David Dutton

In its editorial on 14 December 1963 the Dumfries and Galloway Standard and Advertiser declared, ‘The fact must be faced, Liberalism in Dumfriesshire is on its deathbed and nothing short of a miracle will revive it.’ The evidence for such a statement was strong. In the by-election occasioned by the elevation to the peerage of the sitting member, Niall Macpherson, and whose result had just been declared, the Liberal party, fielding a candidate in the constituency for the first time since the General Election of 1945, had secured a derisory 4,491 votes and forfeited its deposit. This figure, suggested the Standard, was ‘amazingly small’. ‘No juggling of the figures can produce a single crumb of comfort for the Liberals.’ The party’s candidate, Charles Abernethy, and his supporters had ‘put everything they had into the campaign, but however strong Liberalism in Dumfriesshire may have been in the past the by-election figures show that the new generation of voters are thinking along different lines’. A week later, following the publication of two critical letters in its correspondence columns, the newspaper felt it necessary to defend itself against the charge that it had itself contributed to the Liberal party’s predicament because ‘it did not throw its whole weight behind the Party, as in the old days’. A newspaper’s primary function, the Standard argued, is ‘to give a fair and unbiased account of the news, particularly in the controversial field of politics’. If, then, the Dumfriesshire Liberals were looking for a scapegoat for the result of the poll, ‘they must look elsewhere. We have no intention of accepting the role.’

At the foot of the kirkyard at Mouswald, sloping down towards the Solway Firth, lie the mortal remains of Robert Threshie Reid, first and last Earl Loreburn. The simple stone cross marking his grave, lies broken on the ground, its condition a telling commentary on the evaporation of the historical reputation of one who served for more than six years as a leading and much respected member of Britain’s pre-First World War Liberal government. That distinguished administration, formed by premier Henry CampbellBannerman in December 1905, contained three future Prime Ministers – H.H. Asquith, David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill – as well as such luminaries as Edward Grey, Foreign Secretary at the start of the war, and Richard Burdon Haldane, perhaps the most accomplished War Minister of the twentieth century. But Reid’s appointment to the Lord Chancellorship was seen at the time as a step of considerable importance. Indeed, he was the first prospective minister to be approached by Campbell-Bannerman as the latter set about constructing his cabinet.

Probably no short period in modern history has been as intensively studied as the month of July 1914 — or more precisely, the five weeks between the assassination of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand, in the Bosnian town of Sarajevo on 28 June and the British declaration of war on Germany on 4 August. Within the vast corpus of resulting literature the reporting of the so-called war crisis in the British press remains, nonetheless, a relatively neglected aspect. Coverage of events in the provincial press has been even less well examined. At one level this is not surprising. The focus of analysis has inevitably been an attempt to understand precisely what was going on within the corridors of power — what were the motives behind key developments such as the Austrian ultimatum, the German ‘blank cheque’ and the Russian mobilization; which countries were prepared or even keen to accept the transition from diplomacy to war and on what scale; and which countries were genuinely striving for a peaceful resolution. If contemporary political and military leaders, and their governments and cabinets, with all the resources of diplomatic representation and clandestine intelligence operations at their disposal, could not settle these questions with any certainty or accuracy, then it would be unrealistic to turn to the press, and particularly provincial newspapers, for answers. Only painstaking research on the secret diplomatic and political files of the various powers has enabled historians to base their conclusions on hard evidence. Many crucial documents remained concealed from such scrutiny for several decades after the end of the Great War. Even after a hundred years, with little more governmental documentation likely to come to light, historians still find it difficult to reach a consensus on the basis of the vast quantity of archival material now available to them. Explaining what actually happened is, then, unlikely to be the main historical value of the contemporary provincial press. But in their record and interpretation of the events of that fateful summer a century ago, and of reactions to the fast changing picture as it emerged, newspapers are themselves part of the wider history of the time and worthy of note. What follows is an analysis of the coverage of the 1914 crisis by two local newspapers with sharply differing political stances, the Dumfries and Galloway Standard and Advertiser and the Dumfries and Galloway Courier and Herald.