
Southampton. At this point, Oman confessed, his doubts began to recede, for all three
correspondents were writing a short distance from where the Russians were supposed
to have been.85
For Lewis Gielgud the machinery behind the rumour mill was simpler:
all officers admit or refuse to deny that they have official knowledge of them [the
Russians]: while all denials come from or thro’ the F[oreign] O[ffice]: which only
means that FO clerks obey orders! … The most definite news I have had was from a
subaltern who told me he had been turned out of barracks at Bedford to give them to
the Russians for a night – which seems clear enough!86
The involvement of soldiers in spreading these rumours is further illustrated by Dr

William Scott, a doctor with the Shropshire Yeomanry. He first became aware of the
rumour on 28 August from the army ‘mess’, and by 29 August ‘news about passage of
Russians through this country is confirmed from many sources’,87 presumably of a
military nature considering the environment he was surrounded by on a daily basis.
The rumour also reached the German enemy, perhaps deliberately. The only report by
Carl Lody that British surveillance teams let through to Berlin was ‘the famous story of
the Russian troops passing through England’.88
These self-perpetuating stories of Russian ‘sightings’ continued well into October
1914.89 As mentioned, the Press Bureau issued an official denial on 15 September.
However, for many, the official denial only served to add fuel to the rumour’s fire.
Phillip A. Leicester from Worcester recorded in his diary on 31 August 1914: ‘The
rumour of the Russians is publicly and officially denied – but that denial is not
believed, as the Chief Constable has received secret instructions to expect them.’90
Despite her cynicism, Winifred Tower commented at this point that: ‘Everyone
believed in the Russians and most people continued to do so in spite of the very
decided denial of the story issued by the Press Bureau.’91 But, by November, the
rumour was certainly dead amongst the populace. On 11 October John MacCunn
wrote, from Aldershot, to his father, in Glasgow, saying ‘in the West I now admit that
they [the Russians] never existed’.92 MacCunn was a former assistant in the
Department of History at the University of Glasgow who had enlisted in the 6th
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Battalion Cameroon Highlanders in 1914. His letter suggests that he had, at some
point, believed the Russian myth, highlighting that even contemporary historians were
willing to believe the rumour.
79
ANALYSING THE RUSSIAN RUMOUR

The Russian rumour was more than simply hysteria or excitement gone too far.
Although it most likely started as a joke, it quickly transmuted into a sincerely believed
story that had an important function. In sociological terms, the Russian rumour was a
classic example of a ‘pipe dream’, or wish, rumour. The rumour first appeared in the
chaotic and uncertain period following the BEF’s departure to France (9 August) and its
confirmed arrival by the Press Bureau on 18 August.93 The British population knew
their men had gone to the front lines, but did not know where or what that experience
would be like. The only concrete fact was that they had gone away to fight in a war of
unprecedented scale. The Russian rumour therefore appeared at a point when people
were looking for reassurance. To a degree, it can be understood as a compensatory myth
in an unfamiliar period of indefinite separation. Rumours of Russian reinforcements at

