Sir William Beach Thomas, (22 May 186812 May 1957) was a British author and journalist known for his work as a war correspondent and his writings about nature and country life.
Thomas was the son of a clergyman in Cambridgeshire. He was educated at Shrewsbury School and Christ Church, Oxford, before he embarked on a short-lived career as a schoolmaster. Finding that work unpleasant, he turned his attention to writing articles for newspapers and periodicals and began to write books.
During the early part of the First World War, Thomas defied military authorities to report news stories from the Western Front for his employer, the Daily Mail. As a result, he was briefly arrested before being granted official accreditation as a war correspondent. His reportage for the remainder of the war received national recognition, despite being criticised by some and parodied by soldiers. His book With the British on the Somme (1917) portrayed the English soldier in a very favourable light. Both France and Britain rewarded him with knighthoods after the war, but Thomas regretted some of his wartime output.
Thomas's primary interest as an adult was in rural matters. He was conservative in his views and after the Second World War feared that the Labour government regarded the countryside only from an economic perspective. He was an advocate for the creation of national parks in England and Wales and mourned the decline of traditional village society. He wrote extensively, particularly for The Observer newspaper and The Spectator, a conservative magazine. His book The English Landscape (1938) included selections from his contributions to Country Life magazine.
Childhood and education William Beach Thomas was born on 22 May 1868 in Godmanchester, in the county of Huntingdonshire, England. He was the second son of Daniel George Thomas and his wife, Rosa Beart. In 1872, his father was appointed rector of Hamerton and the countryside location of that parish inspired an affection in Beach Thomas which greatly influenced his later observational writings about natural history and rural subjects. Beach Thomas was not a hyphenated double-barrelled name; he used his middle name, Beach, as part of his name as a writer, and in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography his name is "Thomas, William Beach".
Thomas attended Shrewsbury School from 1882. He was a keen sportsman there and was appointed huntsman to the Royal Shrewsbury School Hunt, the world's oldest cross-country running club. He continued his interest in sports after earning an exhibition to Christ Church, Oxford, in 1887 and became a blue, representing the university in various running events over several years. He became president of the Oxford University Athletics Club and played association football, rugby union, and cricket at college level. J. B. Atkins, who competed against him for the University of Cambridge athletics team, said: "With his stately height and gigantic stride, he was magnificent in action; his final effort, always, triumphant, when he saw the goal of all, the tape, waiting for him, was a sight never to be forgotten – though I had a strong reason for regretting it at the time." His exhibition was superseded by a scholarship but he was not academically successful, managing only a third-class degree.
Early career Athletic prowess and the time spent in achieving it may have contributed to Thomas's poor academic performance, but probably also assisted him in getting his first job. He taught at Bradfield College, a public school, after leaving Oxford in 1891. Although he described teaching as "uncongenial", he subsequently took a similar position at Dulwich College in 1897, where he remained until the following year. Journalism became the object of his interest; he contributed columns for The Globe, The Outlook and The Saturday Review, as well as for many other publications of which he was not a member of staff. He also wrote a book entitled Athletics, published by Ward Lock & Co in 1901, following his contribution of a chapter titled "Athletics and Schools" to the Athletics volume in the Badminton Library series, published by Longman, Green & Co in 1900 and edited by Montague Shearman. He became a regular reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement from its formation in 1902.
The Daily Mail took on Thomas as a writer of material relating to the countryside. Lord Northcliffe, who owned the newspaper, recognised that Thomas needed to live in a rural environment if he was to perform his duties well. This understanding delighted Thomas, because it meant he could limit his visits to London. He moved to the Mimram Valley in Hertfordshire, and thereafter held Northcliffe in high regard. Thomas reported on the 78th meeting of the British Association in Dublin in 1908.
Thomas's From a Hertfordshire Cottage was published in 1908, followed by a three-volume collaboration with A. K. Collett, The English Year (1913–14). He did not entirely abandon his interest in athletics and was one of those in Britain who criticised his country's poor performance in the 1912 Olympic Games. Writing that the Olympics were by then being seen as a measure of "national vitality", he explained
War correspondent
The Daily Mail sent Thomas to France as a war correspondent during the First World War. Many newspapers were keen to support the war effort and to take advantage of the demand for news from the front. The British military authorities were opposed to the presence of journalists, preferring instead to control the media by issuing official press releases. Lord Kitchener in particular was opposed to their presence, having had bad experiences of journalists during the South African War. He formed a press bureau headed by , and demanded that all reports be channelled through the bureau, for review by censors; the resulting output was bland and impersonal. The newspapers countered with subterfuge. Thomas was one of several journalists who managed to reach the front lines in Belgium. He was discovered there and imprisoned for some time by the British Army. He described the episode as "the longest walking tour of my life, and the queerest". Even these early unapproved reports, which consisted mostly of human interest stories because there was little opportunity for contact with the British Expeditionary Force, were censored at home owing to a paradox that Thomas described: "the censors would not publish any article if it indicated that the writer had seen what he wrote of. He must write what he thought was true, not what he knew to be true."
