Current Lord Chamberlain Andrew Parker (fmr MI5 head) (Source: The Times)
The Lord Chamberlain (LC) is the most senior member of Queen Elizabeth II’s Royal Household retinue. The office has been around in Britain for over 600 years, the incumbent is usually a peer and traditionally has always been male. Today, the LC handles the organisation for the Queen’s attendances at garden parties, state visits, looks after HM’s thoroughbred horses and he supervises the annual upping of the Royal swans. For much of its history though the LC had another, controversial role, censor of the British Theatre with virtual dictatorial powers — he “was answerable to no-one, not even parliament, and was not obliged to justify his decision to playwrights or theatre managers” [NICHOLSON, Steve. Theatre Censorship in Britain (1909-1968) In: Les censures dans le monde: xixe-xxie siècle[online]. Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2016 (generated 17 novembre 2021). Available on the Internet: . ISBN: 9782753555495. DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/books.pur.45008.] A much aggrieved George Bernard Shaw characterised the LC as the “Malvolio of St James’ Palace” [‘The Censorship of the Stage in England’, G. Bernard Shaw, North American Review, August 1899, Vol 69, No 513, pp.251-262, www.jstor.org/stable/25104865].
Walpole, the first PM (Source: History Today)
⋄ The politics of early Georgian drama
Theatre censorship had existed in England since the 16th century but institutionalising its practice as a function of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office (LCO) was a political manoeuvre by the ”First Minster“ Robert Walpole in the 1730s to blunt the weapon of satire which was being effectively used theatrically against his government. The 1737 Licensing Act handed the LC the “power of god” over the English theatre, remarkably this legislative arrangement stayed in force until as recently as 1968. Hitherto to the crackdown critics🄰 of the ruling Whig Party were relatively free to make satirical attacks through the theatre of the day to expose the political corruption of Walpole’s government. The LC’s new carte blanche powers were designed to silence a theatre increasingly hostile to Walpole and the Whigs🄱 [‘The Licensing Act of 1737’, Eliza Hay, www.ericsimpson.sites.grinnell.edu].
1737 Licensing Act
⋄ Examiner of Plays
The LC was provided with two officers to put the spadework, a Examiner of Plays🄲 and a Deputy Examiner of Plays (the offices remunerated by yearly stipends of £400 and £200 respectively). The examiners’ task, assisted by secretaries and other auxiliary staff, was to read the plays that came before them (the LC himself did precious little of the actual reading of the plays) and write “Reader’s Reports” for the LC. They were also required to visit theatres to check on their safety and comfort and to ensure that the LC’s licensing rules were being observed. Theatres without a licence were liable for prosecution and financial penalties [‘Licensing Act 1737’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org]. Although the ultimate decision on a license rested with the LC, the recommendations to make or break a new play came from the examiners, little wonder then that Bernard Shaw called the examiner “the most powerful man in England or America”.
Above and beyond the spoken word and the text
Censorship was not confined to bowdlerising the texts and banning plays outright🄳, the scope of the Royal censors extended to the actors’ gestures, the costumes, the sound and lighting effects, the set and the stage directions (Nicholson).
Osborne’s 1965 play ‘A Patriot for Me’, the controversy of the dramatist’s refusal to make cuts helped end the LC’s censorship
The view from within the Lord Chamberlain’s Office bubble
The LCO saw themselves as licensors rather than censors. They never really grasped why any reasonable dramatist or manager could object to their control, concluding that playwrights who did so were just trying “to exploit an unsavoury incident or fact”. In the LCO’s Pollyanna-like world view authors of “ordinary decent plays” on the other hand had nothing to fear. The LCO took a disparaging and contemptuous view of the modern playwrights who would rail against their invervention (such as John Osborne and Edward Bond🄴). The LCO tended to justify its censoring role in patronising terms, seeing itself as a moral watchdog, protecting the average playgoer from unsavoury plays, custodians of good taste on the English stage (Nicholson).