least provided people at home with a sense that their men were not fighting alone. The
rumour then took on an added and more forceful level of reassurance at a frightening
moment during and after the Battle of Mons (last week of August and the first week of
September). At a time when the British population believed that their army had been
slaughtered in France and Belgium, the rumour of Russian reinforcements passing
through Britain on their way to the Western Front provided evidence of physical
military support, thus giving a sense of hope and a much-needed boost to popular
morale.
During the period following the departure of the BEF to France, very little news
reached the pages of the British press. What did get through talked ambiguously of
casualties, retreat and the encroaching German army. There was much to be fearful
about. Not only was the lack of news fuelling rumours and stories of annihilation of
the British army in retreat, but the Allied victory at the Marne had forced the
Germans into a ‘battle to the sea’. In other words, the Germans were edging closer and
closer to Calais. It was only a mere twenty miles across the Channel to the British
coast. It is precisely within this vacuum of news and atmosphere of anxiety that the
Russian rumour took hold. According to Violet Clutton, a VAD nurse in London, the
Russians had been landed in England simply ‘to aid the Allies in France’.94 For
Reverend Denys Yonge, vicar of Boreham in Essex, ‘the Russians are said to be in
England on their way to the front. If so they will give a good account of the
German[s].’95 According to a contemporary historian, the rumour ‘was caused by the
hope in those critical days that this immense surprise army from Russia would roll
back the German invaders of Belgium and France’.96 The mystical nature of the myth
provided inspiration for an anxious home front, unsure of where their troops were and
then hearing of the retreat of the BEF at Mons and rumours of long casualty lists.97
The only excuse Michael MacDonagh could provide for his belief in the rumour was
that ‘it was a case of the wish being father to the thought’; in a kind of self-fulfilling
prophecy, the hope that the Russians would come to the aid of the Allies mutated into
a fantasized reality.98 On hearing the rumour of Russians passing through England,
Louisa Baldwin, mother of the future prime minister Stanley Baldwin, recorded in
80
Stourbridge that she was ‘inclined to believe it [the rumour] is true and hope … it
is’.99 For Winifred Tower, ‘the situation looked very black and we all had a bad attack
of gloom, though the thought of those Russians did much to cheer us up’.100
Ultimately, the rumour provided hope that the British troops would receive some
much-needed support, and that this would pave the way towards an early termination
of the war.101 Looking back on the Russian rumour, Basil Thomson wondered
‘whether some self-effacing patriot did not circulate this story in order to put heart
into his fellow-countrymen at a time when depression would have been most
disastrous’.102
However, if this was the case, then that ‘patriot’ did not take into account the
demoralizing impact when it was realized that the Russians were not going to be
reinforcing the British troops struggling on the Western Front. The image of the bubble
of Russian hope being burst is best evoked by MacDonagh: ‘London is depressed today.
The flower of our fondest hope has been suddenly blighted. The Press Bureau has
issued an absolute denial of the rumour.’103 Mary Chamberlain, after reluctantly
accepting that the story was indeed fabricated, added: ‘It would have been such a
splendid coup and was so circumstantial that it is a blow that it is all untrue. Just now
one could have done with their help.’104
The rumour clearly served a positive function. It engendered excitement and hope
amongst people and served a collective purpose in embroiling the population in a
mysterious conspiracy. At a time when little news was reaching the home population
– and what did get through was frightening and spoke of defeat and annihilation of
the British army – a rumour of Allied support coming to the rescue of the retreating
BEF was clearly going to thrive. The rumour was all-inclusive and contributed to a
unifying, collective feeling about the British nation and its allies. This is all the more
interesting when we consider that rumours often act as contributing factors to
violence, prejudice and discrimination.105 Examples exist in French, German and
Indian societies, amongst many others, where rumour has been seen to fuel prejudice
and stereotype, leading to riot situations. The rumour of Russians with ‘snow on their
boots’ did exactly the opposite, promoting societal accord and shared trust in an
inspirational phenomenon. As such, it serves as a compelling case study that should
encourage analysts to view rumour as more than simply a negative and destructive
force.
The function of this rumour is further evidenced by the very fact that it died out
when the BEF began to be more successful in France, i.e. once it had served its purpose.
This supports the view that ‘when situations marked by intense collective excitement
have run their course, tension is dissipated and rumours just disappear’.106 This was
precisely the case with the ‘Russian rumour’. The rumour faded away when its purpose
was exhausted. Although the rumour helped to boost morale, by the second week of
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September the big battle at the Marne was nearly over and largely a success for the
Allies, although not a full victory.107 The Allies had halted the German invasion of
France and prevented the fall of Paris. As the initial tension of the opening weeks of the
war – marked by confusion, insecurity, anxiety and a thirst for news – was replaced by
an acceptance of the new situation, a ‘settling down to war’, more and more people
81
began to appreciate the absurdity of these rumours. According to Vera Brittain, ‘by the
time … that we started believing in Russians, England had become almost accustomed
to the War’.108
CONCLUSION
Rumours are often treated as a footnote in the historiography of the First World War.
However, once we look at these rumours from a cultural perspective, an important
door is opened into our understanding of how populations went to war in 1914. Belief
in something, even though it does not exist, is a very powerful force in history.
Rumours have historical agency and their consequences are powerful. The rumour of
Russians with ‘snow on their boots’ reveals much about the way the population of the
United Kingdom entered the war in 1914.
The rumour goes some way in illustrating ordinary attitudes towards one of Britain’s
main wartime allies. It was an expression of how quickly Britain’s pre-war enemies
became valued allies. As late as July 1914, suspicion was being expressed amongst
ordinary people towards Russia owing to the long-held animosity between the two
nations.109 Yet once the war was engaged, a dramatic shift took place in people’s
perceptions of Russia. Very quickly Russia ‘the barbarian’ became Russia ‘the saviour’.
Its past wrongs were forgotten when Russia’s mass army had early victories against the
Germans. The press rallied to praise Russian victories; cartoons in Punch depicted
Russia as a great bear or steamroller attacking the Germans from the East, whilst the
French and British resisted from the West.110 The necessities of war quickly
transformed past enemies into contemporary allies, and the rumour was one way in
which this new exaltation was communicated. Yet, it is worth noting the paradoxical
imagery used to evoke the Russian ally; it was both a courageous hero and a fearsome
‘bear’, simultaneously a mass army of support troops and a wild rabble of bearded,
foreign soldiers traipsing across the country. One can only imagine how these dual
images played out in people’s minds; the prospect of Russian troops making their way
towards Southampton en route to the Western Front was, at once, both joyous and
terrifying.
An analysis of a rumour of this sort also raises some interesting methodological
issues. The Russian rumour contributes to our understanding of the relationship
between top-down sources of information (such as newspapers and printed pamphlets)
and bottom-up grass-roots opinion. Clearly the lines are blurred, with the rumour
spreading as high up as the King. As mentioned, the rumour was not really dealt with
in the national press until it was officially denied. Consequently it cannot be argued
that press coverage was the reason why the rumour persisted. The rumour spread by
word of mouth across the United Kingdom without the help of newspapers. Thus, any
attempt to understand popular opinion must be flexible enough to take into account
public behaviour, public perception (or the imaginary) as well as top-down and
bottom-up discussion that circulated in the public sphere.
But the real value of this rumour lies in the way it helps us access the mentalities of
people experiencing the war as it unfolded. In some ways, the Russian rumour was a
82
secular apparition. Whilst I acknowledge that there are differences when compared
with a religious sighting, the comparison is ‘revealing’. Granted, it was not a single
‘vision’ in a fixed location; limited sightings occurred across the UK. However, the real
power lay in the rapidity and geographical spread of communication rather than the
number of people that ‘witnessed’ the Russians. Like ripples in a pond, the rumour
spread across the UK in a very short space of time, verified by interpersonal
connections rather than hard evidence. As with most historical rumours, its lifespan
was short-lived, the rumour appearing out of a specific social context, war, naturally
developing from ‘truth claims’ to finished narratives, and then, as the rumour saturated
the community and its purpose was served, becoming a mere allusion, or metonym, to
a known tale.111
Whilst the rumour was not founded in religion and did not contain any overtly
religious expression, it did serve a similar purpose to an apparition. At a time of
uncertainty and fear, rumoured sightings of Allied troops making their way to support
the beleaguered BEF brought much-needed consolation to the majority of the
population. It is well established that apparitions usually occurred in an atmosphere of
upheaval, crisis or war.112 The outbreak of European war in 1914 was one of the
biggest moments of upheaval thus far for the vast majority of contemporaries. Just as
apparitions offered hope and fed a collective faith, the rumour of Russians with ‘snow
on their boots’ gave a shared vocabulary (and imagery) that acted as a source of comfort
and inspiration. The rumour surfaced not simply because people were fearful of war,
although that was part of it; it was also a result of being scared of what the war would
bring. It emerged at a time when people were deeply anxious about what was
happening to British soldiers recently departed for France. It was then fuelled by stories
of the disastrous retreat from Mons. And it gained added potency in late August, when
stories of German atrocities in Belgium were rife and many ordinary people feared the
same would happen on British soil if the Germans could get to Calais and beyond. Just
as the Fatima events of 1917 were inspired by a common enemy, ‘communism’, the
rumour of Russian troops in 1914 was an expression of fear of a marauding German
enemy.113 The Russian rumour should not be dismissed as little more than a comical
aside in the dark days of war; its significance lies in the very fact that it is a window into
the ways in which British men and women at this time made sense of their newly
threatening world.
NOTES
1. Richard Holmes, The Little Field-Marshal: Sir John French (London, 1981), p. 199.
2. Brigadier-General John Charteris, At G.H.Q. (London, 1931), pp. 20–1.
3. Catriona Pennell, A Kingdom United: Popular Responses to the Outbreak of the First World
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War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2012).

