Webb Miller’s was a name I’d not encountered until a fascinating gift was handed to me over a cup of tea and a slice of cake barely a month ago. Utterly unanticipated presents are, in my experience, generally the most enjoyable type.
Given my day job and given the breadth of Miller’s reporting, I felt embarrassed to have reached the 21st year of my time in journalism having not previously encountered a man whose career this particular account shall do scant justice to.
As I leafed through ‘I Found No Peace: The Journal of A Foreign Correspondent’ (1937), three other figures synonymous with this period came to mind in the context of travel, intellect and a sense of adventure: Ernest Hemingway, Orson Welles and Dr Henry Walton Jones Jnr. While my third referee is a work of the greatest and most entertaining cinematic fiction, Jones’s wanderlust covered much of the ground Miller did in reality.
And the deeper I delved into ‘I Found No Peace’, I couldn’t help wondering why we’ve not seen this remarkable reporter’s life developed into a major movie or television series.
But it came as welcome news to discover that the character of reporter Vince Walker (played by Martin Sheen) in the Academy Award-winning ‘Gandhi’ was based on Miller, who befriended Mahatma Gandhi during the course of his work on the subcontinent.
“From the time I learned to read I wanted to write,” states Miller in his ‘Confession and Preliminary’. “At about the age of twelve I wrote a nature poem cribbed almost word from word for a weekly newspaper called Pennsylvania Grit, the only periodical of any kind to which my father subscribed. When I showed the poem to my parents they looked at me with such bewilderment that I thought they knew I had cribbed it and I never wrote another. The next writing I attempted described the bird life on our farm. I then sent it to the Youth’s Champion, which promptly rejected it.”
Webb continued: “I then decided that if I became a newspaper reporter I should learn to write; though even at that age I sensed that I was temperamentally unfitted for that career. Nevertheless, I made it my ambition.”
Making no secret of his self-identified struggle to become a reporter in Chicago, Miller made what he described as two astounding discoveries: “first, that if I liked people and showed it they would usually like me, and, secondly, that most human beings suffered more or less from the same disabilities that I did…My colourless personality for years constituted a great impediment in newspaper work, so I deliberately set about reforming it. I cultivated a bold ‘front,’ which was usually far from reflecting my inward feelings. I wanted to write more than anything else. Nevertheless, after twenty-four years in the newspaper business, I still write laboriously. I have to pull out every sentence by the roots. It took me a long time to learn that simple, straight forward writing which a child can understand is the best, and I have not yet mastered it.”
Miller’s life as a foreign correspondent was catalysed by President Woodrow Wilson’s declaring the United States at war with Germany on April 3, 1917, taking a midnight sailing to London aboard the ‘New York’, “armed with six-inch guns forward and aft, manned by naval gun crews”.
By the summer of 1918, Miller was based in Paris as an assistant with the United Press before returning to London in March 1919 where he took charge of the UP office as the Versailles Peace Conference convened. Miller’s work took him to Dublin in April 1920, shortly after the “Sinn Fein terrorist movement broke out anew in Ireland”.
Recapping the events of that tumultuous year, Miller wrote: “Two officials of Dublin Castle – Alan Bell and Commissioner Redmond – were assassinated. Sinn Feiners sporadically attacked outlying police stations, thus forcing the British government to evacuate more than three hundred of them and leaving the countryside without police protection. Sir John Taylor, Under Secretary for Ireland, was virtually imprisoned in Dublin Castle; on his visits to the Viceregal Lodge (now Áras an Uachtaráin, the residence of the President of Ireland) he travelled in a military armoured car. Occasionally Sinn Feiners fired shots into Dublin Castle, the headquarters of the British government. Another bloody phase of the seven hundred years of strife between Ireland and Britain had begun.”
Within hours of his arrival at Dublin’s Gresham Hotel, Miller received a telephone call from an “unknown voice” which informed him that “Mr Desmond Fitzgerald (the First Dáil’s Director of Propaganda from 1919 to 1921, pictured) will come to see you Sunday at your hotel if you care to talk with him”.
However, this initial meeting didn’t materialise as “the police nearly got him early Sunday morning. He got out about two jumps ahead of them.”
Twenty-four hours later, Fitzgerald, father of future Taoiseach (Prime Minister) Garret FitzGerald was sat in Miller’s hotel room, “a slender man of about thirty-five, with sandy hair and complexion and a slow drawl”.
Miller somewhat naturally asked Fitzgerald “how he dared come to see me at (Dublin’s) principal hotel”. Fitzgerald replied: “The hearts of the ordinary police aren’t in their work. Unless they have explicit orders for the arrest of a man they seldom interfere. The men we have to fear are the military raiding parties or plain-clothes detectives with specific orders for our arrest.”
The interview ends after a Sinn Fein look-out man in the corridor informed Miller than “there are two ‘deks’ in front of the hotel”. A laughing Fitzgerald told the reporter: “Apparently I must be going. If I don’t see you again to-morrow afternoon, you’ll know that my new address is Wormwood Scrubs Prison. I understand they are saving a cell with southern exposure for me.”