Theatre Royal Drury Lane (Source: architectsjournal.co.uk)
Zero guidance for the artist
The Act’s vagueness placed playwrights in an additional dilemma, the office of the LC never really spelt out explicitly what constituted a play’s suitability or unsuitability for a licence, leaving dramatists and the actor-managers of theatres guessing as to the basis of the objection. Plays rejected for a licence or having their manuscripts blue-pencilled for wholesale cuts were usually generically herded under a non-specific catch-all of being either ”immoral or improper for the stage”.
St James’ Palace, home of the Lord Chamberlain (Source: Pinterest)
An effort at codifying
The 1843 Theatres Act made a partial effort at codifying and limiting the LC’s powers, stipulating that a play could only be prohibited if “it is fitting for the preservation of good manners, decorum or of the public peace”. A joint select committee in 1909 advising the LC provided further clarification of the powers, the following were said to be “no-nos” in plays: indecent subject matter; (if a play contains) “offensive personalities”; (if it infers) “violence to sentiments of religious reverence”; “represents invidious manner of living persons”; “calculated to conduce crime and vice”; “impairs friendly relations with foreign powers”🄵 [‘The Lord Chamberlain’s Plays with British Library Curator Dr Alexander Lock’, People of Theatre, (Vlog, 2021), www.peopleoftheatre.com].
‘Mrs Warren’s Profession’ (Photo: V & A Museum)
Plays that dealt seriously with contemporary issues especially sexuality were severely blue-pencilled, eg, prostitution in Shaw’s Mrs Warren’s Profession. The continuing influence of religion saw the LC come down heavily on blasphemy, the portrayal of biblical figures were taboo (eg, Oscar Wilde’s Salome. Obscene language in plays was a serious infraction of the code. Into the 20th century the censorship of the LC maintained its prescriptive role, plays that earned the ire of the examiners included such classics of the modern theatre as Waiting for Godot (bodily functions or parts, even mere sexual suggestiveness) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (homosexuality) which had already had a successful run on Broadway in the US. Increasingly as a result the LC was seen to be out of touch with modern concerns and realities.
Source: WNYC
Self-censorship and censorship by proxy
The LC held such control over theatrical performances in Britain that it even prompted an element of censorship by proxy. Rudolf Weiss has noted that fear of the LC‘s wrath led some playwrights to self-censor their work to secure a license and thus a hearing in Britain. Some of the autocratic actor-managers—fearful of financial losses arising from an aborted production—have done the LC’s work for them [‘“Unsuitable for theatrical presentation”: Mechanisms of censorship in later Victorian and Edwardian London Theatre’, Rudolf Weiss, www.ler.letras.up.pt].
Lord Chamberlain in 1960s, Baron Cobbold, resisted calls to abolish censorship (Artist: George JD Bruce)
End of the Lord Chamberlain’s censorship authority
Opposition to censorship was in the air in the 1960s with the emergence of a permissive society…a new generation of young playwrights like Osborne, Pinter and Bond were exploring increasingly polemical subjects in modern society. The Arts Council of Great Britain described the LC’s veto power as having “a contraceptive effect on the development of British drama” (Nicholson). The coup de grâce for theatre censorship came from the reformist Wilson Labour government🄶. The 1968 Theatres Act was part of a broad sweep of modernising legislation during the Sixties, along with the end of capital punishment, the decriminalisation of homosexuality, the introduction of the pill and the legalisation of abortion [‘50 years after Theatres Act, censorship has evolved’, Sandra Osei-Frimpong, Index on Censorship, 14-Aug-2018, www.indexoncensorship.org]. The repeal of stage censorship opened the floodgates for creativity and bold innovation – just one day after the ban ended, the controversial US counterculture musical Hair (New Age nudity, drug-taking) opened on London’s West End.
G Bernard Shaw (Source: thefamouspeople.com)
⋄ Footnote: Loophole in the system
The LCO’s net was wide but there were ways to get round the expurgator’s ban…when one Shaw play was banned in Britain for perceived profanity, the Irish playwright simply resorted to staging it in Liverpool and then Dublin. Later on some playwrights avoided the public theatre circuit altogether and put on their work exclusively at (private member) club theatres around the country. Even British drama institutions, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court Theatre, frustrated by the LCO’s persistent interference, “threatened to turn themselves into private clubs for specific productions to evade the LC’s rulings” (Nicholson), which contributed to the groundswell of groups and individuals campaigning to end theatrical censorship.
Arts Theatre Club production, 1955 (Photo: V & A Museum)
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🄰 with dramatist Henry Fielding in the forefront along with the Jacobite opponents of the Whigs
🄱 in theory the LC’s authority was limited to Westminster but effectively its jurisdiction applied to all Theatre Royal playhouses [‘Theatrical Oligarchies: The Role of the Examiner of Plays’, Oxford Scholarship Online, www.oxford.universitypressscholarship.com]
🄲 sometimes called ‘Comptroller’, in the 20th century they have mainly been military men-turned courtiers
🄳 each year relative few plays actually got banned, expurgation was the common recourse
🄴 whose play Saved was one of the last to be banned
🄵 these grounds would prove very controversial in the 1930 when the LC Lord Cromer banned a number of English plays which were hostile towards Nazi Germany (a manifestation of London’s appeasement approach to relations with Berlin). Cromer even send some scripts to the German Embassy for their ‘approval’! [‘Theatre of War: how the monarchy suppressed anti-Nazi drama in the 1930s’, Steve Nicholson, The Guardian, 22-Jul-2015, www.theguardian.com]
🄶 the previous Labour (Attlee) government had unsuccessfully tried to pass an anti-censorship bill in 1949
After the early prominence of “Lord Haw-Haw” in World War II (see previous blog ‘WWII’s Psychological Warriors of the Airwaves I: Lord Haw-Haw’s Career in Radio Propaganda’), the Nazis obviously thought the idea of employing native English speakers to undermine the British enemy through radio propagandising was one worth replicating against the Americans when they too entered the global conflict. For this special communications role the Germans choose a woman, moreover an expatriate American woman living in the Third Reich.
Fräulein Gillars (Source: Alamy Stock Photo)
Mildred Gillars Maine-born Mildred Gillars had demonstrated her loyalty to the Fatherland by staying in Germany after war broke out (not wanting to part from her German fiancé). Recruited by program director Max Otto Koischewitz for the German State Radio (Reichsrundfunkgesellschaft), Gillars, dubbed “Axis Sally” by US GIsa̳, had a DJ segment on Radio Berlin which was beamed over the American airwaves. Her messages to America followed predictable themes, eg, “Damn all Jews who made this war popular. I love America, but I do not love Roosevelt and all his kike boyfriends”b̳. Gillars had visited American POWs in German camps while posing as a Red Cross worker, collected their messages for home and then after giving them a pro-Germany tweak, broadcast them on the airwaves (‘Axis Sally. World War II Propagandist/The Bride of Lord Haw-Haw!’, Rob Weisburg, Lives of the Great DJs, www.wfmu.org).
Max Koischewitz (Image: www.popularbio.com)
Berlin calling Gillars’s on air style was diametrically the opposite of Joyce’s hectoring tone, she used a pleasant, conversational approach which sought to sow the seeds of doubt, posing the question whether the wives and girlfriends of the serving soldiers, sailors and airmen would remain faithful during their absence. However, as with Lord Haw-Haw, many of the GIs only listened because they found Axis Sally’s shows humorous (‘6 World War II Propaganda Broadcasters’, Evan Andrews, History, Upd. 29-Aug-2018, www.history.com).
Gillars’ greatest notoriety lies with the radio play (Vision ofInvasion) she broadcast to American soldiers in England a month prior to D-Day, forecasting doom and devastation awaiting the Allies if they were to invade occupied France. After the war Gillars was apprehended and eventually returned to the US in 1948 to stand trial on 10 counts of treason. The ”voice of Axis Sally” was acquitted on nine of the counts but was convicted on the 10th count, the broadcast of Vision ofInvasion. Gillars was sentenced to 10 to 30 years in a West Virginian prison and ultimately served 12 years (released in 1961).
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The strabismic but sexy sounding Rita Axis Sally, Italian style In 1943 the Fascist Regime in Italy sought to capitalise on Nazi Germany’s success with the Axis Sally broadcasts by coming up with an Axis Sally of their own. Actually this Axis Sally, Rita Zucca, was born in New York of Italian parents. Rita Zucca with her sweet and seductive voice was teamed up with a German broadcaster in a radio program entitled “Jerry’s Front Calling”, spewing out defeatist propaganda from Rome to Allied troops in North Africa, Sicily and Italy. When the original ’Sally’, Midge Gillars, heard that someone else had appropriated her moniker, she was ropeable (‘Rita Zucca’, Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org).
One of Signorina Zucca’s ploys was using intelligence provided by the Nazis to try to deceive and confuse the Allied forces. In 1944 when the enemy advanced on Rome, Zucca fled north with the retreating Germans to Milan where she resumed her radio communication with American soldiers. After the war the victorious Allies caught up with Zucca in Turin, any plans the Americans to try the Italian-American broadcaster as a traitor were quickly squashed however after it became known that Rita had renounced her American citizenship in 1941 (before taking up her propaganda broadcasting role)c̳. Instead, Zucca was tried by an Italian military tribunal on charges of collaboration and sentenced to four years and five months. She only served nine months of her term but was barred from ever returning to the US (‘“Axis Sally” Mildred Gillars and Rita Luisa Zucca’, www.psywarrior.com) .
“Argentine Annie:” “Hello Tommy, I am Liberty” (Source: Infobae.com)
Postscript: Continuing Axis Sally’s legacy The two Axis Sallys (and their pro-Japanese counterpart Tokyo Rose) were not to be the last we would see of female propaganda broadcasters in wartime. The Korean War produced its version in ”Seoul City Sue”, an American born missionary in Korea (Anna Wallis Suh) who defected to the North Korean side, joining “Radio Seoul” (when the city was occupied by the North) for a on air spot of undermining American troop morale in the war. The tradition continued in the Vietnam War with “Hanoi Hannah”, a North Vietnamese female broadcaster whose propaganda was directed at “war-weary” American GIs, trying to persuade them that their involvement in the Indochina war was unjust and immoral (“‘Smooth as Silk’ Vietnamese Propagandist ‘Hanoi Hannah’ Dies at 87”, Jeff Stein, Newsweek, 03-Oct-2016, www.newsweek.com). More recently, the Argentine military dictatorship (elProceso) during the Falklands/Malvinas War in 1982 employed the same tactic of a feminine radio announcer—known as “Argentine Annie” or to the Argentinian side, “Liberty”—as the sultry-voiced Anglophone bearer of bad (and fake) news for serving British combatants in the ward̳.
‘Argentine Annie’ (YouTube video)
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a̳ Gillars in her radio show referred to herself as “Midge at the mike”
b̳ a common refrain from Nazis and other anti-Semitic fascist wannabes such as William Joyce and the BUF was that the world war was a war caused by Jews for the benefit of international Jewry which they tended to equate with capitalism
c̳ renounced to save her family’s property from being expropriated by the Mussolini regime
d̳ ’Liberty’ no doubt kept the British forces in the South Atlantic amused with her references to the Royal Marines counting sheep and bizarre diversions into the historic origins of the modern lavatory
WWII calling via the family wireless (Source: news.bbc.co.uk)
A novel feature of Axis and particularly German propaganda during World War II was the broadcasting of radio messages to the enemy, heaping scorn and invective on the Allies’ war efforts via the airwaves. The most famous/notorious of these broadcasters acquired the nickname of Lord Haw-Haw¤. There were in fact several “Lord Haw-Haws” broadcasting from Nazi Germany during the war, including Munich Anglophone journalist Wolf Mittler and a British spy for Germany, Norman Baillie-Stewart. But the person who came to personify Lord Haw-Haw for the British and American publics was William Joyce.
Mosley & his Blackshirts
A pathological anti-Semite and fascism fan boy from his teens, Joyce was drawn to Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists in the early 1930s, becoming the party’s director of propaganda and even rising eventually to deputy to leader Mosley. By 1937 Joyce’s violent rhetoric and frequent recourse to brawling with political foes led to a fallout with Mosley and Joyce’s ejection from BUF§.
‘Jairmany’ calling Joyce tipped off that the British authorities were going to intern him defected to Hitler’s Germany a week before war broke out in 1939, finding work as a broadcaster for Reichsrundfunk (German Radio Corporation). Joyce would began his Radio Hamburg diatribes to the UK and the US with the words “Germany calling”, which in his strange, affected upper-class, nasal drawl sounded like “Jairmany calling”. “Haw-Haw” would bang on about how hopeless Britain’s cause was in the face of the unstoppable German Reich juggernaut, criticising the UK over the calibre of its politicians and soldiers, it’s rationing policy, inciting the Scots to rise up against their English overlords etc, saying anything he thought that might demoralise the Allied troops and their countries’ citizenry.
A dapper looking Wm Joyce in Berlin
Radio ratings king Remarkably, considering his unrelenting message of doom and gloom and the awareness of Britons (soldiers and civilian) of the blatant propaganda of his unbridled rants, Joyce as Haw-Haw early in the war was pulling in an estimated six and nine million listeners a week (some weeks he scored over 50% of the UK radio audience).
British wartime satire depicted Lord Haw-Haw as a jackass
Why were his broadcasts so popular? One reason was their pure entertainment value, in the difficult days of world war many Brits found his fantastic claims a diversion and a fillip, not to mention wildly funny. Listening to the ‘weirdo’ expat British Nazi mouthpiece was the done thing in UK homes. Being widely ridiculed didn’t stop Joyce from acquiring a kind of cult status among Allied audiences. The high level of war censorship imposed in home countries (eg, the BBC’s freedom was strictly curtailed) was another drawcard for many Brits and Yanks, regularly tuning in from home. Their reasoning was that, notwithstanding the propaganda, they might pick up some clues on the circumstance or whereabouts of family members engaged in the combat (‘The Rise and Fall of Lord Haw Haw During the Second World War’, Imperial War Museums,www.iwm.org.uk).
Long before the war began to turn pear-shaped for the Nazis Joyce’s popularity with enemy audiences ebbed. Nonetheless he continued peddling his defeatism theme in his broadcasts—imploring Britons to surrender—right up to the bitter end of the Third Reich. Joyce escaped after Hitler’s death and was captured in hiding in Flensburgϖ, near the Danish border.
Joyce, captured (Photo: IWM)
Stitched up, a quasi-show trial?: Treason for a reason Transported back to London, Joyce was quickly put on trial for high treason, charged with having “given comfort and aid to the King’s enemies in wartime”. The problem about treason in this case was one of nationality. Joyce, born in the US and brought up in Ireland, had obtained a British passport by deception. As he was never a subject of Britain, therefore it was thought that he could not be expected to give allegiance to the king. However, the prosecution aided by a partisan judge successfully argued that as Joyce held a British passport in 1939-40 (prior to his becoming a naturalised German citizen) he did in fact(briefly) owe allegiance to the British crown. As historian AJP Taylor remarked of the episode: “technically, Joyce was hanged for making a false statement when applying for a passport, the usual penalty for which is a £2 fine” (‘When Speech Became Treason’, Mary Kenny, Index on Censorship, 1 2006, www.journals.sagepub.com).
Queue outside Old Bailey trial of Joyce (Source: thejc.com)
There was quite a lot of unease both within the British legal fraternity and in the public—notwithstanding the perceived abhorrence of his vile words and opinions—about the death penalty for Joyce, a sense that any conviction should have been for unlawful actions he may have committed, not for what he said. That Joyce’s sentence was commensurate with major war criminals who committed massacres in concentration camps, some Britons asserted, was a travesty (‘William Joyce’s Lord Haw-Haw Crime Files’, Crime + Investigation, www.crimeandinvestigation.co.uk; ‘When Speech Became Treason’).
Settling scores with the English voice of Nazi Germany Was there an element of payback in Joyce’s draconian fate? A lot of Britons in their homes might not have taken Haw-Haw seriously but the authorities did, he caused the government a lot of grief…he mocked Britain and it’s leadership, he taunted it with his announcements of where Germany bombs would hit Britain next and (bogus but hurtful) reports of Allied loses. And as Mary Kenny notes, London “came within an ace of jamming the broadcasts and banning them” (‘When Speech Became Treason’). Quite simply, Joyce had been the wartime voice of Nazi Germany and the establishment was prepared to do whatever was necessary including resuscitating an archaic law, the 1351 Treason Act, to secure his execution.
Postscript: Lady Haw-Haw Joyce’s wife Margaret who accompanied him to Germany played her own supporting role in the wartime baiting of the Allies (she had her own propaganda radio air time spot). Ultimately though “Lady Haw-Haw” managed to avoid William’s fate at the gallows. No charges against Margaret Joyce were ever proceeded with. Nigel Farndale suggests that rather than an act of leniency, Margaret’s avoidance of punishment may have been due to a deal her husband did with the authorities not to reveal his MI5 links.
Ξ See elsewhere on this site for follow-up blogs on WWII female counterparts of Lord Haw-Haw – Tokyo Rose and Axis Sally.
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¤ Britons tended to imagine “Lord Haw-Haw” as some kind of toffee-nosed aristocratic type
§ Joyce was linked to a host of other extreme right organisations in Britain like the Nordic League and White Knights of Britain and ultimately started his own local Nazi-wannabe party, National Socialist League
ϖ Flensburg was the last capital of the Nazi empire
During the time of European settlement of North America there has been at least three attempts to invade Canada by Americans (or by British settlers in what was to become the United States of America). All three ended ignominiously. The first in 1690, part of the Anglo-French conflict known as King William’s War, was a naval expedition by the Massachusetts Bay Colony led by Sir William Phips with the objective of seizing Québec City, the capital of New France. The English bombardment of Québec was an abject failure and Phips’ expedition was forced to return to Boston in smallpox-infested ships on which hundreds perished on the journey [‘King William’s War 1688-1697’, Colonial Society of Massachusetts, www.colonialsociety.org]<ᵃ>.
1690 assault on Québec City from Massachusetts Bay colonists
The second invasion attempt was in 1775, during the early days of the American Revolutionary War. The idea to invade came from American army colonel (and later defector to the British side) Benedict Arnold, the rationale being to try to induce French Canadians to join the war for independence against their British rulers. The assault on Québec led by Arnold was easily repulsed by a reinforced British garrison and the American patriots reduced to 100 men were forced to retreat with their tails between their legs back to the American side [‘Battle of Québec: When Benedict Arnold Tried to Invade Canada’, Patrick J. Kiger, History, Upd. 29-Sep-2021, www.history.com].
1775 invasion of Québec, brainchild of Benedict Arnold.
The third occurrence was during the War of 1812, when the Americans invaded Canada, urged on by the “war hawks” in Congress who predicted it would an easy victory (in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “a mere matter of marching”)<ᵇ>.Despite making several invasion attempts, via both Upper and Lower Canada, the Americans again emerged empty-handed from their efforts (due to a combination of factors including inept US military leadership and woeful preparedness, and fierce resistance from the allied forces of British ‘Redcoats’ and First Nation warriors). In early 1813 the Vermont newspaper Green-Mountain Farmer lamented that the Canadian campaign had produced nothing but “disaster, defeat, disgrace, and ruin and death” [‘How U.S. Forces Failed to Conquer Canada 200 Years Ago’, Jesse Greenspan, History, Upd. 29-Aug-2018, www.history.com].
Guernsey Is stamp, commemoratingMaj-Gen Brock, War of 1812 (Source: rpsc.org)
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In addition there have been other unsanctioned invasions from the US, such as the Patriot War of 1837-38, a series of disjointed raids from the US borderlands in support of the Canadian rebels (Rebellions of 1837). The Americans who participated, many from the Hunters’ Lodges, were motivated both by antagonisms against what they saw as British tyranny and by a sense of adventurism (Washington under Van Buren maintained a policy of neutrality during this episode to safeguard its trade interests with Britain).
Map source: New York Almanack
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After the American Civil War Irish-American Republicans from the Fenian Brotherhood crossed the border, raiding British military strongholds in both the west and east of Canada as part of a stratagem to force the British into negotiation for Irish independence…the most notable of these engagements was the Battle of Ridgeway (1866) in which the Fenians were victorious over inexperienced Canadian volunteers. For the Fenian militia it was a pyrrhic victory, serving only to a spur for the realisation of Canadian confederation rather than to advance the cause of Irish independence<ᶜ> . [‘An Irishman’s Diary on the Battle of Ridgeway, the Fenian Invasion of Canada in 1866’, Brendan Ô Cathaoir, The Irish Times, 01-Jun-2016, www.irishtimes.com].
And when Americans weren’t engaged in the process of actually invading Canada, they were often scheming and planning to annex their northern neighbour. One of the more bizarre instances of this was “War Plan Red”, this 1930 US plan to invade Canada was, unlike earlier ones, supposedly a scheme to get in first! The US military’s predessors to the Pentagon feared that Britain in the years following WWI might launch an invasion of the US from Canada. Canadians in fact had already preempted the US with the military coming up with its own “Defender Scheme No. 1”, a five-pronged attack plan to invade the US (the idea was that Canada would make the initial (surprise) strike on key American cities and then rely on Britain and it’s other dominions to follow up the invasion). Fortunately, nothing came of either of these plans and they were quietly shelved by the time North Americans managed to crystallise in their minds who the real enemy was (Nazi Germany) [‘The Time the U.S. Almost Went to War With Canada’, Kevin Lippert, Politico Magazine, 21-Jun-2018, www.politico.com].
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Parliament ablaze in Montreal
Another odd manifestation of the tendency toward annexation came from north of the 49th Parallel in the 1840s. In 1846 Britain repealed the Corn Laws<ᵈ> ending preferential colonial trade which provoked a merchant revolt in Canada. Conservative Anglophone businessmen were fearful that without protection for their produce the Canadian economy might plummet into recession, some of them rioted, burning down the new parliament building in Montreal. 325 of the Tory businessmen, convinced that republican system of the United States would be more profitable to them, signed a document known as the Montreal Annexation Manifesto (1849), calling for the US to annex Canada. This of course never came to reality but the movement’s primary objective, reciprocal free trade with the US and access to its market, was ultimately realised with the Elgin-Marcy (Reciprocity) Treaty in 1854…by which Canadian lumber and wheat entered the US duty-free, in exchange the Americans were given fishing rights off Canada’s Atlantic coast.
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<ᵃ> an unexpected consequence of Phips’ disastrous Québec adventure was Massachusetts’ introduction of the first government-backed paper currency in the American colonies, necessary to pay the near-mutinous troops, promised a share of the loot from Québec’s capture [Goldberg, Dror. “The Massachusetts Paper Money of 1690.” The Journal of Economic History 69, no. 4 (2009): 1092–1106. http://www.jstororg/stable/25654034.]
<ᵇ> once again the American invaders made the error of thinking they would be received as liberators in Canada
<ᶜ> curiously, in this same year (1866) a bill—designed to appeal to American Fenians—was introduced into the US Congress to formally annex “British North America”, but it never passed the House of Reps
<ᵈ> the ‘corn’ laws in the UK encompassed all cereal grain crops
Current Lord Chamberlain Andrew Parker (fmr MI5 head) (Source: The Times) 
1737 Licensing Act 
Osborne’s 1965 play ‘A Patriot for Me’, the controversy of the dramatist’s refusal to make cuts helped end the LC’s censorship 
Theatre Royal Drury Lane (Source: architectsjournal.co.uk) 
St James’ Palace, home of the Lord Chamberlain (Source: Pinterest) 
‘Mrs Warren’s Profession’ (Photo: V & A Museum) 
Source: WNYC 
Lord Chamberlain in 1960s, Baron Cobbold, resisted calls to abolish censorship (Artist: George JD Bruce) Arts Theatre Club production, 1955 (Photo: V & A Museum)