4. See Peter Simkins, Kitchener’s Army: The Raising of the New Armies 1914–1916
(Manchester, 1988), pp. 31–78. The first appeal appeared in The Times on 7 August
1914, followed by another on 28 August. See The Times, 7 August 1914, p. 5, and 28
August 1914, p. 6.
5. Nicholas Hiley, ‘The News Media and British Propaganda, 1914–1918’, in Jean Jacques
83
Becker and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau (eds), Les Sociétiés Européenês et la Guerre de

1914–1918 (Nanterre, 1990); Deian Hopkin, ‘Domestic Censorship in the First World
War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 5 (1970), pp. 151–69.
6. National Archives of Scotland (NAS), West Register House: HH 31/5/1, Dissemination of
False News, 30 August 1914.
7. Imperial War Museum (IWM), Documents Collection, WLT/1/1, Journal of Miss W.L.B.
Tower, 30 August 1914.
8. IWM, Documents Collection, WLT/1/1, Journal of Miss W.L.B. Tower, 29 August 1914.
9. David Clarke, ‘Rumours of Angels: A Legend of the First World War’, Folklore, 113
(2002), p. 151.
10. David French, ‘Spy Fever in Britain, 1900–1915’, Historical Journal, 21 (1978), pp.
335–70; David Clarke, ‘Scareships over Britain’, Fortean Times, 6 (1999), pp. 39–64.
11. W. Le Queux, The Invasion of 1910 with a Full Account of the Siege of London (London,
1906).
12. Catriona Pennell, ‘“The Germans Have Landed!”: Home Defence and Invasion Fears in
the South East of England, August to December 1914’, in Heather Jones, Jennifer
O’Brien and Christoph Schmidt-Supprian (eds), Untold War: New Perspectives in First
World War Studies (Leiden, 2008).
13. Clarke, ‘Rumours of Angels’; David Clarke, The Angel of Mons (Chichester, 2004); James
Hayward, Myths and Legends of the First World War (Stroud, 2002); John Horne and Alan
Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven, CT, 2001); John
Terraine, The Smoke and the Fire: Myths and Anti-myths of War, 1861–1945 (London,
1992).
14. Arthur Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime: Containing an Assortment of Lies Circulated
Throughout the Nations during the Great War (London, 1928).
15. Marc Bloch, ‘Réflexions d’un Historien sur les Fausses Nouvelles de la Guerre’, Revue de
Synthèse Historique, 33 (1921), pp. 41–57.
16. Carole Fink, Marc Bloch: A Life in History (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 71, 112.
17. Ibid., pp. 111–12.
18. David Blackbourn, Marpingen: Apparitions of the Virgin Mary in Bismarckian Germany
(Oxford, 1993), W.A. Christian, Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain
(Princeton, NJ, 1981).
19. By their very nature, rumours free themselves from any concrete form of documentation
and spread without leaving any trace, thus constituting an epistemological conundrum for
researchers of the past. See Galit Hasan-Rokem, ‘Rumors in Times of War and Social
Change: A Historical Perspective’, in Gary Alan Fine, Véronique Campion-Vincent and
Chip Heath (eds), Rumor Mills: The Social Impact of Rumor and Legend (New Brunswick,
NJ, 2005), p. 31; Hans Joachim Neubauer, The Rumour: A Cultural History (London,
1999).
20. Georges Lefebvre, The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France (1932;
London, 1973); Clay Ramsay, The Ideology of the Great Fear: The Soissonnais in 1789
(Baltimore, MD, 1992).
21. Ralph L. Rosnow and Gary Alan Fine, Rumor and Gossip: The Social Psychology of Hearsay
(New York, 1976), pp. 21–31.
22. Neubauer, The Rumour, p. 14.
23. Thomas Chadwick, The Influence of Rumour on Human Thought and Action (Manchester,
1932), p. 48.
24. David Clarke and Andy Roberts, Flying Saucerers: A Social History of UFOlogy (Avebury,
2007), pp. 2–3.
84
25. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1975), p. 115.
26. Jamie H. Cockfield, With Snow on Their Boots: The Tragic Odyssey of the Russian
Expeditionary Force in France during World War 1 (London, 1998).
27. Nigel Watson and Granville Oldroyd, ‘Snow on Their Boots’, in Steve Moore (ed.),
Fortean Studies, vol. 2 (London, 1995), pp. 186–97.
28. James Hayward, Myths and Legends of the First World War (Stroud, 2002).
29. Raphael Samuel and Paul Thompson, ‘Introduction’, in Raphael Samuel and Paul
Thompson (eds), The Myths We Live By (London, 1990), p. 1.
30. Blackbourn, Marpingen, p. 13.
31. Horne and Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914, p. 225.
32. This term makes a conscious reference to the suggestion by Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau and
Annette Becker that the First World War was fought, ideologically, along the lines of a
Manichaean cosmology, which amounted to a secular crusade. See Stéphane Audoin-
Rouzeau and Annette Becker, 1914–1918: Understanding the Great War (London, 2002).
33. Jay Winter, ‘Propaganda and the Mobilization of Consent’, in Hew Strachan (ed.), The
Oxford Illustrated History of the First World War (Oxford, 2000).
34. Letter from Austen Chamberlain, 2 September 1914: University of Birmingham, Special
Collections, AC 4/1/1139. Emphasis in the original.
35. Ponsonby, Falsehood in Wartime, p. 63.
36. Cockfield, With Snow on Their Boots, p. 2.
37. Hayward, Myths and Legends of the First World War.
38. Basil Thomson, Queer People (London, 1922), p. 37.
39. Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War, 1914–1918
(Cambridge, 1986), p. 161.
40. Lady Wester Wemyss, The Life and Letters of Lord Wester Wemyss (London, 1935), p. 173.
41. Charteris, At G.H.Q., p. 38.
42. The Times, 15 September 1914, p. 8.
43. Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 18 November 1914.
44. Cockfield, With Snow on Their Boots, pp. 1–2.
45. Thomson, Queer People, p. 38.
46. Daily News, 1 September 1914, cited in Hayward, Myths and Legends of the First World War,
p. 33.
47. Ibid., p. 35.
48. Daily News, 9 September 1914.
49. Michael MacDonagh, In London during the Great War (London, 1935), pp. 21–2. Believing the Unbelievable
50. Lancashire Record Office (LRO), DDFL 1/5, Diary of Thomas Hope Floyd.
51. Rosnow and Fine, Rumor and Gossip, pp. 21–31.
52. Cockfield, With Snow on Their Boots, p. 1; Jean-Noël Kapferer, Rumors: Uses, Interpretations,
and Images (London, 1990).
53. See Appendix.
54. IWM, Sound Archives, 10168, Reel 1 (1988).
55. Liddle Collection (LC), Lady Haworth, Wartime Recollections (n.d.).
56. E.S. Turner, Dear Old Blighty (London, 1980), p. 53.
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57. WRO (Worcester Record Office), Ref 705:185, BA 8185, Parcel 2, Diary of Phillip A.
Leicester.
58. LC, DF 091, Letter from Lydia Miller Middleton, 3 September 1914.
59. See also Catriona Pennell, ‘Going to War, 1914’, in John Horne (ed.), Our War: Ireland and
the Great War (Dublin, 2008).
60. Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI), Duffin family papers, D/2109/9/1, 28
85
August 1914.
61. National Library of Ireland (NLI), A Dubliner’s Diary, MS 9,620, 1 September 1914.
62. LC, GS 0735, Letter to Lt.-Col. C.P. Heath, 6 September 1914.
65. Sir George Aston, Secret Service (London, 1930), p. 83.
66. LC, GS 1119, Letter from Lewis Gielgud, 14 September 1914.
67. IWM, Documents Collection, 67/196/1, Diary of G.F.H. Heenan, 1 September 1914.
68. LC, DF 129, Journal of B.M. Trefusis.
69. NAS, General Register House, GD 433/2/348, Diary of Lady Betty Balfour. However,
there is no record of the rumour in the diary of King George V (see Royal Archives,
Windsor Castle: RA George V’s Diary).
70. Viscount Grey of Fallodon (ed.), The Diary of Lord Bertie of Thame, 1914–1918: Volume 1
(London, 1924), pp. 30, 33.
71. University of Birmingham, Special Collections (hereafter Bir), NC 1/25/14, Letter to

Neville Chamberlain, 3 September 1914.
72. Turner, Dear Old Blighty, p. 53.
73. Michael Saler, ‘“Clap If You Believe in Sherlock Holmes”: Mass Culture and the Re-
enchantment of Modernity, c.1890–c.1940’, Historical Journal, 46 (2003), pp. 599–622.
74. IWM, Documents Collection, WLT/1/1, Journal of Miss W.L.B. Tower.
75. Sir John Hammerton (ed.), The Great War: I Was There! (London, 1938).
77. Lord Lovat, March Past: A Memoir (London, 1978), pp. 78–9.
78. Marianne E. Jaeger, Susan Anthony and Ralph L. Rosnow, ‘Who Hears What from Whom
and with What Effect: A Study of Rumor’, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 6
(1980), p. 477.
79. Bill Ellis, ‘Legend/AntiLegend: Humor as an Integral Part of the Contemporary Legend
Process’, in Fine et al. (eds), Rumour Mills, p. 171.
80. G.W. Allport and L.J. Postman, The Psychology of Rumor (New York, 1947); Rosnow and
Fine, Rumor and Gossip.
81. LC, DF 129, Journal of B.M. Trefusis.
82. Punch, 23 September 1914, p. 270.
83. IWM, Documents Collection, 77/156/1, Diary of Miss G. West.
84. Bir, NC 1/25/14, Letter to Neville Chamberlain, 3 September 1914.
85. Tabotsu Shibutani, Improvised News: A Sociological Study of Rumour (New York, 1966), p.
141.
86. LC, GS 1119, Letter from Lewis Gielgud, 14 September 1914.
87. IWM, Documents Collection, 99/12/1, Diary of Dr William Sibbald Scott.
89. Cockfield, With Snow on Their Boots, pp. 1–2.

90. WRO, Ref 705:185, BA 8185, Parcel 2, Diary of Phillip A. Leicester.
92. University of Glasgow Special Collections, MS Gen 532/3, Letter from Francis John
MacCunn, 11 October 1914.
93. The Times, 18 August 1914, p. 7.
94. DRO (Devon Record Office), 6258M/Box 1, Diary of Violet Clutton.
95. Essex Record Office, D/DU/358/26, Diary of Reverend Denys Yonge.
96. Aston, Secret Service, p. 83.
97. LC, RNMN 060, Dr T.H. Kirk, Wartime Recollections (n.d.).
86
98. MacDonagh, In London during the Great War, p. 23.

99. WRO, Ref 705:775, BA 8229, 9/I, Diary of Louisa Baldwin.

101. Shibutani, Improvised News, p. 136.
103. MacDonagh, In London during the Great War, pp. 23–4.
104. Bir, AC 4/2/205, Letter to Austen Chamberlain, 3 September 1914.
105. Gary Alan Fine, ‘Rumor Matters: An Introductory Essay’, in Fine et al. (eds), Rumor Mills,
p. 2.
106. Shibutani, Improvised News, p. 135.
108. Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London, 1933), p. 97.
109. Keith Neilson, Britain and the Last Tsar: British Policy and Russia 1894–1917 (Oxford,
1995).
110. See, for example, Punch, 16 September 1914, p. 233.

111. Ellis, ‘Legend/AntiLegend’, p. 124.
112. The first great wave of visions in modern Europe occurred in the aftermath of the French
Revolution. Similar apparitions were also recorded during the political upheavals of
Restoration Europe and following the creation of Italy and Germany in the 1860s and
1870s. Blackbourn, Marpingen, pp. 33–4.
113. Nicholas Perry and Loreto Echeverría, Under the Heel of Mary (London, 1988).

PENNELL
87
APPENDIX: MAPPING THE RUMOUR OF RUSSIANS WITH ‘SNOW

ON THEIR BOOTS’, 21 AUGUST TO 11 OCTOBER 1914
Map © Robert Wilkinson, 2013

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Believing the Unbelievable

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BELIEVING THE UNBELIEVABLE

Keywords: rumour, myth, apparition, Russians, First World War, morale

Campus, Treliever Road, Penryn, TR10 9EZ, UK. E-mail: C.L.Pennell@exeter.ac.uk

French ordered an extended retreat, although he agreed, under Kitchener’s orders, to

result of the unruly excesses of wartime lies and propaganda.14

meanings about the significance of these ‘supernatural’ events. Modern apparitions

is value in approaching these events in a similar manner. By bringing witness testimony

efforts were made to quash or deny the rumour until mid-November.

THE ORIGINS OF THE MYTH

Such is that lying jade Rumour!’34

THE MYTH AT ELITE LEVEL

rumour was unquestionably denied. Brigadier-General John Charteris, working as one

government-induced myth nor a propaganda tool invented by a manipulative press.

‘THE RUSSIANS HAVE LANDED’: THE MYTH SPREADS

imaginations of people from a variety of backgrounds and ages.

is a startling move and a good one’.60 On 1 September Thomas Moylan, a lunatic

A rumour does not necessarily have to be a calculated ‘implantation’ from above in

sweeping the North Sea for mines.

The involvement of soldiers in spreading these rumours is further illustrated by Dr

ANALYSING THE RUSSIAN RUMOUR

in an unfamiliar period of indefinite separation. Rumours of Russian reinforcements at

War in Britain and Ireland (Oxford, 2012).

Becker and Stéphane Audoin-Rouzeau (eds), Les Sociétiés Européenês et la Guerre de

71. University of Birmingham, Special Collections (hereafter Bir), NC 1/25/14, Letter to

89. Cockfield, With Snow on Their Boots, pp. 1–2.

98. MacDonagh, In London during the Great War, p. 23.

99. WRO, Ref 705:775, BA 8229, 9/I, Diary of Louisa Baldwin.

110. See, for example, Punch, 16 September 1914, p. 233.

Believing the Unbelievable

APPENDIX: MAPPING THE RUMOUR OF RUSSIANS WITH ‘SNOW

Map © Robert Wilkinson, 2013

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