When the British government relented in mid-1915, having been warned by Theodore Roosevelt that the reporting limitations were affecting public opinion in the United States, Valentine Williams became the Daily Mails first accredited war correspondent. No longer in prison, Thomas resumed his war reporting in December of the same year, when Williams enlisted in the Irish Guards. As with the other accredited journalists, Thomas was paid by the War Office rather than by his newspaper, and all the correspondents were assured that they would be able to publish memoirs of their service to offset the differential between an officer's pay and that of a journalist. Thomas filed reports from places such as the Somme in a format matching that of his colleagues, who regularly played down the unpleasant aspects of the conflict, such as the nature of death. His reports were published in the Daily Mirror as well as the Daily Mail.
The soldiers derided the attempts that were made to indoctrinate them, but the British public was more susceptible. Philip Gibbs, a fellow war correspondent, noted that he and his colleagues "identified absolutely with the Armies in the field ... There was no need of censorship in our despatches. We were our own censors." The journalistic support for the cause was appreciated by military commanders such as Douglas Haig, who saw the propaganda generated by the correspondents as an integral part of the Allies' efforts. Haig eventually went so far as to ask Gibbs and Thomas to produce his own weekly news-sheet. Public opinion at home may have been mollified, even uplifted, by the efforts of the correspondents, but the morale of the troops was not, despite the high demand among them for newspapers from home. One soldier, Albert Rochester, was court martialled for attempting to send to the Daily Mail a letter that stated the realities as he saw them and was critical of Thomas's work, noting the "ridiculous reports regarding the love and fellowship existing between officers and men". Thomas himself later regretted his wartime reports from the Somme, saying, "I was thoroughly and deeply ashamed of what I had written for the good reason that it was untrue ... the vulgarity of enormous headlines and the enormity of one's own name did not lessen the shame."
Northcliffe's brother, Lord Rothermere, expressed frustration with the war correspondents: "They don't know the truth, they don't speak the truth, and we know that they don't." Stephen Badsey, a historian who specialises in the First World War, has noted that their situation was not easy as they "found themselves as minor players trapped in a complicated hierarchical structure dominated by politicians, generals and newspaper owners". Thomas received particular opprobrium. Paul Fussell, the historian, describes him as "notoriously fatuous" during the war period. Peter Stothard, editor of The Times between 1992 and 2002, describes him as "a quietly successful countryside columnist and literary gent who became a calamitous Daily Mail war correspondent" and believes that he may have been the inspiration for the character of William Boot in Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop. John Simpson, a war correspondent, describes Thomas as "charming but unlovable" and thinks that the soldiers despised him more than they did the other British war correspondents, even though all those journalists were playing a similar disinformation role. They considered his writing to be a trivialisation of the realities of war, jingoistic, pompous and particularly self-promoting, often giving the reader an impression that he was writing from the battlefield when in fact he was being fed information of dubious value by the military authorities while based in their headquarters.
An example of Thomas's reporting is as follows:
Thomas's style was parodied using the by-line of Teech Bomas in the Wipers Times, a trench newspaper, but he was lauded by the readers back in Britain. One example from the Wipers Times, based on a report published in the Daily Mail of 18 September 1916, reads:
In 1918, William Beach Thomas published a book based on his wartime experiences, entitled With the British on the Somme. It was a favourable depiction specifically of the English soldier, somewhat contrary to the official line that tried to emphasise that this was a British war rather than an English one. A review in The Times Literary Supplement noted that Thomas
In 1918, Northcliffe asked Thomas to travel to the US. According to Thomas, the rationale for the trip was that "he didn't know what the Americans were doing, and they did not know what we were thinking". He met with influential people such as Henry Ford, Theodore Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson during this visit.
William Beach Thomas sometimes accompanied King George V and the Prince of Wales on their visits to France, noting on one occasion a situation he considered reminiscent of Henry II and Thomas Becket: