George Ward Price (17 February 1886 – 22 August 1961) was a journalist who worked as a foreign correspondent for the Daily Mail newspaper.
Early life and career Price was born to the Reverend Henry Ward Price in 1886 and attended St Catharine's College, Cambridge.
Journalism After having some articles published by The Captain magazine, Price wrote to the Daily Mail asking to have a proposed walk across Europe financed. The proposed articles were turned down but Price was taken on as a reporter, "paid by results". After a year this arrangement resulted in him being given a five-year contract.
Colonel Sherbrooke-Walker recalled Price in this period when he came to report on a Scout camp at Wisley:
Foreign correspondent In 1910 he reported from Turkey and the First Balkan War. Following this, Price became the Daily Mail Paris correspondent at the age of 26. His reporting of the Balkan wars made his reputation as a journalist. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand saw Price dispatched to Vienna to report on the funeral.
First World War The outbreak of the First World War saw Price return to Turkey to cover the Gallipoli campaign on behalf of the Newspaper Proprietors Association members.
Following the evacuation, he wrote:
After covering the evacuation which ended the campaign he moved to the Salonika front. The Armée d'Orient based in Thessaloniki was one of the more colourful forces in World War One, being made up of French, British, Indian, Vietnamese, Serb, Italian, Senegalese, Russian and Greek soldiers. Feeling things had quietened there he redeployed to the Italian Front and witnessed the retreat from Caporetto. In 1918, Ward Price published his first book, The Story of the Salonica Army, recounting his adventures with the Armée d'Orient.
He turned down a CBE for his wartime reporting, preferring to wait until combatants had been honoured.
Extra-Special Correspondent
In November 1918, in the coffee room in the Pera Palace hotel in Constantinople (modern Istanbul), Ward Price first met General Mustafa Kemal of the Ottoman Army. Kemal's role as a commander of a division at the Battle of Gallipoli in 1915 had made him into a popular Ottoman war hero, and Ward Price was the first British journalist to interview the future president of Turkey. Kemal, who already had political ambitions, wanted to appeal directly to the people of Britain via Ward Price to seek a "soft peace" with the recently defeated Ottoman Empire. In his 1957 memoirs Extra Special Correspondent, Ward Price claimed that Kemal offered his services to the British against the French in exchange for a magnanimous peace. The British historian Andrew Mango wrote that if this offer was indeed made, it was as an attempt to divide the Allies as it known that the British, French, Greeks and Italians all had rival ambitions to seize as much of Asia Minor for themselves as possible. Through the British government ignored the interview, the connection with Kemal was to prove beneficial to Ward Price's career. Refusing to accept the Allied plans to partition Asia Minor, Kemal went in May 1919 to the interior of Anatolia to organise the Ottoman army, which had been defeated, but not destroyed, to wage a war of resistance. As the only British journalist who knew Kemal, Ward Price enjoyed access to the leader of the Turkish National Movement.
In 1919, Price attended the meetings in Paris that paved the way for the Treaty of Versailles. Here he interviewed French general and statesman Marshal Foch for what became a four-column piece. In 1920–1922, Britain supported Greece during the Greco-Turkish War. Sir Nevile Henderson, the British Deputy Commissioner for the British occupied zone in Turkey, complained about Ward Price's pro-Turkish articles, charging he "dropped like a vulture from the sky" on any news story. Kemal chose as his capital Ankara, which rapidly became overcrowded with his supporters. The first Western journalist to go to Ankara was the French journalist Berthe Georges-Gaulis who went there in 1920 to interview Kemal, for which she was formally thanked by the Turkish government. Ward Price was the first British journalist to go to Ankara, where he complained that "mutton was the invariable dish and it had the unmistakable flavour of goat...For three weeks, I lived almost entirely on eggs and yoghurt, the highest point of my egg consumption reaching the figure of a dozen per day".
In September 1922, following the victory of Turkey over Greece, the mostly Greek city of Smyrna (modern İzmir) was taken by the Turks, and starting on 13 September 1922 the city was destroyed in an orgy of looting, arson, rape and murder as part of the "homogenisation" of Asia Minor. Ward Price from the safety of a British warship anchored in the Aegean Sea witnessed the sack of Smyrna, writing in the Daily Mail: "What I see as I stand on the deck of the Iron Guard is an unbroken wall of fire, two miles long, in which twenty distinct volcanoes of raging fire are throwing up jagged, writhing tongues to a height of hundred feet...The sea glows a deep, copper red and, worst of all, from the densely pack mob of thousands of refugees huddled on the narrow quay, between the advancing fiery death behind and the deep water in front, comes continuously such frantic screaming of sheer terror as can be head miles away".
After the Turks defeated the Greeks in September 1922, Kemal turned his victorious army in the direction of the British occupation zone, making it very clear that he wanted to the British to leave Anatolia immediately. On 12 September 1922, Ward Price interviewed Kemal in French (their only common language as Kemal spoke no English while Ward Price spoke no Turkish). Kemal's main point in the interview was that he wanted the British to leave Asia Minor, but that he was otherwise well disposed towards Britain. Kemal told Ward Price: "The frontiers we claim for Turkey exclude Syria and Mesopotamia but compose all the areas principally populated by the Turkish race. Our demands remain the same after our recent victory as they were before. We ask for Asia Minor, Thrace up to the river Maritza and Constantinople...We must have our capital and I should in that case be obliged to march on Constantinople with my army, which will be an affair of only a few days. I must prefer to obtain possession by negotiation though, naturally I cannot wait indefinitely."
The flashpoint was the Chanak Crisis where Kemal demanded the British garrison leave Chanak, pushing Britain to the brink of war with Turkey. The British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, supported by the War Secretary Winston Churchill, were determined to go to war over the issue with Churchill sending out telegrams asking for Canada, Australia and New Zealand to all send troops for the expected war. Ward Price's reporting paid tribute to the bravery of the British garrison at Chanak, but were also favourable to the Turks. Ward Price reported that Kemal did not have wider ambitions to restore the lost frontiers of the Ottoman Empire and only wanted the Allies to leave his homeland. Sir Horace Rumbold, the British Chief Commissioner for the occupied zone in Turkey wrote to London that Ward Price's pro-Turkish articles were "beneath contempt".
Ward Price's reporting affected the editorial policy of the Daily Mail which ran a banner headline on 21 September 1922 reading "Get Out Of Chanak!" In a leader (editorial), the Daily Mail wrote that Churchill's bellicose viewpoint towards the Turks was "bordering on insanity". The same leader noted that the Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King had refused the British request for troops, leading for the Daily Mail to argue that Churchill's efforts to call upon the Dominions for help was endangering the unity of the British empire. Lloyd George was the leader of a Liberal–Conservative coalition, and the opposition of the Daily Mail, which normally supported the Conservatives, caused many Tories to reconsider continuing the coalition. The Chanak crisis ended with the Conservatives pulling out of the coalition, causing Lloyd George's downfall and with Britain backing down as the British agreed to pull their troops out of Turkey.
He attended further conferences in Cannes, Genoa and Lausanne. During a stall in the peace conference in Lausanne in February 1923, Ward Price travelled with İsmet İnönü – who had headed the Turkish delegation – from Lausanne back to Ankara, the new capital of Turkey. Ward Price complained that the train that İnönü took had "broken windows, no heating and no electric light", making for an uncomfortable train ride through the mountains of Anatolia in winter. Upon İnönü's arrival in Eskişehir on 18 February 1923 to meet President Kemal, Ward Price wrote: "The Ghazi [Kemal] – a Turkish military title conferred on 'Conquerors of the Infidel' – was dressed in a tweed suit, breeches, and cycling stockings, which contrasted oddly with his patent leather shoes". The picture of Kemal as presented by Ward Price was that of a soldier turned politician who, now that he was president of Turkey, was turning his attention to peaceful pursuits as reflected in his change of wardrobe from his uniform to civilian clothes. About Kemal's wife, Lâtife, Ward Price wrote she was unveiled while wearing "riding breeches with high boots and spurs". Ward Price wrote "Turkish onlookers were startled by this costume which no other women in Turkey would had dared to adopt".
In March 1923, Ward Price published an article about an interview with Kemal where he noted that his wife had much influence with him. Ward Price wrote about Lâtife Kemal that: "Her face had a wilful expression and she was obviously well aware of the importance of her position. 'If I tell you anything you may consider it just as authoritative as you heard it from the Ghazi himself' she said, rather condescendingly." After talking in the tea room at length with Lâtife Kemal, Ward Price finally met Kemal who refused to speak French as in the previous interviews and instead spoke in Turkish with his wife (who was fluent in English) translating. Ward Price wrote that the general guise of the interview was that: "Wives and daughters of the peasantry had always freely mixed with their menfolk, said Mustafa Kemal. The harem and the veil were snobbish innovations copied from the Arabs". The main issue at the peace conference in Lausanne was the Turkish demand for the Mosul region in Iraq, which the British refused to cede on the grounds that the peoples living there were Kurds and Arabs, not Turks. The Treaty of Lausanne when finally signed in July 1923 largely reflected the military realities with the Allies pulling out of Anatolia while the British continued to occupy the Mosul region with the understanding that the League of Nations would arbitrate about the dispute. In 1926, the League of Nations ruled in favour of Britain. Other than the Mosul issue, the Treaty of Lausanne was highly favourable to Turkish interests and Ward Price reported the mood in Turkey was joyous.