Fitzgerald met Miller again the following afternoon, with a car journey taking them to the outskirts of Dublin to meet with Arthur Griffith, the “Acting President of Sinn Fein”.
Griffith told him: “If the English refuse to grant us independence they will have to extirpate the Irish nation; they will have to accommodate this extirpation in the face of the world. We have made this question of the independence of Ireland an international question and we intend to keep it so. The Irish have lost all care for their lives and property and are steeled to sacrifice. Ireland has done for ever with subservient bargaining and will keep up the struggle until he is free and equal.”
Miller then devoted two days attempting to arrange an interview with Lord French, the Viceroy of Ireland, having been assured that his interview would be the Viceroy’s first on ‘the Irish question’ in print. But as Miller writes: “The next morning to my astonishment the London Daily Express published a long interview with Lord French. That afternoon he issued an official statement flatly denying the interview.”
The “short, portly, and rubicund” Lord French assured Miller that “I never give interviews and this is not an interview…I’ll talk with you and whatever you write about is your own affair, but I never give interviews”.
During a half-hour exchange, Lord French declared: “We cannot grant Ireland self-determination. They’re too close to us. Self-determination has its limits. It must be applied within reason, otherwise the nations of the world would break up and revert to the ancient feudal system. Ireland can’t have Dominion Home Rule. They are a part of the United Kingdom. We cannot give them a government like Canada because they are too close to us. It’s largely a geographical question.”
When asked why he rode on horseback around “the Viceregal grounds”, Lord French replied: “I wouldn’t dare walk. But the Irish are soft-hearted; I’m safe on horseback because they wouldn’t want to chance hitting my horse. They love horses.”
Given that Miller had been told that his interview with the Viceroy was not actually an interview, he prefaced his piece as follows: “This is not an interview. Lord French insists that he never gives interviews. But to the best of my knowledge and belief this is what he said during a half-hour’s talk to-day at the Viceregal Lodge. And Lord French is hereby relieved of responsibility for whatever appears in the report of our talk.” Miller added: “He (French) never denied the interview”.
In a chapter titled ‘The Education of a Newspaper Man’, Miller writes as many more foreign correspondents have in the 84 years since he scripted his prescient tome. “The establishment of censorships during and after the (First) World War has made the attainment of truth even more difficult than under normal conditions. Following the rise of dictatorial governments, under which censorship became a fundamental rule, about four-fifths of the world’s area has fallen under some form of censorship. Hundreds of millions of persons in the greater part of the world know only what the ruling cliques want them to know. By terrorism and control of communications these rulers attempt to prevent the outside world from knowing anything about their countries except what they desire. Adolf Hitler threw an army into the Rhineland before his own people or the world had an inkling about it. Mussolini moved an army to the Austrian frontier in secrecy. Never has the truth in foreign affairs been so difficult to obtain. Yet, considering all the circumstances, comparatively little of vital, world-wide importance escapes newspapers for long.”
Again, reflecting on his own demeanour, in that same chapter Miller writes: “I have built up by premeditated effort a personality very different from the one which heredity and early environment shaped for me. I can give a passable imitation of a man of the world, know which forks to use at a state dinner, know the best champagne vintages, can eat caviar, and can wear a top hat without feeling too uncomfortable. I have educated myself by books so that I feel confidence and little constraint in any company. I retain my liking for occasional solitude and whenever possible go away for a couple of day’s walking alone. During these trips I speak to almost nobody. This solitude served as a usual mental astringent.” I suspect Miller’s portrait of the reluctant stage performer who also seeks alone time remains a hardly alien sentiment among the column-inching trade to this day.
From his late 1930s juncture, Miller believed that dark times lay ahead for Europe. “And I am convinced that the Old World is being rushed towards destruction and annihilation by the very same forces that could make for its unparalleled material happiness and well-being. Instead of being used to provide food, shelter, and clothing – the components of material happiness – and leisure – which could make for mental happiness – the power of the machine is being more and more concentrated upon manufacture of means of destruction and slaughter.”
He added: “I have seen the major nations of the Old World plunging headlong towards another great war. The only thing in the European situation that I feel absolutely certain about in my own mind is that another great war cannot be avoided…Which nations will be in the war, when it will start, where and I why, I cannot guess; neither can the rulers nor peoples. But they, also, know it is coming and are frantically preparing for it.”
The case for Miller’s career as a human drama worthy of movie treatment is also strengthened by the manner of how his life prematurely ended. As The New York Times reported on Thursday, May 9, 1940: “Webb Miller, general European manager of The United Press, was killed late last night when he fell from a moving train en route to his home at Walton-on-Thames after he had covered the House of Commons war debate. The body was found ten yards beyond Clapham Junction station, at which the train had stopped, and police inquiries suggest his death was the result of an accident. Mr Miller’s compartment in the train was a non-corridor type, and nobody saw the accident.”
Poignantly, the report notes that two letters were found in the clothing of the 48-year-old following his death: “one from his son and the other from Hollywood, Calif, containing praise from a reader of the reporter’s autobiography, ‘I Found No Peace’. Webb Miller was survived by his wife Marie and son Kenneth, then aged 18. I for one am glad to have made his acquaintance over the past month.
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