BRITISH IDENTITY AND THE GERMAN OTHER A Dissertation ...

efficiently prosecute a ground war proved sadly mistaken. 55 If British policy could be termed
realist in reaction to German naval buildup and demonstrations of force in Morocco, its premise
rested on a fear shared by both Liberal and Conservative politicians. Although Conservatives
went to great length to counter charges of anti-Germanism, and found out the political deficits of
touting the German model for tariff reform, Conservative Germanophobia on the eve of war,
although far more tempered than the journalistic scaremongering of ultra-Right extremists,
nevertheless allowed an easy consensus with the Liberal government for intervention on behalf of
France. 56 Official clannishness and Germanophobia would also breed victims. The case of Eyre
Crowe, senior clerk at the Foreign Office, deserves special mention. Born in Leipzig, educated
in Germany and France, and having ties to Germany through birth and marriage, he became the
leading German expert at the Foreign Office as well as the most virulent critic of any attempt at
an Anglo-German understanding. Shortly after his promotion to Senior Clerk he penned the
famous Crowe Memorandum of 1907, which expressed his views, and the views of the senior
Foreign Office hierarchy, on German diplomatic blackmail and the inevitability of Anglo-
German confrontation. 57 Crowe’s ironic vilification as a German sympathizer in 1915 seems
hardly surprising when one considers the maligning of a scapegoat to be a common and
politically expedient product of the interplay between hysteria and ideological conformism.
55 McKercher, B., D. J. Moss, and C. J. Festschrift Lowe, Shadow and Substance in
British Foreign Policy, 1895-1939: Memorial Essays Honouring C J Lowe (Edmonton, Alberta:
University of Alberta Press, 1984), 23, 41, 49.
56 McDonough, The Conservative Party and Anglo-German Relations, 138-39.
57 Steiner, Foreign Office and Foreign Policy, 110-117. See Kennedy, Rise of the Anglo-
German Antagonism, 266-7, on the division in the Foreign Office between taking a hard line
toward Germany and a more general policy of “easing Britain’s global difficulties.”
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